I used to think that the capitalist was wrong about human nature. Now, I think he is right about human nature—for the first two or three years of its development. When I say capitalism is for big babies, I don’t want to be misunderstood: this is what is best about the theory. When the world is rolled up like a bedsheet and every human striving is accounted for, the Austrian theorists will enter the Kingdom of Heaven lightly remonstrated for being fools—but praised for their unintentional advances in the fields of child psychology and tantrum management. They made sense out of the politics of playgrounds, whatever nonsense they made out of everything else.
The capitalist theorist merely had the misfortune of applying what is proper to toddlers to the more firm-footed humans that follow after, a category error that anyone might fall prey to, given enough to drink. And it is good to think of the theorists of liberal capitalism as so many first-time fathers, addled and sleep-deprived by their one-year-olds’ suicidal antics, imagining all the world a playroom, and man merely a toy. It kindles a warm sympathy towards the economists, where previously there was only a cold, unchristian disdain.
For instance, it is said that human beings are driven by the profit-motive, an open-ended desire for more, rather than less—in its more subtle formulation, for the replacement of a current state of affairs with a better one. But a survey of human communities prior to the industrial revolution strongly suggests that we are animals driven by something stranger than profits: namely, peace. The peace-motive: that drive toward a rest that occurs when each has his due, when the word around town is “enough,” when what came yesterday can reasonably be hoped for today, when expansion, innovation, revolution, and alteration, rather than being taken as the key to the human spirit, are viewed with suspicion—this is a better description of peasant communities unshaken by imperial ambition or modern capitalism, which had to violently create its own conditions by taking away common land and breaking down all subsistent ways of life until amassing money as a security against possible loss became a reasonable thing to do.
Capitalist thinkers who take an honest look at the past, with its stodgy agriculturalism and the pond-water pace of what we now call its “technological development,” must posit—as, in fact, they do—that man’s natural drive for innovation, amassment, and getting-ahead were actively repressed by the institutions of society: by church, law, and custom. But this has always seemed odd, like saying the natural yearning of the foot to kick has been historically repressed by a man’s arms. Church, law, and society are as much a product of human nature as entrepreneurship, mass production, and the stock market. Man may, in the flourishing of his nature, invent the printing press. Man may also, in the flourishing of his nature, suppress the printing press. To describe any number of man-made, innovation-stifling institutions does not necessarily describe a historically aberrant resistance to the naturalness of liberal capitalism. One may very well have described a natural, passionate upspring of the human heart in its desire to destroy something as unnatural as liberal capitalism. Academics are paid to say things like “the notion of social hierarchy prevented the rise of the entrepreneur,” but I see no reason why they might not have said that “the rise of the entrepreneur destroyed the fact of social hierarchy.” The second assertion has the slight merit of having its basis in historical fact. The first has the slight awkwardness of being little more than a superstition, in which a profit-driven, entrepreneurial class is posited as dwelling underneath the real facts of medieval society like an Oedipal Complex.
If we were honest, we would admit that the individualist drive is considered natural merely because it is current; that the naturalness of self-limitation is denied because it would be inconvenient to the wealthy if we were to practice it. We have not determined that it is abhorrent to human nature to suppress technological innovation, we have merely bet our entire world on continued technological innovation and find it valuable to suppress anything to the contrary. We do not think the Middle Ages are backward because we know anything about them, but because the Walton, Bezos, and Zuckerberg families would go broke if we did.
One could berate the liberals for cooking up such ahistorical baloney, but as it has been said, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all. And so I will say this: the capitalist theory of the profit-motive is reasonable—if only it would limit itself to describing toddlers. For, even though the perennial wisdom of mankind teaches that an abstract passion for More ends with the concrete reality of Too Much; that working to get ahead tends to leave others behind; that the individual pursuit of happiness has a name (and it is Selfishness), just as amassment undirected to the common good has a name (and it is Greed), and the result of both of these has its own name (and it is Hell)—still, toddlers lack this wisdom. One must work rather hard to forget these truths as an adult. As a baby, they come pre-forgotten. For a two-year-old, the notion that there is too much of a good thing must come from his mother, who hides the Halloween candy, or from his father, who holds him upside-down by his feet in order to give his mother her moment. For the members of a playdate polity, one must casually and gently introduce the idea that Jimmy holding a firetruck is not a negation of the possibility that you might get to play with the same. I have seen children in an amassing passion, gathering up as many toys as they can, until they fall out of their arms. For the child, his profit motive produces tears. For the capitalist, it produces franchising. In both, it seems genuinely present, and should two-year olds ever toy with the means of production, rather than blocks, I imagine they’d settle on a regime quite like our own, in which all resources are seen as scarce, all men are in competition to amass as many of them as possible before his neighbors do the same, all appetites are valorized as without limit, and perhaps most importantly, everyone is assured that such behavior is right and just.
Similarly, the only room I will make for the liberal’s idea of private property is the playroom. Elsewhere, people seem to have the natural sense that if one has something as one’s own it is because one has the responsibility to use it for the good and peace of all. In the playroom, this principle is lost. I have never seen a more earnest claim to private property, considered as an absolutized, individual, legal right to a thing without reference to the common good, than in debate with a toddler.
“Give me that mop.”
“No! It’s mine!”
“But you grabbed it out of your brothers’ hands.”
“But he wasn’t using it and now it’s MINE.”
(This, of course, is a convenient simplification of the beginning of the capitalist project in the ransacking of England’s monasteries by the nobility.)
“You are trying to hit the window with the mop. Give it up, right now.”
“No! I want the mop! I need the mop!”
A brief pause, in which coercion is administered. “I’m putting it away until we can all play nicely with it.”
Wailing, gnashing of teeth, the summoning of curses, and a profound sorrow at a perceived loss of justice in the realm ensue.
I’ll grant that the capitalist has a primordial theory of property, but only in the same way in which a primary school, or a primate, is primordial. I’ll grant that the theory is a consistent one, but only because it has been consistently asserted, and from a very young age. He believes that a man’s wealth is his own, not for the sake of the whole community, and certainly not because it represents his labor (except in the abstract way in which he might say that Mr. Musk gaining thirty-six billion dollars in a day of stock-trading represents the hard work he put into the fact). If he were to do nothing with what he amassed but deprive the rest of society with it, or even to create some addicting drug, still, he would have as much a claim to it as if he turned all his power, money, and real estate to providing for widows and orphans. The story of capitalism is one in which people increasingly believe that it is not the just, healthy use of property for the sake of others, but the mere fact of having it at all that justifies rallying police forces to its defense. A millionaire buys up the woods surrounding his house and sues whatever pedestrians cross its legally defined borders. Both our society and medieval society would call the police—but we call them to arrest the pedestrians and they would call them to arrest the millionaire. This inversion marks the regime of capitalism. It is an inversion which is really a reversion and a perversion, as it reverts to an early kingdom, that of the crib, and it is always perverse when adults cry “mine!” like spoiled babies.
The assertion that capitalism should be destroyed in its foundational logic says nothing more than this: between the toddler who shouts “mine!” and the mother who caveats “if used for good,” only the mother is correct. It is to take a side, but it is not so much the side of the socialists as it is the side of society. (I would say that it is to take the side of the grown-ups, but this overstates the case, as most toddlers have outgrown the spirit of capitalism by the age of three or four, unless trained otherwise).
God gave the world to all of us, and this means that property is never unconditionally removed from its common state, as Locke would have it, but only ever insofar as it is made useful for the community, as the popes would have it. It is true that liberal capitalism has developed a complex idea according to which taking something for oneself, motivated by private gain without reference to any common good, is, in fact, a way of serving the common good. This makes about as much sense as saying that a pooling of blood in the left foot conduces to the health of the body—something that has been said by better men than me. For the sake of brevity, I will only comment that something like this idea is present in the two-year-old, who is as capable of inventing a lunatic theory for the sake of justifying theft as any Hayek or Bezos.
It is an idea common to adult capitalists that the free market should be left unregulated by any authority, as it is a people’s own desires and their subsequent fulfilment by spunky, business acumen that drives all buying and selling. Worthwhile ventures which satisfy human needs succeed. Less-than-helpful ventures which fail to do so, fail. Business is a darwinian trial of fitness which, left unimpeded by governments, will inevitably reach an equilibrium in which the greatest possible number of individual desires are fulfilled.
Toddlers also believe in this approach. I have heard a toddler observe, loquaciously, that if only such pesky, medieval authorities as Mom and Dad would release their collectivist grip on his individual desires, he would inevitably pick those things which fulfilled his individual will, rewarding the producers of goods for getting it right in regards to his desires, even as he became happy and fulfilled by way of them. Like the liberal capitalist, he bewails the presence of an authority that interrupts the free exchange of goods and services with words like “don’t eat that, it’s rat poison”; that denies the primacy of desire by declaring it wrong and underdeveloped, with assertions like “you don’t really want the gum off the shoe”; that offers hierarchical, non-individualist reasons for intervention within the market like “because I’m the Mom.”
I think this commonality explains why babies and capitalists are in such solid agreement on the subject of advertising. They are the only two groups for whom the existence of advertising is not an immediate falsification of the theory that markets ought to be free. Advertising is the definitive proof that the market is never free, if that means “undirected by anything except human desire.” Advertising is the effort to create and destroy human desire as it benefits those who sell. And one may boo or praise it, but one cannot look at the behemoth amount of capital and labor that goes into this production, often racking up costs greater than the actual production of physical objects, and conclude that the free market is a self-governing mechanism aimed towards an inevitable equilibrium in which the majority of human wills are satisfied. Obviously, this is only true insofar as the majority of human wills undergo a constant propaganda regime in which they are lied to, from their youth, about what they should desire and which objects will fulfill it; insofar as the very air they breathe becomes thick with images associating banal products with ancient objects of human yearning: sex, love, family, peace, joy, ecstasy, abundance, prestige, and power. Insofar as every conceivable human good is seen as an opportunity to peddle Febreeze; then, yes, the market fulfills desires. Why, precisely, this psychological warfare is to be preferred to the possibility of government intervention into the market, I’ll never know. It may be true that government interventions will stifle creativity and make us slaves. It is undoubtedly true that advertising has already done this. And if all the capitalist means by the free market is that men with power are free to lie about what they market, then I see no necessary reason why the rest should restrain themselves—are we not free to form ourselves into bodies of governance ordered towards the restraint and coercion of liars?
But the toddler watches advertisements with the gaze of a true believer. For him, Hot Wheels commercials are infomercials. The pictures of children ascending to cosmic levels of fun through the purchase of SuperSoakers are, for him, as straightforward as consumer reports. The toddler believes that adults are good, or, more generally, that no one is lying to him in order to make money. The advertisements are kindly explaining the ecstasies he will undergo if only his parents would buy him the Hot Wheels Dino Mash Lava Train Race Track for Big Boys; they convey the truth about their product and, when he begins to cry for its presence, the toddler, in his own estimation, is simply practicing the rational pursuit of his own self-interest. It is not clear, to the toddler, that he had no desire, prior to the advertisement of the Epic Spaceman Jet Stream Fun Soaker 3000, for that particular device. He always wanted it, and the advertisement is merely providing a solution to the unfulfilled longing that fluttered in his breast. This is why toddlers ask for advertised objects with all the passion of a man demanding justice and with all the certainty of a beggar asking for bread; they do not distinguish between need and want any more than the advertisements they watch.
Now all this is precisely how the liberal capitalist must defend the presence of advertising within the free market if the whole thing isn’t going to be revealed as a sham. He must assert, against all reason and evidence, that we are all getting what we really want—a trick achieved by including within “what we really want” all of the baldfaced lies of advertising. That he rarely asserts this makes good tactical sense. Were a population to wake up to the fact that what little property they have left is being steadily diminished by vicious men who first destroyed their communities, families, and countryside for profit, and then lied to them from their youth, promising the return of these joys through the purchase of phones, deodorant, birth control, and beer—well, I imagine that those vicious men would be killed. As being killed does not exchange an existing state of affairs with a better one, the consistent capitalist keeps quiet.
If only he would limit himself to child psychology, he might be correct. For it is the nature of the child to look to others for his desires; to be thrown into a world of models who show him, for better or worse, what is worth wanting and what is trash. But again, the capitalist theorist overextends the duration of his case. One might even say that he has overextended his welcome. He asserts beyond the sphere of childhood, making universal claims about human nature instead of those beings yearning to be raised into its fullness. One could show this error in almost every doctrine of liberal capitalism. It is in the description of the universe as a mass of scarce resources, a description that only seems plausible to the two-year-old, crying for food in a world in which dinner is undoubtedly assured and on its way. It is in the dog-eat-dog-world-isms so enjoyable to the ones doing the eating, and only relevant to that brief age in which all sharing is seen as a momentary form of deprivation. The difficulty in pointing this out is that capitalism is not a theory, but a state of affairs, and one that has already achieved its unique devastations. If the capitalist were merely describing the world, his errors would be obvious, and all we would have to do to remove ourselves from capitalism is invite its theorists to remove themselves from the nursery, or at least to observe those who govern it alongside those who sleep in it. But the capitalist rules the world, and has set about making his theory true, not by changing the theory to include adults, but by changing adults to be more like babies, producing, wherever he can, a society of individuals, driven by selfish desires, making absurd claims to absolute rights, simultaneously declaring themselves free of authority and crying to the authorities to protect their self-interest, buying stupid things, eating food that is bad for them, wanting too much, and caring too little for the common good. Because the capitalist infantilizes the world, the solution to capitalism cannot merely be some rearrangement of this law or the correction of that idea. It must be—to grow up.