let's all grow up, what do you say?

     If you believe that Capitalism exists, and that it is evil, then I have some fairly rigorous criteria that will determine whether or not I take you seriously. I might listen to you, but first you have to tell me, truthfully and without hesitation, that you can watch with your own eyes as people starve to death during the transition whatever New Order seems best to you. I'm not talking about the kind of injustice we have now, which is bad enough, but the deliberate death by starvation of millions, possibly billions, of people worldwide, starting with your own family. You also have to accept, and endure, the deaths of still more untold millions from disease and the warfare that will wrack the planet as chaos spreads. If you can't handle that, then you have to tell me how to pay for the complete subjugation of all people under martial law. Tell me who goes up against the wall, who you are willing to co-opt as useful idiots, and who makes the cut as the inevitable elect. If you tell me there would be no elect, then I know you're lying because the very fact that you can advocate something so nebulous and yet so destructive as the uprooting of an entire social order tells me that you imagine yourself among that elect. 
     If none of the above applies to you, then stop talking to me about the Evils Of Capitalism. You're not serious. You like it all just fine, and have a more or less interesting, if not comfortable niche within the Order Of Things, but you fancy yourself a Radical in some way. You're not. (If you drive a hybrid or an electric car, then you're even more deluded.) So let's dial it down, and start talking about how we can raise up those who are cast down without immiserating the rest. 

lazy cross-platform post...

     I'm always surprised for some reason when I learn that others are more cynical than I am. Perhaps I never had any grand expectations to be dashed against experience, but it's true, I'm not really a cynic. I never looked for grandeur from Rome, or any other City of Man, and so I could enjoy the ambiguous beauty of Virgil's poetry, just to take one example. He surely thought the founding of the Imperium, after decades, even centuries, of civil war and political purges, to be a gift of tranquilitas. He also knew what was lost, and lamented that loss, and at times you can hear him wondering if it was all worth it. (Amazing how many people fail to read all of Virgil, but that's for another day.) 
     Then, too, we can read Tacitus and Sallust, Polybius, even from time to time Livy and Cicero, to learn just how far from the Republican Ideal Rome fell even during the Republic. They were searching for something - or rather, for Someone - and kept chasing darkness while running from the light. In this way, they were like The Greeks, who were really the Athenians, the Spartans, the Corinthians. Reread Thucydides alongside the tragedians who remain alive - notice anything? Thucydides writes the Tragedy of the Fall of Athens, and Plato finds the fallen City a Cave fit only for slaves, not citizens. 
     That others erected their utopias on an illusion of Rome and Greece is interesting at times, but not as beautiful, sad, or real as the Greeks and Romans themselves.