Capitalism, Morality, and Hidden Value

M3 BearCast Ep 86

In this thought-provoking episode of the M3 BearCast, Malcolm Traver explores the complex relationship between capitalism, morality, and how society determines value in human life.

The Epstein Case and Capitalist Incentives

Malcolm examines the Jeffrey Epstein scandal through the lens of unchecked capitalism, arguing that the horrific scale of Epstein's crimes reveals how capital—when personified as an entity that only wants to grow—creates incentives that make morality optional for the ruling class. He discusses how Epstein operated in a parallel universe of power where traditional consequences didn't apply, and how this connects to broader patterns of elite behavior from ostentatious displays of wealth to brazen criminal activity.

Work-From-Home and Control

The episode explores why corporations pushed employees back to offices despite proven productivity gains during the pandemic. Malcolm argues this wasn't about efficiency—it was about control. The ruling class doesn't want workers comfortable; they want leverage. Work-from-home became too much of a perk given away for free, disrupting the carefully maintained incentive structures that keep workers insecure and manageable.

Why Trump Won the Working Class

Malcolm offers a provocative theory: working-class voters didn't care about Trump's immorality because survival, not morality, drives people at the bottom of the economic ladder. They wanted someone willing to break rules on their behalf—their own criminal to fight the system. This mirrors how Epstein's network operated: mutual destruction as insurance, power through shared secrets.

The Hidden Value of Disabled People

In a deeply personal turn, Malcolm challenges the narrative that people on disability are drains on society. He argues that disabled people drive technological advancement (from Neuralink to brain research), anchor families, provide essential care, and even serve as the cautionary example that motivates others to work—making them paradoxically valuable to the capitalist system that devalues them. Healthcare and elder care remain recession-proof industries precisely because of this hidden value.

Finding Balance

Malcolm concludes by acknowledging that capitalism, while useful as a tool, requires tempering by socialist principles and recognition of non-commodifiable human value. Without this balance, capitalism logically ends in slavery—the ultimate commodification of people.

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Transcript

 Capitalism and Morality 2025-11-27 19-24-00

Capitalism and Morality 2025-11-27 19-24-00

Speaker: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the M three Bear Cast. My name is Malcolm Traver. Male Media Mind is a grassroots organization dedicated to uplifting and unifying our community through dialogue, insight, creativity, and knowledge. And on the M three Bear cast,

I dissect topics around communication community. Relationships and spirituality that I've had on my M three Live broadcast Every Wednesday at 7:00 PM Eastern, I invite my friends to help me break down topics that could use more experience and perspective. And we go back and forth on a host of different issues and oftentimes I'm left wondering what it all means.

And so that bear cast is a way for me to. Revisit some of those topics and think about them more deeply. Weaving in the comments and questions that my audience and my panelists have made on those [00:01:00] topics, because I'll be frank, a lot of the things that I do are pretty esoteric. A lot of philosophies, spirituality, just sort of weird things about the way that people behave, that a lot of people.

Don't really find interesting, but the way that we frame them on the live stream is such that we kind of joke around and have a good time, sort of poking holes at some of the ways that people look at the world. There was a recent podcast episode where I was talking about the breakdown of morality because of the incentives that capitalism.

And steals in just about everyone. For the capitalist class, we were talking about the emails released by the Epstein Estate, and this was prior to the release of the DOJs Epstein files. And we were just going through how [00:02:00] Epstein used information as a bargaining chip to basically do whatever they wanted for him.

That included a lot of sex trafficking. We really don't know the full extent of how much money he made doing it, but there's very little evidence that the money that he was making as a investor was anywhere near, what he was claiming. It was, a lot of this seemed to be laundered through sex trafficking work, and it is unfathomable the scale of it.

At least a thousand people have come forward. To say that they have been trafficked by him and through him, and for it to have lasted as long as it has for him to have been a confidant to powerful people throughout the world and through many different political persuasions is unthinkable. And it is a way we can't even understand it.

But, you have to [00:03:00] almost draw a new map. Based on the terrain. This is what one of the

content creators was saying that the emails were like the terrain of a country or area that has never been mapped before. This is something different, but we can understand that terrain if we first recognized that their behavior was mostly influenced by. The incentives of capitalism, meaning that you know, capital, with a capital C, we personify it and say that it has desires even though it itself does not have desires.

It is simply a thought construct that people have created for exchange. But when we think of capital as a thing that wants or desires something. Basically all capital desires is to grow. It's like a cancer and it doesn't really care how it grows. If [00:04:00] it's through sex trafficking or through agriculture or through oil drilling.

It really doesn't matter. And the people who are capitalists, those who are the actual conscious beings that you know. Are moved by these desires. When you think about the, the capital is basically a, a, a mental construct inside the minds of conscious beings. Those being the capitalist, they are ultimately driven to just increase their capital as much as possible.

And capital is simply just power in a capitalist system. That includes monetary power, but also social power, right? Like if you, if they ultimately want to demonstrate that power, oftentimes they will engage in illegal activity in brazen ways to demonstrate the amount of power that they have, like they run by different rules.

And if that includes things like pedophile rings, so be it. [00:05:00] It could be drug rings, it could be. Financial schemes pardons that you sell, cryptocurrency, scams, you know, Ponzi schemes, whatever they may be. The point is that you want to be able to demonstrate that you can do whatever it is you want to do.

If that's I, I think recently I read an article about Larry Ellison. Who recently became the deal got a deal with Skydance to buy Paramount and and is also an 80% share of the New American TikTok. And he is a old school right wing, tech billionaire. And he and his son would. They are pilots and for his son's birthday, he bought him a billion dollar fighter jet and they engaged in mock dog fights over their private islands in Hawaii.[00:06:00]

You know, how better could you demonstrate the sort of, the true levels of, of elitism that. You know, the billionaire class engages in even if it's legal, it's still just so os ostentatiously wasteful. And, and that's the point, right? Like it's supposed to, it's supposed to be that way. So then I played this video of a content creator who was making a skit.

It was a person in a tinfoil hat. And he was pointing to the picture on a laptop of a flat earth, and the audio is maybe only 10 seconds long, and she says, why the fuck would I care about that? I still have to live here. I still have these motherfucking bills to pay. Why the fuck do I care what shape the earth is?

You know, like what is this? We were kind of tying this into the idea that on the other end [00:07:00] of capitalism is. The sort of existential angst of survival in that the capitalists in a sense don't want people to live comfortably. That part of the desires of capitalism is a level of income insecurity, so that you are much more controllable and even without in income insecurity.

You know, you don't want to allow someone to have as much freedom as they want. You want to have something that you can hold over their heads. So a perfect example of this had to do with work at home, being reversed after the pandemic. So I think a lot of people in corporate America were skeptical of the concept of people working at home, especially.

The idea that people would not be able to get as much work done, that communication between people would break [00:08:00] down. Productivity would dip, innovation would dip. And when the pandemic occurred and we actually had a billion different experiments of people working at home, we discovered that's not the case.

Right? In fact, in some cases. Productivity went up because you were spending less time commuting. You had to spend less time, say, doing laundry and preparing to go to work, and you just had extra time, money, and energy. You could take naps when you wanted to, and if you were able to get your work done quickly, you didn't have to pretend like you were still working.

The eight hour work day is in many cases, in a a, it is a relic of factory work, not information work, right? You want to have eight hour work days when everybody has to be on the assembly line and putting in so many hours to produce so many units and everybody's working on the same thing. [00:09:00] The eight hour workday when everybody's got their own tasks to do and they can do them on their own, is highly inefficient, you know?

And if you're working from home. It means you can get your job done, whatever it is, and then you can do things like, you know, take your kids to whatever appointments they have, go to the doctor yourself, you know, mail some things that you have to do. Go buy some groceries, do your laundry, whatever it is.

As long as you're getting the job done. A lot of times people are stuck at work pretending to be busy, and it's not just. You know, boring in a waste of time, you're actually losing, the opportunity to do other things. And so when you're opening up that time for people to do other things, you can actually be more productive.

'cause you're more rested at night. You don't have all these extra tasks to do once you get off work. You've done some of them while at work or maybe even gotten some rest, like a little short power nap. And so [00:10:00] it doesn't make sense that. Employers would ask people to come back to the office when people are actually being more productive.

Unless you frame it from the, the standpoint that capitalists, the ruling class don't want their employees to be comfortable. You know, part of the design and incentives of capitalism is to make the working class. As uncomfortable as possible so that you have leverage over them. You don't want to give people work from home for free.

You want it to be a perk of a better job, a luxury job, something that someone would strive to obtain or even take a lower salary to have. But you know, with the pandemic the way that it was, everybody got that perk for free and it was. Incredibly desirable. I, I don't know what the numbers are as to how much money someone would be willing to pay in lower [00:11:00] salary to work from home, but I suspect it's not insignificant.

And so I think we just have to remember the realities of the incentives that capitalism imposes on people. Both, both those at the top and at the bottom. For those at the top, it it. It insinuates its way to making morality optional because there is no punishment for bad deeds because everybody wants to be able to do what they want to do.

And for those who are at the bottom who are struggling on a day-to-day basis, they are not incentivized to care about morality because they're concerned more with survival. And I think this is one of the ways in which capitalism, without any sort of intervening form of social controls, socialism, or, you know, a, a form of moderation and [00:12:00] just like an incentive to make things more humane.

We'll tend to dehumanize people on both sides of the spectrum of, of income, right? And we should just expect that to happen because the incentives exist for everyone. And you know, obviously some people are better able to resist those incentives by the very nature of their personalities. And maybe their upbringing and their education level.

But I think one of the things that I pointed out in that livestream was, is it really that surprising that so many people who were not college educated, working class, voted for Trump when they don't really care about morality at the end of the day? At the end of the day, what they really cared about were their own survival.

Yeah. And the story of a billionaire who was on their [00:13:00] side willing to lie, steal, cheat, for them to get them, you know, advantages when he says that he cheated on his taxes. When people were dogging Trump to release his tax returns, like it was some sort of thing that would've made him less. Appealing as a politician.

I think they were sorely missing the point that a lot of people knew that Trump was a criminal and they wanted him to be their criminal so that they could get what they wanted. You know, they, they told themselves this story that that what they really needed was someone to break the rules on their behalf.

And so they didn't really care that he didn't have any morals. You know, and so think about this in the terms of Epstein and the people [00:14:00] who, you know, he was known to keep their secrets, right? That, you know, Epstein couldn't have seemed like a trustworthy person. I mean, why would you trust this man? With your secrets, if he is a pedophile who breaks the law repeatedly all the time, he's, you know, by definition an untrustworthy person.

But the incentives of the structure that he had created for himself, this network of powerful people and the sense of mutual destruction that would come from those secrets being revealed, allowed him to be a confidant. For those who were in power and they didn't necessarily think about, you know, his personal proclivities for the truth or honor or trustworthiness.

And so I think the same could be said of uninformed voters who were [00:15:00] struggling working class uneducated voters who were, I guess they would say low information voters who. May have not participated in politics. You know, their attraction to Trump was probably due to how outrageous he was a person.

You know, he was a sideshow, he was a reality star. And the more outrageous shit he said, the more interesting he seemed. And, you know, I guess the rest is. You know, speaks for itself. But this is one of those things that just fascinates me, the way that people can rationalize such unthinkable behavior into be surprised now that you know, a lot of these obvious untrustworthy traits of Trump are coming home to roost.

I think the irony about the Epstein files and Trump is that, you know, had Trump not [00:16:00] been elected, I don't know if much of the like Epstein sort of things would have come to pass. Like the actual revelations that are in these emails would never have really come to light. Certainly the conspiracy theory existed around Epstein's suicide in prison.

And I was on the train of this is a ridiculous theory that, you know, some guy who was supposedly a part of a, a pedophile ring was murdered in prison. And now, at the very least in my opinion, there could be reason to suggest that his security wasn't as tight as it should have been. You know, it doesn't mean that someone was sent into his prison to kill him, but knowing that he was suicidal, no precautions, or at least the precautions that should have been in place, were encouraged to not be there.

' Cause at that very, [00:17:00] at the very least it seemed to be a sort of willful incompetence that allowed him to kill himself after already having. Attempted to kill himself once. Right? Like once you have attempted suicide, one time you should be on suicide watch and that shit should not have gone down.

Right? And so the fact that it did go down for such a high profile figure that was on trial, it's, it's a little sauce. It is. And considering like some of the things that are coming out now, and I'm, I'm not certain that everything is gonna come out. But even with the things that have come out so far, we recognize that they operated in a different parallel universe.

That doesn't mean that there was this hierarchy that he was in charge of, you know, it doesn't mean that he was blackmailing all these people, even in the emails that had existed that we do see, it appears more that this was an implied amount of [00:18:00] leverage that he held over people's heads. And it was just a different level of incentives.

Like, you know, prison time and public ridicule would typically keep people from behaving as badly as he did, but they existed in another world of incentives where even going to jail or being a part of some sort of scandal in some ways could make you even more powerful. Because you knew that you had the dirt on all the people around you, and you knew that you could get away with it.

And, and it is true, like it happened for Epstein one time. You know, he was convicted or sentenced and convicted and, you know, the charges were so flimsy that he was out of of prison in no time. Right. That was in 2013. I can't remember the date, the dates, but[00:19:00] strange incentives, right? Like he, even with that conviction, it kind of incentivized the people, the powers that be to treat him with deference.

And that's exactly what happened. His first conviction, you know, what went wrong on the second one, I'm not that heavily. Tied into the the Epstein lore and details, but I do, I do find it fascinating that this whole other world existed. There was another example, where some of the financials of his, his bank were sent up the line to be basically thrown out by some of the people higher up at the bank because.

He had such clout at that bank. I believe that was Chase. It may have been JP Morgan at the time, you know, the banks changed names. But it is, yeah, disturbing just to say the least,

that it, it didn't require there to be some sort of puppet master. [00:20:00] Everybody was just following the regular old pedantic incentives of.

Extractive capitalism and that was enough.

So anyway, I hope to bring up more things like that on future episodes. I know that I have taken a long hiatus from the M three Bear gas because I have to learn how to regulate and to figure out how to record for myself. One of the things that I've done is.

I've instituted a regular reading schedule for myself, and so I do want to cover some of the things that I've read over the past six months or so, and I am going to invite guests back on again to discuss specific books and themes and topics. You know, I hope to keep it to one or two guests at most. I don't [00:21:00] like.

The back and forth that I have on the live stream to the podcast format. You know, the podcast format feels like much more intimate, more like a, a conversation. And so I would like to, you know, invite guests on to talk at length about maybe one topic, and explore that for no more than 30 minutes. I like the idea of the shorter podcast and.

It also allows me to explore more topics to to invite more people. I think when you are asking people to make an investment longer than 30 minutes, both for the production of the podcast episode and for the listeners that you may be asking more than what someone is able or willing to give. So, I hope to keep my ideas succinct and consistent over.

This year, 2026, I'm gonna [00:22:00] try to put out a consistent schedule of programs. And, you know, it starts with, you know, talking about the, you know, understanding and talking about the things that keep me up at night. Keep me thinking to myself, you know, the, the loops of thoughts that are inside my own head.

That I would love to share with other people. I hope that I get to invite you into my thought processes, over the next series of episodes and really get to know myself as well as to share that with you.

So, thank you for listening to this episode of the M three Bear Cast. If you'd like to become a patron.

Male, medium Mind has a Patreon page that allows you to support this podcast as well as our live streams. For $5 a month, you, you'll get access to our Instagram [00:23:00] pages. We have a book club. We have after shows of our live streams, and I'm always looking for new ways to thank our patrons for their support.

Again, thank you for listening to the M three Bear Cast and I will catch you in the next episode. Peace.