The headlines are currently screaming with a mixture of confused awe and thinly veiled terror, marvelling at how the global economy continues to skip merrily through a minefield of war, energy crises, and geopolitical fracturing. To the average observer, this might look like resilience. To anyone with a functioning frontal lobe and a healthy dose of misanthropy, it looks like a terminal illness that has finally learned how to monetize the hospice care. We are told that a 'new form of capitalism' is emerging—one that evades every disaster like a greased pig at a county fair. In reality, it is simply the realization that the world can be burning, literally and metaphorically, and as long as there is a spreadsheet to track the heat, the numbers will keep going up.

Let’s look at the current 'polycrisis'—a word invented by academics who wanted to make 'everything is terrible' sound like something you could get a grant for. We have a land war in Europe, a powder keg in the Middle East, and a decoupling from China that should, by all accounts, have sent us back to the era of bartering goats for salt. Instead, the markets are hitting record highs. The Right-wing ghouls will tell you this is the 'triumph of the spirit' or the 'invisible hand' at work, conveniently ignoring that the invisible hand is currently busy picking the pockets of the working class to pay for defense contracts. Meanwhile, the Left-wing performatists wring their hands about 'inequality' while checking their ESG-compliant portfolios on iPhones built by people who haven’t seen the sun in three weeks. Everyone is a hypocrite, and the economy is the altar upon which we sacrifice our common sense.

This 'new form of capitalism' isn't some innovative breakthrough in human cooperation. It is the industrialization of disaster. We used to think that war was bad for business because it blew up the factories. Now, we’ve realized that war is the best business of all because it creates a permanent demand for replacement parts. The energy crisis, which was supposed to leave Europe shivering in the dark, merely resulted in a massive wealth transfer that saw oil companies posting record profits while the average citizen turned down their thermostat and learned to enjoy the 'rustic' feel of mild hypothermia. The system didn’t break; it just recalibrated its cruelty to a more efficient frequency.

The secret sauce of this resilient hellscape is state intervention—a concept that both the free-market fetishists and the socialist dreamers claim to hate, yet both depend upon like a life-support machine. Governments are now 'de-risking' the economy, which is a polite way of saying they are using taxpayer money to ensure that billionaires don’t have to suffer the consequences of their own bad bets. Whether it’s 'green energy subsidies' or 'national security chips acts,' the result is the same: the socialization of risk and the privatization of reward. It is a beautiful, symmetrical scam that ensures the engine keeps turning even if the car is flying off a cliff.

What truly bores me is the narrative that this resilience is a sign of human progress. It isn't. It’s a sign of our total surrender to the algorithm. We have created a system so complex and so decoupled from actual human well-being that it no longer requires a functioning society to thrive. It feeds on the chaos. Every supply chain disruption is an opportunity for a 'resilience surcharge.' Every geopolitical tension is a reason to pump the defense sector. We are no longer the masters of the economy; we are merely the organic components in a self-repairing machine that views a world-ending plague as a 'temporary headwind' and a regional genocide as a 'sector rotation opportunity.'

There is a profound hopelessness in the fact that the economy can survive anything, because it means that nothing—not even the total collapse of our diplomatic or environmental systems—will force a change in behavior. We are strapped into a roller coaster that has no brakes and is currently on fire, but the gift shop at the end is still doing brisk business. The 'new capitalism' is just the old capitalism with better software and a more cynical understanding of human endurance. It will survive the next war, the next pandemic, and the next solar flare, and it will do so by charging us for the privilege of watching it happen. Don't look for a silver lining; the silver was sold off long ago to cover the margin call on the apocalypse.