Note, this was supposed to be published a couple of months ago, but it somehow disappeared, and the latest news has prompted me to try again.
Well, it had to happen. All the wild and wacky “isms” of the 20th Century have gone down in flames. Fascism, Communism, and now Capitalism.
The pattern is similar. Somebody comes up with a belief that an extreme application of one of the elements of human nature is the only way to run society. A bunch of people find ways to make the application of that theory profitable to themselves, both in a financial and egotistical way. Somehow they persuade all the other people to go along with them.
Then comes the crunch. No extreme philosophy ever works. The world just isn’t like that. So the new philosophy doesn’t quite pan out the way the proponents envisioned. However, they have so much money and ego invested in their little system that it is impossible for them to back out. Besides, for the leaders, it’s working just fine.
So they cheat. They manipulate society so that their system seems to be still making a profit. But, like all problem gamblers, they are spending their capital (infrastructure, workforce, resources, environment) faster than they are creating new benefits, so eventually all comes crashing down.
The Setup
All these systems started during the Industrial Revolution. A whole new class of people was needed to run the complicated networks that became known as businesses.
The Communists, who believed that everyone should be the same, decided that business should be run completely by the central government, thus ensuring that every business would be run the same.
The Capitalists took the opposite approach, lauding the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest. They set up a winner-take-all system.
The National Socialists really wanted everyone to be the same, but their method was to kill anyone who was different, allowing the winners to take it all (like the Capitalists, but more honest). However, like the Communists, they used a political party to control everything.
In the End
The first to go down the tubes were the Nazis, whose desire for power induced them to try to take over the world. The world objected in the strongest terms. So the least viable of the isms was the easiest to deal with.
The Russian Communists created a difficult-to-function economic system run by an impossible-to-manage political system. The result was that their economic system used up their resources, destroyed their environment and crashed, leaving their political masters to maintain their power by jumping to the opposite side of the fence and installing a very crude form of Capitalism known as Oligarchy.
Capitalism itself has had an up-and-down ride, but kept itself alive by teaming up with democracy, an almost-workable form of government, full of checks and balances to keep any one group (namely the Capitalists themselves) from taking complete control.
Teetering on the Brink
Note that each one of these systems is an autocratic construct, designed to allow a small elite to take advantage of the rest of the population to make themselves very powerful and rich. The selfishness of the leaders forces each of these systems to run off the rails and crash, but it requires a whole lot of cooperation from the populace to allow it to happen. So Democracy actually extends the life of Capitalism by hauling it back from authoritarian disaster. But it’s a downhill slide to the edge, and in one country after another, Capitalism, or at least its most extreme form, has failed.
So the Industrial Revolution almost destroyed Britain in the 19th Century, denuding it of trees, polluting its atmosphere (see “pea soup” fogs) and grinding down its workers until the people stood up and said, “Enough of this nonsense.” The movement got an extended life in the United States, where the vast expanse of the country and the great volume of natural resources concealed its failings for several more decades.
In the 20th Century Capitalism got another reprieve when unions forced the ruling class to share their profits. However, in the 21st Century the Capitalists moved their operations to other places in the world to find cheap labour. This will temporarily allow Capitalism to keep going.
But, just like Britain in the 20th Century, America is now stuck with a declining economy. The only way the Capitalists can bolster their profits, keep their economy going and persuade people that their System is the right one is to cheat. They must remove the restrictions placed on them and return to destroying the environment and denying their responsibilities to the society that supports them.
Now a strange political shemozzle of bad luck and bad management has upended all the checks and balances in the American political system, thus giving the Capitalists their last gasp at domination. They have acted exactly as one might expect, quietly dismantling all the regulatory networks that control their operations while everyone is watching the stooge set up to distract us from what is really happening.
Now, with Trump’s refusal to participate in the Paris accord, America’s inability to function under its present economic system has been announced to the world. The last bastion has fallen, and mealy-mouthed Moderate Socialism will now get the chance to strut its stuff.
Of course, there’s still Communist China touting their system, which is neither Communism nor is it succeeding. I take China’s support for the Paris Accord with a large grain of salt as well. They talk the talk for public relations reasons, but I doubt if they’ll manage to harness their own “pea soup” environmental problems any time soon.
Hopefully the American system of government is resilient enough to swing itself back to a more normal situation before the Republicans destroy too much of the environment, America’s international position, and perhaps world political stability. Until then, the Americans will be playing catch-up as they learn to treat their people and their environment better.
With a little bit of luck and a whole lot of work, maybe sexism will be the next outmoded philosophy to go.