A Brief History of Capitalism

As the European Middle Ages drew to a close, Renee Descartes emerged as one of the foundational thinkers of post-pagan European philosophy. The dichotomy between mind and body established by his work provided an idea which subsequent thinkers from Europe remained in conversation with for centuries to come. With the arrival of the Renaissance, first in Italy, then France and Holland, the earliest inklings of the humanistic thought which Land so frequently derides began to rear their heads. The increasing secularization of reason and its dis-alignment from a spiritual understanding of its position and limitations in the cosmic hierarchy, whether Pagan or Christian, demonstrates the process of the growth of Spenglerian atheism (in Western civilization) in tandem with the rise of the Faustian IMPulse to expand unto infinity, even to the detriment of the civilization which spawned it, which could be summarized by this simplified historical progression:Age of Exploration -> Mercantilism -> Colonialism -> Industrialism -> Space Race -> Information Age -> AIAdditionally, the rise of Corporations and Corporatism, which, unsurprisingly, began in Dutch ports, were inextricably tied with the Age of Sail and the ventures and voyages that European powers and adventurers launched in search of land and gold. These explorations set the groundwork for the successive domination of global enterprise by the British, the Americans, and, in the future, possibly autonomous systems as increasingly self-sufficient and self-exciting feedback loops of production and consumption, divorced from any human input, ‘digest’ (see Rajiv Malhotra) the last remnants of real human life before shitting them out, repackaged as just another commodity to be bought and traded.Land explains in an interview with Justin Murphy (2018):

“I think it comes down, again, just to these very, very basic cybernetic diagrams to do with positive feedback. And one sort of image — it’s an entirely satisfactory image once it’s accepted that it is figurative — is a critical nuclear reaction. You have a pile of radioactive rods that are damped down by graphite containment rods, and you start pulling out those graphite rods, and at a certain point it goes critical and you get an explosion. It’s just absolutely — it’s not a metaphor — it’s a positive feedback process [laughs]. It just is a positive feedback process that passes through some threshold and goes critical. And so I would say that’s the sense [in which] capitalism has always been there. It’s always been there as a pile with the potential to go critical, but it didn’t go critical until the Renaissance, until the dawn of modernity, when, for reasons that are interesting, enough graphite rods get pulled out and the thing becomes this self-sustaining, explosive process.So in a certain sense, a lot of the actual fabric, the social historical fabric, is actually a containment system. And I think that containment system had a failure mode in the Renaissance. Just to dip back into the hyper-ideological space for a minute, what the extreme kind of what I call “paleo-reactionaries” get right is that they they totally see that. I share nothing of their mournful affection for the medieval period, but I think they’re totally right to say that there was a catastrophic failure that unleashed this explosive process, and that is what modernity is from the perspective of the Ancien Régime. What any social system is for is to stop this nuclear pile going off. You look at Chinese civilization and you say, well, what is it really doing? What’s it for? From a certain perspective, it’s a capitalism containment structure that obviously worked better in this traditionalist sense than the European one. The European one was too fractured, it was subject to a whole bunch of wild, uncontrollable influences, and unprecedented feedback structures kicked off that no one was in a position to master in Europe.And so we get capitalism and modernity in Europe, and capitalism and modernity is brought to China by Western gunboats. It’s not like they’re bringing a gift, what they’re bringing is … they’re coming to pull the [laughs] graphite containment roads out, you know, from outside. That’s what that process of Chinese modernization is. It’s a process of the indigenous Chinese process of containment being dismantled from outside until it then — obviously in a way that is no less spectacular than the one we’ve seen in the West — goes into this self-sustaining modernist eruption basically in the early 1980s.”