The Seed of Capitalism

The self-concept of pure difference.

Last time, we talked about how actions are expressions of what the actor believes their interests, their reasons for action, to be. These reasons and interests in turn flow from the actor’s understanding of who and what they are and what would be good for such a being. In short, there is an unbroken line from the actor’s self-concept to their actions. The circumstances of those actions and the means available to perform them may change, but these affect only the question of how a particular action might be carried out. They don’t affect the ultimate ends of action, the purpose behind them, the why. Questions of ultimate motivation lie with the actor’s self-concept. 

There is a particular self-concept that is shared by almost everyone alive today. The origin of this self-concept is ancient, and the course of human civilization is none other than the development and expression of this concept. It is this: the belief in a purely negative relationship between self and other. Put another way, it is the belief in a pure difference between what one is and is not. This should seem especially intuitive because its alternative, that something can be both what it is and what it isn’t at the same time, appears preposterous, absurd, and possibly a violation of the basic laws of reality. If I’m correct about this self-concept being the root of all our ills, it should at least be clear why such an apparently innocuous belief has gone overlooked by nearly everyone in human history.

I say nearly everyone because history has recorded a few people, some of whom are among the most revered humans to have ever lived, who have taken the apparently paradoxical position that they are more than only themselves alone, and are, in fact, everyone and everything. That is, they have claimed to be God. If capitalism is the current manifestation of the belief in pure difference, this latter position is that of mysticism, the belief that difference is, as I’ve been calling it, merely self-difference. 

But a discussion of this alternative self-concept must wait. For now, let’s consider how such a simple and apparently obvious claim that different things are (only) different can ultimately manifest itself as capitalism and all its attendant crises. The key, again, is understanding the link between self-concept and action, how what one is is in some sense the same thing as what one does.

To believe in pure difference is to draw a line between yourself and the rest of the world and declare yourself to be that which is on one side of the line. Now, this does not mean that the boundaries of this line do not change according to circumstance, sometimes encompassing many other people, sometimes not even encompassing your own body (after all, you can speak of a difference between “you” and “your body”). Wherever the line happens to be, though, self is on one side and the other, that which is not self, is on the opposite side. In drawing this line and picking a side, you have manifested yourself, created yourself, defined yourself, but by that same gesture you have also determined the means by which you can be destroyed. Without the line, the thinking goes, you will cease to be.

And you can’t simply draw the line once. This is because part of what it is to be a separate being is the act of defining oneself in opposition to everything else. In doing so, you inaugurate an endless process by which you must negate the other in order to be what you are, and you must take from the other whatever you lack: self and self-preservation are the same thing. It is not hard to see that, collectively, this self-concept of pure difference and its ethics of self-preservation has ultimately manifested itself as the capitalist system we live in today. 

That self-preservation, fear, competition, and greed lie at the roots of capitalism should not be a surprise, but what is important to note is that they are all essentially byproducts of the same ultimate cause: the belief in pure difference. With this in mind it becomes easier to see capitalism as simply this concept writ large and fine-tuned over the course of history. Indeed, what we call capitalism is only a few hundred years old, but what differentiates it from older economic systems like feudalism are intellectual and technological innovations (i.e. the context and means of action) and changes in where the line between self and other is typically drawn (tribes, nations, families, individuals). That there is a line, and that it divides self from other in a relationship of pure difference, has never changed. And at either scale, the macro or the micro, the societal or the individual, the definitive principle of action is the same: endless self enrichment at the expense of the other.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll talk about some examples of this self-concept of pure difference in practice, as well as the particular ways in which it manifests socially. I’ll also begin to describe what an alternative ethics and politics based on self-difference instead of pure difference might look like. Thanks for reading, and please feel free to message me on this platform or anywhere with questions, comments or criticism.