Zen-ish Thoughts About "It's just business"

Imagine a historical fiction in which a passion for tea led to the opium addiction of millions of people, two wars, the deaths of tens of millions of people, and devastated the most populous nation on Earth for a century. It would take a heck of a writer to sell that as something believable, but it's not fiction.

By the early 1800s, tea had become a daily ritual in every British social class, part of the cultural identity of the nation, and a significant source of tax revenue. Commercial-scale production of tea was unknown outside of China, giving it a monopoly. China's currency was minted silver, using silver they acquired by trade with other nations. Britain had an obsessive interest in tea, and silver to spend. This led to a mutually beneficial trade relationship.

Unsurprisingly, other forms of trade were also attempted. China exported silk, cotton, porcelain, various spices, furniture, and more, but tea dwarfed every other export in both tonnage and revenue. British merchants tried to sell wool in China, but China had silk for its upper classes and cotton for everyone else, and wool was ill-suited to China's climate. Cotton from British-occupied India worked for a time, until Chinese merchants began shipping domestic cotton from the interior, undercutting the price of British imports. Britain offered clocks, scientific instruments, and other products of the early industrial period, but Chinese culture regarded these things as mere curiosities.

Time showed that the only thing Britain had that China wanted was silver. Because of that and Britain's insatiable desire for tea, Britain was gradually running out of silver. This meant it was in danger of not being able to continue buying tea from the world's then only supplier.

What would any imperialist nation do to a racially different nation when facing an existential threat like not being able to buy tea? I'll let you think about that for a moment.

The British East India Company had controlled opium production in India since conquering Bengal in 1764, inheriting the Mughal Empire's poppy monopoly. The Portuguese had already demonstrated that opium could be sold in China at a considerable profit. On top of that, the Indian cotton farmers were being destroyed by Britain's industrial revolution – cheap factory-made textiles from Manchester had undercut the handmade cloth that Indian laborers produced.

The Company encouraged the ruined farmers to grow poppies instead. If lots of people in China, the world's most populous nation, were addicted to opium, a drug dealer class would arise. The drug dealers would pay Britain in silver for large quantities of opium extracted from Indian labor. If I buy tea from you in exchange for some silver, and then get that silver back from you and buy tea from you again with the same silver, I'm getting tea, and you're not keeping the ever-recycling silver, so I'm getting the tea for free. Minus the modest cost of Indian labor to produce and ship the opium, that's what Britain was then doing. Side effect: Since the Chinese people with the most exposure to this new flow of opium were in the major cities, their addiction and loss of work productivity also had the effect of damaging China's economy. Ah! What a relief! The terrible tea problem was so nicely solved!

The last part of this telling is a bit anthropomorphized. There is no record of anyone deciding to do this. The East India Company already had the opium. The Portuguese had already proven the market. The Indian farmers already needed a new crop. The solution assembled itself from available parts, no identifiable villain required. It was just the natural course of free market capitalism operating in the context in which the strong abusing the weak isn't personal, isn't subject to moral guardrails, "it's just business".

That is what should trouble us most: This was not a conspiracy, or anyone's carefully plotted design. It was the emergent behavior of a collection of independent entities, each just doing what it does, without conscience. Just business. Nothing personal. Just making a profit, balancing ledger sheets. No one was making those people buy that opium. That was on them.

Individual merchants were not rubbing their hands together in glee at the prospect of addicting millions of Chinese people. They were just responding to price signals in the marketplace. They were just business people meeting market demand. They were, in the language of every corporate earnings call in history, creating value for their shareholders.

When Chinese Trade Commissioner Lin Zexu tried to stop the trade, confiscating and destroying twenty thousand chests of opium in 1839, Britain went to war. Not over the right to sell drugs, of course, but for the grand and unassailable principles of free trade, respect for Britain, and the protection of British subjects and their property.

William Gladstone roared in the British Parliament that he could not imagine a war more unjust in its origins. But the vote narrowly passed, and the gunboats sailed.

What followed was not a contest. It was an industrial empire deploying modern weaponry against a great but technologically outmatched empire. The Treaty of Nanking extracted Hong Kong, opened five ports to British trade, imposed an indemnity of twenty-one million silver dollars (God save the queen, and our ability to trade more silver for more tea!), and established the framework of extraterritorial privilege that would define China's next century of humiliation. Opium was not mentioned in the treaty. The opium trade subsequently expanded.

If the story ended there, a generous reader might classify the First Opium War as a catastrophic blunder – a system producing a terrible outcome, after which the "invisible hand of the markets" would provide a correction, you know, like fans of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman economics expect us to believe. But the story does not end there. Fourteen years later, Chinese officials investigated piracy on the Arrow, a Chinese-owned ship whose British registration had expired. That is, China was investigating a crime involving a ship that had no official connection with Britain and was owned by and mostly staffed by Chinese people.

British Prime Minister Palmerston and other British politicians felt that the treaty that closed out the Opium War did not wrest enough concessions from China in favor of British trade. Palmerston used the boarding of the Arrow, a non-British ship, as a pretext for war. Parliament censured him. Palmerston then accused his opponents of being unpatriotic, called a snap election, won increased support in Parliament, and the Second Opium War had begun.

This time Britain was joined by France, to make war on another country "because" a French missionary had been killed in China. Of course it was actually because France didn't want Britain to end up with sole control of European trade with China. Britain welcomed the partnership, in part to defer the cost of the war, but in large part to make it seem as if legitimate international interests were at stake, and not just a British fetish for tea and the economic subjugation of China. This time the concluding treaty did not politely ignore opium – it formally legalized the trade, forcibly opened all of China to foreign commerce, and imposed the right of Western diplomats to reside in China's capital.

When the emperor's representatives resisted ratification, Anglo-French forces burned the Old Summer Palace to the ground – eight hundred and fifty acres of gardens, libraries, temples, and palaces, built over a span of a hundred and fifty years. Now under Europe's thumb, China was also forced into treaties ceding over a half million square miles of its territory to Russia.

Given a second chance, with full knowledge of the consequences, with domestic opposition loud enough to produce a Parliamentary censure, the "logic" of money and power still prevailed. If the First Opium War shows what capitalism does in the absence of moral constraint, the Second shows something worse: Even when constraint appears (the Parliamentary censure), it must stand against the persistent belligerence of power seeking more power, money seeking more money, and often fails to do so.

The Taiping Rebellion, which the opium trade helped precipitate, ultimately killed twenty to thirty million people. Those people should be held in mind alongside every invocation of the alleged invisible hand that corrects free markets.

Lord Palmerston, who championed the war, was primarily concerned with British commercial interests and national prestige. Captain Charles Elliot, the British superintendent of trade in Canton, opposed the opium trade on moral grounds, yet still felt that protecting British commerce was a higher priority. Those engaged in the opium trade were content to operate in a way their government tacitly endorsed. The East India Company was managing what it understood as a revenue problem. Everyone was just doing their job. It was "just business, nothing personal, nothing to be limited by moral guardrails".

A historian, sociologist, or philosopher would remind us that the opium trade did not operate in a vacuum. It operated under the protection of the world's most powerful navy, in a geopolitical context shaped by centuries of racialized thinking about European prerogatives. The ease with which British officials dismissed Chinese sovereignty, the casual assumptions of cultural superiority that pervaded Parliamentary debate, the willingness to use overwhelming force against a non-European power – none of this would have been possible without the ideological infrastructure of empire, and its prominent feature of racism.

But this does not quite answer the question the Opium Wars pose. The question is not whether imperialism and racism were present, but whether the commercial logic alone would have driven toward catastrophe even without those factors. The uncomfortable, historical answer is: Yes.

One cannot make a dent in the long list of capitalism's destruction of individual people, entire communities, and both local and global ecosystems without filling thousands of pages, yet capitalism is not the villain. You and I are.

Capitalism is a financial system, and it does what it does by design. Knowing this, we know it is not an everything-system, not a system of governance, and certainly not a system of moral guidance. Yet we treat it again and again as a morality-free zone that must be left as absolutely free as possible, no matter the cost.

Capitalism does not distinguish between a dollar earned by feeding or housing or educating people and a dollar earned by addicting them to opium. It does not care about cultural heritage, public health, personal dignity, kindness, or the long-term stability of civilizations, or of the planet. That's our job, and we are not doing it very well at all. I would fire us.

The First Opium War is a centuries-old demonstration of this principle on an international scale. A financial system, operating according to its own internal logic, with minimal external constraint, generated an outcome that addicted millions of people, catalyzed one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, and initiated a century of decline for the world's most populous civilization. It did this not through malice but through mere mindless mechanism. The ledgers balanced, the powerful were comforted, and the suffering and deaths piled up.

There has never been, and can never be an unregulated market. Even an ostensibly unregulated market is passively regulated by neglect to produce results like those discussed above. Every market is in fact regulated in one way or another, to benefit some people at the expense of others. That is not "just business". That is personal. That is not morality-free. It is morality-deficient.

The United States has a particular genius for forgetting this. Somewhere in the decades following the Cold War, a conceptual error calcified into dogma: The belief that capitalism is not merely a financial system but a comprehensive social philosophy – a total system that, if left sufficiently unencumbered, will optimize not just for profit but for justice, health, community, meaning, and every other dimension of human flourishing. The market, in this view, is not a tool to be used with judgment. It is the source of all goodness, properly unbothered by something as insubstantial as judgment.

Nobody actually believes that markets have obsoleted moral systems, but in practice, the operational ideology of American public life treats market outcomes as presumptively legitimate and government intervention as presumptively bad. The burden of proof always falls on the regulator, never on the market. This asymmetry is not a neutral methodological preference. It is a morally consequential position disguised as an empirical one, and it produces exactly the results you would expect: Systematic underinvestment in everything the market cannot price, and dubious human value for everything that it can price.

The consequences of this surround us. Health care organized around profit rather than outcomes produces the most expensive system in the developed world with mediocre population-level results. Housing markets freed from meaningful regulation produce simultaneous homelessness and vacancy. Social media platforms optimized for engagement produce epidemic loneliness and political radicalization. In each case, the market is doing exactly what markets do – finding the most efficient path to profit.

Again, the problem is not capitalism or money per se, but about how we should use them instead of being used by them. Capitalism and money have no morals. We are supposed to.

What makes the American version of this error especially durable is its fusion with national identity. To suggest that markets require constraint is heard not as a pragmatic observation about system design but as un-American, disloyalty, heresy, radical leftism, the dreaded socialism even though few Americans know what socialism actually is, or how much they already benefit from its secondary presence in today's America.

The vocabulary is revealing. Regulation becomes "socialism". Consumer protection becomes "government overreach". Environmental standards become "job-killers". The underlying assumption is always the same: The market is the source of American greatness, and any interference with its operation is interference with America itself.

Historically speaking, this requires a special kind of blindness, even if we were to agree with it in principle. The greatest period of broadly shared American prosperity – the postwar decades, the era of strong labor unions, progressive taxation, and massive public investment in infrastructure and education – were periods of heavily constrained capitalism. This observation requires an immediate caveat. That prosperity was broadly shared but not broadly enough. Black Americans, women, and other groups were systematically excluded from many of its benefits, as they still are today.

But note what that caveat itself demonstrates. The failures of the postwar economy were failures of insufficient constraint of the free market, insufficient application of moral guardrails on the market (and society more generally), and of both soft and explicit regulation of the allegedly free market to protect power and anti-free prejudices. It is not that the postwar model was perfect. The lesson is that even a flawed version of constrained capitalism produced more widely distributed prosperity than the unconstrained version that replaced it – we should constrain it more, not less.

The opium merchants of Canton operated in a system that rewarded them for ignoring consequences that fell outside their financial concerns. They had a government that was more interested in protecting commerce than in asking whether commerce was producing outcomes compatible with civilization. It was not a matter of morals, it was "just business".

We have centuries of evidence that capitalism without external moral constraint will optimize for profit at any cost, even to its own resources, producers, and consumers. Some modern examples: The lumber industry's resistance to ensuring forests are not totally harvested; The fishing industry collapsing the Grand Banks cod fishery – a resource that had been productive for five centuries, destroyed in a few decades, putting the entire industry out of business; The 2008 financial crisis – banks selling mortgages they knew would default, packaging them as securities, and then crashing the entire global financial system including themselves; The smoking, alcohol, and fast food industries not caring about the impact of their products on their own employees and customers; The auto industry vehemently resisting the installation of seat belts because it might make people think cars are not safe, hurting sales; Purdue Pharma created millions of opioid addicts, killed hundreds of thousands, and the company eventually went bankrupt; The most vehemently capitalist country in the world reversing decades of hard-won environmental protections, increasing harm to literally everyone on the planet, and the planet itself.

Capitalism is an extraordinarily powerful tool for generating wealth, spurring innovation, and coordinating economic activity on vast scales. Nothing in human history rivals it for these purposes. But it is a tool, not a philosophy, not a system of governance, not a moral compass, and not exempt from moral oversight.

Everyone agrees in the abstract that markets need and have some rules. But abstraction is where capitalism goes to hide from its consequences. The opium traders of the nineteenth century would have agreed, in the abstract, that commerce should not destroy civilizations, but it was "just doing business". The tacit agreement is to have universal agreement on the principle of decency constraining commerce, and universal resistance to every attempt at doing it. This is the market's immune system.

We know that the lust for tea led to narcotics addiction, war, and a century of ruin for a huge portion of the world's population – for tea. Though they are not all this vivid, we have no shortage of additional examples. The question is whether we have the self-accountability to see that we are writing another chapter of our history every day, and the determination to steer today's chapter in a better direction.

Zen tells us to see things as they are, rather than being misled by illusions. Power and money are surrounded by an immense fog of illusion, and we would be well-served to see through that fog. Zen also tells us that compassion is a duty of the first order, and that principles mean nothing if not embodied in our actions in the real world. Capitalism is just a tool, and it's in our hands. How will we wield it?