On capitalism

This week’s reading reminded me of a quote from Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein,

“The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries of near-continuous money creation have left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, and the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, of images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking, spiritual practice. Life itself has become a consumer item.”

Capitalism is unnatural. It is a clear indication that us humans have lost touched with our roots, who we are, and where we come from. If we look at nature, we see harmony, co-creation and coexistence. All living beings have their place, and know their place in nature. Nothing goes to waste and no creature is exploited. It is because the same life force is running through all living beings and in nature, these living beings are aware of it. There isn’t any ego mechanism to keep them feel separated.

Human ego has gone too far and it has become self destructive. Environmental degradation, racial and cultural exploitation are simply symptoms of our fundamentally flawed system. Our system has misled us to chase after things that are ultimately unreal. What is a capital anyway?  Peruvian businessman Hernando De Soto wrote in his book “The Mystery of Capital” that “Capital is born by representing in writing, in title, a security, a contract and other records – the most economically and socially useful of an asset, as opposed to the visually more striking aspects of an asset” (48). Capital is potential value. It lives in not our physical reality but the “parallel universe of conceptual reality” (De Soto). In this sense, it somewhat relates to the “algo más” ideology amongst broccoli farmers in Guatemala.

To me, capital or “algo más” are hallucinating promise because it seduces us to keep living in this parallel universe of conceptual reality rather than our real, physical reality. What’s real is the quality of our life, the wellbeing of nature, community, our relationship with one another. At the end of the day, if we depleted all our resources, can money put food on the table? Can money feed us?

We really need to deeply re-examine who we are, and our role in nature, which Alan Watts eloquently summarizes as follows,

“The relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional, much like buying and selling. There cannot be buying without simultaneously selling. The environment grows the organism, and in turn the organism creates the environment. The organism turns the sun into light, but it requires there to be an environment containing a sun for there to be an organism at all. The answer to it is simply they are all one process. ”

De Soto, Hernando. (2000). “The Mystery of Missing Information” and “The Mystery of Capital” in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Elsewhere, pp14-67.

Eisenstein, Charles. (2011). Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition.