late stage capitalism is a riot

I just went to the mailbox, walked over hot asphalt in bare feet to get there, and it was all junk mail.

A flyer entitled ‘2023 PROPOSED PROPERTY TAX BILL INFORMATION’. All caps.

‘Snooze and save’ said another flyer, even larger, with a beautiful woman making a bed, all lower case. I think it’s a furniture store.

There was a GIANT movie ticket, or facsimile thereof, 8”x12”, just to make sure you got the point. It’s huge. It looks exactly like a movie ticket with numbers on it but the flip side reveals it’s about a church. “Scan the QR code to sign up for our exclusive first time visitor experience” the text happily says. “We’ll be waiting for you with a gift” it concludes.

And a SPECTRUM EXCLUSIVE MOVE-IN OFFER in laminated plastic, like it’s really valuable, like no matter what happens your SPECTRUM EXCLUSIVE MOVE-IN OFFER will be safe. Thunderstorm, flood, apocalypse, emotional breakdown from the stress of modern life with everybody trying to get your attention and take your money - no worries, this offer will survive.

I think this was the breaking point. I realized that capitalism had reached its limit of absurdity, atleast as far as I was concerned. I’m out. I want out. I don’t want to be accosted by trash mail, spam mail, scam mail or any other form of inducement. I’m so tired of endlessly being probed for possible profit making possibilities.

“Good luck kid” you might say, “they won’t stop until they have used up every available means of harassing you and drained you of all your money”. Late stage capitalism, what a riot. Anything goes. It’s all justified by making a profit. It’s good business.

Making a profit, of course, is analogous to being a productive person and holy in the sight of God. I mean doesn’t God believe in capitalism and American democracy? I believe so. Otherwise why is America the greatest country the world has ever known?

After I put the pile of junk mail in the trash I got a phone call. Someone on the other end said, “Hello. Is this Mr. Bayes?”
”What is it?”
”Are you the resident of so and so address?”
Silence.
”Would you like a cash offer for your property?”
Click.

Actually phones these days don’t click, more of a tap. But they’ll be back. You can’t tap them out of existence.

Hey, I’m not a communist but I do think we need a new economic model. If our planet had infinite resources and infinite capability to absorb waste then capitalism would work. Of course there’s also the degradation of workers - turning them into machines, there’s the commodification of everything - giving it a price payable in money.

The psychological impact of late stage capitalism has never been calculated as far as I know. It should be obvious enough though: disillusionment of the youth as they look around them at the world the adults have built, estrangement and abandonment of people - the street people, discarded veterans, old people and even children within families. Depression amongst adolescents is at epidemic proportions, people. It’s because 12 year olds are being put on a conveyer belt and rushed through a process they’re not ready for. That process is assimilation into a society (middle school), a curriculum and a schedule.

Think about that for a minute. I saw my neighbor’s daughter go thru it. From a cute little 3 year old full of wonder who used to play at my house and make cardboard castles, the beautiful little tyke who learned how to swim in the pool in my backyard, the intrepid and eager explorer who used to go on safaris with me thru the overgrown weeds of the backyard and then do a youtube tutorial about how to make a doll out of sticks and grass. She went thru hell going to middle school. She transformed into someone else and had to take anti-depressants to deal with it.

Wait, a 12 year old taking anti-depressants? Wait, what?

Yeah I’m calling you out - late capitalism. You’ve got a psychological effect. Kids are being primed to become useful economic units, as happens with any late capjtalistic society. Money is the highest good. Profit above everything. Progress is draining the wetlands near the river and building more houses. Yeah, then we have more catastrophic floods because the river has no place to go.

I was reading about this, how in some places like the Sacramento Valley and other places in the Pacific Northwest they are letting the rivers flood naturally again so they can replenish the aquifers beneath the surface that have been decimated by drought. Nature has a natural way of ameliorating climate extremes by storing the water in wetlands and aquifers. Use it during drought, store it during flood. I’m sad that we have constricted and restricted our waterways for human (read industrial) purposes.

Here in San Antonio all the arroyos have been turned into concrete culverts. You can see them all over town on your bike. This place used to be an oasis with water flowing everywhere in the wet season and the springs gurgling out fresh water all year long. Now the springs are dry and the arroyos have become ditches or even worse, buried underground. It’s tragic, it’s blasphemous, but no one really complains. Have to keep the machine running, have to keep the streets full of cars, idling at the traffic lights and buying gasoline at the convenience store.

Is there nothing good about the late stage capitalism phase we find ourselves in? Well it’s provided a comfortable lifestyle for alot of people. Comfortably numb. We’re not arrested by the damage done to our planet and ourselves by this system of exploitation so it just goes on. We’re mildly annoyed but that’s life. A low grade stress that we live with every day. And late stage capitalism will keep degrading the environment and the human beings as long as it can. That’s the nature of the beast. It degrades the environment and turns people into useful economic units. That’s it’s fuel. That’s what it eats for breakfast.

Symbiosis, on the other hand, could also work as a system of economics. ‘What can I do for you, this is what I need’. A simple equation. Balanced. No need for cutthroat competition. Currencies consisting of stories, of goodwill and helping out, not just money.

Hey, why not? We’re the ones that invent currency so we can acquire things. Maybe we could acquire some wisdom and exchange that. It is valuable and rare, two requirements for a currency.

But the lack of competition would stifle innovation you say. That 3 year old who used to play at my house had her innovation stifled BY the system. Innovation and imagination and creative thinking happen naturally in human beings. It would be way better to let them develop their own creativity in their own time, in their own rhythm. Then they would invent some really cool things. I’m sure of it.

Imagine a world where caterpillars roam free in pollinator gardens and flood waters wash up on empty fields before soaking into the earth. Imagine a world where people move at their own pace and do what they want, from their heart.

That’s actually how people used to live. Native Americans on this continent go back 15 or 20 thousand years and they had a very different lifestyle. When the European colonizers showed up and established their societies, they were blown away by the Native Americans they met. The level of personal freedom they saw was something they weren’t familiar with at all. The influence of those Native American contacts actually traveled back across the Atlantic and influenced the Enlightenment Movement in Europe as well as the founding of America. You can find traces of the Iroquois Confederation in the United States Constitution.

Take the best parts of capitalism and jettison the rest, the parts that don’t work. That’s all I’m saying. Make it better. Don’t have to crash the whole system. People would be fearful and freaked out.

Copy the best aspects of capitalism and paste them into a new system that respects people as human beings and planet earth as our Mother. Mother Earth. Try something new. We’re not Homo sapiens for nothing, we can do it any way we want.

Late stage capitalism is a riot but symbiosis and sustainability are standing by as the first wave of the future. Gotta be.

Have you ever sat at a railroad crossing watching all the grafitti-tagged railroad cars roll by? That’s all the resources we’re taking from the planet and turning into commodities to create wealth, that’s our economy. Tanker cars full of chemicals, open cars stacked with lumber, box cars full of who knows what. They can be 3 miles long. That’s what a train driver told me once. How do you stop that kind of momentum?

You don’t. It’s too big and too strong. But you can build parallel systems that do the same things, only better. Like gardening. You have just taken your head of cabbage out of the truck hauling it from California and put it in your back yard. Multiply that by thousands and millions and it will make a real difference.

I can think of other examples: bicycling, community building (whatever that might mean), book clubs (so people can talk about things), alternative energy (we don’t have to burn down the forest to light up the planet). What kind of things can you think of to replace this rapacious, greedy and destructive economic system? There must be millions.

So anyways, this diatribe is kind of a take off on the previous episode where I interviewed Abby the ex-barista and heard her views about the world we live in and the economic systems we believe in, or atleast accept. I totally agree with her. Well she wants to start over, go all the way back to monkeys. I don’t know if that’s necessary. Maybe we could find the inner monkey in us and learn something. The inner child. Could save millions of years of evolution. Of course that’s assuming we’ll end up here again. It might not happen that way. Maybe we’ll be a planet like Avatar, people flying around, all one with nature. I can see that.

Peace.

Thanks to NATURRITU for the music mix. Fantastic collection. This is what I listened to while composing this.