Capital evolutionary rationale
An evolutionary-based rationale for Capital rests on a reversal of the growth of affection in evolution as described by a contemporary perversion of Darwin's concepts called Social Darwinism, where de-evolution is described as evolution: a reversal of life's accomplishments. It is still defined as evolution because changes, even if they are deprecatory, none-the-less move forward through time strengthening an organism's ability to obtain resources immorally, and often through violence. It fits the simplistic "survival of the fittest" description often associated with Darwin, but reverses the development of morality. While this strategy may work for parasites, it does not for higher thinking life, as thinking organisms can easily develop defense strategies against attack. Or, in the case of capital, revolution.
Marginalized or Institutionalized
Lewis Mumford provides in his writing extensive historical support for observations of Capital activity, while Aaron Beck provides social and psychological models that can likewise support observation, though they apply to negative social organization universally. Mumford specifically describes two groups that work to inflict damage: highly capitalized industry, and marginalized groups living in isolation. Beck describes structures that protect negative groups from critical inquiry, and especially the insertion of new information that would challenge the misinformation that allows groups to operate destructively.
Capital is extremely developed and the highest capital organizations are described as financial institutions. As they provide the structure for all capital, almost as a religion, capital organizations can likewise be described as institutions. Mumford's other component, the marginalized defectives, can in no way be described as refined or well-developed, as they usually live in poverty and reject modern thought. Mumford describes them historically as people unable to join in the newly created societies of villages when humanity moved from the forests into villages. Lacking the resources of evolving society, these marginalized people have been historically forced to remain in the early human state of "hunter/gatherer," with a reliance on killing animals using contemporary weapons. Mumford further describes them as full-time killers; killing animals, each other, and forming paranoid gangs of killers that survive on brigandry, that eventually grow to provide the violent aspects of the nation-state. Capital operators and these marginalized killers are psycho- and sociologically similar, as they see their development as a negation of affection and morality so that they can more easily obtain others' resources immorally. Perhaps the only major differences between the two groups are intelligence and luck, and these differences separated them early in human society's evolution.
Observationally, Capital families and the marginalized are similar. In the United States, hunters who wander the forests with rifles and shotguns killing animals, and often other humans, are generally associated with the extreme right. Occasionally they present themselves as not being extreme reactionaries but as mainstream members of society living out a historical activity. But that is simply posturing--they enjoy killing, and the joy of killing is the only reason they hunt. Hunters who do not enjoy killing stop hunting to join normal, peaceful society.
Capital in the United States
is purely conservative with only varying degrees of hatred for social
evolution. It has a well-documented reliance on war, environmental
destruction, and labor exploitation for its expansion, its necessary
continual economic growth, necessary to offset its
inefficiencies, waste, and the obsessive spending of its Capital
families. Radical-ness for Capital is the liberalization laws that
attempt to throttle its destructive, and hence immoral, activity that
results from its desperate need for continual growth:
the politics of Corporate Liberalists and Libertarians. To them,
personal freedoms and human rights only mean to provide Capital
operators and their families with the ability to take exactly the same
types of freedoms and rights away from others; if not
the right of individual self-determination, then the right to life.
Mumford's marginalized killers historically support Capital political
strategies with killing: the KKK, and more other reactionary racist
militias. For the marginalized defectives, freedom is similar, but simpler: the right to take away others' right to life.
Mumford describes the development of modern capitalized industry as a departure from classical societies, which at the time were cities guided by the protectionist guilds, to the forests where the resources for industry were: initially wood to create charcoal for industry's energy needs, then coal and iron ore. There, away from the protection of the guilds, capital operators could abuse labor with impunity, and industry operates in that mode today in industrialized societies, despite our highly socialized societies. There capital operators would no doubt meet marginalized killers, and they could bond easily into a mode of predatory cooperation to implement violence to help secure their exploitative operations, and to fight social organizations that may attempt to limit exploitation.
But Mumford leaves a contradiction open-ended; Capital by definition obtains resources from afar and concentrates them in central locations called capitals. Capital, a Roman word, and colonialism, likewise derived from the Roman "coloni," are accepted as Roman refinements of the Empire structure, and have been carefully preserved since the "fall" of the Roman Empire. For guilds to develop into highly-protective and mutually supporting city-states, the antithesis of Capital exploitation, they must have been able to evolve capital cities into socially beneficial environments. Likewise big modern cities have historically supported free-thinkers, such as musicians and artists who successfully challenge the greed of Capital. Capital would have to adapt, or perhaps tolerate, these tribal and natural societies within the capital cities, if only to wait for opportunity to eliminate them and devolve society back into a "greed over need" mode.
There are interchange points between naturally social society and Capital, and these interchanges allow Capital to persist, even though it is purely parasitic and should collapse like any unsuccessful parasite. There is more than tolerance for Capital by society; society expects resources gleaned from capital, usually through taxation, to develop antidotes for capital, such as welfare, public schools, socialized medicine, and the Arts (Maslow's mixed-synergy society). Capital families often insert themselves into natural society, leaving their "high society" behind, "slumming," as it were, with the lower classes, sometimes leaving less-desired family members behind when they return to their accustomed environments.
For its part, the natural society (the vast population that isn't Capital) has worked to defeat its own "natural affections" by using strong drugs such as cocaine, LSD, and "speed," to enhance its consciousness, but has inadvertently instead destroyed its affectionate neural constructs. This defines the "60s" period that abruptly ended, or perhaps crashed, in 1969. But these drugs continued, especially cocaine, which now represents Capital thinking, as in the corruption of Black culture into the cult of violent drug culture.
This is representative of the challenges of modern society. Liberalness implies tolerating less desirable social activities, and Libertarians very openly point to the complete legalization of drugs that are specifically shown to delete empathic constructs. Rumors persist that the intelligence wing of American Capital, the CIA, for many years the private domain of the dominant Bush family, built the inroads for cocaine into the United States as part of a complicated conspiracy, usually called Iran-Contra, that put the political conservatives back into power after their disastrous Vietnam war period. As you can see there are many links between all these examples of Capital. Capital is indifferent, and will expand in exactly the same ways in any environment.
Context in history
Mumford easily supports Darwin's model of natural affection when he shows how human society initially developed in a "pot luck" mode, where affectionate interactions lead to societal development. In that happy time, people who have recently emerged from the forests learn to live and work together in villages were they develop along with their domestic life: hybridized crops and farm animals. Kropotkin expanded on this when he moved to defend Darwin from the treacherous social Darwinists by showing a history of humanity's mutual support in animal communities that is no different from human society. Benedict codifies it by describing a system of social survival through generosity of Native North American society that she names Synergy.
All is good in Mumford's early villages until certain village members move to expand their "personal space" by staking out other property as their private domain from that land that is shared, or the public domain. They effectively deprive greater society of this resource which includes not only food and materials, but represents freedom. They go further; through violence they take others' personal spaces and rationalize the violence as a need to provide for their own families, yet ignore the needs of those they hurt in the process. With this bias these families display an initial decay in empathic evolution, and unlike animal society, human society is unable to limit their effect. If society attempts to marginalize violent families, as animal societies do, then it simply creates a marginalized culture that becomes more dangerous through desperation, and can even further rationalize its violence as it becomes more intelligent, but not more empathic. These violent families can be described as cunning; they have to be tolerated if they cannot be driven away, and a culture of tolerance is created for their benefit, and intellectual, if anti-emotional, version of empathy.
The public domain can be thought of as an entity as Capital is here, the original and traditional mode that Capital exploits as a resource, and replaces socially. The public domain, perhaps now the "Public Domain," is traditional, and Capital, by replacing it, is neoist. As ancient as Capital's roots are in ancient empires, it is young in the full experience of humanity, which is millions of years older than Capital, and can trace its roots in species that precede and accompany it. Along with each Capital structure's continual expansion within its own environments, comes expansion afar, which is the annexation of other lands and the absorption of people living in that land as human assets, or human capital (Spring). But prior to the development of land annexation even in its own environment is the idea of developing family members as assets, or family capital--we see this today as feminine genital mutilation, a strategy to keep children on the family farm by preventing them from joining other families through marriage.
Customary rules enforce social imprisonment within the family, rather than allowing children to leave the family to join the community, which is natural, tribal, and a cornerstone of the Constructivist model for education and human growth. Looking at family rules that would redefine family love as human capital, and enforce the imprisonment of captured humans, even in this day (and certainly within the recent history of the United States), leads to the idea that crime itself is rules-based, criminals depend on extensive rules for their predatory organization (Cosa Nostra), and that the development of society's rules have similar equally immoral roots in the control of humans as assets be it slavery or labor control.
The structure today
Following the institutional-or-marginalized approach, not all important institutions are financial, and fewer and fewer are industrial, as industry decays into disconnected production operations that are merely financial assets. When one uses the word "institution" without context, more often than not, the context is assumed to be "mental institution," and it is true that today's societal guides are often psychologists; gone are the philosophers as guides and religions leaders as moral compasses. Psychology has replaced the thoughts of philosophers, the morality of faith, and even the propaganda of rebellion. Economists and sociologists, psychologists have trickled their research conclusions upward into society to promote Capital's growth and to rationalize its necessity. Behavioral science joins with behavioral economics to assure compliance through the "idiot boxes" of modern communication media, and those who are uncomfortable with this relationship with capital are taught by cognitive practitioners to understand that their role in the system is purely beneficial. Even the humanistic social scientists contribute by tying all the loose ends to introduce a form of mass capitulation that they describe as peaceful communication: resistance to the structure being emotional hostility and defensiveness, not to mention protectionist, the very cause of world war; resistance is as suicidal as it is stupid.
To their credit Humanists worked to bend Capital to force it to contribute its gains as taxes for beneficial uses, such as welfare, education, and the Arts; what can be described as Maslow's mixed synergy. But these Humanist successes only date back to their Renaissance, a period prior to and just after WWII, and the Humanists successfully asserted their liberating influences only momentarily during the American popular rebellion to the Vietnam war, what is thought of as "the sixties." Today the successors of the original Humanists are admittedly pawns of Capital, openly seeking consulting assignments from corporations. Corporations only need Humanists to help them to provide Synergistic rationale as a cover for labor and environmental abuses.
An evolutionary-based rationale for Capital rests on a reversal of the growth of affection in evolution as described by a contemporary perversion of Darwin's concepts called Social Darwinism, where de-evolution is described as evolution: a reversal of life's accomplishments. It is still defined as evolution because changes, even if they are deprecatory, none-the-less move forward through time strengthening an organism's ability to obtain resources immorally, and often through violence. It fits the simplistic "survival of the fittest" description often associated with Darwin, but reverses the development of morality. While this strategy may work for parasites, it does not for higher thinking life, as thinking organisms can easily develop defense strategies against attack. Or, in the case of capital, revolution.
Marginalized or Institutionalized
Lewis Mumford provides in his writing extensive historical support for observations of Capital activity, while Aaron Beck provides social and psychological models that can likewise support observation, though they apply to negative social organization universally. Mumford specifically describes two groups that work to inflict damage: highly capitalized industry, and marginalized groups living in isolation. Beck describes structures that protect negative groups from critical inquiry, and especially the insertion of new information that would challenge the misinformation that allows groups to operate destructively.
Capital is extremely developed and the highest capital organizations are described as financial institutions. As they provide the structure for all capital, almost as a religion, capital organizations can likewise be described as institutions. Mumford's other component, the marginalized defectives, can in no way be described as refined or well-developed, as they usually live in poverty and reject modern thought. Mumford describes them historically as people unable to join in the newly created societies of villages when humanity moved from the forests into villages. Lacking the resources of evolving society, these marginalized people have been historically forced to remain in the early human state of "hunter/gatherer," with a reliance on killing animals using contemporary weapons. Mumford further describes them as full-time killers; killing animals, each other, and forming paranoid gangs of killers that survive on brigandry, that eventually grow to provide the violent aspects of the nation-state. Capital operators and these marginalized killers are psycho- and sociologically similar, as they see their development as a negation of affection and morality so that they can more easily obtain others' resources immorally. Perhaps the only major differences between the two groups are intelligence and luck, and these differences separated them early in human society's evolution.
Observationally, Capital families and the marginalized are similar. In the United States, hunters who wander the forests with rifles and shotguns killing animals, and often other humans, are generally associated with the extreme right. Occasionally they present themselves as not being extreme reactionaries but as mainstream members of society living out a historical activity. But that is simply posturing--they enjoy killing, and the joy of killing is the only reason they hunt. Hunters who do not enjoy killing stop hunting to join normal, peaceful society.
Mumford describes the development of modern capitalized industry as a departure from classical societies, which at the time were cities guided by the protectionist guilds, to the forests where the resources for industry were: initially wood to create charcoal for industry's energy needs, then coal and iron ore. There, away from the protection of the guilds, capital operators could abuse labor with impunity, and industry operates in that mode today in industrialized societies, despite our highly socialized societies. There capital operators would no doubt meet marginalized killers, and they could bond easily into a mode of predatory cooperation to implement violence to help secure their exploitative operations, and to fight social organizations that may attempt to limit exploitation.
But Mumford leaves a contradiction open-ended; Capital by definition obtains resources from afar and concentrates them in central locations called capitals. Capital, a Roman word, and colonialism, likewise derived from the Roman "coloni," are accepted as Roman refinements of the Empire structure, and have been carefully preserved since the "fall" of the Roman Empire. For guilds to develop into highly-protective and mutually supporting city-states, the antithesis of Capital exploitation, they must have been able to evolve capital cities into socially beneficial environments. Likewise big modern cities have historically supported free-thinkers, such as musicians and artists who successfully challenge the greed of Capital. Capital would have to adapt, or perhaps tolerate, these tribal and natural societies within the capital cities, if only to wait for opportunity to eliminate them and devolve society back into a "greed over need" mode.
There are interchange points between naturally social society and Capital, and these interchanges allow Capital to persist, even though it is purely parasitic and should collapse like any unsuccessful parasite. There is more than tolerance for Capital by society; society expects resources gleaned from capital, usually through taxation, to develop antidotes for capital, such as welfare, public schools, socialized medicine, and the Arts (Maslow's mixed-synergy society). Capital families often insert themselves into natural society, leaving their "high society" behind, "slumming," as it were, with the lower classes, sometimes leaving less-desired family members behind when they return to their accustomed environments.
For its part, the natural society (the vast population that isn't Capital) has worked to defeat its own "natural affections" by using strong drugs such as cocaine, LSD, and "speed," to enhance its consciousness, but has inadvertently instead destroyed its affectionate neural constructs. This defines the "60s" period that abruptly ended, or perhaps crashed, in 1969. But these drugs continued, especially cocaine, which now represents Capital thinking, as in the corruption of Black culture into the cult of violent drug culture.
This is representative of the challenges of modern society. Liberalness implies tolerating less desirable social activities, and Libertarians very openly point to the complete legalization of drugs that are specifically shown to delete empathic constructs. Rumors persist that the intelligence wing of American Capital, the CIA, for many years the private domain of the dominant Bush family, built the inroads for cocaine into the United States as part of a complicated conspiracy, usually called Iran-Contra, that put the political conservatives back into power after their disastrous Vietnam war period. As you can see there are many links between all these examples of Capital. Capital is indifferent, and will expand in exactly the same ways in any environment.
Context in history
Mumford easily supports Darwin's model of natural affection when he shows how human society initially developed in a "pot luck" mode, where affectionate interactions lead to societal development. In that happy time, people who have recently emerged from the forests learn to live and work together in villages were they develop along with their domestic life: hybridized crops and farm animals. Kropotkin expanded on this when he moved to defend Darwin from the treacherous social Darwinists by showing a history of humanity's mutual support in animal communities that is no different from human society. Benedict codifies it by describing a system of social survival through generosity of Native North American society that she names Synergy.
All is good in Mumford's early villages until certain village members move to expand their "personal space" by staking out other property as their private domain from that land that is shared, or the public domain. They effectively deprive greater society of this resource which includes not only food and materials, but represents freedom. They go further; through violence they take others' personal spaces and rationalize the violence as a need to provide for their own families, yet ignore the needs of those they hurt in the process. With this bias these families display an initial decay in empathic evolution, and unlike animal society, human society is unable to limit their effect. If society attempts to marginalize violent families, as animal societies do, then it simply creates a marginalized culture that becomes more dangerous through desperation, and can even further rationalize its violence as it becomes more intelligent, but not more empathic. These violent families can be described as cunning; they have to be tolerated if they cannot be driven away, and a culture of tolerance is created for their benefit, and intellectual, if anti-emotional, version of empathy.
The public domain can be thought of as an entity as Capital is here, the original and traditional mode that Capital exploits as a resource, and replaces socially. The public domain, perhaps now the "Public Domain," is traditional, and Capital, by replacing it, is neoist. As ancient as Capital's roots are in ancient empires, it is young in the full experience of humanity, which is millions of years older than Capital, and can trace its roots in species that precede and accompany it. Along with each Capital structure's continual expansion within its own environments, comes expansion afar, which is the annexation of other lands and the absorption of people living in that land as human assets, or human capital (Spring). But prior to the development of land annexation even in its own environment is the idea of developing family members as assets, or family capital--we see this today as feminine genital mutilation, a strategy to keep children on the family farm by preventing them from joining other families through marriage.
Customary rules enforce social imprisonment within the family, rather than allowing children to leave the family to join the community, which is natural, tribal, and a cornerstone of the Constructivist model for education and human growth. Looking at family rules that would redefine family love as human capital, and enforce the imprisonment of captured humans, even in this day (and certainly within the recent history of the United States), leads to the idea that crime itself is rules-based, criminals depend on extensive rules for their predatory organization (Cosa Nostra), and that the development of society's rules have similar equally immoral roots in the control of humans as assets be it slavery or labor control.
The structure today
Following the institutional-or-marginalized approach, not all important institutions are financial, and fewer and fewer are industrial, as industry decays into disconnected production operations that are merely financial assets. When one uses the word "institution" without context, more often than not, the context is assumed to be "mental institution," and it is true that today's societal guides are often psychologists; gone are the philosophers as guides and religions leaders as moral compasses. Psychology has replaced the thoughts of philosophers, the morality of faith, and even the propaganda of rebellion. Economists and sociologists, psychologists have trickled their research conclusions upward into society to promote Capital's growth and to rationalize its necessity. Behavioral science joins with behavioral economics to assure compliance through the "idiot boxes" of modern communication media, and those who are uncomfortable with this relationship with capital are taught by cognitive practitioners to understand that their role in the system is purely beneficial. Even the humanistic social scientists contribute by tying all the loose ends to introduce a form of mass capitulation that they describe as peaceful communication: resistance to the structure being emotional hostility and defensiveness, not to mention protectionist, the very cause of world war; resistance is as suicidal as it is stupid.
To their credit Humanists worked to bend Capital to force it to contribute its gains as taxes for beneficial uses, such as welfare, education, and the Arts; what can be described as Maslow's mixed synergy. But these Humanist successes only date back to their Renaissance, a period prior to and just after WWII, and the Humanists successfully asserted their liberating influences only momentarily during the American popular rebellion to the Vietnam war, what is thought of as "the sixties." Today the successors of the original Humanists are admittedly pawns of Capital, openly seeking consulting assignments from corporations. Corporations only need Humanists to help them to provide Synergistic rationale as a cover for labor and environmental abuses.
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