(Op-Ed) Our Elites Still Don't Get It

[SolarpunkFan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/opin ... gress.html

John Bowlby is the father of attachment theory, which explains how humans are formed by relationships early in life, and are given the tools to go out and lead their lives. The most famous Bowlby sentence is this one: “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”

Attachment theory nicely distinguishes between the attachments that form you and the things you then do for yourself. The relationships that form you are mostly things you didn’t choose: your family, hometown, ethnic group, religion, nation and genes. The things you do with your life are mostly chosen: your job, spouse and hobbies.

Through most of American history, our society was built on this same sort of unchosen/chosen distinction. At our foundation, we were a society with strong covenantal attachments — to family, community, creed and faith. Then on top of them we built democracy and capitalism that celebrated liberty and individual rights.

The deep covenantal institutions gave people the capacity to use their freedom well. The liberal institutions gave them that freedom.

This delicate balance — liberal institutions built atop illiberal ones — is now giving way. The big social movements of the past half century were about maximizing freedom of choice. Right-wingers wanted to maximize economic choice and left-wingers lifestyle choice. Anything that smacked of restraint came to seem like a bad thing to be eliminated.

We’ll call this worldview — which is all freedom and no covenant — naked liberalism (liberalism in the classic Lockean sense, not the modern progressive sense). The problem with naked liberalism is that it relies on individuals it cannot create.

This is the point Yuval Levin made in a brilliant essay published in First Things back in 2014. Naked liberals of right and left assume that if you give people freedom they will use it to care for their neighbors, to have civil conversations, to form opinions after examining the evidence. But if you weaken family, faith, community and any sense of national obligation, where is that social, emotional and moral formation supposed to come from? How will the virtuous habits form?

Naked liberalism has made our society an unsteady tree. The branches of individual rights are sprawling, but the roots of common obligation are withering away.

Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that’s what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis. Freedom without connection becomes alienation. And that’s what we see at the bottom of society — frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction. Freedom without a unifying national narrative becomes distrust, polarization and permanent political war.

People can endure a lot if they have a secure base, but if you take away covenantal attachments they become fragile. Moreover, if you rob people of their good covenantal attachments, they will grab bad ones. First, they will identify themselves according to race. They will become the racial essentialists you see on left and right: The only people who can really know me are in my race. Life is a zero-sum contest between my race and your race, so get out.

Then they resort to tribalism. This is what Donald Trump provides. As Mark S. Weiner writes on the Niskanen Center’s blog, Trump is constantly making friend/enemy distinctions, exploiting liberalism’s thin conception of community and creating toxic communities based on in-group/out-group rivalry.

Trump offers people cultural solutions to their alienation problem. As history clearly demonstrates, people will prefer fascism to isolation, authoritarianism to moral anarchy.

If we are going to have a decent society we’re going to have to save liberalism from itself. We’re going to have to restore and re-enchant the covenantal relationships that are the foundation for the whole deal. The crucial battleground is cultural and prepolitical.

In my experience, most people under 40 get this. They sense the social and moral void at the core and that change has to come at the communal, emotional and moral level. They understand that populism is a broad social movement, including but stretching far beyond just policy. To address it, we’re going to need to confront it with another broad social movement.

Many people my age and above seem clueless. Our elected leaders were raised in the heyday of naked liberalism and still talk as if it were 1994. Many public intellectuals were trained in the social sciences and take the choosing individual as their mental starting point. They have trouble thinking about our shared social and moral formative institutions and how such institutions could be reconstituted.

Congressional Republicans think a successful tax bill will thwart populism. Mainstream Democrats think the alienation problem will go away if we redistribute the crumbs a bit more widely. Washington policy wonks build technocratic sand castles that keep getting swept away in the cultural tides.

History is full of examples of nations that built new national narratives, revived family life, restored community bonds and shared moral culture: Britain in the early 19th century, Germany after World War II, America in the Progressive Era. The first step in launching our own revival is understanding that the problem is down in the roots.

No arguments from me. Though I'm curious about the community bond restoration & shared moral culture overhaul was done in post-WWII Germany (I'm a sucker for the soft sciences and history).

[The Romulan Republic]

Sounds to me like a lot of whining about how we're "loosing our traditional values."

Do people need some foundation on which to build their lives? Yes. Does that mean that "Oh no, society is falling apart because we're no longer based on community and church and "family values" (or whatever)"? No. Their are many possible basis for attachments to form, beyond the "traditional" lines of Idealized Good Old Days American society.

And I practically rolled my eyes when they got to blaming the opioid crisis on alienation due to lack of those traditional values.

Moreover, the article seems to fall somewhat into "both the Left and Right are just as bad" false equivalency rhetoric typical of "anti-establishment" (or "anti-elite") polemics these days, which I have said before and will say again is the most poisonous, dangerous, and insidious lie of our time- one which obfuscates nuance, stifles discussion, normalizes the worst aspects of politics, and feeds cynicism, thereby breeding both extremism and apathy.

The article also seems to be based in part on a fundamentally cynical assumption- that people are basically bad and lacking in empathy, unless trained otherwise by traditional social conventions. I'm not sure I buy into that view of the world.

I... do think that there's a valid point buried in here. But the article's assumptions and employment of very questionable rhetoric undermines its credibility for me.

[Raw Shark]

[Simon_Jester]

Let me see if I can take the valid insight and turn it into something that reads less like an attempt to say "oh my God I just realized Trumpism is bad, but I can't afford to actually change anything about my worldview as a consequence!"

Congressional Republicans think a successful tax bill will thwart populism.

Well, they talk like it will. The Republicans have gotten considerable success out of blaming taxes for that which is wrong with America, using it to redirect the popular resentment of the way America's social fabric has been crumbling. It's one of their favored targets: "taxes are still too high!" The other target is more in line with the thesis of this letter: old social institutions- the old institutions that came apart because they were tyrannical, but maybe if we just reimposed enough tyranny everything would get better? :rolleyes:

I don't think it would. We'd just end up with a new atomized social order that has a class of elite millionaires ruling over the cloud of atoms. Where rich men can get abortions for their mistresses-du-jour, but single mothers of three can't get them for themselves... and consequently fail to raise their children well, and fail to later mature into the glue that could hold nuclear families together. Where men are raised poorly, and drop out of school or go to jail or both, and are never, never given a second chance because second chances are the province of rich kids with "affluenza."

It used to be more like that than we care to remember, even in the days of more 'covenantal' relationships. It would be far more like that now.

Mainstream Democrats think the alienation problem will go away if we redistribute the crumbs a bit more widely.

The thesis here is that if we distribute wider and distribute more than crumbs, people won't be so ground down and crushed by their circumstances, and will have more opportunities to rebuild their own ties. That we'd see more and stronger bonds of communal support, more people willing to adhere to covenental institutions or more people not needing them so badly and hurting so much for them, if it weren't for the conditions of financial desperation that drive the bottom half (two thirds?) of our society.

We can't go all the way back to the way things were, and by and large we wouldn't be better off if we did. But if "naked liberalism" is to clothe itself, the progressive position argues... Well, we need to start by making sure people are supplied with needle, thread, and cloth. Otherwise they're just stuck naked and cowering from the winds that were already blowing anyway.

Washington policy wonks build technocratic sand castles that keep getting swept away in the cultural tides.

I don't even know what he thinks he's talking about, sadly.

[K. A. Pital]

The thesis here is that if we distribute wider and distribute more than crumbs, people won't be so ground down and crushed by their circumstances, and will have more opportunities to rebuild their own ties. That we'd see more and stronger bonds of communal support, more people willing to adhere to covenental institutions or more people not needing them so badly and hurting so much for them, if it weren't for the conditions of financial desperation that drive the bottom half (two thirds?) of our society.

Sorry to play a sad tune here, but it is far from given a society already suffering from atomization and alienation at an extreme level can rebuild itself.

It is possible that it can't, barring catastrophe.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, the hope is that we can at least reduce the scale of the pain, alleviate the worst symptoms, and give people the time and wherewithal to construct an entirely new social order that provides the needs of human development.

As opposed to just saying "well, the old social order met human needs that are no longer met, therefore we must scrap all the other kinds of progress we made and go back to the 1950s when white middle-class males dominated everything," a sentiment that is frightfully convenient for the usually white middle-class male speaker.

it's like, there is hopefully a better way to do things, to have modernity without atomization and alienation. But we will be far more likely to find that way, if we can put up a shield that will stop atomization and alienation from kicking in our ribs and bashing in our brains while we search.

[SolarpunkFan]

The article also seems to be based in part on a fundamentally cynical assumption- that people are basically bad and lacking in empathy, unless trained otherwise by traditional social conventions. I'm not sure I buy into that view of the world.

I... do think that there's a valid point buried in here. But the article's assumptions and employment of very questionable rhetoric undermines its credibility for me.

What I took away from the article was that we seem to be rudderless without others to catch us when we fall and that that's a major reason why society is a bit off the rails.

Whether or not that's true I don't know.

[TheFeniX]

Our elected leaders were raised in the heyday of naked liberalism and still talk as if it were 1994.

What? Isn't the average of a U.S. Congressperson around 60? Naked Liberalism my ass. These are baby boomers. Sure, yea, there might be some hippies there, but the last throw-down in the fight for head asshole was between two people 5 years past retirement age. These people are fucking dinosaurs. I'm not saying we should stack the Fed with 30-somethings, but get real for a moment maybe?

These people are as on the pulse of the next generation as <insert witty comment I'm too hammered to come up with here>.

This feels like some masturbatory bullshit. Like, X saw the light no one else did. It's BS feel-good nonsense. I see a lot of sane comments out of people, even in the Federal side. You've got Fossils who understand what it is to be a person without tons of money (Warren and Sanders) and you've got the younger guys (Castro and the like) the other old-hat fuckers are trying to beat into submission. There's no "loss" or "win" here. A guy like Trump won because Americans were fed up with the system and reacted poorly.

It's the same thing people did with Obama, just worse. It's easy to forget how popular Obama was due to his "inexperience" that everyone liked to saddle him with which turned out to be a huge boon with voters who were tired of the same bullshit. Even HRC ate shit on this in 2008 because she had no idea how much Americans hated the status-quo.

[K. A. Pital]

Well, the hope is that we can at least reduce the scale of the pain, alleviate the worst symptoms, and give people the time and wherewithal to construct an entirely new social order that provides the needs of human development.

You know that I consider the situation similar to the age of slavery, and for this reason I disagree with the alleviation policy, as alleviation of slavery allows us to perpetuate it. Good intentions, bad outcomes.

As opposed to just saying "well, the old social order met human needs that are no longer met, therefore we must scrap all the other kinds of progress we made and go back to the 1950s when white middle-class males dominated everything," a sentiment that is frightfully convenient for the usually white middle-class male speaker.

it's like, there is hopefully a better way to do things, to have modernity without atomization and alienation. But we will be far more likely to find that way, if we can put up a shield that will stop atomization and alienation from kicking in our ribs and bashing in our brains while we search.

I agree that regressing and looking backwards are not a solution. But these other kinds of progress, by fixating on them there is a very real and present danger that even they will be lost to reactionaries when the tide of reaction completes its rise. And it is far from over. The problem is a refusal to acknowledge the deep and inherent connection between alienation, collapse of traditional societies and modernity or, in other words, capitalism (all competing versions of modrnization have been wiped out by capitalism).

Recently a mass murdr happened in the Amazon, a murder of small landowners by logging corporation death squads. It barly made any headlines. The murders of modernity are concealed under “normalcy”. Those suffering ae the dispossessed, the tribal, the old-fashioned remnants of a gone world. But nobody cares, nobody gives two shits about that. I have little hope .

[The Romulan Republic]

Our elected leaders were raised in the heyday of naked liberalism and still talk as if it were 1994.

What? Isn't the average of a U.S. Congressperson around 60? Naked Liberalism my ass. These are baby boomers. Sure, yea, there might be some hippies there, but the last throw-down in the fight for head asshole was between two people 5 years past retirement age. These people are fucking dinosaurs. I'm not saying we should stack the Fed with 30-somethings, but get real for a moment maybe?

These people are as on the pulse of the next generation as <insert witty comment I'm too hammered to come up with here>.

This feels like some masturbatory bullshit. Like, X saw the light no one else did. It's BS feel-good nonsense. I see a lot of sane comments out of people, even in the Federal side. You've got Fossils who understand what it is to be a person without tons of money (Warren and Sanders) and you've got the younger guys (Castro and the like) the other old-hat fuckers are trying to beat into submission. There's no "loss" or "win" here. A guy like Trump won because Americans were fed up with the system and reacted poorly.

I've thought a lot about this since Trump won, and I've come to the conclusion that the narrative that "Trump won because working class Americans were fed up with the system/the establishment/corporations/economic hardship/political corruption" is... well, bullshit.

Or, at least, its only half the picture. One propagated by Trumpers, with collusion from the Bernie or Bust crowd, to blame Democrats for their own defeat and try to get the party to throw Social Justice issues (and the constituents those issues matter to) under the bus.

I don't really blame you for repeating that narrative, because its a very widespread one and it sounds plausible on the surface. Its got that element of truth, or at least "truthiness" in it that every good lie needs. But it doesn't really hold up.

You don't vote for a notoriously corrupt asshole billionaire who inherited a fortune, because you've got a grievance against the current political/economic status quo. You do that if you have a grievance against the current political/economic status quo, and you blame it on minorities/foreigners/"Social Justice".

It reminds me of how Confederate apologists say "They were fighting for states' rights, not slavery." Sure, its technically true- as long as you understand that the "right" of the states that they were fighting for was the right to own people, and that they were happy to abridge states' rights when it served that cause.

Likewise, its true that Trumpers were fighting against the system- if you understand that they blamed the system's failures on women and minorities and liberals, were specifically opposed to those aspects of the status quo that helped those groups, and are happy to prop up corporatism and political corruption as long as it serves to suppress those groups.

[Zaune]

On the other hand, I would argue that people with a grievance against the current political/economic status quo but didn't blame it on women, non-white people or hipsters had no great incentive to vote for Hilary. "Status Quo" might as well have been her campaign slogan, which might have been okay if the Obama Administration had been all it was cracked up to be but doesn't exactly inspire great loyalty or enthusiasm when your personal status quo involves working sixty-hour weeks to afford food and rent and a non-negligible chance of getting shot dead if you tick off to a cop.

[The Romulan Republic]

Well, the incentive would be "keep Trump and his fellow nut jobs out of power". Which was enough to win the popular vote, but not in the right places.

But yeah, I don't deny that Hillary was a poor choice of candidate. I just don't think that Trumpism can be attributed to well-meaning people frustrated by legitimate complaints against the status quo.

Its about hate, and greed. Even when its about something else, its ultimately about that.

Edit: I'll concede that some voters might have fooled themselves that Trump would somehow help solve their legitimate gripes with the "establishment". But if so, that's an impressive level of denial (or possibly shear ignorance of what Trump is and how he has lived his life).

Though I do recall some "progressive" anti-establishment types saying things like that if Trump won, then everyone would see how right they were and they'd win next time. It is... difficult to adequately convey my contempt for that level of arrogant overconfidence, callous willingness to treat the security of the world as acceptable collateral damage, and petty spite.

[aerius]

Well, the hope is that we can at least reduce the scale of the pain, alleviate the worst symptoms, and give people the time and wherewithal to construct an entirely new social order that provides the needs of human development.

You know that I consider the situation similar to the age of slavery, and for this reason I disagree with the alleviation policy, as alleviation of slavery allows us to perpetuate it. Good intentions, bad outcomes.

The first question we need to ask ourselves is "is our system worth saving?" Nearly everyone in the 1st world will answer with something along the lines of "for all its flaws, yes. We have democracy, freedom, human rights and all that other good stuff, we just need to fix a few things and everything will be great".

If I take my country in isolation, sure we've done great things and made a ton of progress over the years. We have universal healthcare, a decent social safety net, we embrace immigrants and multiculturalism and all that other good stuff. But that only happens in Canada, and there's a hell of a cost if you look at the other side of the coin. Like it or not, we're a consumer society, and where's all that shit made, and by whom? Oh. Yeah. To put it another way, our nice modern capitalist systems have exported the slavery to other countries so that we can pretend it doesn't exist and sleep soundly at night. And I'm not convinced that there's enough 1st world nations that are willing & able to put a stop to this in my lifetime.

What we have is probably the best we can hope for given the nature of our societies at the current time. We should all strive for a better future but I don't know if we can get there without first imploding our current system.

[The Romulan Republic]

Well, the hope is that we can at least reduce the scale of the pain, alleviate the worst symptoms, and give people the time and wherewithal to construct an entirely new social order that provides the needs of human development.

You know that I consider the situation similar to the age of slavery, and for this reason I disagree with the alleviation policy, as alleviation of slavery allows us to perpetuate it. Good intentions, bad outcomes.

The first question we need to ask ourselves is "is our system worth saving?" Nearly everyone in the 1st world will answer with something along the lines of "for all its flaws, yes. We have democracy, freedom, human rights and all that other good stuff, we just need to fix a few things and everything will be great".

If I take my country in isolation, sure we've done great things and made a ton of progress over the years. We have universal healthcare, a decent social safety net, we embrace immigrants and multiculturalism and all that other good stuff. But that only happens in Canada, and there's a hell of a cost if you look at the other side of the coin. Like it or not, we're a consumer society, and where's all that shit made, and by whom? Oh. Yeah. To put it another way, our nice modern capitalist systems have exported the slavery to other countries so that we can pretend it doesn't exist and sleep soundly at night. And I'm not convinced that there's enough 1st world nations that are willing & able to put a stop to this in my lifetime.

What we have is probably the best we can hope for given the nature of our societies at the current time. We should all strive for a better future but I don't know if we can get there without first imploding our current system.

And what of the price of "imploding our current system"? Because when societies implode, just the direct death counts can be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Never mind the very real possibility that what gets built afterward will be much worse than what came before, because collapsed societies tend to engender violence and extremism.

This smacks of classic apocalypse prophecy mentality: We are dissatisfied with the way the way that things are, so we imagine a future catastrophe that wipes out all the bad things (and people), so that the new utopia can be built on its ruins.

It makes for fairly good stories, sometimes. It makes an absolutely appalling basis for social/political policy.

Incremental reform is slow and frustrating, but sudden violent change is no less costly, and no more certain of success, however more emotionally satisfying the idea may be. A catastrophe may happen anyway, of course, despite our best intentions. But only a very callous, or very stupid, person would actively hope for that outcome.

[TheFeniX]

I've thought a lot about this since Trump won, and I've come to the conclusion that the narrative that "Trump won because working class Americans were fed up with the system/the establishment/corporations/economic hardship/political corruption" is... well, bullshit.

We've had this dance before: Who said anything about working class? No one "came out of the woodworks" to vote for Hillary. She put up good numbers for a low voter turn-out election. Obama, a black and relative unknown at the time, made inroads into middle class whites. I don't think even Bill Clinton did it as well as he did and everyone loved that intern banging walking sex-factory. What did Hillary do? She could barely win the female vote over an admitted "pussy grabber."

Sorry man, Democrats forgot how they were only universally a BIT LESS reviled than the GOP, because people liked Obama. They thought Obama's popularity applied to the them and people would come out to support Hillary when she championed LGBT rights.... a couple weeks after public support flopped that way.

Even Obama wasn't all that progressive of a candidate, but at least he could put on a face.

Or, at least, its only half the picture. One propagated by Trumpers, with collusion from the Bernie or Bust crowd, to blame Democrats for their own defeat and try to get the party to throw Social Justice issues (and the constituents those issues matter to) under the bus.

Yea, this coming from DNC insiders is such a Bernire or bust deal. Man, "Bernie Bros" had it right. At least those fuckers had balls to say "we're tired of getting fucked by the DNC and the GOP."

Warren for fucking life.

You don't vote for a notoriously corrupt asshole billionaire who inherited a fortune, because you've got a grievance against the current political/economic status quo. You do that if you have a grievance against the current political/economic status quo, and you blame it on minorities/foreigners/"Social Justice".

Yea, because Bush and Co fucking destroying the GOP didn't have anything to do with Obama crushing the ever-loving-shit out of a (at the time) establishment guy like McCain. McCain sold whatever was left of his soul to get the nomination and it showed. Hillary just bought it outright.

Likewise, its true that Trumpers were fighting against the system- if you understand that they blamed the system's failures on women and minorities and liberals, were specifically opposed to those aspects of the status quo that helped those groups, and are happy to prop up corporatism and political corruption as long as it serves to suppress those groups.

Trump actioned the worst of the worst the GOP had only barely tapped, I'm not arguing that. But even with all those people at his side, he couldn't beat "Killary" (NOTE: Obvious sarcasm, please save your jabs) in the popular vote. The guy put up, what? 3 mil votes over Mitt "who gives a shit about the guy" Romney? With an "energized" voting base?

Democrats lost in 2016 because Hillary is the DNC. And people fucking hate them both. Literally, she fucking bought the thing leading up to 2016 when Obama left them bankurput. She's the fucking cheerleader for worthless Democrats that got control in and around 2008 and gave us... what? What? The ACA? That's Obamas. He got all the credit and other Dems ate all the shit.

Meanwhile, Warren rightfully rips into Wall Street execs on Twitter and gets told by the GOP and DNC alike to cool her shit. And Obama does what? Sell us out more to the fuckers who fucked us, but left all that heat to slam the DNC.

Fuck em all man, 2016 was the DNCs to lose and they fucking lost it royally. This isn't some Bernie Bro and GOP bullshit. It's the reality. They portray themselves as the party of the people, but (with some exceptions) are a party of hacks for everyone "not you" just like the GOP. Only reason they are even remotely salvageable is that some are worth voting for unlike the GOP which is filled to the brim with morons and shills.

[Simon_Jester]

What we have is probably the best we can hope for given the nature of our societies at the current time. We should all strive for a better future but I don't know if we can get there without first imploding our current system.

If we become comfortable not having all our stuff be disposable/expendable/cheap, we could actually have a pretty good collective life without this massive global rich/poor divide, I think. A per capita GDP something like a third or a quarter that of the developed nations doesn't exactly mean having to live in squalor. World GDP, averaged out over the whole world, should be about right to support a living standard like that of present-day China. Maybe not as great as we'd like, but not horrible. And further automation is likely to do good things for productivity, further improving access to material goods and basic services.

So it's not so much that good standards of living are unsustainable. Certainly we can hope to live pretty well by 20th century standards. The problem is going to be shifting the economic underpinnings of the system into one that will work in the automated economy that can hope to provide for the whole world, instead of just having 80% of the world be miserable to support 20% in Elysium.

The current system may well have to 'implode' in that some of its basic underpinning just cannot continue to exist. The big one is going to be the core premise "everyone has to work to live." Developed nations cannot have a decent, viable civilization where that expectation still holds in fifty years' time, maybe not even in twenty-five.

Either the developed nations will have learned how to accommodate the fact that much of the population has no skills worth paying them a salary equal to the price it requires to support comfortable living, or they'll be living in some kind of grim meathook dystopia in which the elites gradually eliminate the underclass people they don't need until finally said underclasses blow up the machines in a fit of nihilistic rage.

Or, just as likely, a mix of the two outcomes looking at different countries.

[Zaune]

Well, the incentive would be "keep Trump and his fellow nut jobs out of power". Which was enough to win the popular vote, but not in the right places.

Perhaps. But I know from bitter experience that having to do a 'tactical' vote between one party that is more or less actively trying to kill you and one party that merely wants to make your life thoroughly unpleasant on the principle of "less eligibility", and any third party that doesn't include a pledge to make your demographic stop existing in its manifesto is hopelessly outmatched, it becomes very hard to resist the impulse to say "a pox on both your houses" and spoil your ballot paper out of pique.

[K. A. Pital]

If we become comfortable not having all our stuff be disposable/expendable/cheap, we could actually have a pretty good collective life without this massive global rich/poor divide, I think. A per capita GDP something like a third or a quarter that of the developed nations doesn't exactly mean having to live in squalor. World GDP, averaged out over the whole world, should be about right to support a living standard like that of present-day China. Maybe not as great as we'd like, but not horrible. And further automation is likely to do good things for productivity, further improving access to material goods and basic services.

What you say is quite optimistic and also based on a crude understanding of economics, sorry. First of all, GDP is an abstract figure meant to represent a money-value to the total sum of production in a given country. A low GDP does not necessarily mean a life of squalor and a high GDP does not necessarily mean the absence of poverty, although they are correlated. But the critical issue lies with the fact that GDP is also a measure of concentration of wealth. Extremely high "GDP" of certain banking enclaves and global financial centers does not mean that there is an abundance of production in these territories. Quite the contrary, it only indicates the territories which are being used to siphon wealth that is extracted at source from the territories where production takes place. The gap between Hong Kong and China, for example, does not mean that Hong Kong is an hyper-efficient production center, but rather only that is a conduit for capital flows (inflows and outflows) into the largest production zone in the world. Same with many of the huge figures of First World GDPs and many rich cities. Check the below link out to notice how GDP and consumption can differ a lot, and higher consumption be possible under much lower GDP:
http://www.cgdev.org/media/median-income-versus-gdp

As actual incomes, especially wage incomes, lie well below "GDP per capita" and the gap between "GDP" and actual worker income is only growing for the last 40 years, averaging out the GDP per capita becomes a strange method of solving the problem:


Would you please note the tenfold difference between GDP/capita and median income in one of the NICs of SEA, part of world's new production center, thank you.

The current system of production favors a spatial concentration of wealth. It is designed to produce this result, not the other way around.

What is the reason to pay more or provide more to a peasant or worker in the middle of nowhere, who has no control whatsoever over capital flows? There is a reason to pay more to people who exert at least some tiny share of control over the machines and over the capital flows, hence the concentration of wealth around "control centers", but everyone else is bound to be left behind. Concentration is natural. De-concentration is forced, and unnatural, and it is basically reversing the natural development of markets and capitalism itself.

So it's not so much that good standards of living are unsustainable. Certainly we can hope to live pretty well by 20th century standards. The problem is going to be shifting the economic underpinnings of the system into one that will work in the automated economy that can hope to provide for the whole world, instead of just having 80% of the world be miserable to support 20% in Elysium.

Why, if production is tightly concentrated, should anyone be provided with anything outside the immediate zones where production occurs (there, compensation levels will be determined by "bargaining" or, in terms I like more, class struggle) and the zones where capital flows are controlled (the super-rich cities)? To prevent a march on the cities? That can be dealt with. The outsiders should be provided with the bare minimum to stop them from coalescing into a serious rebellion. This level can be determined empirically, how cruel it may sound.

The current system may well have to 'implode' in that some of its basic underpinning just cannot continue to exist. The big one is going to be the core premise "everyone has to work to live." Developed nations cannot have a decent, viable civilization where that expectation still holds in fifty years' time, maybe not even in twenty-five.

Either the developed nations will have learned how to accommodate the fact that much of the population has no skills worth paying them a salary equal to the price it requires to support comfortable living, or they'll be living in some kind of grim meathook dystopia in which the elites gradually eliminate the underclass people they don't need until finally said underclasses blow up the machines in a fit of nihilistic rage.

Are you saying that the entire population of the developed countries should be basically turned into rentiers who live on rent extracted from their control (or rather, their corporate and government control) over the production and distribution of goods in the rest of the world? That is basically turning the entire First World population into a class of global bourgeoisie. It seems to me a horrible non-solution to the problem, one that exacerbates the current structure and looks dangerously close to the plot of 3%.

[K. A. Pital]

And what of the price of "imploding our current system"? Because when societies implode, just the direct death counts can be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Never mind the very real possibility that what gets built afterward will be much worse than what came before, because collapsed societies tend to engender violence and extremism.

But there is also a death count now, one that bothers you a lot less than potential collapse, because you're not directly exposed to it. It is a problem, because you're not on the receiving end of the stick, and you've probably never been, you can't appreciate what it feels like. And that is you, a person who generally holds progressive views, correctly thinks that a lot of Trump supporters and America Firsters are racists, etc. Think about how callous those people would be to others located halfway across the globe. There is a real possibility that what comes next may be worse. It can be worse with a collapse or without it, but the possibility is always there.

Incremental reform is slow and frustrating, but sudden violent change is no less costly, and no more certain of success, however more emotionally satisfying the idea may be. A catastrophe may happen anyway, of course, despite our best intentions. But only a very callous, or very stupid, person would actively hope for that outcome.

It may be that the person in question is entirely dissatisfied with the lack of progress and considers "incremental reform" simply no progress at all. It may be that this person is on the receiving end of the system's baton, so he/she is not certain of success after change, but hopes for it because the current situation was or is barely bearable for him/her. Think about this.

Do you really think I talk about the deep problems of wealth & poverty, alienation and desintegration of solidarity in the current system just because I'm a lazy privileged person who can't have a bit of patience with "incremental reform", or that I am a callous and stupid person?

[FaxModem1]

Wouldn't a fall of civilization have a much greater death count than what is normal for the world at large? Wouldn't that justify keeping things as is, or close to it as compared to a balancing of the books by destroying the current system completely?

[Knife]

Our elected leaders were raised in the heyday of naked liberalism and still talk as if it were 1994.

What? Isn't the average of a U.S. Congressperson around 60? Naked Liberalism my ass. These are baby boomers. Sure, yea, there might be some hippies there, but the last throw-down in the fight for head asshole was between two people 5 years past retirement age. These people are fucking dinosaurs. I'm not saying we should stack the Fed with 30-somethings, but get real for a moment maybe?

These people are as on the pulse of the next generation as <insert witty comment I'm too hammered to come up with here>.

This feels like some masturbatory bullshit. Like, X saw the light no one else did. It's BS feel-good nonsense. I see a lot of sane comments out of people, even in the Federal side. You've got Fossils who understand what it is to be a person without tons of money (Warren and Sanders) and you've got the younger guys (Castro and the like) the other old-hat fuckers are trying to beat into submission. There's no "loss" or "win" here. A guy like Trump won because Americans were fed up with the system and reacted poorly.

It's the same thing people did with Obama, just worse. It's easy to forget how popular Obama was due to his "inexperience" that everyone liked to saddle him with which turned out to be a huge boon with voters who were tired of the same bullshit. Even HRC ate shit on this in 2008 because she had no idea how much Americans hated the status-quo.

Was pondering this article while I took the dog to the groomer... I agree. Sounds like self masturbatory shit to me as well.

It makes a few vague remarks about how the younger generations don't do this, or see that it's wrong, but pretty much lumps society together in a monolithic block. The shit they are talking about is the moral shit pot that is the baby boomer generation. Not X, not Y, not the so called 'greatest generation' (GG) but the boomers. Sure, we can probably fine examples in each category, but they are exceptions and not rules.

This is the boomers looking at the country they tore up and wondering what happened to the nice place they inherited from their parents. X and Y are trying to wrest their power away from them and steal all their money. Kids these days don't do things the was boomers did, but boomers never stop and think they are the ones who raised those kids. Someone else's fault, always. They broke family bonds and the 'nuclear family' and wonder why X and Y haven't fixed it yet. They gutted social safety nets and wonder why it's failing and are worried they aren't going to get theirs and what's coming to them.

That's what pisses me off on this article, it describes a problem, then dodges who did it, who benefits from it, and who is stopping any sort of fix for it. Instead we'll just say 'society' and leave it at that.

[SolarpunkFan]

That's what pisses me off on this article, it describes a problem, then dodges who did it, who benefits from it, and who is stopping any sort of fix for it. Instead we'll just say 'society' and leave it at that.

I guess I should have read the article more carefully.

My apologies once more, even if they seem to ring hollow these days.

[Knife]

Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that’s what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis. Freedom without connection becomes alienation. And that’s what we see at the bottom of society — frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction. Freedom without a unifying national narrative becomes distrust, polarization and permanent political war.

I took this as the thesis statement.

Then the arguments:

First, they will identify themselves according to race.

Then they resort to tribalism. This is what Donald Trump provides.

If we are going to have a decent society we’re going to have to save liberalism from itself. We’re going to have to restore and re-enchant the covenantal relationships that are the foundation for the whole deal. The crucial battleground is cultural and prepolitical.

As I see it, it's an argument saying with too much freedom we break down into racist fascists. It pegs, again as I see it, things like frayed communities, broken families, and opiate addictions as signs and symptoms of too much freedom. While I strongly disagree with that link, those issues are also very old and have been 'dealt' with the same way for decades to poor effect (in this country anyway). The idea that if we just refocus on covenantal relationships as a fix is ludicrous. It is almost a good old fashion 'things were better in the good old days' argument. If we as a society can just 'get back to what I think it was when I was young and everything seemed to be working right' all would be well.

In my experience, most people under 40 get this. They sense the social and moral void at the core and that change has to come at the communal, emotional and moral level...

Many people my age and above seem clueless. Our elected leaders were raised in the heyday of naked liberalism and still talk as if it were 1994. .

This was his lip service to the truth but quickly lost with

History is full of examples of nations that built new national narratives, revived family life, restored community bonds and shared moral culture: Britain in the early 19th century, Germany after World War II, America in the Progressive Era. The first step in launching our own revival is understanding that the problem is down in the roots.

Which is more 'back in the good old days' shit.

The simple truth is that the current young and middle aged generations, under 40, didn't just pop into the world and the world turned to shit. Broken families have been an issue for over 40 years, how should <40 year old's be lumped in with the problem. They are victims, not perpetrators. The opiate problem, same. We are living in a shit world given to us and broken by our fathers and grandfathers (and mothers). To say the best thing to do is to 'go back to what made the good old days word' from the memories of 60-80 year old fucks who broke it is asinine. If the author had a shred of honesty, instead of 'we all need to get together and do what I did as a kid' he'd instead put forth an argument that to fix our society, perhaps the old fucks who broke it should lay down power, take a step back, and see if the young whipper snappers have better ideas than they do.

[K. A. Pital]

Is it "too much freedom" or freedom without responsibilty and attachment? As far as I can understand from the article, it is the latter.

I also disagree with the idea that a particular generation "ruined" the world and now seeks to absolve self of responsibility. Are we not all agents of the same system? A young person executing the wishes of old corporations and institutions ruled by 70-year olds is also culpable; and the 70-year old was also only an executioner, not the top-level decision maker, several decades ago.

[Knife]

Is it "too much freedom" or freedom without responsibilty and attachment? As far as I can understand from the article, it is the latter.

I don't see how they are connected. If the article is trying to say you can't have freedom without also being irresponsible, I would disagree. And rhetorical arguments he stated don't seem to follow this path though.

I also disagree with the idea that a particular generation "ruined" the world and now seeks to absolve self of responsibility. Are we not all agents of the same system? A young person executing the wishes of old corporations and institutions ruled by 70-year olds is also culpable; and the 70-year old was also only an executioner, not the top-level decision maker, several decades ago.

Well yes and no. As with most things, it's complex with a lot of gray. That said, I would propose some semblance of proportion. A 20 something year old only has so much power and is set in a world with certain social rules and constructs. Sure, a 20 something year old contributes to the 'machine' but has few opportunities to do otherwise.

Your 40 year old's are where the rubber meets the road, where as they could/should/would have the resources to make decisions without actually harming themselves unlike 20 something's. It is also when that group starts getting some political power, both in people their age being in politics and being a target group of said politicians pandering.