Bryan recently mourned the death of a woman who was simply a good human being. While millions mourned the death of Steve Jobs, a flaming asshole who refused to acknowledge his own illegitimate daughter until forced to do so by a court and ran his company more like Captain Bligh than Mother Theresa, this woman was mourned by only a few local people. Because, see, being good is not what gets you rewarded in this neo-liberal capitalist society. Rather, being a flaming asshole is what gets you rewards — money, fame, acclamation.
And that’s pretty much true for all people who’ve been rewarded by this society. A poor person, if you’re down and out, will give you the shirt off his back. Some yuppie mom in an SUV? Not a chance. And stats show this is true society-wide — the poor give a far larger percentage of their income to charity than the well-off do, despite the fact that they can afford it least. But see, the poor haven’t been rewarded (yet?) for being flaming assholes. The well-off? By and large, they’ve been rewarded for being flaming assholes, not for being generous, caring, and giving. People by and large behave in a way that gives them the most rewards, that’s just a fact of biological monkey nature, and if what gets people rewards is being a flaming asshole… is it any wonder that America has become a land of flaming assholes who begrudge teachers their tenure and pensions, who begrudge poor people their food stamps, who say “stick it to them!” to poor kids trying to get a college education, who say we don’t need all those overpaid cops and firefighters and teachers and librarians and libraries with all those heretical books in them, in short, a land of people who act like complete Pharisees rather than like the caring and generous Jesus of the Bible? Hey, they’re just going along with the flow, it wasn’t *their* idea to set up society this way, and they don’t know any other way that a society could be organized ’cause this be the way it ‘spozed to be ’cause, like, it’s always been this way, right?
And don’t say “well, then we should start rewarding being caring and generous”, because being rewarded for being selfish and stingy is inherent in neoliberal capitalism. Unless you change how society is organized, you might as well say “water should start being dry.” It’s simply a violation of the fundamental nature of the beast that is neoliberal capitalism to behave in any other way — selfishness is a core principle of this way of organizing an economy. The evil philosophy of Ayn Rand that “greed is good and selfishness is a virtue” is fundamental to the entire way our economy operates, and most people just go along with what society rewards. This has been papered over from time to time with regulations to reign in the worst of capitalism’s abuses, but capitalism as currently comprised by its very nature rewards those who are most greedy and venal.
The problem… the problem is that this is not long-term sustainable. You can only loot and pillage so far before the whole ball of wax collapses. I don’t know what the solution is to reform a system of evil incentives that most people apparently never question, but the end point of where we’re currently going is hell on Earth, a dystopia that will make George Orwell’s 1984 look optimistic, and I’m tired of being in this handbasket.
— Badtux the Cranky Penguin
Badtux the Snarky Penguin 
Well no shit Penguin. Well said. I doubt this will ever be a discussion topic on Sunday morning tb. When I had money and was working I gave. Now no money and little given.
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The thing to do is to be one of those decent people, to the best of your abilities, and to make friends with other decent people. When The Collapse DOES happen, which I assume will be within my lifetime (and yours) we will have a network of people who will watch our back, and we will watch theirs. It’s no guarantee that we will have a decent life in the Grim World of the Afterscape, or even that we will survive. But it improves our odds. And if somehow we’re wrong, that it’s really NOT a handbasket world, then we haven’t lost anything by trying to be decent and surrounding ourselves with other decency wannabes. Cause no matter how flamey we might want to make our assholes, we probably wouldn’t have a chance to be Steve Jobs or Jamie Dimon anyway.
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One Fly, when someone breaks down in the desert, it’s always a scruffy-looking guy in a crappy-looking old truck or Jeep who stops to help, not one of the well-manicured yuppies in one of those expensive SUV’s. There’s more than one way to give.
Bukko, I’m seeing more of a post-Soviet landscape than a Mad Max landscape. That collapse took roughly thirty years to happen after Khrushchev set it in motion, and the result was ten years of utter misery and chaos followed by some partial recovery under a strongman semi-dictator. It’s what happens after you lose access to critical resources that you’d assumed your military would always be able to keep under your control… for example, once Czechoslovakia broke free of Soviet influence, the Moscow subways basically ground to a halt, because the Czechs were the subway-builders of the Warsaw Pact, every subway car in every subway of the Communist bloc came from there. We’ve built a lot of those kind of single points of failure in remote areas of our economy too… the problems in the computer industry caused by the Thailand flooding are a case in point, we are sourcing drives from anybody who has drives at this point.
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All too true, Badtux. I sometimes wonder if it all begins with what we model ourselves (nationally) upon? I’ve been reading (yes, again, messing up my brain) recently about Mithradates…”Rome’s greatest enemy”. Adrienne Mayor describes his empire east of Rome and then describes Rome…from the eyes of Anatolia and other places the Roman “wolf” viewed as hunting grounds.
Yes, flaming assholes indeed. And America has always had an admiration for Rome…..and thus, we may end as they do. It isnt’ going to be pretty.
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Joe Bageant said that in his time in Mexico he only saw two kinds of Americans behave like decent humans to their Mexican hosts – hippies and working people. He said most Americans showed up in town just long enough to hire servants for their gated homes and were rarely seen in town after that.
Tell me though, where could a person live these days where people are still mostly good?
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Frankly, I don’t/didn’t give a shit about either of them.
“Tell me though, where could a person live these days where people are still mostly good?”
Are you saying that you are good?
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A Soviet-style collapse would be better than Mad Max, Tux, but that would require a Soviet-style population. One that was mentally perpared to suffer through hardship, had fallback positions that would allow them to survive, and also had some sense of social solidarity. Unfortunately, the U.S. population is like a bunch of indulged adolescents with guns. Not all of them — I know plenty of decent people there — but there are millions of people who will go suicidally berserk if those fail-points are triggered in the food supply system.
Do you read Dmitry Orlov’s blog? You are probably aware of his “Collapse Gap” essay that was an Internet sensation in 2006, comparing how Soviet society fared when the USSR went down vs. how Orlov sees U.S. society dealing. He’s expanded it into a book and updated the details. I got a copy when he spoke on Orcas Island in the Puget Sound last October.
Orlov is Russian, so he witnessed the USSR collapse first-hand. Soviet society had advantages that Sovok America will not, such as how most of the housing stock was government-owned, so people were not evicted en masse when their communist jobs went away and they had no money. The apartment blocks were crappy, but at least they weren’t throwing the occupants out. Soviets had a tradition of growing a bit of food in whatever space they had available, or they had kinfolk in the country, so they didn’t outright starve. Life was dramatically shittier, as evidenced by the fall in life expectancy, especially for males. But it wasn’t Mad Max.
In the U.S., unfortunately, there is so much seething hatred of “each against all” and so much weaponry that I foresee mass shooting incidents — desperate, depressed angry men killing three or four family members, neighbours, ex co-workers, random people at the shopping mall… It will be like a fever burning through society. Or so I expect. Time will tell how it plays out. We’re strapped in on a roller coaster ride that’s going through the fog, and we can’t see the end of the tracks. No way of telling whether we’ll go under a beam so low it snaps our heads off, or the tracks suddenly end and we go hurtling offf into space…
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It’s the ultimate pyramid scheme. When those at the bottom no longer have anything to give to those above the whole thing will collapse. Have to agree that if there is a total collapse in this country it’ll be much worse than the collapse of the USSR. Most people haven’t a clue where their food comes from.
If we could convince those at the top to allow more resources(money) for those at the bottom that there’d be more for them by the time it all works its way to the top, then there might be hope for survival. I won’t hold my breath!!
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