Sort of, kind of. Most decisions you'd see him make would quickly cause his control over Amazon to disappear, without actually improving anything for Amazon workers.

That's one part of the bad mental model of organizations and markets (and thus societies) people have. The people at the top may be richer and more powerful, but they're not actually free to do whatever. They have a role to play in the system they ostensibly "control", but when they deviate too far from what the system expects them to do, they get ejected.

Never mistake the finger pointing at the Moon for the Moon itself. Also, never mistake the person barking orders for the source from which those orders originate.

▲

psychoslave 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is nothing like "the" system though. When a government launch some genocide, sure it's an expression of the system in a sense, but it didn't need to respect a majority of actor opinions, and it doesn't mean that "the behavior of the system" is a mere and direct outcome of all the social values at stake which would presumably have great safeguard against any significant deviation.

Virus can kill their hosts, and a bunch of individuals can have significant harmful impact on societies.

	▲	TeMPOraL 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A virus that kills their hosts itself dies out quickly. Viruses that thrive, and that we actually have most problems with, are ones that spread before manifesting symptoms. Much like viruses, systems are subject to selection pressures over time. Systems that are too damaging to society makes society develop memetic, cultural and legal immunity against them. Systems that let individual members easily kill them are fragile and don't survive either. Systems that thrive are ones that are mild enough to not cause too much external resistance, and are resilient enough to not allow individuals to accidentally or intentionally break them from within.

▲

suddenlybananas 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, these decisions just appear out of the aether, there absolutely not the result of capitalists acting in their self-interest. It's nice to claim, oh poor little me couldn't possibly have done anything else, I guess I just have to benefit from all this money my decisions give me.

▲

CalRobert 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you’re agreeing in a way - they are making the decisions that maximise their profits in the existing system (capitalism) and the system is such that it will produce people like this. They can nudge it in their preferred direction but if they were in, say, a frontier economy they’d likely make different decisions.

	▲	TeMPOraL 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That. And the aspect I'm trying to emphasize is, those profit-maximizing people are technically free to choose to not profit-maximize, but then the system will happily punish them for it. They can nudge the system, but the system can nudge them back, all the way to ejecting them from whatever role they played in that system so far. And yes, the system is just made of other people. That's the nature of self-reinforcing feedback loops.