Forever War In Neverland

Neverland can be reached by aiming at the "second star to the right, and straight on till morning". That's the direction given in Disney's popular version of the story about Peter Pan, the boy that refused to grow up.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

In the original play and novel by J. M. Barrie, Neverland is located in a completely different place, as it says that a map of a child's mind would resemble a map of Neverland... The child's mind is where Neverland resides, and if you choose to stay a child forever, like Peter Pan did, Neverland will never seize to exist. Now, I have no problem with Neverland as a metaphor for a child's imagination; this is a popular theme, one that I like and find particularly well worked out in the Peter Pan story as well as in The Neverending Story. I do have a problem however with the fact that so many adults are unable to see reality because they desperately hang on to a fantasy. Their adult version of Neverland is called capitalism, and the problem is they think it's real, when it in fact is a complete fantasy. It's beyond time for them to grow up and realize the truth of the matter: there's no such thing as a free market and there's no way in reality to achieve "perfect competition."

Still, people fantasize about it, and this fantasy has developed a life of its own; the adults who replaced the mythical world of Neverland with the equally unrealistic world of perfect competition in a conjured up free market, cry foul whenever reality doesn't pan out the way they imagined it. Whenever it's pointed out that markets fail, that growing inequality is inherent in an ideology that founded around the very principle of capital accumulation through a self serving profit motive, that crises are a feature and not a bug, that wealth doesn't trickle down but instead takes on a gravity defying upward trajectory, that wages never keep up with inflation, whenever the obvious and inherent flaws are identified, the free market Peter Pans of our time blame something else, preferably the government. The problem is not the government, but your free market version of Neverland. It's the fantasy that makes you blame government, and the same fantasy is what keeps your real rulers in power; belief in something as preposterous as perfect competition is what keeps the arbiters of competition in power. It's why you actually believe you can someday join their ranks, for they also worked hard and had great ideas that benefited many people, just like you do. Well, that's a fantasy too: no such thing as a meritocracy.

By this point you might think that I'm just claiming things without backing them up, and you'd be right. I don't back up these claims for two reasons: 1) I've written hundreds of thousands of words backing up these claims, just like many, many others, 2) look around you and you'll see overwhelming evidence to the truth of these claims, IF you're able to let go of free market Neverland for a few seconds, and 3) just watch the video at the end ;-) There's no competition in the real world, only war. See, "competition" means measuring one's strength, agility, competence against others with the aim to win, whereas "war" is the same but with the aim to eliminate. Any self respecting business person will admit this; you don't compete on the market, free or regulated, to drive down prices or improve the quality of your products. No, you're in a constant war to eliminate your competitors on one side, and a war against costs, which include the employees, on the other side. It's no wonder and not hard to imagine at all that one of the most popular books among business leaders is...

You thought I was going to say Peter Pan, didn't you? Unfortunately it's not: reading that might help them imagine a better world. No, it's The Art Of War, a 2000 year old guide to military strategy by Sun Tzu. "Sun Tzu: Strategies for Marketing - 12 Essential Principles for Winning the War for Customers", "Sun Tzu For Success: How to Use the Art of War to Master Challenges and Accomplish the Important Goals in Your Life" and "The Art of War for Women: Sun Tzu’s Ancient Strategies and Wisdom for Winning at Work" are all titles that indicate its popularity among all kinds of leaders. Here's a snippet from the Huffington Post artice Why Business Leaders Are Obsessed With Sun Tzu’s Ancient Military Guide, “The Art of War”:

The Art of War fits perfectly into our current cultural obsession with leadership, extolling the enlightened individual and downplaying outside circumstances. As Sun Tzu writes: “When troops flee, are insubordinate, distressed, collapse in disorder or are rerouted, it is the fault of the general. None of these disasters can be attributed to natural causes.”
_{source: Huffington Post}

The fact that the book supports the "Great Man" theory of success, you know, the bogus meritocracy claim, is just one of many reasons why reading it is seen as some "rite of passage" for business leaders. This speaks beautifully to the simple fact that trade IS war. We don't aim to win, we aim to conquer, and in the conquering game there are no win-win scenarios; those only exist in the minds that refused to grow up. What's real though is the fact that we've made that fantasy the arbiter of our reality. What's real is that this mindset is prevalent; most people here in the west believe in free competition, some even believe it's all we need to create the paradise they've painted in their heads. I submit that this is the main reason why a growing number of people are becoming depressed, why anti-depressants are a Big Pharma commercial hit, why many young people are disillusioned with the real world and escape into their own bias-bubbles; what's in our minds doesn't match reality in any sensible way. It's literally unbelievable that poverty still exists in the same countries that house the world's richest multi billionaires. Do people even know that poverty is mandatory in the fantasy land that's nestled in our collective mindset? Mandatory. So if you really believe in the fantasy, don't pity the poor, but rejoice in their existence; the ultra rich are ultra rich because so many poor people exist, that's the reality of the fantasy. It's forever war in Neverland and we're all cannon fodder.

The video deals with this issue of economic theory not aligning with daily reality. It covers a lot of what I've written about in many posts, but it's well worth the watch.

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