The Greatest Lie We Were Sold

Capitalism has shaped the Western world through lies and guilt, and it is pushing humanity towards collective suicide.

“There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.” The thought-provoking idea that begins Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus is the foundation Absurdism, and one of the most famous lines of 20th-century philosophy. Camus’ point is to argue that the most fundamental problem of all is that of the purpose of one’s life and whether it is worth living it or not. While he focused his argument on the individual, the question can and should be asked on a societal level.

We are going through a mass extinction event, with species disappearing at a rate up to 1000x the normal. Over the past 50 years, the world animal population has decreased by over 70%. We are destroying our planet at an unprecedented pace, fauna and flora alike. Global warming and climate change cannot be stopped anymore; all we can hope is to avoid the worst effects, and even this lame objective seems out of reach as it would entail changing our ways of life in dramatic fashion, something we seem hell-bent not to do.

We can’t pretend anymore. We must face the truth. We are committing suicide on a planetary scale. And as we’re killing ourselves slowly but decidedly, we’re left with Camus’ essential question.

Why?

Up until the second half of the 20th century, ignorance might have been an acceptable excuse. Since the 1970s, however, when the issue of climate change became so obvious that oil companies started spending millions of dollars trying to downplay its importance, we have lost the right to claim this line of defence. We’ve been merry-go-rounding our way to annihilation, sticking our heads in the proverbial sand.

While we Millennials, Gen-Z and Gen-α, could and do point fingers at all the generations before ours for their failure to act, the problem lies much deeper than their failings. It is not an issue with individuals or any group thereof. It is a flaw in the system that made them.

Humanity’s failure is much more than the sum of all human blunders.

Capitalism is the true reason for our collective suicide. Not because it ushered in an era of industrial development; not because it has altered the way we consume, produce, and trade; not because of how it has changed our lifestyles. Capitalism has brought forth an era of unprecedented guilt and self-loathing that has left us dis-empowered to act and fatigued on an existential level.

In a 1921 unpublished fragment titled Capitalism as Religion, German philosopher Walter Benjamin argued that “capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement.” One hundred years later, Benjamin’s sharp prose is still relevant. His short aphorism perfectly captures the core issue of our global, dominant economic philosophy. In the same essay, Benjamin further argues that “capitalism is a religion of pure cult, without dogma.”

Dogma is defined as “a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church.” In that understanding of the word, I would agree with Benjamin that capitalism has none. It is not a unified worldview. Its American, French, British, or Australian implementations all differ in major ways. Capitalism also isn’t overly concerned with morals and does not purport to provide us with an ethical framework.

A cult is a set of rituals, and capitalism offers us plenty of those we practice every day.

The most fundamental ritual of capitalism is the Cult of Consumerism. We must purchase things we don’t need to fulfil needs we don’t really have to feel like human beings. Descartes’ cogito is now obsolete. The new reality is emero, ergo sum. I spend, therefore I am.

We’re also taught to adore the rich and famous. The veneration of the Saints has given way to the adulation of the billionaires. Forget the intellectuals, the scientists, the truth-seekers of the world. What matters is money and fame, or, in the Instagram era, the appearance of money and fame.

Finally, we’re indoctrinated with the idea that success means money. Our inspirations' materialism is central to Capitalism because it reinforces its core tenet that emero, ergo sum. Success means more purchasing power which means more ability to demonstrate how rich and successful you are.

You were never meant to succeed.

You were meant to work hard trying.

We perform these rituals every day by turning up our social media feeds, watching a TV show, or reading the news. The media reminds us permanently of college dropouts becoming billionaires, of who amongst the 500 is the richest, of simple ideas turning into business empires. It’s all within our grasp, we’re told. Anybody can do it.

While these rites look adogmatic, I would argue that Capitalism has its own version of the Credo, that can be summarised in a saying we’re all familiar with:

If you work hard enough, you will succeed.

This admonition is as fundamental to the capitalistic faith as the Our Father is to Roman catholicism. Where they differ is on the promise. The latter guarantees salvation. The former only makes you hope for riches. As we defined it above, in the capitalistic religion, success means money. Therefore, if you work hard enough, you will be rich.

This idea that anybody can become rich and famous through hard work is hammered in our heads by the media, social network feeds, teachers and professors, parents and friends. It is an irrefutable truth we grow up with. It is a dream we must accept. It is the American dream of the post-WWII era repackaged and repurposed in an ad slogan.

It is also a gigantic lie.

Capitalism is not designed for all of us to succeed or for the many to have equal opportunities. It is designed for a minority to hold the means of production, extracting a profit from the working masses' labour-time. The system was never intended to make us all millionaires, but for us to accept its alienating nature, we had to believe it was.

And that’s where the guilt comes in. You’ve been told all your life that through hard work and dedication you can succeed, you can become rich and famous. So you do that. You toil, sweat, plan your career and make all the sacrifices, yet you’re still not a millionaire. But the CEO of your company is, so it is possible! You work some more, put in extra unpaid hours. And one day, you realise it’s too late. You’re old, not a millionaire, and you start believing you have failed.

You feel guilty because you know it was possible, and you failed. You are so convinced that it is possible that you don’t even dare question the system. The failure is on you. You won’t be able to purchase what you want because you don’t have enough money, which means you can’t partake in the rituals anymore. Capitalism has excommunicated you.

Your guilt comes from the fact that you think the system is fair and you are failing when the truth is that the system is fundamentally unfair and rigged against you.

You were never meant to succeed. You were meant to work hard trying.

Humans have an interesting way to cope with failure. We tend to ignore it. More specifically, we ignore our role in it. It’s called self-serving bias.

A self-serving bias is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner. It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors.

We have seen above that ascribing failure to the system is not an option, since we’re being told every day that the system works through the many rituals of capitalism we take part in. We can’t really accept that the failure is our own either since that would mean we’ve lost our most precious asset, our time, for nothing. The guilt we feel must be understood and attributed to something or someone, however.

We must find a culprit. We need a scapegoat.

More often than not, the scapegoat will be “the others.” In countries with a diverse racial makeup, the others will be foreigners, immigrants, anyone who can be pointed out as “different.” It’s no surprise that the far-right as a whole, and racist, extremist movements, in particular, are increasing in popularity all across the Western world.

These movements tend to be imbued with anti-intellectualism, reject climate change as an issue, reject progress, and praise a return to “better times.” They prevent us from tackling the real issues at hand.

This is capitalism’s greatest crime.

Capitalism’s unrelenting guilt-trip has dis-empowered us on an existential level. We have been conditioned to believe that the system was perfect and that we were not. When we succeed, it’s a proof capitalism works. When we fail, it’s proof we haven’t done enough. This line of reasoning has expanded beyond the economy to all social aspects of our lives.

To slow down climate change, we must abandon our cars, forego our dream holidays, and change our consumption habits while billionaires fly private and major corporations destroy the environment. But it’s not their fault. No, it’s our fault. We’re not doing enough. They, on the other, are successful. They’ve already done all they could; they should get to enjoy life.

Guilty, guilty, guilty.

Capitalism only has this word for us. In the fragment mentioned above, Walter Benjamin ironically quips about the German word for guilt, Schuld, and its double meaning in the language of Goethe. It is, indeed, rather telling that Schuld should mean both guilt and debt.

It’s like the words themselves understand something we don’t.