Chapter 13: Capitalism and Human Relationships

By imposing an adversarial environment which pits individual against individual for artificially scarcified insufficient resources and opportunities for advancement for survival, Capitalism creates and reinforces alienation and isolation of individuals while strongly reinforcing against cooperation and synergy, effectively dividing the people and defusing any potential dedicated, concerted efforts to challenge or change the status quo.

Let us examine how this plays out in various aspects of daily living:

In The Workplace

In current Capitalist societies, it is popular to believe that cutthroat competitiveness, greed, short-term selfishness, bullying/domineering attitudes and behaviors are natural parts of human nature while cooperation, synergy, mutuality, altruism, and the seeking of long-term mutual good is unnatural and against human nature. It is not hard to see how this belief perpetuates, since these societies strongly reinforce the former traits but not the latter ones.

These societies operate on a win-lose-lose-lose-lose-lose paradigm. For one to win, many others must lose.

Picture a business where there are 50 employees. One supervisor position will open when the current supervisor is promoted, dies, retires or leaves. Only one employee will be promoted, if any. The company may choose to hire someone from outside rather than promote from within. Promotional opportunities are few and far between. It will probably be years before the next opportunity opens up.

All of the employees except the supervisor are paid a sub or barely-living wage, surviving paycheck to paycheck. Raises are measured in pennies while the cost of living goes up in dollars. The supervisor doesn't make much more – just-over-living wage - but at least he or she won't be short every month. This paradigm fosters a mind-set that there isn't enough to go around. If one person succeeds, gets a raise, promotion or a bonus, it means implicitly that someone else won't. Many somebody elses won’t.

Such an environment strongly reinforces intense predatory competition among all 50 employees. One will win. The rest will continue to lose. Unless the employees are all above average in compassion and empathy, this situation encourages and fosters a toxic, stressful atmosphere of suspicion, jealousy, distrust, and anxiety that works powerfully against cohesiveness, solidarity, mutual supportiveness and trust.

Individual responses will vary, of course. Out of those 50 employees, some will not allow this situation to affect how they treat their fellow employees, but many will find themselves refraining from being helpful to one another. If Freddy makes a mistake, many fellow employees will let him get written up rather than either fixing it or warning him so he can fix it before the boss discovers it. A few will report him, although Fred might also try to make it look like Jake's fault. Some employees may actively sabotage one another in order to gain an advantage.

It is a well-known fact of behavioral science that behaviors that are reinforced tend to predominate. In an environment that strongly reinforces mutually-destructive competition, abuse of power, selfishness and avarice, those behaviors will predominate while co-operation, compassion, united action and mutual supportiveness will not, since they are not reinforced.

This is borne out historically. In Nazi Germany, many studies have been made of how people who were not true-believer Nazis, or even particularly political and not psychopaths, became willing party to atrocities, cruelties, and callousness of which these same people would not normally have been capable. Husbands, wives, parents, and children commonly informed on each other to the Gestapo. Friends turned in friends. To do so carried reward and assurance of survival. Failure to do so was likely to curtail survival...

Psychological studies have consistently confirmed this. This does not mean that we are inherently that way. The other side of this dynamic is that in an environment where cooperation, initiative, mutual supportiveness, contribution, creativity, respect, and concerted effort for mutual good are reinforced, these behaviors and attitudes will predominate over destructive competitiveness, greed, abuse of power, etc. Where there is no power structure, there is no power to abuse.

While we cannot control the laws of physics or nature, we have a very large degree of control over what kind of social, economic and political environment we live in. We create it. We define it. We create the reinforcers, both consciously and unconsciously. It is absurd therefore to tolerate and perpetuate social and economic paradigms that reinforce the most destructive attitudes and behaviors in us. It is utterly indefensible.

"One man's loss is another man's gain" is a common saying in societies that operate on this paradigm. This sets every individual against every other with respect to survival. Generally speaking, each individual or family is cast as an island in a hostile and stormy sea.

Beyond the confines of the workplace, we now take a look at society in general, especially at the impact of the Capitalist paradigm on family relationships and friendships.

In The Family

In the socio-economic environment created under the Capitalist paradigm, each individual and/or family must constantly come up with a steady supply of money in order to pay for the privilege of being allowed to live, occupy space, eat, and survive. For the steadily growing majority of these individuals/families, the supply of money is barely sufficient (if sufficient at all) to cover living expenses. The majority of people in Capitalist societies live in an almost constant state of unrelenting stress as a result of this situation.

Except among those who occupy the very uppermost reaches of the economic pyramid, who experience a different kind of interpersonal stress, this constant stress, frustration, disempowerment, depletion and overextension of mind, body and emotions results in varying degrees of chronic strain on all interpersonal relationships.

When each family member in a household is exerting to their fullest extent, doing the best they can yet still experiencing no relief or improvement in economic situation or quality of life, resentments tend to arise as each may come to feel like the other(s) aren't doing their part. If any family members are in fact not, for whatever reason, contributing much to financial survival, whether from sickness, depression, lack of success finding a job, or being burnt out and unable to face the struggle, then those resentments and frustrations are exacerbated.

When gambling, compulsive shopping, drugs or alcohol are involved, as sometimes happens as coping mechanisms under chronic stress, it can rip families apart.

Many other factors can complicate family relations and further strain the bonds of love, trust, empowering interdependence and heart connection among family members. In Capitalist societies, people are predisposed through a lifetime of saturation with advertising in a consumeristic culture to shop, to seek entertainments and distractions as coping mechanisms. When barely making it through the month and constantly under stress, the need to conserve resources constantly conflicts with the need that family members feel to relieve stress in ways that cost money.

One family member buys new clothes or shoes. Another family member buys a new computer or tablet. Yet another one goes to an expensive play or sporting event. Each family member feels justified in their own expenditures. Each resents and criticizes the others for theirs. Family members end up blaming each other for the dire stressful economic situation. Those who are able to refrain from these coping mechanisms will feel even more resentful of the ones who are unable. All of this forms a feedback loop that escalates the disconnection and alienation among family members.

Many families are torn apart by the effects of these stresses, which in turn weakens the situations of the now separated family members as each must survive individually. Even in families that stay together through these stresses, the health and quality of life and relationship is frequently seriously compromised.

In a system characterized by the constant need for money, where money is hard to come by, it is not uncommon for siblings and other family members to become bitter enemies and conspire against each other when a parent dies leaving an inheritance.

A healthy, viable, well-crafted socio-economic system does not guarantee perfect interpersonal relationships. Humans are complex and imperfect organisms, and so are our relationships. But the kind of social and economic paradigms we create for ourselves to live in do have a profoundly defining impact on the quality of our lives and relationships.

It is true that one's own inner attitudes largely determine one's experience in an existential sense. If one is predisposed to be dissatisfied, one will tend to find things to be dissatisfied about; while if one is predisposed to be appreciative and see beauty, one will tend to find things to appreciate in the same environment. Yet it is a dangerous oversimplification to leave it at that and perpetuate an unnecessarily stressful and destructive paradigm when we are capable of creating better ones. Life presents us with challenges and difficulties all on its own. It is masochistic and ill-advised for us to create unnecessary suffering and deprivation and then justify it by saying it “builds character.” That is a frequent theme in Capitalist attitudes and social myths. The damage done by prevailing conditions within Capitalist paradigms is described in numerous studies. It is time to break these mental chains.

There are good reasons why people have always tried to migrate from place to place to improve quality of life. While it is true that there were people in German concentration camps, Japanese POW camps and other horrific environments who achieved an indestructible happiness in spite of those conditions, no one would choose a concentration camp over a life of freedom and prosperity. No one would choose slavery over freedom. No one would choose dictatorship over democracy.

Once we humans recognize that we are capable of creating social paradigms that foster a high degree of safety, well-being, quality of life, dignity, peace, thriving, and fulfillment, it is our right, our duty, and our responsibility to do so.

Capitalism and Friendship

The impact of Capitalism on friendships mirrors that affecting families. Friendships are often strained to the breaking point because of money issues and financial survival. Everybody knows examples of friendships that have eroded or even ended over money issues.

When one friend finds him or herself jobless or even homeless due to layoffs, predatory mortgages, catastrophic medical expenses uncovered by insurance or other situational calamities, it is natural that he or she will turn to friends and family for support through the difficult time while they "get on their feet again." And it is equally natural that friends and family would jump in to help and support willingly.

Capitalism, however, makes this extremely difficult and strongly reinforces against this response. Since the vast majority of people live paycheck to paycheck or close to the margin, helping out a friend financially becomes either impossible or a potential risk to one's own future survival. What if we need car repairs or dental work? What if I get laid off? What if I help them out and then need that money later on?

Even a loan will be perceived as risky, because in a Capitalist society, those who find themselves at the very bottom of the economic pyramid, down and out with no income and/or homeless, are rarely likely to be able to repay a loan in the foreseeable future.

Please keep in mind that in today’s economic climate, a person who has been jobless for more than three or four months is almost always automatically dropped from consideration for employment simply because they have been jobless for so long. Added to that is the fact that having no fixed address eliminates one from consideration in any job search or even for many kinds of aid. If one has a bad credit score, this too makes finding a job and/or place to live even more unreachable.

Capitalism generates a society that effectively defaults to an outright denial of life that must be bought out of constantly. The result is that in most instances, when a person is in dire financial circumstances, many friends who would willingly help are unable to do so. Many who do have the ability still tend to perceive themselves as unable to do so. Even if the person in need has friends who are high enough up the economic pyramid to be able to help with no risk to their own survival or comfort, such friends have almost always, in the process of reaching that economic level, developed an attitude that precludes them from helping a friend in dire straits.

Even more to the point, in the rare instances when a person makes a quantum leap from a paycheck-to-paycheck existence to the upper reaches of the economic pyramid, they tend to disassociate from their friends in the lower reaches of the pyramid, at least partially, because they do not want to be reminded of how easily they could end up back there again.

This does not happen 100% of the time. There are exceptions; but the predominant cultural attitudes in Capitalist societies leave the individual or family who falls by the wayside, alone and on their own.

Once again we see that Capitalism has a destructive effect on human interpersonal relationships at every level. Plentiful examples abound: people who marry or befriend each other for money; people who use and betray each other for money, gain, or influence; people who are unable and unwilling to trust or open up to others. All of these behaviors are magnified and intensified as a direct result of adaptation to surviving in the Capitalist environment.

Of course not all will exhibit these behaviors; but they are still the most common in Capitalist society and rare in egalitarian, co-operative, synergistic, symbiotic societies. Behavior that is reinforced always predominates; behavior that is not reinforced tends towards extinction.

In Society at Large

In society at large, Capitalism has the same divisive and destructive effect that it has on interpersonal relationships. The paradigm creates multiple mutually-opposing castes, classes and groups in an environment that predisposes them to be at odds and conflicted with one another by the very nature and structure of the system.

This helps ensure that the population is divided and conquered, blaming each other rather than the socio-political-economic system that defines the parameters which set them against each other: landlords and tenants; management/bosses and workers; employers and employees; rich and poor; native-born and immigrant; ethnic, racial, religious and political affiliations; regional factions; urban and rural and more.

For that matter, the American Civil War was fought largely because the states of the Confederacy had developed an economy based on slave labor and were unwilling to give it up. From a business perspective, if you can pay a one-time price for a worker and thereafter not have to pay them anything, your expenses are greatly reduced, your profits increased and you can undercut the competition that actually has to pay their workers. There is absolutely nothing in the Capitalist paradigm that precludes slavery. That slavery has been abolished in the majority of Capitalist countries is an empirical proof of the inherent nature of compassion and mutuality in the innermost makeup of Humanity.

Under the conditions of created and enforced scarcity that most of the population believes to be a fact of life beyond their control, all of these groups tend to blame each other for the situation. In addition, they perceive any gains made by an opposing group as a loss or threat to their own group, which in this paradigm is often actually the case due to the paradigm’s fundamental operating principles. When there are already tensions among these groups, they are exacerbated under the conditions in Capitalist paradigms. Often those at the top of the economic pyramid actively propagate rumors and subtle propaganda to further encourage and add fuel to the fires of these divisions and conflicts.

In the World At Large

In the world at large, the impact of Capitalism in its current form, in which gigantic multinational corporations wield economic and sometimes even military might greater than many countries, we see similar dynamics with even more dangerous, destructive behaviors and norms coming into play.

So-called First World countries and mega-corporations find some very insidious ways to improve their profit margins and degree of control. One way is outsourcing. Many companies in many industries, including computer and software development, information technology, manufacturing, remote technical support and others, pay professionals in “developing” countries like India or the Philippines $40 or $50 per day or less, rather than pay that amount per hour to a professional in the home country. This leads to massive job loss in the home country. Better paying jobs dwindle, to be replaced by low-wage jobs in the home country. Witness the collapse of much of the information technology industry in the United States in the early 21st century, in which highly-trained technical professionals who were previously able thrive on their salaries, are now working in sub-living-wage jobs in retail.

Many industries, including textiles, footwear, high-tech electronics and many more, outsource production to countries that routinely use sweatshops to produce cheaply, paying pennies an hour to workers in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.

As covered earlier in this writing, agricultural mega-corporations con traditional farmers in developing countries into buying genetically-engineered seed stock by promising increased yields; then if the farmers try to save a bumper crop to plant for next year, the companies take their farms away. Farmers who refuse to use their products are threatened, pressured, sometimes even beaten or killed. When the countries involved intervene to protect their farmers, these mega-agricultural-corporations will go so far as to challenge the sovereignty of those countries. Observe what is happening in Guatemala and other places in Central, North and South America.

Many huge corporations in the plastics and food industries are responsible for the wholesale destruction of the Amazon river biosphere and the cultures who live there, employing irreversibly destructive techniques to make maximum profits as quickly as possible until the soil is depleted before burning and bulldozing yet more thousands of acres of jungle. Keep in mind that the Amazon rain forest naturally generates a significant portion of the oxygen that we breathe. Yet these unchecked mega-corporations continue wantonly destroying that environment for immediate gains that gravitate inevitably into the hands of the ultra-wealthy neo-Feudal Lords.

This is reminiscent of the behavior of addicts of the Russian drug Krokodil (desomorphine), who devote their lives to production and use of the drug that literally rots the flesh from their bones. Indeed, the new-Feudal Lords of the capitalist Pyramid are no less addicts than any alcoholic or Krokodil addict. Allowing them to continue as they are is equivalent to allowing a drunken pilot to fly a passenger airliner instead of mandating treatment. It is a travesty against all parties if we do not quickly bring this pattern to a halt.

The fishing industry does the same in the oceans, as does the logging industry in our forests worldwide. Massive factory ships still prey upon whales, pushing them inexorably towards extinction, even though literally all products of whaling have less expensive alternatives derived from renewable sources. The only exception is whale meat that is considered a delicacy in Japan and Norway. The loss of this “delicacy” is assured one way or another. If whales become extinct, there will be no more whale meat anyway. Therefore it is time for people to give it up before whales go extinct. There is absolutely no possible justification for continuation of the whaling industry for any purpose. Yet under Capitalism, the prime reinforcers are profits, stock prices, market share, and control of resources.

The quality of food suffers as well, because Capitalism incentivizes maximum quantity of corn, potatoes, beef, chicken, lettuce, tomatoes, etc. in the shortest time. In practice, this translates increasingly into artificially forcing both plants and animals to grow bigger and faster, almost always at the expense of both taste and nutritional content. This means that the same amount of food does not sustain you as it would have fifty years ago. Nutritional analyses have shown that a tomato or chicken leg today has only a fraction of the nutritional content of ones produced by traditional methods without hormones, artificial acceleration, and genetic engineering. It is also well-demonstrated that the use of growth hormones and antibiotics to force rapid growth is dangerous to the health of humans, animals and the global biosphere.

The tourist industry destroys much more than most people know.

When a luxury resort is built, usually in a place of natural beauty with a poor, disenfranchised populace so land prices are low and the people poorly equipped to defend themselves, it destroys the local ecosystem and drives the cost of living so high that the rightful residents cannot afford to live there.

Tourism also creates a rigid class stratification in which tourists, who are rich beyond any local standard by comparison, are the over-class, served by a select few locals who are always subservient to the tourists and the corporate owners of the resort, who in turn become a new over-class relative to the rest of their countrymen. This is the Feudal pattern replicated yet again: Royals, served by an over-class vassals who rule over serfs and peasants who have no rights.

Even in countries that are more resilient, we see damage to the quality of life of the home population. The term “overtourism” has recently been coined. Imagine your neighborhood or town overrun with so many tourists that it becomes daunting to do your normal daily errands due to congestion, high prices, and an unending stampede of people, cars, trash and noise.

Human trafficking often thrives in those environments, even though it is illegal in most countries, because there is a demand. In reality the difference between illegal Capitalism and legal Capitalism is mostly an arbitrary definition. The same principles operate. Selling ornamental flowers is legal Capitalism; selling marijuana is illegal Capitalism. The difference is entirely arbitrary.

Overall we can see that the Capitalist paradigm fosters alienation, conflict, exploitation, untold human suffering, and constitutes a very real threat to the long-term survival of life on earth.

Yet those who are at the top of the pyramid are not entirely to blame; it is the paradigm itself that reinforces those behaviors. We can see from this that as a socio-economic paradigm it is untenable, a poor design even more poorly implemented. If it were an airplane or a car, it would never have been allowed to go into production. If it were a ship, it would have sunk long ago.

The Travesty of "Corporate Personhood"

Ever since corporations have been granted Personhood status in the United States, the rights and respect of actual human beings have been compromised and degraded to a shadow in practical terms.

Corporate Personhood has repercussions beyond just the theoretical. For example, a corporation is treated the same as a human being in many civil and criminal legal proceedings. The typical human being is inevitably at an extreme disadvantage in any lawsuit or other legal action against a corporation, equally so as plaintiff or respondent, for a number of reasons.

One reason is the extreme cost of hiring an attorney. Unlike most products whose success in the marketplace is often as much or more a result of marketing and packaging as of quality, the best attorneys for the most part tend to charge high rates, because people are willing to pay more for a better attorney who gets the best results.

Unfortunately, the outcome of court cases depends as much on the relative skill of the attorneys as on facts, evidence and laws. When a typical natural human being who is living paycheck to paycheck is facing a typical corporation in a court of law, the corporation has resources measured in millions or billions of dollars and employs a team of well-paid top-notch attorneys on retainer to fight for their interests. Since the attorneys are on retainer, the extra cost to the corporation is minimal.

Even if costs escalate, the corporation can easily absorb legal costs in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars with very little long-term impact. The typical citizen however, even one who is not entirely living paycheck to paycheck, has a very limited budget. Let’s say you are working for $15 an hour. Attorneys start at about $150 an hour while $300 - $600 an hour is common for decent attorneys. The best attorneys charge thousands of dollars per hour, and there are additional costs that can go much higher. You will not be able to afford the best attorneys, private detectives, researchers, filing fees and other court costs, if you are able to afford an attorney at all.

In a civil case, U.S. citizens are not provided an attorney if they cannot afford one. The individual in a legal battle against a corporation, whether they are the plaintiff or the respondent, is in a situation roughly equivalent to going into combat alone with only an assault rifle and a couple of magazines of ammunition against an armored division with unlimited ammunition.

In a criminal case, the citizen is provided with a public defender if they are the defendant and cannot afford an attorney, but not if they are the plaintiff. If you are bringing charges against a corporation, you are in the same position as you would be in a civil suit, except that some attorneys in a civil suit will work for a percentage, assuming they win.

If you are the defendant against a corporation and can't afford a top-notch attorney, you are represented by an underpaid public defender with a massive case load, which puts you in a position similar to two people with two assault rifles, 4 magazines of ammunition and one grenade launcher with 10 RPG's... against an armored division with unlimited ammunition.

Public defenders' reputation as not being the best attorneys is not entirely fair or deserved. There are some excellent ones. However, they almost always have very heavy caseloads and extremely limited resources. Corporate attorneys on the other hand have light case loads, may even be assigned solely to that case, and have a team and virtually endless resources at their disposal.

The dangerous legal fiction of "Corporate Personhood" completely undermines the Constitutional rights of the vast majority of people in legal proceedings, even though on paper it is not obvious that it does. Occasionally a natural person does win a lawsuit against a corporation, but the legal odds are stacked extremely heavily against the human person.

The same dynamic occurs when a typical person is in legal proceedings versus a member of the ultra-wealthy class. The dynamics are stacked heavily in favor of the ultra-wealthy. Once again we see that under Capitalism one's rights are determined more by one's wealth, or lack of it, than by the Constitution.

"Corporate Personhood" also shields guilty or responsible persons within a corporation from being held personally responsible for their actions. When the corporation is legally treated as the "person" in a lawsuit, the individual within the corporation who was actually responsible for a wrong or injustice, cannot be singled out and held to task any more than a pickpocket's hand can be tried for the crime or a slanderer's vocal cords can be sued for the words spoken.

"Corporate Personhood" has no place in a truly free or healthy society that values and respects the individuals in it. Actually, Corporations themselves have no place in such a society.