The Crapocalypse

Can We Do Better Than Flinging Crap at Each Other as a Way of Life ?

**Official Transcript**
**Global News Network**

CHAOS BREAKS OUT IN CITIES WORLDWIDE

It was a puzzling and devastating scene. Everyday commuters, office workers, and cubicle dwellers began answering nature’s call wherever they were, in plain view. They seemed hypnotized, mesmerized, and entranced by their own bodily waste. Then they began gleefully flinging and slinging…their crap…everywhere….at everything…at everyone.

Anonymous sources say this “Crapocalypse”, as the internet is calling it, is the work of one Umair Haque, who created a virus which makes people seem to be overjoyed by crap, like it was freshly opened Play-Doh. Hence, zombie hordes flinging dung at everyone…rampaging through our cities…with no end in sight…there seem to be no stopping this…Crapocalypse…for now.

Back to you, Anderson.

**End Transcript**

That’s a pretty extreme, and extremely gross, scenario. I’m sorry (OK, not sorry).

Here’s what I mean to symbolize by it: gleefully flinging crap at one another as a way of life. It’s the only path left to success, security, stability, prosperity, in a declining society and stagnating economy. Does that sound like a crude but fair description of the meta-modern human condition to you?

The Crapocalypse, in which I fiendishly devise a virus that makes people joyfully sling crap at everyone else, is a rough analogy for (wait for it, I’m going to use a terrible buzzword for which I deserve to burned alive) what “late capitalism” does to us. Maybe we should just call it “American capitalism”, though, and skip the grad-school Marxism. Because it hasn’t had such a crappy effect elsewhere in the rich world. Scandinavia’s not exactly the Soviet Union, comrade, they have companies and stock markets too. But no matter. The point is that my little scenario is an extreme metaphor for what we’re incentivized, rewarded, encouraged, inspired, made to do by living in an economy that demands the worst of us, just to subsist.

Think about what’s left of what we used to call “careers”. Once upon a time, you could attain a comfortable middle class life by making things people actually valued, used, and benefited from. Today? You and I are rewarded most to make stuff which sucks the life out of cities, towns, societies, relationships, minds, spirits, lives. Hence, stagnation and decline. That’s a simply observable fact — teachers make peanuts, while lobbyists make millions, and so forth. That fact is The Crapocalypse by any other name: flinging crap at one another as a way of life.

We’re incentivized, as the beancounters say, with gigantic sticks and juicy carrots, to crap all over everyone else as the path to success, and should you think I exaggerate, consider that the most highly paid jobs in the economy — hedge fund managers, bankers, etc — are precisely those which subtract the most value from the economy, by blowing up everyone else’s savings, investments, pensions, businesses, lives, and futures.

So sure. You can be idealistic, and take a job which harms no one…but you’ll probably be cleaning hippie yurts for bartered food pellets. Sure, you can be brave enough to protest this mind-numbing disaster of a system, to say hold on a minute, this is fucked. Smooch, the kiss of death. Goodbye and good luck to you on the breadline, Trotsky.

Which just proves the same point backwards and sideways. Mostly, unfortunately, we’re rewarded to harm, bully, cheat, to crap on people, and grin pleasantly while we do it. To fling crap at one another as a way of life — not to make the world a better, more vibrant, more awesome and miraculous place. It’s the only path left to success, security, and prosperity in a declining society and a stagnating economy.

Hence, the Crapocalypse.

There are three different tribes who propose different ways to fix, prevent, reverse, mitigate the Crapocalypse. Here’s what they say.

The Puritans

The first tribe is the Puritans. You know who they are already. They want to dissuade, discourage, earnestly object the Crapocalypse away. Like the Puritans of yore, their fundamental concern is purifying society. Cleansing it of the threatening, harmful, dangerous…the crappy.

Culture warriors, the Puritans would react to my hypothetical scenario thus. They’d protest and chant against the crap-flinging zombie hordes. They’d put up “Don’t Crap Here” signs, hoping to sternly dissuade the zombified crap-hurling masses. They’d try to ban zombies from college campuses, and rid the libraries and lecture halls of any references to crap. They’d probably coin entire new systems of terminology for the crap, and write long essays about it, like this one.

Noble ideas. Destined to fail. Do you really think that signs, protests, and… terminology…would stop…crazed crap-slinging zombies? It’s a little idealistic.

So culture — norms and codes, mores and rules — alone probably isn’t enough to mitigate, prevent, or ameliorate the Crapocalypse. For the crap is a product of something deeper.

The Warriors

Meet the Warriors. They believe that if everyone’s turned into a warrior, given a sword and shield and made to fight to the death, then pretty soon, people will stop crapping all over each other. After all, shit’s a pretty useless weapon against a gigantic six foot broadsword whooshing towards your head.

Their answer to the Crapocalypse is: More competition! Free markets!! And so forth. The invisible hand will turn shit into miracles. They’re right. Except. These two things don’t work hand in hand. Free markets as we’ve erroneously built them, in failed marketplaces, are often the enemy, not the ally, of competition. Such markets (think mega finance, pharma, healthcare), dominated by a shrinking number of players, are “free” in the sense that they’re deregulated — but they’re not free in the sense that you or I can compete, truly choose effectively, enforce quality, and so on.

What’s the net result? Not that people fling less crap at one another. But that the best crap-slinger wins. Competition without true freedom, like in markets above, isn’t crap-reducing, but crap-increasing, selecting, intensifying. Because markets like the above can’t usually be truly competitive, free, open, they create monopolies naturally. For example, in healthcare, unless everyone is a doctor, because patients are vulnerable, confused, and desperate, unable to enforce quality, service, or price, “choice” doesn’t really equal effective “competition”. Hence, the player slinging crap the best tends to win.

It’s as if you stepped into the arena with your little sword and shield…determined to fight nobly…and suddenly, you found yourself face to face with Crapzilla, the greatest crapper in the world, towering thirty feet tall. He looked at you, smiled, shrugged…and with a flick of his tail, buried you alive in a massive avalanche of dung.

So just like culture alone isn’t enough, neither is competition in failed markets. The Warriors’ answer just turns death by the sword into death by shit. You can decide for yourself which is worse, but I’d vastly prefer being stabbed in the face to drowning in a gigantic turd tsunami. The Warriors want society to be a gladiatorial arena, in which crap-hurlers are swiftly killed by noble champions…but the truth is in the Warriors’ Way of free markets without true competition, what really happens is that the best crap-flingers rise to the top.

The Engineers

The Engineers are the last of my tribes. They want to design a crap free world. Crapocalypse? No biggie!! They say. We’ll pay people not to crap everywhere. We’ll put shit detectors on everything. We’ll track and monitor and surveil people. How can it fail?!

How can it succeed? Think about it. My drug releases people from their big inhibition. It makes them love flinging crap at people. Go ahead, pay them not to. Put sensors on everything. Track and monitor them with cameras perched atop every traffic light. They’ll probably…do it anyways. Just like they do coke, meth, crank, porn, prostitution, and so on.

The Engineers are modern day technocrats. Their solution to an economy where jobs, careers, opportunities, businesses, lives, are turning to shit, is to try to disappear it. Whether with bans, vigilant eyes in the sky, ticking meters, or little tiny slaps on the wrist.

The problem, though, is that incentives and disincentives depend on our values. If we value the stuff they’re trying to disincentivize…good luck stopping it. There are countless examples of technocratic wars against sin. But not a single one in history has been won. The War on Hard Drugs…The War on Soft Drugs…The War on Liquor…The War on Prostitution, Gambling, Porn.

All of this stuff was once prohibited, rationed, controlled, taxed. And while that might have brought the demand down, temporarily…it far from eliminated it, and also did so at tremendous social cost. Like filling up jails with innocent people. That’s exactly where a technocratic war on crap would probably end, too. While we might want to jail the truly bad eggs at the top, we probably don’t want to send every middle manager, cashier, and retail drone in the economy to prison.

So this vexing problem of a Crapocalypse can’t really be solved technocratically, either. There’s got to be a better way.

Systemic Problems Need Positive Answers

Where does that leave us? How do we end the Crapocalypse? Wait. Can we? Maybe we can’t! OMG. Maybe this is how everything ends. With us flinging crap at one another…until we’re all drowned in landfills of pointless, flatulent junk.

I’m slightly terrified and stumped. I’d bet you are too. Oh wait. I’m not really that stumped.

The answer’s pretty obvious. You have to get rid of my drug. You have to help people kick the habit. Their deviously crafted addiction to flinging crap. Just like bans, fines, and taxes — and definitely not protests, signs, and speeches — don’t do very much to stop people (risking their lives to) take massive amounts of coke, meth, and pot…except at great social cost…so too they can’t really do much to stop an addiction to flinging crap as a way of life, as the only path to material success, security, stability, happiness, prosperity.

Kicking the habit, on the other hand, might, just might, turn people back into normal, decent, civilized humans again. Anything short of that probably can’t.

Let me put that to you more plainly. What’s the great mistake the Three Tribes above make? Some of them want to protest crap. Some want to tax crap. Some want to fine crap. And so on.

But none of them offer people a way of life that’s better than crap. Remember how in the last chapter we discussed how an economy is a set of pipes? In each of the Three Tribes’ visions, what’s mostly flowing through the pipes of the economy is…still crap. It might be more expensive shit, if it’s taxed, or shit cleverly coated in sugarplums, if it’s banned, or slightly less shitty shit, if it’s fined. But it’s still basically shit. It’s not really the stuff that we actually need — whether that stuff is healthcare, transport, education, finance…or journeys to Mars, cures for cancer, cheap clean energy, and so on.

The Three Tribes have negative answers to the problem of us flinging at crap one another as a way of life — not positive ones. Answers that have to do with trying desperately to reduce the crap — instead of replacing it with something better. But life doesn’t really work that way, because people don’t really work that way. No one’s going to turn around and stop doing something they like, want to, have to…just because you say so, order so, tantrum so…until and unless you offer them something better.

Systemic problems need positive answers. You can’t truly change a system made up of interdependent parts merely by slowing the gears, or swapping one screw for another. You have to somehow swap out most or all the parts at once. And so negative answers don’t change systems.

You can’t really change people with mere laws, words, norms, or mores. You can change their behavior, a little bit, at the edges — and you can change their expressions, a little bit, at the margins. But you can’t really change what people want, desire, hunger for merely by protesting, naming, debating, banning, taxing, or fining it.

Negative answers don’t change people. Positive ones do. What does it take to change people? Institutions, systems, mindsets. That offer people better. If people can’t dream, they don’t change. They remain trapped by their egos, their anger, their thwarted hopes, their buried resentments, the guilt and shame that they can never let go of. They have to cling to all that…because at least it’s something that’s theirs. Hence, changing people — not just their outward manifestations — is about changing their aspirations, their inclinations, their burning, all-consuming passions. What they can devote their lives and selves to in the first place.

And that’s exactly what the Three Tribes don’t offer. They offer less shit, maybe, depending. But people are brainwashed, programmed, incentivized, paid, rewarded, forced, made to like, love, revel in crap. Whatever doesn’t offer better than that simply won’t break the habit.

Destroying Late Capitalism for Pokemon

Wait, Umair. Are you saying that we have to…destroy late capitalism?? Dude!! Sign me up!!! That’s what my culture studies professor told me to do with my One True Life!!

Hold your horses there, Che Brovara. Kind of. But not quite.

Yes. We do indeed have to destroy late — strike that, goddamit — American-style hyperfinancialized socially useless capitalism. The idea of gleefully flinging crap at one another as a way of life. Otherwise known as the Crapocalypse. But not by setting it on fire and burning it to ashes — unless you like living like a cave dweller (I didn’t think so). By using carefully picking apart its non-rotten bits as a vital ingredient to build something better.

You know how the Pokemon had different levels? Cute cuddly Pichu turned into adorable mostly powerless Pikachu turned into mighty, thunder-crackling Raichu. That’s the kind of thing we have to do with the economy. Not raze it to the ground, but transform it into something fundamentally more powerful, beneficial, awesome, self-sufficient. And probably a little more captivating, too.

Umair
London
April 2016