The Century of Recovery

Monbiot's reading list is pre=approved by moi. I have been following Raworth and Klein for years. They're hip to the evolutionary, historical, time-based entropy in human institutions which many take to last forever, taken for granted as products of natural law. My culture-hero character defined capitalism as profit-seeking in a price structure. He went on to say that fascism is the concluding form of capitalism. The seller will hold a gun to your head and compel you to buy only his product. This is when profit‑seeking detached from real human needs and from the social purpose that once justified it. And he's right to say that he saw a deep psychological deformation in the elites who came to dominate late‑stage financial capitalism when profit became an end in itself. Profit is never about human benefit, only incidentally. Human benefit is not its primary concern. The Quartet that financed Hitler were pseudo-psychotic psychopaths about profit. Any other system that did not operate via the profit motive caused hysterical blindness.

He gives the most neutral, almost clinical definition of capitalism: Profit‑seeking within a price structure coordinated by markets. This definition is descriptive, not moral. It’s capitalism as an instrumentality—a tool for mobilizing resources. His real critique: profit became an end in itself. The mythic archetypes' collective alarm bells go off when any instrumentality becomes an institution—when the pursuit of profit stops serving society and instead extracts from it. This isn't limited to capitalism. Every economic system devised by sapients like slavery and what later degenerated into hydraulic empires is in danger of domination by the vested interests that operate it and they begin to think of it as THEIRS alone.

In Jack's era (the 1890s) financial capitalism centralized power in private hands and used it for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups. This is the moment when capitalism ceased to be a productive system and became a predatory one (Veblen).

The psychological mutation of elites: elites who derive emotional satisfaction from money itself rather than from real human experiences.

The “Quartet” around Hitler fits this pattern. The Junkers, industrialists, the Army and government bureaucrats (senior civil servants, judges, provincial governors, and ministerial technocrats who controlled the machinery of the state). The Kaiser was gone, but these remained, elites who sought money for emotional gratification, elites who became detached from real satisfactions (companionship, food, community), elites who used political power to protect their extractive position. Germany was surrounded by the rest of the West's late‑stage financial elite, but they were on the same place of the decay curve, not because they were bankers, but because they embodied the same psychology: money as the only real source of meaning. This is what happens when the financial elite becomes a self‑referential class, emotionally bonded to abstraction rather than reality. It’s the same pathology He saw it in the late Roman senatorial class, the late medieval rentier nobility, and the 20th‑century financial oligarchy. Each age becomes a kind of Golden Husk that has lost its kernel. Since my protagonist belongs to the species from which the culture bearers have come, he can talk about this with some brio.

The reformer’s core idea: a civilization advances by investing in better ways of doing things. The engine of a civilization is its instrumentality of expansion—the cluster of habits, institutions, and technologies that let a society mobilize resources, solve problems more efficiently, transform raw materials into real wealth, and improve the standard of living.

When this engine is healthy, profit is simply the signal that society is allocating resources well. When it becomes unhealthy, profit becomes the goal, and the engine stalls. The MMT reformers are telling us that money’s purpose is mobilizing resources to meet real human needs.

Money is not wealth.  

Money is not satisfaction.  

Money is not meaning.

It stands for the social surplus that is not consumed immediately but is used to create more surplus. Tribes of sapients have been motivated to create more life or life-force. Money is a coordinating mechanism—a way to direct human effort and material resources toward things that actually improve life. On X Kelton's and Monbiot's other authors; entire critique of late-stage capitalism is that money stopped doing this. It became a closed loop, circulating among elites who used it for emotional gratification rather than for productive investment.

The civilizing hero's contribution is that currency is “validated” by clever use. Currency is validated when it is used to do clever things. Not clever in the Wall Street sense—clever in the productive sense like Japan's Lexus. Better engineering; better logistics; better manufacturing; better design; and better ways of organizing work. The Lexus example is exactly the kind of thing I point to as a civilization still investing in its instrumentality of expansion. Japan didn’t “validate” its currency by hoarding gold or pleasing bond markets. It validated its currency by building world‑class cars—by turning money into real capability.

The psychological break: elites who get emotional satisfaction from money itself. Then the civilization has entered a pathological stage. You can see this the late Roman rentiers, late medieval aristocrats, 19th–20th century financial elites, and the industrial-financial “Quartet” around Hitler. They are overextractive, emotionally stunted, and socially parasitic.

A society validates its money—and sustains its civilization—when it uses that money to invent better ways of doing things. When elites seek emotional satisfaction from money itself, the system collapses into predation and decline. Call it monetary anthropology. Its verdict: bourgeois sovereignty has lost its legitimacy.