Is Capitalism Crippling Civilization?

For the last few centuries the world has been obsessed with the ideas of capitalism, which in the end won out over every other social and economic order. Like any system, it has its pluses and its minuses. Lately, though, the minuses seem to be getting more and more visible — on a planetary scale.

We all remember the films where the hero is a cynical businessman who’ll stop at nothing for his own gain, coldly saying something like “nothing personal, it’s just business” or “money doesn’t smell.”

I’m in business myself, and I love money, but… Take a few examples:

— The worse the food, the cheaper it is, which means you can sell it to more people and make more profit. Wonderful! That’s how the world got fast food, and the country that invented it got one of the unhealthiest populations on earth.

— We all have our weaknesses. How can they be exploited? Say, make sweet drinks and advertise them across the whole planet, so that half-starved kids in the poorest countries hand over their last coins for a bottle of soda and some gum instead of real food. The effect on the health of the masses is, obviously, hard to overstate.

— There was an extraordinary place of natural beauty, and someone built a hotel there, then a village, then a city, so that more and more people would come and spend money. The pleasure of the nature is gone.

— It’s more profitable to sell a person medicine once he’s already sick and frightened than to prevent the illness from appearing in the first place. And so we got the modern healthcare system, where treatment comes first and prevention second.

— Women are more profitable to the economy when they work full-time: that way they can’t fully raise their own children, who get handed to institutions where the next generations are taught the “right” values. Meanwhile the women become extra clients for the banks, extra consumers of corporate goods and services.

— Colonial expansion — the exploitation of resources and people by force, for material gain.

I’m sure everyone has their own examples. Do we want to live in a world where money is crowned the highest value? What will be left of a world like that in a hundred years? Where is the line between a capitalism that rewards creation and innovation, and a system that cripples our civilization in the chase for short-term profit — profit that is negligible on the scale of centuries and generations?

One simple fact about the “miracles” of modern technology, the toxic additives in our food, the polluted air and water of our cities: over the last forty years the average testosterone level in teenagers has dropped by half.

I’m no fan of radical measures or sudden moves, and I’m not calling for anything except one thing: to stop and think. What might a system look like that would be the continuation and evolution of capitalism — keeping its strengths and removing the destructive parts?

Here’s to conscious entrepreneurship — to remembering our responsibility, both to our own generation and to the ones still to come! 😎