The reason why we are in a capitalistic death spiral is BECAUSE power is concentrated in the hands of a few sociopaths.

Crowdsourcing has shown net positives in nearly every study it is examined, including several interesting TED talks about altruistic human cooperation.

The thing is, the few psychopaths at the top think EVERYONE thinks like them, which is why they assume that without the fear of starvation that no one would ever do anything productive. Because THEY wouldn’t.

When the REAL truth is the vast majority of humanity is cooperative, creative, and generous, but those traits do not help when climbing power structures, which is why all the assholes seem to flow to the top.

If you trust people and have a large enough crowd, the good nearly always outweighs the bad, like that collaberative pong game where they gave everyone in the audience laser pointers to control two pong paddles.

Sure some jerkwads deliberately tried to work against the group, but they were very few and the game was played meaningfully and the crowd had fun, BECAUSE the cooperative collaboration impulse in the vast majority of people outweighs the destructive impulse.

Think of guys digging a hole on a beach, for no profit, for mostly no reason but they’ll get a HUGE ton of guys to help dig that hole. And sure there’s some yahoos there that will kick sand back in or try to collapse walls, but they are far outpaced by the eager and happy people just digging a hole for no reason because it is fun and who knows what might happen.

If we had direct democracy in all things, in all laws, and in complete legal reform, I think we could have a world a lot closer to utopia than capitalism can ever come.