I was thinking today about the frequent banality of Capitalism. It’s all about the pursuit of the almighty dollar. It is a near perfect system for the creation and distribution of material goods, but a poor means for distributing cultural goods. By this I mean a sense of meaning, of purpose. Making money, alone, is a terrible reason for living. Once you have met your basic needs, it’s not hedonism, it’s not principled, it’s just a type of collecting, no different in principle than collecting model airplanes, with the caveat that what is normally desired is the power that money buys.
Now, an intact cultural system, when subjected to determined attack, will of necessity respond through change. Free markets have been attacked by socialists. What this does is cause a reaction such that where things were relatively unquestioned before, an elaborate “theology” has to be created to defend against such attacks. This has the effect of causing people to become dogmatic and inflexible.
This is what religious fundamentalism is. Where people in antiquity no doubt tolerated any number of aberrations (you don’t read about them, because they weren’t noted down)–imperfect replication being a symptom of a creative, organic social order–once the theology is created to counter the heretics, the stage is set for an unyielding rigidity of thought and action.
There is a clear homology, in my mind, between the socialist goal of abolishing both wealth and poverty, and the cultural totalitarian’s goal of abolishing behavioral difference.
This led to the question: what cultural system DOES best allocate cultural resources? The answer is Liberalism, of the John Stuart Mill variety, in which people are free to speak their mind, to engage in debate, and to vote their opinions as far as governance. Just as people can meet freely to engage in trade, so too can individuals meet to express their views. And just as wealth increases as trade increases, so too does understanding as debate increases, given people with the character to hew to the truth.
Leftist counter-debate narratives–their efforts to shut the process of free inquiry down–are thus simply the cultural counterpart to their efforts to shut down trade.
Socialism is pure destruction, in its pure form. In its most benign manifestations the damage is delayed across generations, and in its most destructive forms it has caused more death than any set of ideas in human history.
There are those in Washington who, for all practical purposes, want us to sell our souls to them.