There is a deeper issue – or set of issues – with the way we as various forms of collective deal with the distribution of resources and access to basic needs and care. As we debate the merits of various systems and ideologies, pointing to extremist examples of collapsed empire as the avatars of our discontent, we ignore the larger, far more obvious problem all of these failed States and horrific systems have in common: us.
We suck. Like, really, really suck. And there’s no magic bullet or divine system that is going to fix that. Buckle up, this is a long one.
Stalin, Mao, Reagan, Pol Pot, Bin Laden, Idi Amin, Erdogan, Milosevic, the Marcos’, Castro, Thatcher, Netanyahu, Duterte, Orban, Putin, Trump, Musk, the Kochs, the Kim dynasty, Milei… ideologically, they’re all over the place. Left, Right, weird conglomerations of various “third way” stews of populism and authoritarianism, the only real commonalities between them is that they’re all collosal shitbags, and the net effect of their rule has been disastrous and unsustainable.
Now, there’s a whole story about the link between NPD and power that we’ve touched on, and the warping corruption of power itself that inevitably overwhelms the human brain to create these delusional, toxic weirdos, and it’s a factor, and you’ll see it crop up again and again. But let’s focus first on the systems themselves.
None of these charismatic lunatics can do shit without popular support and the granted power of the State/populace. Whether through capture of the State or manipulation of power through wealth, nothing happens in a vacuum. And this is where it gets real. We not only allow this as a species, this obviously poisonous, often murderous mechanic, we regularly create demand for it ourselves.
In his classic “The Graves Are Not Yet Full“, Bill Berkeley examines various African countries and their politics through the 90’s, and the rise of warlords and populists across the continent. Rather than finding ancient enmities long simmering – the dominant narrative of post-colonial Africa – he finds the manipulation of divisions by aspiring autocrats to create exploitable hierarchies to ride to power. These divisions are leveraged in times of power vacuum with populations in a state of heightened (often justified) aggrievement, who are looking for some savior to swoop in and solve these demanding, often life-threatening issues.
We’re not playing the blame game here. Wanting immediately threatening problems solved as quickly as possible by someone willing to shoulder the entire burden is unbearably human. Turning to literally anyone who claims to be able to create safety and stability is understandable in any role. People at their most vulnerable are at their, well, most vulnerable. And the people most equipped to exploit that are usually shameless, delusional, and violent, willing to promise everything to everybody, and not give a single fuck about the consequences when they fix nothing, or make things worse.
Real leaders understand that these issues are complex, that solutions require time and resources, cooperation, and a lot of hard work. Who wants to hear that? You want to hear “I can fix this immediately, just give me all of the power and resources, and I’ll make it happen”. And that’s what happens. Poof. Autocracy. Oppression. Repression. Kleptocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, all of the above.
The thing to note here is that these situations arise from literally all kinds of populist uprisings. Leftist reform movements, reactionary Right movements, single issue or survival state, post-collapse or pre-collapse, religious or secular, cultural or social, nothing ideological matters, the only thing that matters are that the conditions allow a sociopath/narcissist/shitbag to face a stricken, fearful, angry population desperate for answers and solutions, and promise them the world, as long as they are given all the power and resources.
In “Graves”, the resulting autocrats arise from every type of movement possible. While autocracy and authoritarianism is inherently Right Wing – requiring hierarchies, in-group-/out-group dynamics, reliance on institutional power, and unequal division of society based on the idea of a “natural order” that provides justification for exploitation if not outright elimination of the “untermensch”, however defined – it can arise and exploit any system, any ideology. One can point out that the hierarchies created in the Soviet Union and China were directly antithetical the even the most basic tenets of Marxism. That hierarchy, that division. that in-group/out-group dynamic is necessary for the perpetuation of authoritarian power and kleptocratic wealth extraction.
Doesn’t matter what kind of car it is, when a dipshit grabs the wheel, you’re along for the ride.
So what’s wrong with Capitalism, if we give our autocrats, oligarchs, kleptocrats, etc a pass on ideological unity? Am I saying that Capitalism is fine, it’s the people that are wrong? Oh my no. Well, kinda. But also, no. Lemme explain.
People misunderstand the fundamental innovation of Capitalism, that separates it from the previous thousands of years of market economies. The free trade of goods and services, markets for those goods and services, and systems to govern and regulate them have been around since the first person to figure out that their two deer could turn into one deer and a fancy outfit if they traded one to the local stitcher. That’s just trade, not Capitalism. There’s no “capital” itself yet.
The fundamental and defining characteristic of Capitalism is in how it treats and distributes capital. Hence the name. It lies in the creating of a “market of markets”, with fungible, purchasable and tradable corporate debt vehicles that allow for indirect investment in economic entities.
Prior to the expansion of massive trade companies exploiting the colonized world, investment was fundamentally a direct investment model. You’d bring a bag of gold to the owner of a shop or factory or trading ship, and say “I would like to invest in this thing here, I’ll give you this gold for a percentage of ownership”. Rapid expansion of proto-corporations like the Dutch East India Co. and the imaginatively named British East India Co. required far more than the State and elite capital to buy more ships, warehouses, etc. Soon, the selling of “shares”, the creation of these fungible investment vehicles, led to a whole ass market for the things.
Hence stock markets, bond markets, commodities markets, futures markets – a market of markets. Fucking meta WHAT.
There are obvious advantages to this model – it democratizes investment by lowering the bar to entry, it amortizes risk among a larger investor pool, investors can further amortize risk by diversifying their portfolios, it allows for rapid, dynamic reaction to market forces, and provides a place to put individual capital to grow, both in collective funds and in safe long term investments like bedrock industry, legacy companies, and government debt.
It also turned the global economy into one manipulable casino to be exploited by greedy dipshits and con artists, ponzi scheme operators, outright fraudsters, rug pullers, insider traders, book cookers… James Clavell’s books may not have aged well from a sociocultural perspective, but “Tai-Pan” and “Noble House” are worth reading just for the depiction of their respective era’s stock market shenanigans. Absolute Wild West.
It also creates a closed loop of capital that remains in the market itself instead of in the real economy. You can create value that ONLY exists in the investment market, extract it, and not a single red penny affects the real economy at all. Money just creates money for those with money. You just dip from the top of the fountain while everyone else dies of thirst and preventable illnesses.
And this is where ideology and emotion come in.
The Economic ideology of Liberalism (meaning “to free or open”, not to be confused with political Liberalism, with which it is usually at odds) defines Capitalism as a self-regulating system guided by the Invisible Hand, consisting of rational actors, where prices contain all knowledge known and unknown, that has inherent safeguards against manipulation and imbalance, and that all economic woes come from government interference and the unintended consequences of policy and overreach.
Whether the Classical Liberalism of Mises/Hayek, or the NeoLiberalism of Rothbard/Friedman, the concepts and defense are fundamentally the same. Greed itself creates incentive to take action to balance the system, to find the underfunded or undervalued innovations and move capital into those entities, away from failing or overpriced investments. It’s a dynamic flow where the smartest and most risk-seeking investors lead the charge towards prosperity for all. Human nature itself creates the incentive to avoid scams, schemes, and moral hazards. They are simply “not profitable”, ergo, and sane investor will avoid them.
And it’s all 1000% horseshit. Literally none of it is true.
There are well-worn takedowns of this hot garbage, Piketty’s “Capital In The 21st Century”, a bit of a surprise bestseller, being one of the most recent. However, any forensic examination of the various crashes in my lifetime – the post-Reagan recession, the S&L crisis, the housing bubble collapse and subsequent Wall Street apocalypse of 2007-2008 – shows clearly that these are as much emotionally driven greed bubbles as Dutch Tulipmania.
As we detailed in our last post, unregulated markets like crypto, “health and wellness” products, and exotic debt securities (STILL), still lure in the bubblers and the grifters, everyone thinking they’re the smartest people in the room, the alpha geniuses who will outsmart the market to get that palace of underage concubines and the skulls-of- their-enemies-throne they dream about. It’s no suprise that these dovetail perfectly with other Right Wing identitarian ideologies and grifts. Every Right leaning podcaster sells supplements. Not even kidding. Wonder why.
Dude, you still got fleeced by Hawk Tua and the least funny Viner in history. You’re dumb as soup.
Well written and implemented regulation demands responsible behavior. It demands a level playing field. Recourse and consequences for fraud and failures. It demands transparency and accountability. Play fair, children, and take responsibility for your actions.
So of course adherents to “free market” ideology lose their fucking minds. How dare the market be regulated to serve the interests of the greater good and not my fantasies of oppressive wealth and power?? The fucking NERVE, I am so SMRT I mean SMART that I’ve only crashed the entire economy ONCE this whole century! So far, anyways!
At it’s core, it’s a religious attachment to a fantasy, a delusional, idealized self image as an apex predator in a fundamentally unequal system that requires losers to feed the image of winners, and devolves into a zero sum game where even winning literally everything means nothing. It is an addiction to unfettered conquest, because as much as they enjoy flexing fancy cars, posing in unlivable hypermansions, and child sex tourism trips or drugged sex worker parties, those are largely just the trappings that validate the delusional, idealized identity they’ve fabricated for themselves.
And they will exploit anything they can to accomplish this, regardless of system. Capitalism just offers the current best chances via this laughably moronic ideological framework. Leveraging fascist manipulation to create a fearful, aggrieved population out of the most prosperous, privileged nation on earth is a wild example of how far these goatfucking shitbags are willing to go to rig the game in their favor long after they’ve won.
The number of “more money than I can spend in a lifetime” sociopaths who spend MASSIVE amounts of money to make more money because it’s the winning that matters to their fragile egos is literally insane. Trump doesn’t give a fuck about governance, Musk doesn’t care about, you know, anything, shit, Rupert Murdoch isn’t even AMERICAN. You cannot tell me that $350 million spent by Musk on this election wouldn’t have done more good as taxes. That the millions upon millions that grifter rectal wart Trump has hoovered from his red hat Nazis couldn’t have been better spent on a random GoFundMe for health care expenses. It’s enraging.
So what’s the point of all this?
We remain at the mercy of a succession of broken, toxic shitbags whose drive to satisfy their shattered internal emptiness is insatiable, unstable, and they will do literally anything, promise anything, hurt anyone, if they think it will give them a single picosecond of respite from the howling winds inside their heads. Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, hell, Cenk and Ana from The Young Turks have lost their fucking minds this week. Destiny and Nick Fuentes sharing…opinons. They’re a plague of this terrifying aspect of humanity, how vulnerable we are to these toxic identities that pathologically prevent us from acting in any remotely healthy way.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to break something and then blame everyone else while claiming to be the only one who can fix it. Because we’re human. And just as poverty and oppression are traumatizing, leading to its own pandemic of problematic behavior outcomes, so to is greed, wealth, power, and fame traumatic. We are not built to handle these things.
There are a million roads that lead to these easy, facile, cut-from-whole-cloth idealized identities, and its a lot easier emotionally to prop up a shiny target dummy to try to convince everyone you’re cool than to actually face the existential journey towards real self-actualization. Whether cultist or cult leader, the mechanism – and the fatally poisonous result – is pretty much the same.
This has to be bedrock understanding of ANY systems we design. If we weren’t greedy fucks with a tendency towards delusional pathologies, Capitalism would work just fine. So would Communism. So would anarchy. If we were all healthy, rational actors who always made perfect decisions and were satisfied with shared abundance, we wouldn’t need systems at all.
But we are fucking DUMPSTER FIRES of pathologies. No one is immune from corruption, no system is immune from corruption, no company, no church, no anything. It is who we are. Sorry not sorry. And we need to deal with the shame avoidance inherent in idealization enough to embrace the humility required for true leadership and problem solving. Any other argument is nothing but religious posturing and deflection. We have to compensate for human nature and human behavior. We have to stop assuming that there’s anything remotely resembling “normal”. And that it’s ok. We can design things to do what we want them to do.
We certainly don’t need a system that claims to leverage human vices for the greater good, an obviously laughable notion in the first place. We need systems that do what they claim to do while being resistant to influence from within and without by fragile, emotional actors who do not have anyone’s best interest in mind. Ideologies are political religions, nothing more. And unless we can examine solutions outside of that while looking at what toxic forces are actually affecting our shared prosperity, we’re going to get nothing of substance done.
Every fair game has rules and teamwork. It’s not that hard, we just need to get the big feels of the fact-resistant crowd out the fucking way.
Kelsoland.Institute 