Cutting through spiritual colonialism first draft.docx

Cutting Through Spiritual Colonialism We are all pretty clear something is profoundly wrong with the world, and maybe with humanity itself.

But what is wrong, and what do we do about it? Vinay Gupta, Sunday 17th May 2020, written in a single sitting hexayurt@gmail.com

If you would like to comment on this document, please request access to: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fJtxGS1hl3xmeFOcZpbRcwebPZZMwCgl/edit

We live in an economy of fear This is an essay about how problems wind around each-other in ways which seem insoluble, and how to pry these problems apart into soluble components. It is fundamentally an essay about decomplexifying our world models by making them more accurate. An analogy is the use of vanishing points in art. If you want to draw in perspective without knowing about vanishing points, the task is almost impossible. But with vanishing points, even a child can do a pretty decent perspective rendering, because our mind is wired to see in perspective: it just needs a little encouragement. Likewise, the structure of the world: we are wired to see power and the abuse of power, but we need three vanishing points put in place to draw the world in its true perspective. I’m going to tell you what those vanishing points are right now: technological acceleration, limits to growth, and the invisible hierarchy of abuse. Each one of these stories is pretty simple in itself, allow me to summarize.

- Technological acceleration is simply that our underlying capacity to manipulate and control matter and energy has been on an exponential curve since the industrial revolution or a little before. 20 years ago a terabyte is an unthinkable amount of storage, packed into a raid array of 250 gig drives. Now you can have 250gb as a MicroSD card, and a single drive is 16 terabytes. Brain scanning. Genetic engineering, solar panels, self-driving cars, drones, you name it. Rocket ships and VR gear. Even retina displays. Every year that the machine keeps running, more innovation in these kinds of areas. Each generation of gore-tex is a little better, a little more nanotechnology, a little more amazing.

We have no capability to understand, much less manage, most of this change. Even if you try to keep up, it’s too much innovation over too much front to really keep an eye on. Even if you watch self driving cars like a hawk, what’s happening in immunotherapy? Have you seen the unthinkable transformation in cancer treatments?

- Limits to growth is as easy as pie: an average American puts out about 15 tons of CO2 per year. Best guess at a sustainable emissions level is 3 tons. If you emit more carbon than the sustainable level, the world gets warmer every year, and eventually that starts to reduce your ability to do things like grow food. This story repeats for basically every natural resource. There are some high quality of life, ultra-low consumption enclaves in the world: Kerala in India is below one planet of consumption, and has demographics right in line with Europe. Cuba is another famous example: they were forced to decarbonise at the fall of the Soviet Union when their oil supply got cut off and built an extremely lean and efficient society as a result. We all know these examples exist, for hundreds of millions of people, but there’s very little interest in scaling them. The world has not exactly beaten a path to Kerala’s door saying “how did you do it?”

Why not?

- The invisible hierarchy of abuse is the answer to most of these questions, but it’s a little harder to see: consider this question. “How much child abuse goes on in boarding schools?” That’s your Etons and Harrows I’m asking about. Is the answer “none?” I don’t think so. Once in a few years, an awful story will break: a sports coach, or a choir master, or a headmaster. And that’s just the staff. Non-sexual student on student abuse is practically an institution in many of these places, and one does not assume those lines stay strictly drawn. Why is it invisible? Why don’t we have some kind of measured dialogue on these issues?

Well, I’m typing this on a Mac that I know for-damn-sure involves actions that I would consider criminal in manufacturing in: no labour organization allowed in that supply chain, and the ever-present worry of conflict minerals down the chain there too. Never mind that my dinner will contain meat, and I know damn well where that came from.

This ability, to turn a blind eye “because we have to” is what makes the hierarchy of abuse invisible. It’s what allows a game which is almost entire made of losers to continue to be played by everybody, as if they were winning.

Reducing the fear of worse loss is not the same thing as winning.

Practically nobody wins the game as it is currently constructed. Even those with near-infinite wealth and power (relative to us mere mortals) seem miserable and unfulfilled. Stare deeply into the moist robot eyes of Zukerberg to see the Abyss staring back into you (don’t do this too long.) Jobs railed, railed against the dying of the light, and got taken out by cancer with the job half done. Gates is the biggest imaginable philanthropist, and appears to be slowly turning into Gollum. Elon Musk looks like he’s one triple espresso away from a nervous breakdown. On the other side of the fence, the most famous actresses and pop musicians in the world - all money, fame, popularity, beauty and intelligence combined - look like feral, beaten animals. Yes, the surface is perfect, but when somebody breaks - Kesha is a good example - and litigates over a lifetime of exploitation, the waves simply close over their heads and they are not much heard of again. Is Taylor Swift happy? Is that happy music? Maybe some of it, but most of it speaks to emotional instability and the difficulty of forming durable relationships. In objective terms there may be bigger female winners than the top tier actresses - female heads of state, for example - but at least in the arts it appears pretty apocalyptic, and that’s the domain of much female ambition and adulation. Why aren’t these people happy?

As the internet says: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

The game that most of us are playing is about avoiding loss. As people clime the entrepreneurial ladder, they get hooked: make your first million, then step off there - and it will slowly dwindle over time - or put it back on the table in another company, another start up - and make the next big leap up to the ten or one hundred million level. At each step, either slow decline as money goes out but does not come back in, or more risk. The fear of losing what we have forces us to continue playing the game, and inevitable we will lose. Almost nobody gets out at the top with their pile, because of the fear of loss. Fear masquerades as greed. Although the entire game appears to be about greed, about the lust for more, in actual fact the big motivation for most of these people is the desire to avoid eventual losses to inflation and their own lifestyle spends. There are a few exceptions: the much-beloved (by investors) mission-driven entrepreneurs who will work like dogs for decades because they believe they are saving the world, and anomalies like Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos. The world’s richest man is talking openly about building a trillion person space faring civilisation which occupies the entire solar system. This is not playing to avoid loss. But most of us are, fundamentally, working because we are afraid and that fear is the driving force in our societies. It is fear of our fellow men, or at least is appears to be. Consider the fate of our more fortunate ancestors: say that by some accident of navigation we have an island to ourselves, just us and our little gang, with plenty of land. To win the fight against hunger, even in this idealised situation, requires labour. Even if the streams and shore are filled with fish, persuading them to get into our nets requires nets and harvesting activity. If it is to be the field and the plough that feeds us, these things must first exist. How much labour is required to stay alive? How hard must I work each day to eat? Society has locked this answer at 40 to 60 hours a week, and increased our socially-enforced material wants to fill this available labour. Our consumption has risen to meet our earning capacity, in a ratchet: social competition (bluntly: on average people prefer partners with lots of earning power, and we detect them by their demonstrated spending power). I’ve told the tale of finally locking in my “City of London” look when I took the black strap off my watch and replaced it with a spiffy stainless steel one. Suddenly, I’d passed through some invisible membrane, and my presence in the room seemed natural. It took me a year to find that little glitch: did the shoes, did the suit, would not sacrifice the hair (but I could get away with that, more or less, because I’m tech.) No, it was that watch band. Humans are sensitive to social cues. “Are you one of us or aren’t you?” You can say it’s about social norms, but at the end of the day, it’s all proxies for future expected reproductive success out to the Nth generation: a combination of genes and social positioning resulting in an estimate of success. All these mechanisms are atavistic: for two million years beings almost biologically identical to us roamed on the plains and lived in caves and forests and jungles, and had their first kids in their teens, and were certainly grandparents by 40, if they lived that long. We have very little of their culture with us today, but we have all of their biology. Imagine the chaos if we introduced modern technology to such a tribe: you don’t have to. We are that tribe, and that is our condition.

Delusional Optimism At this specific moment in time, we are most deeply cursed by delusional optimism. The bedrock of this delusion is the 1960s Human Potential Movement, possibly just a franchise of the US government’s MK ULTRA drugs and brainwashing program. The HPM’s idea was that there were secret supermen, free of ego, fear, delusion, waiting inside of all of us. These evolved beings would be tapped into a single global consciousness, and this wider “us” would be incapable of hatred, greed, fear, and the rest of the kleshas. However, the main tools of transformation were not the traditional Asian religious tools of thousands of hours of meditation practice and severe renunciation, but drug-fuelled transformation. However, for whatever reason, drugs seem to have been very poor at producing the type of evolved spiritual consciousness which the Asian religions promise. It’s not that the Asian traditions did not make use of drugs from time to time - I think it’s reasonably clear that Hinduism and Taoist Alchemy both had their uses for such things at certain times and places - but there’s never been a tradition in which chemistry was the main event. The transformation processes, particularly in repair of PTSD and depression, do appear to be real for some people in a clinical sense, but the spiritual transformative work which these approaches offer does not appear to develop anything like the same consciousness which is produced by years of seated meditation or other serious spiritual practice. In particular, the difficult work of disentangling oneself from the most morally compromising aspects of the material world - lying and lust for material resources of various kinds - result in an extreme imbalance. You just can’t take a bunch of Ayahuasca and work for Google’s advertising departments, and somehow balance the books morally as you spend all the money flying to exotic locations to go kite surfing as you step over homeless people on your way into Starbucks, and call this spirituality. The spirituality which counts is about acting correctly, not about feeling like a demigod. In this respect, it’s not difficult to see why the Asian spiritual masters have had their doubts about developments in America. Very few of the actual hallmarks of spiritual development are present in populations that actually consider themselves quite nearly evolved. Trungpa Rinpoche’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is the relevant ur-text on these topics, of course. The theory of change associated with this model of the world is worth investigating. The basic HPM concept is that higher states of being are possible: this is undoubtedly true, and I myself have taught technologies which access those states for most of two decades. However, there is a bizarre hybridisation with Christian Millenarianism where, in the Californian model, if enough individuals transform their consciousness, a sudden non-linear transformation of the masses will kick in. The entire thing “flips” into a new state. Hunter S. Thompson describes this perspective in the immortal “Wave Speech” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The great and beautiful wave breaks, and rolls back, and we are (surprise surprise) left much where we were. Where are we, then? The answer, unfortunately, is 1948. We have made essentially zero durable progress forwards, as a civilisation, since Gandhi was assassinated. Without the strict figurehead, spiritual evolution has become entirely diluted with various kinds of materialism, but this is not the worst of it. The worse of it is that spiritual evolution has become entirely detached from personal morality. Every ill that Gandhi discussed has become worse, and every remedy that he suggested has been ignored: Satyagraha and Swadeshi as concepts which liberated India should have been the bedrock of a new age of liberation for all peoples, but without Gandhi to lead the way, these ideals have been rapidly forgotten. And nothing substantial has taken their place: the mass awakening does not work, because the masses are not meditating at anything like the required level of intensity, and without mass meditation there appears to be little permanent catalytic transformation in consciousness from drugs alone. Even meditation is not enough: Swadeshi required a fundamental transformation in consumer behaviour: to not buy what oppressed other people, or yourself, as a point of political transformation. Because everybody did it, or at least enough of them, it generated enormous politically transformative force in India, enough to materially contribute to the end of the British occupation. Now compare this to the values of the New Age model which came out of California in the 1960s, and the various adapted permutations of that model which have taken root in the generations since then, from Burning Man through to the Ayahuasca cults which are so much a part of the back room scene of the modern tech world. Does any of this stuff have the grounded awareness of other people’s suffering which was so much a hallmark of the Gandhian perspective on the universe? Of course not: its job is not to challenge colonialism, but to complete it: spiritual colonialism has supplanted spiritual materialism as the curse of our age.

Understanding Spiritual Colonialism Spiritual colonialism is an attempt to ransack the treasure houses of spiritual wisdom found in colonised cultures, and put that wisdom to work for colonialist and capitalist ends. It has exactly the same extractive logic as material colonialism, where the assets being stripped were physical. Let’s look at four instances.

- Tibetan Buddhism arrived in America in the 1960s like a pillar of fire, and was soon tamed and diluted to the point where Vajrayana gurus get kicked out of their Sanghas for being “not very nice.” The formation first of “consensus buddhism” and then mindfulness as institutions separate from traditional Buddhist practice destroys the fundamental integrity of Buddhism.

- Tantra, pretty much the crown jewels of Tibetan Buddhism, Kashmiri Shaivism, and Taoism, gets diluted away from being a fundamental technology for transcending attachment to the material world, and into being a new form of enslavement to an imagined perfected sexual experience, culminating in an explosion of destructive cults which you can read about in the news when they detonate.

- Ayahuasca is further outside of my remit: I cannot speak with fundamental insight on how happy or unhappy the traditional users are with the current popularity of their methodologies. But I do hear a lot of screaming on the internet from South America, as the locals are beginning to realise that easy-to-deal-with fantasy fulfilment gets a lot more PR than complex understandings of a multidimensional universe which does not have humanity at the centre. I don’t want to speak for these guys, but I’m fairly clear at this point that at least some credible voices in that world report there to be A Problem with the way ayahuasca is being adopted. But they are far from my shop.

- Hatha Yoga, the fundamental physical practice of Hinduism, has been pried out of its religious setting like the Nassak Diamond. Whether it&rsquo;s a general health practice, or an approach to creating a body which will support industrious meditation, Hatha has always been part of a system of Yoga practices, starting with the indispensable Yamas and Niyamas - the fundamental moral rights and wrongs which must be mastered before Hatha Yoga is safe. After Hatha practice is established, Pranayama (the breathing exercises) must be cultivated to further transform the energy. It has always been this way: breaking Hatha Yoga away from Ni/Yamas and Pranayama is like cutting a power station out of the national grid, or cutting out a chunk of a pipeline and then wondering where the water went. It makes no sense. Except, inside of colonialism, where the dream of individual perfection is put above all other goals. Spiritual colonialism is the act of using traditional spiritual methodologies from other cultures to advance the goals of capitalism. Once you can see it, you can see it everywhere. It is not that the West does not have its own indigenous spiritual practices. There&rsquo;s plenty inside of Christianity. There&rsquo;s plenty inside of witchcraft in the many and various forms that it survives in across various cultures from Strega in Italy, English Cunning Folk of various kinds, and the surviving Latvian and Icelandic paganisms among others. But what has taken root in America is of an entirely different character: the Californian self-transformation approach takes a few threads from tantra (&ldquo;viras&rdquo; or spiritual heroes) but then attaches this identity to the triumphal Capitalist overlords. Nothing is more Californian than a kid with a trust fund who hops ashram to retreat to ceremony, making Burning Man a regular stop on their calendar, without ever asking where the money comes from, or what is the difference between right and wrong. The dharmic traditions developed these methodologies because the spiritual transformation of the world is hard work and it is better suited to empowered heroes than it is to regular folk. The ability to upgrade human consciousness and indeed the body itself is demonstrated: meditation and yoga work. Some of the more exotic practices in Tibetan Buddhism really work. But not so much if you put them into the service of capitalism rather than into the service of the dharma. Certainly these techniques are accelerators: look at the claims made for mindfulness apps. You take material out of a 6000 year old (or older) guru-disciple tradition, and embody 5% of it in an application, sold to a wage slave, who will toil their entire life in spiritual darkness to the benefit of another being, their CEO. And, by the way, I say that as a CEO. I&rsquo;ve done my shift inside of capitalism, enough to understand it - and we will see how my company fares through this covid pandemic. But I do get what that role is and how it is supposed to work: responsibility to investors, responsibility to employees, responsibilities all round. Only in very rare cases does it turn into freedom, even if in theory it is a privilege. Most of these people are trapped on the treadmill too. Spiritual colonialism is the appropriation of the methods of indigenous spiritualities for the goals of capitalism. I&rsquo;m not telling people to stop doing yoga: you exist, you deserve to be health. But understand that decontextualised yoga is simply another part of the capitalist apparatus, with its rockstars and its schisms, its lawsuits and its feuds. It&rsquo;s just more of the same, at every level above the physical. What is the goal of capitalism? If we accept that the spiritual methods of various other cultures have become accelerants in capitalism, we must then ask accelerants taking us where? Where is capitalism going? The mindfulness and the meditation and the hatha yoga and the meditation are being abused in the service of what, precisely? Money. But then what? If the goal was as simple as money, people who attain infinite money would immediately win capitalism, become <happy, liberated, free> or whatever the concept is, and that would be the end of that. Done. So it is not Money which is the goal of capitalism, because money alone won&rsquo;t do it. What is it then? What does capitalism want? Who is happy? Who has won capitalism? The happiest people I can find in capitalism are mid-tier professionals in respected professions who are making a little more money every year than the year before: they exist at an apex of stability and continuous steady measured growth. They look forwards to comfortable retirements at predictable ages, and expect that their children will do a little better than they did, having access to better educations and more opportunities than their parents. For a moment, let us call this state prosperity. It is rooted in family life, and the reasonable expectation that your children will have better lives than you do. Now let us juxtapose this position with wealth. There are some families who have been wealthy a very, very long time - they&rsquo;ve figured out how to pass on wealth almost like a gene, a stable, enduring kind of wealth. Let us call these people aristocrats. Mostly, aristocrats are cheap, ruthless, and obsessed with maintaining social status. It&rsquo;s been hammered into them that you don&rsquo;t spend the money, because compound interest wins, and peasant revolts suck. They&rsquo;re the survivors of the French and Russian revolutions, and there are only a handful of them. The trust fund babies are generally in awe of these people. Because mostly, the trajectory of the wealthy but not aristocratic is that their children will do far worse than they did. If you&rsquo;re an Elon Musk or a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet, all you can pass on to your kids is genes and money. The lightning-like genius which met a ready environment and produced an enormous river of capital will not strike in the next generation: Prometheus, at his best, hands over only fire, not the will to go and steal from the gods. So the wealthy live with the knowledge that, in most cases, their children will have worse and less interesting lives that they had. They may inherit wealth, but there is a lot of inherited wealth around, and trust me on this: most of these people are miserable. They&rsquo;re miserable because they know that eventually, down their genetic line, the money will run out, because they don&rsquo;t have the skills and talent of their forebears who actually made the money in the first place. They fear for themselves, and especially they fear for their children. Their children can only keep the wealth they can defend, they do not have the skills to make more as their ancestor did, and typically if they bet big, they will lose big. The money eventually runs out. The entire wealth management industry runs on this fear: they are the mercenary retainers who will guarantee the money will grow and be passed down to another generation, in exchange for their 2% fee, come rain or come shine. The rich are mostly helpless and the aristocratic are mostly in hiding. This leaves the pirate kings, the so-called wealth creators, the makers of empires. Churchill famously said &ldquo;the empires of the future are the empires of the mind&rdquo; referring to a new age of peace and prosperity that he believed could come from improvements in travel and international trade.This has turned out to be quite prophetic, as the battle lines in International relations are now as much to do with corporate fortunes as they are with tanks and guns and planes. Apple vs. Samsung is America vs. South Korea. Sony vs. LG is Japan vs. China. Huge international sales mean money at home. Jobs from from money sent across borders, for the most part, because nearly all of the money in the world is somewhere else. The money sloshes around in an enormous bucket, and the countries it sticks to prosper, and those it flees, collapse. In most industrialised nations, agriculture is 1% of Gross Domestic Product. Land is not value. Real estate, although expensive, is not a substantial generator of value. A house produces no little houses, in the same way that a cow produces more cows. A house is not a machine tool, that produces parts for other machine tools. A house is a terminal point for wealth. As housing bubbles pull capital out of the manufacturing economies, and industrial capacity moves away, economies become hollowed out service economies as the people moving money and resources internationally spend their money down the pyramid. Real estate is not productive capacity, other than factories. So if it&rsquo;s not agriculture and not housing, and it&rsquo;s not factories because all that stuff gets outsourced to countries with low costs of labour and safety standards as quickly as humanly possible in most nations. Germany being a notable exception - highly skilled small manufacturing companies make a lot of goods exported globally, and Japan has had a similar model at times. But for the most part, factories aren&rsquo;t really where the money comes from these days. The money comes from trade. Many factors combine to make trade profitable: Ricardo&rsquo;s observation that if you do what you are good at, and I do what I am good at, and we trade, there is more for everybody has stood the test of time rather well. Specialisation, economies of scale, natural differences between nations, path dependence in previous industrial development and embedded knowledge capital which is hard to move internationally all combine to mean that what is easy for one is hard for another. The disparities are so enormous that goods which are worth a dollar at the loading dock in China retail on Amazon in Europe for ten. By the time we introduce the economies of scale again and start to think in container loads everything changes again, and the difference between what manufacturers are paid and what consumers are charged can become a factor of a hundred. All of that gap is soaked up by tiers of middle men who &ldquo;make trade efficient&rdquo; by providing capital to enable large scale mass production of items which are otherwise too expensive when produced in small batches, and find markets for the enormous piles of goods that are being mass produced with this capital. That&rsquo;s basically the entire structure of the real economy right there: people who can marshal enormous demand for things can then pay somebody else to run incredibly efficient manufacturing operations, because when you&rsquo;re making a million of something - or a billion of it - the manufacturing becomes almost free. There are exceptions, things which are genuinely hard to manufacture even at scale (microprocessors, cars etc. spring to mind) but for the most part the wealth comes from optimising industrial mass production. Even the huge commodities markets profit from stabilising prices for the feedstocks which are turned into all the material stuff that we use and consume: they can be parasitic up to a point, but the core logic of their existence is that they smooth prices over time and make manufacturing predictable. And the internet? The internet makes its living as a vehicle for advertising. Some of that money is spent on information services - journalism - or art like music and video games, but the vast bulk of everything, when all is said and done, is material stuff. So is the goal of capitalism to produce this stuff? You could very easily make that claim, but it&rsquo;s not obviously true: if that was the case, why don&rsquo;t we just get on with it and do the mass production inside of some kind of command economy context if the objective is just to produce masses and masses and masses of stuff? If it doesn&rsquo;t produce welfare for individuals even at the top of the pile, and the production of goods and services is not objectively the goal, what is capitalism actually accomplishing? My answer is simple: capitalism is legitimised violence. The goal of capitalism is to make it possible to practice violence without accountability. The same might also be said of socialism, but I have not lived under socialism, so I do not feel entitled to make such a bald statement. But capitalism runs on violence, of three kinds.

The first is that under capitalism, poor people can be beaten for doing the things necessary for their biological existence to continue. The homeless can be moved on, regardless of their condition. The hungry are not automatically fed. Once you have no money you have essentially no rights. Money is therefore the right to act without violence: it is exchanged for consent of various kinds. &ldquo;You make take one of my cakes for eleven dollars&rdquo; or &ldquo;you may stay in my hotel room for $161.&rdquo; No money means no consent means criminalisation, and the State legitimises violence of various kinds against criminals. This is the internal violence of capitalism. Once you fall into the designated victim class, you have few or no rights. Everything you need to do to survive becomes illegitimate: the homeless are homeless because we will not permit them to build homes of plywood and sheet metal on spare scraps of ground. They would all have homes quickly enough if we did not invest massive resources in keeping them homeless by protecting the property rights and building codes and so on of polite society. Note this is not an argument for libertarian style deregulation, but let us observe that it is the law, not nature, which makes people homeless. They will build, if not stopped. The second kind of violence is against nature. This is completely obvious: trees are felled to make furniture, and have no rights as trees. They&rsquo;re just matter to be fed into the mill. The same is true for animals. If it doesn&rsquo;t have a bank account, it doesn&rsquo;t exist. Extractive on one end, polluting on the other: carbon dioxide, methane, CFCs etc. all go into the atmosphere and poison the future. The damage may not be severe one ton at a time, but a gigaton here and there, and pretty soon you&rsquo;re talking about acidifying oceans and the rapid collapse of agriculture. Inside of the capitalist system as it stands, there is no legal identity for Nature as a whole, and very, very little legal identity for biological entities like trees. The biblical &ldquo;dominion over nature&rdquo; is surprisingly literal over law, and while there are occasional protections about felling old trees they are not rooted in the idea that the living being has rights. Corporations, on the other hand, have rights which are in many ways equivalent to the rights of human beings, under legal doctrines like &ldquo;corporate personhood.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s fairly clear that the system of laws cannot work to protect things which do not have identities in the law: there&rsquo;s no name to put on the litigation paperwork. This leaves governments legislating on behalf of nature, and needless to say, Nature does not vote. The people, also, do not vote much for Nature, and so nature is left largely voiceless and defenseless. Obviously the EPA does something and you&rsquo;ll certainly miss it when it is gone but there is nothing like a mandate to unconditionally protect Nature from humans. Americans are at something like five times the sustainable level of CO2 they can emit, an unthinkably gigantic crime against the future which has no scientific defense - the damage is intentionally continued year on year, because the alternatives are not funded or mandated at the scale necessary to achieve fundamental transformation. And this has been going on for decades. The third kind of violence is the violence of being embedded in a system in which the poor and nature are being destroyed, theoretically in our name and for our benefit. This is violence against the soul. In my own life, I have to choose: I can live at the bottom of society, on as little money as possible, and own practically nothing, thereby minimising my impact. I did this for 12 years, largely because I&rsquo;d come to the conclusion that all the money in the world was made from hellish abuses, if you averaged it all out. During that time I got a lot said and invented, and little done because doing things requires financial power in almost all cases. And inside of capitalism, as I started a company, I soon discovered that treating other human beings as if their humanity mattered was a fast road to nowhere. If I&rsquo;d been willing to destroy people to get where I was going, or to enslave them to my will just because I was paying them, how much more effective would I have been? It is practically impossible to be both egalitarian and effective. I thought within high value knowledge work we could make an egalitarian enclave, but even there, it&rsquo;s simply not stable. I don&rsquo;t know what to do about this personally. I eat meat because my metabolism is damaged from previous altitude problems, but where&rsquo;s the ethical exception for &ldquo;being a boss&rdquo; which basically amounts to using fear and greed (mostly the desire to avoid future fear) to make people into slaves? The psychological configuration of effective capitalism involves use of people - even in the high value knowledge work domain - which is hard for me to square with my fundamental morality in practice. I was fangless, and collaboration is not a substitute for control inside of capitalism as it is practiced. Yes, the books say something different. No, those books certainly do not adapt to the start up world. The measure appears to be how effectively can the whip be cracked.

I knew it sucked to be an employee. I figured that out in the late 1990s when I made the decision to permanently fire my boss, and never work for anybody again. I became a contractor, and that was fine to a point. Then I tried capitalism from the other side and, in practice, no dice there either within existing frameworks. To build a moral relationship between employees and employers, which passes inspection at an absolute spiritual level appears to be almost impossible. Maybe there are options which involve a vastly expanded paternalism, or collaborative resource extraction much like the voyagers of old, but for the most part, these moral paradoxes are insoluble. The Elon Musk&rsquo;s of the world balance the books by saying &ldquo;it&rsquo;s for the greater good&rdquo; as they enslave people towards the goal of saving the climate or protecting the future of biology by moving people and plants to Mars, but without any doubt that&rsquo;s one hell of a compromise: to hammer down the individuals in the name of saving the species is a hard, hard path.

Once again we are in a position where all players lose this game. The middle classes who are making steady progress are being progressively sandbagged over time, and everybody else is basically miserable because all positions are basically dominated by the fear of loss. People harm each other trying to maintain stasis or make progress against unbounded evolutionary pressures, fractionalized and focussed by the logical machinery of capitalism.

There is no stability to be had anywhere, and it&rsquo;s hard for an honest man to make a living. So, once again, what is the goal of capitalism? Capitalism has no goal, and more than fire has a goal. Fire is burning in much the same way that capitalism is violence. Capitalism is simply mass predation, encompassed within systems of government that reduce the damage enough that people experience the people feeding on them as shepherds rather than wolves. But in this situation, just as fleas have smaller fleas to bite them, everybody is trapped at their level, constantly fighting against those who attempt to farm them or eat them whole. Products are emitted as byproducts of the evolutionary arms race to effectively allocate their resources, much as brightly coloured bugs develop poisons, or perhaps more as fruit trees encourage people to take care of them by growing desirable fruit from a certain perspective. The notion that capitalism is fundamentally purposelessness fundamentally matters, because humans are not fundamentally purposeless. This mismatch between the meaning-finding nature of human beings, and the meaning-vacuum of the system they have constructed around themselves explains why even the rich are miserable: the environment they are in has sucked away stability and meaning in a way which leaves them afraid for their kids and their souls. At the lower tiers of society we are encouraged to think that money is the answer to our problems, because a lot of problems are caused by the lack of money. But as I&rsquo;ve found out on the few occasions when I was doing alright, past a pretty low level in the grand scheme of things, money does not solve the actual problems, because anything less than enormous amounts of money cannot buy stability, and no amount of money can create meaning or purpose. I&rsquo;m focussing very specifically on the angst of the rich for a specific reason: if even those who are perceived to be winning the game are, in fact, losing then we have every right to assert that the game itself is broken. If the rich were doing just great thank you very much then it would be easy to say that the problem was lack of money, and one day everybody will be rich because capitalism is really effective at making money. And, to be sure, increasing material baselines in areas like healthcare really does solve fundamental human problems in a very direct way. I&rsquo;m not saying that poverty does not create problems. What I am saying is that money does not solve the problems we think it solves problems, even in very large amounts. As soon as the immediate fear of homelessness recedes, for most people, a huge raft of existential questions immediately surface. If they have kids, they can generally ram that stuff down under the immediate crisis which is parenthood, and by the time the kids are safely through college, retirement looms and the chance for a shot at doing nothing for a while. And that&rsquo;s how society continues to function with these fundamental questions unasked and unanswered: people just get their heads down and plough forwards on behalf of their families, and push all the moral issues aside. But for the rich, particularly those born rich, what you see is the existential questions slam into most of them like torpedos. Because if you have the time on your hands to ask what is going on? the answers are so disturbing as to be showstoppers. The aristocrats know how to keep it together, generation after generation, and all have sophisticated fictions to wish away