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Musings Report 2023-37 9-10-23 The Taboo on Honestly Identifying Social Decay?
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The Taboo on Honestly Identifying Social Decay
The secular faith in America is relentless, euphoric optimism, preferably based on technological innovations that spread frictionlessly through the populace via "market demand."
In other words, solutions that require no real sacrifices or tradeoffs: the new innovation spread like magic, providing more comfort, convenience, novelty and status, plus improved productivity and of course, vast new opportunities to reap gargantuan profits.
This can-do spirit is useful, as it breeds confidence that all problems can be solved, once they're identified.
The downside is that when problems are clearly unsolvable with frictionless tech innovations or modest government policy tweaks, then identifying them becomes taboo.
I sense this taboo against identifying social decay throughout the zeitgeist / social-media climate. Mainstream economists point to how great the economy is doing, and studies showing people may feel the nation is faring poorly but they're completely satisfied with their own lives, i.e. everything's great and getting better.
Mainstream commentaries hype "solutions," no matter how farfetched or costly, because to admit the problem is fundamentally economic and social is taboo.
Many people put a partisan spin on various manifestations of social decay, but in my view the source is primarily economic and secondarily cultural/social.
As historian David Hackett Fischer showed in his masterful book The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, humans respond to soaring costs of living and resource constraints in the same way throughout history: their response to this rising economic-material stress is social decay and breakdown.
The economic-material stresses arise from 1) the expansion of the human population and per capita consumption of food, minerals, metals, wood, fuel, etc., 2) depletion of resources due to exhaustion of available deposits or decline of renewable resources due to climate change, and 3) diseases / pandemics borne by trade routes spread, reducing the working population.
This social decay and breakdown manifests in very familiar ways: rates of marriage decline, an increasing percentage of children are born out of wedlock, crime and social disorder increase, social mobility falls, people abandon what's no longer financially viable (farms, trade, etc.), beggars and diseases proliferate, and eventually people are forced by their inability to afford the basics of life to revolt.
These cyclical manifestations are recounted in The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper and Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker.
The proper context for this cycle of rising stress and decay / breakdown is humanity's limited palette of coping mechanisms for dealing with chronic economic-social stresses and insecurity (i.e. precarity). We turn to self-medication (food or drink that reduces our stress), distraction (entertainment), anger against the supposed sources of our stress ("the other"), rituals and rites, and as a last resort, abandoning whatever is no longer working and moving to some lower level of consumption and (hopefully) stress.
The problem is that all these coping mechanisms come with tradeoffs: we become addicted to mood-altering substances and behaviors, our ability to sustain the increasing stress / workload decays and collapses (what we now call burnout), we lash out at "the other" in frustration, and so on.
As our status in the social hierarchy drops, we slide into social defeat: we give up and become incapacitated.
Human famously habituate to just about any condition, even the most wretched (the Gulag prison camps, for example), and those who are still secure and comfortable find it easier to look away and hurry back to their enclaves rather than admit the social decay is terminal / unsolvable within the status quo, which is, after all, the source of the decay.
I have written many posts detailing the immense decline in the purchasing power of wages / labor over the past 45 years, a decline that accelerated rapidly post-pandemic and was quickly papered over with trillions of dollars of "free money" stimulus. None of this "free money" actually solved any of the sources of financial precarity or stress, they just served to "kick the can down the road" a few years.
I have also discussed the equally catastrophic decline in the quality and durability of goods and services, a hidden form of declining value / purchasing power, and the increasing insecurity of the workforce, outside of the few remaining protected sectors such as government employment.
If we cast aside the taboo on honestly identifying America's social decay, we come up with these obvious (and therefore taboo) manifestations:
1. Soaring homelessness, fueled by mental illness, addiction, loss of affordable housing and the rise of economic precarity (few menial jobs are left in the economy, etc.).
In the San Francisco Bay Area (7.5 million population) and Metro Los Angeles (12.5 million), the homeless / "street people" have neem visible for decades, but their numbers exploded around 2017-2019 into vast encampments where there had been no encampments. Cities and town with few or no homeless experienced a rapid rise from near-zero to chronic homelessness.
2. We can debate the sources without any resolution, of course, but it's clear that economic precarity / stress breaks down family ties as those who were marginally adapted to economic demands and costs slip and fall. In Japan, this has manifested in Hikikomori, the rise of social recluses who rarely leave their rooms, and the alienation of aging parents from their adult children.
Young people avoid marriage and having children because the financial stresses are too high, as are the pressures of finding a reliable, trustworthy, secure mate. People hire others to care for their parents because they can't handle the additional burdens of elderly care on top of demanding jobs and childcare. In other cases, the generations are alienated from each other. Permanent adolescence is also a social reality, as people no longer want to be inconvenienced by caring for children and elders.
3. The decay of ethical / moral standards and social obligations. Correspondent R.V., who managed rental properties for many decades, recently reported that where he once could find one reliable tenant among three or four applicants, the ratio has slipped to one in ten applicants. Financial obligations that were once viewed as sacrosanct are now viewed as optional: rent, auto loans, student loans, credit cards, etc.
Once again we can endlessly debate the causes, but in my view the decay of social responsibility is partly the result of the moral rot of the elites seeping down into the masses: the elites are now self-serving, prioritizing maximizing their self-enrichment by any means available over any remaining shreds of civic duty or interest in serving the common good.
Corruption is now so rampant that it's been completely normalized: it's no longer even recognized as corruption, it's simply "the way the system works."
4. The inability to get anything large-scale done in a timely or cost-effective manner. Bridges and subway extensions take decades to gain approval and cost-overruns are in the billions of dollars. Defective building materials bought on the cheap overseas rust and fail, and so on. The priority is political jockeying among the self-interested parties, now called "stakeholders," and on bureaucrats flexing their powers by withholding their stamp of approval to justify their power/budget.
5. The stunning degradation of mental and physical health. The pressures to keep up with relentlessly higher work/life demands increases the rates of burnout, something I've experienced three times now over my 50+ years of work (and the reason why I wrote my brief guide to burnout).
As for our collective physical health, it has plummeted to lows unimaginable a few decades ago: 40% of the populace is obese, 60+% are overweight, metabolic disorders are now the norm, as are anxiety and depression. The degradation of "food" (highly processed, overly greasy, sugary, salty) is one cause, along with a collapse in physical activity / fitness.
This feeds another taboo, which is revealing how many medications one is taking. "Health" has been redefined from "not needing any medications" to "consuming handfuls of costly medications to be healthy." To say this is Orwellian and Kafkaesque in the extreme is an understatement.
6. The multiplying adverse consequences of social media addiction and toxic engagement-seeking media: the scarier and more horrifying the click-bait headlines, the greater the audience "engagement" and thus the higher the profits flowing to the media platforms.
Apologists point to the usual transparently flawed "studies" to "prove" social media addiction isn't harmful, but this is yet another manifestation of moral rot: the damage being wrought by social media addiction is so widespread that it beggars description.
7. The general rise of lawlessness. As noted above, the rot of lawlessness starts at the top and infects the entire populace. The guilt-ridden elites assuage their own self-enrichment by giving common criminals a free hand to act as predators on the masses, while they protect their own disregard for the law with highly paid legal teams, tax avoidance schemes, private security, etc.
8. The general rise of polarization and extremism, coupled with the decline in social trust and civic virtues, for example, basic politeness. Is it any wonder that loneliness and alienation are also on the rise?
9. Extreme wealth-income inequality. As I've documented many times, the top 10% own roughly 90% of all income producing assets and collect roughly half of all income. This drift to concentrated wealth and power began about 50 years ago and has accelerated in the past 20 years of exploitation via globalization and financialization.
The top 10% dominate the mainstream technocracy, governance and media, so it serves their interests to present a happy face of economic growth and tech innovations, what I summarize as: "since we're doing great, everyone's doing great." Not so, but this offers a comforting illusion to those who benefited so asymmetrically from the declining security of the general populace.
As Marx observed, when the populace subjected to chronic economic precarity, "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
If we dare to violate the taboo by being bluntly honest about social decay and moral rot, we too have a sense that everything that was once solid is melting into air, and the melting has a long way to go.
It is perhaps cold comfort, but we can gain some solace by realizing this cycle has repeated many times in human history, and perhaps we should approach it with humility rather than hubris.
We know one thing: acting as if the social decay isn't real, or seeking to diminish it or cloak it in phony finery--none of these accomplish anything but adding the problem of denial/obfuscation to the sources of social decline.
Highlights of the Blog
Reinventing Democracy 9/7/23
We're Living in a Neofeudal Bubble 9/5/23
September 1, 2025: Fed Reaches Inflation Target, Cheese Sandwich Costs $120 9/1/23
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
My 94-year old Mom caught Covid in her assisted living building, her first infection, which fortunately is relatively mild. The building went from zero Covid a week ago to 20+ cases this weekend.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
The Collapse of Civilisation is an Unprecedented Opportunity -- the "upside of down" lessons of history....
The Hidden Brain Connections Between Our Hands and Tongues
How Community Companies Can Smash Monopolies (via Sadie)
Thousands of Old Wind Turbine Blades Pile Up in West Texas (via David E.)
Acid with Pink Floyd and harems with Paul McCartney--the wild life of Stash, the playboy prince-- flamboyant aristocrat-geezer rocker is reanimated on TikTok via a pro PR team....
Rural areas sacrificed for Xi Jinping’s new city, satellite imagery shows (via Cheryl A.)
Why Human Societies Need to Believe in Myths in Order to Exist
The Mouse Utopia Experiments | Down the Rabbit Hole (24 min, via Ryan K.)
Japan wrestles with its views on ‘outside people’ amid population crisis -- Koreans still not "Japanese" after multiple generations of living in Japan....
Airbnb’s NYC Listings Could Be Down 70% after September 5-- a drop in the bucket that possibly portends a change of trend...
How one laughing VHS technician saved 95-year-old Michael Roemer’s career-- "If I could have made popular films, I would have," he says. "But I believe in something. If I betray it then I destroy myself."
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them." Philip K. Dick
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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