Is the World Learning the Lessons of a Collapsing America?
Predatory Societies Self-Destruct Into Fascism and Hate — But Is the World Learning America's Lesson?
|
Image Credit: Mike McClearyThere is, by now, a certain trope in science fiction circles called the Dark Forest scenario. Why isn't there any life out there? Well, there is, says the Dark Forest scenario. Only because there is a predatory galactic mega civilization, everyone's hiding out, scared in the woods. If they pop their heads out — wham! Hence…a universe without the appearance of life.
That's nice, and it's certainly entertaining, but the economist in me can also tell you it's wrong. There is nothing of the sort happening out there. We know what happens to predatory societies, or civilizations. They don't endure. They collapse from within, under the weight of their own cruelty, indifference, corruption, stupidity, fanaticism, and fascism. It's happened over and over again in history. And right about now, in history's most vivid example yet, it's happening to America.
I bring all this up, this sci-fi scenario, for a reason. Americans don't understand the price of being a predatory society. Americans lionise predation, in all its forms. They love guns and hunting and greed and money and power. They are the world's most predatory people probably since the Romans, easily for the last millennium, and before you bring up the Nazis, let me remind you that the Nazis admired and studied…America. The idea of being predatory is something many of us are taught to admire, in the pseudo-scientific argot of "alphas" and "betas" and "apex predators." The ideology of predation is baked so deeply into our culture that we speak its language without recognising it: "going in for the kill," "murdering it," even "headhunting."
The problem with all this is that we now know a certain lesson from history. It's a beautiful one. An optimistic one, an elegant one, and above all, one which reminds us who we really are. I'll come back to that last abstract point. The lesson, though, is this: predatory societies don't grow, multiply, and prosper — they collapse and implode from within. That is a lesson each and every one of us must learn now if we wish to consider ourselves educated people. After all, our future as a civilisation now depends on being something more, higher, and nobler than predatory.
I'm spending the year in a little town in America, just outside one of its great cities. I don't like it here. Why not? There's a man who lingers, begging for change, outside the cafe I go to write at. It's a liberal town. An old one. This man is a war veteran in a wheelchair. You might say: so what? Who cares? The liberal Americans walking by him certainly don't. But contained in his story is the lesson of why predatory societies collapse.
America is visibly collapsing now. It was a minor miracle the coup on Jan 6th didn't succeed — not some kind of robust democratic institutional action, but instead, the actions of a handful of police officers, many of whom paid with their lives. If that coup had succeeded, it's safe to say that American democracy probably would have come to an end. Don't take my word for it, just remember that even America's top generals were reaching the very same conclusion.
How did America get here? Well, the answer is very simple. A predatory society is also one which underinvests and overconsumes. You can see that in America's rate of investment, which is the lowest in the rich world, one of the lowest in the world, period. America invests just 15% of it's economy back in itself, its people, institutions, systems.
But that level of investment is not enough. Not enough for what? For Americans to have functioning…anything. Healthcare, retirement, incomes, jobs, education. So Americans don't have those things. Those things are of course known as "public goods," precisely because the idea is that I'm better off when you have them.
How am I better off when you have public goods? Well, when you have the public good of education, I don't have to suffer your fanaticism, stupidity, and extremism. But America doesn't offer public higher education like, say, Canada and Europe do. The result is that America's uneducated masses are the ones behind its now constant pulsations of fascism — ones which, for example, just elevated a Trumpist to Governor of Virginia, and are almost certain to re-elect Trump next time around.
All public goods have such "positive externalities." Your education prevents fascism and fanaticism even for me. Your healthcare prevents me getting ill, too — isn't Covid a vivid enough example? You having good media improves your sanity and informedness. You being able to have a retirement then and a decent life working an honest job now means that the economy is less unequal for me, too. I could go on endlessly.
So why do Americans reject public goods? After all, if we really want to understand why predatory societies collapse from within, then we have to observe that they choose their own deprivation. In America's case, it couldn't be starker. It's precisely the Red States who live off the public purse who demand less and less investment in things like healthcare and education and retirement for all.
Americans rejects public goods for a combination of reasons, but they all boil down to one thing: predatory values. The problem in America is threefold. Nobody, it seems, has taught Americans these basic economics of public goods making everyone better off. That is because it's not profitable to — it's far more profitable to invent some imaginary enemy, and teach people to hate that enemy in America, yesterday communism, then "Arabs," today Mexicans and Latinos and gays and "wokeness."
But even when Americans are taught — and grasp — the lesson that they'll be better off themselves with basic public goods, they still reject them. You can see that in the following grim observation: 70–80% of Americans say they want a society with healthcare and retirement and education for all, not even barely half that number ever really vote for it. Something gets in the way when it's time to construct a functioning society.
That something is openly visible. The infrastructure bill that Democrats are celebrating today is meaningless. It amounts to less than 1% of GDP. That's not to say that it won't make minor improvements to American life. Sure it will. But it is not enough to stop the downward spiral, for the simple reason that going from 15% investment to 16% investment is marginal at best. It is not transformative, it doesn't reform institutions, or create new systems, but merely puts dicey, short-term band-aids on old, broken ones.
Something stops Americans — and I mean literally stops, as in even when the Dems control all of politics — from ever having public goods, and becoming a functioning society. What is that something?
It's that Americans have internalised predatory values. What are predatory values? Think about the Dark Forest scenario from the sci-fi world. Some alien mega-civilisation takes out any little one which pops its head above the fence. Likely? Not likely at all. Why not? Because a civilisation that predatory wouldn't take care of its own. It would be ruled by values of selfishness, greed, indifference, cruelty, and brutality — just like America is. Life in it would be just as vicious as life in its putative colonies: a bitter, brutal battle for self-preservation. Any form of empathy or emotion or feeling or sensitivity would be seen as weakness, and weakness would be punishable by death. The most cunning, ruthless, greedy, power-hungry, and sociopathic would rise to the top.
Sound like America to you? It should. Who are America's richest people? Not anyone who's done anything remotely socially worthy, or even interesting, as in good for society at large. There's Zuck, sociopath-in-chief, earning billions for…commercializing a literal "Facebook," something which existed for ages at universities. There's Elon Musk, playing games by privatising public goods. There's Jeff Bezos, paying less in taxes than a teacher, or even a school janitor.
No wonder America's collapsing. These figures have contributed nothing — and I mean nothing — to society. A humble kindergarten teacher contributes literally infinitely more than they do. And yet they're the ones looting society for all its worth.
See the problem here? Predatory societies get looted and taken apart and stripped down for profit and power by their own predators.
Those are just the economic predators. I haven't even gotten to the political ones yet. Let's now take the example of Glenn Trumpkin — sorry, I mean Youngkin — Virginia's newest governor. How did he get there? By telling a lie even bigger than "they stole the election from us!" This time, it was "they're coming for your kids!" Who doesn't want to protect their kids, after all? And so white Virginia went into a moral panic, a mass hysteria, the kind America's well known for, from lynch mobs, to (racist) Prohibition and drug panics. They're not gonna get little Johnny!
Meanwhile, nobody pointed out that Youngkin is a "private equity executive." What does that mean, in plain English? He's the kind of man who strips retirement funds for profit. The kind of figure who takes America's once storied and vaunted businesses — and reduces them to shell corporations, paying less than minimum wage. It's Youngkins who make Bezoses and Zucks. Who give the money and power they then use to reduce average Americans to a state of neo-serfdom, more or less.
Like, God bless them, all those gullible working class Virginians. What does the yokel living in a small-town in rural Virginia actually need? Public goods. He can't escape because there's no transport, he's self-medicating with opioids because there's no real healthcare, he has no job because, well, "private equity" shipped them all overseas, and he'll never retire on all that no income. Glenn Youngkin is the last guy all those poor, rural working class Virginians should have ever elected.
So why did they? Hate. Hate is a satisfying meal, if you can't live a decent life. At least you have someone to blame, to demonize, to scapegoat. The dopamine rushes to your head. You feel good again, powerful. You're the chosen one, only you've been persecuted. They were coming for your kids — but you protected them. You're strong and good and noble now. Your life, which was going nowhere fast, means something, suddenly.
That's how Youngkin got elected. Hate, its temptation, the cheap thrill it offers. But the price is that instead of becoming a functional society — which it was on the cusp of — Virginia will now become a place like Texas. Where women are pursued by bounty hunters for just…being women, where minorities are second-class citizens, if that, where dumb fat men carry guns to…Starbucks.
Predatory values. They culminate in all that. People will choose hate over better lives, because they've been taught that hate is the more satisfying, noble, righteous choice. They've been taught that greed, cruelty, brutality are correct. That weakness is a liability, and any form of cooperation or sensitivity or empathy is weakness. A society like that will more or less always end up ruled by Youngkins and Trumps.
But Youngkin is a millionaire, and Trump is a billionaire. Whatever bargain they've made with those resentful working classes is obviously a false, Faustian one. In Virginia's case, that's on naked display. Virginians won't get public goods — they'll get public bads. Mistrust, hostility, aggression, division. Life won't improve — but what will the average person care? They'll have their scapegoats. And Youngkin and his cronies will laugh all the way to the bank. That's a tiny microcosm of collapse.
Predatory societies collapse from within. Under the weight of all that. Corruption. Stupidity. Hate. Brutality. Thoughtlessness. Indifference. Remember the veteran outside my little cafe? Who's taking care of him, Virginia? Nobody is. They're too busy whipped up into a frenzy of hate.
But a society that can't take care of itself in basic ways is of course doomed to implode into chaos, poverty, rage, and ruin. Its systems will fail, and as they do, demagogues will blame it all on scapegoats. The average fool, having had predatory values inculcated into him or her, will believe the demagogue, being prejudiced towards hate and cruelty already. Society will implode into a kind of every-man-for-himself winner-take-all-contest — of which the only real winners will be the Zucks and Bezoses and Trumps and Youngkins, the ones who are looting a society for all its worth, in plain sight, having performed the magic trick of demagoguery, corrupted and corroded everything in their paths.
America teaches us all that, and more. Just as Rome taught it to us, once. And just as Greece's fall into autocracy and chaos, after a brief Golden Age, taught it to us before that. Civilisations come and go, true. But this is how they go.
That is why: I wonder if the world is learning the lesson of American collapse. Predatory values crumble societies — even whole civilisations — from within. This is a beautiful lesson to know. I stress "know," because now we are in the realm of facts, not politics, not beliefs. We know. We have deep empirical knowledge about this now, how predatory values lead to collapse, and therefore the lesson isn't just beautiful, but also urgent.
Take a look at Europe. Again, in places, the far right is surging. Eric Zemmour, emerging as a French Trump…says that the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis…wasn't so bad. By the way, he's Jewish. What on earth? Then there's Britain, where post-Brexit hostility and anger is looking pretty fashy to much of the world. India, in the grip, still of a fervid nationalism, tinged with religious fanaticism. Gentle and wise Canada, too, is seeing the spread of the poisons of hate and greed and fanaticism.
Predatory values.
Then there's our civilisation, as a whole, if it can even really be called that. Do you know what kind of civilization economics says ours is? Our consumption rate is about 80%, and our investment is just about 20%. We consume so much that the planet is obviously at this point beginning to die, cataclysm after cataclysm of every kind, from rising sea levels, to entire ecologies collapsing, heading our way.
We seem to see it as our right to enslave and kill everything around us, which is a lesser being, to us, the walking apes, who consider ourselves supreme. Everything from rivers to trees to insects to mammals has been decimated on this planet — for the sake not of our survival, really, because half of humanity still lives in dire poverty, but so that the richest 1% of the planet can amass amounts of wealth so huge they make kings of yesterday's empires look like paupers.
A predatory civilization.
Will Canada and Europe — the only real beacons of grace and goodness and sanity the world has left — endure? Or will they fall, too — absorbing predatory values like America, from America, and crumbling from within, broken by hate, greed, stupidity, and rage?
What kind of civilization does a hyper-predatory civilisation have, anyways? The sci-fi nerds will tell you grandiose stories about colonising galaxies. LOL. My friends. We aren't even making it off the planet we killed. Our story is the story of a hyper predatory civilization. Want to know how it ends? Take a hard look around. Predatory values end — as they always have — in hate, cataclysm, disaster, corruption, selfishness, indifference.
That is why the wisest civilizations, who were the longest lived ones, indigenous peoples, Natives, always knew it, too, and valued cooperation, empathy, investment, togetherness, gentleness, and trust, instead.
All of which brings me back to my question. Is the world learning a little something about where predatory values end, before it's too late?
Umair
Novermber 2021
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment