Which brings me to this incredible quote from an article about a university professor who investigates—and embeds with—financial criminals, including Mexican cartels. When discussing the motivations of these criminals, who accumulate enormous fortunes but refuse to leave their stressful and dangerous professions, he observed:
“And my question is always, ‘Hey guy, why not stop? You’re rich, your money is safe somewhere, you could have a good life with your family.’ But no. They cannot stop. They take cocaine but the real drug is not cocaine, it’s the dollar. They are absolutely enthralled by greed and they cannot control this passion they have to make money, no matter what. This is the only reason why, to me, as someone who’s been working in this field for years, they are willing to kill so many people – even their own family. The money exerts the same grip as fentanyl on its users. They do anything to get their dose.”
I don’t want to oversimplify things—acquiring money and becoming rich is about accumulating power far more than it is about accumulating money-tokens or even piles of material stuff we can buy with that money. But this quote gets at something really central to our current crisis.
What is capitalism but our version of the ant death spiral? An emergent phenomenon, the product of agents operating by a fairly simple set of rules interacting with each other, setting us on a path of inevitable self-destruction that none of us want but none of us can escape, when we’re all just trying to get home at the end of the day?
3/3
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgwpx7/sinaloa-cartel-studying-economic-crime-drugs
HeavenlyPossum /
npub1hk…ls2a5
2024-01-23 18:09:44
in reply to nevent1q…u2g2
Author Public Key
npub1hkcr3hrpsu5skqcnavew9s8gtegat76zyd4fd3zlrrc29h66f2sqtls2a5Published at
2024-01-23 18:09:44Event JSON
{
"id": "46cb017ad0eeb23d15d6080afd5a801070fe5a25270a9ca2325aa1bb56e2bd20",
"pubkey": "bdb038dc6187290b0313eb32e2c0e85e51d5fb42236a96c45f18f0a2df5a4aa0",
"created_at": 1706033384,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"80c2ea24d0d6cc1f449beb05c0946f629a0243730ca1c9162b8d2cc951875a07",
"wss://relay.mostr.pub",
"reply"
],
[
"proxy",
"https://kolektiva.social/users/HeavenlyPossum/statuses/111806603884246080",
"activitypub"
]
],
"content": "Which brings me to this incredible quote from an article about a university professor who investigates—and embeds with—financial criminals, including Mexican cartels. When discussing the motivations of these criminals, who accumulate enormous fortunes but refuse to leave their stressful and dangerous professions, he observed:\n\n“And my question is always, ‘Hey guy, why not stop? You’re rich, your money is safe somewhere, you could have a good life with your family.’ But no. They cannot stop. They take cocaine but the real drug is not cocaine, it’s the dollar. They are absolutely enthralled by greed and they cannot control this passion they have to make money, no matter what. This is the only reason why, to me, as someone who’s been working in this field for years, they are willing to kill so many people – even their own family. The money exerts the same grip as fentanyl on its users. They do anything to get their dose.”\n\nI don’t want to oversimplify things—acquiring money and becoming rich is about accumulating power far more than it is about accumulating money-tokens or even piles of material stuff we can buy with that money. But this quote gets at something really central to our current crisis.\n\nWhat is capitalism but our version of the ant death spiral? An emergent phenomenon, the product of agents operating by a fairly simple set of rules interacting with each other, setting us on a path of inevitable self-destruction that none of us want but none of us can escape, when we’re all just trying to get home at the end of the day?\n\n3/3\n\nhttps://www.vice.com/en/article/xgwpx7/sinaloa-cartel-studying-economic-crime-drugs",
"sig": "d7d7ea967b01e2e3671a50c1f8679cab7dd52cc03410d69d1a304e077dd7c0a0b1719368c0d3797d7164bc33bc466eb47109da5b342be2df5059e4fe9036e491"
}