Primate Man: Savage Capitalism

Human beings invented the monster, gave it a name, and then started blaming it for everything.

Whenever I listen to Dogs — Pink Floyd, with its chorus about savage capitalism, I find myself thinking about something: everyone seems to imagine capitalism as a monstrous creature, created to produce poverty, wars, and hunger. A faceless, mindless beast that devours the weak while the strong survive.

But what if we're looking at the monster from the wrong side?

Capitalism didn't come out of nowhere. It was created by human beings, in their own image and likeness, shaped by their interests. And, like every human creation, it carries our virtues, our flaws, and, above all, our justifications.

Capitalism didn't invent savagery. Long before it existed, there were already wars, slavery, famine, epidemics, misery, and conquerors who seized the land, wealth, and lives of other peoples. Capitalism didn't introduce human cruelty. It inherited that history and found ways to turn it into business.

The difference is that today we can put our foot on someone's neck while wearing a suit and tie and presenting a PowerPoint.

After all, it's not violence. It's supply and demand.

You didn't make it? You didn't work hard enough.

You didn't get there? You lacked competence.

You lost everything? You took the risk.

One guy may have started the race in a Formula One car while you were on foot, but what matters is that you both crossed the same finish line. If he won, it was merit. If you lost, it was incompetence.

Meritocracy loves results. The starting point is an inconvenient detail.

It doesn't matter if one person inherited wealth, a family name, connections, quality education, and political influence, while the other inherited debt, insecurity, and the obligation to work before even discovering what they wanted to do with their lives.

The winner deserves everything. The loser needs to learn a lesson.

And just like that, inequality stops being a collective problem and becomes a moral deficiency of those left behind. It's a rather polite way of stepping on people's necks without getting your shoes dirty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Na4jy2OUH4

The 3.0 Entrepreneurial Preacher

There's an entire industry dedicated to selling the idea that money brings happiness.

And the question these speakers almost always ask is the same: haven't you earned your first million yet?

Look at the trap. Instead of discussing what it means to be happy, they turn happiness into a financial target. You're dissatisfied with your life because you haven't reached the magic number. Work harder, buy my course, hire my consultant, attend my event. When you get there, perhaps you'll discover that the problem was something else. But until then, there's a whole line of products waiting for your credit card.

Money can buy comfort, security, and freedom of choice. It can allow you to stop selling every hour of your day just to survive. That's real.

But there's a difference between buying the possibility of living better and selling the promise that you'll be happy once you have enough money.

That's where the 3.0 entrepreneurial preacher comes in.

The stage has lights, giant screens, music, pyrotechnics, and a guy shouting as if he's about to reveal the secrets of the universe. He gestures, gets worked up, speeds up his voice, and delivers a mixture of adrenaline, hope, and catchy slogans to the audience.

The crowd goes wild.

Not because they've discovered some extraordinary truth, but because, for a few minutes, they believe their lives are about to change.

It's a kind of religious service without an official religion. The pulpit has become a stage, the testimony has become a case study, the miracle has become revenue, and salvation costs three installments on your credit card.

And the speaker? He's the man selling a map to a gold mine while charging admission at the entrance.

The most curious thing is that many people aren't even there to learn. They're there for networking. They want to meet business owners, find suppliers, hire consultants, close deals, and mingle with people who seem to know what they're doing.

In that environment, the appearance of success becomes currency. An impressive portfolio opens doors. A photograph in Dubai is worth more than an honest explanation of the risks involved in a business. A Porsche in the garage seems to prove that the guy knows how to teach other people to make money.

But knowing how to make money and knowing how to teach someone else to make money are two different things.

A guy can be excellent at selling entrepreneurship courses and terrible at helping someone become an entrepreneur.

He may know his own business inside out and have absolutely no idea what the daily routine looks like for someone who works twelve hours a day, has children, pays rent, looks after their parents, and cannot afford to make the same mistake twice.

The consultant presents the method. You provide the money. The business fails. And you get the bill.

If it works, the method was successful.

If it fails, you didn't execute it properly.

It's a wonderful formula: success proves the consultant's competence; failure proves the client's incompetence.

The method never loses.

And when the business goes under, a convenient explanation appears: the government, the economy, interest rates, the crisis, political instability.

All of these things can obviously have an influence. The problem is using them as automatic explanations for every failure, especially after selling someone the certainty that all they had to do was follow the method.

You paid a fortune for consulting that promised to reduce your risks. Now you're in debt, and the guy who took your money is still traveling, giving lectures, and taking pictures of his next achievement.

He has a Porsche in the garage. You have a debt at the bank.

But don't worry: according to the method, it's still your fault.

Perhaps the biggest business some speakers are running isn't teaching people how to become entrepreneurs. It's convincing people to pay for the belief that they can become entrepreneurs.

Money Doesn't Buy Character

The problem goes far beyond entrepreneurship.

We live in a society that confuses money with intelligence, wealth with competence, and financial success with moral superiority.

If the guy is rich, he must know something you don't. If he's poor, he probably did something wrong.

It's convenient logic for those at the top and humiliating for those at the bottom.

But money isn't a certificate of character. A bank account doesn't record honesty, empathy, courage, or responsibility. Your bank statement doesn't tell anyone how many people you harmed to accumulate that balance.

Money shows how much you have. It doesn't necessarily show who you are.

And perhaps that's why so many people need something greater than themselves to justify their own choices.

Human beings need to believe they're on the right side, even when they're doing something wrong. They need a cause, a flag, an ideology, a political party, or a God to give meaning to their actions.

Here's the question: what purpose does a God serve in the life of someone who uses their own faith to justify everything they do?

For some, religion offers comfort, solidarity, and responsibility. For others, it works as a moral hiding place.

A person expresses prejudice and says it's their opinion. When someone confronts them, they claim they're defending their faith. When they realize they've gone too far in the family group chat, they change their tune, post a picture of their child, and declare that all they want is peace to raise their kid.

It's remarkable how some people discover the value of peace precisely when they begin suffering the consequences of their own war.

The prejudice was conviction. The aggression was a defense of values. The intolerance was loyalty to scripture.

But when things get difficult, everything becomes a misunderstanding.

They don't want to argue anymore. They just want peace.

And the child appears as an emotional shield, as if having a kid at home somehow erases what the father just said.

The opinion they presented as a moral principle now has to be hidden behind their family.

It's not a confession of faith. It's a confession about themselves, made without even realizing it.

The Banality of Evil and the Comfort of Having No Guilt

A conqueror can kill to seize territory, accumulate wealth, and exercise power. Their cruelty is obvious. They want to dominate, and they know they're imposing their will on others.

But there's something especially dangerous about an individual who commits evil believing they're fulfilling a moral obligation.

They don't need to see themselves as cruel. They only need to believe they're obeying a higher authority, defending a cause, or doing their duty.

This is one of the most disturbing questions associated with the banality of evil: ordinary people can participate in atrocities without considering themselves monsters.

The problem isn't simply the existence of evil people. It's how easily ordinary people find justifications for avoiding an examination of their own responsibility.

The businessman says the market demands it.

The religious person says God commands it.

The politician says the system prevents it.

The employee says they were just following orders.

The criminal says they were persecuted.

Everyone finds a larger structure in which to deposit their own guilt.

And responsibility disappears somewhere along the way.

We don't even need to imagine a great villain. All it takes is someone convinced that their intentions are good, their reasons are legitimate, and their mistakes are always caused by someone else.

Perhaps human beings don't need to be convinced that evil is good. They only need to believe that when they commit it, they're not responsible for it.

Has Justice Become a Popularity Contest?

Today, being convicted isn't enough. You also have to fight over the narrative surrounding the conviction.

Someone appears on social media and declares they're being persecuted by the government, the press, their opponents, or the courts. They present their version, select the convenient excerpts, turn the consequences of their own actions into persecution, and call on the public to defend them.

And plenty of people believe it.

Not necessarily because they've examined the evidence, understood the proceedings, or verified the facts. They believe it because the story has been told in a way that fits what they already believe.

Understanding a complex legal system takes time, knowledge, and a willingness to deal with inconvenient information. A narrative, on the other hand, can be consumed in thirty seconds.

People don't need to understand the case. They just need to recognize the villain.

And if the accused already belongs to the group they identify with, the defense can begin before they even know what the accusation is.

Public opinion doesn't replace a legal judgment. But it can turn any discussion into a parallel courtroom, where popularity matters more than the consistency of the arguments.

Of course, justice can make mistakes, persecute people, and convict the innocent. Questioning a judicial decision is legitimate and necessary. The problem begins when claims of persecution become an automatic response, immune to any evidence to the contrary.

Reality requires verification. A narrative requires only loyalty.

And when the narrative becomes more important than the facts, what actually happened matters less. What matters is who managed to tell the story first, who has more followers, and who can turn their own responsibility into a collective cause.

A person can go from accused to martyr without changing a single line of the facts. All it takes is a change in framing.

The Communism That Never Existed and the Capitalism Nobody Wants to Own

Socialism and communism are often criticized as if history had definitively ended any discussion about them. At the same time, many people call China communist without considering that its economy combines state political control with markets, private companies, competition, and capital accumulation.

It's a model very different from the communist society envisioned by Marxist theory. Calling all of this simply communism or capitalism might work for a barroom argument, but it doesn't explain much.

There have been historical experiments with socialist governments and states that declared themselves communist. So saying these ideas never made it off the drawing board would mean ignoring history.

The more interesting question is this: what happens when an ideology promises to emancipate human beings, but power becomes concentrated in the hands of those who claim to know how that emancipation should happen?

Replacing the people in power doesn't guarantee that power will stop being abusive.

And this is where the discussion returns to human beings.

Many people believe that if they had enough money, they would change the world. End hunger, solve inequality, transform education, eliminate violence.

Perhaps they would do extraordinary things. Money allows people to finance projects, build infrastructure, support research, and expand opportunities. It's not useless. It's a powerful tool.

But money doesn't automatically eliminate personal interests, conflicts, vanity, corruption, or the desire to control others.

Human beings have tried to organize the world in countless ways. They've created religions, empires, democracies, monarchies, revolutions, and economic systems. All of them came with promises. None has managed to eliminate humanity's ability to produce suffering.

And if you believe things will be different simply because you'll have more money, perhaps you're confusing the ability to intervene with the ability to solve everything.

Not even a man who makes rockets fly backward can turn back time to undo humanity's mistakes.

Good luck with your first million.

The Third Way and the Blame Factory

When two sides compete for power, each usually presents the other as the source of every problem.

The first blames the second. The second blames the first.

Then someone shows up promising a third way, an alternative capable of overcoming the old dispute.

But imagine that this third way comes to power and begins facing the same conflicts, interests, and limitations. The two previous groups, who once hated each other, may discover a common cause: getting the new competitor out of the way.

If the project fails, the third way becomes proof that the alternative was unworkable. If it achieves some results, its opponents may try to discredit it before it becomes established.

And the public, exhausted, starts asking for a fourth way.

Then a fifth.

A sixth.

How long will we keep changing the names of alternatives without examining the mechanisms that continue producing the same conflicts?

It's like trying to settle a family argument by changing everyone's last name.

The problem isn't the existence of political alternatives. They're necessary. The problem is imagining that a new label is enough to eliminate the interests that corrupted the previous ones.

With every failure, we manufacture a new name, a new leader, and a new promise. The ritual remains intact: someone arrives saying they'll fix everything, someone believes them, someone accumulates power, and when things go wrong, the search for someone to blame begins.

Politics becomes a factory producing people responsible for everyone else's mistakes.

And we keep buying the product.

The Poor, Welfare, and Selective Morality

There are people who criticize welfare programs by saying nobody likes to work.

Funny. If nobody likes to work, why is a poor person judged for wanting to work less, while a rich person is admired for managing to do exactly the same thing?

The rich person who retires early has achieved financial freedom.

The poor person who needs assistance doesn't want to do anything with their life.

The rich person who spends money on restaurants, travel, and entertainment is enjoying life.

The poor person who buys something they like is irresponsible and doesn't know how to manage their money.

The same human desire receives two different judgments depending on who expresses it.

And then there's the argument that poor people will spend their benefits on drugs, alcohol, or other things considered unnecessary.

As if the money they receive simply disappeared from the economy. As if drug dealers didn't buy food, bar owners didn't pay bills, and the workers in those establishments didn't need to survive.

After all, drug dealers and neighborhood bar owners eat rice and beans, too.

That doesn't mean every welfare program is efficient, that it shouldn't be monitored, or that every public policy produces good results. It simply means that morally suspecting people who receive assistance is not the same as evaluating whether that assistance works.

The problem begins when poverty stops being a material condition and becomes a diagnosis of character.

For some people, the poor must prove they deserve the bare minimum needed to survive. The rich, on the other hand, seem entitled to trust before even explaining how they acquired what they have.

The poor must demonstrate virtue to receive assistance.

The rich can accumulate wealth and let their wealth demonstrate their virtue on their behalf.

It's a rather convenient moral accounting system.

And, ironically, those who talk the most about merit often forget that nobody chose the family they were born into.

Capitalism Isn't Savage. We Are.

Perhaps it's comforting to imagine capitalism as a monster because monsters can be fought without having to look at ourselves.

All we have to do is overthrow the system, change the government, replace the business owners, change the ideology, remove the corrupt, eliminate privilege. After that, we imagine people will finally start behaving fairly.

But who will occupy the places left behind by those who are gone?

Human beings.

With their interests, ambitions, fears, virtues, and flaws.

Capitalism can turn exploitation into profit. Religion can turn prejudice into duty. Politics can turn personal interests into public discourse. Ideology can turn violence into historical necessity.

The systems are different. The mechanism of justification can be the same.

Human beings find a structure that allows them to gain some advantage and then learn how to explain why that advantage is legitimate.

When they make money, it was competence.

When they receive privileges, it was merit.

When they hurt someone, it was the circumstances.

When they're confronted, it was persecution.

When they do good, it was their virtue.

When they do evil, someone else must have provoked them.

It's a kind of moral insurance policy: people want to keep all the benefits of their own choices, but prefer to leave the losses on someone else's tab.

And you don't have to be rich, religious, political, or a business owner to participate in this. You just have to be human.

Perhaps that's why savagery survives so many revolutions. We change the rules, governments, flags, and speeches, but we keep finding ways to turn our interests into justifications and our failures into accusations against others.

We don't need a monster to teach us how to be cruel. We just need a good reason to believe our cruelty is necessary.

Capitalism didn't invent hunger, war, or misery. But it can profit from them. It didn't invent ambition, selfishness, or inequality. But it can reward them. And when it does, it offers human beings the perfect excuse: it wasn't me, it was the market.

Except the market didn't write those justifications by itself.

Someone wrote them.

Someone sold them.

Someone bought them.

And someone paid the bill.

Capitalism is savage because human beings have learned to turn their own savagery into a business model.

And the most frightening thing isn't that there are people capable of doing this.

It's that so many of them can sleep peacefully after convincing themselves they haven't done anything wrong.

After all, the monster needs to keep existing.

Not because it's impossible to change it, but because as long as it takes the blame for everything, nobody needs to ask who's making money from its teeth.

The monster has a name.

But it has no conscience.

We do.

And perhaps that's precisely why we're so determined to blame the monster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L4YrGaR8E4

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