The Great Paradox Of Capitalism and Free Markets
How ignorance about the true nature of economy (energy production and preservation) leads to the abuse of it and into “Marxism”, all the same through the back door.
"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Oscar Wilde
Near the turn of the millennium, paradigms were being challenged across the entire spectrum of human thought.
The paradigms often center around dualities, such as patriarchy/matriarchy, but there is also seen a third way that attempts to integrate the polarities, which posits a harmonious co-existence of male and female principles. Dualities being examined these days include: male/female, fear/love, destroy/create, objectivity/subjectivity, control/freedom, victim/oppressor, competition/cooperation and materialism/spiritualism.
One trap can be falling into the either/or false dichotomy regarding the dualities. During the Cold War, Americans were fed the false dichotomy of choosing capitalism or communism, with capitalism falsely called the “free” system and communism the one that imprisons people.
The misunderstanding lies in our mind and our identification with our mind’s predisposition to the isolation of dualities, which distorts their true nature. Isolating one value and attempting to implement it as an isolated system fails because these values are meant to function together.
In this post I will be examining this mechanism when it applies to energy production and preservation (i.e. economy).
The reality is that Capitalism and Communism arise from a genetic disposition inherent in the human species, reflecting complementary polarities. Although perceived as opposites, they are two sides of the same coin. Both deal with resources and support.
Human survival and efficiency revolve around energy conservation and manipulation. The goal - if there was ever an one - is to expend less energy while gaining greater returns, a continuous process.
Compared to other mammals, our bodies are fragile and weak. To counter that, embedded in our biogenetic forms are two significant advantages: self-reflected consciousness and an imperative to create and bond in groups. These abilities have allowed humans to develop sophisticated strategies for obtaining resources, compensating for physical fragility.
The Inner Arm (Communism)
'Communism' derives from the word 'commune' (community), and 'socialism' from 'social' (society). Both emphasize the needs and cohesion of the group over the individual. To maintain the integrity of a group, the individual has to sacrifice some of their individuality. That is the bargain. The sacrifice is not in vain.
This genetic imperative is expressed as the need for acceptance by the group and to be of service. In return, the individual receives support as the ensuring that their basic needs are met (food, water, shelter, and clothing). The individual receive a sense of being part of something larger. In a family, the smallest tribal unit, resources are pooled to provide for all members, distributing money, food, clothing, and shelter.
The value system of the tribe, based on agreed rules and principles, is the glue that holds it together. Work is a supreme value, with everyone contributing to essential tasks like farming, hunting and defense in exchange for support.
All these represents the inner arm of the tribe, the distribution of energy within a community.
The Outer Arm (Capitalism)
In addition to the inner "arm," the tribe has an outer "arm"—the capitalist side—which focuses on resource accumulation and material transformation to improve living conditions. What we experience today as a "market economy" is rooted in an ancient genetic imperative: the desire to improve our status. This is the source of ambition.
The word "capitalism" comes from "capital," meaning energy or resources. The ambition to create or accumulate capital is driven by the need to improve the tribe's conditions and ensure its continuity. This drive is fueled by the fear of failure—synonymous with extinction. No tribe wants to fail and disappear. On the contrary, the goal is to expand its foothold (whether it’s economically as “market share” or genetically, as expansion of a the gene pool).
Side note: The term 'tribe' should not be narrowly interpreted as people sitting around a fire. It encompasses any human grouping such as businesses, families, sports teams, and communities all the way to nation states and countries. All these groups are united by a materialistic orientation and a shared value system.
No new business aims to fail. Instead, the goal is always to survive and succeed. This drive to sell and exchange goods is universal. We constantly sell things even when we think we don't. We sell ourselves to others all the time.
“The world is a business.”
Historically, most people lived outside central towns. Only in the last couple of centuries have megalopolis cities become the global standard, with more people now living in cities than outside them.
Previously, tribes traveled to the nearest town to exchange or sell their goods at markets, where different tribes came together. Each tribe could sell or exchange unique products or resources. This accumulation of diverse resources enabled more sophisticated manipulation of matter.
Recognizing and Honing Talent: The Root of Capitalism
Talent recognition is a key factor in manipulating resources effectively. The root of capitalism lies in identifying and nurturing talents within the tribe. Trade—exchanging resources and services for capital—depends on honing talent. This is the basis of capitalism.
Identifying talent within a group allows us to leverage it for maximum benefit. For example, if someone has a talent for weaving baskets, nurturing this talent enables the tribe to produce many baskets, which can be sold to other tribes. This not only provides immediate benefits but also allows the knowledge to be passed to future generations, ensuring ongoing production and competitive advantage.
This is an ongoing process. As soon as basket weaving is no longer unique, the tribe seeks new talents to meet changing needs, preserving its continuity. The fear of failure drives this constant vigilance. The tribe must stay alert to identify trends in order to be able to adapt and to transform them into capital.
War: A Means of Resource Accumulation
War is another method through which tribes increase their resources. It achieves two primary goals: expanding and rejuvenating the gene pool by integrating members of defeated tribes and increasing wealth through looting.
Despite our perceived sophistication, wars remain fundamentally about resource acquisition. Today, wars are often masked by rhetoric about freedom and democracy, but financial interests are always at the core. War is expensive, and no country engages in it without financial incentives.
In business, the principles are similar. Companies go to "war" through lawsuits, aiming to impoverish competitors, and by taking their market share and resources. This is the business world's version of looting and warfare.
That is why Capitalism has always been closely linked to the military-industrial complex. This relationship revolves around optimizing weapon systems to deter other tribes (countries) and maintain a labor market. This deterrence justifies continued investment and the honing of skills and systems, creating and maintaining a capitalist economy driven by selling weapons and reinvesting profits to refine talent and improve systems.
No matter how much we shun from the notion of war, without the never ending wheel of war economy we wouldn’t have been able to enjoy all our privilege of modern life. One is intertwined with the other.
Connecting the Two Arms: Synergy within the Tribe
The internal arm (socialism) and the external arm (capitalism) are meant to work synergistically within the tribe.
The internal arm distributes resources and support among all members, while the external arm recognizes and hones talent to produce goods or services that can be exchanged for capital.
The relationship between the two functions like a pump (battery): one side draws energy from the outside, and the other disperses it within. This capital is then meant to be redistributed within the tribe, providing both the necessary energy allocated for basic needs and services, as well as for continued improvement and steady growth.
Without the capitalist drive, humanity would still be living in straw huts. This drive pushed us to explore, expand, and innovate, leading to our current level of civilization and technology. Conversely, without the socialist drive, tribes would disintegrate, jeopardizing the survival of the human race. This balance is crucial for human development.
Practical Integration in Business
In any business, the two arms work together, though not explicitly named as such. Human Resources (HR) represents the internal (socialist) arm, focusing on employee well-being and support. The sales and marketing departments, on the other hand, represent the external (capitalist) arm, driving revenue and growth. Isolating these functions would undermine the organization's performance.
A company that focuses solely on sales without attending to employee well-being will eventually face breakdowns and low productivity. Conversely, a company that overly prioritizes employee benefits without maintaining productivity will risk bankruptcy.
For a healthy economy, we must strive for a balance between the two arms. This equilibrium ensures health and prosperity for all members of the tribe, or in modern terms, society. Only by maintaining this balance is it possible to guarantee a thriving, sustainable system.
A Word on Globalism and Current Affairs
Despite advancements, human mentality has not changed much since ancient times. Material anxiety governs human beings, whether they are on the side of the have or have-not. All are still driven by primal fears, living in a world of "eat or be eaten," despite claims of being an enlightened species.
Modern propaganda reinforces these fears, perpetuating preconceived notions. The mainstream histories of capitalism portray it as mankind’s natural state. The history of capitalism’s triumph is seen as merely the removal of obstacles to mankind’s highest state.
Competing ideologies such as communism (never really practiced in the Soviet Union or China) or socialism are rejected as systems that do not honor human nature. In reality, the salient feature of “human nature” that today’s capitalism honors is greed. Capitalistic ideologists have transformed greed into a virtue, turning reality upside down.
When I moved to the U.S., some 20 years ago, I was always astounded at how paranoid Americans are; how they start twitching the moment they hear the word ‘socialism’. A form of PTSD as a result of incessant demagoguery propaganda on steroids for decades, starting with McCarthy’s era. Nowadays, mentioning "socialism" to most people still invokes images of the "Bolshevik revolution” representing a threat to "freedom" and American values.
This rather fear-based mentality inadvertently gave birth to the biggest cancer of this nation: lawsuit mentality. l was astonished to see how everyone is suing everyone whenever something brushes them off the wrong way (the tragedy is that this cancer is now metastasizing to all other industrialized countries).
Why is that?
Because the inner arm was never cultivated to begin with. I mean, if a country that prides itself as the center for progress and innovation doesn’t provide natural basic rights, as the right to be supported - treated when becoming Ill, - what do you expect will happen?! The system has to self correct itself . but it does so in a very inefficient manner which overtime robs its energy. In the end, the entire “body” collapses
When everyone is suing everyone as the only recourse; when this is the only language they speak whenever they're confronted with a crisis - when you combine that into a mentality you realize why such crony capitalism exists within our institutions and why the gap between those who have and those who don’t only widens.
This is why insurance and attorneys are the only thing Americans know, because the culture is all fear-based. Every business is mostly occupied with the fear of being sued because the support side, reflected by the inner arm, is practically non existent.
And so, much of the planning and thinking process is directed towards the enactment of strategies to minimize risk and include it in the pricing models, which always drives prices up, because sooner or later there’s going to be a lawsuit. Most of the energy is wasted on protection from “what-if” scenarios that erodes any potential for real growth.
That’s why medical treatments cost an arm and a leg in this country. That is why an average American get 12 sick days a year whereas a European, 35. And yet the average American still believes he lives in the “land of the free”, convinced he needs to protect a piece of paper (constitution) which has long gone become obsolete (a piece of paper means nothing. It’s the people and their integrity or lack thereof that underlies prosperity or not).
It’s really ironic to observe the so called “greatest nation on earth” being not far from being a third world country with dilapidated roads, tunnels, bridges and public transportation, while having the largest accumulation of richest people per capita. All this huge disparity is the byproduct of ignorance; the incessant insistence that these systems must be separated while abusing them.
Most Americans still see subsidized healthcare as counteract to “freedom”. The irony is that after all these years, echoing hollow slogans of “freedom”, they still don’t even know what freedom is. They’ve never been free. They were only given the illusion of freedom. The state of affairs and the economy reflects that. People still believe that if they can afford a house, they live the American dream. It’s always been a deception and it’s about time people begin to wake up to the delusion.
So-called “free society” as the U.S., is structured in such a way that Freedom and Privatization are but illusions. We’ve been borrowing and conjuring currency out of thin air which in reality is the robbing of future work of future generations (i.e. enslavement of our future for the illusion of freedom in the present).
When push comes to shove, the central and larger banks have all the right to confiscate everything we owe, even that which is free of debt.
Marxism Through the Backdoor
The great irony is that someone whose been illustrated for years as the enemy of freedom, has actually predicted with great accuracy the fate of capitalistic societies.
Karl Marx's insights from The Communist Manifesto, made over 150 years ago, still resonate with the predicament of modern society.
Marx observed that periodic commercial crises threaten the middle class, destroying products and productive forces and leading to an absurd epidemic of overproduction. This overproduction thrusts society into a state of temporary barbarism, as he called it, in which civilization's excesses—too much industry, commerce, and means of subsistence—paralyze it.
The productive forces become too powerful for the existing middle class conditions, causing disorder and endangering its property.
Marx also noted the gradual decline of the lower middle class—small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, craftsmen, and farmers—into the proletariat. This shift occurs because their small capital cannot compete with large capitalists, and their specialized skills become obsolete with new production methods. Consequently, the proletariat is recruited from all societal classes (aka “the gig economy”).
Don’t know about you, but to me it paints a pretty curate picture of the current state of the economy of the modern world.
“It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society.
In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence, industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why?
Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence: too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become to powerful for these conditions by which they are fettered, and as soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”
Karl Marx
Marx had foreseen the progression of such a pattern and the inevitable capitulation of imbalanced capitalistic society. Hence, his solution was to cut it short by imposing a new system, rather than wait for it to collapse on its own.
I disagree with his solution because:
The notion that it’s possible to drape a formula on society from the top down and expect exact results in the field is a false premise. History proves that that never works time and time again. True change can only work from the bottom up; from the individual to the community level, and all the way to the collective. The individual has to wake up to themselves and regain their own power within: The recognition that the only true commodity is the energy they naturally create within, designated towards activity. And that what we call money is merely a formula that measures that. (in other words, Gold or promissory notes (IOU) don’t build you a house, humans do)
Implementation can never work in either direction - a purely capitalistic or socialistic society - because they were never intended to be isolated.
People nowadays shout “Marxism” and “communism” to something they don’t really understand. They either can’t or don’t want to confront the fact that an imbalanced system, in which the capitalistic arm has been overly cultivated on the expense of paralyzing the inner socialistic arm, creates the same predicament nonetheless in which it starts to autophagy (self-devour).
What is being espoused today as “Marxism” / “Communism” is merely a fear-based projection on reactionary policies by those who in their vanity have taken upon themselves the role of caretakers of the world. A Nouveau riche bourgeois class who try to contain the disarray, based on reckless and greedy actions in the past, fearing the capitulation of an imbalanced system imploding on itself. None of them see themselves a “Marxists” however. It’s all reactionary decision making based on fear.
In other words, globalist capitalists have no way but to recourse to exactly what Marx predicted the economy would go to. It’s “Marxism” through the back door - through the inevitable consequences of the abuse of the capitalistic arm without accountability over the years.
Conclusion:
Separation Breeds Distortion
Capitalism and Socialism were never meant to be isolated. They symbolize the outer and inner (material) arms of the ‘tribe’, respectively. The former deals with TRANSFORMATION of talent and skills into resources for the improvement of conditions, whereas the latter is about SUPPORT.
The capitalistic arm is about generating capital for improvement and innovation, whereas the socialistic/communal arm is about redistribution of resources as support mechanisms: roads, education, facilities, protection (Police, Fire department, etc.), healthcare and so on. Each balances one another.
The problems attributed to capitalism and communism are not inherent to these systems but result from their separation and improper balance. Believing that one system should dominate the other creates further distortion. It leads to the theft of capital and incorrect resource distribution.
Proponents of each system have invested enormous energy in promoting one while vilifying the other. Each of the prevailing ideologies has its foot soldiers that defend the paradigm that puts food on their table. But the reality is that neither system can work in isolation. Each has elements of the other, even if not balanced or explicitly recognized.
The Integrity of Future Communities Lies in Maintaining Balance
Since the world is going caput due to the change in global cycles, the solution is not on a global scale, but lies in the integrity of smaller communities.
Since the communities that underlies our civilization are breaking down for the deception of individual prosperity, only a few understand that it’s merely a trap. The key is to find and establish new communities based on the objective understanding about the true nature of being.
If or when you happen to find or establish a community, please understand that it can only work as long as there’s a balance between these two arms. The dedication should be towards absolute integrity of such balance and the full adherence to maintain it. It’s on such balance lies the future health and well being of any community and business, as well as its individual members.