Death and Capital
Broadly, humans fear and loathe unpredictable death and preventable suffering. Without the tools or the wherewithal to process the trauma of being intelligent creatures who prize being alive but can think about death in the abstract, humans have found themselves at inconvenient odds with Mother Nature, who defies all efforts to escape her ultimate reclamation of our bodies in death. In an effort to tame the whimsical nature of nature (you can tell from the start that this is doomed), Man made an enemy out of the Wild and the Natural, and sought to domesticate, prune, refine, and control her. The illusion of success only makes the ultimate defeat more humiliating.
As a second runner-up to immortality, Man created the practice of intergenerational transfers of wealth, ensuring that his mini-me’s would have the benefits of his living labors to carry on with better odds of achieving what still could not be done – to live without dying. In order to ensure the success of this transfer beyond the scope of one’s living agency, the structures of society had to appear stable and predictable, able to effectuate will beyond the grave. We literally called them “wills.” To make a long story short, social stability and entrenched structures of power are actually distorted forms of self-preservationist love and paternalistic caretaking, in addition to being a whimpering Hail Mary against the indecencies of time.
Some people became obsessed with amassing resources for themselves and their progeny. I posit that these people are more traumatized than most, denatured by the illusion that they are responsible for the functioning of abstract structures that benefit them above others, and insecure that, without those structures, they would be as vulnerable and pitiable and lost as the maddest pauper with whom they cannot otherwise relate. These, the most traumatized of peoples are stuck in a materially elevated existential crisis mode where they cannot point to “reasonable causes” for inner emptiness and dissatisfaction as they appear to have the external trappings of wellbeing and fulfillment. So, they amassed and amassed and amassed resources, and they reified and reinforced and replicated structures of power. They put themselves at the top. When famine hit and they were the only ones still with resources, they exchanged some of their surplus for a promise that everyone else would play the amassing game, too, and give them some of their mass back as a tax in the future.
Another long story, short: fear and greed have found themselves on the thrones of power in the kingdom of the human psyche. Systems of power exist to ensure order and self-maintenance, rather than expression and evolution. When the scared and greedy found out they could make others make value for them, but then not have to care for them as their slave property, the power-keepers subjugated entire groups of people to the lives of sentient cogs and machine operators. When the capital-wielding class in-sourced and compensated industrial labor, they outsourced care for the laborers. This is an invention of modern capitalism: millions and millions of slaves feed, clothe, and house themselves under risk of real, material insecurity, and they call it freedom.
We can do better.
14 December 2018