The Capitalist Creed

Capitalism, Harari argues, runs at its core on faith in growth — the assumption, largely absent from most premodern economies, that the total pie of wealth in the world can genuinely expand rather than staying fixed. Credit is the central ritual that makes this faith operational: it means trusting that future production will be larger than today's, so that lending money now, before that future wealth actually exists, is a reasonable bet rather than an act of pure charity.

Banks and investors routinely fund ventures that do not yet exist in any physical form — a factory not yet built, a product not yet invented. Entrepreneurs hire workers and construct facilities before a single unit of profit has appeared, on the strength of a projected future. States borrow heavily on the same underlying assumption, that tomorrow's expanded economy can cover today's obligations. The entire system runs on collective confidence, and a sudden loss of that confidence — a financial panic — can freeze credit and production far faster and more completely than any actual physical shortage of resources ever could.

Growth, under this system, gradually becomes something close to a moral demand rather than merely an economic preference. Consumption is actively encouraged, because continued buying is what keeps the wheels of production turning; governments come under real pressure to expand trade and output continuously, since stagnation itself starts to feel like an existential threat to the whole arrangement rather than simply a quiet year.

Harari is direct that this creed has a dark historical ledger alongside its genuine successes: the same growth-and-credit logic that funded universities and infrastructure also financed the Atlantic slave trade and brutal colonial extraction, treated as ordinary profit-seeking ventures by the standards of their time. Capitalism links tightly with both science and empire in his account — scientific research opens new commercial possibilities, imperial conquest opens new markets and raw materials, and the resulting profit finances still more research and still further expansion.

A self-reinforcing loop forms, powered fundamentally by shared belief rather than by any physical guarantee. The creed itself is simple to state: the future will be richer than the present. When that underlying belief genuinely fails — during a severe depression, for instance — the spell breaks, and the entire elaborate structure built on top of it can come apart with startling speed.