Capitalist Dishonor Is, Literally, Worse Than Death
After a brief interview with a researcher who is studying online communities, including once prominent individuals within them, I was brought to think again about Aaron Swartz—a textbook case of a neurodivergently compassionate and ethical person, a man literally too good for this world. This led me here, on that man’s blog, where the author recounts a lecture from a speaker who poses the self-trolley problem. Would you sacrifice your own life, to save ten other people? About a third of them said they probably would.
This one’s both hard and easy. It’s hard because none of us know what death is. It’s easy because it feels like it has an obvious right answer: To die, thus saving ten people. Let’s say that there is an afterlife and that our actions in this life do matter. It becomes straightforward—do not pass Go, do not collect $200 or make for your boss $50,000, go directly to Heaven. Okay, but let’s say there is no afterlife—no God, no objective meaning. The best we can do is create our own meaning. Saving ten others, as one’s created meaning? One can do worse.
I don’t know if I’d actually make the sacrifice, when put on the spot, because I cannot predict the amount of sheer biological fear I would likely be experiencing, but I still feel confident, to the 95-percent level, that I’d make the right choice.
The speaker then asks the students if they would live in poverty, which they have probably never experienced, to save ten lives. The percentage of affirmative respondents goes up—almost everyone says they would. This is the part I do not believe, and the speaker clearly does not believe it either, because he points out that, by occupying middle-class positions in a capitalist system that murders millions of people annually, they have not walked away from something far worse than Omelas.
Is this a case of hypocrisy? I don’t think so. I fully believe a middle-of-the-road college student would consider giving his life to save ten strangers. Some really would. And I believe nearly zero middle-of-the-road or even morally excellent people would endure poverty, if we’re talking about the real kind, to save ten or even a thousand lives.
The speaker poses the question at first like this (emphases mine)(:
The king says he will let his people go if you will agree to give him all the money you have and all the money you will make in the future, except of course enough for you to feed and house yourself and take care of all the absolute necessities. In other words he’s asking you to be poor, but not so poor that it impairs your health in any way.
This, of course, isn’t real poverty. It’s not even close. There is guaranteed housing and food. The subject’s ability to find and keep gainful employment, it is implied, will be guarded. There is mediocre protection by a mediocre-ly tyrannical king who becomes implicitly responsible for guaranteeing a mediocre standard of living. This isn’t what a child fantasizes about, but let us be honest. There is, in fact, already a four-letter word for “not so poor that it impairs your health in any way”—Rich. If you do not stress—to the degree of serious bodily damage—about losing your job and career and reputation and thus being homeless or unable to care for others, you are either oblivious or rich.
The king’s offer is: You won’t own a castle, and you’ll probably need a job that sends you if you’d like to travel the world, but—it is right there in the contract—you can never fall so low in social status that it damages your health. You can step out of the office ratrace for a week, or a year, and not only not die but be no sicker than before hand. Ninety-five percent of Americans and ninety-eight percent of people in the world would take this deal. It’s an upgrade.
It is not actually inconsistent that these college students would take on the poverty discussed above to save ten lives, but not even consider the degradation that is real poverty. The hypothetical is not demanding you suffer the hell of true poverty, or even the purgatory of corporate life—it requests you consider descent to the experience of being rich, but with no money. There’s a huge difference. Your friends will wonder why you can never afford things, but if you tell them that you saved ten lives, you won’t be the one feeling small.
This I say knowing that rich people and poor people are unhappy for, in general, the same reason. When your life is all about money, your life is terrible. Money is other people, and it’s other people at their absolute fucking worse. When you’re a billionaire, you effortless receive high social status that you know you did not earn and that will be taken away from you the moment a business decision or (justified or false) criminal conviction or international entanglement deprives you of the ability to do things for others. When you’re poor, you suffer low social status you also do not deserve, and you are constantly humiliated by your inability to do things for others, and your life is even more about money—the lack of it, the degrading things you do to get it. Guaranteed mediocre material circumstances, with insurance against true dishonor, is something most people would take. We are literally talking about a trust fund.
To turn this hypothetical into one that would truly test people—a moral test that I might actually fail—let us make it truly bad. To save ten lives, you must live ten lives—sixty years each, with no escape—in genuine poverty. You will have bosses who don’t care if you’re tired and who will withhold food if they decide you’re slow. If you don’t eat, you’ll experience starvation but never die. If you get sick, you’ll live with chronic pain, because medicine will be unavailable. If you stop working, you’ll experience social rejection to the point of developing intractable, end-stage depression—the bed-shitting kind, not the medicable kind, but you won’t even have a bed to shit in. If you succumb to the suicidal impulse, you will not only fail but live with the dishonor and disfigurement of the failed attempt. You will be awakened in the middle of the night by law enforcement and forced to move because your presence is disgusting to others. You might die of untreated bone cancer in the street, while others point and laugh. You stand a 99% chance of being sexually violated in at least one of these lives. Others will eat in front of you while you starve and you will have the most violent, unprintable fantasies about them, but be too tired to move an arm. That will be your next six hundred years—to save the lives of ten strangers, nine of whom would probably spit on you if they saw you in such a state, unknowing that you took it on yourself to save them. Would you take this deal?
As far as I can go, and I consider myself a standard deviation or two above average in moral character, is to say that I would consider trying it. I do not think I would last the six hundred years. The experience itself might turn me into a coward.
And now we understand capitalism. Capitalism persists not because we are terrified of death—we are scared of it, of course, but not so much as to tolerate capitalism forever, as the inevitable revolution against it will show—but because it has punishments far worse than death in store. If you do not “provide for” your family, it will find, torture, and murder them.
Capitalism, for all the death it causes, has no conception of it, because capitalist entities—artificial persons that cannot be killed; that is, gods—are expected to live forever. Once people no longer transact with the market, they do not matter and, in fact, they also never mattered because, while there may or may not be supernatural mechanisms by which they can confer favors, there are no legal structures to force them to do so. Capitalism does not know or care what happens in the next life; it does not even know or care about the conscious experience of this one.
No one built capitalism, not exactly, so no one knows what it’s supposed to do. But I’ll tell you what it does do. It measures, with shocking efficiency and precision, the valuations placed by humans on all things—material possessions, affirmations of esteem and reputation, the asymmetric state services called “property rights”—as ranked by how much people are willing to suffer to get them. It has no concept of meaning, but it knows how to measure ours. That is the first stroke of its malignant genius: get the humans to tell you what they value. The second is to collect all those valued things and, with priority placed on the ones most valued, put them where they do the least good and the most harm—in the coffers of people who already too much. It is reverse alchemy; it turns gold into shit. It cannot be regulated, it cannot be reasoned with, and it cannot be fixed—either we will destroy this mammon machine, or it will destroy us.
Capitalism knows our fears; at least, it can follow gradients. It is not biological, but it understands our biology well enough to know that we do not like hunger or heat or cold, and it is according to this principle that the means to escape such pains are priced. Capitalism has no fear of death, but it does we do. It knows, more than that, our fear of social rejection. We fear the look on someone’s face that suggests violence is imminent more than we fear a few moments of pain followed by release or nonexistence. We fear—and it knows this too—that we fear dishonor most of all; that we fear rejection most when coupled with total confidence that our rejectors are right. We fear dishonor so much—social rejection becomes no issue to us if we die; social rejection of the people we care about, after we are gone, is its real threat—that we will suffer the miserable lives capitalism intends to give us instead. Suicide, if not in the context of medical euthanasia, is considered so extremely dishonorable that the act of self-termination remains, in spite of our living under capitalism, rare.
I’ll say now that I am an advocate of the global birth strike and want it to continue. The people of South Korea and Japan—and, now, basically everywhere—who are refusing to produce more wage slaves or shrapnel catchers for capitalists and warmongers are doing exactly what they should. This must be applauded. I do not have human extinction as a goal, but the dysfunction caused by a birth strike, which will be fatal to the capitalist system if it continues, both gives us the least violent solution to our problem and reduces our ecological load until we devise a more humane and sustainable economy. I am personally optimistic. I believe the birth strike will spread and that there is nothing the ruling class can do; if, for example, they start to force women to reproduce against their will, this will give us open license to eradicate our capitalist rulers forever. Nonviolent solutions do not exist, because inaction is violent—capitalism has murdered a couple hundred people in the time you’ve spent reading this essay—and because the dysfunction the global birth strike shall induce will cause loss of life, but it might still be the least violent way to go about it.
Death, in all cases but especially those involving direct personal opposition to capitalism, becomes a possibility. Dishonor, for those who accept capitalism and live as the system wants them to live, is a certainty—it is, point blank, dishonorable to allow this socioeconomic system to continue. If people truly realize dishonor to be worse than death—I suspect they already do, which is why they will gladly die to save human life, but almost never suffer even the mild personal dishonor of, say, being unable to provide for loved ones—then capitalism can fall within an afternoon.
I shall conclude on the topic of religion. As I said, we don’t know what death is. I am in some ways an intensely religious person—I believe in a purposeful originating cause (a God) with a direct, intimate interest in the health of human culture—but I will also confess that I do not know. I believe things; that’s all. I don’t believe in eternal hell, because I don’t think God is insane or vindictive—a God who is better than me in every way would not use a punishment that even I, at my worst, could not inflict—but I do believe in hell. I just make no claims about how long it lasts. Hell is a moment of infinite regret—it is unclear what time is, in a nonphysical world, but this excruciating destruction might not take long at all—at the realization, after one’s life, that it did in fact have a purpose, but that one’s exertions were all moral failures, and that one’s soul or essence has become so corrupted that continuation (because I believe God to be omnibenevolent but not omnipotent) is impossible. What follows might be nonexistence—it might also be an unfavorable reincarnation, such as into the body of tapeworm, that would make discontinuity total. It is not for me to speculate on the details. Who goes to hell? I do not believe it matters how many times you masturbate. I don’t think God cares if you prefer your own sex or the opposite one for romance or physicality. I am fairly sure that God expected many of us to be nonbelievers, as the world seems designed to look like it runs on its own; if God exists, God knows and doesn’t need to be told the fact by our belief. So I am very confident that gay atheists wake up in the better half of the afterlife all the time. No, the question of who goes to hell, in my mind, is pretty simple. The same people who make this place hell are the ones who will go to hell.