Darwin’s Nightmare On Wall Street

Pleased to eat you, won’t you guess my name?

Do a Google search on Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and you’ll get 1,900,000 results. To say that this is a popular topic would be an understatement. There seems to be two schools of thought on the relationship between these two. The first is that Darwin is actually the ideological role model for capitalism; dog eat dog, only the strong survive, etc.etc. The other prevailing thought is that Marx was duly influenced by Darwin’s ideas from a purely tactical standpoint, eliminating any aspect of religious narrative from the human script. According to those that are heavily invested in the connection between the two, Darwinism is the superscript for a Godless and ultimately morality free system. When it comes to Darwin, I think both schools of thought are actually true and what we are seeing in the current economic collapse is the convergence of both ideologies fusing together through The Darwinian Matrix.

In the mutant version of “The Free Market Economy” it has been a truly Darwinian nightmare, akin to the Nile Perch that splashed down in Tanzania. The bankers, hedge funders, CEO’s, Paulson, Bernanke, et al were like the giant fish with no natural threat, no organic check and balance who consumed all of the lesser fish in Lake Victoria. Now, Lake Victoria lies in a precarious ecological balance, bordering on crisis as algae grows out of control and threatens to overwhelm the lake’s carbon dioxide level, which will ultimately be The Nile Perch’s own undoing. In the Darwinian universe, these big fish, without any checks and balances, without any oversight threaten to tilt the balance of the economy right off the face of civilization as we know it.

From a Marxist perspective, this also dovetails nicely with the aftermath of such a collapse. What replaces the system that fed and nurtured fish big and small once there is now longer any layer between the little fish and their potential extinction? It’s a new system, an economic and political pool, or for lack of a better term, a holding tank, perhaps even a fish farm. We are on the brink of such a radical transference of our environment, moving from the relatively free spaces of open water to a lock or a pen where since the waters have become brackish, toxic and dangerous, where the big fish has consumed nearly every single life form available, and the little fish can no longer provide for itself, it must willingly embrace the regular feeding schedule of the fish farm in order to stay alive, in spite of the fact that there is no more freedom and ability to swim and move amongst the greater currents and tides. The new layer of governance is the Marxist version of a society that has most of it’s basic needs provided for it, with little upward mobility and an utter dependence on the state for nearly everything. The ultimate expression of natural selection is not some Adam Smithian race towards higher evolutionary standards through competition and innovation, based on the faux free market model, it’s the crushing of all competition and then as the final solution; re-setting the entire environment itself in an artificially crafted, limited, simulated universe.

Darwin was an Aquarius and if you haven’t already figured it out, today is his birthday. Some months back I did a couple of posts on Darwin and Saul Alinsky (another Aquarian), linking Alinsky’s amorality to Darwin’s theories of natural selection. Without the moral checks and balances that traditional, Christian religion provided via scripture and adherence to an all watchful God, the slippery slope towards justification and rationalization got a lot slicker.

I also did not embrace the other polarity in this long running and often tiresome debate between science and religion, which is the creationist mindset. Instead, I was working towards a different outlook, one based on our celestial origins, which I will return to at some point and that the new, emergent moral code will lie in our ability to see and feel what another sees and feels so intimately, that we would not do harm on another lest we would be willing to take on the grief and anguish ourselves. But that’s for another time.

So let’s raise a glass of dead water to the big fish whose time will be shorter than they think in the decimated environs they gorged themselves on, for if Darwin was indeed correct, lurking out there somewhere, perhaps in the vastness of space or in the vicinity of a tiny microbe or the shrug of the great mothers shoulders there is an even more dominant force than they can even begin to surmise which in turn will restore some semblance of natural order.

POSTSCRIPT

If you aren’t already aware of the analogies I drew on in this post, they come from a movie called “Darwin’s Nightmare” and you can find out more about it by looking at the left sidebar where there is a brief description of this powerful and tragic documentary by French filmmaker, Hubert Sauper.