Like most progressive youths, I had an anti-capitalist awakening. With a nudge or two to the left from more educated friends, I understood just how ruthless the modern world is. Every layer of society, from housing to education to entertainment, is an unregulated marketplace. Every system invites the strong to prey on the weak. At the top of the pyramid is a gluttonous elite, utterly unsustainable, steering us ever closer to oblivion.
My friends introduced me to socialism, capitalism’s arch enemy, a system of equity, solidarity, and long-term planning. A collective effort, but informed by each individual’s ability and need. That’s what’s normal, I realized. That’s what the whole world would look like if corporations didn’t keep us under their heel. So, I began to hate capitalism, for robbing me of that saner world.
But over the past few years, I regret to say, I’ve had the inverse awakening. The strong preying on the weak, unsustainable gluttony…that just sounds like life to me. That’s what organisms do. Animals kill each other to survive. Ecosystems fall before hungry, invasive species. The natural world is every bit as ruthless as the modern, just as laden with inequality and disaster.
“Well, that’s nature, not humanity”, one may object. “We should be better than that.”
But humanity has never been better than that. Our reigning systems have always mirrored nature. Imperialism, feudalism, colonialism, most realizations of communism – they’ve all been unjust and unsustainable in essence. People have always had too little or too much. That’s what’s normal.
“Solidarity and altruism are also human qualities”, one may object. “There have existed many small, egalitarian societies. Oh, and many animal species are generally peaceful.”
I agree, and value those qualities highly. But when, I ask, have they ever ruled more than pockets of the world, eyes in the predatory storm?
I’m not going to say that capitalism hasn’t wrought any new evils upon the world. Economic wealth is more flexible than any previous measure of power, allowing for a thousand new forms of exploitation, and power even further divorced from effort and responsibility. Capitalism is also contemporary with modern technology, with all the destruction that entails.
But there’s no ancient, universal moral code that capitalism betrays. If the world has a moral code, it’s a cruel one, and capitalism is surely in alignment with it. It didn’t steal or cheat its way to power; it slid comfortably into place.
It felt good to hate capitalism. I enjoyed the image of an insidious system corrupting human nature. Now that I’m older, however, hatred has become sorrow. Sorrow that this is human nature. Sorrow that all our attempts at civilization somehow end up reproducing the law of the jungle. Sorrow that my world is so naturally cruel that capitalism fits perfectly into it.
I would love for socialism to displace capitalism as the global system. But it wouldn’t be a political shift as much as an anthropological shift. A biological shift. A human overhaul.
Do I think it’s possible, though? Absolutely. I have great respect and esteem for human kindness. It has a history of beating odds.