It's not the troubled economy. It's not the educational system. It's not teen pregnancy, government corruption, widespread drug use, the Electoral College, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, media bias, gas prices, political apathy, overpaid celebrities, or even Sarah Palin. The problem is that Americans have too much freedom.
The problem is free markets.
Americans no longer need each other as fellow workers. International trade has made us prosperous but also a nation of unconnected drones. We work and consume and shit and those are the boundaries of our existence. We regard our neighbors more as competitors or burdens than allies. We identify ourselves not by our principles (if indeed we even have any) but by what we choose to consume. We are a nation of aging adolescents, attaching the same importance to the size of our house or the model of our car or where we spent our vacation as teenagers do to being fans of a particular band.
The problem is freedom of communication.
With the Internet, it has become possible to associate ourselves almost solely with people who share our views. Are you an angry young feminist? Start a blog to meet other angry young feminists and denounce any dissenters as trolls or just delete their posts. Are you a libertarian? Start a blog and denounce any dissenters as socialists who just don't understand economics. No need to actually think or argue your point; just build yourself a soapbox, preach to the already-converted, and be drenched by the self-congratulatory circle-jerk as your readers tell you how right you are to agree with them.
The problem is freedom from consequences.
Don't feel like learning new job skills? That's OK, the government will raise the minimum wage, give you an earned income credit, subsidize your housing, and provide affordable medical care. Don't like your boring marriage? That's OK, you can walk away and still get half your spouse's stuff and maybe some spousal support, too. Did you buy a house you couldn't afford? That's OK, you can blame it on greedy Wall Street fat cats and maybe get the government to help with the mortgage payments. Or maybe you're a bank that made stupid loans and unsecured credit swaps? Well, hell, the government will cough up several hundred billion to take them off your hands.
We are materialistic, intellectually lazy, and financially irresponsible.
Any questions?
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2 comments:
I basically have to agree with: "materialistic, intellectually lazy, and financially irresponsible" (though maybe you have to be more specific and say which segment of Amercian society you're referring to: the "yuppie class" seems to be what you're referring to mainly). I'm not sure I agree that freedom of communication or free markets are necessary causes, but I think there's something to "freedom from consequences." There is a sense of entitlement people have as a result of (relative) affluence, government stepping in to bail people out, etc. (On the other hand, there are people that aren't well off that are too busy struggling to make it financially to spend leisure time educating themselves. I know a few such people.)
The big problem as I see it is a certain narrowness of intellectual horizons and ignorance in the American psyche. The affluent feel entitled and therefore are less motivated to better themselves. The struggling might be motivated, but have too little time to reflect and analyze, even if they wanted to. Religion provides people on both sides with ready answers and psychological comforts, and most people just aren't that skeptically inclined, not enough to question traditions and authority. It's time-expensive being skeptical and trying to sort out truth and falsehood, especialy if you've got a 50+ hour job and kids. (Incidentally, you might add "workoholic" to the list of American characteristics which is probably distinguishes our attitude from that of Europeans.)
Maybe part of the problem is that our culture is relatively young and hasn't yet gone through quite the same struggles as the rest of the world has had time to go through. I wonder, for example, if one of the reasons for the profundity of Russian or German art, music, etc., has to do with the extreme collective hardships people went through and the self-reflection the hardships led to. We've been comparatively a "carefree" and "easy" culture, insulated from the worst of the rest of the world's shocks.
I kind of hate to say it, but it may be our relative lack of real hardships that shallows out our culture. Sure, we've had the Depression, World War II, and other wars, but that was long ago by now, mostly out of our collective consciousness. Now we have the Iraq War and the threat of terrorists, but honestly, most of us aren't really directly affected by that unless we've got family serving.
Not that I'm hoping for hardship to come upon, however.
I think some of our shallowness comes from that disconnect you are talking about with other people, and that comes not from the free market per se, but from the extremity of our individualism relative to, say, Europe. Maybe that individualism is a luxury of our lucky affluence; it bears some thought as to why we as Americans (myself absolutely included) are less community-minded. When things are harder, you fall back on other people's help, and maybe become less individualistic in the process as you begin feeling more dependent.
The "financially irresponsible" part probably has something to do with our recent history of over-easy credit. People born before or during the Great Depression probably wouldn't max out their credit cards the way many of our generation do.
Hmmm, rare to see a comment that's longer than the original post. Lots of stuff there, so I'll try to stick to key points and careless generalizations.
I'm slapping that label on all Americans, while realizing that it may not perfectly fit one or two. I loathe smug yuppies but I also loathe old people who fucked up their finances and poor people who complain about being poor and middle-aged union workers who cry about losing job security nobody my age ever had and pretty much loathe everybody else, too. But I still think we're at least as good as anybody else.
Every society needs to find a balance of freedom and coercion. There are things that need to be done if the society is going to persist in its current form: have a standing army or you get invaded or colonized, collect taxes to provide a safety net or you get a workers' revolution, that sort of thing. So, yeh, it's not really that free markets or the Internet are causing America to fall apart but they're symptoms of a society in the process of fragmenting precisely because people now have the freedom to fragment.
Free markets provide material comforts but also make us less concerned with our fellow citizens, because there is that much less mutual dependence. But money is not the only thing in life that matters. As a nation, we have chosen to let our social bonds wither in favor of making even more money. I'm not even saying it's wrong; I'm just noting it as a fact.
Follow that with freedom of communication. Those people we do associate with are, more and more, resembling us. With the Internet, it has become so much easier to isolate ourselves within a comfortable social bubble. So, it's easy to avoid any sort of novel thinking, because you're that much less likely to be exposed to any new ideas.
Finally, we get to freedom from consequences. The form of irresponsibility changes with age, but every age group is guilty. Young people may be more likely to dig themselves into a credit hole or take on an impossible mortgage but middle-aged people are more likely to cash in on a divorce and the majority of Americans approaching retirement age have hardly anything saved because they spent it. And older people should know better. But they're not too worried - even if the money runs out, the government will pick up their tab for a nursing home.
So, let me recap. We are totally focused on money - I hear more grumbling about the money we're spending in Iraq than lives lost. We are stretching our minds less than ever - for proof, just look at Kevin Trudeau's book sales. We have less accountability than ever - the government gives out medical care but doesn't put extra taxes on junk food or body fat.
I think we as a nation are in real danger of turning into slugs, like in some horrible science fiction story where humans become dependent on machines or the lower classes and finally unable to control or even influence their own fate. History is full of decadent (read: rich and cultured but unable to put up a good fight) empires falling apart in the face of a better-organized, more determined enemy.
We could kick the probable causes and potential solutions back and forth all decade. But, if you look at the title, it's What's Wrong, not Why It's Wrong or How We Can Fix It. I haven't thought that far back or ahead yet.
You're right that our relative lack of foreign threats has made it easy and natural to be complacent. There may be no solution - maybe nothing can push us out of our lethargy. Our best hope would be that the rest of the world is becoming decadent faster than we are. The Soviet Union crumbled before we did - maybe China will, too.
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