the failure of capitalism

I blog pretty prolifically these days, but it doesn’t represent a market failure as much as a market paradigm shift. I do most of my work at night, and spend most of the day sitting around waiting for emails to come in from my clients. Since I’m tethered to the computer anyway, blogging gives me something to do when I’m not tinkering with my magnum opus.

Also, since I work from my home, blogging is my equivalent of getting up to go to the coffee machine or my coworker’s cubicle for a bit of a conversation. In all the years that I worked in an office, that would be how I’d get some variety into the day. Since my dogs don’t make coffee and have a very limited range of opinions, I find that the blogosphere meets those needs nicely.

This has little to do with the outer circumstance of our lives and more to do with the human condition.

In Soviet Russia, the problems were blamed on shortages and the failure of communism. Now we are blaming Capitalism. Next it may be the failure of Fundamentalism, or the Chinese flavour of Communism, or Despotism, or Fascism. All systems have their good points. All systems have their bad points.

Sure outer conditions are important, in fact they are vital, but having established a modicum of balance, it will always lead to discontent, dis-satisfaction, dis-ease.

That is the human condition. No matter how good life is, it will never be quite good enough.

Today, the average man can enjoy living conditions and luxuries only dreamed of by kings of the past. If you were seriously wounded a few hundred years ago, death would certainly follow. They had no means to contain the spread of infection. If you had bad teeth or gum disease, you lived a life of pain and suffering. An abscess could kill a man.

Now it is commonplace for a body to have a complete blood transfusion. Ensuring a thorough cleansing of all bodily fluid. Heart replacement is commonplace. A heart transplant no longer makes the news.

In the major cities, you can eat almost any foods your imagination can conjure.

Man has been to the moon and is now journeying to Mars. Our lives are filled with such wonders.

But still the mundane cannot be tolerated. The problem lies not with the system, but the human being.

The dis-satisfaction experienced is being expressed through a new vehicle. The blog.

The problem lies not in the system, but in our own hearts.

Circumstances may change, but the problem remains the same.

Only in the sense that sleep is evidence of a market failure. Idiot.

You get paid to sleep?

You get paid to blog? Maybe I misunderstood your point.