CAPITALISM'S SHADOW
19 DECEMBER 2022 (18 MIN READ)
Let me begin this article by prefacing that I, by no means, am using this to influence any other sort of economic system than free-market capitalism. Although capitalism definitely has its faults, I believe that communism and socialism are significantly more destructive for society. Since I am not an economist, I do not intend to write an article weighing the pros and cons of these economic systems. However, I am a philosopher and healer, thus I believe it to be my responsibility to speak truth to some faults in a system that’s causing too much suffering. Due to the fact that capitalism is the economic system we will find ourselves in for a long time in this Western world, and no other better alternatives exist for a large-scale society, we might as well learn about how it may be traumatizing us and do our best to heal these negative side effects.
Capitalism undoubtedly has a lot of light, such as giving us the ability to follow through with our soul’s mission without having to worry about government suppression and totalitarianism, to some extent. Additionally, for those who come from nothing and make it, an amazing hero’s journey is cultivated and is able to inspire the hearts of millions. Nevertheless, with anything that brings a lot of light, the same level of shadow is hidden beneath the surface. Similar to individual psychology, the more we, as a collective, ignore this shadow and create an illusion that only the light exists, the more we will find ourselves playing out our pain and trauma unconsciously, leading us to suffer without knowing what’s really causing it. So, as a collective, we must become aware of capitalism’s shadow and try our best to alchemize it into light. But, as anyone who has entered the dark corners of their shadow and made it out smiling would know, finding this light will involve a scary journey into the darkness.
Without further ado, here is a blueprint of capitalism’s shadow and what we can do with that information to heal ourselves as a collective.
CONDITIONAL LOVE
If we see capitalism as a way of perceiving the world, then something must have created and embedded that perception into our minds. This perception comes down to believing that our performance should be tied to our self-worth and will dictate our standing in the world. In terms of how this plays out in society, consider the corporate structure, which gives you a label based on your performance and rewards you a salary based on that criteria as well, leading you to have a position in society monetarily based on your performance. And since us faulty humans like to attach our significance to our monetary standing in society, our self-perception boils down to the quality of our performance in a corporate setting. Where did this preposterous way of thinking begin? If it didn’t seem obvious already, then you may be shocked that it began in school. The Western school system serves as an indoctrination to the matrix of capitalistic thinking, specifically in the sense of making one believe that their self-worth should be tied to a grade. Within school, we are taught to believe that we should always aim for an A+ on every assignment or test, but what does that really mean when you pick it apart? The symbol of an A+ is not as simple as a mere letter on a page, it represents the attainment of perfection, in the form of getting everything right, appeasing our grader to the highest degree, and dominating all of our peers for our own pride.
So, if we obsessively aim to get an A+ in school, then we are actually aiming to never be wrong, impress our superior to the highest extent, and beat everyone in our group to the extent that they are nothing to us. Hmmm, if that doesn’t sound like the blueprint for how to succeed in a capitalistic society, then I don’t know what will. Beyond brainwashing us into being greedy capitalists, what does this do for our psyches as a collective? In essence, believing we are only “good” if we perform perfectly for someone makes us believe that we are only worthy of praise and perfection if we satisfy that condition, rather than feeling worthy of affection for just being authentically ourselves. Put differently, capitalism trains us to believe that our ability to feel loved is dependent on how well we can be perfect for the expectations of someone or something else. How else do you think everyone agrees to sell their soul to the corporate machine and spend their lives clacking away at their keyboards?
Unfortunately, due to the fact that we believe we are only worthy of love based on how well we can perfectly perform for someone else, we learn to only give ourselves love when we meet our own expectation of a perfect performance. This can look like only feeling good about ourselves if we ace a test or make a pitch-perfect business proposal. Since this capitalistic system makes us love ourselves conditionally based on achievement, we end up transferring that habit to our children, handing them additional love and praise when they bring home an A+ or score 30 points in their basketball game. This generational trauma adds serious fuel to the fire of conditional love bred by capitalism. Now that we are aware of this habit of conditional love, what can we do to counteract it? First, we must begin by feeling its consequences, which looks like understanding that one of the main causes of depression is fueled by not feeling loved for our authentic self. Since almost all of us under a capitalist system only feel loved for being a perfect function, rather than just being ourselves, we all are carrying some form of depression with us—whether we are aware of it or not. Understanding that the result of not tackling this issue will lead to a collective depression should light a fire under your ass to do something about it. And that something boils down to handing yourself love for just being yourself, rather than only feeling it when you are achieving perfection.
But how can we do that and still play the capitalist game so we can put food in our children’s mouths? I’m not saying that the solution is to become a nihilist and stop giving a crap about anything, but rather lessen the devastating blow of the game by realizing it's a game in the first place. So, sure, make as much money as you humanly desire and spend time accomplishing your business dreams; however, it’s important to separate the game from reality and understand that you are more than just a creative output. To put this notion into practice, take time to pull away from the capitalist mindset and go into your body, handing yourself love for just being. A meditation practice will take this a long way, as well as any form of good-meaning play.
STUNTED CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT
Our brains and ways of understanding/relating to the world are created in our childhood, which ends up getting pretty messed up due to the stressors of the capitalist world on parents and the marketing campaigns designed to breed children as eventual slaves of the system. In terms of parenting, three key components exist that capitalism causes deep issues with: immediate return to work for mothers, being emotionally absent, and transferring the stress of life to one’s children. When it comes to going back to work immediately, the stress of that begins even before work starts. When we throw pregnant mothers into stressful work environments, where they are expected to be emotionless robots and get all their work done consistently, we are messing up the child’s development in the womb. New data is coming out that reveals how stressful pregnancies can mess with the development of a healthy brain in a child, as well as the child’s telomeres, which keep our cells healthy and help us ward off disease.¹ So, by having almost all mothers in the Western world having to go through immensely stressful jobs throughout their pregnancies to provide for their families, it actually stunts the collective development of babies in the womb. Now, I’m not a politician, but I do have a degree in political science, so I know it’s a difficult topic to make some rules around, but we should at least be aware of the dangers this system poses and use that awareness to get creative and make some ideas to help, such as reduced hours at the same salary during pregnancy or extended maternity leave before birth. And if your brain goes straight to, “but that would mess up the economy,” then you can see how the system has brainwashed you to value money over healthy children.
For the next component of work and motherhood, when mothers are expected to go straight to the office after birth, they are creating deep emotional abandonment wounds for the baby. Straight after birth, all a baby wants is to be held by their mother all the time, and when they only get small doses, their brain develops in a state of terror and feeling like they are not worthy of love and attention. (If you want to learn more about this in more scientific detail, then check out Dr. Gabor Maté’s book, The Myth of Normal, which explains this topic very well). Unfortunately, this brain state doesn’t suddenly leave the child when they grow up a bit, it stays with them forever, creating a fundamental piece of them that will take serious therapeutic work to heal if they ever choose to go down that road. And before you send me an angry DM calling me a misogynist, fathers, you are not off the hook! A baby also needs their father’s presence frequently throughout their infancy, which also leads them to have abandonment issues if they are not around so much due to work. I am not saying any of this to place blame on hard-working parents doing what they can to survive. Rather, I am painting an accurate picture of the side effects of a failing system that needs desperate rejuvenation: that the pursuit of money and security has trumped the well-being of children.
With regards to kids absorbing stress from their parents, kids are like sponges, they absorb whatever their parents bring home. And since most parents come home from work still stressed with barely any time to decompress and soothe their psyches, their children can never really get the peaceful presence they need to grow up feeling loved. Let’s paint a picture to have this reality land a bit harder. Consider a five-year-old boy whose mother works as a maid for a nice hotel and whose father works as a mechanic for a successful car shop in town. Both parents do their jobs out of obligation and tolerate crappy treatment every day, making them stressed throughout their work days and wishing their lives were better. Once they get home, they are exhausted and want to lie down and forget about the day, but all their child wants is their attention and time to play. Because they are still so stressed and exhausted, the parents either tell the kid to watch television by himself quietly or play with him while mentally checked out. Due to these distant actions, the kid feels as if he is not worthy of his parents’ love and attention, doing whatever he can in his power to get it when he’s around them. This constant need for love and attention that he’s not getting, and his energetic outbursts to do so, make him also feel stressed and wishing his life was better. So, as you can see, although the child has a much different life from the parents, he still ends up absorbing their stress in his own manner. And this stress comes down to the immense pressures on middle to lower-class citizens to put their personal lives on hold for economic survival. I, unfortunately, don’t know the solution to this problem, but becoming aware that it is a serious problem is always required before searching for a solution.
Lastly, in terms of the marketing campaigns designed to brainwash us as children, we can only feed into the capitalist system if we are manipulated to believe in it from a young age. And no, I’m not saying that free-market economics are making their way into Teletubbies, but rather, children are exploited by advertisers to believe that they need certain products to feel happy—a key component of capitalism’s shadow. As a kid, I remember watching advertisements of happy families playing a certain board game and I believed that I needed that game to fix the sad dinners my family had been having forever. Or, seeing fast food advertisements with all their excitement and beautiful colors and believing I needed that food to take part in that happiness. As we grow up, this bad habit sticks with us, such as believing we need that handbag or that car to fill a hole in our life that we can’t seem to give ourselves. This is capitalism working at its finest: making us believe that we need an external product to fix an internal solution. I believe that if we stop brainwashing kids to believe this lie and focus on teaching them how to heal their ailments with psychological tools instead, we will save ourselves from a ton of corporate manipulation and misery in the future. But as long as children make tons of money for the system, they will never not be used as pawns. Even though that is brutally true, what I can say is that if you are ever marketing a product for children, think about the pain you are handing them if you make them believe that a product will fix their issues, which comes down to leading them to believe that their life isn’t good as it is and that they need an external solution to fix it. Truly sit with this feeling before you go down that road and if you still manage to do it with ease, then the next section is perfect for you.
ENCOURAGED PSYCHOPATHY
In order to make it to the top of the capitalist matrix we find ourselves in, for the most part, you have to engage in some sort of psychopathic behavior. This psychopathy boils down to three tenets: domination, removed empathy, and ignored feelings. With regards to domination, similar to how you wanted to get an A+ in school to beat everyone else and declare your superiority, in the real world, that A+ becomes a bucket of money you can throw up in the air and gloat in everyone’s envy. Sure, to some, making a lot of money is a result of dedicating themselves to a higher purpose and helping make lives easier, but, for most people, it comes down to chasing a position in society where they can feel dominant and better than everyone else. Since most people use this motivation of wanting to feel better than everyone as fuel for their success, then the collective juice humans beings feed off to fuel their capitalist lives is an extension of psychopathic behavior: treating and viewing people as mere pawns to destroy on their way to take over the position of King or Queen. This need to dominate and destroy regular human beings in order to achieve “greatness” leads one to start throwing away their empathy in the process.
If you ask any licensed medical professional to list the biggest telltale sign of a psychopath, then they will go straight to telling you about signals of a complete disregard for empathy. And if you look at most boardrooms of large companies, you will be quick to see that empathy is nowhere to be found, as consumers in their eyes lose their humanity and just become vehicles for personal profit. In order to create a regular consumer, they have to manipulate them to believe that their product is not only beneficial for them, but also that they need it to compensate for something missing from their lives. For some companies who are just selling harmless products, this philosophy isn’t the end of the world when compared to the ones who are selling harmful things, such as tobacco companies back in the day or fast food advertisers now. In terms of the tobacco companies, they fooled people to believe that in order to be seen as more cool or masculine, they needed to be smoking a cigarette, sacrificing their health for monetary gain. And when it comes to the fast food companies, they trigger childhood colors and memories to make you want to unconsciously revisit simpler times through a McDonald’s cheeseburger or a Dairy Queen Blizzard. Similar to the smoking companies, these boardrooms don’t give a crap if you fall dead because of your health, as long as you made them a pretty penny and helped them go further down the road of personal domination. Similar to how capitalism can make us remove our empathy, it can also remove our ability to recognize our feelings and the feelings of others.
Since financially making it in this world requires one to embrace being a full-on workaholic, emotions become a detriment rather than a tool on the path to domination. These detrimental emotions include fatigue, sadness, isolation, anxiety, and fear, just to name a few. If one wants to dominate their field and make a lot of money, then being tired or sad is not an option, so over time, one has to learn how to repress the feeling when it comes up and just focus on work. Although many “successful” people will tell you this model is an essential way to live, repressed emotions will eventually land you in a deep depression that you cannot fake your way out of anymore or with a serious disease, as repressed emotions don’t vanish into the cosmos, they get stuck in the body and cause disease. Another negative side effect of this emotionless life is that one starts to lose patience for the emotions of others, since they refuse to accept and see the emotions in themselves. This effect can manifest as yelling at one’s kids for feeling sad or distancing oneself from their romantic partner because they are exhibiting negative emotions. Put differently, the habit of ignoring one’s emotions will lead them to ignore the emotions of others, destroying their relationships in the process since they will be such a pain to be around.
From the picture this section has painted so far, a full absorption into the capitalist matrix will make you exhibit psychopathic behavior through needing to dominate people at all costs, losing empathy for people’s ailments, and becoming an emotionless robot who nobody wants to be around. Since this is such a dire reality for so many of us, what the fuck can we do to find a way out? The biggest thing one can do here is to begin realizing that they are engaging in this behavior and start feeling disidentified by it. This process can look like catching your desire to dominate people, noticing how you have lost empathy in a certain moment, or seeing how you are ignoring your emotions, and feeling detached from that way of living, as if you no longer want it to be a part of your experience. Once this detachment starts to become automatic, you will need to bring in a new way of living, which should be one of love. Instead of wanting to dominate, desire to help. Instead of making people suffer so you can get paid, see if you can offer them a service that genuinely makes their lives healthier. And finally, rather than constantly suppressing your “useless” emotions, allow them to teach you something about yourself and use the wisdom gained from those experiences to connect with others.
DESTROYED HUMANITY
Going about being human can go one of two ways in my eyes. You can either use Gaia and your fellow earthly siblings for personal gains, creating an egoistic separation of you versus the world, or you can assist or coexist with Mother Earth and her inhabitants, seeing everyone as an extension of yourself. Unfortunately, the capitalist system we find ourselves in finds an overwhelming majority of us stuck in the way of using the earth’s resources and people for a personal gain of power. In terms of how we are relating to the world, look no further than the amount of pollution in the air, factory farms, pesticides, supply chain energy expenditures, etc. And don’t worry, I’m not standing with a bunch of annoying, vegan women with armpit hair judging anyone who eats a steak. I realize that these issues are required for the functioning of the capitalist infrastructure we find ourselves in and suddenly ending anything that causes disruptions to the health of the earth will cause mass poverty and starvation. However, it’s still important to sit with the fact that most of us are destroying the earth with no hesitation. And even deeper than that, most of us are losing our connection with the earth in favor of a connection with power and the demonic forces that come with that. So, I unfortunately can’t give you the exact formula to save the planet, but what I can do is ask you to sit with your relationship with the earth and how it’s being affected by the choices you make tied to capitalism. If each individual truly reckons with this reality and feels the love lost by cutting ties with Gaia, then we can make a large wave of change in this world.
With regard to using people as vehicles for personal profit, which all of us are forced to do in this capitalist world, it comes at a deep cost to the soul. Think about how we refer to socializing these days: networking. Let’s unpack what that word really entails. When someone says they’re networking, what they mean is that they are communicating to people in a specific manner that could lead to them potentially gaining profit in their professional world. For example, if I am an aspiring actor and I go to a party, then I could use that social situation as a chance to find powerful people and charm them into potentially giving me a role in a show or movie. Thus, instead of treating social situations as a chance to deepen our connections as fellow brothers and sisters and feel loved, we use social events as an opportunity to further our positions of power, going from lovingly existing with people to using them for our own profit. If we all walk around treating social situations with this lens, then we are never really allowing ourselves to properly connect with people and we can miss out on the opportunity to cultivate deep friendships that do not have an agenda.
Whenever anyone takes a psychedelic, and their ego leaves the equation, all they begin to care about is the well-being of nature and spreading love to the people around them. At its core, without the brainwashing of an egoistic, capitalistic society, this is the way humans are designed to be: one with nature and one with each other. Since fully falling into this matrix of capitalism can lead to losing all sense of connection with nature and people, you can definitely make the argument that the capitalist system is destroying our humanity. So, to offset this painful truth, do whatever you can to do something that connects you with Gaia and to the people around you, without any agendas and without the lens of the ego. Your soul will thank you deeply.
¹ LaMotte, Sandee. “Stress during pregnancy may harm unborn baby’s brain, studies find.” CNN (2020).
