The Trouble With Capitalism, Part 3

In Jared Diamond's book, Collapse (I am a huge fan of Diamond's writing),  he essentially writes about some of the environmental challenges that face us currently, and compares them to environmental challenges faced by past civilizations that were unable to overcome them, speaking in story-like prose but using archaeological evidence as the engine powering his argument, very tidy and scientific.  Reading the book, then, to the cognoscenti, becomes increasingly terrifying, but not in the look-behind-you sort of way that movies attempt to scare us with.  Instead, it's what Diamond fails to say in black and white which is the most terrifying thing I've ever read: all of those ghost towns, which still look today like people could just move right in and live comfortably, where great civilizations once stood, were killed where they stood, abrupt in the night, by depleting their local natural resources beyond survival, and they didn't see it until they collapsed.  In other words, in the absence of science to shine the light on the right hook coming in sharply from the blindside (or maybe in its presence, which I'll get to in a future post), it hit them, knocking them out cold and forever, and if they saw it coming, they never let on.

Al Gore, as John Stewart said, is an unlikely film star, but his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is a very good scare-umentary on the current science concerning global warming and its human causes.  I have much to say about this, but I'll get to most of it later.  When Al and other high-profile left-leaning politicians (our current president included) came out to say that "green jobs" were the future of this country, for the sake of political savvy, they left a large portion of what that means unsaid: "If we don't find another basis to power our country and its infrastructure, its manufacturing, farming, military and way of life, then that way of life will collapse.  Further, that collapse is avoidable but we've got to do it now and be serious about it."  Saying it that way makes a person sound like a conspiracy nut, but I don't think most Americans know how pervasive oil and other fossil fuels are in the economic lifestyle of the world right now.  The big one that comes to mind is plastics, but also chemicals, lubricants, and, of course, many different types of fuels powering many different vehicles.  Imagine if that oil were to suddenly dry up.  Even if the process is fairly slow, over a number of years or decades, we humans would have to find other ways to make/replace each and every one of those things.  Sure, it may be a spur of economic growth in and of itself to be in an age of such inventiveness, but only if people get cracking and now.  Are you cracking now?  I'm not.  We're being screened from seeing that we need to get cracking by those who profit from the black stuff, sweet crude.

I talked about the perverse incentives that capitalism gives to business executives, where the information that we should probably stop using oil as the basis for our whole economy and right now, is decidedly counterproductive to profits.  Also, allowing politicians to do so would be just as counterproductive.  So, like with Diamond and the Liberals, it's what goes unsaid.  In a country where money = free speech, those with the money, whose free speech is now far louder (corporations, PACs, and "think tanks"), can just depose the naysayers and put people in charge who are willing to cast doubt on science (future post) or pretend none of this is happening, real, or is part of a larger long-term process instead of being a temporary political setback that can be solved through rhetorical ideology, or both.  That's the trouble with capitalism:  it's primary concern with profits and influence necessarily means that it must keep secret those things which the public needs to know and put current profitability ahead of future sustainability.  It may be the case that socialism cannot address these concerns, either (future post) but the watchman is not sleeping, he's been paid to leave in a capitalist society.  It's not the unsaid, but the willfully silenced.

In my next post, I'd like to delve into that war on science raging through the debate.  Unfortunately, the belligerents on the side of ignorance wield much more substantial weaponry...