Getting into Paradise

Escaping the trap of being an economic slave

The world contains a host of anti-democratic societies. The Orwellian society of China. The criminal nation-state of Russia. The fundamentalist-religion nations, repressive and barbaric. The failed nations riddled with corrupt officials.

Closer to home, there is the currently anti-democratic economic system called capitalism.

Up until now, capitalism has been founded on the premise that one person, or a few elite people, get rich by exploiting a large group of workers. John D Rockefeller is the perfect example of the capitalist robber baron. You could argue that this figure is still alive and well in certain corporate cases: Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, et al. Even lacking a high-profile public figure at the helm, however, no matter how shrewdly manipulated and contrived the public image, most businesses are still operating on the same premise.

Some history:

Southern plantations, operated by slaves who were forcibly kidnapped from Africa, are based on the capitalist model of exploitation. Old news, you say? Ancient history? Well, then, how do you explain migrant farm labor in America? What about Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez and the system of subminimum wages which they oppose? Has that much really changed, in principle, between the slave states of the deep South and today’s farms which employ migrant laborers?

Royalty was the ultimate institution of social enslavement. No version of economic enslavement is more insidious and malicious than the concept of having a family of “Royals” who are somehow endowed with the God-given, supernatural, unassailable right to be filthy rich at the expense of the serfs.

Back to now:

Your average large company in the US, privately held or publicly traded, is a fraud and an abomination as currently structured. Under the guise of “Human Resource” departments “taking care” of their “Associates,” American corporations typically make a few people in the executive suites unfairly rich at the expense of the hard-working and underpaid workers. The workers are essential. The executives, like royals, are not. They are arguably parasites.

In a typical American corporation, there are no “Associates“ who are somehow all co-equal team members in some fictional workers paradise. There are only employees, who only make money as long as they are productive, and are easily discarded. They only remain employees while they are going along with the charade, because as soon as they blow the whistle or attempt to unionize, they are fired. It’s a dictatorship, pure and simple, dressed up as something presentable. Lipstick on a pig. A cesspool advertised as a Club Med swimming pool.

There are remedies. Capitalism may be sordid and impure as historically conceived, but in principle it is well constructed, so it can be easily redeemed. Cooperatives and employee-owned businesses provide a healthy antidote to the prevalent system of usurping labor. Socialism and communism were both conceived out of inspiration for an ideal society, so they too can easily support a healthy society if properly carried out.

That is a different discussion, however, than the one being presented today.

Society will not be a success just by altering the choice of economic system, or by improving the existing one. Technical expertise comes later, as does enlightened guidance. Before the system can be successful, the people must change.

Culture and tradition seeps into your bones and your DNA. Generations and generations of serfs, slaves, and just plain old grunts in one’s ancestry installs a pattern which must be purged and corrected inside us before true social change is possible.

We are accustomed to being slaves. We have a deeply ingrained program of scarcity and poverty. No matter how hard you work, you can never get ahead. You try and try and try, and still fall short. Not enough. Just barely enough. Those conditions, those programming assumptions if you will, must be faced and overcome.

Poverty is imprinted into us. The human being is hardwired for scarcity, for insufficiency and lack, and it is this intractable bad habit which must be transformed before any success can be achieved.

In essence, we are programmed for slavery.

The cure for economic injustice is inside each one of us. The cure is abundance. Plenty. Surfeit and surplus of love, money, success, happiness. It is a paradigm shift. It is a core transformation in mode of operation, an operating system overhaul. It is a radical, if you will, shift in context, a complete change of scenery. From outhouse to penthouse. From cellar to solarium. From swamp to white-sand beach. From prison to tropical resort.

The chains which bind are also the keys to liberation. Capitalism, socialism and communism are now the prison, but in time they evolve into the luxury resort. Each nation develops its own version of the ideal society. We begin in the cellar, we start out in the swamp, but we end up in paradise.

It begins with us.