The more time passes, the more my mind keeps going back to the question “Can (or will) capitalism hold a space in its structure for ethics?” I also ask myself what my place is in a system where individual gains often forego holistic and collective wellbeing. I ask myself what and where could be the place of ethics in a capitalistic economic model? When do you put ethics first and capital last? Is there such a case in which we could put capital second—or at least, in which we would be willing to? I, a hopeless utopist, would like to think so. After all, capitalism, however poor its reputation may be in this day and age, still holds the most potential for individual reward out of most economic models. The risks are high, but so are the prizes at the finish line. The question, when analyzing this topic through the lens of ethics, is if we even need those risks at all in the first place. Do we need to stomp on each other like we’ve been so keenly doing for the past few decades, or is this apathy towards human suffering a result of capitalism itself? Is there a solution? Nihilistically-thinking, there may very well not be any solution to our current predicament, if not a complete reshuffling of priorities and values. But, unless we look within, we won’t know what can be done without.
The Meriam-Webster dictionary defines capitalism as “an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market”. So far, nothing problematic—quite the opposite in fact. Often contrasted with the notions of communism and socialism, whereby the elimination of classes and private property is advocated along with the common sharing of all resources, capitalism is an economic system in which a society’s means of production are not held by the government but rather by private individuals or corporations, and where the products, their prices and the ways they’re distributed are determined by competing in a free market. As to defining capital itself, the Meriam-Webster dictionary describes it as “wealth—that is, money and goods—that’s used to produce more wealth”. In simpler terms, capitalism has for aim to make money, and use that very money to make more money. Because capital (and indirectly money) is the golden rule of capitalistic societies, individuals are incited to compete for the growth of personal wealth. Culturally, capitalism therefore fosters individualism over collectivism. However, no society is currently purely capitalist, or purely socialist (and that’s probably a good thing). A purely capitalist society would in fact not have any public schools, public parks, government programs like Social Security or Medicare, or any public highways and police. These would all be managed by private entities or organizations, and the rules which they would abide by would also be determined by the latter. In opposition, a purely socialist system would not have any private corporations, and personal business venture would therefore not be possible.
Now that we understand the basis of each notion and the systems they foster, we can start understanding the behaviors and consequences they may yield in people as individuals, but also in people as a group. On one hand, capitalism enables the development of individual wealth for anyone in society, regardless of their background. Societal or cultural biases aside, capitalism enables people to develop local economies and generate unprecedented wealth. An example is what was known as the “Black Wall Street” in early the 1900s in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where African Americans had created a self-sufficient prosperous business district—later destroyed in 1921 during the Tulsa race massacre perpetrated by a White American mob. By enabling personal venture, capitalism therefore opens the door for the generation of wealth where it previously did not exist. However, this is only theory, and as we all know, theory often differs from practice. What makes practice different is the human factor; in other words, us. We make things different and complicated (as usual). Throughout time, the intensification of capitalism in society has also influenced our behaviors. By operating in a system where wealth and its production is made the very aim of one’s existence (since we cannot survive without it), people have been gradually conditioned to stomp on each other to survive. While such behaviors are naturally human—stomping on each other being nothing but plain and simple survival instinct—it also gives way to rather gruesome situations where people are ready to cause irreversible damage onto others for their own personal gain, or put simply, for money. A hypothesis to explain why capitalism remains an attractive model may be that it allows us to overtly practice morally condemnable behaviors without the fear of being punished for it, or without the necessity for rationalizing them since they’re made societally acceptable. It also raises the question whether the possibility for less selfish and gain-oriented behaviors may be to offer people fairer access to basic resources instead of being incentivized to continuously fight for them. After all, as contributors in a system, shouldn’t we ideally receive as much as we give?
Our mental conditioning in partaking in a continuous dogfight and accepting that these are the only rules we should abide by is where ethics go missing in capitalism. More precisely, the greatest challenges in respect to ethics in capitalism may in fact happen at the level of decision-making inside each business and corporation. Every decision made is ultimately a responsibility we as individuals take for the potential consequences they may bear. Oftentimes, we deem choosing economic profit at the expense of human suffering an acceptable decision. Understanding why is what I find not only fascinating but necessary in order to adjust our behaviors. One explanation behind our growing penchant for individualism can be found in the progressive decrease of empathy in people over the years. Horacio Sanchez, author, clinician, and CEO of Resiliency Inc. writes in his 2021 book “The Poverty Problem: How Education Can Promote Resilience and Counter Poverty’s Impact on Brain Development and Functioning” that empathy has in fact steadily declined in people between 1979 to 2009: “The average person is less empathetic than three-quarters of the people living in 1970 (Konrath at al., 2011)”. Those findings are linked to our increase in online interactions and our decrease in face-to-face interactions. This diminution of in-person exchanges contributes to the erosion of our empathy skills. These empathy skills can however be regained or retrained; Sanchez cites work from clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Helen Weng and colleagues in which they discovered through the use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that people can develop empathy and altruism through cognitive reappraisal in a short period. Nevertheless, because such solutions are not known of and practiced enough, this steady decrease in empathy continues its due course. In parallel, levels of narcissism have significantly risen since the late seventies. A 2008 study by American psychologist and author Dr. Jean Twenge found that “almost two-thirds of recent college students are above the mean 1979–1985 narcissism score, a 30% increase. The results complement previous studies finding increases in other individualistic traits such as assertiveness, agency, self-esteem, and extraversion.” Twenge in fact calls this phenomenon the “narcissism epidemic”, which she associates with America’s cultural focus on self-admiration. She reviews this topic in great depth in her 2014 book “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—And More Miserable Than Ever Before”. In a 2012 study, Twenge shares that the use of narcissistic phrases such as “I am the greatest” has increased between 1960 and 2008. Among similar findings is one from Cassandra Rutledge Newsom and colleagues in their 2010 study “Changes in Adolescent Response Patterns on the MMPI/MMPI-A Across Four Decades”, in which they found that the endorsement rate for the statement “I am an important person” has increased from 12% in 1963 to 77–80% in 1992 in adolescents. I could go on for days with such findings, but I think we all get the point here: we’re overall growing more self-centered, and care less and less about others. In the context of capitalism, this translates into an increase in self-prioritization and a decrease in consideration for our decisions’ impacts on others. For instance, many Western corporations choose to get their goods manufactured in places of the world where labor costs are cheaper than where their company is headquartered. In many cases, the working conditions in which those goods are manufactured violate the labor laws which the corporations they work for abide by. In exchange, those corporations can make greater profit when selling the final product. Put simply, it’s money before morals.
Cheapness and abundance in fact constitute the very appeal of capitalism. People are incentivized to work hard, and to consume even harder. As a result, people are increasingly unhappy because the chase never ends, and life no longer makes sense because everything happens so fast to the point where being alive is simply no longer enjoyable at all. In a September 2022 article, Gallup (American analytics and advisory company) stated that “unhappiness has been steadily climbing for a decade”—way before the mess 2020 brought—and that the rise of this unhappiness “had been in the blind spot of almost every world leader […] Why? Because they were focused on measures like GDP and unemployment. Almost none of them were paying attention to how people were feeling.” Earlier that year, in June 2022, Gallup declared “World Unhappier, More Stressed Out Than Ever”, detailing that “on top of the increase in negative experiences, fewer people reported that they had positive experiences the previous day [of the survey conducted]. After several years of stability, the Positive Experience Index score in 2021 – 69 – dropped for the first time since 2017.” Although we have more to do, more to consume, and all in all more of everything, we’re less and less happy; almost like this “more of everything” is just too much. Likewise, because our days consist of a compression of more and more tasks in an ever-shorter time span, we feel like the pace of life is accelerating, making us feel like there’s no way out from the system we currently live in. In simplified terms: we feel trapped like a fly in a jar. This feeling then engenders sinister consequences for human life and on health in general. A 2020 study by Renee D. Goodwin and colleagues in fact stated that anxiety increased from 5.12% in 2008 to 6.68% in 2018 among adult Americans, with a notable increase from 7.97% to 14.66% among 18–25-year-olds—a more rapid increase than among 26–34 and 35–49-year-olds. Another study by Goodwin and colleagues conducted at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and City University of New York in 2022 found that “depression was prevalent among nearly 1 in 10 Americans and almost 1 in 5 adolescents and young adults”. One irrefutable factor influencing these trends was the social and political changes which occurred between 2020 and 2022, and which disrupted the lives of many around the world—from social isolation, to grief, and overall, a destabilization of people’s day-to-day lives. In brief, human homeostasis is more and more challenged through the environment we live in and increasingly harder to restore.
The notion of people breaking under pressure is embedded in our system, with an almost entirely reliable guarantee of replacement, since the great majority of the people who inhabit this very system are trapped in it and will never be able to get out. People breaking from time to time and getting replaced is a key notion to understanding the role which we humans play in capitalistic societies: a role of mere expandable resource. As a matter of fact, we refer to employees as human resources. Humans indeed constitute one of many resources which a business utilizes, alongside money, land, or raw materials. Whether or not this is an ethical notion is outside of the question here. Capital constituting the very goal of our economic model, most of us do not challenge the possible immorality of the actions taken to feed the system in place. Another reason behind that is that as much as we feed the beast, the beast feeds us too. While a lot of us participate in the continuation of capitalism knowing the damage it causes, we also profit personally from our very participation. The only issue is that we probably feed the beast more than it feeds us.
Another observable consequence of capitalism and our lives being ruled by money is the killing of personal hobbies. We often come across the term “hustle” on social media, and the notion that if you don’t market your skills, you’re wasting them or are missing out on potential profit—the bottom line being “If you’re not doing it for money, why are you even doing it at all?” This applies to anything. If you paint, sing, or make pottery on your Sunday afternoons, you should open an online account and sell your creations. If you sing, or play an instrument, you should record yourself and sell your art. If you’re well-built, have attractive facial or bodily features, you should model or sell your appearance in some shape or form. All in all, despite the tremendous rise of hedonism in Western culture, the notion of doing things for personal and private pleasure without anyone having to know about it is slowly disappearing. As a result, capitalism heightens our sense of greed, often leaving us wanting more and feeling less and less happy about ourselves or what we do. We equate our worth to our income, and our having to our being.
I frankly am not too sure what the conclusion is here. A part of me would like to think (or hope) there is a possible middle-ground between ultra-capitalism and mild socialism—although I do also have my own fears around socialism after seeing a few glimpses in the past two years of what the world could become if ruled purely by governmental agencies. I am no expert in economy, but one thing I know we could all do more is taming our own personal demons: our greed, our apathy for others, our narcissism, and all those insecurities we refuse to work on because repeating the same day all over again is easier than tidying up and starting anew.
Sources
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capitalism
Horacio Sanchez, “The Poverty Problem: How Education Can Promote Resilience and Counter Poverty’s Impact on Brain Development and Functioning” (2021).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45508353_Changes_in_Dispositional_Empathy_in_American_College_Students_Over_Time_A_Meta-Analysis
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.00507.x
http://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/twenge2009.pdf
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327752JPA8101_07
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040181
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5783345
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/401216/global-rise-unhappiness.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/394025/world-unhappier-stressed-ever.aspx
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e2.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7441973
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9483000/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/08/how-to-fix-capitalism-eight-experts-solutions
Aude Calloch 