State Capitalism: A Religion Now Collapsing
Having lived in New York City, USA, for almost three months, I found myself immersed in a vast outpouring of information through books, documentaries, public lectures, and relentless television interviews with human rights defenders, environmentalists, social activists, and one of the world’s most respected public intellectuals, Dr. Noam Chomsky. This exposure profoundly transformed my understanding of the global system we live in. What many of us have long called capitalism, I came to realize, is not classical capitalism at all, for such a system would collapse under its own contradictions. What truly governs the modern world, particularly the United States, is State Capitalism: a system in which the state actively protects, subsidizes, and advances corporate and financial elites, allowing them to dominate society, politics, and nature itself.
This system has given birth to what Adam Smith once called the “Masters of Mankind”: multinational corporations and powerful financial institutions that dictate government policy, shape public consciousness, and extract wealth from both people and the planet. Contrary to the popular myth of a free market, these entities do not believe in free competition when it threatens their interests. Instead, they rely on state power laws, militaries, police forces, and propaganda to ensure their dominance, while the costs are borne by the public.
Dr. Chomsky has long emphasized that State Capitalism thrives on a disturbing principle: “war is the health of the state.” War is not merely a tragic accident or an unfortunate necessity; it is a highly profitable enterprise. It stimulates arms manufacturing, secures access to natural resources, silences dissent, and disciplines populations into obedience. In times of war, values such as creativity, reason, compassion, beauty, and the enhancement of life are quickly sacrificed. Citizens are pressured into conformity, while dissenting artists, intellectuals, environmental defenders, and human rights advocates are marginalized, mocked, imprisoned, or eliminated.
The consequences of this system are no longer hidden. Across the world, State Capitalism has produced deep social crises: staggering inequality, systemic poverty, ecological collapse, and widespread despair. In the United States itself, many awakened citizens have begun to question long-held narratives. They have confronted uncomfortable truths about history, including revelations surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Increasingly, evidence suggests that Kennedy’s move to withdraw from the Vietnam War threatened powerful military and corporate interests. For those who profit from perpetual war, peace is intolerable.
It was within this context that the “Occupy Movement” emerged in 2011, beginning in New York City and spreading across the globe. As Dr. Chomsky described it, Occupy represented the first major public response to three decades of class war, a war quietly waged by elites against ordinary people. Though the physical encampments were dismantled and thousands were arrested, the movement succeeded in something far more important: it awakened the public conscience. It exposed how corporate globalization, driven by unbridled materialism and consumerism, had numbed humanity into passivity while concentrating wealth and power at the top. At the heart of this global system lies a dangerous dogma: that the market knows best. Corporations and financial institutions are treated as the rightful “masters of the land,” invoking a distorted reading of the biblical command in Genesis to have dominion over the Earth. Under this worldview, nature is reduced to a commodity, people become expendable resources, and the planet itself is driven toward catastrophe. Today, even scientific warnings describe Earth Gaia, our living home, as standing just “one minute before midnight”.
In the Philippines, this ideology has been especially devastating. A profit-driven, market-centered paradigm has replaced the indigenous and communal economies that sustained Filipinos for thousands of years. For generations, people treated nature not as property to be exploited but as a home that generously provided for human needs. Under State Capitalism, however, land is commercialized, forests are stripped, mountains are mined, and communities are displaced, all in the name of development.
Those who resist this destruction face severe consequences. Intellectuals and activists committed to serving the poor and protecting the environment are vilified or silenced. Indigenous Peoples, who live in deep harmony with nature, are among the most brutally targeted. In Mindanao alone, more than one hundred Indigenous chieftains have been killed since 2016 for defending their ancestral domains against corporate land-grabbing, illegal logging, and mining. These murders are not isolated crimes; they are structural violence, an essential feature of a system that prioritizes profit over life. Dr. Chomsky has also exposed the staggering scale of global inequality produced by State Capitalism. Over the last thirty years, roughly 1,000 corporations have accumulated unprecedented wealth at the expense of billions of people. The combined wealth of just eight billionaires now equals that of 4 billion human beings, half of the world’s population. Meanwhile, the wealth of these corporations exceeds that of more than 8 billion people combined.
The human cost of this inequality is unbearable. According to United Nations reports, poverty remains the world’s most urgent crisis. Out of 5 billion people in developing countries, 1 billion survive on less than one dollar a day, and 2.8 billion on less than two dollars. Nearly 790 million people struggle daily to meet basic food needs. Every year, approximately 15 million people, many of them children, die from poverty-related causes. In some places, desperation has become so extreme that people are forced to sell their own organs just to survive. These realities are not natural; they are the direct outcome of an economic system that functions like a false religion, demanding endless sacrifice from the many to satisfy the greed of the few.
This leads us to a critical question: Can civilization survive existing capitalism? Dr. Chomsky offers a sobering reflection. A future historian, he suggests, would look back at the early twenty-first century as a tragic turning point when humanity, for the first time in history, knowingly battered the foundations of its own survival. Some sought to prevent catastrophe through solidarity, justice, and ecological responsibility. Others, especially the richest and most powerful, worked tirelessly to deny reality, manipulate public opinion, and prioritize short-term profit over life itself. Ironically, those leading the struggle for a livable future are often dismissed as primitive like the Indigenous Peoples of the world. Yet it is they who understand the sacred interconnectedness of all life. They know that harming the Earth is harming ourselves.
In the Philippines, resisting this destructive system means confronting political dynasties, corporate monopolies, and the violent enclosure of the commons. Despite constitutional prohibitions, dynasties persist because they serve the interests of State Capitalism. Money controls politics; those who dominate economically ensure political dominance as well. Votes are bought, public funds are siphoned off, and the country is drained like a lifeless body by elite vampires. This is not unique to the Philippines. Even in the United States, political leaders from both major parties have been deeply entangled with corporate power. Democracy becomes hollow when government policies serve capital instead of the people. As many Americans now declare, “sovereignty must reside in the people, not in corporations.” This must also become the rallying cry of Filipinos.
Enough is enough. Enough of global poverty. Enough of weapons capable of destroying humanity many times over. Enough of rising inequality, ecological collapse, and spiritual emptiness fueled by consumerism. It is time to dismantle the illusion that the market is sacred and profit is supreme. True transformation requires a profound shift in consciousness. We must debunk the ego, reconnect with the sacredness of nature, and rediscover genuine spirituality not as ritual or dogma, but as deep communion with the formless, unseen Consciousness we call God. To be truly spiritual is to serve the least of our brethren, to protect life in all its forms, and to live in solidarity with both humanity and the Earth. We are not merely consumers or economic units. We are consciousness itself, inseparable from all life. To know this deeper self is to awaken. And to awaken is to resist together against State Capitalism. All for God’s greater glory.
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