The Pursuit Of Happiness – “Whenever capitalism wishes to enslave us. It tells us that it is setting us free”.

The first great global machine was Capitalism. It was made by man but now man no longer has or wishes control of it, now it controls man and, eventually, it will exterminate man and replace him with machines. Socialism is merely the human in us seeing that there is no driver at the wheel and that the cold blooded machine of capitalism is out of control; that it is grinding up men in its wheels and gears.

The machine of capitalism has for centuries dictated and shaped human life; promoting our alienation from nature and our isolation from each other and eventually, corporations, the arms of the capitalist machine, will start to sell us something else and, as before, ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’ and ‘empowerment’ will be the slogans that they use in their ad campaigns. This new thing shall be called Transhumanism. They will sell it to us, at first, as a medical necessity and then as a lifestyle choice; first as an artificial heart, then as an artificial soul.

In the beginning they will sell us robots to replace what they will call the ‘drudgery’ of our lives but is actually the work that gives our life meaning and our souls a sense of fulfilment; they will replace our reality that they will call ‘humdrum and mundane’ by selling us a more exciting artificial reality so that we end up being permanently in a dream state, dreaming the dreams that corporations want us to dream instead of using our own imaginations; they will sell us artificial sex and artificial reproduction and artificial child care so that we can spend more time making and spending money and less time being parents and couples and last of all they will replace us, piece by piece, like the ship of Theseus, selling us replacement parts for every part of our body and the last thing they will sell us is a replacement for our brain.

“Why be satisfied with an inferior brain”, their advertisments will say, “Be smarter and buy our computerized replacement for a brain that thinks a hundred times quicker and will make you the next Mozart or Einstein”.

And on that day, my fellow human beings, humankind will begin to become extinct because my brain is ‘I’;  myself; the person that I am and once we give up our brains and take the ‘superior’ brains created for us by a corporation, we will lose ourselves; we will die and the human race will become extinct; replaced by the machine progeny of the machine mother, Capitalism.

Through much of the last half of the twentieth century people have been sold, by supporters of capitalism, the idea that Socialism was dehumanizing; that the aim of socialism was to crush the individual and reduce them to a number and a brain washed drone in a state run hive; meanwhile the media has been used by corporations to coral people like cattle; to shape our opinions; to make us into a few homogenous consumer groups; groups that wear the same sort of clothes; listen to the same sort of music; eat the same food and vote for the same brand of political party and why? Because, to the men who run the corporations we are just numbers as insignificant as workers or  cows making money instead of honey for our capitalist beekeepers.

And ultimately, Capitalism, the caliban that we created but refuse to control, will prove to be more dehumanizing than socialism could ever be because it will strip us of our flesh; remove our bones and replace them with plastic and steel.