CommentsTHE REAL COST OF CAPITALISM-Here’s a tiny observation, which you’re welcome to disagree with. I wouldn’t blame you.
It’s a contentious one. It feels to me as if our minds are breaking. As if we’re unable to handle living in the difficult realities of now. Like we live in an age where the trauma, anxiety, and fear of living in collapsing economies, fractured countries, and a dying planet, is metastasizing into lethal forms: collective delusion, paranoia, and psychosis.
Let me explain — or at least try to. One of the more tedious exercises we go through these days is interrogating one another about our “beliefs.” I constantly get asked if I believe in X (the Green New Deal, in socialism, in this politician or that, what have you.) We say that the internet is an “echo chamber,” but I wonder if even that does justice to it. It’s something more like what economists call “assortative mating” — a dork’s way of saying birds of feather flock together. So we interrogate each other about our beliefs as if they were the most important things in all the world — and then we find people whose beliefs match up with ours, we cling to them like…
Like parents, more or less, I reckon. What the internet — but not just the internet, what it expresses, which is the tribe, the hive, the collective — is really doing, my friends, is reinforcing our deepest insecurities. Not resolving them. What we’re not really doing when we play this game of ritually-relating-through-beliefs is learning much of anything — or asking ourselves. Intelligent people, as an intelligent person once said, change their beliefs when the facts change. When a mind changes, it lets go of its insecurities.’
But we don’t change our minds much anymore — have you noticed? Why is that? It’s because it’s become much easier not to. Never to have to. As long as we’ve found a group of people who “believe” the same things that we do — no matter how backwards, foolish, bizarre, or upside-down — we feel safe, secure, loved and protected. How precious that is, in a world, an age, like ours.
Now, I want you see to what a perfectly diabolical fit fleeing to the safety of the tribe is for the troubled time we live in. Everyone feels deeply, profoundly, badly insecure most of the time — not just you. About what? About money — nobody can make ends meet. About our looks — nobody’s hot enough, perfect enough. About our flaws — are they the right ones? The ones we’re told will be cherished and adored — not the really ugly and horrible ones? About ourselves — are we happy enough, optimistic enough, at peace enough? We are one giant manic ball of insecurity these days, my friends, and that’s not a coincidence, and it’s ripping us apart.
It’s a result of capitalism — call it predatory capitalism if you must, Americans still have a problem saying the word “capitalism” even though it’s literally killing them. That’s not strange — it’s predictable. Nobody says the name of the gods or the demons. Nobody calls out the boogeyman. Just doing so raises the specter of panic and terror and fear that our bruised, battered psyches are working so hard to defend us against, just so that we can pretend we function at something resembling a normal level. What we can’t say reveals more than what we do.
So there we are — searching desperately for security in a world that appears to be collapsing by the day. And there’s Prince Charming: the internet, the hive, the tribe, the collective. A place full of strangers just like us. Who must be safe…if they believe just the same things we do? Then there’s no reason to attack us, right? Which is what the rest of the world is trying to do to us, all the time, which is why we’re paranoid.
How paranoid are we? Well, that depends on how attacked we feel. If we genuinely existentially threatened, we might even give up on the rudiments of civilization themselves. We might turn into, for example, anti-vaxxers — form a kind of death wish, that says, “you can’t kill me! I’ll kill myself first!” We might offer to sacrifice our kids to the gods, just like desperate, hopeless people throughout time have done, which is what anti-vaxxers are: people whose minds have been shattered by the paranoias of capitalism. They are just seeking safety in a troubled world, like all of us — only in more destructive and genuinely dangerous ways.
But wait. Aren’t we trying to do that to the rest of the world — attack it, even as we flee from its attacks, into our little tribal caves, where the like-minded comfort us, even if the beliefs that bind us together are killing us? Why is it that so much of our culture, our attitudes, our ways of being, rest on a kind of violence, which is to say we must dominate and possess and control and conquer others? In fact, that’s what the economy is more or less about — off we go to “work,” in a system where most “jobs” are basically some CEO ordering you to find a way to outwit some poor sucker less powerful than you. No wonder work makes us so miserable.
The sad, weird, gruesome truth is that we are the ones attacking each other, and therefore we retreat into our tribal caves, feeling unsafe, where fears can become paranoias, which then destroy us from within. The feeling of unsafety, of danger, of constant threat is very real — lose your healthcare? sorry, maybe you die — but the ones who are attacking us are us. They’re not aliens or little Mexican babes or time-traveling knights. We’re caught in a vicious circle of abuse — and we’re abusing one another.
So why do we do it? Why can’t we seem to break out of it? Remember Prince Charming? The internet, the tribe, the like-minded. The feeling of safety in a deeply unsafe world is worth all the gold in all the rivers and all the hills. That’s human. But the price of our relationship with Prince Charming is — just as in any abusive relationship — our better selves, a sense of integrity, of meaning, of purpose. It’s hard — maybe impossible for many of us — to say: “this is a false sense of safety. It’s just a lie, that comforts me. But it’s still a lie, and living a lie is going to destroy me, in the end.”
These things are all connected — though perhaps we don’t often think of them that way. Let me try and link them all up.
Capitalism made a world that’s literally driving many of us mad. Fleeing to dark age superstitions — when we’re not falling into the strong arms of fascists. Our anxieties and fears and traumas are becoming collective delusions and paranoias and psychoses, operating at a social level. They are the stuff of fascism — “those Mexican children are the cause of our problems!!” or “The EU is the reason we’re going nowhere as society!!” But see what’s behind all this.
In the world capitalism made, safety is the thing in shortest supply. Your kids could get shot at school anytime. Bang! You could lose your healthcare whenever. Wham! Your life savings — what little you have — could vanish overnight. Zap! Safety is always in deficit, in shortage, unavailable — it’s the most unaffordable thing of all. Where is one to find it? Where do you get it?
Now, capitalism is never interested in solving a problem. Just selling you the cheapest thing, at the highest price. So what does it sell us, to relieve this terrible dread, this anxiety, these fears?
Well, it used to sell us escapism — and it still does. All those superhero movies that some people think are the great literature of the 21st century (heaven help us if they are.) But even that costs money.
So now capitalism just sells us tribalism, essentially. And tribalism turns our wounds, our fears and anxieties, into collective delusions and paranoias and psychoses.
But see the dynamic here: those wounds and fears and anxieties were created by capitalism in the first place, by being treated like worthless, disposable things. But because capitalism could care less about healing you — it sells you the tribe, the collective, the hive, which makes those very fears explode into even worse, more dangerous things.
I could put it this way. It pimps us out to each other, and designs algorithms for us to find people just as wounded, hurt, broken, confused, and deluded as we are — and then we comfort each other. Capitalism has learned that the cheapest thing to sell the wounded is people just like them. So it is selling us the hive, the collective, the tribe. But those things take our fears and anxieties and turn them into full blown delusions and psychoses — “beliefs” which are totally disconnected from reality, forms of hate, spite, self-destruction, violence.
Do you know what capitalism’s really doing? It’s putting a bunch of broken-minded, badly hurt people in a cave — and charging you a few pennies for the privilege of joining them, so you can all commiserate. Or selling ads to the lost wailing souls therein — and pocketing a fortune. In the process, the people in the cave start going mad. Yes, really.
Needless to say, none of this is good for us. Where does it leave us? Well, mostly, it leaves us even more broken, lost, confused, and deluded than we were before we went into the cave — because now, we’re seriously disturbed. We’re totally detached from reality. We don’t believe there is “an outside” anymore. So we stay hunkered down into our little tribes — constantly interrogating one another over our “beliefs.” Just like in any proper dark age — very few stop to ask: “wait, what do we actually know, not just believe?” They’re promptly exiled to the dark, deep forests, beyond the comforts of the caves.
The people in the caves? Their fears and anxieties soon become paranoias and delusions — just like you might expect if bunch of lost, terrified people spent long enough isolated from the outside world. What kind of strange myths and stories would they tell each other, as the years went by? Maybe things like vaccines are bad for you, the earth is flat, the climate isn’t changing, only guns can save us. You see my point a little bit.
That is the kind of people we are becoming. The fears and anxieties that capitalism have produced are turning into delusions and paranoias. They are becoming something like collective psychoses and revenge complexes and sociopathies. They are becoming explosive and implosive. Bang! That is how capitalism collapses into fascism and tribalism — one among many ways: because people fracture and shatter from within, mentally and emotionally, unable to bear its traumas without defending themselves through superstition, magical thinking, fantasies — or just unmitigated, sheer, outright hatred. What else is there left to bond them, when capitalism has taken away their towns, cities, jobs, democracies, futures, lives?
It would be wrong to just point to technology. It is a product of many things. Of stagnation. Of capitalism in the pure sense, income increasing for capital perpetually, but never for labor. Of a colonial mindset of cruelty and dominance. All those things converging, to make us more mentally and emotionally unhealthy by the day.
The last thing capitalism has left to take is our minds, my friends.
(The modern American left, having (finally) read a little bit of Foucault, focuses obsessively on the “body.” But Foucault was not the end of continental philosophy. He was just one thinker among many. He was right to say “bodies” are “oppressed” and so forth. But his focus was not the mind. t’s true that capitalism has taken the body — many bodies, in fact. Your body, my body, the social body, the political body. But that is not the end. It is just the beginning, really.)
If capitalism can eat through our minds, greedily, viciously, then its paradoxical victory is complete. At that moment — bang! — everything collapses into fascism. Because a mind that is only operating the program called capitalism only wants to do one thing, too — exploit, take, seize, profit, by any means necessary. So then a society’s laws and institutions are changed and uprooted to do just that, by dehumanizing minorities. The sequence of capitalism imploding into fascism happens this way. Not just through the body — but through the mind.
Capitalism taking your mind isn’t a matter of brainwashing you. That’s nice — but it doesn’t need to. It just needs to make you afraid and anxious and scared enough to become deluded and psychotic and paranoid. It doesn’t need you to be a card-carrying libertarian. When you’re deluded and paranoid — you’ll buy anything, won’t you? Even something as absurd as “those Mexican babies are the reason we’re in decline!” or “The EU is the reason we’re not prospering! It’s war!” or “vaccines kill kids!!”
When you’re busy hating that vaccine, or that Mexican baby — LOL, the billionaires laugh, because you’re going to get poorer, while they get richer. You’ll buy anything, pay anything for some form of safety now — and all they have to do is find something cheap enough to sell you by the dozen. What could be cheaper, then, than people just as weak, addled, and broken as you? They don’t cost a thing, the hive, the tribe, the collective. That’s why they’re the last thing capitalism has to pimp out, really. And it gets a bonus — your mind gets broken, by the very safety it’s seeking, too.
Yet we should see people fleeing to such pre-modern forms of organization in droves as a glaring sign that something is badly wrong with our societies. That they don’t really work as “societies” anymore, just loose agglomerations of competing tribes, each one as terrified as the next. Tribes whose minds have been shattered and destroyed by capitalism — which left them so afraid and frightened, there was nowhere left to go but backwards, into the past, into the darkness, where you don’t even have to see the monsters who stalk you by day. Where the fears and traumas of capitalism become its delusions, paranoias, and psychoses.
(Umair Haque posts at Medium.com.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.