An unrewarding ritual in which both you and your sparring partner unwittingly reveal more of your respective ideologies than your understandings of commerce, history and anthropology. It's a game of strategic double-think. Your adversary ascribes every success and pleasure of the modern world to capitalism - or as partial benefits afforded by even our supposedly crude approximation of true capitalism - but insists every failure and evil is owed instead to our insufficient embrace of unmitigated, truer capitalism. Our 'good' is because we are capitalist, and our 'bad' is because we are not.


The dialogue is constrained; they will seem unable to conceptualise anything beyond the measure of economics. "That is fundamentally qualitative and cannot be quantified", you'll say, and they'll reply "I have factored that in". Love; holistic happiness; the joy of spoiling a child; the impulse to die to protect one's sibling; all economic quantities supposedly appearing as higher order corrections in a hitherto unobtained grand unified equation. All monetary, all inextricable from a dehumanising cost function, and all given philosophical significance only by the mathematically illiterate.


Your opponent is insistent. Yet, something hides behind their loyalty to the dogmas of capitalism, and underpins their commitment to the rehearsed rhetoric of MBAs. It is there behind the pride, and the unconvincing guise of having logically derived their position. You will detect something deeply personal, deeper even than the delights of contrarianism, and the self-flattery afforded by the indulgent delusion of meritocracy. 


Lurking beneath is a terrifying social anxiety. It is no comfort to be a beneficiary of a system if perceived as undeserving by its victims. And it is an existential threat to know that respected peers think lowly of the forces which have enabled your luxuries and cemented your world view. That the calculus with which you measure yourself - the good are rich, and the poor are inadequate - is in jeopardy. That instead, to be elite is to be a bit pathetic. When self-assurance is in short supply, one battles for peer assurance; and to be unable to receive it appears in your interlocutor as an immense frustration.


The argument will leave you craving a crude honesty. 'I eat because I am hungry, I fuck because I am lonely, and I deny foundational injustices because I am insecure'.