How do you eat an elephant?
“One bite at a time,” as the old adage goes.
Belief forms reality—or, more correctly, consciousness does. Beliefs are just the filters our raw consciousness runs through before we take incarnate action; they color the deep knowing we all possess from the imaginal realm with the dualism we must experience in this one. If concepts are like containers, compartmentalizing consciousness, beliefs are the Chemex filter distilling living water and grist for the mill down into an embodied brew of manifest behavior.
That’s a long way of saying something insanely practical: if we can change our collective belief, we can change our collective behaviors, and in so doing change our reality.
Capitalism has had it’s day in the sun. The jig is up. We all know something has metastasized and led to the obvious cancer plaguing our world’s most dominant -ism. It’s made for wealth inequality that just really shouldn’t be possible on this planet.
If you really want “no kings,” don’t stop at a silly government official with a brief 4 year tenure. Revolutionize the system that churns out uber-monarchs like nothing Planet Earth has seen before, who engage in cloak and dagger tactics, forcing the hand of fate for the rest of the human race.
Stop Believing It’s Working
A broken clock is right twice a day, but that bitch is still broken.
Feeling the urge to defend capitalism? You don’t need to. I am not at all suggesting capitalism needs to be completely burned to the ground.
I’m suggesting it’s riddled with stage 4 cancer and needs to clean up its diet, surround itself with positivity, reconnect to nature and community and spirituality, or it will die on its own. The cancer (like an overzealous parasite) feeds on its host, and doesn’t possess the forethought to realize that ceaselessly feeding on the healthy, correctly-functioning cells around it will eventually lead to its own demise.
In many ways, however, the cancer eating capitalism is far worse than the basis of our analogy, because it does know its unchecked, under-regulated practices and exploitations will eventually mean the death (or at the very least, the destitution) of the entire system; it just believes it will be able to keep on living without a healthy host. These parties actually really do wager their dominance and wealth on a razor’s edge, knowing full well anyone and everyone/everything else could suffer for the sake of their exploitative ways, and knowing the system could collapse because of their own actions… they just don’t care.
Evil is the willful perpetuation of illusion. We can’t call cancer “evil” by this definition, because a cancer cell doesn’t “know” it’s supposed to be a skin cell or a brain cell or what have you; this ignorance is what causes its destructive behavior. Thus our analogy breaks down precisely because capitalism’s malady is actually worse than cancer, because it knows what it’s doing. It’s evil and sadistic.
It’s lunacy.
Sixty Percent
If the “c word” is working so well, tell me, how are you feeling at the gas pump and the grocery store, or when you’re sitting at the kitchen table sending your rent payments and checking bills off the list?
You don’t have to tell me, because statistically, it’s not looking good.
One study from The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity states:
Majority of Americans Can't Achieve a Minimal Quality of Life: … Bottom 60% of nation’s earners hold just 22% of disposable income but need 39% for a minimal quality of life.
Sixty. Percent.
Meanwhile, if you fit the world’s top billionaires into a school bus, those 20-30 or so people have more money than the entire bottom half of the rest of the world.
If our current version of capitalism made this possible, regardless of the (rather shocking) defenses you’ve heard for billionaires and how capitalism is the best thing since sliced bread, is your heart telling you it’s working? You mustn’t underestimate the importance of that question, nor of the conclusions your heart reaches. I’d say like a broken clock, capitalism just isn’t “right” nearly often enough for us to let it keep functioning the way it is.
I’m not trying to pose a question of whether capitalism should change its identity or not (though I’m sure many of you are open to that); I’m simply asking if it can reinvent its behaviors for its own good and for the good of literally every other creature on this planet. Symbiosis is a crucial element of living systems.
Live Differently
If you want to be part of a movement of people looking to change the system, the road to change is so much simpler than we allow ourselves to believe. After all, belief creates action creates reality.
For starters, you can simply integrate generosity into your life with a few friends, without the need for some religious institution or government program backing you. Don’t call it “philanthropy” or “charity”—call it what Charles Eisenstein calls it: The Gift Economy.
You can move on to a lot of other methods, like investing in decentralized currency, conscious consumerism, third party voting (well… that last one is debatable, but you get the point).
But here’s the method I think is going to make the biggest difference:
Conscious Business.
Embrace ethical sourcing, sustainable materials, spiritual retreats, somatic healing… the list goes on and on. You should support businesses doing these things, absolutely, but what the market really needs is to see how much better a conscious product or service performs than the ones they’re used to. If we’re really going to change capitalism, we have to look squarely at the demand which has allowed the cancer to metastasize.
It’s a complicated issue, right? And in many ways it feels like a catch 22. The cheap, disposable garbage we buy (Americans, at least) are purchased largely because a better option would be seen as “less affordable” by a citizenry already beset by myriad financial troubles (remember: SIXTY. PERCENT.). How can you sell a better, sustainable product on the kind of mass scale that made billionaires possible in the first place, replacing unsustainable plastics per se with biodegradable options en masse, when the end user is having a hard time affording the very roof over their heads and thus has a harder time justifying the spend?
Example: Amazon starts out as a company where you can buy anything “from A to Z,” but through its globalization and algorithmic strategies, the first purchasing options you’re now shown are often from brands you’ve never even heard of offering garbage products, cheaply manufactured and unethically sourced, made in factories with unspeakable conditions. But because we’ve been conditioned to our convenience, to working from home (largely by a certain pandemic, but that’s another issue for another time), and we’d rather not spend the gas money or our precious time—time is money, don’t you know?—driving to the store to get this specific product, we accept our narrow options.
And all of this leads to Jeff Bezos becoming one of the wealthiest of wealthy human beings to ever live. It’s not right, and we all know it.
“Legal” doesn’t mean “right.”
Again, change is possible. I’m not going to let loose on a tirade of macroeconomics and make a case on those grounds, though a case can surely be made (and is being made by brilliant voices as we speak). But I will say… demand for the better, sustainable choice is only growing. Hell, we’ve seen efforts to transition the entire automobile industry over to electric power, just in recent years; whether or not that would be a truly effective course for addressing our existential issues—like the Paris Accords—is debatable, but the fact remains that these issues are getting more meaningful attention and are on a more visible stage.
There is plenty of room for optimism that progress can happen, and barriers can be removed to allow prevalence for a more conscious consumerism.
Regardless of the semantics, for the sake of your own heart and for the sake of our planet, the time is now to jump on this train. If you’ve been thinking about making a splash with a conscious business but you’ve been holding back, remember: this moment is all we have.
Be true to your heart, and accept the support of others who want to see you succeed at doing business better.
I’m one of them.
Grace & Peace. -JACOB