Incurable Capitalism

The Human Tendency to Capitalism

The Root of All Evil

Of all human sins, avarice summons the greatest energy and resourcefulness from its practitioners. An occasional Don Juan or Casanova, dedicating hours of his life to lust and pride, is rightly seen as a freakish anomaly; but a criminal career, demanding similar dedication in the pursuit of money, is a commonplace not only of our day, but of any recorded age.

In an exchange economy, where the same money stands for a wide range of pleasures, this tendency is intensified: avarice becomes almost an investment, the practice of which gives wider rein to all other appetites. After yielding to avarice, we may sate our gluttony with finer food, or our sloth with ease and leisure while we pay others to toil; our wrath and lust are empowered to new potency; our pride is reinforced and our envy assuaged. So much of what we might covet is now ours for the buying that avarice and covetousness are scarcely recognized anymore as separate tendencies.


The Toolmaker

Avarice harnesses the full range of human capability, including the capability for analysis and inventiveness. This is so obvious that we have to think about it carefully; it is written before our faces every day, in letters too large to see. There is a moral distinction between working for our daily bread and working for further luxury and power; but the desire for money, and willingness to work to obtain more, is so pervasive that we have lost the ability to make that distinction.
By “inventiveness” here, I do not mean merely technical innovation, but the ability to exploit whatever resources are at hand. We are surrounded by potential resources, and often only modest ingenuity is required to exploit them – turning an element of our environment into a tool for our own enrichment. A primitive farmer, finding himself in an environment of undeveloped forest, might convert it into an asset by felling and burning the trees, to clear the land for planting. A salesman or investment banker, having won the trust of a client, might convert that into an asset by adding it to his resume, in the hope of moving to a better-paying job.

In either of these cases, the protagonist has converted a feature of his existence into a useful tool by which to increase his wealth;* into a means for gaining more wealth without more labor; in a word, into capital. The quest for capital flows directly from the application of human intelligence in the service of avarice; and thus, as we have already seen, in the service of nearly any other sin. This tendency to capitalism is nearly as old as original sin, and as incurable.

* Since we are discussing individuals, rather than entire economies, we will not distinguish in this essay between wealth and money.

The Functionary

A particular example of the tendency to capitalism is cronyism. We must analyze this in two stages. First, the positions granted to cronies may in themselves be valuable beyond the mere income they bring, because they can be made into capital for the recipient. Second, the patron who hires the crony may observe no direct gain; but we can dissect his motives by considering the process as two steps.

The first step is to sell the position at full market value, incorporating all its potential for exploitation, rather than granting it; the second is to give to the recipient a gift equal to that value. The second action may be motivated by generosity or status-seeking pride; the first action is the exploitation of capital inherent in the patron’s own position.

A more striking example of the discovery of capital is the slave trade which coalesced around the Soviet Gulag. Professor R. J. Rummel has described this at the real gulag:

This forced labor, camp system -- Gulag -- was fully developed during this period. It became, in effect, a slave-labor system, with prisoners bought and sold, and contracted for, as though commodities. They were treated with the same consideration: they had absolutely no rights, no individuality, and could be and were killed at the whim of the owner (especially, nonessential intelligentsia—scientists, engineers, doctors, teachers—who were weeded out for killing physical labor). Ponder the impressions of the manager of a Trust who was sent to Kem, the administration center for the Solovetzki camp, to purchase a squad of forced laborers.

Can you imagine that there . . . .the following expressions are freely used:
“We sell!” -- “We discount for quantity!” -- “First class merchandise!” --
“The city of Archangel offers 800 roubles [sic] a month for X. and you offer only 600! . . . .What merchandise! He gave a course in a university, is the author of a number of scientific works, was director of a large factory, in pre-war time was considered an outstanding engineer; now
he’s serving a ten-year sentence at hard labor for ‘wrecking’; that means that he'll do any kind of work required of him, and yet you quibble over 200 roubles!” Nevertheless, I bargained and they finally agreed to reduce the price, because we purchased at wholesale fifteen engineers.

A contract was signed, a lawyer checked and approved it, and the chief of the camp signed it.

In the heart of an empire dedicated to the eradication of capitalism; in the very bowels of its system for punishment of recalcitrant capitalists and enemies of the people; this savage manifestation of untrammeled capitalism, freed of all constraints of morality, arose and terribly blossomed.

Harnessing Avarice

Many manifestations of avarice – for example, theft – are nakedly unproductive. But, just as avarice turns human ingenuity to its service, so it can be turned by human ingenuity into the service of other ends. The avarice which drives a prosperous baker (to borrow Adam Smith’s famous example) to buy a second oven and hire an assistant is serving those around him.

Lust, Jealousy and Marriage

Lust without a specific direction is destructive, both socially and morally, especially as it inevitably mixes with jealousy. As Dr. Theodore Dalrymple puts it in “Tough Love”, reprinted in Life at the Bottom,

And there is very good reason why such violence should have increased under the new sexual dispensation. If people demand sexual liberty for themselves, but sexual fidelity from others, the result is the inflammation of jealousy, for it is natural to suppose that one is being done by as one is doing to others – and jealousy is the most frequent precipitant of violence between the sexes.

The invention of marriage was an amazing coup, alchemically transforming this poisonous mixture into a positive force. Wanton lust outside marriage becomes concupiscence, which brings husband and wife closer together in greater trust. The formal acknowledgement and societal reinforcement of marriage reinforce its power; they dampen the negative consequences of lust by deligitimizing the behaviors that exacerbate them, without attempting the impossible and dehumanizing task of suppressing all sexual desire.

This sacramentalization of what was forbidden seems suspicious, a theme explored by Thomas Mann in Doktor Faustus; and of course it does not work every time. There are marriages, and even faithful marriages, tainted by distrust, jealousy or brutality; but marriage, uniquely it seems, gives the good a chance to prevail.


Legitimacy and Illegitimacy

So far, we have talked of the human tendency to capitalism, but not of the social system generally referred to as capitalism. That system is characterized by private (or corporate) ownership – which is to say, legally sanctioned ownership – of capital. What is not emphasized in this definition is how it hinges on what is considered capital, in the sense of being legitimized by the capitalist system. The owner of an asset has a right, in law and under the norms of society, to seek the best price for it in the market. But while capitalism, as we practice it, allows a woman to seek the best market price for her car or her stock, it does not simultaneously say that she may seek the best price for her child. Some entities, like the stock, are legitimate capital; while others, like children and public offices, are held in trust and may not be capitalized upon.

The parallel with the channeling effects of marriage should be obvious. If the tendency to capitalism is forbidden in all its forms, then productive and barbaric forms will be equally suppressed and will, ineluctably, equally emerge. It is no coincidence that the human slave trade today is dominated by Eastern Europeans, whose long subjugation by communism has largely destroyed the societal boundary which had delineated impermissible conduct. Just as Dr. Dalrymple’s essays show the degradation of sexual relations in the absence of norms to encourage their wholesome and humane aspects, so the shards of the Soviet Empire show the degradation of economic society.

This, then, is the strength of the capitalist system: that it recognizes that some manifestations of avarice are productive for society as a whole, while many others are barbaric and destructive; and that it brings the power of the law and society, not to suppress avarice, but to channel it into productive forms.


The Best of Intentions

Is Prosperity Evil?

In The Screwtape Letters (XXVIII), C. S. Lewis’s eponymous tempter notes:

That is why we must often wish long life to our patients: seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unraveling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth….
So inveterate is [the young’s] attachment to Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or ‘science’ or psychology, or what not.

And surely, by increasing prosperity and the hope of still greater wealth, we increase both the scope and the duration of the temptations of the world. For a still blunter assault on prosperity, see John Owen’s On Temptation, Chapter VI. Does it follow that the prosperity of society is itself a temptation to be resisted on behalf of all?

I think there are two major errors in this argument. The foremost is that, translated into action, it is intensely prideful: I, it says, will be the one to decide whether prosperity is good for your soul. Such arrogant and overweening concern for others’ spiritual well-being seems evil.

The other main argument is that people perceive not only the prosperity they experience, but also that which they imagine they realistically might have experienced. Destroying the prosperity of one group does not make it more godly, as the Muslim world has abundantly shown; rather, it inflames rage and envy. To imagine that we can avoid these consequences while acting against prosperity is not only prideful, but demented.

Opting Out

There is an additional consideration in favor of prosperity: it allows individuals within a society to choose not to dedicate their lives to the labor of staying alive. Paradoxically, this freedom is available to so many only because so many choose not to exercise it; those who “getting and spending, lay waste [their] powers” are helping to gain for us the opportunity to do otherwise. It is an option chosen by few.


Extracting Work

If a society is to prosper, or even to survive, at least some of its members must do productive work, producing whatever that society may consume. In general, we identify three main reasons why people should do such work: altruism, personal gain, or coercion. These may be combined, as in a society which regards work highly, thus offering gains of prestige to those who perform it and coercing the unwilling with the threat of opprobrium.

It is difficult to distinguish, from without, between a man who is incapable of innovation and another man who could innovate but chooses not to. For coercion to bring forth innovation from the latter man, it must be so severe as to punish the former despite his best efforts. Beyond the heinous immorality of such a system, the punishments it inflicts on the well-meaning but less capable mass of humanity will also degrade its performance. Thus prosperity can never be founded on coercion.

In a capitalist society, this problem is of course circumvented by rewarding the innovator, thus encouraging him to make visible the distinction which coercion cannot see. When industrialized countries compete to be centers of innovation, they do so by offering the innovators an increased stake in the fruits of their labors.

Capitalism need not war against altruism; a committed altruist may give of himself directly, or indirectly by giving the money he has earned. In the latter case, a wish to do good leads to the same ends as a wish for enrichment.


The Underclass

In the so-called “social democracies”, capitalism is applied to the well-to-do while the poor live under a modified form of communism: the state owns their housing, which it allocated on the basis of computed need, and provides them with an income independent of their work. The first consequence is that the marginal cases, those most inclined to sloth and least to industry and hopeful avarice, cease working and rely on their dole. As this way of life becomes more commonplace, the value which the community attaches to work inevitably declines, and the dependence on the dole increases further.

But it is not quite right to say that the poor have no incentives to work. Rather, they have an incentive to do those things which will maximize their rewards. Dr. Dalrymple describes a cottage industry of self-harm and flamboyantly antisocial acts, rewarded with better housing assignments, in England today. And what is the state-underwritten right to better housing, extracted as if by alchemy from a bottle of sleeping pills, but capital?

If the poor do work, they generally do so “under the table” to avoid loss of benefits; and this requirement for stealth makes their work more occasional, less systematic and less productive than it otherwise would be. Avarice is no longer trammeled to the benefit of all, but grows like weeds in a neglected vacant lot.


New Humanity

Finally, imagine that humanity transcends the bounds of flesh into a new medium, as envisioned by futurists like Dr. Ray Kurzweil. I regard it as axiomatic that this newly created world will not be perfect – that the legacy of original sin will ineradicably follow us and all our creations. A crucial question, however, is whether the inhabitants of the posthuman world will be complete in themselves, thus coming to resemble pure spirits, or whether they too will exchange and haggle.
One does not imagine John Milton’s Lucifer being subject to avarice. What, after all, would he purchase? Spirits can have no medium of exchange; only we, immersed in the soulless world, need devise tokens for exchanging control over bits of it. Now imagine the creation of a Matrioshka Brain. If the world is brought to life, what will remain for money to buy?

In Praise of Humans

Encouraging recent reports suggest that the death toll from Hurricane Katrina may be under a thousand, not up to ten thousand in New Orleans alone as had previously been feared. The destitute and dysfunctional of Louisiana were not crouching fearfully in their attics, slowly drowning as the flood waters crept up to the roof. Instead, they were leaving the city or had already left, uncounted and unmonitored, asking nothing, taking care of themselves.

A friend of mine was working in the South Tower on the morning of 11 September, 2001. When the North Tower was hit, his office was instructed to remain calm and not evacuate. He and his coworkers looked at each other, shook their heads, and headed for the stairs. Fifteen minutes later he was in Tribeca, walking north.

These are not the heroes of 9/11, but they are part of its story: the people who did not need saving, for whose sake no one had to die. In those first panicked days, the death toll was estimated at over 20,000. The reasoning used by the agencies to come up with these numbers was simply: If we didn't save them, then they must have died. But humans don't die quite that easily.

Many of the missing have suffered terribly, and some suffer still. Some have died in out-of-the-way places and will be found in time; some now alive will still die. Our protective systems have utterly failed these people, to our shame. They were not saved by Republicans or Democrats, by federalism or centralization, by big government or private enterprise. When all those ephemera failed, they were saved only by themselves, or by other humans operating below the clouded oversight of the agencies in which we foolishly placed our trust.

Let this be included in the story of Hurricane Katrina: human beings, with no resources but their own, enduring and surviving. Here's to humans.