But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could shove the exploiters and parasites out of the periphery, and let them struggle at the impoverished margins of the public that they robbed. And we can put the people that we love and that need our care at the center. We can heal the sick, feed the poor, nurture the young, and keep the elderly in good company at the twilight of their years (we may even be able to extend those years). That’s what we can do. But we have to see capitalism as a hurdle that needs to be overcome in order to do it.
I hear smart people say things like “the top 1%” or “all the extra income goes to the top”. I agree with some implicit aspects of this grammar. I agree that there is an exploitive class of hyper-rich folks who get most (or all) of the extra pieces of the economic pie when the pie gets bigger. But I don’t agree with the model that says the socio-economic status of society is like a pyramid and the rich, Ivy League educated folks are at the top. I don’t even want to negate the idea, I just think it’s irrelevant.
You see, there are two kinds of Darwinism: there is Spencerian Darwinism and then there is Darwinian Darwinism. Spencerian Darwinism is right-wing ideology, pure and simple. Spencerian Darwinism says that the rich are at the top because they belong at the top morally and cognitively. Darwinian Darwinism is scientific, and the only kind that really matters—analytically or rhetorically. Darwinian Darwinism thinks about the scientific survival of genes and communities. It’s the collective (species) that matters.
The collective survives based on empathy and mutual aid. The species may occupy a niche in the ecosystem. The species may function at some trophic level of the food web. But either the species is at the top or it isn’t. If it doesn’t work together, some of its members are not going to stay at the highest trophic level. That’s why equality matters. Equality is literally a matter of survival for social species like us.
The rich are in line with everybody else. Society is horizontal, not vertical. Who really produces what we need to survive? Who would survive if all the artificial layers of the finanicial-legalist economy broke down? I’d say a family comprised of an auto mechanic and a trauma nurse are in a much better chance of real survival in a natural ecosystem than a family comprised of an investment banker and a M&A lawyer. The hyper-rich and fancy educated folks are not at the highest trophic level of society. I’d say we forget about the metaphor of the wealth pyramid. I’d like to propose a different model: the concentric circles model of society.
Think of society as a collection of concentric circles; where by society we mean the shared spaces of a social species. The outermost layer is the periphery. These are the people that exist at the margins. These are the people having a rough time of it, because they are not getting the care and empathy they need in social interactions with other people. The intermediate circles in the pyramid consist of average citizens, working hard to take care of themselves and their families. But these people also work hard to provide care, empathy, and warmth for the innermost concentric circle. The innermost concentric circle is the warm core of society because it gets the care, empathy, and warmth of everybody else out there working hard.
The innermost circle should consist of the most vulnerable: the young, the infirm, the poor, and the elderly. In some species it does, say certain kinds of foxes. But in capitalist society the innermost circle consists of the hyper-rich folks with all their fancy education. Their gardeners tend their gardens, their nannies take care of their kids, their cooks prepare their food, their mechanics and technicians keep their stuff running in tip-top shape, and their nurses heal their wounds and prevent them from getting sick, and so on and so on.
They buy all of this empathy and care and warmth at some price. They can even buy the most sacred form of social interaction, intimacy. For many of them, they inherited this kind of life, so it’s all they know and they take it for granted. The rich, over privileged kids at schools for rich kids take it for granted—some of them may even think everyone else owes it to them. But they don’t produce much of value. It’s everybody else who does the production that leads to survival. The rich think they are the most disciplined, but it’s easy to be disciplined when everyone else is taking care of YOU.
Capitalism is the system that inverts society. It takes the takers, the predators, the exploiters, and it puts these folks at the center of the society where they stay warm, fat, dry, and comfortable. Capitalism puts the people that need the warmth and care of hard-working citizens and throws them out to the periphery. The vulnerable and kind-hearted are pushed the margins. The mean-spirited, competitive parasites get to snuggle near the center, where they live warmer and better than everyone else. Capitalism is like a social disease that helps protect parasites by moving them to the heart of society.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could shove the exploiters and parasites out of the periphery, and let them struggle at the impoverished margins of the public that they robbed. And we can put the people that we love and that need our care at the center. We can heal the sick, feed the poor, nurture the young, and keep the elderly in good company at the twilight of their years (we may even be able to extend those years). That’s what we can do. But we have to see capitalism as a hurdle that needs to be overcome in order to do it.