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An Unidentified Addiction —–——–
In modern times, human beings are all taken in the swirl of what has been called economic growth. It is the be all and end all of life. It comes thru a face that seems to bear the name of innovation or periodic new generations of products and services to serve the needs of human beings and make them happy.
However, economic growth has been historically chopped by a chain of crises or disruptive downturns which regularly bring deep human suffering and misery. Something thus seems to be wrong in the big picture of our economics, prompting some to blame it on trickle-down form of economics, while others adamantly blame regulatory economics.
Whichever direction we stretch the rubber, it always ends up breaking up. So, the problem is perhaps in the stretching. The stretching takes unsuspected shapes and forms, mostly called under the many latitudes of this globe political liberalism and political conservatism. Yes, that is the stretching, the reductionisms that make us see the world or a patch of it in either absolute white or absolute black. If the world is for us black, then everything white is wrong, and if it is bright white for us instead, then everything black is wrong. Reductionisms refuse to see a black and white world at the same time and space.
So there’s been McCarthyism or the strain that produced it. It brainwashed everyone in anti-communism. If you hate communism and socialism, try not having a mother though. Human mothers are in the business of fashioning and giving life, because no one can or has given life to oneself but received it. Mothers have been forever the greatest communists of the world, because the greatest and most powerful communist regime in the word is the DNA regime. Mothers merely and simply want to have or procreate children, they own and exercise the collectivist DNA regime by which human life is perpetuated and endures.
But there’s also been Marx and Marxism, which brainwashed an entire planet in anti-capitalism and class warfare, or the strain that sprouted it. If you hate capitalism, try not creating any value whatsoever, not accumulating or saving goods at all to empower yourself against inhospitable natural elements and have a life; by all means, try not owning anything from accumulation like a house, or not exchanging any of the value or value-added items you happen to hold and forever suffer the lack of those that you don’t have but direly need. So, the free marketplace, which is a product of both free initiative and accumulation, has been there forever. The first capitalist was indeed the man out of the cavern who thought of going out there to collect and save fruits and nuts or whatever else the forest had to give. Without the capitalist instinct of conservation, preservation, the foresight of accumulation and the enterprising initiative of exchanges of value, life under the sun is simply not viable and thus possible.
In the West and particularly the USA, McCarthyism is rampant and conservatism, otherwise called neo-conservatism, dominates the socio-economic landscape. Few realize that it is a stretch and most think of it as a natural way of life. When Boeing causes the death of nearly 300 people around the world in unsafe-plane accidents due to utmost pursuit of profits by its new class of administrators, which despite FAA is still years later producing planes with doors flying off their body while in flight, you do not have to wonder whether valuation of money over human life is at work. It is nothing other than the blind stretch dictated by addiction to money.
If a company like Purdue Pharma manufactures drugs that knowingly creates addiction ending in deaths to the tune of a lethal epidemic, that puts in evidence the very money-addiction force that permeates the economic environment. While still in business, they were not exactly capitalists but money addicts, just as addicted as their victims were to the white powder or the pills they were selling. It is the same uncontrolled thirst that pervades the mentioned Boeing Co. You could name and put that charge on any other sector of the US economy, big Oil, big Pharma, Big Gun, Big Tobacco thankfully now demoted, etc. The most important economic trend in the West is its tendency to constitute economic monopolies as the clearest sign of this exaggerated drive for money at all costs as an addiction. It is not capitalism, certainly not a natural way of life, since mother Nature would break under such stretches, whereas what we see in Nature is an overwhelming harmony, unrelenting equilibrium and adaptability thru what is known as the physical law of parsimony or Inclination for the Path of Least Resistance. She is not in the business of hustling or stretching it.