Soviet "communism" was nothing but social democracy. It can be called "communism" if people insist, but nothing about its economic model wasn't capitalist. Yes, it was a "planned economy;" so is Amazon; so is Walmart; companies like these exert unbelievable control over national economies. Whether or not planning is done by politicians or by stockholders doesn't fundamentally change the workings of the system. Both Soviets and Americans had interest in pretending the USSR's "socialism" represented a radical break from capitalism: the USSR to justify its own existence, and the U.S. to justify the Cold War. A more accurate picture of things is that the Soviets
established capitalism in a largely pre-capitalist country. It shouldn't be surprising to find they had similar problems as more Western countries.
Yeah, I generally agree. I initially wrote a paragraph or so in response to this in disagreement but realized I was just splitting hairs. Anyway, I suspect much of this is linked to pop culture, which tries to package and sell mass-produced elements of the human experience for the mass market. I've been thinking a lot about why it bothers me so much to listen to pop music on the radio, or to watch trailers for generic movies and TV shows. It's as if...well, no, more that it really happens that executives say: "OK, we've found a catchy tune. Love songs sell; let's get someone writing lyrics about love." Or "OK, we have a premise for a drama. Now we just need to figure out who the protagonist will fall in love with during their hour and a half of screentime." Expressions of the emotions you mentioned just get shoehorned into media without any regard to their presentation, because the idea is just that they should "be there," not that their presence should be believable or speak to any meaningful fragment of human experience. I don't believe there's anything inherently unartistic about pop music, but there's a
reason every pop song about "love" sounds like it's actually about either the singer's horniness or addiction to coke, and it's because expressions of simple feelings like horniness or addiction don't require complex thought in order to be conveyed. And when every portrayal of emotion out there is like this, depicting this "bastardized" notion of it, it's inevitable it'll lead to a certain emotional insensitivity or confusion of baser feelings with more complex ones, inhibiting the formation of those complex feelings to begin with in people exposed to that kind of media.
Organized religion has always been a stain on human history. Its sudden resurgence isn't something to be desired, I think.
I used to read some of Ali Shariati's writing, and I had a naive hope that Islam would be able to mount some kind of defense against capitalism where Christianity had failed.
Given the picture of Mecca above, that seems pretty unlikely, but perhaps it's for the best that religions are dying wherever capitalism's taken root.