People Struggling Like Me Are Fed Up With Our Capitalistic Society — 'It's Like Economic Cancer Mutating Our Lives'
Without fighting against capitalistic cancer, our society is doomed to have an economy that will crash.
MAYA LAB | Shutterstock Editor's Note: This is a part of YourTango's Opinion section where individual authors can provide varying perspectives for wide-ranging political, social, and personal commentary on issues.
The sympathy for CEO Brian Thompson’s killer has not let up since he was arrested. If anything, I’ve noticed more and more people calling for acts of violence toward health insurance CEOs — among others.
As a perennially online person, reading social media comments almost constantly, I find it impossible to ignore the boiling rage I see in comments. People are beyond stressed. They’re ticked and on the verge of being pushed too far by greedy companies.
If I were a CEO, I’d give my employees raises, lower my prices, and start working on initiatives to make my services better. Why? Because there are few things scarier than thousands of faceless people screaming for your blood. But I digress.
People are fed up with the current system in America. I’ve started to hear people say “Capitalism ruins everything” and “Capitalism is cancer.”
I don’t think they realize how right they are about those two sentences — especially about capitalism being cancer. Have you ever seen a person who had cancer? I have. My parents both had it. One lived, and one died. My dad was the one who died. Mom survived, thanks to modern medicine.
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When my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he felt fine aside from tingling in his legs. Initially, we thought it was lung cancer because it metastasized there. Overall, I couldn’t imagine him being sick.
He was just there. He was Dad. And yet, he was sick with this disease. And I watched him get sicker, trailer, and in more pain than ever before. The cancer kept spreading, unchecked, until it consumed his body, killing him in the process.
It was horrifying. That’s why I don’t take comparing something to cancer lightly. With that said, American-style capitalism is the exact illustration of economic cancer.
Do you know what cancer is or how it starts?
I’ll explain the basics for those not in the know. Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of mutated, “corrupt” cells in the body. These cells reproduce quickly, don’t die off, and keep growing into tumors.
In a healthy body, your immune system will notice the mutant cells and attack them, killing them off. Or, better yet, your cells won’t mutate and will continue to live a regular life before they go through apoptosis — programmed cell death.
Apoptosis sounds scary. No one ever thinks of death as a good thing. But, with cells, apoptosis is necessary. It’s how we avoid cancer and regulate our bodies. Cancer cells can no longer go through apoptosis.
In a body that has cancer, the cells get traits that make them unable to be killed by your immune system. They can even “turn off” your immune system to keep them from getting destroyed.
They keep dividing, growing into clumps that break off and spread elsewhere. This leads to tumorous growth in your body. Eventually, those tumors keep growing, making it harder and harder for your body to function.
Your body starts losing resources to the tumors. It stops looking normal, and you start developing symptoms from the cancer. And yet, the body can’t recognize the cancer that’s killing it.
Cell growth, which is part of a regular body, needs its checks and balances. Cancer is what happens when unlimited, unchecked growth takes over a person’s body.
A human body has finite resources and finite space. It is not feasible for cells to grow unchecked indefinitely without it ending in the death of the organism.
Let’s translate this allegory into economics.
Much like the human body, our planet is not infinite nor do we have infinite resources. Our planet is “the body,” with a smaller macrocosm being our country’s economy.
In a healthy system, our governments and people offer safeguards that prevent uncontrolled growth. Governments enact antitrust acts, restrict what businesses can and cannot do, and blame companies for their damage.
These laws restrict companies of a certain size from coming up, simply because it hurts and even prevents companies of certain sizes from growing. These laws also curb how much a CEO can make compared to how much their lowest-paid worker makes.
This is the equivalent of apoptosis. It’s programmed, pre-planned business “death” or regulation. Economic apoptosis keeps everything in a balance that keeps both people and the planet healthier — or at least, capable of functioning.
Every billionaire who exists acts as a clump of cancer cells. Their growth has gone unchecked, causing them to amass a clump of money. Our immune systems in this situation are the laws and politicians meant to protect people over governments.
The “immune systems” are not working the way they should. Politicians are avoiding cutting out the billionaire class. They’re ignoring megacorporations and egregious abuse of the working class.
So, their growth continues unchecked. As they grow, they start taking more and more resources from regular people — the people who keep our “body” glued together. And then it starts to eat into environments.
With no one to check their power, companies continue to grow and consume until they overtake almost everything in sight — weakening the very economy they “helped” grow.
Eventually, the growth kills off the economy because the divide between the rich and poor is too high to sustain those prices. Then, the country tends to collapse.
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There’s also an allegory in the cure for cancer, too.
Cancer is either removed surgically, removed by immunotherapies that bolster the immune system against cancer growth, or removed through chemotherapy, which poisons everything — not just the cancer.
The idea behind chemo is that it can kill off the cancer and hopefully allow the body to recover, despite it being poison. Immunotherapy is often the best option if surgery is not available, simply because it directly attacks the cancer cells exclusively.
In our economic allegory, here’s what each “cure” would mean:
- Surgical removal would be the equivalent of legal groups going in, confiscating the business, and telling billionaires that they can no longer earn money past $750 million. The rest of the money would be redistributed via taxes and benefit programs.
- Immunotherapy would be the beefing up of laws and policies that curtail business growth, require specific worker protections to be in place, and punish businesses that are deemed to be unethical or a threat to life.
- Chemotherapy would be the equivalent of violent strikes, political uprisings, and similar behaviors. When society turns to violence, we all hurt. It’s just that it’s a final hope in the fight against unchecked wealth growth and hoarding.
American-style capitalism is cancer, and we need to fix it.
Without fighting against cancer, our society is doomed to have an economy that will crash. It will make 1929 look like a cakewalk. And the cancer will likely destroy the government along with our environment.
We have cures available. We’re hoping it doesn’t get to chemo. But, one thing is for sure: ignoring cancer won’t stop its growth. It will only make it grow faster, and make it harder to remove.
So yes. American-style capitalism, complete with business protections in place, is cancer. It’s just cancer for our economy, our political world, and our environment.
The question is, are we going to continue to ignore it? Or are we going to try to fight it?
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.