Politics – Page 3 – An Alternative Perspective

AI Isn’t the Problem—Capitalism Is: Who Benefits From Automation?

In recent years, the rise of artificial intelligence has stirred public anxiety, particularly around the idea that AI is here to “steal jobs.” On the surface, it’s a fair concern. But when you scratch a little deeper, you find the real problem isn’t the technology itself—it’s the system we’re embedding it into. The outrage should not be directed at the tool, but at the hands that hold it.

The Original Deal of Civilization

Civilization began as a shared survival strategy. Tasks needed to be done—farming, building, teaching, healing—and so societies developed systems of trade and compensation to ensure everyone chipped in. Money evolved as a practical tool to coordinate contribution and reward. Work and currency were born out of necessity: to keep the machine of civilization running.

But that necessity is evolving.

The Promise of AI: A Future with Less Toil

We now possess tools that can perform many of the repetitive, tedious, and cognitively exhausting tasks that humans have had to endure for centuries. AI can analyze vast datasets, answer customer queries, optimize supply chains, and even compose music or assist with design.

These developments should be good news. They should signal the dawn of a more liberated era—one where humans are freed from survival labor and can pursue creativity, care, curiosity, and rest.

But that future is not unfolding.

So Why Isn’t It Happening?

If machines can do the work, why aren’t we seeing shorter workweeks, universal basic income, or enhanced quality of life?

The answer is simple: because the rewards of automation aren’t being shared. They’re being hoarded.

In our current economic system, productivity gains don’t translate into shared prosperity. They become profit margins for a small minority. Workers don’t get more time off; they get laid off. Freed labor doesn’t result in more freedom—it results in more precarity.

AI isn’t stealing jobs. Corporations are.

The System is the Saboteur

We fear AI because we know, intuitively, that our survival is still tethered to our economic usefulness. If we can be replaced, we can be discarded.

But that only holds true in a system where value is measured in profit. If we restructured society to measure value in human well-being, automation would be a gift.

Imagine if AI were treated as a public good, developed and deployed in service of everyone. Imagine if its productivity gains funded universal healthcare, education, and guaranteed income.

We have the power to design systems where technology lifts everyone, not just the elite.

The Fork in the Road

We’re standing at a pivotal crossroads. One path leads to further concentration of wealth and social instability, as technology accelerates inequality. The other leads to an age of collective liberation, where humans are free to live, grow, and contribute on their own terms.

We must stop asking whether AI will take our jobs. We must start asking why the survival of human beings is still conditional on having one.

Because the truth is: AI didn’t create the problem. It only revealed it.

“People fear AI because they suspect, deep down, that their value is measured only by their usefulness to the economy. But we have the opportunity to redefine that value—and to reclaim our time, our dignity, and our future.”

The future of work isn’t about jobs. It’s about justice.

Wealth as Blood Clot: The Real Parasites of Society

Money is more than currency. It’s the lifeblood of society—an abstract representation of energy, value, labor, and potential. It flows (or should flow) through the social body, facilitating action, growth, and survival. Every job done, every meal eaten, every home lived in is ultimately mediated by this symbolic fluid. It moves resources, motivates behavior, and governs who lives comfortably and who suffers.

But like blood, money can clot. And when it does, it becomes dangerous.

The accumulation of wealth—especially in massive, unspendable quantities—acts not as a facilitator of society, but as a blockage. Rather than circulating where it’s needed, wealth becomes trapped in symbolic reservoirs: offshore accounts, luxury assets, and inflated portfolios. It stops serving its organic function and instead becomes a self-sustaining monument to individual power.

This hoarding of potential is rarely about need. Nobody requires a billion dollars to live. The purpose of this accumulation is more psychological than practical—it’s a fortress, a deterrent, a cold war stockpile of “just in case” power. A performance of untouchability. A message to the rest of the world: Don’t challenge me. I can crush you. In this sense, hyper-wealth acts like nuclear armament—more a threat than a tool.

We have entered an era where individuals possess wealth that rivals the GDP of nations. And with this imbalance comes risk—not only to economies, but to democracy itself. One person’s whim can now shape public discourse, influence elections, or destabilize entire regions. We are no longer at risk of dictatorships from governments alone. We now face the specter of global dictatorship by wealth.

Meanwhile, society’s most vulnerable are accused of being the drain. The “benefit scroungers.” The disabled. The jobless. The marginalized. They are framed as parasites, leeching off the hard-working majority.

But that narrative is upside down.

Those struggling to survive are not hoarding. They are not stockpiling resources they’ll never use. They are not distorting the flow of society’s lifeblood. If anything, they are the ones most in need of that flow reaching them.

The real parasites are the ones who do hoard. The ones who sit atop mountains of untouched capital while the host organism—society—grows weak. Parasites don’t bleed the system by asking for enough to live; they bleed it by taking far more than they need and giving nothing back.

If we are to examine parasitism honestly, we must look to the organs that no longer circulate resources. The hoarders of lifeblood. The blood clots. The tumors.

A healthy organism distributes. It balances. It adapts to the needs of its parts.

We are not that organism.

Until we challenge the sanctity of accumulation, we will remain a sick society—mistaking our cancers for crowns, and punishing the wounded for bleeding.

The God of Growth: A False Idol with Real Power

We tend to imagine power as something held—gripped tightly in the hands of politicians, CEOs, billionaires. But what if even those figures aren’t truly free? What if the system they uphold is not just a structure, but a kind of self-sustaining entity… a living thoughtform, fed by belief and fear?

Welcome to the worship of the God of Growth.

The Scoreboard That Replaced the Game

At the centre of modern politics is a points system: GDP, stock prices, employment rates. These numbers are treated not just as tools for understanding wellbeing—they become wellbeing. They are shorthand for national success, political competence, and collective security.

Politicians are judged by how well they can make the economy “grow.” More points = good leadership. Fewer points = failure.

But here’s the catch: these “points” don’t reflect reality. A rising GDP doesn’t mean people are thriving. It might mean more people are being overworked. It might mean more forests are being destroyed. It might mean weapons are being sold, addictions exploited, or resources strip-mined.

Still, the scoreboard glows. The numbers go up. Applause.

The Recursive Trap

So politicians, in their quest to stay elected, are forced to worship growth. They don’t necessarily believe in it. Many likely feel the contradiction. But survival within the system demands obedience to its logic.

And the voters? Conditioned to equate economic growth with personal safety, they too uphold the cycle—rewarding leaders who promise expansion, punishing those who don’t.

No one designed this trap. It emerged.

It’s like a recursive algorithm:

Growth is good.
We fear the lack of growth.
We reward those who promise growth.
Those in power pursue growth at any cost.
Growth causes harm.
Return to step 1.

Over time, this loop generates its own momentum, evolving beyond the control of any individual.

The Egregore: A Spirit Born of Belief

In occult and psychological terms, this is what’s known as an egregore—a collective entity formed by the thoughts, emotions, and actions of a group.

The God of Growth isn’t a person. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not even a single decision.

It’s an emergent intelligence. A social phantom.

It lives in policies, in media headlines, in boardrooms, in national budgets. It rewards loyalty and punishes defiance. It doesn’t need to be real to hold power. It’s real enough.

When the Idol Demands Blood

The tragedy is this: the God of Growth doesn’t care about its worshippers. It doesn’t care about ecosystems, human joy, mental health, or long-term stability. It only knows one command:

More.

More production. More consumption. More markets. More extraction. Even if the cost is collapse. Even if the cost is us.

Seeing the God for What It Is

The first act of rebellion is not protest. It’s recognition.

Once we see the idol for what it is—false, hollow, powerful only because we believe in it—we can start to loosen its grip. We can question the metrics. We can ask better questions:

What if wellbeing isn’t measured in money?
What if slowing down is not a failure, but a healing?
What if true progress means learning to live within limits?

Growth is not inherently evil. But endless, mindless growth is cancer. And we are not here to serve a tumor.

Ending the Worship

Let this be the beginning of a new form of economic spirituality—not one rooted in numbers, but in nurture, justice, and balance.

The God of Growth will not give us a better world. But we might still find one—if we’re brave enough to stop praying and start listening.

Systemic Gaslighting: Let’s Finally Say It Out Loud

You Know It, I Know It: Systemic Gaslighting Is Real

Let’s stop pretending this isn’t happening.

You know the feeling. You go to the GP or A&E with something serious, something that’s quite literally threatening your health or your life—and you get fobbed off. Not just dismissed, but unacknowledged. It’s as if your suffering never even entered the room. I once went through a period where due to my dysphagia (difficulty swallowing foods), I couldn’t swallow anything—not even liquids—and three different doctors didn’t just ignore the urgency. They didn’t even acknowledge that not eating or drinking might be life-threatening.

That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s gaslighting at a structural level.

We don’t always use that word in this context, but maybe it’s time we did. Because the plausible deniability this system thrives on? It’s wearing thin. It’s implausible now. And yet the more glaring the denial becomes, the more we’re made to feel crazy for seeing it.

When the system fails you repeatedly, when it actively erodes your trust in your own perception, it doesn’t feel like negligence. It feels like being crushed. Slowly, deliberately. With no admission of force.

And if you’re neurodivergent? It’s a whole extra layer of hell. I’m autistic. I have social phobia. I don’t perform distress the way they expect. I don’t cry on cue. I don’t shout. I process. And because I process, I’m read as cold, or fine, or “not that bad.”

So I mask. I over-explain. I try to predict what they want from me, how to appear distressed in a way they’ll believe. But it always feels off. Like I’m being baited into dishonesty just to prove my honesty. And that makes them feel justified in writing me off.

This is what systemic gaslighting looks like:

They act like they care.
They position themselves as your advocate.
But every policy, every interaction, every flicker of body language says: “We’re not spending money on you if we can help it.”

I’ve warned others before. Told them: don’t be fooled by the performance of care. If you have the strength, call it out in the moment. Name the evasion. Ask for honesty. Demand respect. But know that they have tactics too. And they’re good at them.

So what keeps me going? Partly survival instinct. Partly the sheer disgust at how far we’ve allowed this to go. But mostly: the knowledge that it doesn’t have to be this way. That somewhere under the mountains of bureaucracy and gluttony and cruelty, there’s a version of the world where institutions actually listen. Where they respond with compassion, not scripts. Where people aren’t punished for needing help.

And until that world is real, I’ll keep writing. Even if no one hears it right now, the truth is here, in black and white.

You know it. I know it. Let’s stop pretending.