I agree Yabbs.

'Capitalism is simply the whipping boy that you use, to excuse
human nature.'

As I said in another thread, it's more instructive what people buy, and how it is sold to them. The innate thing is what they're looking for. People cant 'afford' not to have a car, in time or money, as it conflicts with their need for private schools and a home theatre room and a bunch of other things, and they sure as hell don't want to do exercise.

Even with cyclists, you don't see them with bagels in the front, riding with a flowing dress. Well you do in Paddington, but generally they're in the latest lycra, with the latest 'Mountain' bike. People like to have the idea of riding, but with all the comforts, and being able to maintain a fashionable look.

Just like to compensate for their desire to have that quaint village existence, we have cooking shows and shabby chic.

It's a conflicted world. Of course people wouldn't really be any happier with that village existence, they just think that's what they want. What they do and what they buy is a better indication of what people really want deep down.

We go to poor countries to go through a 'journey' and immerse our self in culcha, but we don't want to actually live like that. Good god!

The sum total of human endeavour is to be comfy when you break it down. The pillars of society; Leisure, Comfort, Safety, gossip an being better than the neighbors.

The Rodent was never more profound than with 'Relaxed and Comfortable.'

Yabby:
<Capitalism is simply the whipping boy that you use, to excuse
human nature>

Not at all old chum. I don't really believe in human nature, apart from the basic drives--survival, procreation, techne, creativity etc. Apart from them we're a tabula rasa waiting to receive whatever impressions the host culture instils (though I half subscribe to the notion that consciousness implies a critical distance between the subject and its acculturation). Human nature is your whipping boy to excuse capitalism.
The real centre of our being is ideological (there is no centre); we adapt to prevailing conditions. There are those innate human forms of adaptation, however, techne and creativity, which are perhaps as natural to us as flight to birds, but rather than these being given scope for development, under capitalism we are flightless, alienated from our natural proclivities, which are exploited, commodified and fed back to us instead. Such at least is the Marxist critique in a nutshell.
Nature did not make us naturally vicious, or avaricious, and capitalism is not our natural habitat--it's merely the ideology we are interpellated into, that most of us are incapable of seeing beyond, let alone critically.

*I don't really believe in human nature, apart from the basic drives--survival, procreation, techne, creativity etc.*

Squeers, what you believe or don't believe, is simply a matter of
your opinion. So I look at the realities. No matter which system
you can think of, socialism, communism, etc, invariably those
who are able to access power and resources, land up usually being
older men who land up shagging attractive younger women. All part
of their basic drives really.

Yabby,
you look at the realities.. Don't flatter yourself! What do you see in the ideological fog?

Squeers, I see that people usually put self interest ahead of the
communal good.

Yabby:
< I see that people usually put self interest ahead of the communal good>

And yet people formed societies and institutions and community and shared beliefs. We are social animals by definition, above and beyond animal or individual being. Without society and culture and ideology, we’re merely animals, mute and stupid. The modern institution of self-interest, Thatcher’s self-fulfilling prophecy that there’s “no such thing as society”, only individuals and families, that seems so compelling to libertarians, denies the whole history of social evolution in favour of post hoc devotions to an economic abstraction.

Houellebecq,
I think the rodent’s predecessor was closer to the money with his “life wasn’t meant to be easy”. For humans to be relaxed and comfortable is non sequitur, as the incidence of “mental illness” and obesity and NCD’s in the modern West suggests. You’re guilty of the same post hoc fallaciousness as Yabby with your “the sum total of human endeavour is to be comfy when you break it down. The pillars of society; Leisure, Comfort, Safety, gossip an being better than the neighbors”. These are the consolations of a commodified life, not the end of the rainbow. According to materialism there is no purpose to life, yet Man’s capacity not merely to adapt, but to Terraform, gives her the capacity to transcend nature and make a very Eden, at least in conception and aspiration. To throw that potential away in favour of the “virtue” of self-interest and mean-spirited avarice and sloth, is to deny human striving "as" potential. Why did we not stop with the decadence of Henry the 8th or Louis the 14th? Yet you propose we stop now with the drastic inequities and decadence and wretchedness of late capitalism because some of us are relaxed and comfortable (and fat and lazy and neurotic and devoid of talent)?
If Adam Smith was around to today he’d admit that enlightened self-interest had culminated in a new dark age.

But back on topic; on your bikes, Squires!