Throughout the world and in the United States neo-liberalism and vampire capitalism have generated an overwhelming feeling of despair, a feeling that it is hopeless to resist the so called “New World Order” of global capitalism. Voting seems a waste of time in the one-dollar-one-vote pseudo-democracy. Labor unions seem to be ineffective against the power of the global Leviathans that dominate the world’s economy. We fear layoffs, downsizing, the relocation of our jobs abroad, and we see the homeless on the street and say to ourselves, “That could be me. I’m one paycheck away.”
We live in a parasitic economy that is a royal feast for some, a constant struggle for survival for most, and a living hell for many of us. Though we are capable of producing an abundance of wealth that will improve the quality of life for everyone, the vampire capitalists search the world for cheap slave and child labor to maximize their profit and to feed their blood lust, and now, they are spreading this disease throughout the world, endangering the survival of the human race and the life of the planet itself.
In principle, socialism should be able to take advantage of the increasing awareness that capitalism is failing us, and it is an evil that feeds off our very life blood. But, tragically, just at the moment when capitalism has revealed its fatal flaws and the horrors of its true nature, socialism, as it exists today, has revealed its own weaknesses as an alternative. For example, the Soviet Union in its collapse revealed the fatal flaws of a nondemocratic command economy.
Western Europe and the America of the New Deal have also failed to fully realize all their hopes and dreams of a new future, primarily because they have retained capitalism as the core to their economy, and, therefore, at their best have only been able to ameliorate capitalism’s worse effects and provide a minimal safety net for its victims.
To save ourselves from the evil of vampire capitalism and the apocalypse of self-destruction that will come if we continue to allow the spread of this cancer, we need a new vision of our future, new political and economic paradigms to guide us back to a future of new hopes and dreams. This should be relatively easy for us to do because the answers have always been with us. They are rooted in our finest traditions and lie deep in the ethical and moral roots of the American dream.
Unfortunately, for so many years, we have spent most of our time creating a labyrinth of lies and self-delusion, and we have become madder and madder as we face one dead end after another. It seems to me that this is what the myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth is all about. The Minotaur is the truth that gores us because we do not have the courage to face the truth. The truth is that our future is dead in the womb if we continue on this path, and we don’t find our way out of this labyrinth of illusions and lies.
Fortunately, the truth is far more straight-forward and liberating than the lies that we tell ourselves. For example, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Or “that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Simple words, straight forward and profound, and they rocked our universe and caused us to dream great dreams, but now they are like ghosts to us, ghosts of a dream that never came true because democracy is a revolution that has never been won.
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