The Great Cancer

National Cancer Institute, accessed 2/9/2018

Capitalism and Capitalists, in many respects, are the closest things to cancer that can be found on the scale of the human society.  Cancerous cells, generally defined, are cells which have ceased to regulate their cell division and reproductive processes.  They draw resources from the common pool of the body's resources while propagating themselves and their genetic make-up throughout the body at the body's expense.  Eventually the body is drained of its resources as the body's resources are drawn into the out of control reproduction by the cancerous cells, until the body (and the cancerous cells) die.

Capitalism, and Capitalist owners of production, function with a similar logic.  These are individuals and individual entities who have ceased to regulate their consumption and production patterns at the expense of the society, its people, and the environment in which we all have to live. Wealth that is produced by the larger socio-environmental complex gets drawn into the accounts of the Capitalists, and away from more healthy uses in the rest of the society.  The Capitalist cells draw increasingly large portions of the wealth that society and nature produces, to the point where most people in society are no longer able to support themselves, and/or, the environment is depleted of natural resources and polluted by their activities.  In healthy societies, these selfish tendencies of businesspeople and businesses is corrected at many points, from socialization at young ages to be more considerate and empathetic towards others and the environment, and through explicit government enforced regulations that penalizes anti-social and anti-environmental behavior and give incentive to pro-social and pro-environmental behavior.  Without these social regulations to prevent greed and unhealthy forms of individualism from manifesting in our world, we get predicaments like we're currently in in the United States, where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a decreasing number of people and institutions without any form of timely and effective accountability and feedback from the society or the society or environment.

When Capitalists, Right-wing conservatives, or other laissez-faire ideologues get into influential government positions, they effectively shut off the regulatory frameworks that keep people from being able to reap profits at others' or the environment's expenses.  As the works of Elinor Ostrom demonstrate, this is usually a signal that tough times are ahead for the society foolish enough to sacrifice its wealth, efforts, and inhabited ecosystems for a few peoples' extra wealth.  The results are then experienced in our lived world, as we get collectively poorer, our land, water, and air become polluted, and our finite natural resources get depleted for a tiny minority's benefit.

Now, this by no means is intended as a dictatorial, normative argument that we should adopt more pro-social, and pro-environmental outlooks and policies to regulate the anti-social tendencies of the Capitalists and business owners.  I firmly believe that societies can, and should, be allowed to make their own choices regarding how they organize and internally regulate themselves.  I would point out though, that even though people and peoples may be free to make their own choices, they are never actually free from the consequences of those choices.  Even if you intended one outcome over another, you will achieve a different outcome if your methodology and perspective produces those kinds of outcomes.  The ends may justify the means, but the means are what determines which outcomes are actually achieved in the world.  One can imagine turning a standard faucet on from an off position.  You may choose to turn the faucet clockwise (righty-tighty), but you will not get water flowing in spite of your best efforts when you choose a method that has the effect of closing the faucet.  Likewise, I think people should remain free to make their choices for Right-wing conservative, laissez-faire forms of government.  My kind warning to those people though is that they will not achieve a stable, healthy, or collectively prosperous society through those chosen policies and methods.  As a matter of fact, it's predictable that they'll more likely create a considerable amount of harm and damage to the society and the environment in their pursuit of either Right-wing ideologies, or their own personal wealth at the expense of other people and the environment. 

Therefore, until human societies, and the people who wield influence in those societies, understand these basic concepts, and adopt this basic orientation in the world, I think we will continue to march closer to social ill-health and destruction in spite of peoples' best intentions and opinions on the methodologies.  The cancer of Capitalism will continue to spread and leech resources from the whole society until the either the society rises up to eliminate the cancerous people from the society, or until the environment changes to the point where we no longer are able to live in it.  The universe is a dictatorship, and we can discover its laws to live better and healthier within it.  We can also ignore those laws, avoid them at all costs, and suffer the consequences of our ignorance and poor choices.  We are free to make those choices.  We are never free from the consequences of them though.