The Global Economy Is Metastatic And Suicidal

Create a new way of life or continue creative destruction.

Eight billion people are evidence of temporary, contingent success and ultimate extinction under our current scheme.

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The nature of corporations within a capitalist system parallels biological organisms' inherent drive for profit maximization/survival, often at the expense of ethics and the biosphere. Human behavior, due to social programming, is metastatic within this system. 

We think we are wise and intelligent, but if we were, we wouldn’t kill for an unsustainable system structured to ignore biophysical limits.

A company's fundamental purpose is to multiply capital; its products and services are secondary. Classical economic theory views firms as rational actors seeking to maximize profits; profit maximization is a corporation’s sole directive.

Corporations are “moral imbeciles” without inherent ethics. Their actions are solely dictated by their potential for profits. Corporations can not be socially responsible without external pressures, also known as government regulations and laws.

If exploiting labor, selling harmful products, or damaging the environment (ecocide) increases profits, a company, by its very nature, "must" do so—the pursuit of financial gain consistently overrides ethical considerations.

Corporations can not act morally or ethically, so laws, customs, and regulations are required to prevent harmful behavior. However, these restraints hinder profit-seeking, requiring corporations to find ways to circumvent them. 

Corporations must be hypercompetitive and consistently destroy or devour weaker companies in pursuit of monopoly power. Ethical compromises are necessary for a company's survival.

Shareholder primacy dictates that a corporation’s primary duty is to maximize profits for its shareholders. When not balanced by stakeholder interests, this can negatively affect employees, customers, and the biosphere. In economics, negative externalities are a part of the cost of doing business. The costs or benefits of production are never fully reflected in the price. Social inequality and environmental damage are common externalities corporations ignore if they are not forced to account for them.

Corporations are monetary organizations within the global economy whose primary function is capital accumulation. They “live” to devour energy and materials by exploiting people and life. Modern Techno-Industrial “Corporate Persons” cannot understand their dependence on living systems.

Employees are worker symbionts essential for a corporation’s energy and resource consumption and product production. Within the more extensive “organism” of rapacious capitalism, a corporate person is limited to understanding only what’s required to gain monopoly power.

Employees and citizens, like mitochondria in a cell, have limited influence over a corporation's overall behavior and direction. A corporation’s primary function is to serve the economy's needs (The Great Game).

Politicians, accountants, educators, journalists, etc., are service providers that corporations employ to gain advantages over competitors by coding capital, creating or destroying laws advantageous to a given company, and programming society to serve the structures and processes of the economy for the wealth pump that pushes profits towards elite Players.

Employees, as worker symbionts, can’t be held accountable for the corporation’s actions, as their agency depends on the dictates of management (CEO) and large shareholders. Alienation and ignorance extend from specialized roles and the need for workers to exhaust their brainpower in the service of the corporation, leaving them vulnerable to social programming and addiction.

Yeast and rats possess a more fundamental understanding of survival within environmental limits than myopic, easily manipulated ordinary people. Hubris and the inability to understand the importance of knowing how Great Nature works will destroy the Homo sapiens during its omnicidal rein as appex preditor on Earth.

Modern humans are deluded about their ability to control or transcend the fundamental laws of nature. Although we all have the potential to learn about physics, chemistry, and biology with their inherent emergent complex systems and interactions, we are discouraged from doing so in favour of performing our roles as temporary, valuable, and exploitable consumers.

Capitalism is an entropic resource consumption machine and an omnicidal heat engine capable of effectively exploiting Earth’s resources at scale during a period of relative abundance of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are an ideal transportable and liquifiable energy source, excellent for powering machines to extract minerals and materials from Earth for product manufacturing.

Endless capitalist-style economic growth is biophysically impossible on a finite planet.

Capitalism has co-opted the Progressive Movement, and attempts to regulate corporations have become a form of performative control rather than genuine constraint.

Unfettered profit-seeking as resources become scarcer and harder to exploit leads to corporations shedding the pretense of social responsibility, driving intensified competition and war to acquire and control dwindling, easy-to-harvest energy and material resources.

The end game of the end game is fascism, autocracy, dictatorship, violence, and death.

The laws of physics and resource availability will ultimately trump the logic of monetary systems, a point that those focused solely on financial growth fail to grasp.

We have known for a long time that economic activity can’t exceed planetary boundaries. Past reform movements' failure to fundamentally alter the underlying logic of profit maximization raises questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to corporate social responsibility and sustainability initiatives. People are disconnected from nature in favor of human-constructed systems like finance, threatening our survival within our natural environment.

Don’t blame only the Players; blame the system, the social construct, and get rid of it. We need a new way of life. If we understood how Great Nature works, we could design a sustainable socioeconomic system in service of optimal health and posterity.

Capitalism is the most effective resource extraction and energy-burning system the world has ever known. It is so good at what it does that it devours its metabolism; hence, it is omnicidal, ultimately metastatic, and suicidal. 

Capitalism is so attractive that all competing socioeconomic systems have adopted it.

Demonizing corporations and their Players (managers, service providers, and leaders) prevents us from seeking structural and systemic solutions and addressing capitalism's underlying incentives, pressures, and contradictions.

Our challenge is to create a system that can harness the productive power of economic activity while respecting ecological limits, promoting social well-being, and protecting living systems. This requires rethinking corporate governance principles, implementing stronger regulations, primarily embedding economic activity in their immediate locations, fostering alternative economic models, and shifting societal values away from endless material consumption.

If we don’t create a new way of life, the omnicidal heat engine will destroy human habitat and lead to our extinction. In the meantime, we will experience unprecedented suffering on an unimaginable scale.

Now read this excellent article from The Chris Hedges Report.

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