So, the other day my father says to me "America is a capitalist country. It was born a Capitalist country and, if it ever does, it will die a Capitalist country."
And when I first considered this statement and its validity...I defined capitalism as the economic, the more intellectual definition, that is a system of privately owned Capital. And when I thought to myself, can a country, a nation, whose fundamental beliefs are of this privitization, holding onto what is their own, change? I quickly knew the answer. It is not a question of human nature - because all humans are different and I believe there is no such thing as a single Human Nature - but rather of a Human instinct.
Imagine a kid in a candy shop. If he get a piece of candy - whether by doing his chores or simply being fortunate enough to be that kid whose local candy man is just so nice - he will not give it away. He will fight, even if it means he loses the change still in his pocket, enough to buy another piece, spills blood or, go forbid, is thrown onto the floor, his head crashing onto the cold wooden floor voluntarily for the last time.
This is what all humans do, though, maybe, not to such an extent. After all, isn't a child in a state of "tabula rasa..." isn't he sanskara-less. Yes he is and, for this reason, he is the best test rat for our experiments.
So, what does this have to do with our capitalism? The thing is...we, as Americans, confuse this determination for greed. It is not greed. Yes, if the boy is forced by the vociferous arms of violence to hand over his candy, he will never oblige. But, if he loves someone, say his mother, his sister, his best friend or the girl across the street , and if that someone were to ask him for that piece of candy...HE WILL OBLIGE. Our Revolution and the rise of our Constitutional government beautifully illustrate this point.
This misunderstanding - that is confusing greed and determination - is one reason why the United States will never budge from its "Capitalist" roots. But a second fault that is feeding into this Capitalist frenzy, that is also greatly puncturing Humanity as a whole, is this obsession with specifications, that is too get more and more detailed with a certain subject, so much as to forget the greater picture, the larger picture.
Consider a situation with a car salesman and a potential car-owner. As the car-owner spits out numbers, the car salesman nods yes or no and, even now and then, spits out a few numbers of his own. Now, we must wonder, what is the whole point of this. The customer wants the lowest price and the salesman wants the highest...or does he? No, he doesn't. He wants a home, maybe he wants to buy his parents a home in Key West or his girlfriend a diamond ring.
But, with all this intertwindedness and arrows, if you will, there seems to be a possible way to get all these things if the salesman gets the highest prize. So, now, the deal is not to comfort the customer AND the salesman, but to just get a price for this car that lies between the customer's floor and the salesman's ceiling. This is another great Institution in Americanism - arguable the best run Capitalistic Democracy: compromise.
This perfection in compromise has made Americans successful in, amongst others, two pillars of society: politics and economics. Because we are (or should I say were?) able to make deals and compromise to perfection, we were able to hammer out the Great Compromise, which is the first of the many compromises that popped into my mind; however, the GC was such a great event in our eventful history because it was the first compromise we made as a country within ourselves, but mainly because otherwise, the United States would have descended into chaos. Besides just politics, it doesn't take a genius to understand that deals are a critical part of a Capitalist economy.
So, yes, our country has decline in its once awesome power not because of our strength as deal-makers or of our weakened Congress. It is rather because of how big our country has become and, instead of look at the larger picture we have decided to specialize and specialize until we have put our trust, our very own existence, on something so specific and small. Its like a computer who runs a caching system and is trying to look for a file that is stored in some obscure pathway...it will never find it and, even if it does, it will be a very long time.
As Americans we have some broad ideas and beliefs that are very common, but the more and more we specify an issue, the more and more we disagree. There is a fancy word for this, but I have forgotten it. This is a central point in American political culture.
So, to arrive at a consensus, a deal, we mustn't specify as to how to do things, but to broaden. Why do we talk about debt ceilings and floors when we could try to up our treasury through taxes? A wealthier businessman can give more than an inner-city single mother. Why do we occupy ourselves with the ifs and buts when we know that decisions like these will really get us back to where we were. We could do it the ugly way, by transforming our children into economically driven robots "studying" unhuman specifications, or we could do it the American way: to look at the broad picture.
To all those who still may disagree with me: how can the trickle-down effect work if there is no "trickler" or, for that matter, nothing to trickle-down to. Because, according to the President of the United States, "this is it." DEAL OR NO DEAL.
And when I first considered this statement and its validity...I defined capitalism as the economic, the more intellectual definition, that is a system of privately owned Capital. And when I thought to myself, can a country, a nation, whose fundamental beliefs are of this privitization, holding onto what is their own, change? I quickly knew the answer. It is not a question of human nature - because all humans are different and I believe there is no such thing as a single Human Nature - but rather of a Human instinct.
Imagine a kid in a candy shop. If he get a piece of candy - whether by doing his chores or simply being fortunate enough to be that kid whose local candy man is just so nice - he will not give it away. He will fight, even if it means he loses the change still in his pocket, enough to buy another piece, spills blood or, go forbid, is thrown onto the floor, his head crashing onto the cold wooden floor voluntarily for the last time.
This is what all humans do, though, maybe, not to such an extent. After all, isn't a child in a state of "tabula rasa..." isn't he sanskara-less. Yes he is and, for this reason, he is the best test rat for our experiments.
So, what does this have to do with our capitalism? The thing is...we, as Americans, confuse this determination for greed. It is not greed. Yes, if the boy is forced by the vociferous arms of violence to hand over his candy, he will never oblige. But, if he loves someone, say his mother, his sister, his best friend or the girl across the street , and if that someone were to ask him for that piece of candy...HE WILL OBLIGE. Our Revolution and the rise of our Constitutional government beautifully illustrate this point.
This misunderstanding - that is confusing greed and determination - is one reason why the United States will never budge from its "Capitalist" roots. But a second fault that is feeding into this Capitalist frenzy, that is also greatly puncturing Humanity as a whole, is this obsession with specifications, that is too get more and more detailed with a certain subject, so much as to forget the greater picture, the larger picture.
Consider a situation with a car salesman and a potential car-owner. As the car-owner spits out numbers, the car salesman nods yes or no and, even now and then, spits out a few numbers of his own. Now, we must wonder, what is the whole point of this. The customer wants the lowest price and the salesman wants the highest...or does he? No, he doesn't. He wants a home, maybe he wants to buy his parents a home in Key West or his girlfriend a diamond ring.
But, with all this intertwindedness and arrows, if you will, there seems to be a possible way to get all these things if the salesman gets the highest prize. So, now, the deal is not to comfort the customer AND the salesman, but to just get a price for this car that lies between the customer's floor and the salesman's ceiling. This is another great Institution in Americanism - arguable the best run Capitalistic Democracy: compromise.
This perfection in compromise has made Americans successful in, amongst others, two pillars of society: politics and economics. Because we are (or should I say were?) able to make deals and compromise to perfection, we were able to hammer out the Great Compromise, which is the first of the many compromises that popped into my mind; however, the GC was such a great event in our eventful history because it was the first compromise we made as a country within ourselves, but mainly because otherwise, the United States would have descended into chaos. Besides just politics, it doesn't take a genius to understand that deals are a critical part of a Capitalist economy.
So, yes, our country has decline in its once awesome power not because of our strength as deal-makers or of our weakened Congress. It is rather because of how big our country has become and, instead of look at the larger picture we have decided to specialize and specialize until we have put our trust, our very own existence, on something so specific and small. Its like a computer who runs a caching system and is trying to look for a file that is stored in some obscure pathway...it will never find it and, even if it does, it will be a very long time.
As Americans we have some broad ideas and beliefs that are very common, but the more and more we specify an issue, the more and more we disagree. There is a fancy word for this, but I have forgotten it. This is a central point in American political culture.
So, to arrive at a consensus, a deal, we mustn't specify as to how to do things, but to broaden. Why do we talk about debt ceilings and floors when we could try to up our treasury through taxes? A wealthier businessman can give more than an inner-city single mother. Why do we occupy ourselves with the ifs and buts when we know that decisions like these will really get us back to where we were. We could do it the ugly way, by transforming our children into economically driven robots "studying" unhuman specifications, or we could do it the American way: to look at the broad picture.
To all those who still may disagree with me: how can the trickle-down effect work if there is no "trickler" or, for that matter, nothing to trickle-down to. Because, according to the President of the United States, "this is it." DEAL OR NO DEAL.
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