A new era has begun.

[The Renaissance Man]

The engines of the Western System lie in the emotional core of you and me.

The Holy War of militant Islam against the West and the current crisis of confidence in the American economy have hit the citizens of the Western World with a challenge of an unprecedented kind. They have given you and me--readers, culture-makers, publishers, editors, journalists, pundits, and thinkers--what may be our greatest opportunity and our greatest responsibility since the Depression and the Nazis threatened to topple the Western Way of Life in 1933.

There’s a void in our sense of meaning. We have come to regard “the Western System” as one in which the rich stoke artificial needs to suck money, blood, and spirit from the rest of us. We’ve been told that the barons of industry work overtime to turn us from sensitive humans into consumers—mindless buyers listlessly watching TV while growing obese on the hydrogenated fats, artificial flavors, chemical preservatives, and the cheap sugars of junk food. And some of that is true.

 
But the problem does not lie in the pistons of the Western Way of Life—it does not lie in industrialism, capitalism, modernism, pluralism, free speech, unfettered information exchange, and democracy. The problem lies in us—in you and me. It also lies in our bosses, in our corporate CEOs, in our intellectual elite, in our super-rich, and in our political leaders. We fail to see what’s under our nose—a set of moral imperatives and of heroic demands that are implicit in The Western Way of Being. We fail to see our magic, our gifts, and our utopian capacities.


We are saviors who must wake up to our powers. We have to grab the rush of satisfaction that comes from liberating other human beings. We have to see the line of Holy Grails that we’re achieving. And we have to see the spires and the cliffs between idealism and greed.

The Western World is in a new war, a war for its heart, a war for its head, a war for its values, a war for its identity, and a war for its very right to be. This is not a war of bombs, munitions and military might. It is a War of Faith & Culture. A slew of separate Fundamentalist Islamic movements have come together with a common aim—to displace the U.S., Western Civilization, and Global Capitalism. These are the modern Jihadists, the makers of Holy War, Jihad. The warriors of Jihad are winning hearts and minds. They’re setting fire to the passions of adolescents and of young adults thirsting for something to believe in, for something to live and die for, for purity, faith, and ideals. Meanwhile we are in danger of defeating ourselves. We don’t know who we are and what we stand for. We fail to have a vision of our future possibilities.

This Holy War of competing faiths and cultures is not one we can fight with the old-time American strategy of walling ourselves off behind the Atlantic and Pacific Seas. The Jihadists are using our own infrastructure against us-bombing us with our passenger jets and our Rider Rent-a-Trucks, using our Constitutional freedoms to infiltrate our prisons, our slums, our middle-class districts, our universities, and our very minds. We’re facing the prospect of random terrorist body blows at the very time when the fundamental tenets of American-led Global Capitalism are experiencing a crisis of faith. Key corporations from Enron and WorldCom to Arthur Andersen are falling for a reason few perceive. America is being undone by those best able to save it, betrayed by the lack of something vital in its leadership elite.


Cultures live and die by where they choose to live their emotional lives. Dying cultures dream of the glories of the past and yearn to travel backwards, reclaiming the safety of a mythical golden age. Living cultures look forward to building futures better than any past they’ve ever seen. Our first choice after 9/11 and the corporate crash of the early 21st Century was to look backward. We feared the next bit of bad news and asked the wrong questions-who’s accountable, who’s to blame, who can we pin our woes on, and who can we cast out and shame.

We should have asked what lessons can we learn, what can we invent, what can we upgrade and create? What new twists of culture, of technology, of insight and technique will help us leapfrog over our assailants and carry us forward toward new ways of being? How can we take the values of our Founding Fathers to even higher peaks? How can we loft the best that’s in us into the next two centuries?

The answer lies in giving capitalism a heart and a soul. More specifically it lies in giving all of us something only saints have previously been required to possess—something Bloom calls “tuned empathy.”

[The Renaissance Man]

There’s a new form of capitalism struggling to be born among us. In reality it’s been here all along, but we’ve failed to see it. It’s Emotional Capitalism, a capitalism vibrant with the power of something that has to seize the heart of every boardroom meeting—the power to care, the power to feel the emotions of the people you serve, and the power to feel your own emotions in new ways.

The true businessman is a seer and servant. He is not trafficking in inanimate goods sold to anonymous “consumers.” He nourishes human souls. When he helps those souls catch fire, money flows. Those who look deep into their passions can anticipate the needs of others. A bone-deep love for others’ needs is the secret to personal growth, to profits, and to prosperity.


If given a choice between earthly goods and emotional nourishment, humans will tighten their belts and go for emotional meat. Capitalism offers more things to believe in than any system that has ever come before. Capitalism lifts the poor and the oppressed and helps them live their dreams.

In the mid 1700s, cotton clothes were a luxury import only the very rich could afford. The masses worked from day to day in stiff fabrics that scratched and tortured the skin. In roughly 1800, capitalism introduced the cotton mill and changed the very nature of the shirt upon man’s back. By the 20th century, capitalism had made a cotton t-shirt the norm even for the poorest Sub-Saharan African.

In the mid 1840s, a trip from New York to California took a year and a half by either wagon or by sailing ship. Your odds of dying on the way were roughly one in five. Then in 1868 there came a capitalist masterpiece, the transcontinental railway, and snipped the trip down to a week. In the 20th century, capitalism gave the average citizen jet wings and slivered the New York-LA trip from roughly 100 hours to five.

[The Renaissance Man]

Every one of these capitalist leaps changed the nature of being human. And every one of them set new forces of emotion and of imagination free. But without leaders who can preach, these techno-deeds have been devoid of meaning. Without inspired citizens like you and me, there will be no meaning even for tomorrow’s most elevated dreams.


***

It’s time for all of us—for those in our offices and our homes, and for culture-leaders in boardrooms, universities, and editorial headquarters--to wake up and see that humans are nourished by perception, nourished by passion, nourished by feeling. It’s time for us to see the emotional substance in what we’ve mistakenly labeled with a dehumanized vocabulary, the language of clods, lumps, stones, and numbers—the language of “materialism,” “commodification,” “consumerism,” “derivatives,” “transfer agents,” “utility maximization,” “quarterly profits,” “products,” “markets,” and “supply and demand.”

People are the ones who demand. We do it because we desire, we hanker, we hunger, we’re eager, we’re roused. Or we’re deadened, we’re hurt, we’re unsatisfied, we need. Wanting is an emotional thing. Value is emotionality. So is price. And so is profit. Coin is massed attention. Cash is emotional need.

[The Renaissance Man]

It’s not the plastic or the silicon in what we make that counts. It’s the passion, stupid! It’s the emotional boost, the emotional satisfaction, the emotional soar, the emotional swiftness, the emotional whisper, the emotional roar, and the emotional solidity.


 

We desperately need a reinvention and a re-perception of the system that has given Western Civilization its long-term strength and its recent weaknesses. We need the Capitalism of Passion. Those who struck us on 9/11 peddle passion brilliantly. They feed the hunger for meaning with the junk food of emotion—violence and righteous fury. Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine reveals how The Capitalism of Passion offers those of us who are emotionally starved a more solid meal—the exuberance of satisfying others, the exhilaration of feeling wanted, and the elation of creativity. If we don’t learn to smell—and sell—this plate of steak and cup of coffee, you and I may well soon cease to be.

Here’s the Death-of-Western-Civilization Report as of early 2003. Islam’s been crusading against Dar El Harb, the Land of the Unbeliever, since the first Mohammedan armies swept from the Arab Peninsula in roughly 634 A.D. Those conquering forces took Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, India, Afghanistan, the Western edge of China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Central Asia, Somalia, the Sudan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. For most of that time, Islam had the Western world penned in—keeping Europeans out of the vast Islamic Imperium, ruling Spain and Portugal, seizing control of Sicily, Sardinia, and entire regions of Italy, raiding England, Ireland, and the Caucasus Mountains for slaves, conquering lands in Bosnia, Sarajevo, and Albania, and repeatedly attacking Vienna.


Osama bin Laden, in nearly every speech, laments the day in 1922 when the West dissolved the Moslem Empire of the Turks and took Islam’s power to attack away. It is the fondest dream of Osama and of those who follow in his wake to return Islam to the offensive, but this time to do it with Western technology. 9/11 was sent as the merest foretaste of future deeds.

The Osamaites are something new doing something very old. They are wireless warriors, masters of the World Wide Web and of the Internet. They are the flower of modern Islam—its rich and privileged kids, its top university students, and its growing middle class. With laptops and airline tickets, they’ve invented a new World War—a global, cyber-based Jihad—one in which the attacking army can hide in the central cities of its enemies. The approach is a parallel-distributed conspiracy. It hangs together not because a central leader has command. It percolates independently in nooks and crannies, held together by common beliefs.
The Jihadists—the preachers of Holy War—want everything. The world! As Osama sees it, the boundaries of Islam’s nation-states are dividing lines that Westerners contrived to weaken the Ummah—the vast family of Islam. It is time, says Osama, for a global caliphate.

[The Renaissance Man]

Can Jihadists win this new world war? You bet. Jihadist Islam has been winning for more than 1,350 years. It’s won an empire that spans the 10,000 miles from the Philippines to Nigeria.

It’s won a third of the population of Africa. It’s won all up and down central Asia. Its biggest wins have been in three huge states—India (where Islam has held sway periodically from the 11th Century on), Indonesia, and Malaysia. Islam’s won more than fifty nations and is infiltrating Europe furiously. Islam is the second-biggest religion in Britain. There are six million Moslems in France, and many of them are kicking up a fuss. There are Islamic communities and Islamic terror centers in Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, and Denmark. And they’re growing rapidly. 1.2 billion Moslems are spread around the world. They are urged by a mass of worldwide Islamic websites to perform Dawa—to resist assimilation and to convert you and me—peacefully with words if possible, otherwise violently.

Many of the Moslems in the West are peaceful and productive. Some of them are not. Do the militants among those in Europe and America want to eradicate the Western way of life? You bet. Do some of those militants see the Moslem communities of the United States, Britain, and Europe as beachheads and as launch pads for conquest? Yes.


So what do we have to lose? Everything. The current crisis of capitalism isn’t just a normal economic rise and fall. It’s part of a bigger picture. We are fighting for our very way of life.

But is our way of life worth fighting for? The deconstructionists, post-modernists, post-colonialists, and anti-capitalists say no. Capitalism is a game in which the rich manipulate the rest. Capitalism steals the very soul and replaces it with artificial needs. Capitalism thrives on sucking lifeblood. Capitalism, say these thinkers, is the enemy.


And guess what? This segment of the intellectual elite has framed the terms of the debate. We use their language and buy into their tale of capitalism’s history. We have been too lazy or too unaware to know that our language and our history determine the way we see our roots, our ideals, and our long-term goals. History’s tales are our modern myths. They are the molders of belief. They are the source from which we take our zeal and our sense of meaning.

The story the anti-capitalists tell is WRONG. Since its first beginnings, capitalism has been a non-stop liberator, an emotional-upgrader, and a full-speed-ahead creator of new forms of empowerment, new frontiers of human possibility.

Indications are that the production of goods and services—and their trade—began two million years ago in Africa. In those early days humans bartered lumps of slate and of obsidian, the stuff from which the best stone tools were made. A system of trade from tribe to tribe to tribe carried stone from areas where it was common-as-dirt to territories where it was coveted as luxury.

That’s something trade has always done—taken one man’s boring overflow and passed it to those who hungered for it dearly. In modern terms we hide this human element behind words like arbitrage. But trade that seeks out surpluses and satisfies deep physical and emotional needs is one of the capitalism’s unspoken central creeds.

Trades are emotional exchanges. They’ve always been. You can get a sense of the earliest swap meets on this globe from the primitive tribes scrutinized by anthropologists in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Sheer eagerness drove every man, woman, and child in a tribe to trek 200 miles or more so they could trade their everyday possessions for the rare things of their neighbors.

[Luinitari]

Stupidity.

[The Renaissance Man]

Stupidity.

Have you read it Luinitari?

[io856]

Who's gaymmick is this?

[Luinitari]

I've read enough to know where I stopped was not worth continuing.  I'm Sorry.  And now it is time for bed.

[The Renaissance Man]

It's time to reinvent Capitalism. How does this related to bodybuilding?

Bodybuilding is going through a similar crisis. Searching for its meaning and yet trying to stay afloat financially. Once the magazines are gone for good (sooner than you can imagine) and the supplement companies have turned their back on the sport to instead target mainstream, there will be no more.

[io856]

It's time to reinvent Capitalism. How does this related to bodybuilding?

Bodybuilding is going through a similar crisis. Searching for its meaning and yet trying to stay afloat financially. Once the magazines are gone for good (sooner than you can imagine) and the supplement companies have turned their back on the sport to instead target mainstream, there will be no more.

the prize money for the Mr Olympia contest went up to $800 000 USD this year...

[Rami]

can someone condense it to a few words?

[Mars]

[Cleanest Natural]

both girls are romanian porn actresses

the left one sucks a mean dick

[The Renaissance Man]

both girls are romanian porn actresses

the left one sucks a mean dick

Rumor is you like underage girls and have been in hot water because of it.

Is it true?