Goldstein’s colorful description of end-stage capitalism, its intensely competitive, scarcity-based, mendacious, pretentious and, underneath, lonely and terrified charade of “making a (rapacious) living” at the expense of literally everybody else both fascinates and repels.
I’m reminded of the netflix film I watched last night: “The Corporation,” which compared the gradual legal transmogrification of this all-too-human structure — which is not natural, which can and must be either transformed or abolished — to a psychopath, its charter dictating the financial, short-term “bottom line” (for shareholders) as the single overriding value while ignoring ethics, empathy, and responsibility.
Given the way corporations work, how can you be anything but a psychopath and actually succeed on Wall Street? Remember Gordon Gecko’s “Greed Is Good”? — Let’s remove one letter: “Greed is God.”
