What We Got Wrong About Capitalism
The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.
I believe there is one thing we have misunderstood about capitalism. We have told ourselves that industrial progress would make us happy through material achievements, through consumption, because we would be able to have lots of things like cars and houses. But that wasn’t true.
It wasn’t about consumption. If at some point we believed we could be happy within the industrial economy, it was because it offered — or promised to offer — a place in society for everyone. It was the myth of the “normal man”: 40, 60, 80 years ago, the promise of a good job gave you a role in society, the possibility of being relevant, of contributing, of having meaning, of being useful to others. Material consumption was no more than the accounting system that made this value explicit.
A man who had a private jet — to take the most extreme example — was not happy because he had a jet, but because everyone knew that only the most valuable people in society had jets. A jet was a way to tell society, and yourself, how much you were worth. A huge number on your personal balance sheet, a signifier.
Now that there are a bunch of nepo-babies buying jets and the ultra-rich have become public enemy number one, having a jet no longer adds to that accounting — in fact, it subtracts.
The same thing is happening at street level. Having a shelf full of Lladró figurines was a way to tell your guests, without saying it, that you had so much spare money you could waste it on thousand-euro trinkets that would break if you looked at them the wrong way. But when it became possible to copy Lladró figurines in such detail that they were indistinguishable from the originals, the shelf lost all its value. Today, the less money there is in a house, the more figurines, and vice versa.
When houses finished filling up with figurines, countries set out to fill up with new houses. When that was exhausted too, everyone stared at technology, expecting it to produce a new invention that would keep fueling the fire of industrial production. If cars, then washing machines, then Lladró figurines, then houses had driven growth for so many years, surely something else would come along, right? Flying cars or smart homes or something. But no. Nothing came.
Many more gadgets came along, but none of them fulfilled that role. No new material good ever again brought what humans truly long for, which is not to consume more and more, but to have meaning.
And the thing is, for various reasons, work is collapsing as a provider of that function. Not only because there are proportionally fewer and fewer good jobs, but also because work has become too simplistic an artifact to confer value on a person in the 21st century.
People today have much higher expectations for their lives than what a job can fulfill. There are very few jobs — perhaps being a doctor? — that can meet the personal fulfillment expectations of an average person in the 21st century. People want to be much more than what the job market offers them, and this is, let’s not forget, ma-gni-fi-cent.
So while capitalism has been the most efficient mechanism in history to provide humanity with material goods, it is proving completely incapable of adapting and providing people with meaning and social value. On the contrary, everything capitalism does strips people of their perceived value: with standardized housing, with industrial labor, with the homogenization of consumption.
In this mess lies the root of my generation’s crisis. An army of millennials and Gen Z who do not understand that diffuse discomfort eating away at them, which manifests itself as a dissatisfaction without a clear cause. Why do they feel bad if they have everything? Why do they feel bad if they have reached the consumption standards of their parents or what was expected of them? (Or nearly, in any case.) Are they spoiled children for not wanting to work? For wanting to separate themselves?
They are looking at the wrong accounting. What their parents had, and what they lack, was that perception of value, of meaning. It was the possibility of doing something other than what was expected of them. Of growing, of developing, of having their own idea of personal progress.
The hordes fighting their battles in therapy these days are learning a little bit about this. But only a little, because psychologists cannot venture beyond what can be fixed in a consulting room, and this is something we need to resolve as a society. And it is, no more and no less, about facing the end of work as an indicator of people’s value in the 21st century.
And since we cannot live without measuring everything — because we are that foolish — we have no choice but to invent another accounting system, another way to judge our own value and that of others.
I sense that this new accounting system has to do with art. With each of us bringing out the artist inside us that our fathers forbade us to be, and that our grandfathers forbade them to be.
When I say “art,” of course, I don’t just mean painting or sculpture, but any manifestation of human creativity and ingenuity, everything we do with the intention of connecting with other people, of saying something about ourselves that is relevant to others.
That’s why I believe the path is to push for a 21st century full of writers and screenwriters and actors and comedians and mathematicians and dancers and designers and photographers and singers and editors and painters and poets and bartenders and pastry chefs and journalists and makeup artists and many other things we haven’t even imagined yet.
And many more “entrepreneurs” and project creators in the broadest sense of the word. Because perhaps the most perfect form of art is launching a project in service of others, whether it’s a café, a school, or a cultural association.
Notice that this new paradigm has a wonderful virtue, which is that it is not competitive. There is not a limited number of artists who can coexist, as there is a limited number of people who can work as engineers at Renault. Unlike in this late-stage capitalism, in the age of abundance there really can be a place for everyone.
And in that age, surely, each of us will be, in ourselves, a work of art.
But that is a topic for another article.