You’ve lived your life, whether you know it or not, gripped by the fear of a myth.  In much the same way someone aquake with the prospect of Sasquatch might be looked down upon, perhaps it’s time to look down upon the uninsightful myriad who perpetuate the false notion that scarcity has to be part of the human condition in the year 2024.  

I’ve been told that the world is getting better.  This message is usually communicated by the idea that people are living longer and everyone is increasingly equal in the eyes of the giant organizations and institutions that bat them about as data points.  As much as I’d like to really dig into the various statistical reasons that both of those are intentionally misleading figures, I’ll suffice the digression with this:  “Tell me what numbers you want, and I’ll find you the sample audience that feels that way.”

I want to talk about whether or not the world is getting better, with my boots on the ground.  Someone just starved to death in Africa.  Someone else just decapitated his unfaithful wife in Indonesia.  Forty-eight-gajillion dollars in goods are being stolen and traded and swapped and stolen again.  We treat each and every one of these incidents as isolated disruptions in the stream.  We actively choose to ignore the negative space between these conclusions that suggests something considerably more pernicious and universal.  Every time one of these tragedies occurs, we punish the action and not the system which created the action.  

Limited exclusively in the hands of 1% of the global population is the power and means necessary to literally absolve the world of physical need.  The only thing preventing that is the time they all spend at each other’s throats, creating competition where none exists in order to satisfying that aching place in their spirit which correctly identifies them as essentially unspectacular when set against the enormity of the species and the infinite span of geologic time.  

I often hear competition touted as the only means to founder innovation, but I struggle to see the forty-thousand inedible flavors of an ubiquitous sandwich cookie as innovation.  Competition certainly breeds more ‘stuff,’ but it has bred ‘stuff’ which is actively antithetical to improving the universal human experience.  Any ‘innovation’ resulting in the proliferation of automobiles was obviously less interested in improvement and much more interested in maximizing the most selfish impulses of human beings, now confined to environmentally catastrophic machines that increase the individual footprint to SUV size.  Competition, as always, gratifies the friends and cronies of those winning and destroys the soul of the thing by demanding it be made cheaper and more plentiful until it becomes simultaneously indispensable and worthless.  Competition created a human existence which is, more or less, a subscription to a wan form of brand-powered life.  

And the vision that set the snowball to rolling is dead.  The odds that *your* direct supervisor founded the business for which you work is an increasingly unlikely prospect, as your jaded, millennial middle manager doing his best Jordan Belmont impersonation is merely a cog in a greater bureaucratic machine.  Worse than that, however, is that even the C-suite of most companies had little to do with their founding, any longer.  We created a series of amorphous, cancerous masses of capital.  Whatever dynamism is required to found a business venture is capped and snuffed by the passage of time, either when a small business is cannibalized by a larger one threatened by its product or when founders pass on and are replaced by the pale facsimiles found in their ingrate nepo-babies and brown-nosed cronies.  So the process becomes the point and an ethos of creating a problem to sell a solution enamors the executive class with the idea of activity instead of action–to dance as fast as they can to prevent anyone from noticing how naked the emperor seems.  

Then they’re too big to fail and swaddled so closely in the quietly-spoken trappings of socialism which they pay corporate-friendly politicians to decry when implemented for the common person.  These great beasts, borne on the backs of a paycheck-to-paycheck nation, are the unique beneficiary of bailout after bailout, despite their predatory business practices being directly related to the dire pendulousness of our economic state.  Immoral wealth disparities and the weaponization of debt has replaced social contact in an era where investment in society is wholly being stifled by society’s complete lack of interest in reciprocal investment in its populace. Your value in the social hegemony we all choose daily to perpetuate is determined by someone who has progressively less idea what you do for them aside from, “keeping them on top of the pile.”  Data models require data points and rendering a human to a data point requires the debasement of all their essential humanity.  The advent of AI is yet another weapon in the tyrant’s arsenal, as they require fewer and fewer essential workers to analyze and enact their distant directives. When an AI manager handles operations for an automated manufacturing system, where then do all these people go?

We have reached a point in our history where it is vital for the government to perform its role as the guardian of the people from undue burden.  Many industries have become dominated wholly by conglomerates with incestuous, intermingled boards.  They have become hydra-headed monsters reaching well beyond state lines, often in flagrant violation of antitrust and anticompetition law.  If not always the letter, then certainly the spirit. There is a solution to this problem which has been successfully undertaken many times in Europe wherein these companies which have become “too big to fail” are nationalized, corrected, and set back to work with better leadership once the damage has been corrected.  I vote that America takes this a step further and reduces all business to none-larger-than regional.  If Amazon is dead set on operating universally, they still must incorporate and enact itself as a confederation of smaller scale enterprises more tuned to the populations they serve.  Any business of a sufficient size becomes, in itself, ‘government.’  It is preposterous to allow seditious, anti-human governments to continue to coexist within our borders when they do so to the explicit detriment of our own representative democracy.  They must be reduced to their proper place in the social order, where they serve their clients, customers, and workers instead of some vague notion of “infinite growth.”  No institution, given such control over the modern lifestyle, should attempt to meet every need for every person.  Our population outpaced that style of leadership many moons ago.  “Of the people, by the people, and for the people” is not a marketing slogan; it is the groundwater of democracy.  At the level which human beings are viewed by these multinational leviathans, at the macroscopic height, the people look like bits and bytes to be shuffled and reshuffled until the results come up how they’d like them.  

Allow me to preempt your rebuttal:

“These are complex, systemic challenges with no easy answers. Heavy-handed government intervention and constraints on corporate scale risk stifling economic dynamism and growth. Open competition, even if imperfect, is still the best system for allocating resources and spurring innovation.”

Anyone who thinks “open competition” exists in a world where A) the inheritance system does little to claw back undue benefits from the unexceptional children of the vaguely exceptional businessman and B) the largest companies, headed up by some of the most devout conservatives and free-market proponents, are the recipients of a disproportionate array of subsidies and handouts which prop up their anti-humanist proliferation.  The former is feudal; the latter is socialist (though lopsidedly benefitting the vague “individual” notion of corporate personhood).  The idea that a corporation is an entity making decisions outside its leadership and culture is a brilliant move in protectionist legislation and in propaganda.  Dismantling corporate personhood is the first step towards clawing back human decency from the grasp of foolish fiduciary responsibility.  When companies are “fined” and “penalized,” it does nothing to correct the corrupt wellspring of that malfeasance.  Until we corner those oligarchs as they are–as parasites abusing a system they’ve sculpted like a warped bonsai–we will be unable to rectify our grand failures as a species.  

Another rebuttal:

“The dramatic reduction in extreme poverty in China over the past few decades is directly related to the expansion of their free market system. According to World Bank data, in 1990 there were over 750 million people in China living below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day (adjusted for purchasing power parity). By 2015, that number had fallen to less than 10 million.”

On top of the issue that cherry picking statistics causes in a discussion, let’s compare this to something more tangible.  The international poverty line hovers around $2.00 a day.  That, alone, should cause most people to wretch violently.  But let’s quell the urge to spew and consider even further–there are still *10 million people who are not making more than $2.00 a day.*  Any system which allows that to happen is bad enough but one who allows it to happen while the wealthiest of our society loose the surly bonds of morality and ethics and use their extravagant wealth to peer behind the veil of good taste into depravity unbecoming.  10,000,000 people made less than $2.00, today, while Bryan Johnson, 45-year old ‘tech tycoon,’ spends incalculable sums taking blood from his son to inject into his own veins in some vain and foolish pursuit to “reverse his aging.”  What would have once been viewed as heavy-handed ‘eat the rich’ satire is literally occurring and no one is doing anything to stop it. 

The joy of it is that they only *want* you to feel trapped by it.  Anyone who tells you to “accept the things you cannot change” is not demonstrating wisdom.  They are demonstrating a complete lack of imagination.  

From Hell,

–The Strangest