I come down hard on greed and materialism and the associated lifestyles. My ideas about consumer culture are objective; I use rational arguments that rely on describable and provable causes and effects. I hate it when an opponent tries to argue that my convictions on the subject are just opinions. Many people feel strongly about many things, and often it is the case that they’re working off opinions, sometimes from intuition, sometimes from partial evidence. But when an argument is made with sound, logical statements and clear evidence suggesting certain causal relationships, the argument is no longer a mere opinion. At that point it can only be disputed with stronger counter-arguments and stronger counter-evidence, not counter-opinions. 

But my convictions are also subjective in the sense that they have become deeply personal. They did not come about by some kind of argument made to me. Rather, my own change in conviction away from consumerism was intuitive and subtle, based on experiences that invisibly shaped and reshaped my worldview. The most powerful influence on my worldview has been spending years abroad, particularly in struggling, developing countries. By befriending people born into that circumstance and connecting with them, identifying with them, I was able to see weaknesses and shallownesses in my thinking, my goals and aspirations, my values, and where I was devoting my time and energy. Questioning where those weak values came from was key: the desire for accumulation was something that the society I was raised in had implanted in me from birth.

I’m not an anti-materialist; in fact, I’m as unimpressed with hippies as I am gamblers or bankers. I’m also not anti-capitalist. But I am anti-runway capitalism, also increasingly referred to as “tyrannical capitalism”, which is the system we now have. Our corporations and the finance and banking industries operate with impunity. In a literal way, they have successfully carried out a coup d’état over a government that was created to protect people from forces that become obstacles to human flourishing and freedom. The coup was successful the day it became possible a person to be born into debt. The system we now have is ruled by a debt that’s basically inescapable by all but very few– some who are part of the class that created and participated in making the debt model itself, and some who are just lucky, good timing, a good contact, etc. The vast majority of the rest are all locked into debt for the rest of their lives for merely having been born. The corporate state has basically usurped power from the only source of protection for people, the US government, and has made a slave state of its own. It determines what wages are and it is determined to keep them at just the right level for people to have enough money to buy things, but never enough to escape what is a large scale poverty trap clamped at the ankles of the majority of citizens. Wages haven’t changed in 30 years despite unprecedented economic growth over the same period of time. Where did all of that money go and what enables that to even be possible? Very simple.

For a long time, the system was sort of OK. If people wanted to spend their lives studying the movement of capital around the country and the world and making investments and shifting assets around to funnel money out of the system, it wasn’t particularly dangerous, just a bit of a lame “contribution” to the world. But things have changed now. Because of deregulation, there are no brakes on greed and there’s no more balance. Over the last few decades the largest institutions of finance have grown and expanded their holdings to the point that they now control most of the world’s combined wealth. Individuals within those institutions are able to remove obscene amounts of wealth for doing almost no “work”, and rather just manipulating columns of numbers using crafty and sometimes creative ways to get one column to grow and others to shrink, and making sure their bets are the one they can manipulate to grow. The problem is that those numbers on the page are not mere numbers. There are people on the other end, who are ultimately doing actual work, but their labor is now completely removed from its real value. Its value is determined not by need or trade equivalent (my basket for your bike frame), but by people who move columns of numbers around, singly determining the value of actual hours spent building, creating, working, and making that determination based on what will funnel as much money into the account of the firm that has the office in which the spreadsheet is being fiddled with.

How did this happen? Partially because no one was looking. There are indeed many people in the world who use their days pursuing other goals and can’t spend hours every day making sure that corporate thieves and bankers and manipulators are under control. That’s what “government” is supposed to be for, to protect and serve people. But deregulation has led to the opposite of this. The safeguards for people, societies–whole economies–have been systematically removed in just a few decades, taking government oversight out of finance almost completely, allowing for breathtaking consolidation of wealth under a few umbrella institutions, using the justification of “free market capitalism.”

So what exactly is so wrong with unfettered capitalism? It’s simple: if you allow for impunity against an institution that has just one mandate for itself– to make profit at all costs– the human costs of achieving that mandate do not matter.  So if creating a massive recession that winds up destroying an entire economy and puts millions of people out of work is profitable for the institution, then it will be done. And that is what happened, and they did end up profiting from it. Make no mistake, traders love recessions.

The tactics the banking industry used to create the recession, such as issuing loans that they knew would fail and then betting against the same loans not failing in order to profit off of them, are illegal. But, impunity. Our own government, powerless against the corporations that have grown to control the entire banking sector in our country, actually used our tax dollars to pay the same people who are responsible for what happened 2008 and for what will be happening for the next 10 years or more. And the ruination of our economy– the millions now unemployed and broke and struggling– is just one kind of human cost of corporate impunity– there are many.

Outsourced manufacturing, for instance, has ravaged the US economy, and yet it’s supported by every major financial institution because of the short term profitability. But the real harm is what it’s ultimately about: we have laws in this country that protect against slave labor, that protect against exploitation of children and of the poor because as a society we agreed that such practices were morally unconscionable. But because the only thing that matters now is the bottom line, companies are encouraged to move manufacturing to places that don’t protect people from such things, where, as evidenced by practice, it is believed that people matter less. When a company does move manufacturing overseas and into slave labor deals with struggling foreign economies, and when it does generate profit because it’s paying almost nothing for armies of trapped people to work 16 hours a day until too weak to go on, it’s rewarded. Investors swoon and pump more money in. Keep it going. No one on Wall St. can imagine the life of a slave, but between 9-5 every day they’re supporting regimes that actually commoditize human beings, commoditize people no different than you or me, who just happened to be born there instead of here. The same thing happens in our own country– people born on that side of the tracks instead of this side. What does it take for a person to be able to sleep at night knowing that their chosen occupation in life leads to the suffering, real suffering, of thousands and thousands of real people? It takes a system to design that kind of guiltless, zombie “person”. And that is what we now have.

You see, people are groomed from birth to govern their entire lives by what they think is good: massive and intense accumulation of material wealth at all costs. The problem is that they never clarify “good” for themselves, they merely corroborate it with others who, like themselves, are products of a system that thrives when people believe in its determination of good, rather than their own. They gauge their “success” in life, their happiness, by what the system requires them to value. They’ve been cultivated from birth to worship what makes the corporation thrive. They were created to believe that their ability to accumulate in unlimited fashion matters more than anything else in the universe.

In this country, tyrannical capitalism has surely won: the constant messages or portrayals depicting– dictating–how life ought to be for all humans is essentially inescapable now, crafting within people a belief of “ought” that is nothing of our own conception or imagination, and everything of an external conception that has everything to gain from our assimilation, while individual humans and their cultures have everything to lose from it. Many who study this phenomenon have gone so far as to say that there is no longer any “culture” in the capitalist word, only consumer culture. Art, they say, is dead. When that happens, humanity is lost, having become the soulless robot, reverting into the soulless monkey that various paradigms of great advancement throughout human history have mercifully pulled humans out of. The current system will return us to feudalism, a reversal of hundreds of years of progress.

It could be hundreds of years until humanity pulls itself out of what has rapidly destroyed our ability to rise and expand our minds, our consciousnesses, our potentials as beings in the universe. A helpful visual to clarify the point: imagine the galaxy with all its billions of stars and planets, see the little spec of dust that is the earth, zoom all the way into it to an office in Manhattan, and study what the life forms you encounter there spend their 60 or so years doing before returning to non-existence. Columns of meaningless numbers for an entire lifetime.

Humanity is very far along the course of self-destruction, and tyrannical capitalism is leading the way there.

We grow up in a world in which large, self-propagating institutions have trained a “market” (human beings) to expect “value” (happiness) from certain things and not other things, and the “market” grows and shifts in response to how many people are convinced to spend their lives finding ways to acquire what they’re groomed to believe is of value. The fact that the things that are supposed to make us happy are now decided for us by institutions with existential interest in making that decision for us makes no difference in our society: people don’t even care where their desire comes from, or care to even consider it. Marketing has reached a level now that goes far beyond awareness and choice, to the point of manipulating people’s most basic intuitive functions so that they do and feel things that are manufactured by the group interested in making them feel that way– the group asking for their money. People don’t even know why they’re doing it, why they’re buying it, half the time, other than that for some reason it feels good.

There are dozens of tests showing that conceptions of happiness can be manufactured and given to people. That’s all that marketing is– and the shoes do make people feel “happier”, despite the brand sticker being fake, part of the independent variable in the control studies showing how most people live like sheep, imitating rather than creating. The argument here is that now most people do this from birth, groomed to be as such by a system that benefits from human ignorance, impulsivity, and crudeness, and keeps them that way as much as possible by making it difficult for any alternative way of living to even be possible.

Last thing on this: I’m an insider here. I used to work for a multinational corporation and did quite well for them. I took my rewards and invested in real estate in a country with a sprinting economy, and also into a large business that I’m now completely detached from other than that every two weeks a check gets deposited into an account I have over there. I’m also an insider in the sense that I have friends who are caught up this system– people who are now experts at getting other people to give them money, sometimes money they don’t even have, in hopes of it turning into more money. I have other friends who spend every working hour just moving numbers around and between holdings so for that one day one column grows, they take the difference and put it in their own bank account, and then put everything back to where it was– all perfectly legal despite it not being of any value to anyone, anywhere, but somehow “earns” them money. That’s their whole occupation in life, and they live in opulence because of it, despite the results of their “work” causing harm to humans not just in their own communities, but now just about everywhere in the world. I don’t shy away from it when it comes up. It’s just so pitiful and weak and I don’t hide my thoughts or feelings about it from anyone when asked. It’s a sad state when my friends agree with me about almost everything I argue, but still can’t stop supporting the system. Zombies.

I’m trying to incorporate these truths into my own choices in life because the alternative is demonstrably harmful to people and to culture and whole societies.