It’s Not That Bad

Or, How Capitalism Became a Cult and Stopped Being an Idea

Bro Army: It’s not that bad.
Umair: The middle class is now a minority, not the majority.
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: For the first time in history! It’s unprecedented. And it’s unique among rich nations!
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: The majority of public school kids are in poverty.
BA: It’s not that bad!
UH: …Fine, let’s keep going. Incomes have been stuck since the 70s. 
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: Young people aren’t going to have careers, retirements, savings…they might not even make it out of their parent’s basements.
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: The richest 20 people in the country are worth more than the bottom 150 million. 
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: This is the first time in modern history that life expectancy is beginning to shrink.
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: The average American can’t find a thousand bucks to meet emergency expenses.
BA: You have a really bad attitude, dude.
UH: These are facts! I didn’t make them up, or make them happen.
BA: It’s not that bad. There’s a recovery!
UH: Recovery? Where? Can you point it out to me? Incomes are still flat. Wages are stuck. More than 100% of the gains from the so-called recovery have gone to the super rich! Calling this a recovery is like calling cancer a workout.
BA: It’s. Not. That. Bad.
UH: How much worse would you like it to be?
BA: At least we’re not Somalia.
UH: You’re comparing the world’s richest country…to the world’s most failed one? That doesn’t even make sense! That’s like calling an Olympian turning into a meth-head OK because he’s not a corpse yet. Sensible people reason from potential, not from the lowest common denominator.
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: Fine. Let’s keep going. The US has the rich world’s poorest healthcare, education, infrastructure, and safety nets. 
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: The jobs created after the “recovery” were worse than the ones destroyed during the recession.
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: The fastest growing jobs in the economy are all dead-end low-wage McJobs. Retail, hospitality, assistants, and so on.
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: Do you guys have a reality problem?
BA: No! You have an attitude problem! It’s not that bad!
UH: What other evidence do you need?
BA: Evidence? Dude, you haven’t even shown us any evidence! Where’s the data? 
UH: Auuuurrrggghhhh…I just — 
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: But I just showed you the data! The facts are that the middle’s imploded, the young are screwed, the economy’s borked, and society’s declining. That’s reality!
BA: No, that’s what you think is reality.
UH: That’s what…facts…say is real.
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: WTFFFFFFaaagggLOL
BA: You’re a real jerk. Why do you hate us?
UH: I don’t hate anyone. I’m just…look, let’s try it another way. What facts would it take to make you believe that it really was bad?
BA: I don’t know. Maybe nothing.
UH: But that means you’re…fundamentalists…ideologues…fanatics.
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: Sigh. Can we maybe — 
BA: It’s not that bad.
UH: Use your brains!
BA: It’s not that bad It’s not that bad It’s not that bad It’s 
UH: I give up.
BA: We win!
UH: Maybe. But that’s how we all lose.

The Cult of Crapitalism

Capitalism these days isn’t really a system of moral philosophy, a way of thinking about the world. Maybe it never was, but I’ll leave the conspiracy theories to the internet.

It’s more like a cult. You know how Scientologists believe that the world was created five thousand years ago by aliens and they secretly still live in our brains (or something to that effect)? There are no aliens in our brains! But. No amount of evidence can disprove it to them.

Now, the interesting thing is that there are useful and good bits of Scientology. It’s a mishmash of humanistic and behavioural psychology and cultural anthropology, all eminently useful. But never mind. The point is that before it’s all those things, it’s a faith.

What happens in my imaginary dialogue above?

Well, first, it’s not imaginary. I deal with such tedious bullshit every day on Twitter, here at Medium and anywhere else I write. There’s an army of people who are true believers that It’s Not Really That Bad. And no amount of data, evidence, logic, can convince them otherwise. The interesting question, of course, is why. We’ll get to that. But first: what does this make capitalism?

A cult.

It’s better to call capitalism today something akin to EconoScientology for Aspiring But Usually Broke Billionaires. Maybe just Crapitalismology. Fanatical belief in a system of broken down crapitalism, which I defined last time as extreme socialism for the rich and extreme capitalism for the poor, that cannot be disproven.

After all, if no amount of evidence can dislodge your faith, then you can’t be said to hold a philosophy. That’s all it is: a faith. At best, it is a religion, and more probably, a cult. In this case, because crapitalism contains no moral precepts worth following, because it doesn’t seem to be making any of us (no, not even the super wealthy) better off, it isn’t really worthy of the term religion. And so all we’re left with is cult.

Faith is Not the Opposite of Reason

Faith is good and fine. But it must be counterbalanced with reason. If we’re to make sense of the world in an accurate and effective way. We must have faith enough to experiment, dare, proceed, create, imagine, and reason enough to accept our failures and rejections and wrongs, if we are to progress. That elementary logic is as true for social organizations as it is for human lives.

You might think that of these two concepts, faith and reason, faith is the more dangerous one. Maybe you’re right. But I tend to think that it’s precisely because you think that that reason’s the more dangerous one.

Reason’s a dangerous word precisely because we don’t think it’s dangerous. You only have to look as far as the twenty-something male denizens of the internet who pride themselves on “REASON”, or Richard Dawkins, to see why. Fanatics of reason are no more sensible than extremists of faith. It’s rational, after all, to pimp your child, or sell your organs, or steal from your neighbor. For Richard Dawkins, it’s eminently reasonable to harass a fourteen year old kid…for making a prize-winning science project. But it’s probably not wise, right, or just. So just like faith, reason taken to an extreme makes fools of us.

Overreason is dangerous because science, logic, clear thinking, is not about what we can prove. It’s about what we can disprove. So even logic requires a little bit of faith. Faith enough to run the experiment, to craft the hypothesis, to try something crazy and new and totally absurd…like Einstein’s relativity, or Hoyle’s impossible idea that the elements were forged in stars, which everyone laughed at at the time.

So faith, too, plays an important role in the thinking process. Just because we cannot prove something does not mean it isn’t true. But when we can disprove something, it usually means that it is false. That’s basic empiricism — the idea that the world around us can be perceived and made sense of.

The paradox is this: reason taken to an extreme becomes its own kind of faith. It stops us from seeing the world as it truly is — and traps us into seeing the world as we wish it to be. Perfect, pure, flawless. An immaculate engine of cold calculation. But that’s not usually how the world works. Not everything can be proven, and not everything that can be proven is true. And so if we’re fanatics of reason, just as if we’re fanatics of faith, we’re unlikely to be people who can make sense of the world.

All Progress Depends on Doubt

Crapitalismology is a long and probably terrible name for a cult. But more of us are members of the cult than we’d like to admit.

Here’s what we’re not, though, if we’re members of this little cult.

We’re surely not capitalists. Because capitalists don’t believe that capitalism is the answer to everything. Just to making, buying, and selling stuff. But you probably don’t believe even that, right? So consider this. If I asked you to pimp your partner at the going market rate, would you? No! So capitalism isn’t the answer to everything. The only people that would we’d call either truly desperate, or extremists, fanatics, lunatics. And that’s precisely where Crapitalismology takes us.

What’s the result? We can never change or improve it — or us. If we’re OK with pimping our partners for money, because we have to, or have been persuaded to, then we’ll probably also never press for, demand, create a system where we don’t.

So I think that it’s probably wiser for us to treat capitalism as a moral philosophy than as a cult. Moral philosophies are humble. They are human creations. Ever fragile, erroneous, mistaken, they are theories, concepts…ideas. And so they are amenable to logic, reason, empiricism, doubt.

But faiths are products of the gods. Maybe they’re what the gods are there to sell us. They are proud, immaculate, perfect, fully-formed. And thus we cannot question them. They’re divine, sacrosanct, above us. They admit no doubt. And thus, they are probably the greatest vehicles to resist change humans have created.

Hence, while faith is useful to guide us individually, it’s stubborn resistance to change is exactly why we probably don’t want to use it to try to run, fix, or change the world. Cults are ways to control, suppress, objectify people. But rarely do they free them. To doubt, question, provoke, agitate, resist, refuse. Which, of course, is the beginning of true freedom.

Because all progress depends on doubt.

The Tribe Is A Warp Drive to the Past

When moral philosophies ossify into faiths, dogmas, creeds, a remarkable thing happens. They are no longer ideas that we discuss and debate. They become tangible social realities: social markers, badges, signals of belonging to tribes. Just like saying you’re a a Catholic, a Protestant, etc, is a social identifier. That’s dangerously close to where we are when it comes to capitalism, socialism, etc — they’re less ideas we hold than badges we display.

Remember in my not-so-imaginary dialogue how the Bro Army constantly says: you’ve got a bad attitude, Umair! That’s besides the point, surely. Who cares! We’re discussing ideas, right? Wrong. Philosophies hardening into faiths are also social badges of belonging. And what the bros are saying to me is: you’re not one of us. You don’t believe the same things that we do. You’re not a member of the cult.

There’s an upside to social badges. They make it easier for us to find partners, friends, pals, colleagues, etc. The bros can spot one another from miles away. But there’s a price, too.

I believe this. Do you believe it too? That’s the only way that I’m going to really trust you. That’s effectively what we’re thinking when we use faiths as badges of belonging. That’s what we do in churches and temples, right? We bond with those whose most deeply seated beliefs are exactly the same as ours. It’s OK in those places. Perhaps we need it there.

But it’s probably wrong when we begin to treat faith as a replacement for ideas. Because we’re no longer able to question, provoke, challenge, defy, rebel, create, imagine, build, grow. And so we’re less capable of progress.

The price of faith as a system of social organization is human potential. Our potential is foregone. It’s not just that we’re limited to interacting only with the tribe, little cliques. It’s that that we can’t challenge the gods. Tempt the fates. Defy the demons. Plunge into the underworld and snatch the prize, open Pandora’s box, eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

In other words, faith limits us, forever, to a set of beliefs. Even if — or maybe especially when — that faith is reason. Beliefs are seductive things. They comfort and console us. They please and fascinate us. But, like controlling partners and jealous lovers, they also suffocate and stifle us. They demand our attention, not cultivate our intention. They ask us to pledge our obedience and allegiance — not discover our defiance and develop our intelligence. Beliefs are precisely what we must be willing to let go if we are to grow. It’s as true for lives as it is for societies.

And yet, like all true believers, increasingly, we’re reduced to tribalism. And that’s the big problem with all this. If crapitalism is something like a cult, then it’s also a cult taking us backwards.

Go ahead and mull it over. Can you think of a single tribal society in history that has come up with a great creation, invention, innovation…not just a pre-historic one? It’s almost impossible to. Tribalism is the enemy of human progress. It takes us backwards.

The tribe is a bridge to the past — never to the future.

And the danger of crapitalism as a cult, not merely as a poor system of moral philosophy, is precisely that. By snuffing out human potential, it takes us backwards into an age where there are no great breakthroughs, creations, inventions.

Because we’re not guided by what’s before our very eyes. An age where facts, data, evidence, logic count for little. Belonging to the right cult, caste, clan, being a member of the most powerful tribe, the tribe of the right faith, is what does. For that tribe alone has the power to define social reality. It’s not that bad. Remember?

We call such periods in history dark ages. They never really think they’re dark. But what’s common to them all is that faith is called reason, reason is called faith, and fanaticism is called belonging. And so human progress reverses. The secret ingredient of human progress is both, together, reason and faith, working hand in hand— for each alone prevents the worst in the other, and so elevates us towards our highest selves.

Umair
London
April 2016