Capitalism affects everything we think, feel, and do -- and in this respect capitalism has to change.
More specifically, capitalism has to return to a base and a foundation of 'good ethics' and 'fairness'. The other 'brand' of Capitalism that we are seeing more and more every day -- narcissistic (one-sided) manipulative Capitalism -- will simply not sustain itself. It has bred a 'culture of narcissism' -- which includes a culture of exploitation, manipulation, deceit, distrust, disloyalty, betrayal, and paranoia.
This is not rocket science. If you betray, deceive, and/or treat a customer or an employee unfairly, the customer or employee is going to think, feel, and behave differently towards you. In the middle of this 'triangulation' of new thinking, feeling, and behaving is going to be the key element or essence of resentment-anger-rage. And one way or another, that is going to come back on you, the betrayer, the manipulator, the deceiver. If you don't fall into this category, then you are doing things 'right' -- you are practicing 'ethical capitalism'. If you do fall into this category, then you need need to seriously look at yourself in the mirror, and ask yourself if the 'end justifies the means'. In the business world, we have built -- and/or are still in the process of building -- a corporate-industrial society based on the unsustainable characteristics of deceit, betrayal, manipulation, distrust, and disloyalty. And it works both ways -- employers deceiving employees, and employees deceiving employers. Anger, resentment, alienation -- carry the day -- government-wise, and corporately, 'everything is broken'. People, in general, no longer trust the 'bill of goods' that their politicians, their cable and internet providers, their banks, their telephone companies, their oil companies...are selling them...
Over-spending at the top of the food chain, in the upper echelons of government power, are being compensated for with 'serious spending cuts' at the bottom of the food chain, among those citizens who are going to feel it first, and feel it worst. The same civilians who are paying $24 for every politician's pension (to every $1. that the politician chips in on his or her own pension) are themselves experiencing reductions -- and even cutoffs -- in their own pensions. What we used to be eligible for at 55 or 60, in a few years we may not be eligible for until we turn 67. Which means that for many civilians who have worked hard all their lives, they simply won't be retiring unless or until they are 'forced' out of the workforce.
Cable and telephone companies 'seduce you with lures' that tell you, that you are going to 'save money' for more and more services...they 'hook you'....and then 'they eat you alive'.....you sign a contract (which should be illegal because they are generally designed to 'hide' crucial information that you won't find out about until you 'try out your new service' and/or you get your first or second bill online, or in your email, or by mail only to find out that your bill has just jumped from its usual $150 to $700..... And you ask yourself, 'What did I miss? Did the salesperson tell me something that I didn't hear?' And 'the corporate design' of the whole situation was that you weren't intended to get 'the bad news' until after you signed the contract....
I could go on and on...hidden bank charges coming from every direction, every account....
Mortgage deals that involve 'easy payments' in the first couple of years -- and payments that will leave you 'homeless' after the 'back loaded interest rates' kick in...
Are these just cases of 'caveat emptor' -- 'buyer beware'....
Or is there something really insidious going on here that is destroying the whole infra-structure, the whole fabric, of our society?
Unless we 're-set' our 'ethical values' to take away the 'lures' and 'hooks' that involve 'exploitative, manipulative tricks', capitalism in North America is going to collapse -- from the bottom up....until even the people in the highest echelons of power start to collapse with the collapsing infrastructure and the lower classes below them...
Capitalism requires ethics to sustain itself -- plain and simple.
The more ethics becomes non-existent -- or becomes a 'twisted, distorted, one-sided type of narcissistic ethics' -- in the face of depleting resources, and greater and greater credit liabilities -- the faster the collapse will happen. It has already well begun.
And even the psychotherapy profession needs to sit up and take notice...Because the tell-tale signs, and a cross-section of the affected people, will be entering your offices every day....And in this regard, the psychotherapy profession needs to be a part of the solution to the problem -- not a part of the problem.
Capitalism needs to be like a circulating lake and river system -- with money essentially being the economic nutrient that needs to circulate all over the lake and river system -- from the owners and employers and upper class, down through the middle class, and the lower class -- with each economic class being able to sustain itself.
When you have a 'blockage' -- a 'dyke' or a 'beaver dam' that stops the free and fair flow of money down through each economic class -- because of greed and bad ethics at the top of the food chain that 'cuts off the circulation of the lake and the river to all its different parts' -- and/or alternatively, 'cuts off nutrients and oxygen to all the peripheral parts of the body' -- well, you get what might also be called 'gangrene capitalism'.
That is what we have today.
Gangrene capitalism.
-- dgb, Aug 12, 2012...
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I like Adam Smith. I like Ayn Rand. I like making money as much as the next person. But you don't have to read Karl Marx and Erich Fromm for very long to realize that Capitalism -- Narcissistic Capitalism in particular -- can have some very nasty self and social side effects. Or maybe they are the 'main effects'. Collusion, corruption, price gouging, price fixing, betrayal of the customer, betrayal of the employee by the employer, betrayal of the employer by the employee, lack of integrity, lack of ethics, alienation, distrust, a deadened spirit....
What this all comes down to is whether you really care about the customer, co-worker, employer or employee you are working for or with -- or not....This is the essence of the difference between Narcissistic Ethics and Capitalism vs. Dialectic-Humanistic-Existential Ethics and Capitalism -- caring about the person you are dealing with -- or not. Are you really trying to help them? Or do you give one iota how much you hurt people in your pursuit of money? In the end, it comes down to this question and this question only: Do you have a set of ethics and integrity that shows that you care about the people you are doing business with -- or do you not?
Narcissistic Capitalism breeds betrayal bad will, and distrust of the customer and/or co-worker, employee, employer whereas DHE Capitalism and Ethics breeds co-operation, good will, and trust in the other.
Money changes everything. It enters the picture as a heavy potential 'conflict of interest' factor -- in narcissistic capitalistic ethics the goal is to maximize profitability and income even at the expense of betraying the customer and/or co-worker, employee, employer...which is in effect robbing the social, economic. corporate, and political world of good will, trust, and co-operation...Instead, a broadening world of bad will, distrust, and paranoia seep in, or rush in, to take its place...And this is the world we live in... dgb, Aug 8, 2012
From one of my favorite mentors...Bob Dylan...
It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), 1965
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
Temptation's page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover
That you'd just be
One more person crying.
So don't fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It's alright, ma, i'm only sighing.
As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.
While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind it's gates
But even the president of the united states
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.
An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge
And it's alright, ma, i can make it.
Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.
You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.
A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.
Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, ma, to live up to.
For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.
While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say god bless him.
While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.
But i mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, ma, if i can't please him.
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares propaganda, all is phony.
While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.
My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, i scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, i have had enough
What else can you show me?
And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, ma, it's life, and life only.
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/b/bob_dylan/its_alright_ma.html ]
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.
A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.
Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, ma, to live up to.
For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.
While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say god bless him.
While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.
But i mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, ma, if i can't please him.
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares propaganda, all is phony.
While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.
My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, i scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, i have had enough
What else can you show me?
And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, ma, it's life, and life only.
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/b/bob_dylan/its_alright_ma.html ]
http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/its-alright-ma-im-only-bleeding
