Will Corporate Capitalism be Fading Out?

Now before we get all political, let me make a few points: capitalism has done some pretty good things. It's gotten us where we are today, roughly, but it has developed mankind at a huge rate since the Industrial Revolution. The corporation model has provided vast amounts of resources so that aspiring academics could develop many of the great technologies we have today, either by hiring scientists, engineers, developers, etc; or by creating the economic basis by which our government was able to support such research, take NASA for example.

However, capitalism has its dark sides as well. As an entity that focuses more on profit than progress, the development it has created has also been hindered by the same model as competition stifles cooperation amongst researchers. Also, the profiteering model is a very clear breeding grounds for corruption, and companies will go to great lengths to protect their markets from revolutionary designs that will be more ethical but challenge their positions at the top. A particularly gruesome example of this is when some major medical company attempted, and thankfully failed, to copyright strings of human DNA that could be used for research to fight disease.

So capitalism has some good, mainly in that we needed it to get this far, past tense. But the playing field is changing now. We live in a world where kids can build nuclear reactors in their garages, and the dissemination of technology and information is only increasing exponentially. We live currently on the brink of 3D printing technology, which in the next decade might be so accurate as to reach the molecular level. That's the technology I want to talk about today.

Money is the World's Largest Religion

Human beings study several sciences: physics, mathematics, biology, ethics, and of course economics. When we look at an object in physics, one of the more 'real' sciences you could say, depending on the perspective in question, we can determine and assign it several properties: things like mass, height, length, inertia, density. However, in recent years, we've added a property to that list: cost. Cost is commonly the first aspect we look at, especially nowadays in our state of economy. But what is it? To answer that we must ask what is currency.

A friend of mine named Shawn has more money than most people I know, so when he told me what money was, it surprised me coming from someone who had so much of it. He told me, money is a promise. It's a promise that because you gave me some item or service, someone else in a similar society will give you an item or service of equal value. But then what is value? It might be measurable, but how so? We can measure weight, and dimensions, and the like, without question. But value is something different. It's a psychological phenomenon, a process in the brain in which the human undergoes some equation to calculate how much currency the asset in question is worth. It's not a real thing, it's an imaginary game. However, the ritual of applying value to assets has become so widespread, along with the trade of, accumulation, or at least obsession over currency, it reaches every corner of the planet. It's a mental process which we use to justify actions such as sacrifice and war and the joining of labor systems which consume our health and life, all for the dollar. Money is truly a religion is every aspect.