Capitalism provides a pyrrhic victory for its much-vaunted progress. Achievement comes at a dire and much higher cost to humanity than its proponents are ever willing to admit. In its quest to achieve its version of material heaven it frequently devalues, and it eviscerates the more important metaphysical side of man, his soul here on earth, often leaving a byproduct of utter destruction and of waste in its wake.
It is as tarnished silver. It is as a great reservoir of water, marketed to the world as pure, but with the carcass of a very small, dead and rotting mouse lying at the bottom, hidden. It is one of modernity’s damning humanistic religions which produces idols, ones worshipped by millions, via mass production. It is a ubiquitous evil, a specter of death, often dressed in silk and which portends hell.
Capitalism justifies the means to its end — any means at all — whether they be reasonable or unreasonable, whether they be truthful or untruthful, whether they be just or unjust, whether they be healthful or unhealthful, and whether they be selfless or selfish. Whatever it is, it makes no difference to it so long as its greed is satiated.
Although the word “innovation” can be used to describe many of its eye-catching, glittering successes, it cannot claim that it was the originator of, or that it was the inspiration for the word as the meaning of the word had long predated it by thousands of years. Despite this fact of history, like so many things that it has soured by way of its cankered touch, the word is, nearly always, a metaphor for its untrammeled lust for material gain — a baleful and an insidious propaganda.
Capitalism uses a pernicious equation which, by its misleading calculation, holds promise for millions, but which mostly benefits the very few. It leaves the door of opportunity ajar, and atop a very high and daunting hill, with a steep, a winding, and a treacherous path strewn with esoteric principles and practices which, in truth, are all but helpful and inclusive, especially for those of its victims who are trying so hard to free themselves from its abuses and from the prisons of privation, of poverty and of oppression which it created. It not only blames its victims for their lot in life, but it often transforms those who it allows to matriculate into its brand of success, by ably instilling within them the same selfish attitude towards others, with an amnesia for the basics of respect and decency.
Capitalism has created a society, not of mutual interdependency, but one of unilateral dependency. It is one which it has managed to place itself at the apex of a world akin to the dark, sordid underworld of drug-pushers, and of pimps which have made us whores of consumerism and of materialism. Our alleged self-interest is, in all actuality, tied up in, subordinated to, and superintended by its own destructive self-interest. Our self-interest is not mutually exclusive with respect to its own.
The ontological study of modern man in the western world, on the heels of imperialism, of colonialism, of chattel slavery, and of violent industrialism cannot be divorced from it. We have become, tragically and terminally, a part of this cancerous malignancy. We are the disease. To paraphrase the words of the Apostle Paul, in Holy Scripture, “Oh, wretched man that I am, who can deliver me from this body of death?”
I hate Capitalism — I really do. As God judged the gods of Egypt, I believe that He will judge this one too. Capitalism’s children might ask, “What then of an alternative?” “What system is better?” And my reply would be — I do not know. But this I know — no system must ever be allowed to trump the universally accepted tenets of basic humanity. No system must be allowed to devalue and to debase our species, nor any other species for that matter. No system should be given the license to reduce people to mere statistics on a marketing chart, or to determine the value of nature in the cold abstraction of numbers in an accountant’s ledger.
Capitalism is the product of men who, in claiming their independence and their individuality, have proven to be chronically flawed and self-centered. We have proven, over and over again, from the annals of history that we are incapable of and unwilling to govern our base instincts as they affect the welfare of others — especially the weak among us. And yet, against our better angels, many of us champion the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest — pandering to and elevating our animalistic tendencies, reminiscent of life in the jungle. Therefore, as men must be regulated by law, so must the system of Capitalism. It cannot be and it must never be left to its own devices.
As I said, I hate Capitalism — I really do. As God judged the gods of Egypt, I believe that He will judge this one too.
