What? I didn't write the linked essay. It was written by Eugene McCarraher. I was actually trying to make a point that his essay was too dense and unreadable for the average reader, which is what people would have noticed if they'd bothered to read my segment past the divider:
I was making a point that this type of writing is inaccessible academic sperging. In order for writing to have impact with most people, it has to get to the point, and it has to be at about a 4th-grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid scale.
Just for shits and grins, I threw that article into a Flesch-Kincaid readability checker, and it said grade level 17. The author is a show-off. They're showing us that they have a thesaurus and they're not afraid to use it.
This. There have, at varying times, been congruent strains of thinking in left-wing and right-wing discourse,
vis a vis economics. Both attack the sense of alienation caused by consumerism and the atomization of the community, but from different angles. Progressives aim to dismantle the upper class and revive the welfare state. Conservatives want a return to the nuclear family, nationalism, and traditionalism.
The right-wing critique of the "consoomer bugman" whose life seems purposeless except for striving to obtain the next generation of Apple Watch is striking in its similarity to the alt-globalist thinking of the left during the 1990s, where people railed against sweatshops and the exploitative business practices of multinational corporations. However, the Left have increasingly jettisoned this sort of ideology in favor of identity politics, pushing them off into a psychotic fringe of race-baiting and abandoning the class struggle in favor of narratives based on intersectionality.
Also this. Some of the most successful intentional communities are the ones with a religious and traditionalist basis. Secular communes are too fractious and have too many fault lines to cohere into a purposeful whole.
Many Millennials often complain that they don't feel like their job has any social impact. This is because they each, individually, think that their actions and expressed beliefs should have a measurable effect on their environment. A sort of solipsism and narcissism has set in, where people are deceived by pop culture and mass media propaganda into believing that they are the plucky protagonists of a YA novel, and all they have to do is tug on a certain thread to unravel the villain's evil plan and save the world. Note how saving the world, in this sense, is often framed as returning it to a more pristine, primal state of innocence and defeating the evil mad scientist or industrialist or whatever. It's a common refrain. There are very few myths where the scientist and the industrialist are the heroes. Everyone lives in the clutches of modernity, but they resent it. They want to cut loose. They want to be innocent and beast-like, like the revelers at Burning Man, but they still want the benefits of depressing, regimented organization. Modernity is Frankenstein's Monster. A product of a mad necromancer, dredging up bits of culture and assembling them piecemeal into the perfect being.
Everywhere you look, bureaucracy has wormed its way into our lives with meaningless credentialism and paperwork. Philosophical opposition to bureaucracy has petered out to nothing. It has become taboo to speak ill of it. It's the one thing you cannot criticize. It is treated as an invisible, omnipresent, divine force beyond the reckoning of men. Civil servants have become a priesthood, always out of reach and always above reproach.
Yes, my generation want to feel like heroes, but their job isn't to be a hero. Their job is to work. To be cogs in this bureaucratized, triple-stamped, notarized, wax-sealed machine. The trouble is that they were lied to, during the entirety of their formative years, about what their work is and what it accomplishes. Moreover, as they grow increasingly disillusioned with their jobs, carrot-sticked by the false promise of financial security, they start to notice that what they're actually doing is burdening the planet with their existence.
What we're seeing, right now, are thousands of people who don't want to feel like a burden, who are desperate for affection, a sense of purpose, and, hell, the next paycheck so they can eat and pay rent. What connects them? What do they have in common? Buying things. Just buying things to declare their allegiance to a brand. How can someone base their entire identity around consuming? The very emptiness of it would haunt them everywhere they go. The reason for this is quite simple. The things we purchase can never reciprocate our affection. You can't use a new car or a new phone or a new watch as a surrogate for a healthy connection to a healthy community.
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Corporations want to divide people from their communities, from their support networks, from their ethnic and cultural groups, and from their families. They want to divide people so they can use consumerism as a kind of surrogacy for real bonds between people.
The CHAZ in Seattle was a perfect example of what I mean. A bunch of people gathered together in one place, aiming to make an intentional community. They all hated each other. They didn't have any useful skills. They were all more attached to their own possessions and baubles than they were to each other. Of course it would fail. Why would people expect an entire generation raised on iPhones and Starbucks lattes to be good at farming in a park? They've fetishized communism without ever considering the abandonment of their atomized mindset. They don't want to actually be communists. They just want the dopamine rush of consuming, and they want it all the time. They are already hopeless addicts; non-functional, with no agency outside the system.
I think one of the most pressing issues of the next couple decades will be the impact of automation further diluting the value of labor. People have downplayed this for years, insisting that there is no way that their job can be done by a mere machine, and yet, artificial intelligence and neural networks are encroaching on what we thought of as intellectual labor as we speak. GPT-3, for instance, can write rudimentary code when given a description of a website. Microwork tasks are being used to train AIs and improve cloud services.
It isn't hard to imagine that, at some point in the future, "cornucopian" tech may allow for prosperity without labor. Where, then, does the wage laborer receive a wage from? Perhaps the next stage of society is something akin to a
Resource-Based Economy, where goods are a common, shared utility.
People derive a lot of their sense of self-worth from their work. If people spend all their time being babysat by machines, then a sense of alienation and existential dread most profound will set in. I fear that our descendants will turn towards drugging the humanity out of themselves to avoid this. We can already see evidence of that right now. How many of us are on SSRIs because of how purposeless our lives feel?
On the other hand, menial labor seems to waste a lot of untapped potential. How many people are slaving away on assembly lines today, who, given the right opportunity, could have been great scientists, authors, scholars, painters, musicians, and so on? Are we depriving society of the benefits of their intellectual labor by foisting menial labor on them instead, or is the untapped potential illusory and their intelligence inadequate to realize any real gain were they liberated from work?
I mean, think about it. Try and imagine a society without work. What would people do? How would they stay sane? How would they build a legacy while avoiding thinking about death?
These questions, and many more, have bothered me for quite some time, now.
I agree. State socialism is vile. It takes all the power and wealth of competing interests in a capitalist society and condenses it into a single ruling party whose only real opponent is the teeming masses. The end result is the diminishment of liberty for the many, all for the benefit of the few.
I've always considered myself more of a Veblenite than a Marxist. I think Stalinism and tankies are disgusting.
Thorstein Veblen was awesome and must be read by everyone to understand the mess we're in.
I've found that Thorstein Veblen's name is something of a Fnord. Nobody can actually see his name in a debate. If he is brought up, then the topic will typically be abandoned altogether in moments, as if he doesn't actually exist. It's amazing. I've broached the topic of his writings with numerous neoliberals over the years and they completely refuse to discuss him.
What makes this even more incensing is that his books are in the public domain and freely available.
Thorstein Veblen made some very interesting observations about capitalism. To condense them down:
- The wealthy purchase expensive goods for the sole purpose of displaying their wealth, something that he termed conspicuous consumption. If you've ever encountered someone who was like "Guess what? I got a new iPhone", then you've encountered conspicuous consumption. Their sole purpose for informing you about their purchase was to raise their status and your estimation of them.
- Business owners must engage in what he termed the "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" if they are to survive. That is to say, no business can afford to produce a good in such excess as to make it essentially free. Any excessive machinery must be sold, any excess workers must be laid off. Capitalism automatically and reflexively retards efficiency and increases scarcity on purpose according to the laws of supply and demand so that goods have value.
Modern economies are essentially a vicious cycle of conspicuous consumption and planned obsolescence. We purchase goods to demonstrate allegiance to a certain branded product, like Apple or Samsung, Ford or Chevrolet, Xbox or PlayStation, and so on. These goods are designed to be promptly made obsolete in the span of one or two years, so the act of conspicuous consumption can occur many, many times in a row. Electronics are furnished with new and more powerful hardware taking advantage of advances in manufacturing processes. Cars are given styling facelifts to make them look different from their predecessors, not necessarily better. Last year's clothes are cut up and tossed in the bin.
I do not advocate for communism or the redistribution of wealth. What I am taking aim at is the ritualized destruction of wealth that our society engages in on a continuous basis. Every good that ends up in a landfill, every object that is replaced instead of repaired, everything that is recycled instead of up-cycled or donated--that object represents someone's congealed labor that was tossed right down the drain in order to maintain the ritual of "growth".
Families used to have dynastic wealth. People used to inherit things. They didn't slave away continuously so they could buy the same disposable objects over and over again in a weird Sisyphean exercise. My favorite analogy is the razor. Back in the day, people bought straight razors, practiced with them, kept them sharp and stropped, and they used the same razor for years and years. These days, people buy a pack of a dozen disposable razors and the blades rust and become unusable in a matter of weeks. Heirloom objects have been supplanted by disposable plastic junk.
Imagine a society that produced incredibly durable objects that almost never needed replacing. The economy would contract. Growth would reverse. Our carbon footprint would decrease, since we wouldn't be moving so many disposable goods around by container. If humanity as a whole practiced such frugality, then the surplus labor could be turned towards other aims. Those freed from menial labor could instead contribute intellectual labor.
Yet, at the same time, such a society would be in the worst depression ever by our standards; physically rich, but monetarily poor.
Neoliberalism is destroying our natural capital for the sake of the strange exercise of making numbers go up. The world's reserves of minerals are being depleted one after another. Aquifers are being drained and arable land is turning into desert from over-farming. Trees are over-harvested; the world's forests are being cut down to make more agricultural land which, in turn, is turned into desert from soil loss. What are our descendants expected to inherit? Human activity is aiming to turn Earth into a barren ball of rock with mile-high mountains of garbage.
Why does America even
have a homeless problem? We throw away enough wealth every year to buy every homeless person in America a home. $165 billion dollars of unsold food. $55 billion dollars worth of materials in electronic waste. That's $400,000 for each of the 552,000 homeless people in the US. Our
trash contains enough wasted value to buy over half a million people a home. And a nice home, too. Why did people labor to farm that food and produce those electronics if they were just going to end up thrown away?
Try and think about what it would take to put an end to mindless hyper-consumerism and waste, and the institutional structures that support it. Not just the consooming itself, not just an alteration of mankind's habits, but actually getting rid of the clerical jobs that manage the consooming, the wasteful services that help those clerical workers manage the consooming, the transportation that supports consooming, and all the way on down the line, until you have something resembling sustainability.
Our global society is controlled by a tiny, elite cadre of uber-wealthy parasites who don't provide anything of value to us at all. They privatize their gains and socialize their losses. They use nonprofits as their PR agencies, and they funnel tons of money towards political causes that advance their goals and hand them ever-increasing amounts of wealth and power. They spur humanity towards wasteful consumerism, growth, and profit, and they skim off the top. They fund wars and back warmongers. They keep us all divided and squabbling among ourselves so we don't turn on them and tear out their throat. That's all they do, all day; figure out ways to skim a little more and skim a little more, until they have amassed huge fortunes and the rest of us are living in cuckbarrels and repurposed shipping containers. They are robbing our descendants of their own opportunity to have a decent standard of living, all for their own temporary gain. The result is a society that routinely discards enough wealth
in the garbage to give large swathes of the population a sizable dole.
Imagine how insulted the workers of the world must feel, to know that their sweat, blood, and tears are literally going into landfills.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus' punishment was to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity. This is what modernity has wrought. A Sisyphean society that exists for the sake of the Work-Ritual, with financiers and bureaucrats as its clergymen.
Maybe humanity will one day take our heads out of our asses and realize that at some point, the work is supposed to
stop and you're supposed to take a breath and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Medieval peasants had more leisure time than we do. They fucking tilled the fields half the year, and spent the other half lounging around doing next to nothing. These days, people are lucky if they get 15 days of paid vacation a year, and the rest of the time, they're slaving and wagecucking like mad so some prick can buy a second Lamborghini.
From coast to coast, the US is full of overworked basket cases increasingly turning to psychiatrists and social workers and begging them for pills to escape the misery and futility of their existence. That's just another way to extract value. They work you to the bone just so they can sell you chemical relief from the misery they put you in.
Who in God's name thinks any of this is healthy or sane? Who?
