On Capitalism, again

Started this one over a year ago. Good to come back to it.

It's interesting: I used to think I was pro-capitalism. What I've realized is that I'm not pro-capitalism, I'm pro-free-market, but in a very strict sense. For a free market to function, the people must be free to choose between goods and services on an informed basis, and free to opt NOT to participate in a consumption based culture. This is essentially impossible for most people born today. In order to own land anywhere in western civilization, you have to pay taxes on that land. This means that you MUST somehow contribute to the system that you may be trying to avoid.

I believe that we need to shift from an ownership based society to a stewardship based society. This is in keeping with my feelings that the Judeo-Christian belief that man was created to rule over the animals is a misinterpretation. The belief by many people of the Yahweh based faiths is that God gave man a place above the animals, to do with as he pleased. I believe that this is a corruption of what ancient (and more modern "primitive") peoples knew: that for the earth to provide for us, we need to live in stewardship of the land. Rather than act as if it is a possession for us to do with as we please, we were entrusted with responsibility for the land, and have failed miserably in keeping watch over our charge.

Healing of our relationship with the planet cannot begin until we take a hard look at how we've behaved as a culture. The so-called progress of the last 10,000 years has been an wholesale plundering of the world's resources with little thought for how we should responsibly live within our means. It might seem trite to refer to a popular movie, but the description of humanity in the Matrix had an eerily pure ring to it: humanity, or at least the dominant part of it, most resembles a virus that invades, poisons and chokes off another organism.

The problem with perception that causes us to perpetually fail at this needed introspection is the curse of incrementalism. Given our lifespans and relatively narrow frame of reference, it's very difficult to see how the bits of damage that we do add up to a major catastrophe. Very broad-minded thinkers have been able to make observations about what's happened and what's happening, and they've sounded alarm bells for generations now. Outside of our culture, though, there are other societies that have a more natural way of living, and a stronger connection to the history of the place where they live. It's difficult for Americans to understand, as we've only been on this continent for a few hundred years. The native populations still maintain the stories of their ancestors, when food was so abundant that you could catch fish with your bare hands, bring home plenty of meat for your village and gather whatever you needed from near your home. We have no frame of reference beyond the institutionalized story of Thanksgiving, and no real connection to the land itself now that the vast majority live as part of the city-sprawl networks fed by factory farms and institutional agriculture. We hear stories told by our parents about how this or that area was woods or farm when they were kids, but our culture is so mobile now that even that has little meaning as a child grows up in one or more areas, likely not close to where his parents grew up, then moves away to a college town and finds a job in the nearest city, or possibly another city far away.

The pursuit of capital is directly to blame for this state of affairs. Not so long ago, it was rare, indeed, for a person to travel more than a few miles from their home on any regular basis. The people knew the land, they knew their place in the order of things. Now ones place is mutable. This is good in some ways, but it also harms our connection to the land and one another. By seeing markets from a global perspective, we learn how best to manipulate those markets. But we need to see more than markets to fulfill our role not as owners, but as stewards. Understanding that introducing a commodity in limited supply to a world market will deplete that supply and possibly damage the system that it is a part of is far more important in the long term than the profit to be made by exploiting the resource. But the failure of our culture's moral system leads us to believe that if we "own" it, the consequences are unimportant.

Localized economies have inherent stability based on factors like what crops grow well in a particular climate, what natural resources are readily available and what the nature of the land is. A protected bay, for example, will likely be a port. Without careful management, the introduction of foreign influence on these local economies can drastically change the face of those economies: an area that has good wood can be quickly stripped bare, leaving the locals with reduced resources; an area with ability to support a limited population can be propped up based on resources pouring into that area, but when those resources become scarce, the population is left starving. This isn't the problem of the capitalist, but it is the problem of the locals. The locals may not understand the consequences – resources that have seemed endless may suddenly become scarce, or the greed of some will overshadow the conservative planning of others.

The point of all of this is that capitalism is a great tool for making money, but it must only be one tool in a greater tool set used for managing our resources.