The trouble is that there’s no money in the pursuit of the good, and there’s no goodness in the pursuit of money.

If you want to devote your life to doing good, then you will likely need to consign yourself to a life of far less material comfort than if you had not. Teaching. Nursing. Social work. Environmental work. The vocations which are typically sought out by people who feel called to dedicate their lives to helping are also notoriously low-paying for how stressful they can be and how much education is required to get into them. Many important callings like peace activism, environmental activism and community volunteer work don’t pay anything at all.

People who devote themselves to the pursuit of money wind up looking in the exact opposite direction. Think of all the surest ways to get extremely wealthy and you will find exploitation, ecocide and abuse at every turn. Extracting profits from the toil of the working class. Investing in surefire sources of profit like defense contractors and fossil fuels. Offloading the costs of industry onto the ecosystem and the developing world. War profiteering. Scams (both the legal and illegal varieties). Monopolistic practices which crush smaller businesses and lay waste to entire communities. The countless depraved manipulations that go into selling medicine for profit.

The Sackler family amassed a fortune by creating an epidemic of opiate addiction. The Walton family got rich by deliberately destroying the local economies of small towns so that everyone would work and shop at the local Walmart. Elon Musk is a Pentagon contractor who’s helping US intelligence construct a planetary surveillance network. Jeff Bezos got rich with the help of contracts with the CIA and Pentagon, and Amazon’s aggressive campaign to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy is destroying whole industries and creating immense suffering for workers. Larry Ellison’s Oracle is intertwined with the US intelligence cartel and the Israeli genocide machine, as is Peter Theil’s Palantir.

These are just a few examples of how depraved you have to be to amass immense amounts of wealth; beyond that there are all the ugly manipulations people engage in to protect the status quo upon which their wealth is premised. The extremely wealthy buy up narrative control in the form of media, think tanks and Silicon Valley platforms in order to influence public political opinion to their benefit. They influence the government through legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying. Sometimes they even hop right in to the actual government itself like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. All to ensure the continuation of the unjust systems which allow them to amass wealth while destroying the biosphere and making everyone else poorer, busier, sicker, more exhausted, and more propagandized.

These are the kinds of people who rise to the top in our current system: the absolute worst among us. The more ruthless and underhanded you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our systems reward and elevate sociopathy, which is why we now find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

And meanwhile the best among us toil in obscurity, swimming against the current of this sociopathic dystopia their entire lives before dying with nothing to their names but the love that they shared. These should be the people running the world and charting the course for our species, and instead they live and die unknown and unrecognized, because our system does not elevate such beings. Instead it elevates narcissistic plutocrats, vapid celebrity artists, and groveling pundits and politicians.

This is what you get when you have a system in place where mass-scale human behavior is determined by what is profitable instead of by what is right. This is what that looks like.

Is it working?

 The unspoken premise behind the plan to keep capitalism going is that the world will be saved by sociopathic tech plutocrats like Elon Musk. The idea is to just continue the plan of infinite growth on a finite world until hopefully some tech company produces technology that makes such growth sustainable in a way that both (A) benefits everybody and (B) turns billionaires into trillionaires.

That’s the assumption underlying the decision to keep capitalism in place even as we watch our biosphere disappear before our eyes, and it’s pure fantasy. As long as mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, you’re going to see the interests of humanity and the ecosystem subverted by that pursuit. The belief that capitalism will rescue us from the ecological disasters it creates assumes that the blind pursuit of profit for its own sake will somehow possess the wisdom necessary to preserve the delicate ecosystemic context upon which human life depends while also ensuring that we all have a decent quality of life (as long as we work hard enough, of course).

This is a religious belief. It’s blind faith dogma, based on literally nothing other than one’s desire to believe it. It ascribes a wisdom to the “invisible hand of the market” that is tantamount to claiming that capitalism is being steered by God. It’s something people want to believe because the alternative is falling back on some form of socialist system to ensure our survival on this planet, which we in the west have been indoctrinated into reflexively dismissing.

Market forces are not guided by wisdom, they are guided by greed and fear, and by the unresolved early childhood trauma of the Musks and Theils and Bezoses of this world. Capitalism is a great way to guarantee more production and consumption, but it is completely useless for curbing ecocide and restoring planetary health.

As long as ecocide remains profitable under a system where mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit, ecocide will inevitably continue. What we need, then, is a completely different system. One where we move from competing with each other at the expense of our biosphere to collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem. Collaboration-based systems are inherently incompatible with the competition-based ones we live under today — but they are also the only way we are going to be able to continue living on this planet.

And proponents of capitalism might here say “Aha! That’s what you are missing! We’re NOT going to continue living on this planet! Daddy Elon’s going to take us all to Mars!”

But that’s kinda my whole point here. This is a baseless religious belief. Proponents of capitalism rely on the entirely faith-based belief that technological innovations will soon make it possible for limitless space colonization to occur, thereby enabling the infinite expansion upon which capitalism depends.

But there is no scientific evidence that humans will ever be able to live outside the biosphere from which we emerged. The closest we’ve ever gotten are these glorified scuba excursions wherein astronauts pack up pieces of Earth’s biosphere and suck on them for a while before returning to their planet’s surface. Assuming this means we can colonize space and live permanently completely independent of Earth’s biosphere is the same as assuming you can one day flap your arms hard enough to fly into the clouds just because you are able to jump.

The assumption of space colonization as a reality in our future arises not from science but from the egoic delusion which pervades human consciousness that we are much more separate from our world than we actually are. The human organism is no more separate from its biosphere than a ripple in a teacup is from the tea. Assuming we can just pack up our bodies and permanently move them offworld is like assuming you can take a single ripple in a teacup and transport it into another cup of tea in a country across the ocean.

Science simply does not understand the many different ways in which the human organism is interconnected with Earth’s biosphere, and isn’t anywhere close to understanding it. Even if it is technically possible to someday have us survive on another planet (or in floating space cylinders as per Jeff Bezos’s plan) — and again it is a complete article of faith that such a thing is even possible — we have no reason to assume that we’ll be able to attain this goal fast enough to avert ecological disaster here on Earth. The technology to adequately replicate our planet’s living conditions to make human life and reproduction sustainable in the long term could be many centuries off, by which time capitalism will have long ago devoured the face off of this world.

So the belief that capitalism will be able to carry us into the future is entirely faith-based and premised upon many unknowns and absurdities. We can keep clinging to those baseless superstitions hoping our evidence-free gamble eventually pays off so we never have to change ourselves, or we can move into a mature relationship with reality and start building something different together.

Author

Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz or caityjohnstone.medium.com. You can read more about her project HERE. Read her Substack blog.