Crisis Blindness

President of the United States, Donald Trump, is the madness of our times incarnate. I won't give any specific examples - a random gloss over his many daily tweets should suffice to convince you of the veracity of this statement - but this man seems bereft of any coherent thought, is unable to construct a valid, meaningful sentence, and is impervious to any criticism because he's completely oblivious to his own ineptitude; a textbook example of a narcissist fool.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

In his defense it has to be said that we all suffer from similar blind-spots; it's hard to see one's own shortcomings when they're part of one's very essence, when they're so deeply rooted in one's personality as to become invisible like a proverbial tree in a forest. I believe, and this is not fact but conjecture, that we've collectively suffered from this kind of blindness with regard to the destructive nature of the capitalist economy, and that a growing number of us are only now slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth; the ideology that has pervaded our society, culture, and even our psychology, is nothing like what was promised by economists, politicians, movies, television, billboards, commercials and all the other public voices that repeated the same vapid message over and over again.

We are still in the middle of capitalism's greatest crisis in history, despite all the propaganda pointing to growing GDP's and rising stock-markets; these metrics are meaningless and unusable for representing a rising or falling quality of life for the average citizen who doesn't own stocks or bonds, and who's ambulance trip to the hospital after a heavy accident is counted as a big plus for the gross domestic product. Completely useless. This is capitalism's greatest crisis simply because of the fact that we're now talking about a world-economy, which is why we see its negative effects becoming apparent all over the world; Trump isn't the only right wing nationalist populist who's been able to bumble his way into the higher echelons of national politics, as he's just one instance of a world-wide reactionary move against neoliberal globalism.

These populists all use the same slogan over and over again: "Our own country first! Our own people first! Make (fill in country of preference) Great Again!" They all promise to protect their indigenous populations against the "others" coming from abroad, they demonize the immigrants as they are blamed for the woeful financial circumstance of the butchered middle class; the others steal "our" jobs, drive down our wages and plunder our social security nets. These reactionary leaders cultivate an authoritarian, "no nonsense", and politically incorrect atmosphere around themselves, and are adored by their blinded followers for daring to publicly express opinions and emotions that have been brooding among those who have been left behind, who were not allowed to participate in the enormous economic growth of the past half century; they've given up on waiting for their share of the pie and have decided it will never come because it has been stolen by those "others".

These are the people who still suffer from the aforementioned blindness; the thought that maybe it's the economy failing doesn't even occur to them. And that's sad because it's so clear and so necessary to put a stop to it. Capitalism's greatest crisis shows it's ugly head in so many ways that, for me at least, it's hard to imagine that anyone can miss it. Growing inequality, the destruction of the environment, climate change, the death of democracy and the consequent feeling of powerlessness, despair and apathy, the escapism provided by vapid, meaningless pop-culture icons like "The Voice", "Dancing With Stars", "Big Brother", "The Kardashians", the hedonism expressed by the TV celebrity of gourmet cooks, DJ's and sexualization of women, men and everything in between; these are all signs of an empire in decline, and all products of capitalism's unrelenting focus on individual gains and economical growth. We've lived this ideology for so long now, and have been told the same propaganda by the winners in this system so often, that we're blind to this fact: "it's the economy, stupid!"

_{Richard D. Wolff - When and Why will Capitalism end?}

Socialism's and communism's growing popularity among the younger generations is so easily explained: their minds aren't shaped by capitalism's vapid promises yet. I'm happy to be able to count myself among the young ones in this case; I've never believed that "you'll make it if you just play by the rules and work hard", as I've seen the fallacy of that statement with my father and uncle, who both studied and worked their asses off, both as immigrants, and one, my uncle, made it, but my father never did. But... My father could still with a straight face tell me that I would grow up in better times than he did; middle class parents can not make that promise today as they've experienced a half century of continuous economical growth, which they've been excluded from. They've seen with their own eyes that they worked harder and more hours, just to make their bosses, and their bosses' bosses, richer. Still, even though they've seen it happen, they've adopted the capitalist mindset so completely that they won't admit, don't want to admit, that they've been lied to their whole life.

Trump and his bumbling peers inside the western hemisphere are the tangible expressions of the neoliberal world economy in crisis. They are not the answer though. The answer can be found in the recognition of capitalism's fundamental failures and finding solutions to them. The answer is not a fearful retreat behind one's own borders, or pointing accusing fingers to those on the other side of those borders, as that would mean a step back in time and a dismissal of the fact that we all need resources found elsewhere. This crisis is a global problem that affects all inhabitants of this planet, human and other life, and needs a global solution through international cooperation. We have to leave behind us the idea that these solutions will come through international competition; that's one of the capitalist stories that's never been true to begin with as history irrefutably shows that we do great things when we cooperate, when we set our minds to accomplish a common goal.

What that goal should be is not so hard: leave the world in a better place than where we found it. That's the exact opposite of what we've been brainwashed into doing right now; we are, for example, in the middle of the planet's sixth mass extinction, the first one caused by humanity (by capitalism), and dubbed a "biological annihilation" by researchers in the study Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines. Depression and suicides have reached astronomical proportions among the disillusioned peoples of failing free market democracies all over the world. We're slowly expanding into space, but that gives us no joy because we do so to make a profit, not to explore new possibilities. Artificial intelligence and robotics should free our bodies and minds, but within the capitalist framework and mindset they're rightly seen as modern day's greatest existential threats. We rightfully fear artificial minds that are created with a mindset that truly believes that "greed is good", which it is in the world we've created. The ideology that values profits and growth over happiness, democracy, over life itself even, should be abandoned, or we will never make a better place for ourselves and future Earthlings.

Here's a wonderful interview with Marxist David Harvey who does a great job explaining all this in Marxist terms like "the alienation of labor". You'll hear Trump brag about the rising stock markets under his administration followed by Harvey's exposition that can be summarized as "bond holders creating an economy that's good for bond holders", the uselessness of many jobs, and much more:

_{David Harvey Talks about the Crimes of Capitalism}

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