Upon reflecting on the essay Why aren’t Americans fighting back, which presents many reasonable answers, I came away thinking about the idea of capture.

Individually Captured

When you rely heavily if not solely on the lower level deficiency needs—food, shelter, safety, healthcare—of people as the go-to-lever for getting people to do as you desire (this is called modern management) then of course you would be against any initiative that would satisfy deficiency needs and thus reduce the effectiveness of your fear-based  method of management.  Who would want to render him/herself ineffective by doing away with the only tool one knows how to use!  With the basic human needs being met, most business managers would be at a loss for how to manage the work of enterprise.  Hence the private business sector—especially big business—is adamantly against the satisfaction of these needs through government programs.

The public reason given is that they are concerned about government spending though they make no effort to diminish, eliminate or refuse government handouts to their firm or their industry—in fact there is considerable effort to secure these favors.  It has become so much a part of the conduct of big business that these favors have become what big business believes to which it is entitled.

Collectively Captured

The capture of government by big business (e.g. big pharma, big ag, big banks, big technology) parallels that of predator to prey or parasite to host.  Further, like an addict seeking his/her pleasure with the next fix, the intensity of the grip on public money for private profit can never be too tight.  The answer to the question how much do you need is, I need it all!  Hence the effort to privatize society.

People are captured: captured individually in the workplace by fear-based management that keeps them deficiency-need focused and collectively in society by the co-dependent relationship between elected officials and captains of business & industry.

Freeing One’s Self

It need not be this way!  Contrary to common misunderstanding we are not destined in life to seek to maximize our own pleasure in the moment.  We are not destined to define and structure life as the pursuit of maximum material gain—people are not defined by what one has accumulated.  If this is in deed our nature then everyone would realize this: by definition nature would provide what we each require.  Also it would be going against one’s nature to do otherwise, and this logically and rationally can’t be.

As previously argued, we’ve numbed our self to your humanity.  Our destiny is not to be captured by capitalism.  We aren’t born as capitalists we are born as human beings.  The sooner we wake up to this unquestionable fact the sooner we will free our self from its grip.