31 July 2019

Capitalism's Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance was "a North American Indian religious cult of the second half of the 19th century, based on the performance of a ritual dance that, it was believed, would drive away white people and restore the traditional lands and way of life."

So; a religious insistence that the bad thing is magically not going to happen.


The bad thing is going to happen. The seas will rise and agriculture will fail.

Even from a purely empirical "was this a desirable result?" perspective, capitalism has failed.  No accumulation of money excuses making your species extinct.  Rather than face this, admit error, and seek to make restitution, what we're seeing is a whole bunch of effort to create religious movements able to forcibly prevent anyone from mentioning the fact of the failure.

(Fascism is the trivial cowardice of supposing will can prevent change if only you will be violent enough.  But much as you can't practically tell a fandom from a religion, you can't empirically distinguish fascism from a religion, either.  It's the same broad category of not dealing with things as they are.)

Is this going to work?

Well, probably, in as much as there isn't much sign anyone is going to be able to shut down the system of social organisation around the accumulation of money in time.  ("In time" would have been by about 1980.)  There remains some hope people will figure out that the diverse justifications offered for going on with organising society around the increase of wealth are all nonsense.

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