How Capitalism Preys on Basic Human Needs Until They’re Twisted Upside-Down

How Capitalism Made Necessities Luxuries (and Luxuries Necessities) for Americans

I’m always entertained when American thinkers discover capitalism’s failings for the first, time and recoil in horror. I’m even more entertained when the cognitive dissonance kicks in — and they can’t quite bring themselves to what they’ve discovered is capitalism failing, since in Soviet America, because you’ve been conditioned your whole life long to believe that capitalism can never fail (even while — take a hard look around and America crashing and burning — it is), it’d be a little like questioning religion during the Spanish Inquisition.

Here’s the latest example: “human interaction is becoming a luxury good.” It’s a good take. Sure, Big Tech has made real human interaction something like a luxury. But it’s not an excellent one. It’s true — but. The truer truth, which would have been an excellent take, is that…

Under capitalism necessities become luxuries, while luxuries become false necessities. You might even call it the first principle of capitalist collapse. Americans don’t really understand it, but capitalism preys on people by twisting their basic human needs until they’re upside down — making basic human needs things people must constantly buy back from capitalists, at ever increasing prices, in increasingly weird and grotesque forms. (Bang! Was that too much, did the cognitive dissonance kick in? Think about it with me — if you can.)

What’s the most basic human need you can imagine?

In America, life itself has become a luxury good. Sorry — that’s not an overstatement, that’s a fact. Life expectancy for the average American is cratering — and it’s the only country in the world in which that’s happening (apart from barely-countries at all, like maybe the Congo). Longer lives are something most Americans can’t afford — only the richest ones — which is most Americans are only getting shorter ones, every year. Isn’t something only the rich can afford the truest definition of “luxury”? Then life itself is a luxury in America now.

Why did life itself become a “luxury good” in America? Simple. The average American can’t afford decent healthcare — and decent healthcare doesn’t really exist in America. What Americans are forced to do is something the rest of the world considers absurd — when they understand that is, because it’s mostly incomprehensible to them. Americans pay astronomical prices for “health insurance” — but it comes with “deductibles” in the tens of thousands, and barely covers serious illnesses at all.

They cannot afford basic medicine, which is kept artificially scarce. Things like insulin cost ten times what they do just across an imaginary border, in Canada. As I often kid, in Soviet America, the breadlines are for insulin. It’s not really a joke — what it means is that Americans face chronic, persistent shortages — for one reason.

Who’s “providing” all this — or more accurately, failing to provide much at all? Profit-maximizing corporations are, of course. Now let’s ask the question: is there a good reason they can’t “provide” healthcare and medicine? Are those things in actual short supply? Did the vital ingredients in basic medicine suddenly run out? Did all the doctors die? Of course not. The only reason — the only reason — those things are “unaffordable” to Americans is that is how profits are maximized. So while the profits of “healthcare management organizations” and Pharma companies have never been higher (literally, in history), Americans can’t get decent healthcare. Hence, tnewhe obvious, predictable, thoroughly unsurprising result: they’re beginning to die, younger and younger every single year.

America is living evidence of what happens in an extreme, predatory capitalist economy, as it eventually collapses in on itself. It is the world’s most capitalist country by a very long way — as capitalist as a country can ever really hope to be. Roughly 3/4 of the economy is private and profit-maximizing. Any more than that, and there wouldn’t be any firemen, schools, or roads (which, unsurprisingly, is what the GOP wants.) The point is that America is as capitalist as is humanly possible. In that way, it’s a mirror image of its old enemy, the Soviet Union — which collapsed out of just the same kind of one-dimensional ideological blindness.

From America, we can deduce what happens in a solely capitalist economy, too — whether or not Americans really get it or not. What happens is very simple. The rule above. Under capitalism, necessities become luxuries — and luxuries become false necessities — until the whole house of cards begins to collapse in on itself, and people’s lives fall apart…but, most grotesquely of all, they cheer it all on, because their understanding of what basic human needs are has been twisted beyond recognition. Let’s do a few examples.

What are some other necessities that have become luxuries, apart from healthcare? The better question is — which ones haven’t? Decent food now costs a “whole paycheck”, as the grim joke goes. There’s no real public transport, so, good luck — buy a car. Educating your child? It’ll cost your life savings — if you have any. Go ahead and think of a necessity. In America, it’s become an unaffordable luxury.

That’s not just idle opinion. That’s cold, hard fact. The price of all the necessities has skyrocketed by thousands of percent. Healthcare, 3000%. Education, 2000%. I call that “eudaimonic hyperinflation” — eye-watering increases for the prices of basics. America economics is totally ignorant or oblivious to its existence. Those are just rough estimates, of course, because the increases have been so insane, that no one really knows how to calculate them well. What we can say is that just a few decades ago — the average American wasn’t left broke by the simple act of affording necessities.

Yet that’s exactly where he or she is. The average American lives paycheck to paycheck. They can’t raise $1000 in emergency savings. It’s not because they’re buying Picassos and Lamborghinis. It’s because they can’t make ends meet — and they haven’t gotten a raise in decades, while the prices of basics have exploded like Mount Vesuvius. Hence, most Americans have struggled to afford education, healthcare, and housing, all at once. It’s vivid, undeniable, terrible proof of the first principle of capitalist collapse: basic necessities become unaffordable luxuries under capitalism — even for once-prosperous middle classes.

Why? Because that’s how capitalism goes on profiting. It’s not immoral or wrong to earn a profit. The problem is that under capitalism, huge companies have to earn greater profits…every quarter…forever…to please “shareholders”…who are mostly hedge funds…run by robots…programmed only to reward higher profits…every quarter. It’s as insane as it is impossible. The only way it can be done is to charge people more, while giving them, and paying them less — hence, necessities become luxuries.

But at the same time, capitalism does something very clever, very devious, very cunning. It positions luxuries as false necessities. Think about the things Americans are told to want. A McMansion. A fine car. A perfect face, a perfect body. Designer clothes. I could go on endlessly. Endless ads bombard everyone with these messages thousands of times every day, don’t they? Maybe you don’t believe it — good for you — but that’s not the point.

American thinking goes something like this: “I ‘need’ that McMansion, that fine car, that designer vacation, that wardrobe, a new massive TV, every year. Much more than everybody needs healthcare, retirement, education. My pleasure first! It comes before everyone’s intrinsic worth, meaning, value, or happiness.” What the American forgets is that “everybody” includes, them, too.

Hence, the list of bizarre luxuries parading itself as false necessities is endless in American life, and grows weirder and more flagrant every year: perfect pecs, handbags, the right shade of hair, giant boobs, designer yoga pants, spring break in Vegas for the kids. How much do all those cost? The self is the truest false necessity of all. So why do Americans — enough of them, anyways — seem to feel they need all these strange and outlandish things? Why have so many outsized luxuries become artificial necessities to Americans? What are they really competing for?

They’re told that without these things, they’re not good enough. They’re not worth anything. They can’t be happy. They’re not to respect people without such things, either (hence, Trumpism.) They’re right. They probably won’t be. But that’s only because other Americans have bought into capitalism’s suckers’ game. Their entire perspective of basic human needs has been twisted upside down — they’ve been preyed upon that way, but they don’t quite know it.

Americans are competing for the belonging, respect, and dignity — not to mention happiness and longevity and security — that they could simply give one another, by perpetually buying luxuries disguised as artificial necessities. Their understanding of basic human needs has been warped beyond recognition. No wonder they’re so depressed — that suicide is skyrocketing. They have been told they need to buy the following things, through luxury goods, effectively: meaning, value, purpose, worth, respect, happiness. But that also means they must not feel they have any of those things intrinsically or inherently — which is precisely what capitalism wants people to feel, that they have no value, so they must buy all those things, over and over again, every month, every year, through bigger, shinier, newer things.

But lasting human feelings are not often found in bigger, shinier things — so Americans are on what’s often called a “hedonic treadmill.” Yet that phrase disguises the grim reality that American living standards are cratering, because people are trying to buy the feelings of happiness, security and worthiness, with ever more costly consumer goods — the feelings they could simply give one another, through real investments in healthcare, education, retirement, and so on, and which can only come from those things. Has having more expensive stuff ever really made you feel lastingly happy or secure or worthwhile? How about decent healthcare and education? Maybe you see my point.

Capitalism creates intense, perpetual, ever-mounting status competition this way — by making luxuries false necessities. It preys on basic human needs, and then twists them upside down, teaching people luxuries are necessities, but necessities are luxuries. How else would it sell stuff? Who really needs a bigger TV at this point? A designer vacation? “Branded” clothes? A larger McMansion? These things are not necessities — healthcare, food, water, transport, education, retirement, and so forth are. But Americans do not want to pay for those things collectively — they have been deluded by capitalism into thinking luxuries are necessities, and necessities are luxuries, and that’s the way life should be. Americans are just what capitalism has trained them to be — hyper-individualistic consumers who think of luxuries as artificial necessities in an illusory game for feelings of happiness and self-worth, but not people who seem to understand the idea that true necessities exist for everyone at a social level. Let me put that complicated thought a little more simply.

Luxuries are false necessities to Americans — while real necessities have become luxuries — because Americans are constantly trying to buy being needed, wanted, respected, loved, admired. But that’s impossible. You can never buy the sense of being needed or worthy or whole. So they have to do it in more and more outsized ways, and it’s still never satisfying. The real problem is this strange and foolish game Americans play: contesting individualistic luxuries as false necessities, while never granting each other real necessities. They’re playing a game they can’t win — because you will never feel happy, respected, whole, or safe by buying more luxuries as false necessities, only by having real necessities, the very real ones of universal healthcare, retirement, education, which can only be had by all.

Do you see the mistake? Americans won’t come together and give one another healthcare, retirement, affordable college. But they will happily buy into the idea that luxuries are false necessities they themselves can’t live without — without that McMansion, or that BMW, without a designer wardrobe to parade on Instagram, maybe nobody will respect you, like you, want you, so you “need” one. These two ideas must go together — they’re logical flipsides, after all. You can’t have one without the other — and that’s how capitalism trapped Americans, by making them think of luxuries as necessities, and necessities as luxuries.

Americans today — maybe not you, enough of them — see luxuries as false necessities, even while they can’t afford, and don’t think people should have real necessities. But that’s precisely the capitalist illogic they’ve been trained and conditioned to obey. Enough of them really believe that bizarre upside thinking to make plastic surgery normal, to make Instagram envy real, for their kids to demand the right “brands” or they’ll be bullied, to feel they need to drive the “right” cars and live in the “right” homes or else they won’t be respected. To make life a constant and endless and relentless battle of status competition for luxuries that are false necessities — while everybody seems to overlook the grim reality that nobody much can afford real necessities anymore. But these two things aren’t a coincidence — the latter is the inescapable consequence of the former.

If people are so busy chasing luxuries as false necessities— how will they ever create a society where people have actual necessities affordably? See the problem here? And isn’t what they’re really chasing in this game of status competition the feelings of happiness, safety, security, and worthiness? But couldn’t they just have given those to each other — and in fact, isn’t that the only way to really feel those things, not to buy them? Don’t those feelings really from true necessities — not false ones, disguised as luxuries? And aren’t true necessities the very things Americans lack — because they’ve been told that an endless and increasingly weird list of luxuries are their false necessities?

Do you see a little bit what I mean by “capitalism preys on people’s basic human needs, and then twists them until they’re upside down?”

(Please understand. I’m not saying that nice things are bad. Far from it. I like my nice furniture and my nice jeans and my designer leather jacket. Does that make me a hypocrite? Of course not. I don’t consider any of these things necessities. What I’m saying is that people can and should have nice things — especially artisanally made ones, which reward human-scale production — but they should have necessities first. Not just for themselves, but for everyone. When people do that, they’ve escaped capitalism’s trap. Not by becoming ascetics, monks, hermits — but by being a little more fully human.

That means not letting capitalism’s absurd, endless, and constant status competition dictate every last aspect of their lives. I don’t like my favorite things, my nice things, because other people like them. I like them because they are made with care, with respect, with intelligence, with a great deal of thought and attention. I don’t buy them to try to dominate other people — “see how rich I am!! See how much you must want me!!” — which is what capitalism wants.)

When you’re busy imagining that your own competitive, egotistical, power-trip is a necessity — not everyone’s healthcare, education, or retirement, which includes you — you’re badly confused, my friends. Your understanding of basic human needs has been twisted upside down. Hence, a society of such people will always end up like America. Collapsing. Because people have forgotten what necessities and luxuries really are. They individualistically and competitively chase luxuries as false necessities, while saying to each other that everyone’s shared necessities are luxuries — “I won’t pay for your healthcare! You’re weak and therefore you deserve to die!” Where will everyone eventually end up when society is ruled by such illogic? Without much at all, pretty obviously. Basic human needs will go unmet when they’re preyed on by capitalism, twisted upside down, hence the UN recently called American poverty a crisis.

Endgame? Everyone’s quality of life will crater — because they’ll constantly have to buy back life itself from capitalists, billionaires becoming trillionaires, hedge funds, mega corporations, every last bit of life, including happiness, meaning, respect, and inherent self-worth that such people themselves have foolishly given away. Remember how life itself is a luxury in America now, in hard terms? None of the above is a joke or idle theory. Bang! People whose basic needs have been twisted upside down right where capitalism wants them. Suckers, marks, rubes. For the greatest con game in history. Capitalism selling the lives they could have had right back to people, at ever skyrocketing prices, while never paying them a penny more — all by persuading them that no one needed anything decent or true or real at all.

Capitalism preys on us — and then it preys on us again, by twisting our understanding of basic human needs until it’s upside down — even if they’re our own. And in that regard, America’s experiment with extreme capitalism is the modern world’s most spectacular failure.

Umair

March 2019