🐾 The Hyenas of Capitalism: Consuming Earth’s Resources 🌍🦁
In the movie The Lion King, the lion Scar gets to rule the kingdom for a while. He allows the hyenas to consume everything in sight — unfettered consumption, free to run riot and do whatever the hell they like.
Of course, when this happens, when they eat everything, there comes a time when they have nothing left to eat.
Those who consumed and profited the most ended up as starved as those who suffered through this process.
Capitalism is the hyena’s from The Lion King. The Pattern Integrity of Capitalism, the code woven into its DNA, is endless growth, consumption and accumulation. It is a win-lose game by design.
It works well for a while. Until it does not.
Syntropic World believes that we must create a way of honouring and exchanging value that transcends Capitalism.
This is not Conscious Capitalism, Regenerative Capitalism, or any other attempt to put lipstick on the already-dead-in-lag-capitalist system and have it look better for a moment. It is also not socialism, communism, or any other tested ‘isms.’ It is to transcend to something we do not currently have. A completely new way of engaging and exchanging that places the increased well-being of Earth and all her creatures as central to 100% of everything.
Here is the path of Capitalism in three acts
Act 1.
The playing field is initially more even than it is in its final moments. Those who start with wealth and capital have the advantage. More money enables more negotiating power, a greater ability to borrow, and access to power brokers, insider trading, and information. This is the way of Capitalism. Those with money like to proclaim meritocracy yet deny the advantages their schooling, social and family connections and ability to borrow give them.
However, in this first stage of Capitalism, there are opportunities for those with little to make it up the ladder of capital accumulation. The American Dream was relatively accurate for all but enslaved and Indigenous people in the early days.
Act 2.
The power differential increases. The elite few, the 1%, are now in the business of monopolisation. They buy up everything. The vertical and horizontal supply lines. Their competitors. With their financial finagling and ability to pay the big accounting firms ridiculous fees to access the ‘pay no tax’ options, their bloat and accumulation increase. They become ‘too big to fail’ and require bailouts by governments using taxpayer money. Bailouts that are gifted without any requirement to repay. Socialism for the wealthy, while the middle to lower classes are society’s taxpayers.
The Middle-Class wealth begins to slip. Those from the early days of neoliberal Capitalism, the boomers, often have established enough wealth to remain viable in retirement. They enjoy telling themselves stories of hard work but forget the opportunities provided for them to get ahead. Opportunities now denied to the younger generations. The boomers do not want anything to erode their wealth and rights, even if it means their kids and grandkids will have less opportunity. The chasm is getting so big.
The Elite, the hyena equivalent from The Lion King, continue their rapacious consumption and growth. The amount of money the big Retirement and Investment funds need to make yearly to stay viable is exponential. This growth requires more digging, extraction, and exploitation, predominantly from the Global South. They leave devastation and poverty in the countries that are pillaged. Imagine a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up anything of any worth from whole countries, leaving devastation and inequity behind. The people’s wealth sucked out to fuel the platform for the privilege on the other side of the planet.
On that side of the planet the lower-class people, neglected by all sides of government for decades, are filled with bile. Their trust in any government institution is hollowed out. The “American Dream’ and its equivalent in other countries is now known to be fiction. Elite capitalists and monopolists own governments. Elected leaders are puppets on the strings of the few billionaire kingmakers who fund their puppet ministers and judges.
Because of the decades of neglect, the financially poorer people, in their anger, seek to find blame. In the brilliant book, Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, she points to the caste system that lives in many societies and is defined by various categories from skin colour to socioeconomic status — categories that have complex nuances beyond race. When one caste is usurped by another, even if both are at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, there is a caste/culture war. Blame is often towards the other caste or minority group, even when both have been neglected for centuries — this is how people of colour, LGBTQI, Indigenous or migrants and refugees are seen as the enemy by blue-collar workers and fellow immigrants with deeper time-based roots.
This group of financially poor, angry, people become easy prey for the manipulators and spell casters. Snake oil salesmen have always been known to prey on those hollowed out of hope and systemically uneducated and forgotten — those who often, through no fault of their own, have been marginalised by society.
The Snake oil salesmen prey on these people, inciting hate and anger to be directed to all those they are told to believe are the reason they suffer.
Hate on migrants, refugees, LGBTQI, Trans, POC, governments and institutions. Neglected people turn on each other. But never the Elite, who are the actual cause of their suffering. Indeed, the Snake Oil Salesmen are the Elite. They are the hyenas consuming everything as they convince their prey to participate in stoking the flames of distraction by hating on the minorities. The master magician’s hands work away while the coins roll into their coffers, and their acolytes get bolder and madder, yelling at others who have also been at the effect of the same system.
Act 3.
The food is all gone. The Earth is barren. The heat kills everything. The water has inundated whole nations. Climate refugee populations are 1000 times bigger than anything seen in 2023. People cannot buy anything. The world of the consumer and endless growth cannot be sustained. The Capitalist Elite cannot maintain their profit margins with no one able to buy.
Funny about that. They needed the people to buy their shit. But their business ate the buying power of people as it grew. In their shortsighted greed, the Elite become the victims of their success. The Oroboros ate its tail in desperation. The Snake oil salesmen eat themselves in the end, not even realising that they feasted until it is too late.
What can we do?
First, recognise the game we are in.
Ask questions that few are asking. For example, what conditions make someone like Donald Trump so loved by his base?
How do people get so snared in the trap of conspiracy? What conditions create this?
Is Capitalism, no matter its costume — regenerative, conscious or green — the answer? Or does its Pattern Integrity and DNA indicate it is in reality the engine room of humanity’s problems?
How might we find a better way? One that does place the increased well-being of Earth and all her creatures as central to all actions.
If we can see the conditions that create an increasingly polarised world where hate, conspiracy, lying, and corruption are all standard, we have a chance to begin changing it.
If we get caught in the fractals of the story and do not understand the whole, then we are rearranging deck chairs on the already-hit-the-iceburg Titanic.
We have much work to do.
But first, always, understand Source. The Source Code of Capitalism, neoliberal economics and legal codes of global business and why they maintain the status quo.
When we have broken our own spell and see the game being played and our part in it with clear eyes and a steady hand, we can create something better.
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Syntropic World is a global education and community of practice applying the organising principles of nature to enterprise design and human coordination. Creating ecologies of trust, ensuring integrity in everything, enabling collective sense-making, and organizing around a central purpose — how to create a world that works for 100% of humanity without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.
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