From Denial and Demise by Sir John Whitmore:
Greed is not new. It pre-existed capitalism by millennia. It just shows up in even sharper relief at a particular stage of social evolution. This assertive/competitive state of consciousness is the fuel that drives individuals and businesses to strive for ever more and ever bigger. This stage is best described as the need for status and recognition, and naturally we have an economic system commensurate with that need. Capitalism glorifies it, such that it becomes our way of life, and keeps people stuck there. They see it as an end in itself, rather than as the passing level of immaturity that it reflects. This was accentuated when the Berlin Wall fell, since, in simplistic dualistic thinking, some people became convinced that capitalism was indeed the right or the best social structure for the world from then on.
A basic understanding of the evolutionary process should tell us that it is time to move on up to the next level, now the current system has become obsolete and the harm it is doing is intolerable for much of the world. Capitalism was invented in the West for Westerners and it offered riches to others who joined the club. It soon became so pervasive and dominant that other cultures were obliged to abandon their own evolutionary choices and adopt the Western system or die. Many of them die anyway, for Western capitalism does little to feed them: it serves Westerners first. Communism was seen as the only alternative, and it had some appeal as a collective counterweight to self-serving capitalism, but, at least in the way it was imposed and malpractised in the Soviet Union, it was doomed anyway.
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