Here’s a surreal fact about the dystopian age we live in. The literal end of the world…is also now the most valuable thing, period, in the world, in human history — at least according to capitalism. Reread that sentence. Yes, really. Wait, what?

Let me attempt explain how this bizarre, head-spinning illogic came to be — and what it means.

Yay!! In case you haven’t heard, the world got its first trillion dollar company. Capitalism, soaring to new heights. Aramco, the company which owns all of Saudi Arabia’s oil, and then some. It’s now the most valuable company, ever, in all of economic history.

There’s just one tiny problem. The most valuable company not just in the world, but in human history…is the one that owns most of the oil…at the precise moment the planet is melting down…when climate change is going from severe to catastrophic…when we have just a decade left to stop it. What the?

If something seems badly wrong about all that to you, well done. You’re right. The most valuable company in history, ever…owning most of the world’s oil…while the planet’s melting down…will be regarded by future generations as the most grotesque of capitalism’s failures, ever, too. Yes, really.

Let me delve into precisely why.

American economists and pundits and finance types cheer all the above because, according to them, a trillion dollars of value has suddenly been created. It just…appeared out of thin air. That’s because there were “investors” willing to pay that much for shares in most of the rest of the world’s oil. Wait, what? Is that really how “value” is “created”? Of course not. Why not?

The rest of the world’s oil is “worth” — to capitalism — (at least) a trillion dollars. That’s the most valuable thing to it, in the world, in history. But what happens if we burn all the rest of the world’s oil? The end of the world does.

The planet warms by 10 degrees or more. The skies burn away. The oceans are boiled to dust. Life begins to die off (even faster than it is.) The topsoil becomes dust. Much of the world’s landmass becomes uninhabitable. Famine, drought, and plague become everyday realities. Societies implode, economies collapse, and institutions revert (even faster) to pre-modern forms of authoritarianism, fascism, and tribalism. None of that’s an exaggeration — it’s grim reality in a world that’s simply burned to a husk.

If we burn all the rest of the world’s oil, all the following things go with it: life, democracy, society, and human civilization. Yes, really. I think you already have a hunch that’s true, and your intuition is precisely correct. We can’t exist without what ecologists call our “support systems” — ecosystems, reefs, rivers, forests, fish, soil — and none of those can exist on a planet that’s warmed not just severely, but catastrophically.

Do you see the unreal dots we’re about to connect?

If we burn away all the oil, the world ends. But that’s exactly what makes the world’s and history’s most valuable company worth a trillion dollars: the end of democracy, life on the planet, and human civilization. To capitalism, that’s a fantastic trade.

Is your head spinning yet? Let me put it even more simply.

The end of the world is the most valuable thing in the world, according to capitalism. The world’s and history’s most “valuable” company is also the one that, if it’s successful, will irreversibly bring about…the literal end of the world. The literal end of the world is the thing capitalism has valued the most highly, ever, period, by a very long way. What the? WTF?

If all that makes you want to tear your hair out…you’re quite right. The only people the above could make any sense to are either economists are sociopaths.

The bizarre, twisted illogic above is vivid, irrefutable proof of an old, old dictum — which we might have had reason to dispute, but now, there can’t be really any debate. Generations of great minds have said, from Marx to Durkheim to Baudrillard have said that capitalism is innately prone to crisis, destabilization, because it simply doesn’t care about the very things that support it — from nations to democracy to ecosystems. It’s amoral — the charitable interpretation. It’s Sociopathic — probably the more accurate one.

Now, on the other side, generations of less-great minds have disputed that. They’ve said that capitalism forces us to care more, not less. That’s the Ayn Rand slash every second and third rate American economist since school of thought. Which one’s right?

If the success of…history’s most valuable corporation…means everything that we genuinely hold dear has to be destroyed…then there is stark proof that there is a very, very big problem, a moral problem and a structural problem both, with capitalism indeed. Capitalism is working exactly backwards as an economic system. It’s destroying the things we cherish, in order to make money out of them. It literally doesn’t care about anything — anything — but money. In fact, that’s an understatement. Let me try to put it as accurately as I can.

Capitalism doesn’t just “not care” about the literal end of the world…the end of the world is capitalism’s most profitable opportunity, ever. That isn’t hyperbole anymore, or guesswork, or some kind of outlandish theory. It’s the simple empirical truth. Capitalism is a perverse system of incentives, rules, and rewards in this way.

Marx would have said that capitalism profits from suffering through exploitation. Was he right? Here we have economic history’s most astonishing example of the linkage between exploitation and profit, ever. The world’s most valuable company ever is the one who can exploit it literally to death — and cause suffering on an unimaginable scale.

What the? To a sensible person, that’s a dystopian nightmare. So why is it that to American economists and pundits and finance types, all the above is a wonderful thing?

Let’s go back to that trillion dollars. That Aramco’s now “worth.” What happened, in literal terms, was this. “Investors” — read: hedge funds — gave a trillion dollars to the Saudi “royal” family, it’s minions, and a few hundred mil to investment banks along the way. In exchange for what? For rights to the profits earned by selling all that oil. Those profits are literally capitalism hoping for the end of the world. You don’t buy a stock, after all, if you don’t expect a company to be profitable — and you don’t make oil profitable by not selling it. What the? Do you see how nightmarish all this is?

Now let’s think about all the things we apparently…don’t…magically have a trillion dollars to truly invest in. The reefs and rivers. The forests and oceans. Our own healthcare and education and retirement. Our childcare and elderly care. The skies. The animals. A trillion dollars doesn’t seem to ever appear for any real investment…in anything. Real investment meaning: it yields better standards of living, for us, for all life…not the end of the world.

In fact, you yourself probably believe the foolish line that “we’re poor societies now.” So how come there’s a trillion dollars to “invest” towards making the end of the world happen…but not for saving anything of real worth on it? What the? That’s why capitalism failed in a nutshell.

How did that failure come to be? Capitalism doesn’t assign any inherent value to anything of real worth. The rivers, reefs, forests, skies. The animals, the soil, the rain. You, me our kids, our grandkids. Democracy, civilization, humanity, life. Nothing holds any inherent value to capitalism whatsoever. Hence, all these things are effectively free, according to the rules of global capital. That is why capitalism is free to exploit them.

If the ocean’s not worth anything — why not dump your trash in it? If those reefs aren’t worth anything — why not poison them? If those human beings have no inherent worth — why bother giving them benefits, rights, futures? If life on the planet has no intrinsic worth, from the human being to the insect to the tree — why bother protecting or nourishing it? You won’t.

Hence, if I buy a plot of land in the Amazon, the trees don’t have any inherent worth, and so I can just chop them down, and sell them. In the same way, if I employ you, you don’t have intrinsic worth — and so I’m not required to give you any healthcare, childcare, retirement, and so on.

Everything is a disposable commodity to capitalism. Everything. But that is a belief system that will bring about the end of the world. Because the only point of anything then is to destroy everything, and turn it into one thing: money. That is what capitalism really is.

I don’t say that in an ideological way. I say it an analytical one. Whatever we feel about capitalism, we should be smart enough to learn from the evidence before us, especially at this crucial juncture. The proof is before us, in plain sight. What is capitalism? It’s a system that destroys everything in its path, to turn it into money — but money is a dead thing, a useless thing.

Let me sum all that up for a second.

Capitalism literally (literally) values the end of the world as the most valuable opportunity in the world. Illogic like that is so bizarre and perverse that it’s surreal — because it leads to obvious, catastrophic self-destruction. A system of ruinous self-destruction that large is a massive failure, on an epic scale. It’s one of history’s greatest failures.

Sure, communism failed. So did feudalism and tribalism and empire. But capitalism is failing in an even greater way. None of those threatened the planet, all life on it, and civilization across it. None of those were failures at an existential level, at the highest level we know — none of them threatened to simply tear apart…everything. Capitalism…does. The self-destruction of the world is literally what it’ values most, ever.

So how do we fix all that? Well, the answer is hidden in plain sight. Remember when I pointed out nothing has any intrinsic value to capital — from a reef, river, or tree, to you and me? The answer is to give everything — and I mean everything — intrinsic value. Inalienable worth. That no one and nothing — no one and nothing — can take away.

Let’s say that we said every life in our society is worth at least a hundred thousand dollars. Then that’s exactly the amount we’d endow every person with at birth — just for being here — as a safety net, as a gift, as a nest egg, as nourishment. Let’s say that we said the Amazon was worth a trillion dollars. Then we’d have to…invest in it every single year so that it was worth at least that, not watch it depreciate, fall apart, be savaged. And so on.

Where would that money “come from”?

If there’s a trillion dollars to shower on the literally stupidest and most evil things in human history…like, oh, say, the end of the world…then we also have trillions to genuinely invest in things that matters. If hedge funds have a trillion dollars to bring about the literal end of the world — then my guess is that we can put that money to better use. That we had better take it from them and genuinely invest it in things that matter. If we have trillions for making the literal, actual the end of the world happen…how come we tend to accept the fiction there’s not a trillion dollars for anything really worthy? Both those things can’t be true.

There’s always a trillion for the wrong thing, isn’t there? The destructive, stupid, thing? A war. Bailing out all those very banks and hedge funds that think the end of the world is a wonderful profit opportunity. What does that tell you? The money is not what is in short supply. It is abundant. Not to you — but at the level of capital. At that level, there are trillions to throw at…literally the most stupid things in history, like the literal end of the world. We have the money. What we don’t have is the thinking, the insight, the idea.

It’s understanding all the above that’s in short supply: the real economics of the world, and how capitalism fails at improving them. Our elites aren’t interested in learning them. Our economists can’t begin to process them, mostly. Our politicians are more interested in polls. People? They they tend intuitively guess most of the above — but then they’re swayed by jargon and formal technicalities wielded by men in suits. “But…but…what about the deficit!” Wait — we have a trillion dollars for the end of the world…and the deficit is an issue? Give me a break.

We have less than a decade left to save the planet — and life on it, and civilization across it. Yes, really. Not in an absolutist way — “we’ll all die!” — we won’t: just in a sensible one. Life will simply fall apart, societies will go with it, and progress will become regress, as it already is. Those are the stakes. And yet…

Capitalism values the literal end of the world at a trillion dollars, which is it’s most profitable opportunity ever. What the? And that, my friends, is why the future will think of capitalism the way that we think of slavery, empire, and world war.

We need to build a better global economy, and we need to build it now, if we want a future worth living in. One based on a lot more common sense, empathy, and humanity — and a lot less greed, stupidity, and violence.

Umair

December 2019