Tag: morality

Technofeudalism: Taxing Rent

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I’ve just finished Chapter 5 of Technofeudalism by Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, and I can’t recommend it enough. Retiring from being a professional economist, I’d paused reading economic fare in favour of philosophy and fiction. Recently, I picked up Hobbes’ Leviathan and Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, but this one called to me. I recall when it was released. I read some summaries and reviews. I heard some interviews. I thought I understood the gist. I did. But it goes deeper. Much deeper.

I considered Technofeudalism or Feudalism 2.0 as more of a political statement than a sociopolitical one. Now, I know better. Rather than review the book, I want to focus on a specific aspect that occurred to me.

In a nutshell, Varoufakis asserts that with Capitalism, we moved from a world of property-based rents to one of profits (and rents). We’ve now moved past this into a new world based on platform-based rents (and profits and property rents). Rent extraction yields more power than profits, again reordering power structures. Therefore, I think we might want to handle (read: tax) rents separately from profits.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing this topic.

A Radical Proposal for Modern Taxation

Introduction: The Old Dream Reawakened

Economists have long dreamt of a world in which rent — the unearned income derived from control of scarce assets — could be cleanly distinguished from profit, the reward for productive risk-taking. Ricardo dreamt of it. Henry George built a movement upon it. Even today, figures like Thomas Piketty hint at its necessity. Yet rent and profit have grown entangled like ancient ivy around the crumbling edifice of modern capitalism.

Today, under what some call “technofeudalism,” the separation of rent from productive profit has become not merely an academic exercise but a matter of existential urgency. With rents now extracted not only from land but from data, networks, and regulatory capture, taxation itself risks becoming obsolete if it fails to adapt.

Thus, let us lay out a theoretical and applied map for what could — and arguably must — be done.

I. The Theoretical Framework: Defining Our Terms

First, we must operationally define:

  • Profit: income generated from productive risk-taking — investment, innovation, labour.
  • Rent: income generated from ownership or control of scarce, non-replicable assets — land, intellectual property, platforms, regulatory privilege.

Key Principle: Rent is unearned. Profit is earned.

This distinction matters because rent is an economic extraction from society’s collective value creation, whereas profit rewards activities that enlarge that pie.

II. Mapping EBITA: Where Rent Hides

EBITA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, and Amortisation) is the preferred metric of modern corporate reporting. Within it, rents hide behind several masks:

  • Property rental income
  • Intellectual property licensing fees
  • Monopoly markups
  • Platform access fees
  • Network effect premiums
  • Regulatory arbitrage profits

Parsing rent from EBITA would thus require methodical decomposition.

III. Theoretical Approaches to Decomposing EBITA

  1. Cost-Plus Benchmarking
    • Estimate what a “normal” competitive firm would earn.
    • Treat any surplus as rent.
  2. Rate-of-Return Analysis
    • Compare corporate returns against industry-normal rates adjusted for risk.
    • Excess returns imply rent extraction.
  3. Monopolistic Pricing Models
    • Apply measures like the Lerner Index to estimate pricing power.
    • Deduce the rentier share.
  4. Asset Valuation Decomposition
    • Identify earnings derived strictly from asset control rather than active operation.
  5. Economic Value Added (EVA) Adjustments
    • Assign a competitive cost of capital and strip out the residual super-profits as rents.

IV. Toward Applied Solutions: Imposing Sanity on Chaos

In theory, then, we could pursue several applied strategies:

  1. Mandated Rent-Adjusted Reporting
    • Require corporations to file a “Rent-Adjusted EBITA” metric.
    • Auditors would have to categorise income streams as “productive” or “rentier.”
  2. Differential Taxation
    • Tax normal profits at a competitive corporate rate.
    • Tax rents at punitive rates (e.g., 70-90%), since taxing rents does not distort incentives.
  3. Sector-Specific Rent Taxes
    • Levy special taxes on land, platforms, patents, and monopoly franchises.
    • Create dynamic rent-extraction indices updated annually.
  4. Platform Rent Charges
    • Impose data rent taxes on digital platforms extracting value from user activity.
  5. Public Registry of Rents
    • Create a global registry classifying rents by sector, firm, and mechanism.
    • Provide public transparency to rent-seeking activities.

V. The Political Reality: Clouds on the Horizon

Needless to say, the aristocracy of the digital age will not go gentle into this good night. Rentiers — whether in Silicon Valley, the City of London, or Wall Street — are deeply entwined with the political machinery that might otherwise regulate them.

Yet the costs of inaction are higher. If rent extraction continues to eclipse productive activity, the very legitimacy of markets — and democracy — will erode into cynicism, stagnation, and oligarchic decay.

Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

Separating rent from profit is not merely a technocratic tweak. It is a radical act — one that could reorient economic activity away from parasitic extraction and back toward genuine value creation.

In a world where algorithms are castles, platforms are fiefdoms, and data is the new serfdom, reclaiming the ancient dream of taxing rent is no longer optional. It is, quite simply, the price of our collective survival.

Questioning Traditional Families

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I neither champion nor condemn tradition—whether it’s marriage, family, or whatever dusty relic society is currently parading around like a prize marrow at a village fête.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on traditional families.

In a candid group conversation recently, I met “Jenny”, who declared she would have enjoyed her childhood much more had her father not “ruined everything” simply by existing. “Marie” countered that it was her mother who had been the wrecker-in-chief. Then “Lulu” breezed in, claiming, “We had a perfect family — we practically raised ourselves.”

“We had a perfect family; we practically raised ourselves.”

Now, here’s where it gets delicious:

Each of these women, bright-eyed defenders of “traditional marriage” and “traditional family” (cue the brass band), had themselves ticked every box on the Modern Chaos Bingo Card: children out of wedlock? Check. Divorces? Check. Performative, cold-marriage pantomimes? Absolutely—and scene.
Their definition of “traditional marriage” is the vintage model: one cis-male, one cis-female, Dad brings home the bacon, Mum weeps quietly into the washing-up. Standard.

Let’s meet the players properly:

Jenny sprang from a union of two serial divorcées, each dragging along the tattered remnants of previous families. She was herself a “love child,” born out of wedlock and “forcing” another reluctant stroll down the aisle. Her father? A man of singular achievements: he paid the bills and terrorised the household. Jenny now pays a therapist to untangle the psychological wreckage.

Marie, the second of two daughters, was the product of a more textbook “traditional family”—if by textbook you mean a Victorian novel where everyone is miserable but keeps a stiff upper lip about it. Her mother didn’t want children but acquiesced to her husband’s demands (standard operating procedure at the time). Marie’s childhood was a kingdom where Daddy was a demigod and Mummy was the green-eyed witch guarding the gates of hell.

Lulu grew up in a household so “traditional” that it might have been painted by Hogarth: an underemployed, mostly useless father and a mother stretched thinner than the patience of a British Rail commuter. Despite—or because of—the chaos, Lulu claims it was “perfect,” presumably redefining the word in a way the Oxford English Dictionary would find hysterical. She, too, had a child out of wedlock, with the explicit goal of keeping feckless men at bay.

And yet—and yet—all three women cling, white-knuckled, to the fantasy of the “traditional family.” They did not achieve stability. Their families of origin were temples of dysfunction. But somehow, the “traditional family” remains the sacred cow, lovingly polished and paraded on Sundays.

Why?

Because what they’re chasing isn’t “tradition” at all — it’s stability, that glittering chimera. It’s nostalgia for a stability they never actually experienced. A mirage constructed from second-hand dreams, glossy 1950s propaganda, and whatever leftover fairy tales their therapists hadn’t yet charged them £150 an hour to dismantle.

Interestingly, none of them cared two figs about gay marriage, though opinions about gay parenting varied wildly—a kettle of fish I’ll leave splashing outside this piece.

Which brings us back to the central conundrum:

If lived experience tells you that “traditional family” equals trauma, neglect, and thinly-veiled loathing, why in the name of all that’s rational would you still yearn for it?

Societal pressure, perhaps. Local customs. Generational rot. The relentless cultural drumbeat that insists that marriage (preferably heterosexual and miserable) is the cornerstone of civilisation.

Still, it’s telling that Jenny and Marie were both advised by therapists to cut ties with their toxic families—yet in the same breath urged to create sturdy nuclear families for their own children. It was as if summoning a functional household from the smoking ruins of dysfunction were a simple matter of willpower and a properly ironed apron.

Meanwhile, Lulu—therapy-free and stubbornly independent—declares that raising oneself in a dysfunctional mess is not only survivable but positively idyllic. One can only assume her standards of “perfect” are charmingly flexible.

As the title suggests, this piece questions traditional families. I offer no solutions—only a raised eyebrow and a sharper question:

What is the appeal of clinging to a fantasy so thoroughly at odds with reality?
Your thoughts, dear reader? I’d love to hear your defences, your protests, or your own tales from the trenches.

What Good Is Morality?

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The New Yorker reviewed The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality by Hanno Sauer. I read the favourable article and then the reviews. Rather than read the book, I asked NotebookLM to discuss the article, the article itself being behind a paywall.

Audio: NotebookLM Podcast of this topic.

Although the rating was not bad – 3.8 as of this writing – the reviews told a different story.

 The first half of the book was worthwhile as it was a thought provoking description of how early societies may have developed social systems to encourage group cooperation and discourage harmful behaviors. The second half however was a rambling, preachy, and judgemental dissertation on postmodernism using the all too familiar tropes of social justice dialog. Overall it was poorly written though some of that may be due to translation. There is too little useful material here to justify its purchase.

Firstly, this version is from a German edition. Some people feel that some structure and communication value was lost in translation. In any case, he’s accused of being verbose and circumlocutory.

Amazon describes this book as “a sweeping history,” but the only thing sweeping about it was what I wanted to do with it under the nearest rug. 

Bailey (review)

Secondly, it may be somewhat derivative of Nietzsche’s work on the same topic.

The book is rambling and incoherent, the author makes wild assertions about things that happened before recorded history, leaps from one train of thought to another, poo poos the ideas of religion but frequently quotes Nietzsche as the infallible source of knowledge…

Tonyo (reviewer)

In any case, the topic interests me, but I don’t see myself reading it any time soon.

The Church of Pareto: How Economics Learned to Love Collapse

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—or—How the Invisible Hand Became a Throttling Grip on the Throat of the Biosphere

As many frequent visitors know, I am a recovering economist. I tend to view economics through a philosophical lens. Here. I consider the daft nonsense of Pareto optimality.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.

There is a priesthood in modern economics—pious in its equations, devout in its dispassion—that gathers daily to prostrate before the altar of Pareto. Here, in this sanctum of spreadsheet mysticism, it is dogma that an outcome is “optimal” so long as no one is worse off. Never mind if half the world begins in a ditch and the other half in a penthouse jacuzzi. So long as no one’s Jacuzzi is repossessed, the system is just. Hallelujah.

This cult of cleanliness, cloaked in the language of “efficiency,” performs a marvellous sleight of hand: it transforms systemic injustice into mathematical neutrality. The child working in the lithium mines of the Congo is not “harmed”—she simply doesn’t exist in the model. Her labour is an externality. Her future, an asterisk. Her biosphere, a rounding error in the grand pursuit of equilibrium.

Let us be clear: this is not science. This is not even ideology. It is theology—an abstract faith-based system garlanded with numbers. And like all good religions, it guards its axioms with fire and brimstone. Question the model? Heretic. Suggest the biosphere might matter? Luddite. Propose redistribution? Marxist. There is no room in this holy order for nuance. Only graphs and gospel.

Jevons warned us…that improvements in efficiency could increase, not reduce, resource consumption.

The rot runs deep. William Stanley Jevons—yes, that Jevons, patron saint of unintended consequences—warned us as early as 1865 that improvements in efficiency could increase, not reduce, resource consumption. But his paradox, like Cassandra’s prophecy, was fated to be ignored. Instead, we built a civilisation on the back of the very logic he warned would destroy it.

Then came Simon Kuznets, who—bless his empirically addled soul—crafted a curve that seemed to promise that inequality would fix itself if we just waited politely. We called it the Kuznets Curve and waved it about like a talisman against the ravages of industrial capitalism, ignoring the empirical wreckage that piled up beneath it like bones in a trench.

Meanwhile, Pareto himself, that nobleman of social Darwinism, famously calculated that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of its people—and rather than challenge this grotesque asymmetry, he chose to marvel at its elegance. Economics took this insight and said: “Yes, more of this, please.”

And so the model persisted—narrow, bloodless, and exquisitely ill-suited to the world it presumed to explain. The economy, it turns out, is not a closed system of rational actors optimising utility. It is a planetary-scale thermodynamic engine fuelled by fossil sunlight, pumping entropy into the biosphere faster than it can absorb. But don’t expect to find that on the syllabus.

Mainstream economics has become a tragic farce, mouthing the language of optimisation while presiding over cascading system failure. Climate change? Not in the model. Biodiversity collapse? A regrettable externality. Intergenerational theft? Discounted at 3% annually.

We are witnessing a slow-motion suicide

We are witnessing a slow-motion suicide cloaked in the rhetoric of balance sheets. The Earth is on fire, and the economists are debating interest rates.

What we need is not reform, but exorcism. Burn the models. Salt the axioms. Replace this ossified pseudoscience with something fit for a living world—ecological economics, systems theory, post-growth thinking, anything with the courage to name what this discipline has long ignored: that there are limits, and we are smashing into them at speed.

History will not be kind to this priesthood of polite annihilation. Nor should it be.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Posted in agency, anarchism, economics, equality, identity, intelligence, morality, nature, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

A Hobbesian Rant for the Disillusioned Masses

Reading Leviathan has me thinking. Nothing new, mind you—just reinvigorated. Hobbes, bless his scowling soul, is the consummate pessimist. People, in his view, are untrustworthy sods, ready to stab you in the back at the first flicker of opportunity. He doesn’t believe in community. He believes in containment.

Audio: NotebookLM discussion about this topic.

And to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong. He captures a certain cohort with uncanny accuracy. You know the type. Type-A™ personalities: the Donald Trumps, Elon Musks, Adolph Hitlers, Shahs of Iran, and that guy in marketing who always schedules meetings for 8am. The ones who salivate at the mere whiff of power, who’d sell their grandmothers for a press release and call it vision.

This, in short, is why we can’t have nice things.

Now, I’ll concede that most people want more than they have. Economics depends on this assumption like religion depends on guilt. But not everyone is driven by an insatiable lust for money, dominance, or legacy. That, my friends, is not ambition. It is pathology—a malignant, metastasising hunger that infects the likes of Trump, Musk, Bezos, Sunak, and their ilk. The hunger to rule, not just participate.

The trouble is, the majority of the world’s population are idiots—not technically, but metaphorically. Soft-headed. Overstimulated. Easily distracted by flags, influencers, and “free shipping.” And there are flavours of idiots. Musk is a lucky idiot. Trump is a useful idiot. Most are a hair’s breadth from being cannon fodder.

And then we wonder why everything’s broken.

The world could be configured differently. It could consist of autonomous collectives, each minding its own business, each respecting the other’s boundaries like courteous houseplants. But this equilibrium is shattered—always shattered—by the predatory few. The outliers. The sharks in suits. The ones who mistake governance for domination and diplomacy for personal branding.

So we build mechanisms to defend ourselves—laws, institutions, surveillance, standing armies—but these mechanisms inevitably attract the same types we were trying to ward off. Power-hungry cretins in different hats. The protectors, it turns out, are rarely benevolent dictators. They are predacious politicos, wearing virtue like a costume, mouthing justice while tightening the screws.

And here lies the eternal problem. Not technology. Not ideology. Not even ignorance.

But the recurring infestation of pathological ambition in a species otherwise just trying to get on with its day.

This is the challenge for all of humanity.

And we’ve yet to rise to it.

Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

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I’ve read Part I of Hobbes’ Leviathan and wonder what it would have been like if he filtered his thoughts through Hume or Wittgenstein. Hobbes makes Dickens read like Pollyanna. It’s an interesting historical piece, worth reading on that basis alone. It reads as if the Christian Bible had to pass through a legal review before it had been published, sapped of vigour. As bad a rap as Schopenhauer seems to get, Hobbes is the consummate Ebenezer Scrooge. Bah, humbug – you nasty, brutish, filthy animals!*

Audio: NotebookLM podcast conversation on this topic.

In any case, it got me thinking of free will and, more to the point, of will itself.

A Brief History of Humanity’s Favourite Metaphysical Scapegoat

By the time Free Will turned up to the party, the real guest of honour—the Will—had already been drinking heavily, muttering incoherently in the corner, and starting fights with anyone who made eye contact. We like to pretend that the “will” is a noble concept: the engine of our autonomy, the core of our moral selves, the brave little metaphysical organ that lets us choose kale over crisps. But in truth, it’s a bloody mess—philosophy’s equivalent of a family heirloom that no one quite understands but refuses to throw away.

So, let’s rewind. Where did this thing come from? And why, after 2,500 years of name-dropping, finger-pointing, and metaphysical gymnastics, are we still not quite sure whether we have a will, are a will, or should be suing it for damages?

Plato: Soul, Reason, and That Poor Horse

In the beginning, there was Plato, who—as with most things—half-invented the question and then wandered off before giving a straight answer. For him, the soul was a tripartite circus act: reason, spirit, and appetite. Will, as a term, didn’t get top billing—it didn’t even get its name on the poster. But the idea was there, muddling along somewhere between the charioteer (reason) and the unruly horses (desire and spiritedness).

No explicit will, mind you. Just a vague sense that the rational soul ought to be in charge, even if it had to beat the rest of itself into submission.

Aristotle: Purpose Without Pathos

Aristotle, ever the tidy-minded taxonomist, introduced prohairesis—deliberate choice—as a sort of proto-will. But again, it was all about rational calculation toward an end. Ethics was teleological, goal-oriented. You chose what aligned with eudaimonia, that smug Greek term for flourishing. Will, if it existed at all, was just reason picking out dinner options based on your telos. No inner torment, no existential rebellion—just logos in a toga.

Augustine: Sin, Suffering, and That Eternal No

Fast-forward a few hundred years, and along comes Saint Augustine, traumatised by his libido and determined to make the rest of us suffer for it. Enter voluntas: the will as the seat of choice—and the scene of the crime. Augustine is the first to really make the will bleed. He discovers he can want two incompatible things at once and feels properly appalled about it.

From this comes the classic Christian cocktail: freedom plus failure equals guilt. The will is free, but broken. It’s responsible for sin, for disobedience, for not loving God enough on Wednesdays. Thanks to Augustine, we’re stuck with the idea that the will is both the instrument of salvation and the reason we’re going to Hell.

Cheers.

Medievals: God’s Will or Yours, Pick One

The Scholastics, never ones to let an ambiguity pass unanalysed, promptly split into camps. Aquinas, ever the reasonable Dominican, says the will is subordinate to the intellect. God is rational, and so are we, mostly. But Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the original voluntarist hooligans, argue that the will is superior—even in God. God could have made murder a virtue, they claim, and you’d just have to live with it.

From this cheerful perspective, will becomes a force of arbitrary fiat, and humans, made in God’s image, inherit the same capacity for irrational choice. The will is now more than moral; it’s metaphysical. Less reason’s servant, more chaos goblin.

Hobbes: Appetite with Delusions of Grandeur

Then along comes Thomas Hobbes, who looks at the soul and sees a wheezing machine of appetites. Will, in his famously cheery view, is simply “the last appetite before action.” No higher calling, no spiritual struggle—just the twitch that wins. Man is not a rational animal, but a selfish algorithm on legs. For Hobbes, will is where desire stumbles into motion, and morality is a polite euphemism for not getting stabbed.

Kant: The Will Gets a Makeover

Enter Immanuel Kant: powdered wig, pursed lips, and the moral rectitude of a man who scheduled his bowel movements. Kant gives us the “good will”, which acts from duty, not desire. Suddenly, the will is autonomous, rational, and morally legislative—a one-man Parliament of inner law.

It’s all terribly noble, terribly German, and entirely exhausting. For Kant, free will is not the ability to do whatever you like—it’s the capacity to choose according to moral law, even when you’d rather be asleep. The will is finally heroic—but only if it agrees to hate itself a little.

Schopenhauer: Cosmic Will, Cosmic Joke

And then the mood turns. Schopenhauer, world’s grumpiest mystic, takes Kant’s sublime will and reveals it to be a blind, thrashing, cosmic force. Will, for him, isn’t reason—it’s suffering in motion. The entire universe is will-to-live: a desperate, pointless striving that dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction.

There is no freedom, no morality, no point. The only escape is to negate the will, preferably through aesthetic contemplation or Buddhist-like renunciation. In Schopenhauer’s world, the will is not what makes us human—it’s what makes us miserable.

Nietzsche: Transvaluation and the Will to Shout Loudest

Cue Nietzsche, who takes Schopenhauer’s howling void and says: yes, but what if we made it fabulous? For him, the will is no longer to live, but to power—to assert, to create, to impose value. “Free will” is a theologian’s fantasy, a tool of priests and moral accountants. But will itself? That’s the fire in the forge. The Übermensch doesn’t renounce the will—he rides it like a stallion into the sunset of morality.

Nietzsche doesn’t want to deny the abyss. He wants to waltz with it.

Today: Free Will and the Neuroscientific Hangover

And now? Now we’re left with compatibilists, libertarians, determinists, and neuroscientists all shouting past each other, armed with fMRI machines and TED talks. Some claim free will is an illusion, a post hoc rationalisation made by brains doing what they were always going to do. Others insist that moral responsibility requires it, even if we can’t quite locate it between the neurons.

We talk about willpower, will-to-change, political will, and free will like they’re real things. But under the hood, we’re still wrestling with the same questions Augustine posed in a North African villa: Why do I do what I don’t want to do? And more importantly, who’s doing it?

Conclusion: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Mess

From Plato’s silent horses to Nietzsche’s Dionysian pyrotechnics, the will has shape-shifted more times than a politician in an election year. It has been a rational chooser, a moral failure, a divine spark, a mechanical twitch, a cosmic torment, and an existential triumph.

Despite centuries of philosophical handwringing, what it has never been is settled.

So where there’s a will, there’s a way. But the way? Twisting, contradictory, and littered with the corpses of half-baked metaphysical systems.

Welcome to the labyrinth. Bring snacks.

* The solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short quote is forthcoming. Filthy animals is a nod to Home Alone.

Elites Ruined It For Everyone

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David Brooks and the Hollowing Out of Conservatism

David Brooks is the quintessential old-school Conservative—the kind who once upheld a semblance of ideological coherence. He belongs to the pre-Reagan-Thatcher vintage, a time when Conservatism at least had the decency to argue from principles rather than blind tribalism. We could debate these people in good faith. Those days are gone. The current incarnation of Conservatism contains only homoeopathic traces of its Classical™ predecessor—diluted beyond recognition.

The Degeneration of Conservatism

The rot set in with Reagan, who caught it from Thatcher. Greed and selfishness were laundered into virtues, repackaged as “individual responsibility,” and the party’s intellectual ballast began to erode. By the time Bush II’s administration rolled in, Neo-Conservatism had replaced any lingering Burkean ethos, and by Trump’s tenure, even the pretence of ideology was gone. Conservatism-in-Name-Only—whatever Trump’s brand of reactionary nihilism was—swallowed the party whole. Do they even call themselves Conservatives anymore, or has that ship sailed along with basic literacy?

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To be fair, this didn’t go unnoticed. Plenty of old-school Republicans recoiled in horror when Trump became their figurehead. Before the 2016 election, conservative pundits could barely contain their disdain for his incompetence, lack of moral compass, and general buffoonery. And yet, once they realised he was the party’s golden goose, they clambered aboard the Trump Train with the enthusiasm of lottery winners at a payday loan office. His staunchest critics became his most obsequious apologists. What does this tell us about their value system? Spoiler: nothing good.

Brooks’ Lament

Which brings us back to Brooks, who now bemoans the death of Conservative values. On this, we agree. Where we part ways is on whether those values were worth saving. Say you’re boarding a train from New York to Los Angeles. Conservatism might argue that a Miami-bound train is still a train, so what’s the problem? It’s the same vehicle, just going somewhere else. Except, of course, Conservatism has always insisted on the slow train over the fast train—because urgency is unseemly, and progress must be rationed.

If I’m an affluent middle-classer, I might prefer Conservatism’s careful incrementalism—it keeps my apple cart stable. Admirable, if you enjoy tunnel vision. Progressives, by contrast, recognise that some people don’t even have apple carts. Some are starving while others hoard orchards. To the Conservative, the poor just aren’t trying hard enough. To the Progressive, the system is broken, and the playing field needs a serious re-levelling. Even when Conservatives acknowledge inequality, their instinct is to tiptoe toward justice rather than risk disrupting their own affluence.

The Fallacy of Objective Reality

Leaving politics for philosophy, Brooks predictably rails against Postmodernism, decrying relativism in favour of good old-fashioned Modernist “reality.” He’s horrified by subjectivism, as though personal interpretation weren’t the foundation of all human experience. Like Jordan Peterson, he believes his subjective truth is the objective truth. And like Peterson, he takes umbrage at anyone pointing out otherwise. It feels so absolute to them that they mistake their own convictions for universal constants.

As a subjectivist, I accept that reality is socially mediated. We interpret truth claims based on cognitive biases, cultural conditioning, and personal experience. Even when we strive for objectivity, we do so through subjective lenses. Brooks’ Modernist nostalgia is touching but delusional—akin to demanding we all agree on a single flavour of ice cream.

The Existential Problem

And so, I find myself in partial agreement with Brooks. Yes, there is an existential crisis. The patient has a broken leg. But our prescriptions differ wildly. I won’t offer a metaphor for that—consider it your homework as a reader.

Brooks is likely a better writer than a public speaker, but you may still find yourself nodding along with some of his arguments. If you’re a “true” Christian Conservative—if you still believe in something beyond crass self-interest—he may well be preaching to the choir. But let’s be honest: how many in that choir are still listening?

Man in Capitalistic Society

Posted in economics, equality, modernism, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, politics, power, property, psychology, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This is Chapter 5 of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society. I’ve had this on my bookshelf for quite a while and wasn’t sure how a 70-year-old book could have so much relevance, but it does. Granted, some of it is irrelevant, a victim of the period it was written. This happens.

Sidebar: Whilst praising Freud, Fromm also calls him out, essentially accusing him of projecting his mummy-daddy issues onto the world at large. When I first encountered Freud’s work in the 1980s, it was already largely discredited. Some of what should have been wasn’t. Freud’s work as a psychoanalyst heavily overshadowed his other contributions. In fact, Freud offers some strong philosophical insights into society and civilisation. He’s not all about cigars and dreamscapes.

What strikes me about this chapter is the historical perspective it provides on capitalism. I’m an academic economist. I taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade. I’ve read (and recommend reading) Marx’s Capital firsthand.

Audio: NotebookLM Podcast commentary on this content.

Fromm adds additional details here. Firstly, he notes that the capitalism that marked the early days of the Industrial Revolution—the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—differed from that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earlier period still had cultural and moral tethers that became frayed or lost in later periods. Without regurgitating the chapter, I cite some themes:

“this underselling practice is grown to such a shameful height, that particular persons publicly advertise that they undersell the rest of the trade.”

People were not very keen on price cutting as a competitive mechanism.

They also note the unfair competitive advantage of the monied elites who could buy materials in cash instead of credit and could thereby undercut prices, who would have to account for paying interest rates or markups on credit.

Whilst in the twentieth century, regulating undercutting is seen as protectionism, the earlier centuries had no problems defending merchants. We do have laws on the ebooks that prevent dumping, but these are rarely enforced, and when they are, it’s a political rather than economic statement. In practice, but done in the name of economics are politics in the same manner as science was used as cover to implement policy during the COVID-19 debacle.

Montesquieu says “that machines which diminish the numbers of workers are ‘pernicious’.” This sentiment echoes the current sentiments about robotics and artificial intelligence.

Nineteenth-century capitalism saw man as the measure of all things supplanted by capital. This is the capitalism Marx rails against—profits over humanity and society, the pursuit of local maxima at the expense of global maxima. This is also where the goal of hypergrowth and growth for growth’s sake came into vogue, ushering us into the Modern Age of Modern ideals—science, progress, order, and so on.

I won’t exhaust the chapter here, but for what it is, it’s a relatively light read. Whether I comment on later chapters depends on whether they engage me. Cheers.

The Schizophrenia of “Human Nature” Arguments

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Humans, we are told, are exceptional—unlike the rest of the lowly animal kingdom. We alone possess reason, morality, and the ability to transcend our base instincts. And yet, curiously, this argument is rolled out only when convenient. At times, we are commanded to rise above our primal urges; at others, we are scolded for even thinking about resisting them. This ideological schizophrenia is no accident—it is a feature, not a bug, of our prevailing moral and economic order.

The contradictions of “human nature” arguments can be broken down into two key patterns:

A. We must transcend our animal instincts—but only when they threaten social or economic order.

B. We must accept our animal instincts as unchangeable—but only when they reinforce existing power structures.

This hypocrisy is especially visible in how capitalism and morality are framed. Let’s examine two case studies.

Case 1: Prostitution—A Market That Must Be Morally Suppressed

Sex is as fundamental a biological drive as hunger or thirst. One would think that in a world where everything is commodified, prostitution—the most direct transaction of supply and demand—would be embraced by free-market capitalists. But no. We are told that engaging in this “base” activity is degrading, immoral, and must be curtailed. The same capitalists who defend free enterprise at all costs suddenly become moralists, urging us to resist temptation and rise above our urges. Sex, despite being one of the most natural acts imaginable, is treated as an impulse to be tamed rather than an economic exchange to be normalised.

Case 2: Capitalism—A System We Must Accept as “Natural”

Contrast this with how we are told to think about capitalism. Greed, exploitation, and ruthless competition? Those are “just human nature.” The strong thrive, and the weak perish. We are warned not to question the system because to do so would be to fight against nature itself. Socialism? A naive fantasy. Economic cooperation? Impossible. Mutual aid? Utopian nonsense. We must accept that humans are selfish creatures, that hierarchy is inevitable, and that billionaires accumulating obscene wealth while millions starve is simply the way of things.

Why are we ordered to suppress our instincts in one case yet surrender to them in another? Because morality, in its institutional form, is not about virtue—it is about control.

The Convenient Flexibility of “Human Nature”

This selective logic is designed to keep power structures intact. The rules shift depending on whose interests are at stake:

  • If an instinct challenges profit or control, it must be suppressed.
  • If an instinct benefits the ruling order, it must be accepted as natural.

Thus, the same societies that demand moral restraint when it comes to sex, leisure, or pleasure suddenly rediscover their inner Darwinist when defending capitalist greed and economic cruelty.

The “Natural Order” Myth

The claim that capitalism is the inevitable result of human nature is one of history’s greatest ideological scams. If it were indeed “natural,” it would not require:

  • Constant propaganda to reinforce its legitimacy.
  • Violent suppression of alternative systems.
  • Trillions in government bailouts every time it fails.

Moreover, humans are not only competitive, selfish creatures. We are also wired for cooperation, altruism, and communal living—traits conveniently erased from discussions about economics.

Final Thought: Breaking the Cycle

If we can rise above base instincts for sex and violence, why can’t we rise above capitalist greed and exploitation? Why is overcoming “human nature” only demanded when it suits power? The truth is, we are only commanded to rise above when it keeps us obedient—and ordered to accept reality when it keeps the powerful in control.

The only real rebellion is to reject this hypocrisy entirely. The future belongs not to those who passively accept the contradictions of the present, but to those who refuse to play by its schizophrenic rules.

Capitalism is Slavery

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It’s not uncommon to label workers under the capitalist system as wage slaves.

As with the abolition of slavery in the United States, the future will one day recoil at Capitalism, wondering how humanity could ever have justified the exploitation of others for commerce and profit. Then again, that’s the same question, isn’t it?

As with the old story, a man asked a lady: “Would you be willing to sleep with me if I paid you £1,000,000?” Without hesitation, she answered, “Yes.” “And what if I only paid you £5?” The irate lady fumed: “£5? What do you think I am?” The man replied: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re trying to determine the degree.”

Capitalism is only a matter of degree from slavery. In practice, slavery is a Capitalist’s wet dream.