Capitalism sucks
Like Nosferatu...
I’m pretty distraught these days, as many of us are, witnessing an uninhibited demonstration of greed, corruption and vengeance at the highest levels of government, driven by a heartless cruelty that makes me wonder how these miscreants sleep at night and how they feel when they wake up. I truly wonder.
What we are seeing is one of two political parties getting sucked into the quicksand of dreams of unlimited power in the service of nothing good. That quicksand is around all of us all the time. Our system of government, like most governments in the world, whatever else it does, supports capitalism, and capitalism sucks.
Capitalism sucks like quicksand, because it is built on getrichquicksand, without any firm basis of actual human need or satisfaction.
It also sucks like vampires suck blood. It sucks something vital from us, whether we will it or not. That’s what so depressing. It’s a system that does not have our best interests at heart. We exist in this system like a fish in polluted water.
Marketing and advertising are the pointy fangs…
As it is practiced, capitalism seeks to fulfill its purpose by deluding and confusing us with cheap thrills and fractured attention. We complain about the effect of social media on our ability to focus, and we sort of forget that we have been trained to break focus by advertising since forever ago. Advertising, by its very nature, is an interruption, a demand for attention.
Advertising in print (print? What’s that?) is slightly easier to ignore, but when the big emotional scene in some show we are watching suddenly cuts away to a rousing proclamation that a brand of toilet paper will change your life, it messes with our synapses.
Not just because our attention was diverted from something we were actually interested in; but because toilet paper doesn’t matter. Sure we need it and use it. But we absolutely do not need to get emotionally involved with toilet paper, and that’s what advertising tries to make us do.
Every ad, every exhortation to BUY, feels like a sad little violation of my attention and goodwill, inflicted upon me by those who do not care about me. And how can I care back, when the vibe is so flawed?
Advertising has trained us to have a hard time distinguishing between what is true and what is a lie; it has also trained us to think that lying is how you get what you want.
I’ve been watching shows on Amazon Prime lately, which includes ads, unless you pay even more money. The fact that it costs money not to see ads proves that ads are an annoyance, no matter how much creative effort goes into their creation—no matter how hard they try.
When I’m dancing to a song I like on Youtube, and it is interrupted in the middle by a noisy solicitation for something I have no interest in, I feel invaded. My spirit is invaded by someone’s desire to get something from me; not by their desire to help me in any way.
Somebody wants me to give them money in exchange for whatever they are selling. I am just a potential ATM; nobody who wants my money cares whether spending money in this way will be helpful to me. Getting people to part with their money is not just the name of the game; it’s the game’s DNA.
Sure, there are outliers (and I want to be one) who are doing something creative and big-spirited enough that it doesn’t feel like manipulation.
I want to participate in the capitalist system of exchanging money for goods, tangible or otherwise. I like the term goods. I very much want to offer ‘goods’ in exchange for money. I don’t mean objects necessarily; ideas and experiences are goods also.
The trick for me, and others who feel the same way, is to realize that there is nothing wrong with exchanging money for something else; that’s what money is for, or should be. Too often people think of money not as a form of energy, but as a form of identity. That’s where you get all these people whose goal is to gather huge amounts of money energy and keep it all for themselves beyond any possible need. They think it makes them special, or safe.
We are overripe for some kind of explosion/implosion that forces us to envision and create a new system based on something more profound and sustainable than greed and immaturity.
I’m looking for ways to convey the physicality of the tension that builds when something goes too far, lasts too long, pushes against reality hard enough that reality punches back. I’m talking about physics, natural forces obeying their inner script.
A friend of mine recently suggested the metaphor of a star flaming brightly before it explodes for what we we are seeing in our political/cultural life. As horrified and terrified as I am by what the current administration is doing, I also know, in every fiber of my being, that what they are doing is unsustainable.
Some stars, particularly massive ones, can experience significant brightening and outward material expulsion, often referred to as "flaming," before they ultimately explode in a supernova. This pre-supernova activity is associated with a star's final stages of evolution, where instabilities within the star lead to increased luminosity and potentially dramatic eruptions.
I don’t have any big guarantees that our species can get it together enough to realize our potential for greatness, and trust me, I am using that word to mean something very different from what people mean when they say MAGA.
Greatness has nothing to do with spray-painting everything gold or suppressing/killing everything that isn’t scared of you. It has nothing to do with resurrecting an imaginary past.
What’s craziest in the MAGA slogan is the word ‘again.’ It gives away the whole game, the whole backwards-looking, delusional wishing for a time that never was and never will be.
Human greatness requires submission to cosmic meaning. It requires playing footsie with cosmic intention. It has to do with being bigger than you are, not as a star, but as a moon, reflecting light.
I can’t see what’s coming; I know that the perils of the present are immediate and require immediate strategy and action. I am truly scared by the ruthless intentions of people who are doing everything in their power to inflict their self-interested will on others. Every day when I read the news I feel like crying.
My suggestion is that immediate strategy and action is most effective when informed by a long view. There is no viable going back (no ‘again’) to a seesaw system of left and right that has predatory capitalism as its fulcrum. We can do better. We have to do better.
We have to be willing to come up with, to articulate, a way for our species to adapt to life on this planet that goes beyond short-term self-interest, self-aggrandizement, and fear-based aggression. We have too much power to affect our environment in ways that cause harm to all life, including us, not to take responsibility for that power. We have too much potential for awareness, love, creativity and joy, to squander it on the nothing burger of mayhem and mammon.
My Thesis, or some other word...
Whether I’m writing about my direct experience, or what’s going on in the world, or what I find interesting or funny, I can’t get very far without consciously or not so consciously, expressing/inserting my ‘thesis.’
So glad to find you! Love your work and still use your cards b/c I bought a big stack and believe in handwritten letters. Be well!
Love that "getrichquicksand" that maybe you coined? Either way, another catchword for late-stage capitalism.