Critique of Capitalism Using Only One-Syllable Words

The way wealth moves through the world needs to be called out in new ways.

The way wealth moves through the world needs to be called out in new ways. Most who live now feel great strain due to one big thing, and it’s more than fair to say in plain words what it’s like. It’s like a fist clamped down on the heart of the world that with each year, each day, each hour, gets more tight. The heart of the world gets squeezed with more torque, and more death leaks out. It’s not that death would not be with us were the fist not there and so tight, there would just be more life to make the death that is borne seem more light. Yet the fist just gets more tight, and with each beat the heart tries to fight off the fist, but no beat can break its grip.

The fist is not just the scheme by which wealth is held, it is the lore by which the scheme is forged. The lore gives wealth its awe. It’s the tales told that shade the past in ways that make the way wealth is made seem sound and have no flaw. Law, goes the lore, comes to us through a fair trial of years. One thing this trite view of time past leaves out: those who hold the wealth make the laws that guide its flow, and it’s they who tend to tell the tales that frame the past. Those who make no laws, those who tell no tales of what once was, get less of the stuff that it takes to buy things, to be sure. But the thing that’s most sad and what we don’t grasp is that those with less start to think that the cause of their lack is not us, but God, or some Hand no one can see backed by math and charts and graphs that it takes a kind of priest who needs to be numb to love to read.

This lore is forged by the class that loves to think and who lives in the lab of the mind and who longs to turn their time and life to art. We take pride in what we know and what we say on the things we know. We do not sit on top of the walls that guard the wealth of those who own it, but all our words paint the walls. And for whose gain? Those heirs who ease most in the gifts of the past’s dice rolls and croak that chance is good and true and just. The songs sung, the walls built, and the paint on those walls, and the work of thought done by those who grow the wealth in the shade of those who wield the law to shield it, gird the faith of those with less that things are how they are, in some sense, due to fate, that force we hate to frame things in, and yet don’t quite seem to run out of vile things to blame on, at least in our minds where no one can judge.

Well, we should feel shame when we let fate freight the weight of the ills of those who lack what we lack. We know wealth and law are not bound, they just seem so. We know wealth and law if pulled in two parts would make room for new thoughts about what is whose. Were we to make love the wealth we store, would the cold not be less cold? Would our wars not be more rare? Would all not see, if they had been born with no hope of more than they have, that wealth and love are both like fire, found here and there in the wild, to be sure, but much more made than found?

The bolt from the sky, it’s not known when or where it comes, so life can’t be lived on its terms. But the flash of flint on flint in a hearth at night is right there, each night, in each home. Just as we share our “I love you” and our “I love you, too.” We can and do make what we need. That is all you need to know to know that the fist that grips the heart of the world would let go if we let it let go.