>>241>capitalism promotes the pursuit of short term pleasureYes, as long as the system does this, people will be degraded by the system.
You are huffing pure ideology if you think your appeals to personal responsibility can override systemic shit.
You are trying to find individual solutions to collective problems.
If you want people to have better pursuits, you need to change the system so that it promotes those.
>to get rid of porkie and the capitalist system, something you really have no control overIt's possible to change economic systems, if you look at history, that happens alot.
Individually people have no control, but collectively they do have the power to change the economic structures.
You are making the mistake of ignoring the societal level.
In class societies, the lower classes tend to get degraded, because ruling classes usually are very unexceptional and mediocre people, and the only way for them to be better than the rest is to make everybody else worse. In capitalism there is a lot of money to be made from that degrading stuff, so even if your individual motivation could work and all the people started to self improve, the system would start to loose profits and react to it and increase the intensity of degrading people.
But class-societies also kill the motivation for self-improvement. If you invest all that time and energy into leveling your self up, it's still the capitalists that reap most of the rewards, because they get better workers. People simply don't invest in self-improvement because they don't get enough returns.
Your appeals would work in a socialist society that has progressed to the stage where people really are no longer exploited and society really is classless. In the current society however, i think you can't motivate people to improve them selves unless that is the path to systemic change, if you say the economic system can't be changed, you are asking people to make an investment without any hope of returns.