Capitalism Unchecked
The journey of capitalism represents one of humanity's most consequential economic transformations. What began as a liberating alternative to feudalism has evolved into a global force that shapes not just our economic systems but our very consciousness. This evolution demands our attention and understanding if we hope to create more balanced and humane systems moving forward.
Capitalism emerged as a response to the rigid hierarchies of feudal Europe, offering new possibilities through trade, ownership, and productivity. The early merchant economies of Islamic trade routes and Renaissance city-states introduced movement and exchange where bloodlines and land once dictated destiny. However, the transition to mercantilism between the 1500s and 1700s marked a darker turn, as European nations used empire, slavery, and colonization to extract wealth from others. This period fundamentally reshaped how humans viewed the world – the earth became a resource, humans became labor, and spiritual connection was increasingly marginalized.
When Adam Smith articulated his vision of free markets in "The Wealth of Nations," he imagined self-interest guided by an "invisible hand" would lead to collective good. Yet his often-overlooked warnings about merchants colluding against public interest foreshadowed problems to come. Nowhere did capitalism take more radical form than in industrial America, where the market revolution transformed a nation of farmers into wage laborers. Steam power, railroads, and the telegraph created infrastructure that moved goods faster than nature and people faster than culture could adapt. This period, what historian Charles Sellers called "the birth of the capitalist nation," came with profound costs – land became commodified, labor alienated, and time monetized.
The post-Civil War era saw American capitalism explode through the Second Industrial Revolution, with titans like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan building vast empires through monopolies and vertical integration. Workers endured grueling conditions while immigrants chased an American dream that often delivered exploitation instead of opportunity. Mark Twain aptly named this the "Gilded Age" – glittering with surface wealth but rotting underneath. Churches aligned with business, unions faced violent suppression, and indigenous peoples were displaced in the name of progress. What was called progress represented a kind of collective forgetting – a disconnection from land, community, and spirit.
The 20th century brought Henry Ford's assembly line – efficient but soul-crushing. The Great Depression revealed capitalism's volatility, prompting FDR's New Deal interventions designed not to end capitalism but to save it from itself. The post-World War II era delivered a "golden age" of industrial capitalism for some, with strong unions and rising wages, but this prosperity excluded many – women were pushed into domestic roles, Black Americans were systematically denied generational wealth, and the global South saw its resources extracted to feed American industry. Throughout this evolution, something profound was eroding – community gave way to consumerism, spirituality to spectacle, human time to machine time.
Capitalism's mutation into globalism represents its logical extreme – a borderless, stateless, and frictionless system designed to serve capital itself rather than communities, nature, or people. This transformation allowed corporations to manufacture in one country, sell in another, and report profits in tax havens. It enabled exploitation of labor in the global South while selling luxury lifestyles in the global North. Multinational corporations emerged with more power than most governments yet answering to no electorate and no moral compass beyond shareholder value.
While globalism promised interconnection and shared prosperity, its practical outcomes have been complex and contradictory. For every benefit – specialization, consumer access, poverty reduction, cultural exchange – there have been corresponding costs: unevenly distributed growth, dependence on fragile supply chains, cultural homogenization, and power imbalances in global governance.
The spiritual costs of this evolution cannot be overlooked. Modern capitalism rewards the destruction of the earth while numbing our ability to feel the loss. Extreme wealth inequality not only divides us economically but erodes empathy and creates a kind of spiritual amnesia where we forget our essential interconnection.
Tune in to “Capitalism Unchecked: How Globalism Infected The World” on The Evolved Podcast for more!
