After yesterday’s diatribe, I feel rather talked out… but there are a few points that did not get made… somehow…
In all the discussion of capitalism and its discontents, there is one thing that is often brushed away, like an annoying gnat. Capitalism is horrible. We acknowledge that. We know that it is destructive. It is wasteful and exploitative. It is dumb. But we don’t talk about how it exists. We don’t say that we make it. We ignore the glaring fact that we work very hard and completely against biophysical reality to prop up this monstrosity.
Capitalism should be impossible. It should eat away its center until it implodes in a fizzling gasp. It takes more than there is to take. It confers rewards onto increasingly small numbers of people, requiring the complicit efforts of vast numbers of humans, none of whom benefit, most of whom are actively harmed by their complicity. Replicating capitalism should not work. Except that we put so much work into it.
In other words, we do this to our selves.
Capitalism can not function without selves. It can’t exist without an entity that is separable from the harm that capitalism creates, an immaterial self that is not part of this material world nor party to its destruction. We must have selves, preferably transcendent and eternal selves, that will exist in happiness on some other plane, in order to endure an existence in this body that is ruled by this illogical and unlikely economy. Without a self, there is no Other to exploit, to take from, to use for profit. But invent a self and there are no limits to your destructive capacity. Apparently.
Except… live in reality for just a few hours a day — like, say, as a geologist — and you soon see that the self is as highly unlikely as capitalism. Where and how and what is this thing that is inside its own self-proclaimed boundaries? What are boundaries in an interpenetrating world? What does separation mean in the context of the interdependence of life? What is I and Thou and that over there? Where does the self begin and end and what are beginnings and endings in the gentle curvature of reality?
Geology makes it so hard to center any particular thing. It is nigh impossible to be a selfish geologist, never mind a capitalist one. It’s just too much work to maintain that kind of hubris. And we are awed by the enormity of existence revealed in a rock cut, where there is no beginning, no boundary, just rolling fluctuations in time. We realize that we are insignificant children, staring at the intricate workings of the mother that holds us in her hands. And sometimes we sense that we are her children and we are her. But we are never apart.
To be a separable self engaged in capitalism is a-biotic. It is anti-ecological. But it is also pure nonsense. Where did you come from, oh self-made captain of industry? From what spring did you suckle? To whom do you owe your first breath? Or your last? By whose labors did your belly grow so large? Do you have sensible answers to any of these questions? And if you don’t, then what logic explains you?
When we acknowledge life in its completeness, we know that there is no center. There is no specialness sucking up all the light and air. No privileged state to state rules for commoners. There is no exploitation when there is no object and no abuser. So know this… when you bow to this system, you are exploiting you — and you are enabling the abuse.
I believe in geology. I believe in life. I believe in an absence of defined boundaries. But my anarchy does not imply an absence of rules, only an absence of rulers. Most particularly, an absence of hierarchies that separate out the rulers from the ruled. Those who make the rules and benefit thereby over those who follow the rules and bear the burden. I believe in social wholeness not stratification. Stratification is only interesting in rock layers, and then only from the stories found in their relationships with each other. No granite ever lorded over the shale. What nonsense! Even rocks know it is all a cycle of being, from one to another, none more special than any other.
And then you step into the garden… Where can the self be found in all that riotous growth? Who is the garden and who the gardener? And is there ever a functional division?
Nope… just a seasonal round of breathing in winter’s rest and breathing out summer’s release. A cooperation of green bodies.
I do like collective nouns. These are the words we use in recognition of community. A pod of whales. A parliament of owls. A grave grove of oaks. One being composed of many and nary a self to cloud comprehension.
You see, I am an animist. I see the sacred life in all things. But in no thing have I ever found a self. I-am is an illusion, an illness spawned by human want. In this world there is only We, with diffusion in all directions. Perhaps there is a plane of separable and hierarchical selves out there elsewhere. If there is, I do not want to go there. I hope never to feel such numbing and bewildering isolation. But that is not this world, and all such agony is stupid self-imposed delusion.
Which brings me back to capitalism… we do this to ourselves… we could also… just… not
Here is something provoking. If I am ever feeling tapped out, I turn to music for rejuvenation and inspiration. A Winged Victory for the Sullen never fails me.
But don’t take YouTube’s word on it. Go find an actual album and listen to it on good speakers in the quiet of a cold night with candlelight and cats for company.
You will never again believe in a separable self.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
There is a fundamental contradiction that defines human existence, the dilemma of the individual and society. Humans are essentially social beings, but exist biologically, experience reality, as individual beings separate from other beings and society. We exist in physically-separate bodies, yet are dependent on others, i.e. society, for our survival and especially well-being. It is this tension between society and the individual that is the core contradiction driving human existence.
In psychology, the contradiction is described as the ego and id. This contradiction also defines human economics. In this case, the globally dominant economic system called capitalism. Economically speaking the contradiction is played out between the private/state ownership of the means of production and the commons. Our society is so broken, i.e. out of balance, because the ego/individual aspect of the contraction has become pathologically dominant. Life however, has way of dialectically resolving contradictions in a new synthesis. I for one, can’t wait!
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