“This happened because caring for everyone was never the goal of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to extract labor from the working class and resources from the global south to sell goods and services at a rate that generates profit for the owners of the means of production. That’s it.
Capitalism has no wisdom. It will start wars to generate profit. It will have impoverished populations toiling in mines and sweatshops for pennies in order to generate profit. It will burn up critical drinking water supplies for AI data centers in order to generate profit. It will cut down the last acre of old-growth rainforest in order to generate profit. It will pollute the air, fill the oceans with plastic and kill all the insects if offloading the cost of industry onto the ecosystem helps generate profit.
The entire world is being consumed by an artificially imposed system which holds as its foundational premise that mass-scale human behavior should be driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake. It’s a mindless, planet-devouring machine of our own making. It is creating unfathomable destruction and suffering for terrestrial organisms of every species.”
Like much of Corbin's writing, this piece is chock-full of lines that I wish were on billboards throughout the county and on our TVs every bit as often as the damn pharmaceutical and lawyer ads. Pick a line and put it on a billboard or a TV ad in your town. People running for office can find their campaign's motto in here. This is a gold mine.
"The billionaire who wants to own everything is celebrated as a visionary. The worker who wants to own a home is told to lower their expectations. That’s the scam."
They stole Christmas. They took Santa hostage and are selling him back to us in little pieces that we can't afford. Whoville is about to erupt and storm grinch mountain. Honestly ive never had Want and Get living close by, as a matter of fact, Get put up a privacy fence so Want couldn't see how much Get was getting at Want's expense. This year is the fist time, im 57, that ive made over 38k and im not complaining its just that I, like so many of my neighbors, was sold a pig in a poke, told that if I worked really hard for a really long time I could have a better life and all I got was a worn out body and a bag of disillusionment because every time my ship came in someone over at the department of Thou Shall Not sank it before it could dock and then sent me the bill! How F'd up is that? I feel a tremor coming a faultlines forming and Whoville losing its cool.
I so appreciate your writing and your insights, Corbin. Thank you.
It's been obvious to many for a long time, but lately it's big enough to be seen from space that capitalism and its slavish adherents are the root problem of so much suffering in our world.
I do have one bright spot to slip into your analysis of families though. For most of our two daughters' childhoods, we were one of those low-income 2 working parents households with rent, utility bills, doctor and dental bills and the upkeep of 2 working vehicles to maintain. There were plenty of daily, monthly and annual money worries, robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes, and unavoidable tension and arguments that goes with those stresses. Our kids went to (rural) school with plenty of rich kids, (and poor kids, in-between kids) so they saw the game consoles at Christmas and the new cars for 16th birthdays of their friends.
But we managed to bring them up to know that shopping at Goodwill and Value Village was FUN, that re-using clothes and other items was smart, and later, for example, that if they wanted to get their drivers' licenses and use the family car they'd also have to help with the auto insurance through part time local jobs. (Of course this is back when such jobs were available, for the most part -- school came first but there was babysitting, working at a local grocery and a small rural library, and odd jobs that fit.)
We weren't as poor as some in our community, and we had a home where some did not, so for the most part we felt lucky!
So this is just to remind readers that financially poor families are not easily stereotyped to one size fits all. And thank you again for your thoughtful, right-on analyses of this country right now!
As a blue collar guy born in 1960, I've lived this post in real time. And yet I was way more fortunate than young people are today. Both my boys are well paid professionals, but I worry about how long before their jobs are threatened by AI. When enough people get hungry and desperate enough there will be an uprising.
There exists a psychotic break inside the human brain. Perhaps it always has been there, or perhaps it has 'evolved' as that brain became more enmeshed with stress that it could not cope with in paleolithic terms.
If we are to believe our own experiences as animals, then we must admit that paranoia exists as a mental condition. Fear creates stress, but fear has impetus due to the presence of agents of stress. It is these agents of stress, accumulated across time via the expansiveness of the human brain to create new behaviors, that have created the paradigm of behavior we now call capitalism.
But here is the rub. All animals have, within them, many other animals. Animalia is paleolithic. The fear of need without satisfaction drives paranoia, creates behaviors that we might call ambitious, or even aggressive, that go far beyond finding the next meal or a safe place to hunker down for the night.
These animals within animals have many forms. One prominent and paleolithic form is parasitism. Some animals feed off other animals. Parasites, we call them, as if 'we' are somehow excluded from our own observations. This 'shift' in psychic observation could be labeled 'dualism,' or 'subjectivity,' Cartesian style. Them and 'us.'
This is the psychic break. We have to 'live,' while we can justify that 'others' die so that we can keep living. Survival, eh? Has to be right, que no? But scientific inquiry and information accumulation shows that not all animalia feed off others. Or at least there are limits to the scope of that feeding, that parasitism. It is not a 'kill or be killed' equation. In many cases, the feeding actually has benefits for both, or at least a break even behavior, commensalism. Animalia can eat plantae, and as long as the feeding is not absolute, the plantae stay alive, regrow, reproduce new plantae, and things can get rosy and easier.
This is known as mutualism in ecological terms. Do not behave in an absolute way, a winner take all way, and most if not all 'others' can survive too, and perhaps thrive. Now we have what we call 'obligate carnivores.' Animalia that have no choice but to eat other animalia - felines, some fishes, etc. Amazingly, as if some wiser force is present to affect behaviors, these obligates are few in number, and left alone in their paradigm, will not destroy their own food sources.
But when one obligate carnivore, a predator that must eat, lives inside another obligate carnivore, a sticky problem exists. Hunger never goes away, and if the overarching environment becomes imbalanced, the ferocity and consumptive behaviors of parasites living within parasites fuels this imbalance, and 'things fall apart.'
This condition is what we call capitalism - survival at any cost. Hunger is 'always' present because there exists within one predator another predator, a parasite within a parasite, perhaps more than one iteration than that. Soon enough, the hunger is insatiable, it cannot be appeased, and now only the rats live on the island, and they must begin eating each other. This is paramount capitalism - only hunger exists, and its end result is total elimination of the entire environment that supports from one to many animalia, and along with that, the plantae foundation that ultimately feeds and shelters ALL.
We humans cannot 'outbuild or rebuild' this parasite. We cannot build newer and more efficient parasites. The only solution, if there is one at all, is to reduce the number and type of parasites down to a volume that does not threaten, and may in fact enhance, a thriving biodiversity that exhibits balance and creative change. We humans are no where near this realization right now.
Before we build anything, like yet another War on Something, we have to realize and admit that we humans ARE the parasite that has way too many other parasites hiding inside our gut, metaphorically speaking. We have to relearn what life is like in paleolithic terms, where we keep balanced, keep Small, keep Beautiful, and keep our appetites not only in check, but in balance with the paradigm we call ecological stability, NOT rigid, unchanging stability, but dynamic but subtly changing stability.
If not, we have signed our own death warrant, and soon enough Earth will look like Mars, and Musk can stop killing the atmosphere with all its useless rockets and satellites that do nothing more than monitor the death of a planet.
Right on point and very well written. Thanks Corbin! Tom and Greg - I agree with you both. Let's help more of our fellow citizens to see and understand the structure of the "systems" we live under so we can change them for the better. Thanks again all 3 of you!
“This happened because caring for everyone was never the goal of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to extract labor from the working class and resources from the global south to sell goods and services at a rate that generates profit for the owners of the means of production. That’s it.
Capitalism has no wisdom. It will start wars to generate profit. It will have impoverished populations toiling in mines and sweatshops for pennies in order to generate profit. It will burn up critical drinking water supplies for AI data centers in order to generate profit. It will cut down the last acre of old-growth rainforest in order to generate profit. It will pollute the air, fill the oceans with plastic and kill all the insects if offloading the cost of industry onto the ecosystem helps generate profit.
The entire world is being consumed by an artificially imposed system which holds as its foundational premise that mass-scale human behavior should be driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake. It’s a mindless, planet-devouring machine of our own making. It is creating unfathomable destruction and suffering for terrestrial organisms of every species.”
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-craziest-thing-in-the-world-is
Like much of Corbin's writing, this piece is chock-full of lines that I wish were on billboards throughout the county and on our TVs every bit as often as the damn pharmaceutical and lawyer ads. Pick a line and put it on a billboard or a TV ad in your town. People running for office can find their campaign's motto in here. This is a gold mine.
"The billionaire who wants to own everything is celebrated as a visionary. The worker who wants to own a home is told to lower their expectations. That’s the scam."
Our current country, in a nutshell.
They stole Christmas. They took Santa hostage and are selling him back to us in little pieces that we can't afford. Whoville is about to erupt and storm grinch mountain. Honestly ive never had Want and Get living close by, as a matter of fact, Get put up a privacy fence so Want couldn't see how much Get was getting at Want's expense. This year is the fist time, im 57, that ive made over 38k and im not complaining its just that I, like so many of my neighbors, was sold a pig in a poke, told that if I worked really hard for a really long time I could have a better life and all I got was a worn out body and a bag of disillusionment because every time my ship came in someone over at the department of Thou Shall Not sank it before it could dock and then sent me the bill! How F'd up is that? I feel a tremor coming a faultlines forming and Whoville losing its cool.
I so appreciate your writing and your insights, Corbin. Thank you.
It's been obvious to many for a long time, but lately it's big enough to be seen from space that capitalism and its slavish adherents are the root problem of so much suffering in our world.
I do have one bright spot to slip into your analysis of families though. For most of our two daughters' childhoods, we were one of those low-income 2 working parents households with rent, utility bills, doctor and dental bills and the upkeep of 2 working vehicles to maintain. There were plenty of daily, monthly and annual money worries, robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes, and unavoidable tension and arguments that goes with those stresses. Our kids went to (rural) school with plenty of rich kids, (and poor kids, in-between kids) so they saw the game consoles at Christmas and the new cars for 16th birthdays of their friends.
But we managed to bring them up to know that shopping at Goodwill and Value Village was FUN, that re-using clothes and other items was smart, and later, for example, that if they wanted to get their drivers' licenses and use the family car they'd also have to help with the auto insurance through part time local jobs. (Of course this is back when such jobs were available, for the most part -- school came first but there was babysitting, working at a local grocery and a small rural library, and odd jobs that fit.)
We weren't as poor as some in our community, and we had a home where some did not, so for the most part we felt lucky!
So this is just to remind readers that financially poor families are not easily stereotyped to one size fits all. And thank you again for your thoughtful, right-on analyses of this country right now!
As a blue collar guy born in 1960, I've lived this post in real time. And yet I was way more fortunate than young people are today. Both my boys are well paid professionals, but I worry about how long before their jobs are threatened by AI. When enough people get hungry and desperate enough there will be an uprising.
Can we send them to Mars yet?
There exists a psychotic break inside the human brain. Perhaps it always has been there, or perhaps it has 'evolved' as that brain became more enmeshed with stress that it could not cope with in paleolithic terms.
If we are to believe our own experiences as animals, then we must admit that paranoia exists as a mental condition. Fear creates stress, but fear has impetus due to the presence of agents of stress. It is these agents of stress, accumulated across time via the expansiveness of the human brain to create new behaviors, that have created the paradigm of behavior we now call capitalism.
But here is the rub. All animals have, within them, many other animals. Animalia is paleolithic. The fear of need without satisfaction drives paranoia, creates behaviors that we might call ambitious, or even aggressive, that go far beyond finding the next meal or a safe place to hunker down for the night.
These animals within animals have many forms. One prominent and paleolithic form is parasitism. Some animals feed off other animals. Parasites, we call them, as if 'we' are somehow excluded from our own observations. This 'shift' in psychic observation could be labeled 'dualism,' or 'subjectivity,' Cartesian style. Them and 'us.'
This is the psychic break. We have to 'live,' while we can justify that 'others' die so that we can keep living. Survival, eh? Has to be right, que no? But scientific inquiry and information accumulation shows that not all animalia feed off others. Or at least there are limits to the scope of that feeding, that parasitism. It is not a 'kill or be killed' equation. In many cases, the feeding actually has benefits for both, or at least a break even behavior, commensalism. Animalia can eat plantae, and as long as the feeding is not absolute, the plantae stay alive, regrow, reproduce new plantae, and things can get rosy and easier.
This is known as mutualism in ecological terms. Do not behave in an absolute way, a winner take all way, and most if not all 'others' can survive too, and perhaps thrive. Now we have what we call 'obligate carnivores.' Animalia that have no choice but to eat other animalia - felines, some fishes, etc. Amazingly, as if some wiser force is present to affect behaviors, these obligates are few in number, and left alone in their paradigm, will not destroy their own food sources.
But when one obligate carnivore, a predator that must eat, lives inside another obligate carnivore, a sticky problem exists. Hunger never goes away, and if the overarching environment becomes imbalanced, the ferocity and consumptive behaviors of parasites living within parasites fuels this imbalance, and 'things fall apart.'
This condition is what we call capitalism - survival at any cost. Hunger is 'always' present because there exists within one predator another predator, a parasite within a parasite, perhaps more than one iteration than that. Soon enough, the hunger is insatiable, it cannot be appeased, and now only the rats live on the island, and they must begin eating each other. This is paramount capitalism - only hunger exists, and its end result is total elimination of the entire environment that supports from one to many animalia, and along with that, the plantae foundation that ultimately feeds and shelters ALL.
We humans cannot 'outbuild or rebuild' this parasite. We cannot build newer and more efficient parasites. The only solution, if there is one at all, is to reduce the number and type of parasites down to a volume that does not threaten, and may in fact enhance, a thriving biodiversity that exhibits balance and creative change. We humans are no where near this realization right now.
Before we build anything, like yet another War on Something, we have to realize and admit that we humans ARE the parasite that has way too many other parasites hiding inside our gut, metaphorically speaking. We have to relearn what life is like in paleolithic terms, where we keep balanced, keep Small, keep Beautiful, and keep our appetites not only in check, but in balance with the paradigm we call ecological stability, NOT rigid, unchanging stability, but dynamic but subtly changing stability.
If not, we have signed our own death warrant, and soon enough Earth will look like Mars, and Musk can stop killing the atmosphere with all its useless rockets and satellites that do nothing more than monitor the death of a planet.
Right on point and very well written. Thanks Corbin! Tom and Greg - I agree with you both. Let's help more of our fellow citizens to see and understand the structure of the "systems" we live under so we can change them for the better. Thanks again all 3 of you!