Nathaniel

Shockey

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January 7, 2008

Capitalism Works, But Britney Spears Can Tell You: Evil Gets Rich

Most people agree that capitalism, despite its considerable drawbacks, is a pretty good system. It tends to weed out the lazy and encourage the diligent. And what separates it from Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” is that humans have a basic understanding of morality. Instead of throwing aside the handicapped and the elderly, we have the ability to care for and nurture them, because deep down, we know it’s better that way. So that’s the whole idea, in a nutshell: Capitalism plus human goodness equals burgeoning society.

But what about the morally handicapped? Capitalism naturally discourages laziness, but it does not naturally discourage evil.

Take, for example, pornography. Just do a tiny bit of digging and you’ll see that almost every stripper or porn star was abused as a child. Good luck finding one porn star in a thousand with a healthy, happy family. Dig a little further and you’ll learn how many marriages have been ruined by an addiction to pornography. And if you keep going, I think you’ll learn that, on a psychological level, pornography has already poisoned the minds of millions around the world who struggle to rectify what they’ve seen on video screens with real life. Almost everybody, if they really scour their hearts and are totally honest, agree that pornography is a bad, bad thing. And yet, it is alive and well in our society.

Or take Hollywood, for example. To be more specific, consider the fascination most of us have with the often seriously mangled lives of celebrities. I like the line from Britney Spears’s song, “Piece of Me,” when she says she’s “most likely to get on the TV for stripping on the streets when getting the groceries.” (Okay, it’s not wonderfully worded, but when every word is an eighth note, you have to be a little forgiving. This isn’t Shakespeare.) We followed Britney Spears around through her descension into increasingly sleazy songs, through her marriages, through her pregnancies, through her divorce, through her completely bizarre negligence of court orders, up until her most recent breakdown and separation from her children. Since “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” her life has been a freight train without breaks. She can only blame herself, but let’s not kid ourselves and act like we didn’t get a thrill out of watching the paparazzi continually harass her until she was committed to an institution. Britney Spears is just one of many stars who has gone off the deep end, due, in part, to the way she ceased to be treated like a human.

Capitalism takes things that are obviously wrong and turns them into huge industries. It gives evil a foothold by making it rich. And of course, anything rich has the ability to skew its public perception.

How the hell did Playboy manage to assert itself as an acceptable part of society? Despite the way it has completely and unnaturally objectified the female body, it has developed a reputation of being harmless, playful fun. If the word “playboy bunny” was not the most brilliant marketing ploy in the history of marketing, I don’t know what is. But then, how dumb are we?

I’m nothing more than your proverbial, American capitalist. It’s the best we’ve come up with, and on many levels, it works. But it needs to be tempered by human goodness.

John Donne’s famous words speak potently to this very situation: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Capitalism gives evil a foothold by making it rich. But the evil doesn’t come from anywhere but ourselves. We make it rich. It doesn’t just get that way. And the peripheral damage is all around us, whether we acknowledge it or not. Everyone is affected, everyone is to blame, and it is up to all of us to decide what we allow to be a part of our lives. 

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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