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Capitalism Is The Most Inefficient Wasteful System; We Sacrifice Our Children For It

By Lionel Anet

31 December, 2015
Countercurrents.org

So my prime concern is the survival and the wellbeing of today’s young. The greatest danger is that we still have much fossil fuel the system can and must burn in an effort to grow the economy, its fanciful to hope that wind and sun will be able to power an eternally growing world economy. As well, we’re also destroying more carbon absorbing trees and top soil; they’ll let the biosphere heat up to possibly the worst of all mass extinction, which’ll include ourselves. On top of it all, the planet must support 9 billion people with each one expecting to consume more. Thus the three main dangers are 1) global warming, 2) nuclear warfare and 3) mass starvation help with agribusiness resulting in chaotic attempts to rob others of what’s left, and fighting off revenge attacks.
What are our human needs, what gives us the most satisfaction with the least anxieties, and how can we assure all that for our children? Those are the questions the Cop 21 meeting in Paris should have put to the world to discuss. But it was the latest in a series to save civilisation’s economy from an inhospitable lifeless planet. However, the question that comes to my mind is, is civilisation worth saving? Life especially ours is unique, there’s nothing like it for many light years around the universe, so it’s definitely worth saving, but a system that has produce such devastation and carnage for its thousands of years existence should be seen for what it is. Do we really want to save civilised capitalism that has continually competed to exploit whatever of value to the detriment of life including its people? No matter how much we tinker with the system, which is gear for the above purpose, the most it will achieve is the length of time it will take for our eradication, of rich and poor.

We are due to have a population of 9 billion, for nature to support so many people by mid-century we need peace, but we can’t fight for it, as peace can only exist in a state of fairness, which is impossible to achieve in a competitive system. So, we abandon capitalism and have a better life, or competed to produce and consume more from diminishing resources and die out, it’s the ultimate sacrifice for a system. The attribute for a social life rest on its individual’s ability to cooperate and to see the need of the community as paramount and ones needs as a part of that society’s requirements, this we are ideally suited.

On the other hand, our thinking is tune by our education, which includes the entertainment/information media, it justifies past outrageous acts, explained as a gradual social learning from our assumed barbarous past towards today’s comprehension. So we had to accept the need to be controlled then overtly and now covertly to comply with the unfairness, violence and then feel guilty for it. Thus we assumed it’s our inadequate human nature’s moral frailty that’s to blame, that thinking is maintained by many civilised educated people to justify their cruelty. If that was so, nothing can be done to rectify our so call human sordidness, but for more strict social controls and international agreements. That’s more of the same and it doesn’t work and is now a fret to our survival. The reality is different and more complex.

We are the most social of all social animals, because we can be, and we are also the most adaptable of any life forms, because we can be. That great ability and flexibility needs foresight and self-control, those attributes aren’t universally distributed as we have different temperament that manifest themselves to be foremost, depending on different social and environmental circumstances. People’s feeling for others vary considerably nearly everyone are somewhere in the middle with very few at the extreme who have little feelings, but even those can acquire feelings in favourable situation. Whilst our adaptability does allow people to survive under hateful and violent conditions and people will then tend to be crueller in turn. On the other hand in a friendlily jolly atmosphere we all follow suit. So the setting is all-important. Capitalist civilisation is domineering and violent therefor living in such situation people must reflect that condition and very few of us who have the appropriate traits of little feeling will flourish and dominate.

The unique problem we have that other life forms lack is our supreme abilities. Before humans appeared, each species was controlled by a multitude of other species as not one of them had overwhelming power, even before agriculture people had many of those constrain. That lessening control from other living things was largely replaced by the dominance of warriors, as they heroically fought to gain control of as many people and territory they could. Agriculture facilitated civilisation and that gave us the illusion of grandeur, above and separate from nature and with carte blanche, we soon made a welter of limited areas under the control of the top echelon of civilised society, who see everything and people as a resource.

With basically the same ideology but the energy of millions of years of long passed sun light we are in deep trouble. May well we talk about not emitting greenhouse gasses, for we are in capitalist society, and we must do what that system demands of its participants. There are no ifs and or buts about it, we must participate in whatever the system is, or else we are an outsider, at best a curiosity. However, if we do what nature demands of social lives, then we don’t have a capitalist civilisation; we would have to have a natural system that is cooperative instead of competitive, to interact in agreement with our genetic makeup as social people.

Although nations at the COP21 in Paris have agreed that we should really try to limit global warming to 1.5o C, nevertheless, the heads of states know it’s impossible to stay below that temperature within the capitalist system and as that’s all there is for them, so we have to make do with 2o plus. It’s the educational system that coordinated students to take us on this path of economic growth that has landed us in this dilemma, so we are trap in our thinking; unfortunately it’s difficult to dislodge oneself from that teaching.

The difficulty is also due to the continuing and intensifying competitive spirit experienced since childhood, which makes people look outwardly mainly to gain opportunities for oneself as others need to do. To survive the competition in that socioeconomic system is stressful and uncertain and devoid of trustful supports so the economy increases with the help an increasing need of psychotherapy.

Capitalist education requires and can impart a great amount of knowledge but in most cases little understanding, especially of social life. The knowledge enables excessive output and the lack of understanding keeps it members growing the economy. Competitive exams are ideal for that purpose as knowing is easier and quicker than understanding and that occurs in narrow specialise disciplines. The educated have an enormous responsibility and a vast task ahead. But however big ones problem is, we are still bigger, for a little longer. The reason this is a difficult situation isn’t physical, it’s a psychological one that we must tackle and that’s the only hardship we must make, which’s to review our social needs and discard the civilised notion of superiority, so that our young ones can have a life. If we can abandoned the systems that has taken us to this dilemma, then our reference is just to be fair, honest and compassionate.
The more successful capitalism is the sooner and the more thorough the extinction will be. To have an all-out-competition, without disinterested control cannot be just and as it’s impossible to have independent impartial umpire, so it’s a struggle for dominance, that’s the core of capitalism without it, it isn’t capitalism. The more Competitive the system is the less social it’s people will be, competition is a contradiction for any social life, on the other hand, the more social life is, the more secure it becomes, it includes social relations between species that may or may not be conscious of their social activities.

The attempt to have a just peaceful life under a world capitalist system introduces growing complication that has always failed, so we fiddle with it, which has a tendency to hide the dishonesty rather than prevent it. Furthermore, the simplest need of basic security is not only ignored but aggravated by reducing services; increasing stressful work conditions so that enterprise can have a competitive advantage all of it with a complex justice system. There must be something very wrong with civilisation and its latest creation capitalism to need such a complex controling system that keeps on failing.

Honest societies must be as simple as possible ensuring that nearly everyone can understand why we do what we do, and each one can feel involved in the functioning of their society. We have a wide range of ability, but the power individuals exert mustn’t be to dominate regardless if it’s by the sword, money, or intellect. That’s opposite to selection by competitiveness. Life, for humans, should be basically easy, simple, secure and cooperative, because we have the ability and now, a desperate need to do that just to survive. We got side tract by the few whose need was to enslave us, by the sword and now with money. Therefore, we need to gradually, but quickly, reduce the importance of money in an orderly way and increase the cost of fossil fuel and non-renewable, until people and nature’s welfare is significantly more important than wealth.

The reason for a lack of actions on global warming is the stated cost of reducing carbon emissions. But this is a desperate dishonest campaign to gain and retain wealth in preference to the future of one’s children; the wealthy can’t see the fatal future, because the money is in the way so we must help them in that, not just showing them of the danger to the poor people near the sea, but to themselves. 2015 was very hot with many more natural disasters but what we have emitted so far will heat up the biosphere for another 2 decades, which will increase the temperature and severity of storms. It will also increase the release of methane from the permafrost and the methane hydrates from the sea and that methane is over a hundred times more effective than carbon over a 20 year period.

Therefore, it could easily be fatal for most if not all life and that threat is obviously independent of one’s wealth and power. Wealth is the main concern of rich people so they don’t see the high possibility of an uninhabitable planet, especially as the concerns, up till now is with a few islanders who will lose their land. Even millions of deaths are not worth their wealth, but theirs and family lives might be different for a number of them.

By splitting the interest of that 1% of the riches people it should be possible to marginalise the deniers so that we can be on our survival mode. I don’t think there’s much difference between the genetic makeup of wealthy and poor people and when wealth becomes decreasingly less important we will attain a common interest and competition will be seen as antisocial behaviour. The most important need now is to persuade those few scientists who have an understanding of the serious state we are in to convince those complacent wealthy few, that there’s no future for them, unless they cooperate to do whatever is needed to save all children, to save their children.

Lionel Anet is a member of Sydney U3A University of the Third Age, of 20 years standing and now a life member



 



 

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