Nikola Tesla and the Death of Abundance: Why Capitalism Stifled the Future

I was watching “Funny or Die Presents” the other day on HBO and it confirmed an idea I had been developing for quite a while. “Funny or Die Presents” is a hilarious new show that features multiple segments. One segment is a skit is called “Drunk Historian.” In this skit producer(s) get a historian drunk and make him or her tell a first-person narrative about a historical figure. While the story is proceeding, the narration (which oscillates between first and third person) becomes a film played by mainstream actors—like Will Ferrel, Jack Black, Don Cheadle, and Zooey Deschanel—who act out the narration in a hilarious parody of the drunken historian’s slurred and drawn-out emphasis with occasional errors in proper names. It creates an amazing skit while being original and educational. Trust me… It’s hilarious!

One day I saw this skit about Nicola Tesla. Being the historical sociologist I am, I had known the genius of Telsa for years. I understood he was the most brilliant conceptual and pragmatic engineer of his time. He “invented” electricity and radio as we know it; period! Marconi and Edison had to use a great deal of Tesla’s patents for their inventions to work.

One day Tesla had a miraculous vision that helped him conceptualize a circuit of alternating current (AC). AC was an engineering milestone because it allowed an immense amount of power over long distances. Eventually this technology was produced for mass commercial, residential, and industrial interests. Although the technology received staunch opposition in the beginning it overcame the hurdles, was adopted, and became the reality we know today.

However, the acceptance of this change wasn’t welcomed by all. The inventor Thomas Edison was sternly opposed to its implementation. He created a malicious campaign to portray the “dangers” of AC current. He demonstrated this danger by filling the gap of an AC line with animals. That’s right; Thomas Edison electrocuted sheep, horses, and even elephants in an attempt to scare the public out of using AC power!

Why would he perform such horrendous acts? One must understand that Edison was also a wealthy capitalist that had investments and patents in direct current (DC) power. He understood that if AC power was implemented and disseminated on a large scale—which was its direct application—AC would detract from his investments, eventually making them inferior goods. Edison was fundamentally opposed to the utility and efficiency of AC power because the use of this new and better technology was a direct threat to his profit margins.

After the adoption of AC power Tesla started working on his lifelong obsession of wireless energy. He became increasingly convinced that power could be transmitted wirelessly. Tesla saw the world as motion where everything was spinning or vibrating—like the earth’s rotation or light waves. Therefore, he saw space, including the space around you, as having energy that could be harvested through the correct frequency. In his experiments he was successful in illuminating lights without wires in his hands and almost destroyed his own laboratory building after tuning a small device to the structure’s frequency. The device shattered windows and almost crumbled the structure because of the created vibrations.

Eventually Tesla began working on a tower to transmit electricity through the upper atmosphere, like lightning does during a storm. Eventually he lost funding for his project after unveiling to his investor (J.P. Morgan) that he had not been working on a system of wireless communication but rather a system for wireless power.

Although many contemporary engineers do not agree he could have accomplished the feat, to his dying day Tesla claimed he could transmit energy wirelessly if he only had the funding. He was unable to pursue any other projects after this failure due to his own lack of personal business sense and the ability to obtain investors.

What I understand now is that Tesla was too brilliant for the world (just like Einstein and the Atom bomb). I know what you and I are thinking. “That’s wonderful, pulling electricity out of the air. It would have to be cheap, easy, and efficient.” But Tesla was ostracized after claiming he could retrieve energy from the air.

Creating this new technology was in violation of the principle of capitalism—to make profit from a controllable good. The capitalistic world that we live in was unwilling to pay high costs for an invention that would produce little return; even though it would make humanity thrive. I’m not trying to say that capitalism is evil or a terrible system; but it is inherently flawed.

Capitalism is fundamentally opposed to efficiency and abundance. Especially in a world today with the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and IMF were markets are not free or fair; a capitalist society will never implement a system designed for abundance and efficiency. This is because capitalism—which follows the law of supply and demand—is dependent on scarce resources in order to make a profit (which is capitalism’s “bottom-line”). The scarcer a resource, the higher one can make the cost and the higher the profit margin. Capitalism is not a system designed to procure, maintain or sustain efficiency and abundance because these create smaller profits.

We must always remember that all ideas, like one’s from Adam Smith, were once just though up and then disseminated into society by popular consensus. Any system exists in reality only because theorists turned pragmatists became realist. Capitalism, just like feudalism before it, only survives because people actually follow the idea.

Thanks for reading! Please comment!

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