I see and hear many people talk about abolishing capitalism, and granted, the version of capitalism we deploy today is outright poisonous to the excellence and longevity of the human species. A nonexistent vector of capitalism is causing an anthropogenic cascade from which it becomes harder to recover as time goes by.
In many ways, capitalism today is the pyrrhic victory of the evolutionary walking dead. As pyrrhic as any trust in the acquisition of assets without clearly defined humanitarian benefits is.
Planet of Idiots
Ignorant of our collective goals as arguably the most intelligent species, the debate over capitalism plays out in a dumbfounding arena of foregone conclusions with humans drawing their preferred battle lines of desperate solipsism once again.
On one side are the idiots who do not care about or believe in evolution. One degree of idiocracy away from flat-earther, they hold on tight to oligarchic constructs of unchange. On the other side are the idiots who believe just one more pile of legislation will secure equality of outcome for all.
The silly and futile combat between both parties, taking their eye off the health of our pale blue dot, is perhaps why Carl Sagan referred to our planet as the planet of idiots.
Go ahead and vote to keep these “geniuses” in office. Just don’t whine about progress and leadership, or more likely, lack thereof, afterward.
Capitalism Is Not A System
Of course, the real problem is that capitalism is not a system at all (as I explain here), but merely a symptom of gameplay described as the exchange of money for products or services rendered.
Everyone names everything wrong.
Richard Feynman
To imply capitalism is a system demands the formulation and explanation of a human theory based on agreed-upon principles to convert a selection of input into the desired output. I dare you to identify today’s theory of capitalism if you can find one.
Capitalism is called a system in the way a weather pattern is called a system, feigning predictability of outcome that never materializes. Not beyond the length of your nose or seven days, that is.
Rebel Without A Cause
Capitalism is merely the distribution of trust in the value of products or services rendered, with every country in the world, yes even communists, deploying it. Trust is the cause of remuneration as its consequence. To infer the integrity of trust from the integrity of its distribution, and by the asymmetry between cause and consequence, is a foolish mistake.
For example, people can make a lot of money from purchasing cheap goods on Alibaba, made in China, and subsequently resell them at western prices on Amazon, with capitalism’s supposed integrity intact. Yet, clearly, the integrity of remuneration does not infer the integrity of trust in the endeavor.
The same applies on an evolutionary scale. We can sell ourselves many things using the supposed integrity of capitalism, today in the U.S., to the tune of eleven times the size of production, while the cause of most of those transactions makes little humanitarian sense. To wit, let me ask you, what forms of capitalism today improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy? Shouldn’t they all?
Capitalism, today, is a rebel without a cause, giving capitalism a bad rep. It need not be this way, for the antithesis of Bronze Age capitalism is capitalism subjugated to a cause, nature’s cause. One that improves human adaptability to nature’s entropy.
Failure Institutionalized
The recurring debacles of finance, conveniently attributed to external factors, cunningly obfuscates how a consequence detached from cause -unchanged- will continue to fail humanity.
The tech bubble was not caused by a sudden lack of interest in or by waning technology adoption when eighty percent of the world remains in need of technology to improve their standard of living. The misjudgment of socioeconomic value by financial arbitrage caused it, too enamored by the conversion of advertisement clicks. Instead, inferring value from valuations sold to a chain of greater-fools with the public, eventually discovering its flagrant anomalies.
The real estate bubble was caused by lenders doling out money to people who had no credit buffer to cope with economic aberrations with defaulting loans resold at a discount to third party lenders, empowering a financial system locked into infinite sub priming until people defaulted en-masse.
Both forms of ill-formed risk assessment, a uniformity of risk avoidance called subprime, have destroyed the intrinsic value of the underlying asset and damaged the reputation of the asset-classes and its participants.
The quality of arbitrage, short on evolutionary relevance, destroys the reputation of capitalism.
False-Positive
In come ESG and a plethora of loosely defined so-called impact investment programs, invented by financiers eager to outdo themselves, portrayed as the savior of the world based on the premise of sustainability.
Never mind, sustainability does not exist anywhere in the universe. Or that the strategy to achieve sustainability does not look in any way similar to the strategy of renewal dictated by nature.
Worse, a strategy to achieve sustainability resembles a stale flat-world strategy attempting to measure round-world relativity, falling many dimensions short of tracing the real-world capacity of humanity. So bad, even the SEC sees through the plot.
So, here we go again, financiers conjuring up another manmade theory incompatible with nature, designed to expand the fractal of humanity. What could possibly go wrong?
Turnaround
The problem with capitalism is what we normalized capitalism to; nothing.
Today, capitalism is a laissez-faire rebel without an evolutionary cause. Worse, in its most ignorant and greedy implementation, capitalism, in love with the vile-maxim of short, erodes the excellence of our humanitarian long.
The way to improve capitalism is simple. Subjugate the merit of capitalism to the evolutionary objectives of humanity. Which in turn means, subjugate the principles and theory of capitalism to our best understanding of the principles and theory of nature. So, that human gameplay adheres to nature’s gameplay and the gains of capitalism constitute gains in human adaptability to nature’s entropy.
Three Steps
To change humanity and the world we depend on for survival is easy. It requires we acknowledge not humanity but the authoritarian rule of nature determines the excellence and longevity of the human species. We cannot get there with elective procedures easily tossed aside by a democracy valuing the vote of ignoramuses equal to the observations of the informed.
We must deploy a benevolent dictatorship informed and in-tune with the authoritarian rule of nature that decides on our survival as a species.
Step 1: Principles
Leaders must implement well-known principles of nature to align human gameplay to nature’s gameplay. The alignment with a single theory, nature’s theory (I teach in my masterclasses) will make the following change happen in one fell swoop:
Step 2: Policy (of Policy)
Leaders must change their laissez-faire policies spawning dangerous vile-maxims towards predictable, regenerative, and life-improving policies to serve collective interests, like so:
Step 3: Execute and Adapt
Leaders must implement nature’s theory, in the words of Einstein, that determines what can be discovered, so as to continually adapt the human theory to our best understanding of nature’s theory, proven to consistently produce alpha.
Real Leadership
Leadership is not as is so frequently portrayed; herding of people like cowboys herd cows to move them to the pen of control. That only works to promote politics, not to improve policies.
Real leadership is the ability to normalize an objective to the highest possible normalization of nature’s cause, so a closer alignment of that normalization improves the evolutionary excellence of the human species.
The objectives of improving the excellence of humanity and improving the regenerative capacity of the environment upon we depend are not mutually exclusive. The change to improve capitalism requires the audacity of real and unprecedented leadership, in MLK parlance, more in love with humanity than in love with power.
With the kind of leadership capable of seeing the forest through the trees, we can reinvigorate and repair the reputation of capitalism to serve our humanitarian interests, take care of our surroundings, and inspire the world with new humanitarian excellence we first and successfully apply to ourselves.
