The Crackpot and the Cowardly Lion
Is this the kind of capitalism we want to have?
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are the two richest men in the world, each with a net worth of around 250 billion dollars. It is hard to see a number that big and understand it — it exists out beyond the place where our intuitions were built to function, especially when we are talking about something like money, which we have to translate in our minds into actual purchases in order to make it mean something. But see if this analogy helps. If you could travel at the speed of light, you could cover 1 million miles in about 5 seconds. To cover 100 million miles, it would take you about 9 minutes. But to cover 250 billion miles, it would take you 15 days.
The point is that you would be making a mistake to think of these two men as people who have just made a lot of money. Instead, the right way to think about them is as two men who have achieved a level of success at the game of capitalism that is incomparable to everyone else who is participating in it (which is to say, all of us). Not only do they sit at a spot impossibly far away from us on the wealth curve, but also neither inherited their wealth — instead, both became rich by founding (and continuing to own significant percentages of) incredibly successful companies. From the perspective of capitalism, Musk and Bezos are perfect — they are gods among men.
They are similar to each other (and only each other) in other ways that are notable. Both decided that they should own important media companies — Musk’s Twitter and Bezos’s The Washington Post. Both decided that they should build companies that launch rockets — Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin. And both seem to have a substantial blind spot around industrial design — Musk’s Tesla rolled out a truck that looks like a dumpster and Bezos’s Blue Origin launched a rocket that looks like a giant penis.
Which is to say that both men (by virtue of their capitalist perfection), seem to be convinced that they should be (and, at a minimum, have amassed the power to actually be) humanity’s stewards for both our efforts to understand the world around us and our efforts to bring humanity beyond the boundaries of our planet. And yet, at the same time, there is some evidence to suspect that, notwithstanding their perfection from the perspective of capitalism, these two men are not necessarily the best that humanity has to offer.
Actually, there is a lot of evidence that — off the playing field of capitalism — these two are not great men. Musk is a crackpot, gorging on the most noxious and idiotic conspiracy theories the world has to offer and then passing them on with all of the clueless self importance of a cat leaving a rat’s carcass at your front door. And Bezos is a cowardly lion, who thinks of himself like this
but who just this week decided to cut the throat of The Washington Post as part of his pre-emptive prostration at the feet of Donald Trump.
There is a lot to dislike about both of these men, but they are — albeit accidentally, and in perhaps the most costly fashion imaginable — giving us a useful opportunity to see capitalism more clearly.
I can feel the tension already. One way you can tell that capitalism has taken on a lot of the elements of religion here in the United States is the way that everyone tenses up as soon as the subject is raised, alert to the possibility of blasphemy. So let me get this bit out of the way — capitalism is clearly the right infrastructure for an economy. Its track record is incredible all on its own and is even more incredible in comparison to competing infrastructures (such as socialism). But that is actually all beside the point that I want to make here. This isn’t about whether capitalism is the right choice or not.
Instead, this is about the necessary work of being able to see capitalism clearly — to see it for what it is and what it isn’t. That work is necessary because our inability to see capitalism clearly — the way that we obscure it with layers of stories and beliefs — prevents us from doing some things that we very much need to do.
To see capitalism clearly, another analogy is helpful — we should think of capitalism as being like fire.
Like fire, capitalism does one thing and one thing only. Fire burns and capitalism produces.
Like fire, capitalism is (at least, in some form) a natural phenomenon. Where there is fuel and sufficient heat, a fire can start all on its own. Where there are resources and self-interested people, capitalism can start all on its own.
Like fire, capitalism does not itself have intelligence or morality. Fire doesn’t know the difference between burning in a fireplace to warm you and burning your house down. Capitalism doesn’t know the difference between producing antibiotics and producing meth.
Like fire, capitalism is most often experienced — not in its natural form — but rather as mediated through machinery that we have built to magnify and direct its power. We build one fire in the furnace of a power plant and we use it to create steam that turns a generator that creates electricity that can warm tens of thousands of homes. We put capitalism into a legal and political structure that allows it to persist across thousands of miles and billions of people and use it to generate lives of historically unprecedented material comforts. Moreover — and this is a crucial point to understand — these machines that we have built, they very much do have both intelligence and morality, provided, of course, that we have built them in such a way.
There is a story circulating today that further illustrates this difference between capitalism as (on the one hand) a raw natural phenomenon of production and (on the other hand) something that we experience primarily through machinery that directs it according to an intelligence and morality. That story has to do with artificial intelligence — more specifically, with the various scenarios in which artificial intelligence might destroy humanity. It can be referred to as the paper clip scenario. In that imagined doomsday, an all powerful AI is instructed to create paper clips. The AI executes this instruction so blindly and so thoroughly that it doesn’t stop until the entire planet has been used up — the only thing left is the now idle AI and a sea of paper clips. That imagined AI doomsday is actually just a nightmare about capitalism — it is infinite production that misunderstands our intentions, has no morality, and therefore (rather than serving our interests) uses all of us as fuel.
So, perceiving more clearly the difference between capitalism itself and the machinery that we have built (and that we have imbued with an intelligence and morality), we should now be able to manifest a healthy suspicion of those who claim that the results we see from capitalism here in the United States are simply the natural results of capitalism or — even more dubious a claim — are inherently good because they are natural. These results are almost certainly neither of these things. Instead, they are the results of the intelligence (or stupidity) and the morality (or immorality) that we have built into the machinery.
And there is some strong evidence that the machinery we have built is not nearly as intelligent or moral as we need it to be. A few examples.
If you are like most of us mere mortals, you pay income taxes. But if you are like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the machinery has been built to allow you to pick and choose if and when you pay income taxes. In 2018, Musk paid nothing in federal income taxes. Same for Bezos in 2011.
Here’s another one. Our machinery has defined speaking to include the activity of spending money and has interpreted our Constitution’s First Amendment to prevent limits on the spending of money in support of some political aim. As such, your political speech and my political speech are like whispers in a hurricane, but Musk or Bezos can use their incredible wealth to absolutely saturate the sensing organs of the body politic with whatever they want to say.
Contrast those examples to an approach to wealth that we find in the Constitution. The Constitution creates a set of rules under which individuals can amass wealth by coming up with a valuable invention (which the Constitution protects with a patent) or a valuable form of expression (which the Constitution protects with a copyright). But that wealth is not the goal of those rules. Instead, it is merely the mechanism by which the real goal can be obtained. In the words found in the Constitution, the goal is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” which we achieve “by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The machine is built to create progress, not wealth. And, in fact, the exclusive rights that are granted as a part of the inner workings of that machine are limited — the intention is to grant just enough exclusivity (just enough wealth) for the country to get the progress that it wants to achieve. That approach is all but absent in the machinery of today.
We have a very serious problem to solve, not with capitalism itself, but with the machinery that we have built to magnify and direct the power of this natural phenomenon. The intelligence inside that machine and the morality inside that machine are both out of alignment. Fundamentally, it is being run in a way that identifies a very small number of people (selected solely for their ability to win the game of capitalism as it is played today) and hands them the power to make the decisions that shape the world.
There is nothing causal in the relationship between wealth and goodness. Sometimes, truly great and good people become rich. Sometimes, they use their wealth to do great and good things. But just as often — maybe more often — they are crackpots or cowardly lions. Those are certainly the examples that we are dealing with today in Musk and Bezos. And yet, we continue to run the machinery of capitalism in a way that assumes — indeed, depends upon — the idea that the wealthy will be great and good.
Because we have so thoroughly conflated capitalism with patriotism, and because we have so thoroughly oriented our morality toward making money, and because we have so thoroughly obscured the difference between capitalism and the machinery that we have built, we have mistaken men like Musk and Bezos for geniuses, for the elite, for the kind of people who should be listened to, for the kind of people who should lead us. The reality is that they are none of these things – they are just rich.