What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing

If we believe substituting self-serving cover stories for a truly realistic appraisal is going to generate real solutions, that is the ultimate delusion.

One way to summarize the present zeitgeist is What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing: all the intellectual frameworks that “made sense of the world” are now reduced to cover stories masking a reality that defies reduction to the old ideas that have shriveled into misleading cliches. Tri-Methyl+ B Complex ... Buy New $22.47 (as of 07:36 UTC - Details)

Exhibit #1: ideology. Capitalism vs. socialism, left vs. right, progressive vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican–none of these make sense of what we actually experience, and the manic effort to make the world fit these contrivances only increases our civilizational psychosis.

So Capitalism with a capital C “makes life better for everyone by rewarding innovation.” Or in econo-babble, Capitalism allocates capital to optimize efficiencies and innovations that “bring good things to life,” in a classic marketing slogan.

So Capitalism good. Okay, got it. Now let’s look at the world we actually live in. Private equity snaps up veterinary clinics to assemble informal cartels and then jacks up prices without improving the services at all. Does this “innovation” “make life better for everyone” by “optimizing efficiencies and innovations”, or is this just “rational actors” exploiting “capitalism” to extract more wealth from customers without adding anything other than cost and misery?

There’s no risk here, only gains, so we’d be foolish not to stripmine people who value their pets’ health. “Capitalism” at its most profitable and therefore at its best.

To those who protest, this isn’t capitalism: okay, then what is it, and why is it now the dominant structure of our economy?

Or how about “healthcare” insurance? Is there actually any real competitive price/service difference between two shades of gray touted as “the best system in the world”? Or is this just another cover story for a system that corrals everyone into privatized totalitarianism–i.e. a system of false choices that actually leaves no real choice– that maximizes extraction that those reaping the gains deceptively glorify as “free market Capitalism”?

Or how about when the state (central government) bails out private banks because the collapse of those banks poses an existential threat to the citizenry and the state? Is the state enabling banks to privatize gains and then stepping in to socialize the banks’ losses actually “capitalism” or is it socialism for the wealthiest few at the expense of the many?

You see the point. In a system that optimizes extraction, exploitation and the distributing of risk and consequences to others, the line between “capitalist” and “socialist” blurs to the point of being useless in explaining what’s actually happening. VitaRaw Quercetin with... Buy New $22.49 (as of 07:36 UTC - Details)

Is this “democracy”, or is it as correspondent Simons Chase put it, “what’s moral is what’s legal, and what’s legal is for sale”? And what’s for sale in a transactional structure is, well, everything, especially when the consequences can be offloaded onto someone else and the gains skimmed off for those who own what by a common-sense definition is a criminal network.

Consider what my friend Mark Jeftovic calls network states, private enterprises of such scale and reach that their power rivals or exceeds those of traditional nation-states. Big Tech corporations reward their owners and managers via pulling strings invisible to all but those doing the pulling to maximize extraction of data, profits and control of the data, which then draws the nation-states in as partners in these structures of control.

Does making the distinction between public and private actually elucidate anything, or is trying to distinguish between the two itself an obfuscation?

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