Capitalism death cult

The sooner we come to terms with some uncomfortable truths, the better. It must seem surpassingly strange to most of us to hear this, but capitalism is a literal death cult. There are many other ways to describe it, which are equivalent, but possibly less harsh sounding. For example, it is a process in which we build ever more complex, man-made structures while bringing about the radical simplification of the natural world. Put another way, it’s a process that entails mass death and destruction of biological life, whether as direct and intentional killing, or as an indirect yet predictable and inevitable byproduct of our activities, in exchange for creating ever more complex taxidermies of dead matter, which appear to have many advantages and conveniences associated with them, obeying the much simpler and more predictable dynamics of physics and chemistry, instead of the vastly more complex and unruly dynamics of biology.

Yet, in the process of building these complex taxidermies, we soon discover that even dead matter can be manipulated into forms and arrangements sufficiently complex that their own dynamics eventually become unpredictable even to us, their authors.

We are capable of developing elaborate risk management schemes in response to the problem, but the cost of mistakes remains too high. The designers of the Fukushima reactors relied on risk analysis that put the probability of a catastrophic failure in the range of a once in one thousand to once in ten thousand year event, far, far beyond the operating life of the plant. They concluded all was well, but we all see they were wrong, and the awful consequences will now unfold over countless generations.

And yet, as in a cycle of addiction, although the evidence of our senses ought to be unmistakeable, we can no longer help ourselves. We continue in the laborious work of converting living things into dead matter as rapidly as possible, not knowing any other way to live anymore.

(I am being inexact, of course, and could well have said "industrial civilization" instead of capitalism. We know that the Soviet Union had more than its share of catastrophes similar to Fukushima, of course, so different ownership arrangements can still lead to similar results. But given that capitalism has largely inherited the mantle of industrial civilization at this point, it's pretty fair to say that, in some sense, they are now conjoined as one. Radical changes to both are therefore required, if we care to survive much longer.)