I found myself recently in an unfamiliar position: I was reading a column by Thomas Friedman, and I was actually agreeing with (some of) what I was seeing on the page. His article of Nov. 4, titled “No, No, No, Don’t Follow Us,” concerns itself with a looming socio-environmental concern: Tata motors is planning on releasing a four-door, four seat sedan with a price of $2,500. The car is aimed at the developing world, striving in a sense to be the Model-T for the next age of global development.

Friedman rightly senses the danger looming within this market development. As India develops, it has yet to establish a strong mass transit system. If millions of Indians acquired cars, the already
strained road system would be pushed past its capacity and the cities of India would grind to a halt. Furthermore, the environmental impact of 500,000+ new cars on the road cannot be overlooked, especially as part of the larger set of problems caused by the rapid development of China and India.

What Friedman suggests is that the Indian government learn from our mistakes and heavily tax this new vehicle until a mass transit alternative can be established, instead of flooding the market (and the streets) with millions of uber-cheap vehicles. He points to the Indian’s apparent propensity for creating affordable versions of Western inventions and suggests that they apply this skill to green transportation. If the Indian government can develop a cheap, reliable mass-transit infrastructure, they will have jumped a hurdle that we in the U.S are still struggling to overcome.

Friedman is right; for this car to hit the market unregulated and without viable alternatives would be disastrous. It would probably cause a variety of structural problems that could plague India for the next several decades. Furthermore, if this became a trend in the third world, the environmental implications could be huge.

The problem, however, is that this sort of situation is going to crop up time and time again, with increasing frequency as the rest of the world moves towards consuming as much as we do. The middle class lifestyle is one of consumption; without them, you have no one to buy the products that the rich finance and the poor create. For the capitalist machine to survive, it must continue to consume. In order to ensure this, the developing world has been sold an ideal of comfortable middle class existence, ensuring that consumption will continue to spread to the rest of the globe.

The anthropologist/economist/sociologist Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation” about a moment in the history of capitalism in which a shift in the Western consciousness occurred and we began to accumulate for the sake of accumulation and produce for the sake of more production, setting an infinitely consuming mechanism loose on a finite world. This new frame of mind turned into a drive for economic domination; profit became the leading goal, and consumption was necessary to drive profits.

China is currently going through this very transformation; it is gripped by the spirit of capitalism (albeit in a more institutional manner than the United States took), and is setting processes in motion that will be difficult to halt. The Three Gorges Dam is a prime example; the Chinese government is literally destroying its own country as fuel for its economic machine.

To get philosophic, we have created a perspective that may well be entirely self-indulgent, and therefore incurable (according to Aristotle). Since the goal of capitalism is to always pursue excess, whenever it is presented with the opportunity to do so, it will, without any regret. Lacking regret, it is therefore incapable of change. Capitalism cannot be made to understood its negative effects and change its nature. Furthermore, this is predetermined: since the very essence of capitalism is to continually consume, the choice has already been made at the universal level.

Or has it? Maybe Freidman is correct. Perhaps the developing world can escape the pathologically self-destructive nature of capitalism and conduct the Industrial Revolution v. 2.0 a little better than we handled the first one. Perhaps we can address these issues as they arrive and so prevent capitalism from continuing on its suicidal course. But it is crucial that we remain aware of the nature of the beast that we have created; else it will destroy everything that human society has created over the past 10,000 years.