“But how could this have happened?”
Fast-forward fifty years to a college classroom. Assume history is still being discovered, not just decreed. (Free inquiry is treason in a totalitarian state.) Assume the antecedent of “this” is the puzzling disparity between material and spiritual well-being, circa 2024, in mature democracies. Folks were unprecedentedly well off and pissed off. How come?
Social media, the complexity of modernity, citizen indifference, a sense of doom as wars proliferated and climate corroded, loneliness… various factors contributed to this result. Here’s my pet thesis:
We are experiencing the failure of capitalism.
Wiki, with characteristic verbal verve, describes capitalism as “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, economic freedom, consumer sovereignty, profit motive, entrepreneurship, commodification, voluntary exchange, wage labor and the production of commodities.” Click on any of these headings for further immersion in a soup of words.
Capitalism is so intrinsic to our American concept that its failure is unthinkable. How could we exist without Amazon or a new car now and then! Who would we be! What would people do with their time if they couldn’t spend money on stuff they didn’t need!
Capitalism has proven the mightiest engine for change in human history. Mankind’s circumstances changed more in the last three centuries than in the preceding five hundred. Drastic diseases and scourges have been eradicated or ameliorated. We have flown to the moon and invented Wordle. Born a generation earlier, I would not be alive at my age – that’s a big difference. “Better things for better living” was capitalism’s promise – and man, did it deliver. So why aren’t we all jumping for joy?
Turns out, better things don’t make for better living. Time-saving devices don’t make time worth saving. Task by task, chore by chore, capitalism deprived humanity of necessity. Few grew their food anymore. We could travel far, quitting our communities. We could sit in dark rooms and watch Fox News and order in. With less and less to do, time hung heavy. We developed anodynes to ease the pain: video games, extreme sports, pills, pugnacious politics. We wondered why we were here and what the fuck. More and more opted not to have kids, a damning indictment of being.
Cranky, we found fault with all authorities. We had time to be cranky, so why not? Worse, we felt like losers, deprived of celebrity, private jets, all those winners’ gewgaws. Pre-capitalism, humans were too busy surviving to wonder why. Their pastor or master told them. Now free to think for themselves many concluded, uh-oh, life’s more pain than pleasure, more chore than cheer, why bother?
The genius of capitalism transformed us into units. Unit almost rhymes with eunuch. We weren’t needed anymore, not really. This made us sad, mad, bad.
What makes us happy? Hope. Not what we have but what we don’t. The star over some cruddy cradle. Love. Belief we matter, any evidence notwithstanding.
Hope can’t be packaged and peddled – not easily, not for long. We must find it within, invisible, inaccessible, resistant to repair or even a good talking-to. Some find it in creeds, others in their passions or pastimes. I in words. Hope makes me happy. I don’t want to be comfortable, I want to be trudging – in the direction of my dream! I want to strive so hard I hurt. No pain, no gain.
Capitalism gave us what we wanted. But what we wanted wasn’t what we wanted. So what happened next?