(Being done with the latest tour of the Genius section, we are currently revisiting the Economics section. It is rather awkward that instead of dealing with each section as a whole and in the sequential order of entries, I am posting bits from this one and pieces from that one, thus making the continuity maintained in my book impossible to sustain in these sample postings. But at least such sampling gives the reader a flavor of the book itself, which was originally, and still remains, my intention.)
It is often assumed that capitalists are good politicians, but not according to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who had this classic gem about the greedy capitalist who, if the price is right, would be eager to sell the communist a rope which to hang him with. In other words, paraphrasing Nietzsche, greed is stupid.
In my experience as an expert on America, having directly participated in numerous political, scientific, and business US-Soviet negotiations, and as a former United Nations official with daily multinational contacts, capitalists make poor politicians, and they are far more susceptible to manipulation by the politically savvy talent than any socialist or communist has ever been. The core flaw of the capitalist mindset is the pseudo-Marxist belief that the economic motivation of human and social behavior is more important than politics or psychology. A capitalist will never accept the premise that money cannot buy just about everything. A chess-playing capitalist will be sorely uncomfortable with a material-losing gambit if he cannot envisage a return with interest.
Generally speaking, does our capitalist understand that money is not always the prime mover of human and social action?
His most effective tool of persuasion is the trickle-down concept: if you allow me to get very-very rich, the trickle-down effect will raise your standard of living too. He is prepared to rob the world "for his country," and he just cannot help lying, cheating, and stealing from his own, as such is the nature of “free enterprise.” Because he firmly believes in the adage spuriously attributed to Keynes to the effect that “capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
Alas, in America, the capitalist seems to have been able so far to brainwash the populace to the extent that the American public is eager and anxious to defend “capitalism” against “socialism-communism,” even if it means paying more for inferior services, like in the ongoing healthcare debate, as long as our capitalist is still able to stuff his pockets with profits off human life and death.
How does this mindset translate into foreign policy? But surely, what is there to politics, after all, besides the wallet and the muscle? If I am rich enough to buy your services and strong enough to punish you for wrong behavior, this is all the politics I need!
I believe that this capitalist mantra has been firmly adopted by American foreign policy in the post-Soviet era, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, rather than President Obama, is its ultimate embodiment today.
Perhaps, America has the right to this mantra, and her lack of subtlety in foreign affairs shows her renunciation of hypocrisy, and thus represents a commendable saving grace? Military and economic power together must be an unbeatable combination, and the very essence of hegemonic politics!
But, unfortunately for Washington, and even more unfortunately for the rest of America, the world does not turn by wallet and muscle alone. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, even more revealingly, “Power makes stupid.”
But in the world at large the capitalist's ignorance of the fact that money does not rule the earth leads him to the greatest folly of all, as a result of which he is bound to lose what he cherishes the most. The doctrine of Globalism is basically an extension of the trickle-down concept to the global scale, but the world as a whole cannot be as easily brainwashed as the folks at home: it has found a powerful antidote to brainwashing in nationalism.
The tragedy that took place in Russia in Yeltsin’s time, was a kind of chess gambit, brilliantly played by the Russian nationalists against American capitalism. When the capitalist brought in his plundering in the name of trickle-down game, the Russian people, raised with immunity to capitalist brainwashing, angrily rebelled against the American capitalist and his Russian-born lackeys. As a result of the American capitalist ‘victory’ in the Cold War, the anti-American and anti-capitalist tidal wave has swept the planet. Globalism has been one of the most conspicuous victims of the nationalistic backlash, according to the admission of some particularly astute American observers, like Patrick Buchanan. In the overall scheme of things, the so-called new world order is in fact a statement of fact, revealing to the whole world that the American capitalist is no longer the master of the universe, and his insistence on the primacy of the economic factor is nothing but an unseemly manifestation of the ugliest congenital defect of the capitalist mindset, gradually reducing the great American superpower to the status of a pariah nation in the new world of the twenty-first century.
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