I said their chief pleasures 'may' be those things - a list suffixed with 'etc'. My aim was to get the reader to have an idea of the kind of person I was talking about rather than construct an exhaustive but useless and pointless list of their activities.
Yes, those people could do the things you say. But they don't. The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral.
I have an IQ in the top 0.001%, am relatively wealthy, relatively well educated, and have a bizarrely diverse skillset. I play Call of Duty and enjoy life's trivialities much more than I paint or talk philosophy.
I agree that society can be fearsome for some in the way you describe, but as I said its reflective of its components, and in order to change the scary bits you have to enforce change on those nearer the top of our curve - and I outright reject the notion that they are more deserving of the pains of coercion owing to their status. Everybody will always suffer in a plan to take one set of ideas and force them upon others. History teaches this lesson over and over again. Present government is teaching it now.
Capitalism - the best word to describe our current societal system - is the antithesis of this. It promotes freedom for everyone to do what the hell they want, not what they 'should' or are told to, and prescribes nothing but subscription to capitalism itself which incidentally is not a system imposed on the world by political leaders, but rather a descriptive term for something humans have been doing (or trying to do against a range of government constraints) for centuries: trading 'stuff' they have for stuff they don't freely and openly.
"The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral."
I agree that it's not moral, but it is demonstrably practical - business changes the way people act all the time, coercing people into behaving in a way that, in my opinion, holds the majority back and turns them into mere passive consumers rather than the creative, intelligent people they could be. While you say in another comment that you want purer capitalism without government interference, I actually want to go further still - removing corporate interference in our lives as well. Although, admittedly, I have no idea at all how you'd do that.
Yes, those people could do the things you say. But they don't. The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral.
I have an IQ in the top 0.001%, am relatively wealthy, relatively well educated, and have a bizarrely diverse skillset. I play Call of Duty and enjoy life's trivialities much more than I paint or talk philosophy.
I agree that society can be fearsome for some in the way you describe, but as I said its reflective of its components, and in order to change the scary bits you have to enforce change on those nearer the top of our curve - and I outright reject the notion that they are more deserving of the pains of coercion owing to their status. Everybody will always suffer in a plan to take one set of ideas and force them upon others. History teaches this lesson over and over again. Present government is teaching it now.
Capitalism - the best word to describe our current societal system - is the antithesis of this. It promotes freedom for everyone to do what the hell they want, not what they 'should' or are told to, and prescribes nothing but subscription to capitalism itself which incidentally is not a system imposed on the world by political leaders, but rather a descriptive term for something humans have been doing (or trying to do against a range of government constraints) for centuries: trading 'stuff' they have for stuff they don't freely and openly.