When it comes to the free market of free market economics, the market is not truly free. It is free of government regulation, yes, but it is not free of the personal interests of individuals, which in Smithian theory would increase both the efficiency and the social benefits of the market. At the center of a capitalist system is the profit motive, which is described by Arthur Melzer in his essay, The Moral Resistance to Capitalism, in the collection “Are Markets Moral?” Melzer describes it as a constant need for increasing wealth and growth, regardless of what one already has in hand. The profit motive, while being beneficial for the growth of materialism and consumer economics, is generally subject to two major criticisms; it has a negative effect on others, who must deal with one’s constant search for increasing profits, and it has a degrading effect on oneself in the constant rush for material gain. This, in turn, causes the most disadvantaged of society to become victims of capitalist competition as those with wealth rapidly accumulate it ever further, and in the words of the old adage, “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.” While examples of global capitalism causing the poorest within the Global North to grow richer persist, this can easily be explained by the globalist system of capital and exploitation. While the richest countries maintain and even improve the quality of life for all of their citizens, the poorest countries remain on the periphery of economic growth and ultimately see their populations fall prey to exploitation under global capitalism. In this sense, the profit motive is maintained not just on an individual level by people within a capitalist system, but also by entire nations, which then apply it in their ever-searching rise to the top of the metaphorical money pile.   

As previously mentioned in the sections on Nietzsche and particularly Heidegger, there is a general malaise about modernity within the writings of philosophers described in this collection. In Heidegger’s essay about the subject of technological development, “The Question Concerning Technology,” he describes his idea of modern production versus previous production and attacks the new system of “producing-forth” as a human corruption of the natural order, as opposed to the previous embrace of the natural order via “bringing-forth.” Heidegger, however, seems to approach production with a grass-is-greener mentality, and creates no substantial delineation between his conception of positive production and negative production. Take, for example, the writing of a book; has the act of printing that book made it any less worthy of consumption than a manuscript entirely printed by hand? When does the act of bringing forth, no matter how noble, cease to positively benefit society? To this, Heidegger argues that humans are now challenging nature by taking more than just an immediate aid from it, by building machines that can store energy from phenomena such as wind and then keep it for their own use. The concern, because of this human use of technology, is that our primary mode of interacting with the world is not through nature itself, but through the technology that we use to challenge nature and reveal it. Once again, however, Heidegger fails to consider the truth that technology is becoming part of nature through its use by humans, and that the natural landscape and the landscape created by humans are combining in a continuation from the earliest days of mankind’s inventive processes. From the earliest days of waterwheels and plows, humans have shaped the land around them to match their desires, and the development of technology is a natural extension of that behavior. The actions of people, in this sense, have brought about a modernity, but a modernity with humanity, not a modernity ruled by technology and hubris as put forth by Heidegger.