Darwin, Capitalism, and the Rise of the Economic Stinkbug

Here you see a man with enough money to hunt endangered animals on other continents. This man assuredly views himself as a lion in the economic sphere, which only goes to show what a perversion of nature our economy has become. If this is what we regard as an example of human nature at its peak, then humanity shall swiftly pass from the face of the earth, and justly so. Evolution will not long permit such an aberration.

The laws of the market determine different winners than the laws of nature. And what happens when a man lives according to laws contrary to nature’s laws? He becomes unnatural. Inferior men are thrust into positions of power they themselves know they do not deserve. Unlike a natural man, an unnatural man senses he is a fraud and feels always on the brink of being discovered. Like a wounded animal hiding its defect, he becomes defensive, more prone to lash out lest anyone discover the hidden flaw. He acquires more and more as a way to convince himself and others that he is as great as he feels he needs to be. He becomes cruel, indifferent to the pain of others. The natural man will kill in order to sustain himself and his family. The unnatural man kills because he comes to enjoy it, or because he no longer accepts that he himself has any role to play in the death of others. He has re-written the natural rules, the universe is his to define. It is the law of the market that speaks, and morality has no part in it. The market dictates that you take whatever you can, whether you need it or not.

A lot of people say that capitalism is simply taking the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, and applying it to the world of finance. That is not true. Capitalism uses one principal of the jungle, yes, the ruthlessness, but it removes tooth and claw and brute strength from the equation. It substitutes instead the attributes of the worm and the mole, the gnat and the mosquito.

Jonathon Swift once said: “If you ever find an intelligent good looking aristocrat it’s probably the coachman’s son.” The best offspring of the capitalist class are spawned in torrid affairs but it is not the bastard offspring that get the benefit of the wealth but the lesser ones that are hatched in a financially constructed household. To them are the nests feathered with hundred dollar bills while the hardiest of the breed are lucky to get a college education. Thus the wealth of a capitalist society, like that of the royalty of days past, is inevitably concentrated in the hands of the mediocre inbreds.

But money does a good job disguising bad genes. Acne medicines, plastic surgery, liposuction, well-tailored suits all go towards making an inferior product look appetizing, like a well-waxed apple. And a Harvard degree, made possible only because your father went there and could afford to send you, is more important than intelligence. Just look how smart the Scarecrow seemed once he got his diploma.

What physical strength is necessary for the capitalist? None. Intelligence? Only a rudimentary amount. Too much is counter-productive. A mind interested in maximizing profit should work only on the economic level. To them existence is only comprehended in the economic sphere. All of mankind’s great ideas are lost to the man of money.

His eyesight need only be good enough to see the bottom line, his hearing need only be able to hear the cash register ring.

His attributes are no doubt refined, but like the whippet or the aardvark, are useful only in limited applications. The intelligence of the capitalist can best be witnessed in the likes of Donald Trump, an idiot-savant who nonetheless is able to succeed extraordinarily well with what few talents he possesses. You only need enough intelligence to learn a sucker’s game, like three card monty, and then play it over and over again. Too much intelligence and you would soon be bored with the game.

Most of all, learn to serve your master, whether he be your boss, you prospective client, the masses, whoever has cash they’re willing to part with. Identify the teat with the most milk and do what ever it takes to get it flowing.

The traits of the capitalist are these:

Monomania

Sociopathy

Ability to hide your sociopathic traits

To a lesser degree, work ethic

And there you have it, the traits of the 1/10 of 1% These are not traits of a lion, but those of an ant or chihuahua. Persistence wins over strength, intelligence, or worth to one’s fellow creatures. To pass on these genes is to pass on traits unhelpful to the species as a whole, not to mention the planet. Too much a love of money in ones genetics is as harmful to oneself as a predisposition for alcohol, and much more harmful to others. The worst harm a drunk has ever caused that I can think of is the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which while awful, pales next to what the oil industrialists are doing overall.

Think about it. Those who would never waste the time nor money on an art degree are the very same ones who own the world’s greatest art. It hangs on walls of rooms seldom visited. And when looked at, it is not appreciated as art, but is there rather as a trophy, next to the head of a lion they shot while on vacation. This is not natural, it is a perversion of nature that needs to be rectified. 

Understanding My Novels

Thoughts I had at work today regarding the series of novels that include The Amazing Morse Series and Seven Stones, as well as novels yet to be finished:

I am constructing the paradigm through which humanity needs to look if it wishes to survive.

How’s that for a bold statement? Give a few moments before you judge. I think my books best make the case but I’ll try to summarize for you. It's not so much of a perfect summary as thoughts upon the matter.

The Amazing Morse was a story of an individual overcoming the restraints one is capable of placing upon himself. Your worldview can act as a straightjacket upon you, restricting your ability to move in the directions you wish to go.

Perchance To Dream, my second novel, involves the individual overcoming the restraints society places upon him. In the end, it shows that the disbelief of a single individual in a shared vision, can save the whole.

The Association deals with the inevitable rise and fall of societies due to their imperfect conception of reality. In it, it is stated that in the fall of a dominant paradigm, people and groups of people constrict, and fear and defensiveness take the place of trust and interdependence. The tragic result is always violence, war. Man can no longer survive war.

War. It is the symbol of all that is wrong with the human race as well as the one great human evil that we must evolve from if we wish to survive an age of atom bombs and ICBMs. I go back in time 100 years to do an earlier series which will tie into my Amazing Morse series, beginning with Seven Stones. I decided that seeing the foibles of the present age might prove too difficult for some, and so I went to another era in order to critique it. That we do not see the foolishness of our own era and find it so easy  to mock whatever is different about another era is a theme that runs through The Amazing Morse Series.

The year is 1913, shortly before the start of WWI. I wanted to show the senselessness of war and this one truly looks pointless in retrospect. At the beginning of the 20^st Century, Mankind had emerged from primitive means of production, had at hand the tools necessary to build whatever society he wished to build, and yet morally and emotionally had not been able to elevate from the fear of others and the desire to protect himself through violence. The very science he believed could free him from his past had built new and unimaginably cruel weapons to kill him. The seven stones in question are representative of the seven continents. Divided, each stone is a strength but one that does not work with the others. Individually, power is destructive. It is only the unity of the seven stones that can achieve the understanding mankind requires.

The era immediately preceding World War 1 was also a beginning of new perspectives. In art, different perspectives were being represented in a single painting. Albert Einstein was postulating ideas that were tearing down our conception of the universe. Constants were being shown to be relative. The very world we lived in, or at least our understanding of it, was beginning to break down. We needed to find new ways of thinking about the world, not just simply more answers to plug into our existing paradigms.

The Seven Stones trilogy will end with an understanding of what has gone before and a laying of a basis for understanding that will spread throughout the 3 Amazing Morse books as well as the not yet written The Beyond Show  trilogy. It is the shattering of humanity’s mindset and the rise of a new, more comprehensive one. It is the realization of our interconnectedness and the rejection of violence as a means of change.

The Amazing Morse: To liberate oneself before being able to liberate the world, or at least one is able to liberate the world only so much as one is self-liberated.

Perchance to Dream: The doubt of an individual can save the whole. It only takes one person to put a crack in a paradigm held by the group, allow cracks to show in it.

The Association: The idea of a society coming to grips with the collapse of an imperfect understanding is not resolved in the action of the novel, but the roots of what will happen in novels to come are revealed.

Magic is my description for the ability to see unimpeded by the intellect (i.e. whatever paradigms we have acquired), to see through the eyes of a child. Because life is truly magical when we are young, although occasionally very frightening. This is not to say our vision should not be assisted by the intellect, the paradigms we have imagined, merely that we should not mistake the finger that points at the moon for the moon itself. We should never mistake the model for the real.

Perception versus reality, that is the source of all struggle. The more we mistake the finger for the moon the intellectual construct for what it represents, the more religion and philosophy divides rather unites us. Two differing vantage points are not reasons to quarrel but opportunity for us to gain a deeper understanding.

In denying another person’s perception of God we are limiting our own understanding of God, and in a very real sense denying God. 

A Big Change Has Begun

     We are all frightened daily by news we hear regarding the state of the world, frightened by glimpses of problems seemingly too big to be solved. Panic does nothing to help, it merely gives us the impulse to run away. Sometimes it gives us that initial jolt of adrenaline, but our inability to conceive of a path of action eventually causes us to turn away.

     It is the fight or flea impulse--with which we are all familiar—on a societal level. We mostly choose flight, we avoid doing anything, and so choose to live in a bubble and pretend that we are safe in it. Turning inward is society’s equivalent of flight. And when some demagogue comes around and plays upon our fears, then society turns to the fight impulse. Whatever grand delusions we have about ourselves being individuals, creatures on par with lions, we are herd creatures that succumb to the common mind when we are troubled. We gather around, afraid to wander too far from the herd. Humans don’t do this physically but intellectually. When we become frightened, we constrict our thoughts so that they do not stray too far from the herd mentality. It is how we are designed as a species and an area of study too little researched as of yet, at least by those who would seek to do good with the results. I suspect advertisers and special interest groups could give us insights into such behavior, though they use such knowledge for personal gain.

     Many adult human beings have experienced the urge to fight or flee, at least on a personal level. To truly mature into a well-functioning adult means you are able to overcome to a good degree those baser impulses of fight or flee. You learn wisdom, real wisdom, understanding that such basic reflexes can often lead you astray. You have learned that to accomplish the goals you wish to accomplish you must set aside your fears and work with a fixed determination towards those goals, putting aside your fear and anger. Those fears never go away but you learn to identify them for what they are and keep them in check when you start to notice them influencing your behavior in a negative way.

     Perhaps society too is in the process of maturing, of learning how to gain control over such a herd mentality of fear and anger that so often leads us into war and financial disaster. It certainly doesn’t feel like that now, it seems the world is in utter chaos, and the best thing we can do is either to confront things with violence or else flee from attempting to deal with the situation at all. Here is an alternate viewpoint, one which I think appeals more to the adult in us, mature creatures living in an increasingly mature society, despite whatever fears and doubts we may harbor.

     Our era already has a good idea of the problems it has to face, it is merely taking its time to gather its courage. It is taking its time, too, to make sure it deals with the pressing problems of its day not merely with courage but with wisdom. Courage alone is how people of a century ago faced their problems and it created world wars. We today know we cannot confront our obstacles in such a manner. As frightening and destructive as the technology was then, our advances will make such an approach the end of human civilization.

     So we wait and we debate. We wait although emotion and passion pulses strongly within our veins. We wait as Hamlet once waited in order to ensure that balance is once again restored.

     We tread cautiously because we have seen the danger of courage unbound by humility. That does not make us weak, it makes us wise.

     That might seem like an unrealistically optimistic view of the situation as it now stands. All dramatic turnarounds begin in such a manner. That is how it is done. Humanity must put the skids on and come to a decision about where our lives are heading and then make adult decisions about how we want to spend our lives from here on out. It happens with individuals everyday. A drug addict decides to quit or seek treatment, an overweight person decides to get his eating under control, a worker decides upon a career path that will lead him to a degree of success. People turn their lives around all the time. So will society once it admits to the situation it now finds itself.

     It will begin with individuals, deciding a change has to take place. These individuals will encounter like-minded others and be encouraged and assisted by them. And once it has hit a critical mass, that herd mentality that has been resisting the change that must come will suddenly become its greatest asset.

     It will come. It has to come. We are ready because we must be ready. We wish to be more, we all do. We want a society that is equitable, a society that nurtures the best aspects of human beings. We have great things inside us and we all want a chance to let them grow. It’s time now, we are adults who are ready to live our lives. We are a race that has seen too much mindless bloodshed and indifference to our fellow man.

     It has begun. Minds all over the world are locked into a commitment to a better world. This is not like the adolescent well-meaning but immature rumblings of the 1960s. This is the maturation of the human species that does not want to be an addict or a screw up any longer. This is not believing, it is doing. It has begun.