PrintDecember 27, 2008
'Meritalism' not 'Capitalism'
The Left has edited the political dictionary in a way that determines how we are able to think about politics and ideology. A prime example is the word, "Capitalism," an invention of the silly and evil Karl Marx. It is instructive how deeply this semantic pathology has reached that people who passionately opposed the manifest horror of socialism reflexively reach back to words like "Capitalism" to describe what they believe to be good.
"Capitalism," of course, simply does not exist. It never has. Using this word to describe the vast oceans of human relationships which Marx sought to bottle up in his shibboleth "Capitalism" accomplishes only the goal which Orwell feared: It mutilates language and cripples our capacity to understand what "Capitalism" and "Socialism" really mean.
What we call "Capitalism" actually encompasses something much grander and much broader. Wealth is not simply financial wealth and man is much greater than homo economus, a creature governed solely by economic factors. Except for neurotic personalities, like the fictional Midas or Scrooge, people work, invest and strive for success in the marketplace of all human interactions.
Mormon missionaries, for example, devote years of their lives for religious purposes. Catholic monks and nuns do the same. Orthodox rabbis often eschew greater material riches for the spiritual riches of keeping Shabbat. Pastors and ministers likewise often dedicate their lives to tasks greater than money. Keeping God at the center does not mean, however, that effort is abandoned: people who commit their lives to Judeo-Christian faith often work much harder in their lives than the rest of us (material success, coincidentally, sometimes comes from this - religiously serious people have tended, historically, to do better than faithless people.)
Putting religion aside, people who commit their lives to music or art or literature or science or medicine are not people sweating after money. The section of the marketplace in which these people compete is artistic or intellectual or humanitarian, not financial. Albert Schweitzer may have raised vast sums for his work in Africa, but he raised them by giving concerts or writing books and he used the money to relieve the suffering of Africans through his medical skills. Schweitzer, according to Marx and the language we use today, was a "Capitalist," and yet he was as far removed from anything connected to our calculating machine "Capitalism" as it is possible to conceive.
The continuum of human relationships, the "Market," is simply all the voluntary interactions that human beings have engaged in since the beginning of time. "Capital" is a tiny part of this. Even radical Leftists, like feminists, recognize that men and women are motivated by much more than just money. Indeed, the radical Left has come up with a whole range of mythical evils intended to transcend the narrow term "Capitalism."
But the infiltration, indoctrination and immersion of word-wielders with the childish and ignorant words of ancient Leftists like Marx is so profound that they simply cannot think outside the semantic jail of "Capitalism" and other words. Language controls thought, especially for those who live in a universe of Orwellian mind control.
What if we all used the word "Meritalism" instead of "Capitalism"? When we use the word "Capitalism" what we really mean is "Meritalism." That is to say, we mean that economically aggressive people who devote themselves to making money do so, and they do so by merit. Those devoted to faith bring themselves closer to God, and they do so by merit. Those who devote themselves to raising good children do so, and they do so by merit. Those who dedicate their lives to body building are healthy and attractive out of hard work. Artists and musicians become successful by dedication to their craft. Actors and writers are the same. And so on.
Many of these paths are mutually supportive. Healthy and happily married people tend to do well financially, because of the interaction of health, marriage and wealth. Religious people tend to excel at art and study, because both draw inspiration from God and because studying the Bible or Torah is a profound intellectual exercise. Honorable people who work hard in all areas of life find that all those areas tend to converge into what we call "success." But all success in every area of life is self-defined - and not by money.
Merit -- reaping what we sow -- in all areas of human interaction is the natural order of things. Although, like nearly all of life, achievement often rests upon statistical probability, one's "batting average" is still a function of how long the individual spends in the batting cages. Capital, money, cash -- these have so little to do with it as to be meaningless. There is no such thing as "Capitalism." There never has been. It is an imaginary word for a purely fictional notion, as phony as the Loch Ness Monster or the Abominable Snowman. We should drop it from our vocabulary and adopt, instead, a real word for a real system: Meritalism.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
