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People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by ‘culturism’.
We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’
Behind the meteoric rise of both science and empire lurks one particularly important force: capitalism. Were it not for businessmen seeking to make money, Columbus would not have reached America, James Cook would not have reached Australia, and Neil Armstrong would never have taken that small step on the surface of the moon.
Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future.
You could cut the pie in many different ways, but it never got any bigger.
Over the last 500 years the idea of progress convinced people to put more and more trust in the future. This trust created credit; credit brought real economic growth; and growth strengthened the trust in the future and opened the way for even more credit. It didn’t happen overnight – the economy behaved more like a roller coaster than a balloon.
Today, there is so much credit in the world that governments, business corporations and private individuals easily obtain large, long-term and low-interest loans that far exceed current income.
Being rich meant being moral. In Smith’s story, people become rich not by despoiling their neighbours, but by increasing the overall size of the pie. And when the pie grows, everyone benefits. The rich are accordingly the most useful and benevolent people in society, because they turn the wheels of growth for everyone’s advantage. All this depends, however, on the rich using their profits to open new factories and hire new employees, rather than wasting them on non-productive activities.
‘When profits increase, the landlord or weaver will employ more assistants’
modern capitalist economy was the emergence of a new ethic, according to which profits ought to be reinvested in production. This brings about more profits, which are again reinvested in production, which brings more profits, et cetera ad infinitum.
In the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is: ‘The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.’
Capitalism distinguishes ‘capital’ from mere ‘wealth’. Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth, on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.
In the modern era, the nobility has been overtaken by a new elite whose members are true believers in the capitalist creed. The new capitalist elite is made up not of dukes and marquises, but of board chairmen, stock traders and industrialists.
Conversely, the history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account.
The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years – such as the continent of America, the internal combustion engine, or genetically engineered sheep. Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.
credit financed new discoveries; discoveries led to colonies; colonies provided profits; profits built trust; and trust translated into more credit.
Capitalist entrepreneurs only increased their financial momentum from conquest to conquest.
THE MODERN ECONOMY GROWS THANKS to our trust in the future and to the willingness of capitalists to reinvest their profits in production.
Economic growth also requires energy and raw materials, and these are finite. When and if they run out, the entire system will collapse.
Whenever a shortage of either has threatened to slow economic growth, investments have flowed into scientific and technological research. These have invariably produced not only more efficient ways of exploiting existing resources, but also completely new types of energy and materials.
The modern capitalist economy must constantly increase production if it is to survive, like a shark that must swim or suffocate. Yet it’s not enough just to produce. Somebody must also buy the products, or industrialists and investors alike will go bust. To prevent this catastrophe and to make sure that people will always buy whatever new stuff
Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘Just do it!’) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.
The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’
None of us was alive a thousand years ago, so we easily forget how much more violent the world used to be. And as wars become more rare they attract more attention.
Even more importantly, it’s easier to relate to the suffering of individuals than of entire populations.
In the year 2000, wars caused the deaths of 310,000 individuals, and violent crime killed another 520,000.
(Even today, as the above figures indicate, local crime is a far deadlier threat than international wars.)
peace is the implausibility of war. There has never been real peace in the world.
The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms.
