The World’s Greatest Theme Park
Chapter I: Pay-to-Piss
“Those damp piss dollars add up.”
Imagine an untamed wilderness full of precious woodland creatures living in their hidden tree holes, eating their foraged tree nuts, swimming happily in the same shimmering ponds they drink from, all surrounded by jewelweed, beautyberry, hydrangea, milkweed, phlox, dandelion, and clover. Now imagine that you are a disembodied presence just sort of floating around above this wild splendor, and you have eighty thousand dollars burning holes in your large ghostly pockets – what would you do? The shrewd trader may invest this money into stocks, placing their fate in the hands of capricious market forces; the selfless do-gooder may donate this money, giving that money back to the people who truly need it; the hardcore gamer may ignore the woodlands altogether, spending this money on the ultimate PC complete with one-hundred-terabyte solid-state drive that contains literally all the games; the bleeding-heart socialist may evenly distribute this money, sharing the wealth amongst the community; the amateur writer-philosopher may bemoan the current state of humankind, burning the cash before writing a long essay about how money is the root of all the bad stuff in the world; and the venture capitalist may use this money to bring in a fleet of bulldozers, tree harvesters, tractors, and backhoes to raze the land bare, exterminating thousands of breezy birds, caterwauling coyotes, rummaging raccoons, funny foxes, war-dancing weasels, and dashing deer – all in the name of building The World’s Greatest Theme Park.
Many children of the millennial age got their first taste of venture capitalism through Chris Sawyer’s 1999 theme park simulation computer game, RollerCoaster Tycoon; a beautiful isometric crash course in finance, business management, and capitalist-systems-of-ethics which dictate that drowning park guests or trapping them in maze-like pathways with no exit is detrimental to overall financial success because no one wants to go to a theme park where the disembodied ghost boss is being a megalomaniac; and in a roundabout way, this is one of the benefits of capitalist greed: dead customers don’t pay to ride Revenge of the Vomitnator. But RollerCoaster Tycoon teaches the downsides of capitalist greed as well: the ease at which capitalism gives way to exploitation; the fact that people are willing to pay up to a dollar to use the restroom because they have no other option besides urinating on a park path, which is a misdemeanor crime with a sentence of up to one year in jail in most parts of the United States.
The bottom line is that killing customers hurts the bottom line, but forcing customers to pay-to-piss increases profit margins; public toilets have an upkeep cost after all, and in RollerCoaster Tycoon that upkeep cost in a park of roughly 1,000 guests is about $50/hour or $0.83/minute. Those damp piss dollars add up, and if guests start complaining just remind them that it’s all in an effort to build The World’s Greatest Theme Park.
This pay-to-piss mentality is at the foundational core of RollerCoaster Tycoon, where being a capitalistic control freak is encouraged through the ability to tweak every little thing about your park. From wait times, load times, the color of the paths – black is the go-to choice as the heat absorption of the black-painted cement leads to slightly warmer in-park temperatures which leads to thirstier guests who will pay more for drinks at Señor Slurpy’s Soda Shack, or at least that’s what Six Flags is doing; keeping in mind that “No outside food, beverages or coolers may be brought into Six Flags” and all the water fountains are broken and a bottle of water costs $12 from the vending machine – to ride speeds, coaster rail types, which music plays on which attractions, the cost of literally everything – including umbrellas, which can be sold for as much as twenty dollars each because no one wants to get rained on – and even things like the costumes that park entertainers wear and the shirt colors of the mechanics and handymen who are criminally underpaid because every penny pinched is then used to line some sleazy executive’s pockets – or rather, build The World’s Greatest Theme Park.
*in the Roman Quarter, you will Pay-to-Piss and you will like it
As if you were a magical hand in the sky or a god of the gaps, the placement of attractions, restaurants, scenery, pathways, and amenities is within the full control of the disembodied presence that you – the player – assume in RollerCoaster Tycoon. In fact, like most simulations, the majority of the fun lies not in the Excel-sheet-like money-management aspects of the game but in the perfect placement of every little thing to create The World’s Greatest Theme Park both financially and aesthetically. And placement is very important, as clever placement of pathways, fountains, Roman columns, lamps, mounted televisions, marquee signs, gelatinous cubes, giant mushrooms, gravestones, Roman statues, massive pumpkins, spooky skeletons, Alice in Wonderland-like chess pieces and playing cards, candy mountains, pyramids, ugly postmodern art exhibits, and perennial woody plants of all types increases the excitement rating of nearby attractions; this leads to greater income downstream as you can charge more for an attraction based on its excitement rating rounded down by the decimal. For example, you may have a coaster with a baseline excitement rating of 6.00, but five Minervas and a handful of Roman columns later and that excitement rating chariots to 7.10, which means guests will pay $7.00 for each ride on the giant-metal-death-trap. And the placement tricks don’t end there: placing pretzel stalls near drink stalls allows you to gouge prices on drinks because These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty#1 and strategic placement of ATM kiosks ensures guests can afford those absurdly overpriced pretzel-induced beverages, and placing one free attraction near the entrance of your park effectively tricks guests into extending their visit.
This is just scratching the surface; once you’ve discovered each of the capitalistic-control-freak tips and tricks in RollerCoaster Tycoon, Oxford University might as well give you an honorary bachelor’s degree in marketing and sociology because you are already a gold-certified master manipulator of human behavior.
Chapter II: The Executive Leadership Team
“It’s revolution, baby.”
Capitalism’s avarice begets a certain level of cleanliness, which is yet another downstream benefit of praying to the gods of worldly possessions and arithmetic. No matter how high the excitement rating on your roller coaster might be, guests don’t want to wade through small pools of vomit with bits of trash floating about while on the way to those exciting attractions; and guests who don’t ride, don’t pay. In this way, even the most heartless of executives are forced to hire some handymen to sweep, empty the trash cans, and scrub vomit off the pathways outside the exit of Revenge of the Vomitnator.
The same downstream benefit of capitalism exists for park safety: if there are violent gangs of centurion-attired children brandishing spiked clubs roaming the paths of the Roman Quarter, park guests are less likely to go to the Roman Quarter and much less likely to return to your theme park ever again. In this way, even the most heartless of executives are forced to hire some security guards to protect their investments – or rather, their park guests. And park safety doesn’t stop at park security; the rides themselves need proper maintenance to stay up to par with state safety regulations. (In the United States – as of the publishing of this article – all but six states have theme park safety regulations enforced by law; those unregulated states are: Alabama, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, and Utah.#2) If theme park executives were to cut corners on safety regulations, guests may find that the catapult launch launches them right into the nearby pond or, worst case, decapitated after their raft goes airborne into a metal shaft at just the right angle to tear their neck asunder, leaving parts of the trachea and esophagus just kinda dangling from the exposed-head-hole while the head itself spirals through the air squirting blood like one of those oscillating yard sprinklers until the skull cracks on the pavement below simultaneously popping the eyeballs out from their sockets like a jack-in-the-box wound way-too-tight. And of course, these types of “unexpected accidents” are terrible for business. In this way, even the most heartless of executives are forced to hire a few mechanics for regular ride inspections and repairs.
To the far less cynical eye, it may appear as if the Executive Leadership Team of Diamond Heights – The World’s Greatest Theme Park – actually cares about the park guests, but let’s pull back the wool for a moment. While the Executive Leadership Team did hire security guards to keep the guests safe, they did so only to ensure guests don’t get mugged so that guests will continue to visit the park thus continuing to spend money; and while the Executive Leadership Team did hire handymen to keep the park clean so that guests don’t get nasty and sick, they did so only to ensure that guests aren’t complaining so that the guests will continue to visit the park thus continuing to spend money; and while the Executive Leadership Team did hire mechanics to keep the rides safe, they did so only to ensure that guests aren’t decapitated because that will surely put the park out of business.#3 So while it may seem like the Executive Leadership Team at Diamond Heights really cares a whole hell of a lot about human beings what they actually care about is reputation and profit.
An argument could be made that the Executive Leadership Team of Diamond Heights actually cares about their employees too, but this is yet another capitalist fabrication. Diamond Heights only pays its mechanics $80/month, or $0.46/hour; security guards only make $60/month, or $0.35/hour; and handymen make a meager $50/month, or $0.29/hour. When considering that Diamond Heights turns $5,000 in profit every month, these slave wages become inexcusable. And – yes, those are fictional computer game numbers from the hit 1999 computer game RollerCoaster Tycoon, but the numbers in real life aren’t much better. The average security guard at Six Flags Over Georgia is paid $18.75/hour,#4 which is $37,500/year. When we consider PCE (“Personal Consumption Expenditure”) in Georgia, which is $47,406/year per person as of 2022,#5 this means the average Six Flags Over Georgia Security Guard needs to take a second job at Burger King to cover the remaining $9,906 needed just to afford basic expenditures, or get a roommate that they will end up hating within three months. The point is, while average real-life wages are much better than RollerCoaster Tycoon’s abject poverty wages, they’re still nowhere near where they should be to ensure a comfortable existence within not only the state of Georgia but the entire United States.
And – yes, an argument could be made that the Executive Leadership Team at Six Flags Over Georgia really cares about their employees; they might even give their employees some paid leave and health insurance, but they fail to adequately compensate them compared to the cost of living; and while arguments could be made that Six Flags cannot afford to pay their employees more because they as a company don’t really turn a profit month-over-month – which is true, in January 2023 they only turned a small profit of $1,358#6 – this becomes a whimpering point when considering that the CEO and CFO of Six Flags Entertainment Corp make $1,923,775 and $1,129,746 per year respectively.#7 Now cut those executive salaries in half and suddenly Six Flags Entertainment Corp is making a significant profit month-over-month. Those big numbers are much bigger than how much the Six Flag Executive Leadership Team actually cares about their employees – which is none, zip, zero care. To the Executive Leadership Team: employees are numbers on spreadsheets, expendable tools that are easily replaced, and this is not unique to Six Flags – it’s an inherent feature of capitalism.
*numbers go down when you kill your customers and don’t clean your park
Don’t, even for a second, think that any corporation truly gives a shit about you – even with heavy regulation telling them to give a shit about you.
Human society started from a state of pandemonium, slid into violent tribalism, morphed into a hellscape of feudalism, and then gradually evolved into a network of highly-regulated, complex nation-states vying for control over the planet’s resources through the proxy of money, with slavery and war riding in the passenger train of the roller coaster along the way. Progress has been made, and continues to be made, and with every bit of progress comes more regulation. Today, capitalism across the world is heavily regulated – labor laws (not enough), consumer protection laws (not enough), antitrust laws (not enough), some environmental stuff (also not enough), and much more – yet CEOs like Selim Bassoul make nearly two million dollars a year while people on the ground floor doing his dirty work and getting his coffee make barely three percent of that.
The Executive Leadership Team would pay their employees nothing if they could get away with it – and they’d laugh and dance and sing all the way to the bank while doing so. The only thing stopping them are those pesky regulations.
But there is a nagging question that remains – if humans are so selfish, where did these regulations come from? The regulations seem to be geared toward a semblance of fairness and well-being. Is there something like kindness in the human heart out there in the shimmering distance? On the one hand, it’s nice to believe that humanity has a glimmer of benevolence within its collective psyche, but on the other hand, it’s far easier to explain the emergence of regulation using the same logic that the Executive Leadership Team at Diamond Heights uses to justify the expense of paying for a mechanic to repair Revenge of the Vomitnator: as human history progressed, intelligent people in powerful positions started to realize that life for the average peasant under feudalism was leading to famine, disease, and high mortality rates, and if the feudal lord’s serfs died, those lords would have no one to tend their farms and stimulate their little suffer economies. Thus, it became in the feudal lord’s best interest to enact policies that improved the lives of their subjects. And as more of these pro-serf policies were enacted, the feudal lords’ supreme power slowly slipped away into the shimmering distance. Unbeknownst to them, the feudal lords were digging their own graves, and the lords who refused to dig ended up with their heads on a pike after a peasant revolt.
The feudal lords need to keep their serfs alive in the same way that the Diamond Heights Executive Leadership Team needs to keep their employees alive in the same way that any modern government needs to keep their citizens alive: without the serfs to farm the grapes, the wine stops flowing; without the workers to maintain the theme park, the roller coasters fall apart; and without the citizens to spend the money, capitalist society collapses like a poorly constructed Jenga puzzle. Without regulation, society collapses into anarchy – and anarchy is not good for business.
What the Executive Leadership Team doesn’t want their workers to know is that the workers are the entire Jenga puzzle. The Executive Leadership Team sees themselves as being above the puzzle and, as such, not part of the puzzle at all. If all the workers walked out of Diamond Heights, the trash would pile up, the vomit would flow, the rides would break down, the guests would die, and The World’s Greatest Theme Park would turn into The World’s Greatest Dumpster Fire.
Chris Sawyer knew this basic fact about capitalism too: firing all the employees in RollerCoaster Tycoon tanks your park rating faster than a broken coaster track kills its riders. It’s just that intuitive – no workers, no business. Without workers, there’s anarchy, and anarchy is not good for business.
When workers walk out: it’s revolution, baby.
Chapter III: Enter Mason
“… for my Blortjaz …”
Capitalism creates fake love and fake kindness – but isn’t this better than no love or kindness at all? The obvious answer to this question is: yes. The more interesting question is this: is true love and true kindness better than fake love and fake kindness even if they both produce similar results – and if so, why?
Let’s explore this.
Enter Mason. (And I promise this is going somewhere.) I met Mason online about a year ago as of the writing of this article. He was developing a computer game and was irresponsibly sacrificing his entire livelihood to do so. Mason seemed to have a deep passion for his project. To keep his identity a secret, let’s refer to this computer game project as Blortjaz, a name as nonsensical and coprophilic-sounding as the real name of the game he was actually working on.
Blortjaz was set in the near future and loosely inspired by the idea of “what if Donald Trump turned the world into a post-apocalyptic wasteland?” It was a text-based role-playing adventure game, and as such, it was very niche, appealing only to a limited audience of older gamers who grew up playing these types of practically-no-graphics games. But I am drawn to niche projects and oddball endeavors, and I am also intrigued by the passionate people behind them. So, my interest was immediately piqued when Mason added me as a friend on the social media network Mastodon.
Mason would post screenshots and brief gameplay videos of Blortjaz, and with each post, he would ask for a donation. Several months and hundreds of gameplay-donation posts later, he started mentioning that he would not be able to continue working on Blortjaz because he was struggling financially and couldn’t devote time to a project that wasn’t bringing in any income or “true fans.” Mason would often say things like, “I am operating under the 1000 true fans model. If each true fan gives me a dollar a month, I will be set to work on Blortjaz comfortably.” This should have been the first red flag because passionate people don’t typically abandon their still-in-development and very niche games if those games don’t provide an immediate return on investment – especially when the game was still in development and oh so very niche. But being the fool that I am, I donated a non-zero amount of money to Mason to help him realize his Blortjaz.
After donating to Mason, everything changed: before, he never showed much interest in my own writing, but after the donation he suddenly started linking to my work, quoting it, and even going as far to say that it was “like Neal Stephenson and Douglas Adams combined,” when, in hindsight, this is clearly an insult to both Neal Stephenson and Douglas Adams. This should have been the second red flag waving in my face, but I was too flattered to notice at the time.
Mason continued “advertising” my work until one day he reached out to me directly through a private message on Mastodon. His message read something like this: “My Blortjaz is not making any money, and I am living out of my car, eating mustard packets from McDonald’s to survive. I don’t even have enough money to pay my cellular bill, and if I can’t pay my cellular bill, then I can’t access the internet and won’t be able to continue work on my Blortjaz. Could you please, just this once, spot me the money for my cellular bill?”
Feeling sorry for Mason and still very interested in his weird Blortjaz, I gave him the money for his cell phone bill.
*a window into Mason’s world
Momentarily content with my charity, Mason continued to sing praises for my work. However, a few weeks later, he private messaged me again asking for more money – then he asked for even more, and then more and more and more, “for my Blortjaz,” he would say. All the while, he was posting hourly on his Mastodon account, and none of those posts were about Blortjaz. Instead, he slipped into very weird justifications for killing children: “I have sympathy for the suffering of children in the US, Ukraine, and Israel. [sic] not in any country who attacked them or invaded them,” and started spreading thinly-veiled anti-trans rhetoric: “Mental illness should not be encouraged.” Basically any vague far-right dog whistle circa 2020 you could think of, he was posting it.
Mason’s bizarre breaks in character became so frequent, and Blortjaz became so infrequent, that I started to suspect that he was a fraud. Even if Mason was still working on Blortjaz – which it was clear from his post history that he was not – he was doing nothing to better his own situation, was espousing some weird stuff (understatement), and only continued to ask for money while showing no signs of being in any danger due to his self-proclaimed McDonald’s-Mustard flavored abject poverty. From that point onward, I ignored Mason entirely, but he would continue to message me, asking for more money.
Once I started to ignore Mason, something interesting happened: he stopped “advertising” my writing altogether. You see, in Mason’s mind, since I was helping him with monetary donations, he thought he would help me too – by “advertising” my work. This by itself isn’t terrible until I realized that Mason didn’t truly care about my work; he only cared about flattering me to ensure that I continued to give him money. I was an investment. And while I appreciated it, I never asked for his help. I don’t make any money from my projects to begin with. I do it for, like, the art, dude – the journey, the self-improvement, with a bit of narcissism mixed in. Making the Best Damn Piece of Literature on Computer Games is itself the reward, and being known as The Writer of the Best Damn Piece of Literature on Computer Games is a small part of that as well; there’s some vanity, there’s always some vanity in everything, but money has neverever been part of it for me.
Mason’s glaringly obvious quid pro quo made him entirely untrustworthy. And while my motivations may not be entirely altruistic, Mason’s were devoid of altruism whatsoever. Mason sees people as cash-money machines, and if anyone shows him even the smallest bit of support, he subtly manipulates that person so that he can continue to personally benefit off of that person, hence the “free advertising” he was doing on my behalf (that I never asked or expected of him) and the discontinuation of that “free advertising” when I stopped being a source of income for him. To Mason, I was only a long-term investment. I was a quid for his quo, a tit for his tat – or something.
Now that you’ve reached the end of this personal tangent, here’s the point: Mason is the poster boy for true capitalism. His values, his behavior, his outlook on life – he is what happens when you worship the god of arithmetic. Mason’s Blortjaz is nothing more than a product that he is selling you – albeit an incomplete product, but a product nonetheless. Mason will brown-nose, flatter, and lie to you, all in an effort to cajole money from you, and in this way, you can never trust him. Mason may call you his “true fan,” but what you really are is his customer. The moment Mason can’t drain money from you is the moment he stops caring about you. The mere presence of money in a relationship corrupts the relationship on some level – leading to issues of trust and entitlement.
To answer the original question: Mason is the reason that real kindness is better than fake kindness. It’s a matter of trust.
Chapter IV: The World’s Greatest Theme Park
“Soon, we will capitalism ourselves out of existence.”
Before we move on, I present to you a question: would you rather have brain surgery performed on you by a doctor who went to medical school because they were really passionate about gray matter and fixing brains, or would you rather have your head cut open by a surgeon who only went to medical school because brain surgeons make a lot of money? Carefully consider your answer while reading this chapter, and if the answer was immediate, consider why it was immediate.
Just like Mason, the kindness of capitalism is tit for tat, quid pro quo, You Pat My Back I Pat Your Back ad infinitum. Capitalism’s version of kindness comes with stipulations – the ever-present feeling that there’s something expected from you in return. And if you don’t provide a return on investment, you’re worthless, quickly abandoned, and replaced by someone with a higher ROI. We see this all the way down the capitalist food chain, from fast-food chains to television networks to hospitals to news outlets and even to small online content creators (note that someone who labels themselves a “content creator” is ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time pretty much telling you, “I’m only in it for the money.”)
This may sound harsh, as if I’m saying that your local hospital nurse is only in it for the money and doesn’t actually care about you, as if all people are little demon-spawn scurrying about waiting to prick you with their figurative pitchforks, but it’s not necessarily the people who are demonic – it’s the hellish system that they find themselves in. Even if people have altruistic intentions, the capitalist system coerces them into prioritizing money above everything else, undermining their altruism.
Take, for example, two people with Bloaty Head Syndrome, a fictional condition from the computer game Sim Hospital, in which the head inflates with air and needs to be deflated with a pinprick. The first bloaty-head person has an insurance plan that pays out $3,568 for the treatment. The second bloaty-head person has an insurance plan that pays out $1,576 for the treatment. The receptionist has been instructed by internal policy to prefer patients whose insurance pays more, so the second bloaty-head person is denied treatment in favor of the first. In the hospital industry, this is a well-known practice called “cherry-picking.” The Chief Financial Officer of the hospital may say something like, “We’ve been going to our lowest payers and either demanding increases from them or canceling those contracts that we view to be inadequate and simply admitting patients whose insurance will pay us more,”#8 while twirling their mustache, slobbering on a Cuban cigar, and blowing smoke from their nose and ears and mouth – presumably from the cigar, one would hope. Meanwhile, back at the front desk, the sweet receptionist just wants to keep her damn job so she can feed her two children.
Capitalism as a system is not altruistic and, in fact, turns people anti-altruistic due to its primary doctrine of Money Over All Else. The higher one rises in the employee hierarchy, the less kind they tend to become; and if plotted on a line graph comparing acts-of-kindness-over-time to yearly-salary-increases, the lines would form a perfect X. I posit that this is not necessarily because people are inherently evil or unkind themselves (although many are when considering most standard systems of ethics), just that the system they participate in changes their behavior to appear unkind. Even you – the reader – are not immune. Statistically some of you will eventually find yourself on an Executive Leadership Team monthly call presenting a slide deck about how cutting 15% of the workforce is actually a good thing and that the new health insurance plan which has exactly the same benefits as the old plan is 12% more expensive for the employees because the company had to switch providers but don’t worry because you are proactively curbing the employee backlash with help from the marketing team which came up with the catchy name “WeCare Health Plans” with four different tiers of care – the final being UltraCare which is a whopping $350/month – and will be putting the names of employees who sign up for the UltraCare package in a raffle for a free iPhone. The presentation is met with great fanfare and applause, and many executives request a recap email with the presentation attached. But can you really blame yourself at this point? You’re just going through the motions of the monstrous system that you were thrust into – what else could you do, forgo all material possessions and live in the woods and refuse to participate in capitalist society at all? (The answer is yes, probably yes.)
The whole health-insurance-plan-system thing itself is overwrought with baked-in stipulations that undermine the healthcare plan’s surface-level kindness to begin with. If we take the WeCare Plan at The World’s Greatest Theme Park as an example, the stipulations are as follows: employees have to sign legal employment agreements that contain their own sketchy stipulations; employees must surrender a portion of their pay to cover the plan; employees have to follow the Employee Handbook to the letter or else; employees still have to pay out-of-pocket fees for each medical visit (many plans do this, but more expensive plans may offer a special credit card that you can use for these fees – of course that’s an additional cost); employees sometimes have to do something a little unethical when the boss asks nicely; and employees must neverever complain lest they run the risk of losing their job entirely. The healthcare plan is a small kindness, but this kindness is undermined by The Man with a very shaky trigger finger who happens to be holding a gun to the employee’s head.
And – yes, like your hardcore-capitalist stepfather or someone like Mason may tell you – employees who don’t like their jobs can always find another job, with the same stipulations, of course. That same hardcore-capitalist stepfather may also tell you that the American healthcare system is The World’s Greatest Healthcare System and that you can walk into literally any emergency room in the country and they cannot refuse to treat you. That’s technically true for things like broken bones, blistering burns, bated breathlessness, pernicious poisoning, vicious vomiting, and crippling concussions, but you will be handed a large bill after your visit, and you are expected to pay that large bill. If you don’t pay that large bill, the hospital can garnish your wages – the very same wages that could not pay for the initial hospital visit to begin with. The hospital will get their money somehow, even if you can’t pay for it immediately. You will pay for it over time, and this over-time-paying-for-stuff will ensure that you stay poor for a long time. Thus, the Cycle of Poor persists like a roller coaster with never-ending loop-de-loops.
*the Cycle of Poor persists
My hardcore-capitalist stepfather would often say, “You’re complaining about capitalism while benefiting from capitalism.” This was the end-all-be-all counter to any anti-capitalist argument: since capitalism allows me to drive a car and watch television, capitalism is the best and I am wrong – or something. This is a variant of the “you’re complaining about social media on social media?” argument or the classic “you’re saying we should fix society, yet you participate in society?” argument. Each of these arguments posits that since the opponent of the thing is doing the thing, they are a hypocrite and therefore their position is invalid. Yet this does not take into account that personal hypocrisy itself does not undermine the truth value of any individual statement. For example, I used to smoke cigarettes, yet I would tell my daughter to neverever smoke because cigarettes are harmful to your health. Does the fact that I smoked cigarettes myself undermine the truth claim that cigarettes are harmful to one’s health? No. They are separate things entirely. In fact, calling someone a hypocrite as a means to refute these types of arguments is nothing more than a personal attack on the person making the claim.
The more advanced argument that a hardcore capitalist might use is, “Capitalism has brought about the most prosperous era in human history and has done so at incredible speed, therefore capitalism is good” or something. It is true that we are living in an era of unbridled innovation and technical achievement, much of which was inspired by the competitive spirit of capitalism. You’re likely reading this on a flat-panel monitor or a smartphone built out of materials mined by slaves in the Congo,#9 and this technology was unthinkable only 40 years ago. Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has advanced under capitalism at an incredibly fast pace – arguably faster than ever before. It’s nearly self-evident that if you’re reading this article, there was some capitalism at play making this experience possible. But the fallacy here is assuming that capitalism is the only path that could have led us to this point, akin to believing that since my car gets me to the nearby park, it’s the only way to get there. This assumption does not logically follow. What if my home was closer to the park, so I could just walk or ride my bike there? What if I took the bus to the park? What if I passed out from drinking too much wine and woke up in the park with no recollection of how I got there? There are many possibilities beyond just that one thing that worked that one time.
My hardcore-capitalist stepfather would often tell me that capitalism works so well because it plays to humankind’s selfish nature: people want to have a lot of stuff, and people want to have a lot of power. People can make a lot of money by producing innovative goods and services, and money affords more mobility in society, which equates to more power; it follows that money is a proxy for power. My stepfather may even go as far as to say that capitalism would always exist, even if we reset humanity, because capitalism is selfishness, and selfishness is at the core of the human condition. He would go on to argue that capitalism not only promotes this selfish desire for power but also encourages innovation by fueling competition. You may have a cool theme park now, but your competitor just made an even cooler theme park, so now you have to make your theme park even cooler than theirs, and so on. The underlying idea is that through constant innovation, we will eventually create The World’s Greatest Theme Park and become Theme Park Gods or something. But The World’s Greatest Theme Park never comes, it’s never quite great enough because capitalism doesn’t have an off switch. Capitalism requires continued competition and a continuous circulation of cash – the line must always go up.
Capitalism’s supposed endless cycle of innovation eventually slows down and then stagnates, and the computer game industry is one of the greatest examples of this. When people like Mason take over the industry – as we are seeing today with Activision, Microsoft, and even Sony – we get quick yearly cash grabs, cheaply produced downloadable content at high prices, and broken games that may or may not be fixed with future patches. The Masons of the world find ways to swindle consumers out of money, and this is especially easy in the absence of strict regulation preventing publishers from buying up all their competition, resulting in the release of low-effort copy-paste jobs with a higher number tacked onto the end of the title that consumers still purchase for some ungodly reason; and people call this “Triple-A Gaming.”
Anything that can be created is eventually corroded by the presence of money because money becomes more important than the creation itself. Sure, there are some exceptions to the rule: Nintendo is still frequently creative, as are many independent developers, but the list is becoming smaller as the industry becomes dominated by these Call-of-Duty-Assassin’s-Creed-FIFA-Overwatch-Battlefield-brained corporate clowns who sit around all day brainstorming more devious ways to spend less money while simultaneously making more money without having to cut their own egregious salaries.
Thus, we come to one of the capitalist’s central arguments: “But without monetary incentive, people won’t have a reason to make anything!”
Consider the creator of RollerCoaster Tycoon, Chris Sawyer. Before RollerCoaster Tycoon, Sawyer had a true passion for developing computer games. He started developing his own computer games in the late ’80s, using a Memotech MTX. And although he sent these games to publishers for consideration, his motivations were not solely to make money. When asked about his motivations for creating RollerCoaster Tycoon during a 2016 interview for Eurogamer, Sawyer stated, “I just kind of worked on ideas which I thought were fun at the time.”#10 Sawyer did what he thought was fun without consideration for downstream return on investment. Sawyer did go on to publish and sell RollerCoaster Tycoon, but the core motivation for creating the game itself was a passion for computer games, roller coasters, and fun – not money.
Chris Sawyer’s story resonates with me because I can relate to it on a deep level. I spend a considerable amount of time writing, having written and published around two novels worth of material within the last year alone – and I make approximately zero dollars on any of it, in fact, I lose money hosting the domain where the writing is published. I don’t put my work behind a paywall; I don’t ask for donations; and I don’t try to repackage my work in some sort of physical format for profit. It may seem like I am tooting my own horn – “I suffer for art!” – but my intention will become clear in just a moment.
Now, compare this to someone like Mason, who will only complete work on his precious Blortjaz after receiving 1,000 donations from 1,000 True Fans. Mason requires assurance that his creation will yield some monetary benefit, while Sawyer, myself, and many others do not. This difference in motivation indicates that money is not the only driving force of human creativity; instead, there exists a passion deep within that compels some people – not Mason – to create stuff regardless of material benefit.
For the record: I respect creators who sell their work, just not those who create only to sell. The lust for money not only dilutes the work itself but it’s oh-so-damn-obvious when something was created only for money that it becomes an immediate turnoff. For computer games, the example is something like the now-very-common phenomenon of having to log in to an online server to play a single-player game and there are reminders everywhere that you can skip ten levels if you spend $30 on the level-up juice or whatever; the theme park example is when leadership opts for low-quality screws for Revenge of the Vomitnator to save money, which makes it less safe but still within acceptable range of the state safety regulations; and the medical example is Dr. Cheever forgoing the whole washing-his-hands thing before performing brain surgery because he doesn’t realize just how easy it is to transfer common viruses through contact, having cheated his way through medical school and failed to read a single medical journal because he only cared about the money.
Are you still thinking about which doctor you would choose to slice your brain up?
*observe The Passionate Artist, who cannot resist the urge to paint, even when standing in The World’s Greatest Theme Park
We are rapidly approaching the end of the article, and you are likely asking, “Well – if capitalism is so awful, what can we replace it with?” The answer to that is – well, I don’t know. I wish I had all the answers for you, dear reader – but, I just don’t know. I do have some ideas, however.
Capitalism has its place in the annals of human development as a force that has driven rapid technological expansion, but we have collectively hit a brick wall and I don’t think we even realize it yet. Consider early medical experiments on live human subjects that led to quickly developed cures – yes, terrible and vile and all the bad adjectives, but they produced good outcomes to the point that some could argue that these experiments were a necessary evil. In this way, capitalism is similar to the U.S. Army’s yellow fever experiments on live human subjects in the early 1900s, in which Major Walter Reed exposed people in Cuba to mosquitoes and the yellow fever virus after obtaining very questionable consent; the results of these experiments immediately reduced the incidence and spread of yellow fever, saving countless lives.#11 Just like these experiments and their sketchy consent, capitalism may have functioned as a necessary evil to deliver us to a more comfortable world (consider electricity, rock music, running water, computer games, air conditioning, and then consider everything else), but the doctrines of capitalism – the necessity for continued cash flow through innovation and thus endless expansion – are not sustainable, just like endlessly exposing people to deadly viruses for the sake of science is not sustainable.
Our first steps as a society (from a very American perspective), could be focusing our technological marvels not on personal gain but on improving well-being worldwide; we could house the homeless by building tiny homes using massive 3D printers; improve worker compensation by capping the Executive Leadership Team’s salaries (OK – not a technical marvel, just something that needs to be done); feed the hungry through vertical farming, hydroponics, and artificial meat (meat is murder); take money out of the healthcare equation by providing universal coverage, ensuring everyone has access to basic medical treatment without figurative guns pointing at our heads (also not a technological marvel, but something else that desperately needs to get done regardless); enhance and expand public transportation systems to reduce carbon emissions and improve urban mobility because cars are actually terrible; pay teachers a living wage and provide textbooks to students free through digital mediums (academic textbook publishers hate this because they are the only people really making any money on textbooks, as they [they as in: their Executive Leadership Team] take around 95% of the profit and throw the remaining pennies in the faces of the authors), and invest more in our education systems thereby equipping people to start critically thinking from a young age thereby fostering innovation that’s not solely profit-driven; and invest in the development of more community spaces to encourage the type of social cohesion that has been lost with the advent of the World Wide Web (OK – this one is more “moving away from the technological marvels,” which, as the last one in this list, seems appropriate).
Instead, we are collectively compelled by our capitalist system to make The World’s Most Foldable Smartphone, The World’s Largest Flat-Screen Television, The World’s Most Powerful Rocket, The World’s Smartest Artificial Intelligence, The World’s Deadliest Drone, The World’s Greatest Theme Park, and The World’s Greatest Virtual-Reality Headset so that we can jack-out of this doomed world that we ourselves have created. There are just so many resources dedicated to the creation of landfill fodder that one has to wonder if Oscar the Grouch is orchestrating the whole thing. We are missing the point. We are teetering on the edge of a stagnant pool full of garbage and are about to fall in headfirst; some of us are diving in nude. Soon, we will capitalism ourselves out of existence.
Capitalism had its time and its place – and this is neither the time nor place. It’s time to move on. It seems to me that we need to end the resource struggles that make capitalism necessary to begin with by forgetting about arbitrary lines on maps, forgiving the harm we’ve caused each other in the past, thus stopping the devastating revenge cycles perpetuated by this ancient harm, and finally we must unify globally so we don’t feel the need to kill each other for non-renewable resources. We don’t even need to really like each other – we just need to get along. Your first-grade teacher had it laminated on the classroom wall surrounded by cute bears and little hearts: The Golden Rule. Do unto others and all that jazz.
Now you may be thinking, “OK – this sounds cool, but how do we make it happen?”
The short-term (again, very American) answer is regulation, regulation, regulation, and more regulation – and if that means “communism” or whatever to the dude with the pick-up truck, the Confederate flags, and the faded lock-her-up bumper sticker next to one of those Calvin-peeing-on-the-word-LIBERAL bumper stickers: that’s fine. Let them seethe. They’ll get over it, and if they don’t – well, humans only live for about eighty years anyway. Society moves on, and sometimes it leaves people behind. To move society along – apart from full-blown revolution (baby) – we have to vote for it, and not just in presidential elections, but also in local elections, which have far more impact on our immediate well-being than anything else, but which many people (myself included until the last few years) have a bad habit of completely ignoring.
How to achieve each of the items on this admittedly very generic list of basic liberal talking points is a much more complicated question than I can hope to answer here; nor would I pretend to be able to, but maybe I can sway the rhetorical (from: rhetoric) battle which might help to change an individual’s ideological leanings by offering the following argument:
Let’s assume you don’t buy all the kindness stuff, and that’s fair because every day there is some kind of darkness#12 or whatever. Let’s assume that Mason, my stepfather, and all the capitalists out there are correct: that people are driven primarily by selfish desires. (I realize that I’m potentially undermining a large portion of my original thesis here, but bear with me because it’s about to get good, I think.) The Golden Rule itself is selfish. The Golden Rule’s underlying premise of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is, at its core, about self-preservation. We try not to go around punching people because we do not want to get punched ourselves – so why would we support any form of violence? We try not to steal from people because we would not want to have our own stuff stolen – so why would we then swindle and con people out of money? We would never want to be discriminated against by the color of our skin – so why do we do it to other people? Consider this: why would anyone hoard resources or wealth when the very act of ownership deprives someone else of something that they may need? Using the capitalist’s core tenet of selfishness, we can justify extreme altruism – because ultimately the capitalist would (selfishly) want to be treated altruistically when their back is to the wall. Capitalists lean into the selfish aspect of humanity, but they lean into it in a shortsighted, retaliatory way; conversely, anti-capitalists don’t lean into selfishness enough, instead leaning too heavily into unconditional love and virtue signaling, which makes the pro-capitalists perceive the anti-capitalists as weak, naive, and ineffectual.
The capitalists are right: people are selfish. But it’s time to flip the narrative. It’s not about selfishly acquiring personal wealth; it’s about selfishly sharing the wealth because resources are finite and I don’t want to die because mega-corporations used up all the planet’s resources trying to build The World’s Greatest Theme Park.
Of course, you’ve heard this all before. And – yes, it all sounds like a pipe dream, doesn’t it? Maybe it is. But The World’s Greatest Theme Park is also a pipe dream, and I’d rather chase my pipe-dream utopia than build the Cycle of Poor at The World’s Never-Quite-Great-Enough Theme Park.
And besides, I can boot up RollerCoaster Tycoon whenever I want.
Footnotes:
#1. Classic Seinfeld bit in which Kramer is cast as an extra in a Woody Allen film and only has one line, “these pretzels are making me thirsty!” Of course, each of the Seinfeld cast start delivering this line in their own special way, insisting their version is the best. It’s big laughs all around. Here: https://youtu.be/nIypMI_zXSQ
#2. Regulations & standards. IAAPA. (n.d.). https://www.iaapa.org/amusement-ride-safety/regulations-standards#StatesareBestEquippedtoRegulatetheAmusementParkIndustry
#3. Hollandsworth, S. (2018, July 20). Schlitterbahn’s tragic slide. Texas Monthly. https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/jeff-henry-verruckt-schlitterbahns-tragic-slide/
#4. Security Guard salaries in Georgia for Six Flags, Inc. | indeed.com. Indeed. (n.d.). https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Six-Flags,-Inc./salaries/Security-Guard/Georgia
#5. U.S. Department of Commerce; Bureau of Economic Analysis. (2022, October 4). News release. Personal Consumption Expenditures by State, 2022 | U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). https://www.bea.gov/news/2023/personal-consumption-expenditures-state-2022
#6. Six Flags Entertainment Corp. (2023, March 2). Six flags reports fourth quarter and full year 2022 performance. Six Flags. https://investors.sixflags.com/news-and-ehich is vents/press-releases/2023/03-02-2023-110028434 (Note from future me: Upon rereading this section, I discovered an error in the passage this footnote links to; the passage erroneously states that Six Flags only made $1,358 in profit during the month of January 2023; however, the true figure is $1,358 million for the entirety of 2022 [reported in January 2023], this is obviously a much higher figure than what I cited here, but it only reinforces the point that Six Flags can afford to pay their employees more. In fact, according to the source here, this is a net-profit decrease of $139 million compared to 2021, which some executives surely huffed and puffed about hardcore; they probably even used this fact as an excuse not to pay their employees more! My point remains unchanged: Executive Leadership Team salaries need to be cut across the board; and while my error does not invalidate the point I’m attempting to make in this essay, it was clumsy on my part, hence the correction.)
#7. Salary.com, S. built by: (2023). Six Flags Entertainment Corp Executive Salaries & other compensation. https://www1.salary.com/SIX-FLAGS-ENTERTAINMENT-CORP-Executive-Salaries.html
#8. Brubaker, H. (2023, July 31). Friends Hospital’s corporate owner says the company has started “admitting patients whose insurance will pay us more.” https://www.inquirer.com. https://www.inquirer.com/health/uhs-friends-hospital-philadelphia-terminating-insurance-contracts-20230731.html
#9. Gross, T. (2023, February 1). How “modern-day slavery” in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara
#10. Yin-Poole, W. (2016, March 3). A big interview with Chris Sawyer, the creator of RollerCoaster tycoon. Eurogamer.net. https://www.eurogamer.net/a-big-interview-with-chris-sawyer-the-creator-of-rollercoaster-tycoon
#11. Mehra, A. (2009, April 1). Politics of participation: Walter Reed’s yellow-fever experiments. Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association. https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/politics-participation-walter-reeds-yellow-fever-experiments/2009-04
#12. Lyrics from Curve’s song “Faît accompli” off their 1992 album Doppelgänger. See: https://youtu.be/FZO8eCE3cyM
(Originally published on 6/14/2024)