Political Memes

Have you ever listened to a child invent some piece of mythology and try to pass it off as fact? Maybe it's just my kids, but they like to make stuff up to explain stuff they don't understand. Like one time my kid said that the postal worker lives at the post office, and that all the mail in the whole country arrives at her house where she sorts it and then delivers it to everyone like Santa Claus. There's a series of pneumatic tubes going every which way, and a fleet of postal trucks to save time on refueling. There was a whole team supporting her as she drove across the country, making deliveries. She ate flavored stamps and slept in an envelope-shaped bed.

My point is, nobody told her that's what happens. She understood some of the concept and filled in the rest with what she thought might be true, what she thought should be true, what she hoped was true.

Nobody who understands capitalism has ever thought that capitalism creates fair competition or encourages innovation. People who say it does are either lying or they are talking about how they think it should work, ideally, because they have not yet realized that it cannot work that way. The mythology of capitalism is repeated and shared and taught like gospel, and with the same level of critical thinking.

I heard a comedian and an atheist point out that, if all the science books were destroyed and all the scientific knowledge lost, eventually humans would rediscover every truth. If every holy text were destroyed, and all religious theology lost, those ideas and stories would be gone forever.

Were society to collapse, and civilization had to start anew with no concept of economics, you can be damn sure capitalism would make an appearance, only it wouldn't be called capitalism.