Amerika

Another day, another liberal trope to bang a tin drum with. This time, it is popular for the Left to talk about “late capitalism” as if the problems of the West were related to its one functional economic system instead of civilization collapse.

That is the entire point: to distract from the obvious and conceal it with a scapegoat. Why blame our lack of leadership, narcissism, dysgenics, instability and general amorality? Just point the finger at people who are making money, because that enables you to both steal from them and feel excused for doing nothing.

Capitalism like any other social institution does not function in a vacuum. In healthy societies, capitalism is balanced by the rule of culture, and some form of social hierarchy so that the consumers making decisions about which products persist are toward the right side of the bell curve.

In our present society, we have democratized and dumbed-down ourselves to the point that capitalism only reflects what the audience desires; we might call this “economic demotism” and list it alongside popularity, appearance, democracy and trends as yet another outpouring of Crowd fanaticism.

But the Crowd, canny as it is, already wants to hide its bad deeds and have someone else take the fall. So instead of calling it “late empire,” as is most accurate, they call it late capitalism and pretend that this tidy little formula obviates notice of the many failings of our society since it adopted its ego fetish several thousand years ago.

Tags: late capitalism, late empire, memetics