Have You Seen This Man?

Have You Seen This Man?

An allegory of the creature that lives in our pockets, our streets, and our skies

By Yamin Kogoya  |  Updated and expanded for republication

There is a figure who walks among us, and most of us have met him without ever learning his name. He does not knock. He does not introduce himself. He simply arrives, dressed in whatever the moment requires, and by the time you notice he is in the room, he has already made himself at home.

This is an attempt to describe him properly — not as an economic theory in a textbook, but as the living, breathing presence so many people across the world have felt pressing on their lives, their land, and their children. If you have ever wondered why a place can be rich in resources and poor in spirit, you have already met him. You simply may not have known what to call him.

A Stranger Who Wears Every Face

He has no face of his own, which is precisely what makes him so easy to miss. He borrows the face of progress, of opportunity, of a better life just over the horizon. He decorates an otherwise empty interior with the trappings of sophistication — fine words, polished manners, a confident smile — so that no one looks too closely at what is, underneath it all, hollow.

He does not arrive announced, with banners and warnings. He arrives at night, the way a thief does, slipping through the back door of a village, a family, a forest, a nation. By morning, something has been taken — though it can be hard to say exactly what, or when, or by whom. That uncertainty is part of how he survives.

A Creature With No Home of Its Own

Unlike the rest of us, he belongs nowhere. He has no ancestral land, no songs passed down through generations, no graves to tend. He is not rooted in any soil, which means he cannot be wounded by losing one. Instead, he survives the way a parasite survives — by finding a living host, drawing what he needs, and moving on the moment that host is no longer useful to him.

This is the engine of his survival: not creation, but extraction. He does not grow his own food, build his own home, or raise his own children. He moves from body to body, from community to community, from continent to continent, each time presenting himself as something new, something necessary, something you cannot live without.

Because he understands no language but appetite, he cannot be reasoned with the way you might reason with a person. He does not hear grief. He does not register loss. He only registers whether the host is still profitable.

The Armies and the Market in Stolen Things

He does not work alone. Over centuries he has built armies — not of soldiers in uniform, necessarily, but of believers, investors, administrators, and enforcers, all sharing in whatever has been taken. He rewards loyalty generously, which is how he recruits so easily: a cut of the spoils is offered to anyone willing to look away.

Through these armies, he has built marketplaces where the most precious things are quietly converted into commodities — forests measured only in board feet, rivers measured only in kilowatts, and in the cruellest version of his trade, children and futures measured only in profit margins. His generals do the harvesting. He simply waits to receive what they bring back.

He has been patient enough to recruit the very people meant to protect their communities — leaders, elders, pastors, officials — convincing many of them, often gradually and without their full awareness, to serve an agenda that was never really theirs to serve. This is not always a story of villains. More often it is a story of people slowly persuaded that there was no other way.

The Slow Numbing

Perhaps his most effective weapon is not theft but anesthesia. Where there should be grief, there is distraction. Where there should be outrage, there is exhaustion. Communities that have watched their land stripped, their waters poisoned, their young people leave and not return, often describe the same strange sensation: a numbness that makes it hard to even locate the pain, let alone mourn it properly.

This numbing is not an accident. A host that still feels everything keenly will eventually resist. A host that has been gradually desensitized will tolerate almost anything, mistaking endurance for normal life.

The Rainbow That Disappears When You Reach It

When he senses he is being watched too closely, he changes tactics. He dresses himself in spectacle — bright lights, grand promises, a shimmering display engineered to pull every eye in his direction. Whole communities will pause what they are doing, set aside the people and responsibilities in front of them, and run toward the glow.

But reach the rainbow and there is nothing there. No substance, no shelter, no nourishment — only the memory of how beautiful it looked from a distance. This is not failure on his part. It is the design. The chase itself is the product. As long as people are running toward the light, they are not looking too closely at what is happening behind them.

When the chase finally exhausts a community — when there is nothing left to give — he does not linger to witness the cost. He simply moves on to the next horizon, the next rainbow, the next host, and the performance begins again, as though for the first time.

Why He Has No Name of His Own

It would be comforting to think of him as a single villain who could be caught, named in a courtroom, and removed. But he has no body to arrest, no fixed address, no single face to put on a wanted poster. He exists only in the systems we build and the choices we make inside them — which is exactly why he has survived every attempt to outlaw him by name.

And yet he does have a name. It is one most of us already know, even if we rarely say it aloud, and even more rarely connect it to everything described above.

His Name Is Capitalism

Not capitalism as a clean diagram in an economics lecture, with its tidy arrows of supply and demand — but capitalism as it is actually lived by people whose forests become someone else's timber quota, whose labour becomes someone else's quarterly earnings, whose children become someone else's workforce, and whose grief becomes background noise to someone else's growth chart.

This is not a claim that markets cannot do good, or that trade has never lifted anyone out of hardship — that is a separate and genuinely contested conversation. This is something narrower and more personal: a description of what an unaccountable, extractive logic feels like from the inside, when you are the host rather than the shareholder.

Living With the Host

He is in your pocket, in the device you are reading this on. He is in your home, your supermarket, your school, your church collection plate, your superannuation fund. He is not always visible, and he is not always entirely unwelcome — he has, after all, built roads, funded hospitals, and put food on countless tables. That is part of what makes him so difficult to simply expel: the relationship is real, even when it is unequal.

The point of naming him is not to pretend we can live entirely outside his reach. Few of us can. The point is smaller and more useful than that: to recognize the rainbow for what it is before we run ourselves empty chasing it, to notice the numbness before we mistake it for peace, and to ask — honestly, and without flinching — whose blood is in the cup before we drink from it.

Have you seen this man? Now you know his name. What you do with that knowledge is the only part of the story he cannot script for you.