What's black and white and red all over? Nearly every “think piece” you've ever read on the global credit crunch. There may be a shortage of debt finance but there's no lack of born-again Marxist newsprint commentary decreeing that we are living through Capitalism's Götterdämmerung. A belief in the rule of markets is now supposed to be as obsolete, naive, even ridiculous, as confessing that your religion is built on faith in Thor and Wotan.

But, at the risk of being thought one horn short of a helmet, can I beg to differ? You can no more immolate capitalism than you can pronounce the last rites over the lifeless corpse of laughter. Capitalism, like laughter, is the expression of an ineradicable human instinct.

My belief in capitalism's durability is based not on any particular understanding of economics, no long immersion in Ricardo, von Mises or Friedman. It is based on my bewilderment in the face of mobile phone charms.

Which genius thought it would be a good idea to make, and then market, tiny pieces of rhinestone encrusted metal or teeny plastic toys designed to dangle from mobile phones? What deep human need, what desperate, unslaked appetite, does the mobile phone charm meet? I cannot conceive what possible use or attraction these devices have: I can no more imagine buying one than I can imagine sacrificing our pet Jack Russell to the sun god Ra for a good harvest or setting off to work by camel.

But its clear that there is a demand for these things, a demand which countless websites and shops on every street corner are there to meet.

And the ability of one individual, a few years ago, to have divined this demand, then to have devised ways of getting these trinkets into shops and then into the hands of hundreds of thousands, is all the proof I need of capitalism's certain immortality. Mankind's ingenuity will always find a way of finding a profit. And the mobile phone charm is concrete proof, more powerful than any George Monbiot polemic, that we humans are hard-wired to buy, trade and accumulate. We are social animals and our natural environment for gathering, our communal waterhole, is the marketplace.

Mobile manners

Mind you, of all the phrases that stick in my throat I have to confess few are as hard to say as “mobile phone charm”. Charm is the one quality I find it very hard to associate with mobile phones. I find that mobile phones increasingly have the same effect on an individual's charm as napalm on Vietnamese foliage. Mobiles appear to eradicate all natural grace and beauty, and the more they are deployed the more of a wasteland is left behind.

I've written before of my dislike of BlackBerries. But, my anger is fuelled by a self-loathing more powerful than any hangover can induce. For I'm as guilty as any one of MIR - mobile induced rudeness. And I squirm at the thought of my sins. They include:

a) Sherman McCoyism - that is to say, treating every other human being not so much as a servant, or even a slave, as a robot built to service your wants. When in the grip of Sherman McCoyism, an individual will arrive at the head of a coffeeshop queue, briefly raise his head from the mobile device, mouth the word “cappuccino” and then resume his telephone conversation, all the time ignoring the barista's questions about size, chocolate, pastries and lid. When the coffee is thrust towards him the individual will not say thank you, smile or apologise for ignoring the barista but will take forever to respond to the request for payment before huffily proffering a £20 note. Then another aeon will pass before he acknowledges the change the barista has been waving in front of him and someone else can be served. This absorption in your own affairs, indifferent to the rest of the world, is also known as BBC Senior Managementism.

b) Hollywood Agentism - that is to say, not returning calls or replying to texts within a decent time frame and imagining this terrible rudeness might be construed as evidence of general in-demandness. This delusion that people should somehow be grateful for any communication, however late or shoddy, is also sometimes known as Royal Mailism.

c) My Text Life is Privateism - that is to say, breaking off any real-life contact at any time in order to either read, or worse search for, a fresh text message. This belief that you can breezily ignore those nearest to you in pursuit of the fleeting thrill of brief contact with an unknown other is also known as Menopausal Maleism.

Like cars before them, mobile phones are proof that every technological advance is another platform for people to invent new forms of rudeness. My only consolation is that, given capitalism is as restlessly adaptive as our capacity to be impolite, someone even now is working out how to make money out of curing my weakness.

Money for nothing

While on the subject of making money by devising products that are now ubiquitous but which no one could have thought we needed a generation ago, who invented scented candles? And something called a serum designed to eliminate not a tropical disease, but wrinkles. Not to mention botulism injections to get rid of your frown. And as for collagen fillers... I think we probably still have quite a long way to go before we get back to Austerity Britain.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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