So what Marx calls political economy, and what I have named anti-social capitalism, bases its success on its participants' willingly giving up their humanity for the acquisition of wealth. The secret to success is to become a sociopath, a person lacking human feelings and needs other than the material aggrandizement of oneself. Compassion has no place in the life of this person, or pity, or mercy, or justice or love. They are perfect examples of applied social Darwinism, and piss poor examples of human beings.
There are a lot of people out there who--because they are unwilling or unable to shake a lifetime of indoctrination that Karl Marx and anything that he wrote is an evil lie--believe that Marx is not worth our time or our effort to study. In other words, the individuals who have probably already decided that I am some brand of "commie pinko" who has no idea what it is I am talking about--and this fact is proven by my quoting Marx--and are ready to ignore this article.
Well, I recently discovered that I am joined by eminently good company in my use of Karl Marx to point out the failings of our current form of a capitalist economic system. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan--as well as a one time assistant editor of The Wall Street Journal-- is speaking of the foresight of not only Karl Marx, but V.I. Lenin, with regards to our current problems.
Mr. Roberts, in his article "Marx and Lenin Revisited" (OpEdNews.com, October 6, 2009), opens with the following statements:
"If Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics."
"Marx predicted the growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordination of the production of goods to financial capital's accumulation of profits based on the purchase and sale of paper instruments. Their predictions are far superior to the "risk models" for which the Nobel Prize has been given and are closer to the money than the predictions of Federal Reserve chairmen, US Treasury secretaries, and Nobel economists, such as Paul Krugman, who believe that more credit and more debt are the solution to the economic crisis."
In the words of the late Howard Cosell, that is telling it like it is.
Before going further into the discussion of Social Capitalism, I think a very short discussion of how I arrived at the terms Social Capitalism and anti-social capitalism is vital before we go further.
I came up with the term "anti-social capitalism" first.
I have made it no secret that I suffer from either Type II or Type III bipolar disorder. I was misdiagnosed for a number of years as suffering from unipolar depression, which is not unusual for these versions of the disease: it is difficult to differentiate hypomanic or cyclothymic episodes from times when things are just going well with your life. It required several years of weekly group therapy before my counselor and I realized what the real problem was with me. (He probably realized it long before I did, and it took him time to coach me into diagnosing myself.)
In my struggles with my illness, I have come to realize that in every form of mental illness there is always one consistent component present: selfishness.
Whether you are in the depths of depression or the unbounded heights of a manic episode, it is all about you, and your pain or elation. If you are paranoid, they are out to get you. If you are schizophrenic, the voices in your head are talking only to you; the visions that you are seeing are only for you. Narcissism is about loving you to the exclusion of all others. Being a sociopath is about what you need, and to hell with everyone else. All of the forms of true sexual deviance are about you getting your jollies, not about sharing life's most intimate experience.
You get the idea.
If selfishness is an invariable component of mental illness, then what does that have to say about an economic system that is based on selfishness? Can an economic system that distorts the fabric of civil society through its overriding emphasis on selfishness be considered healthy? Can we actually draw the conclusion that the economic selfishness exhibited by our society is a component of a deeper underlying illness within our society? I think we can.
Almost sixty years ago, the Rand Corporation created one of the most important models of game theory, "The Prisoner's Dilemma." Their assumption was that if presented with a choice between cooperation and self-interest--where the outcome of the dilemma was, unknown to the participants, weighted toward self-interest--the participants would choose self-interest. When they tested it on their secretaries, they were surprised that the secretaries overwhelmingly chose cooperation over self-interest. The people at Rand ignored the outcome of this iteration of their test, stating that the secretaries lacked the sophistication necessary for a valid test.
John F. Nash, whose life was featured in the film A Beautiful Mind, at the same time proposed the Nash equilibrium, where Nash assumed that individuals acting in their own self-interest would always arrive at the best possible outcome. While brilliant, Nash was also a paranoid-schizophrenic, whose view of the world was tainted by his illness and its innate selfishness. However, Nash and the Rand Corporation's conservative outlook of fear and selfishness appealed to the military and more conservative elements of the government, who used the fear to create America's nuclear policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.
