Capitalism and Evolution
The entire universe is its own economic system. Matter and energy flow through the universe in certain ways, and not in other ways.
Life has its own economic system. All life depends on matter and energy flowing in certain ways, and not in other ways.
The problem is that those two economic systems are completely opposed to each other.
The economic system of life exists inside the economic system of the universe. The economic system of life makes matter and energy move in the opposite directions of the economic system of the universe. The economic system of life counteracts the economic system of the universe, but only in a small way. The economic system of the universe is going to win in the end.
Here on Earth, if there were no people, the environment would’ve kept right on working the way it’s always worked. Virtually all of the energy that powers the economic system of life on Earth comes from the sun (plus a little geothermal energy from under the Earth’s crust). The sun is going to burn out eventually, and when it does, life on Earth will end. But you can’t talk about the economic system of life on Earth ending without talking about the death of our sun. So even though the economic system of the universe and the economic system of life are completely opposed to each other, before people came along they weren’t pushing against each other very hard!
We naturally perceive the economic system of life, and we don’t naturally perceive the economic system of the universe. That means that when we act upon what we naturally feel to be true, we act against the economic system of the universe without realizing it.
All animals do that. But humans have an ability that no other species on Earth has: human intellect. No other species in the world could destroy the global environment because every species’ effect on the world is balanced by other species.
Human intellect gives us the ability to outsmart all other species on the planet. We outsmarted animals with weapons and hunting tactics. We outsmarted plants and fungus with tools and agriculture. We outsmarted viruses and bacteria with medicine and sanitation. Now our population size isn’t being limited by predators, food availability, or disease. Our population keeps growing, we keep inventing new things, and our impact on the world keeps growing, because there’s nothing on Earth that can counteract our impact on the world. We could counteract it ourselves, but we aren’t doing that yet.
Capitalism is just a highly developed version of the economic system of life. We know instinctively how the economic system of life works, and Capitalism is just more of that economic system—meaning laws and cultural values that have been established to reinforce the economic system of life, and which discourage or prevent people from trying to cooperate with the economic system of the universe.
A lot of people say that the fact that Capitalism has been the easiest economic system to get people to cooperate with proves that it’s the best economic system to use. It is true that the Capitalist economy is the easiest to apply to any situation. But it is also true that any economic system that valued people or the environment over profits was an economic system that cooperated better with the economic system of the universe. People who used those economic systems used them because one way or another they’d figured out how to cooperate with the economy of the universe within their living conditions.
Really, to say that Capitalism is the economic system that’s easiest to get people to cooperate with is only to say that it’s easier to destroy people’s living conditions and cultural values than it is to preserve them. If you destroy people’s environments or drive them off their land so the habits they’ve developed from hundreds or thousands of years of practice at cooperating with the economic system of the universe don’t work anymore and each person is left to fend for themselves, then Capitalism is the easiest economic system to get everyone to cooperate with.
Of course, some groups of people never developed higher economic systems, or lost them so long ago they’ve been completely forgotten. In Europe, Capitalism was an improvement over monarchy, because really, monarchy was a Capitalist economic system where only one person was allowed to be a Capitalist. The Europeans were the cultural heirs to thousands of years of kingdoms and empires that began in Mesopotamia. They were also the most economically, and therefore politically, powerful group of people in the world.
Basically, the Europeans discovered an economic system that worked better than the one they’d been using for thousands of years, and then they thought they were doing all the so-called “savages” in the world a favor by dragging them down to a European level of cultural development.
That’s the general idea, anyway.
This is why Capitalism seems like such a great idea to so many people—even workers who are being exploited by Capitalists and who would be better off with a different economic system. That’s why it’s so easy for Capitalists to make lots of people feel like anti-Capitalist revolutionaries don’t know what they’re talking about—because understanding anti-Capitalism requires a lot more education than understanding Capitalism. (I am talking about understanding Capitalism as the idea behind an economic system, not understanding Capitalism as a political system.)