How I Got Here

I've had the sense, since a very young age, that there was something terribly amiss in the world.

Maybe this was partially a function of growing up towards the end of the 20th century, when a combination of factors—the back-to-earth reality check brought on by hard economic times in the 70s and early 80s, the increasingly sensationalized television coverage of the world's many crises, maybe the alienation and ennui caused by an increasingly complex and stratified social and economic structure, etc.—combined to create a much more demoralized narrative than the one with which my parents were raised in the 50s and 60s. We might have beat the commies at creating a prosperous and functional society, but there was a hole in the ozone layer, and black babies with distended bellies cried on late-night TV, and American teenagers were depressed and doing hard drugs and shooting each other at school.

As a result of all of this, many people in my generation, it seems, have a less optimistic outlook on the world than our hippie-turned-stockbroker parents. But I have been plagued, more than most of my peers, by perpetual unease over all the things that are wrong with modern society. I have never found comfort in the fact that there are also many things right with modern society, like the (ostensible) recognition of universal human rights, and humanitarian aid that transcends cultures and borders. We are a society that put people on the moon, for Pete's sake. It has always seemed to me that if we really wanted to fix the world's problems, we could do it easily.

As I grew older and began to express my views, this became problematic. I was billed by friends as a downer, or worse, a pessimist (the gravest of all personality traits in this feel-good culture). I alienated people with my constant focus on injustice and dysfunction in the world. I had a brief respite from these troubles during college, where I met other similarly-minded folks who cared about similar things, but I found, upon graduation, that most people's enthusiasm for getting to the bottom of What's Wrong With the World was pretty thoroughly extinguished once they had jobs and car payments and such—as it turns out, most people just want to be happy...they don't want to be constantly contemplating how their consumer choices are creating misery for sweatshop workers in Indonesia.

I began to suspect that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was too pessimistic. Possibly even chemically unbalanced. I was probably just a natural misfit, doomed to an ill-fitting existence in a culture I couldn't escape—it wasn't society that was all wrong, it was me. Sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind.

And then, gradually, I began to discover voices that made sense.

It began with Kunstler's criticisms of suburbia, which I read during the six months I spent stranded at my parents' place in suburban hell, where I regrouped after doing some extended travel. From there, I started to read about peak oil, and and I found it absolutely FASCINATING—enthralling, almost, in a morbid sort of way. I had never before considered the impact energy flow has had on our society. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of understanding the world (and the world's problems). I was somewhat tempted to interpret peak oil as some sort of cosmic limit or override that confirmed what I'd been claiming all along—a message from above, if you will, that we'd completely botched everything up and The Powers That Be would be revoking our most critical resource shortly, thank you very much—and despite recognizing this train of thought as rubbish, I began to feel slightly more validated, and slightly less insane.

Eventually this led me to the the internet and in particular, the blogsphere, where I discovered voices that had been there all along, sounding off about the raging dysfunction that has gotten us in this predicament of peak oil, climate change, resource depletion, and, more recently, the financial crisis. I devoured these people's thoughts like my life depended on it. And as I did, I felt secure in my worldview for the first time ever. As Rod Dreher of the Dallas News said in his column on austerity, "[T]he U.S. government is trying to restart an economy blown to bits by debt by encouraging Americans drowning in debt to resume spending money that they don't have for things they don't need. You tell me: Who's crazy here?"

Precisely.

As I've thought and read and synthesized, I've begun to take certain ideas for granted that are fairly controversial, or even totally unheard of, within the mainstream. I will treat these things as given in all of my writings from here on out, so I figure I might as well get them out there on the table.

In no particular order:

1. This is not progress.
And by "this" I mean modern society. Most people seem to believe that in spite of hard times, the world is progressing towards a better and more just arrangement, à la Thomas Friedman. This is the story that we're fed in order to get us to accept the particularly ugly aspects of the modern world trajectory like poverty, exploitation, apathy, depression, obesity, cancer, divorce, senseless violence...the list goes on. It should be pretty clear to anyone paying attention—really paying attention, that is, not merely reading the New York Times with the so-called critical eye of the educated liberal class (who happen to be quite vested in the status quo)—that things are absolutely NOT getting better in the long-run. There are ups and downs, depending on the world economy and general political atmosphere, but in the long run, corporations have become more powerful at the expense of individuals, both in developed and "developing" or "underdeveloped" nations. Income disparity in the U.S. is growing, the environment is increasingly degraded and unable to support the full range of human activities it used to, and modern economic arrangements in many third world countries are breaking up families and providing a lifestyle that's hardly, if any, more sufficient than subsistence farming at providing basic needs. I could go on, but I won't for the time being—my point is that the evidence does not indicate an increasingly just world, even if that's what the rhetoric says.

And on that same note...

2. Modern capitalism is not "good". It does not "work".
Any economic system that does not have inbuilt checks on greed is an economic system that will likely benefit the few at the expense of the many—and thus, is NOT an economic system that most of us should support! Until recently, many have tried to claim that capitalism does keep greed in check, by giving consumers the option of moving their business elsewhere, if a certain company is getting a little greedy—but this argument takes for granted that consumers are informed, and I have trouble with this one...if we're so informed, how did so many of us end up with retirement money in repackaged sub-prime mortgage securities? We're too busy getting lulled into a semi-coma by cable television to know a sound investment from a con, let alone where our bank banks or who sold seeds to the farmer who grows the tomatoes we buy at Big Box Mart, and a lack of transparency, coupled with the ridiculous tangled web of corporate ownership that recent takeovers have produced, are making it increasingly difficult even for those of us who want to be informed consumers.

Capitalist principles actually make quite a bit of sense in certain contexts—particularly, the context in which they were originally observed—but today's enormous, complex, technologically-intensive global economy has about as much in common with that original context as George Foreman has in common with my grandmother. Therefore, in order to benefit the greater good (which is what most of us little people should be rallying for, considering where unchecked greed has gotten us), those capitalist principles require some serious tweaking—otherwise, we just end up with the kind of morbid economic train wreck we've got currently. I'm not saying we need to switch to a USSR-style planned economy, where you've got to wait in line for three hours just to be able to wipe your butt with something other than a leaf; people jump to the grossly-uninformed conclusion that anything other than pure market capitalism (which, by the way, we don't even have in this country) is automatically socialism, and nobody seems terribly interested in setting them straight. But some regulations, made with the well-being of the individual consumer rather than the corporation in mind, would be fabulous, and we'd be so much better off for it, even if these regulations contradicted everything we hold dear about the free market. I have a feeling that Adam Smith would be horrified by the society that we've created through our blind adherence to capitalism. Poor man's bones are probably spinning in his grave even as we speak.

3. Perpetual economic growth is not only not good, it's not possible.
And all those people working in factories in third world countries are never going to see a first world lifestyle as their country moves through the phases of industrialization, the way we tell them they will. There's not enough stuff to provide it for them, unless we discover fresh water and trees and fossil fuels on the moon sometime very soon. (And besides, then who would manufacture our Nikes and false eyelashes?) Anyone who believes that perpetual economic growth is a possibility needs a refresher in basic common sense; we may have made amazing technological advancements in creating synthetic materials, but all of these technologies depend on real, tangible, scarce, and increasingly depleted resources. Again, you tell me: who's crazy here? You can not run a growth economy in perpetuity in a closed system. End of story.

Of course, this has some pretty major implications for the way our economy is set up, not to mention the priorities we've set as a society. But more on that some other time.

4. The people with the greatest investment in the status quo happen to be the same people who control idea flows in our society.
I mean this very generally, because the internet has really changed how we get our ideas; nowadays, people can go online and find communities based around the ideas they support and wish to exchange, just like I did. But in general, among those without access to the internet or knowledge of the countless ways to connect with others online, and most definitely among those who spend any significant amount of time watching TV, the ideas, values, and norms to which they are exposed are at least somewhat—probably largely—influenced by the media, and by powerful interests speaking through the media.

And not only is media ownership increasingly concentrated in fewer and more powerful hands, it is with few exceptions a profit-driven business that owes its revenues to whatever company is making this month's must-have consumer shiny, and thus, has a limited capacity to question the processes that make this dysfunctional society run: consumption, capitalism, maybe exploitation, and a little bit of existential desperation brought on by the mind-numbing rat race. They don't want you to wonder whether you really need that new shiny toy, so they're not going to encourage you to think for yourself. And thus, the band plays on...

5. We fail to solve most of the problems we tackle because we treat the symptoms instead of addressing the causes.
Whether this focus on symptoms is an accidental feature of our culture, or engineered/encouraged by elements of the power establishment, I don't care to speculate right now—though it's probably some of both. There are certainly powerful interests that have a stake in this approach, such as pharmaceutical companies, which profit from the long-term treatment of chronic conditions far more than they do from preventative medicine. But it's unfortunate that this approach permeates nearly everything we do to make this world a better, happier place, from our approach to poverty to our response to terrorism.

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This blog will be a place for myself and one of my college friends to vent our frustrations with business as usual in the world, hash out thoughts or ideas that need refining, and generally join the dialogue about what went wrong, what it means, and how we can work to make it better. We welcome your thoughts, ideas, and feedback.