Many of you have probably seen the video by now. Jimmy Kimmel describes the birth of his son and its aftermath, his life-threatening heart disease, the immediate struggle to save his life, and Kimmel’s tearful plea to never let money determine life or death in these situations. For anyone whose heart is not yet turned to stone, it was deeply moving.
But this moment of true feeling, this call to arms when it comes to our health care system, should raise a host of other questions about our economic system itself, and I fear it won’t. I fear people will immediately go back to thinking in terms of gradualism, incrementalism, tweaking the system here and there, when the reality is, capitalism itself is shockingly heartless and irrational and endlessly destructive. Its very nature is to put profits before people, and we allow this. We allow the economic system itself to toss people into the garbage, to live and die early deaths, to suffer, all for the obscenely arbitrary fiction that money gets to make that call and should. Money. Not humans. And If we step back, take a deep breath, and ponder its hold on us, its power to decide not only life and death, but our educational pursuits, our travel, our cultural horizons, our environment, whether we go hungry, homeless or naked through the cold, the insanity of it becomes all the more clear. It’s fundamentally, self-evidently crazy to allow money to ever be the determining factor for anything in human life.
I’ve heard for decades that the massive inequality on display as a result of the capitalist system is entirely fair, and that it’s just a sign of the “natural” differences between one’s intelligence, hard work or creativity and the next guy’s. That it supposedly makes perfect sense when a hedge-fund manager makes billions while a teacher makes 50K. But this is only the case within the crazy tree world of the invented fiction that is capitalism, and nowhere else in “nature”. As in, it can only ever make sense as a form of forced logic within an entirely unnatural and illogical, invented world. Nowhere else, in any previous economic system, did we ever see such neck-breaking verticalities/hierarchies in the way one person’s work – and their lives – are valued over another.
Think about it. How many people can accurately claim that they’re even twice as smart as the average person, much less thousands of times smarter? Or that they work ten times, a hundred times, ten thousand times harder than anyone else? Or that their exceptional creativity warrants those massive gaps? Not by any measure of intellect, effort or creativity we have on record. The smartest people in the world, for instance, have IQs in the 150 – 200 range, with the average IQ being 100. And it’s physically impossible to work more that roughly 4 times a forty-hour week, even if you go without sleep and do nothing else. Even the best athletes in the world, at the height of their physical powers, aren’t ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times faster or stronger than the average person. As in, from top to bottom, human beings aren’t separated by all that much, and certainly not enough to legitimize the ginormous gaps in valuation under capitalism.
And, of course, even among the most gifted, the true geniuses, the great athletes, a huge part of their relative superiority has to do with the luck of the draw, birth-wise, their genetic code, the relative wealth they were born into which helped them develop their skills and their individual genius. It was never in a vacuum. How much of the gap between those superior few can be isolated to just their own hard work, perseverance and tenacity, and how much is a result of factors beyond their control? How much is solely on them?
I don’t think most Americans actually stop to question how all of this came to be. I don’t think many wonder at the steepness of the pyramids, or why the few should get to decide the value of the many. But they should wonder and question. They should, in my view, stop seeing this as “natural,” step away from that fake, invented world, and look instead at humans as humans. As fellow humans. The way we’re valued under capitalism is more like the differences between species, with humans at the top, dogs in the middle, worms at the bottom, and hundreds of species in between. We’re centuries past due for a reassessment.