How did the development of capitalism encourage new thinking about the individual and society?
The idea of capitalism and consumerism created competition among business owners and entrepreneurs a like. The drive to produce a valuable product that would make money forced people to start being inovative thinkers. Still today the inventors, and dreamers of the world are having to look at things in a new way to create new products that we the consumers would spend our hard earned cash on. Society then adapted to this new ideology, and the focus of even everyday life became about making and spending money. Those who make the most money, and considered more powerful, and have more options available. While those who don’t make money now find it harder to function in society.
The development of capitalism was, essentially, the development of a system by which it was legal and accepted for an individual to acquire and hold more than his or her fair share of the common resources.
This demanded new thinking about the individual and society, mostly in order to rationalize what everyone knows inside is an unjust system. The mythos that arose was that the size of one’s ‘fair share’ was related to how hard he or she worked for it. i.e. "some people work harder than others; therefore, it is fair for them to take bigger shares – that it is okay for individuals to take (in addition to their own) portions of other people’s fair shares, if they work hard to do so.
This new thinking contrasts with the old thinking, that an individual’s fair share of the common resources was related primarily to their specific needs.
The old thinking in practice: generally similar human beings have generally similar needs, and therefore require a generally equal share of the common resources (the reason this sounds so obvious is that this is the basis for the ‘fair share’ concept), and nobody requires significantly more than anyone else.
The new thinking in practice: Everyone works hard trying to take everyone elses fair shares. Since everyone works hard, only those who ‘want it more’ are able to actually take other people’s shares, thus acquiring above average wealth.
