Capitalism: It’s Only One Story
How many of us have a sneaking suspicion that something pretty fundamental is going wrong in the world? We’ve grown up listening to a fairytale story that tells us we are unfulfilled, and the only way to be happy is to consume more and more, faster and faster. We keep hearing about the potentially devastating consequences of climate change but we are pumping more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere every single year.
We are manipulated into enduring one fake economic crises after another and the only class whom aren’t brought to their knees and forced to pay for it are those responsible for creating it in the first place. In fact, the 1% often just get richer and more powerful while the rest of us work harder and harder for less and less.
We live in a Matrix — yes just like the movies. And within this Matrix we are all driven by the neoliberal meme of growth, the root driver of growth is debt.
In a debt-based monetary system, the very creation of money creates debt. Therefore, growth has to exceed interest (which is the payback of debt) in order for capital to increase. We thus get locked into perpetual debt-based growth, which creates inequality and destroys our planet.
The mathematical way to describe this is that we are now in a period of exponential growth. When this happens in an organism we call it cancer: uncontrollable growth of cells to the point of self-annihilation. And because we are all locked into a Matrix that serves the neoliberal ideology, we are made complicit in our own self-annihilation. —- Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk.
Today the 1%, authors of this fiction concealing the massive theft of public resources for private gain, have reached a point where they will soon become wealthier than the rest of the 99% combined. These oligarchs are pushing our planet to the brink of destruction while impoverishing billions, destroying biodiversity, and laughing all the way to the bank.
Time for a new story. Our story.
The contents of this post first appeared on The Rules.
