Just as finer and finer branches develop out of larger branches, which develop out of the trunk of a tree, finer and finer modes of problem solving develop around primary modes of functioning, regardless of whether they are useful any longer. A society must maintain a certain shape, within which exist the solutions a society must take to solve its myriad problems. Binary divisions seeking alternatives to failure continue on from avenues long since traveled, with those divisions growing ever finer and numerous as failures mount around a fundamental premise that won't be questioned.
Complexity develops like capillaries around an intractable contradiction, which ultimately reproduces the contradiction within each division seeking a solution, but these divisions do temporarily delay the ramifications of contradiction with the passage of time.
To offer concrete examples, our insurance-based health care system, fractional reserve banking, and industrial agriculture systems are predicated on the core driving principle that moves this business society: the sacred right of businessmen to make a buck.
Ever more complex insurance schemes are required to make vast mechanisms of extraction continue to work, interspersed between a populace and its health care institutions. Fractional reserve banking essentially functions to create debt money, perpetually owed to a financial class in greater amounts, so that ever more complex credit systems and financial instruments are required to cushion the oscillations caused by this antagonism. Agriculture must be both expanded and adulterated with ever-finer methods of manipulations to feed a growing population, while at the same time maintaining favorable rates of profit.
All of these systems are plagued with spiraling problems of overcomplexity, which won't be solved unless the organizing principle of industrial capital is scrapped. The ever-growing and interrelated layers of contrivance that are required to cope with a capital class that grows in wealth and a productive/consuming class that shrinks only delays the effects of problems caused by this contradiction. This also ignores multiple loci of contradiction, which put greater pressures on each other.
On a more fundamental but related point, no amount of large-scale green energy or organic farming programs are going to solve the problems of sustainability that are posed by a society that requires unlimited economic growth to function. The endless, class-staggered process of exploitation requires constant growth: nothing less than a radical change in collective notions of ownership and social relation will do.
One has to keep digging deeper. What was it that produced these business-friendly principles in the first place? It seems as though self interest, hard materialism. and hard rationalism were all that would motivate a society that had grown exhausted from subsisting under the constant pressure of religious doctrines that were no longer living, so that this process of accumulation, started as a blind engine of emancipation, ran away from its creators and continues to shake itself apart.
And so, does it take complete disintegration and calamity for a large-scale society to solve its most pressing and fundamental contradictions?
To offer concrete examples, our insurance-based health care system, fractional reserve banking, and industrial agriculture systems are predicated on the core driving principle that moves this business society: the sacred right of businessmen to make a buck.
Ever more complex insurance schemes are required to make vast mechanisms of extraction continue to work, interspersed between a populace and its health care institutions. Fractional reserve banking essentially functions to create debt money, perpetually owed to a financial class in greater amounts, so that ever more complex credit systems and financial instruments are required to cushion the oscillations caused by this antagonism. Agriculture must be both expanded and adulterated with ever-finer methods of manipulations to feed a growing population, while at the same time maintaining favorable rates of profit.
All of these systems are plagued with spiraling problems of overcomplexity, which won't be solved unless the organizing principle of industrial capital is scrapped. The ever-growing and interrelated layers of contrivance that are required to cope with a capital class that grows in wealth and a productive/consuming class that shrinks only delays the effects of problems caused by this contradiction. This also ignores multiple loci of contradiction, which put greater pressures on each other.
On a more fundamental but related point, no amount of large-scale green energy or organic farming programs are going to solve the problems of sustainability that are posed by a society that requires unlimited economic growth to function. The endless, class-staggered process of exploitation requires constant growth: nothing less than a radical change in collective notions of ownership and social relation will do.
One has to keep digging deeper. What was it that produced these business-friendly principles in the first place? It seems as though self interest, hard materialism. and hard rationalism were all that would motivate a society that had grown exhausted from subsisting under the constant pressure of religious doctrines that were no longer living, so that this process of accumulation, started as a blind engine of emancipation, ran away from its creators and continues to shake itself apart.
And so, does it take complete disintegration and calamity for a large-scale society to solve its most pressing and fundamental contradictions?
