Wherefore Capitalism?

The yin and yang of dystopian speculative/science fiction, George Orwell’s dark 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s light Brave New World, share a common motif about the consequences of both any contemporary and future human cultures: Love is so dangerous to power that power always seeks ways to eradicate love.

In Orwell’s other world, fascism simply bans love, and for Winston and Julia, their love is an act of rebellion. Huxley’s brilliant alternative is incredibly disturbing in its prescience since love is sacrificed on the alter of distraction — monogamy is taboo and recreational promiscuity is the norm along with the ever-present soma.

As a result, Orwell’s warning feels speculative, and Huxley’s reads chilling because we can more easily see his fiction in our recent history (the sexual revolution of the 1960s) and in every single “right now” we encounter.

In 2018, citizens of the U.S. are nearly eternally distracted — the sexless and loveless virtual other world of our devices — mired as we are in our consumerism and the Social Darwinism of capitalism.

While I was thinking directly about Orwell’s 1984 when I wrote “fascism” — ”fascism always comes for love/fascists know that lovers always win every battle” — and the risk taken by Winston and Julia “in quest of rendezvous or tobetogether,” I am more compelled by Huxley Brave New World — not as some dire warning about a possible future, but a very powerful analysis of what we face today.

As Margaret Atwood argues in her Introduction to Brave New World:

Surely it’s time to look again at Brave New World and to examine its arguments for and against the totally planned society it describes, in which ‘everybody is happy now’. What sort of happiness is on offer, and what is the price we might pay to achieve it?

I am drawn to Atwood’s word choice, “pay,” and it is there I ask, Wherefore capitalism?

I am struggling with a sub-question to that as well: Did humans create capitalism or has capitalism created a brave new world, a new inhumane humanity, one perilously close to having our most precious gift next to life, love, erased?

Has the Western world (a code for “America”) so pervaded the entire world that no place remains unscathed from this consumerism/capitalism that consumes us?

In 1891, Oscar Wilde protested: “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.”

And Wilde concluded about the materialism of capitalism: “But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.”

So it is another work of speculative/science fiction, a label rejected by the author, that speaks directly to the corrosive power of capitalism as the enemy of love, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. A brilliant satire of religion and politics, the novel includes a scene in which John fails to understand that Mona, the woman he claims to love, “adored her promiscuity”; in Vonnegut’s faux-religion, Bokononism, promiscuity is the full embracing of love, unlike promiscuity as a distraction from love in Huxley.

And they argue:

“As your husband, I’ll want all your love for myself.”

She stared at me with widening eyes. “A sin-wat!”

“What was that?”

“A sin-wat!” she cried. “A man who wants all of somebody’s love. That’s very bad.”

… “Bokonon tells us it is very wrong not to love everyone exactly the same. What does your religion say?”

Resting beneath this exchange are the central tenets of Christianity expressed by Jesus as two simple commandments: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

Resting beneath this exchange is the implicit message that the Western world worships capitalism and consumerism, that Westerners who claim to be Christians do so only in word, not action.

John can express his claim of love for Mona only in his ownership of Mona, a commodification of affection as if love is a finite thing to be obtained.

As we “scuttl[e] across the floors of silent seas” toward Valentine’s Day, then, we cannot ignore the distractions before us as good consumers and very marginal lovers — as disconnected from all sorts of unconditional love, familial and romantic, as the well-conditioned cast in Huxley’s Brave New World.

I was first introduced to the idea that god did not create humans, but humans created god through reading Karl Marx as a naive college student, a redneck who made mostly As.

I am compelled now many decades later to lament that humans may have created capitalism, but capitalism has created a not-so-brave new humanity. And in the process, while we have been distracted by fear-mongering about fascism, capitalism did its job.

And the price?

All it cost us was love.