Welcome back to our little thinking room at the edge of the economic universe.
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is not a dystopia—it is a projection line. A future built one diluted principle, one morally flexible transaction at a time. The novel names the terminal state of unrestrained markets: corpocracy—a world where capital is mastery, humanity is raw material, and profit is the one liturgy left standing.
Mitchell’s brilliance lies not in inventing a nightmare but in extending a trend line we already recognize:
efficiency without empathy
freedom without responsibility
growth without guardrails
Capitalism, handled properly, is the most human-centered engine ever designed—voluntary exchange, innovation, incentives aligned to serve. But untethered from purpose, it corrodes into what the book reveals: industrialized extraction masquerading as progress.
Where human dignity is not embedded, capital becomes predatory by default.
The lesson is not anti-market; it is anti-amoral market. The economy is not a perpetual motion machine. It bends toward its animating values, not its quarterly targets.
The Financial Takeaway:
Capital has a soul—or it borrows one from its stewards. If your enterprise cannot prosper without using people as modes of production, you are building the prequel to Cloud Atlas’s corpocracy. Virtue isn’t a soft input. It is the structural steel.
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