The Demise Of Global Capitalism

 

Global Capitalism is a more precise term than Globalization for defining what is encircling and strangling-to-death the planet  by reducing the quality of human life to the point where boredom, meaninglessness, and misery are undermining the will  to live, not only for the few or even the many, but for everyone. Beneath the growing inequality of wealth, the competitive struggle for individual and family survival, and the mounting class warfare, there is the  deeper and more sinister emergence of an Exterministic culture or civilization whose laws, institutions, values, mores, and attitudes head toward social suicide (via ecocide, nuclear war, or in some other way).

 

America exemplifies this death spiral because a highly developed finance capitalism commercializes everything, reducing social life to a means for the accumulation of money, squeezing evermore the joy out of human existence. The rising level of frustration, depression and anger that results then promotes and perfects this economy to even higher degrees of  manipulation, exploitation and ruination.  Dissatisfied and mistreated people make the best owners, operators, and workers in an economy that requires (for profit) that we do a better and better job of using and abusing one another (not to mention nonhuman lives). In other words, human disappointment and hardship are driving an economy that makes money by producing more dissatisfaction and hardship for the sake of more money, and so on. We are spiraling downward in an economy that is growing stronger, bigger, and meaner by creating evermore unhappy and  hateful people. As a result, the feeling-idea is growing in the back of the American mind that this society is not worth saving, that the social whole doesn’t deserve to exist. Deep down, people want to escape from the accumulating suffering of everyday life through collective suicide.

 

It’s not so much that individuals contemplate and plan their own suicide, but rather that they participate in a way of life that is becoming increasingly empty/worthless and destructive, and they don’t know what can be done about it, or they don’t think anything can do done about it, so they go along, stay the course, perpetuate it, which only makes social reality worse (by pumping our  misery and anger back into the very economy that pressures and punishes us more and more), and social suicide becomes an attractive option. The demise of global capitalism means not only that this economic system is unsustainable, but also that it takes everything down with it; it not only self-destructs, but it also destroys alternative ways of life because it destroys life itself.

 

It’s not just the Republican Party leadership and Base who are Exterministic, but the entire population is moving in the same direction, although in a slower and less vocal way.  Americans are caught in a downward social dynamic in which even the simple  pleasures of life, as well as the  higher ones--thus far available to all hitherto existing societies--have disappeared or are fast disappearing due to an economy that values nothing for its own sake. When the quality of life falls below a certain threshold, then people no longer want to go on living, and we resign ourselves to dependency, defeat, despair, and death.

 

American society has its origin in a culture of asceticism in which the postponement of pleasure is taken as the path to the good life. Asceticism offers the pleasures of self-denial, self-punishment, self-contradiction, and self-delusion, but these are false/perverted pleasures in that they can only be gained at the cost of increasing overall unhappiness for the individual and society. Only if individuals get enough real immediate pleasure from others, and from the world around them, in spite of efforts to postpone it, is it possible to sustain a meaningful and joyful existence. Asceticism feeds off the real, immediate joys of life until it kills the substance of life that sustains it, then it self-destructs. Exterminism is the last stage of asceticism.

 

When the ascetic ideal becomes the inner core and driving force of an entire economic system, as happens with the emergence of Capitalism, then Exterminism commences because the hunt for profit increasingly penetrates, occupies, and kills the free enjoyment of life everywhere. American style Finance Capitalism has taken this ascetic economy to unbearable heights by widening and tightening its grip over the people in ways unimaginable in all hither existing societies. It eliminates the margins, spaces, and times for the spontaneous and intrinsic enjoyment of life by subjecting everyone to continuous and inescapable rules, regulations, tasks, responsibilities, and concerns about money, with every minute aspect of social life measured, calculated, priced, and monitored toward the goal of abstract happiness (money) that only promises, but never actually provides, human fulfillment.

 

This economic system is so dense, interconnected, computerized that there is no room for error, rest, or questioning. The daily option is to keep ahead of the stress and strain that is swelling up and threatening to overtake us. Any little problem escalates, driving people to the breaking point again and again because the whole punitive system is geared and ready to come down with a vengeance. We are entangled in a network of instrumentalities that is dragging us down. With no freedom from the relentless, aggressive, and accelerating economic demands of  everyday reality, and trapped in a standardized, uninteresting, traffic-infested, isolated, ugly, unhealthy, unfriendly… social environment, the qualitative differences between life and death diminish, and the underground feeling-thought of social suicide grows.

 

It is simply untenable to believe that the American people can tolerate indefinitely an economy that keeps turning up the dial on human dissatisfaction for the sake of money. Given the growing scientific and technological control and manipulation of human nature and behavior,  it is not surprising that people (with few exceptions) do not understand or envision genuine social transformation, so we cannot and should not deny or dismiss the notion that Exterminism is a deep and dangerous social tendency. If people cannot find an escape form accumulating fear, depression, guilt, frustration, anger, resentment--in short, from escalating human suffering, then they will take the path of least resistance, which is Exterminism via ecocide, nuclear annihilation, or in some way. Not a lonely solitary death that might require difficult individual action, but one in which we all go down together comfortably and effortlessly.

 

Global Demise is not inevitable (if we evolve an alternative economic order), but it is the established trajectory of human affairs under the dictates of International Finance Capitalism because this way of life provides everything but happiness. Look at Americans: the more we acquire the more unhappy we become, and along with the rising GNP the misery index also goes up, generating an underground death movement/momentum comprised of  many who secretly agree--Left and Right, Liberals and Conservatives--that the whole thing is not worth the effort.

 

The worst kind of depression and anger that is rising today, among the old and young, is not specific, but rather, a general malaise or discontentment with the whole, and  this feeling-idea that social life is uneventful, pointless, or futile  is the deepest obstacle to social change. Americans don’t act, or even believe in social transformation, because we are in the death grip of an intensifying economy that overwhelms us, immobilizing us, with feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, creating the deep notion that we might all be better off dead.

 

As an American, I’m posting a WARNING of an undertow that is getting stronger and stronger in my country--namely, we are becoming cynics, fatalists, people who surrender to death, not because of an inherent flaw in human nature, or not because we are bad or evil creatures, but because this hyper-capitalist economy is making us so selfish, greedy, and miserable that we have become complicit in our own social annihilation. Don’t blame me for the doom and gloom of this message because if I thought it was too late to do anything about our social situation, then I would remain silent. Perhaps articulating the ugly truth about what is happening to us (with grave implications for the rest of the world) will generate some political awareness of the root-cause of the crisis of civilization?

 

Glenn Parton