The Sickness

Why the World is Being Murdered in Broad Daylight

For many years I have had a saying: Life is Hell with Beautiful Scenery. When I coined the phrase I was thinking both of the ecological devastation of the Amazon Basin and of the remnants of war in Europe and Southeast Asia. I was thinking of how human beings could wake up on a soft spring day, feel the sun on their skin, smell the cool morning air, and proceed to bomb the neighboring city to smithereens, or cut down 100 hectares of virgin forest.

Or even, to go a step deeper, get in a fossil fuel burning machine and go to work evicting hungry families.

How does this occur? In our current global conversation it is common to just pop out one word—Capitalism. But this system, as ripe for complete reform as it is, did not appear fully fledged out of nothing.

Nor did the ongoing fall of the world’s oldest and strongest democracy occur de novo—out of nothing. There are connected dots, threads, histories. Nothing exists in a vacuum.

Before the Capitalism came the patriarchy, the Judeo-Christian conceit, the Western European hubris, the materialism. It could not have been born without these things nor have grown large enough to do harm without the technology of the first, second, and third industrial revolutions. And then came the age of thinking machines, and then came AI. Awareness of the tragic character defects that afflicted individuals, especially heads of state, and whole societies were well known to the Greeks. Most of their mythology is an attempt to explain it.

For example, this story:
”King Erysichthon cuts down a tree sacred to Demeter in order to show that he is more powerful than the gods. In revenge, Demeter, the goddess of Plenty, sends her cousin, the goddess of Emptiness and Want, to inhabit Erysichthon and fill him with insatiable Hunger. Permanently hungry, Erysichthon eats his way through his fortune and even sells his daughter into slavery to feed his habit. Erysichthon captures kingdom after kingdom and devours all the food and edible substance in each kingdom. No matter how much he consumes his ravenous hunger only increases. He winds up eating himself, limb by limb, organ by organ, part by part.”

Can you see how this represents the present overlords? The human sickness is ancient.

By itself, capitalism is just an economic system—a way we humans arrange our business with one another, as money itself is just a means of exchange.

There are differences though, between the capitalism that dominates the world today and any other system.

Whenever this comes up, someone always points out that greed is not the ‘fault” of capitalism per se. That it has been with us for as long as humans have had a thinking mind.

Yes, and so has hubris, and so has selfishness in general, and arrogance. These are personal character flaws. They are baked in to our human existence. But capitalism, in particular, bakes them into our culture as a whole.

It comes down to this: How do we as individuals value each other and life itself—or not? How do we see each ourselves in the fabric of society—as equal to the rest of the beings we share this planet with? Or not? Do we even perceive the existence of the others? Or, not.

Each of the faults mentioned above has its own qualities and symptoms, but when writ large they are also all part of the same category—institutional character flaws. And capitalism as practiced requires those very flaws in order to succeed.

There is a long standing discussion in psychological circles about the dark triad, as regards it being a mental illness. Many of us simply could not understand how a sane person could treat others the way individuals afflicted with the dark triad disorders of Sociopathy, Machiavellianism, and Malignant Narcissism treat people, animals, and the world. So, it was argued, it MUST be a mental illness.

I thought so myself until it came to me: Both the individuals with these disorders and the entire societies so afflicted are not unaware. They know, individually and collectively, the difference between right and wrong. They know they are doing massive, irreparable, unforgivable harm. They simply don’t care.

It is not a mental illness, but rather a MORAL one.