Two very important ideas that Taoists think about the universe: 1) Everything is always and already changing into everything else, and 2) Ideas, thoughts and words do not actually exist. Blending ideas 1 and 2 together, because everything is changing, what we consider real is only our version of reality. By the time you’ve wrapped your head around something, it’s already changed into something else. We can look at someone and call them a man or woman, but that’s only temporary. So take with me this idea that because everything is temporary, what you think reality is says much more about what you think it is rather than what it is.
From that idea, let’s go to capitalism. Like everything else, capitalism doesn’t exist. It’s a system of thoughts that people keep in their heads. It’s an idea, and like all other ideas, illustrates what the viewer thinks the world is like but not what the world is like at all. So what does it take to make a turkey sandwich? A turkey, food for the turkey, a butcher, wheat, a baker, a truck to bring them all to you, and let’s not forget, the sun and the existence of a planet that can support life on it. But if you were to ask someone else, they’d say five dollars and someone to make it for you. Money is in it’s own world. It doesn’t care about the forces of creation that bring breakfast to it. It’s very, very possible to walk around capitalist society and not know that your food and that your life by extension is powered by the sun, and you think that you power your own life because you’ve managed to earn these strange green, cottony pieces of cloth called “dollars”. And that’s the reason why we’ve got this environmental crisis, it’s because we’re too busy believing that money is real but don’t know enough about the lives of bees, ants and trees.
so TLDR – Capitalism is barrier to actually understanding the forces of creation. Dollars don’t even exist. We made them up. When people confuse reality for fiction in their love lives, it can be painful. When people confuse reality for fiction and then base the operations of their society upon it, disaster will come.
Discursive Discourses 