An Open Letter to the Internet
Dear Everybody –
I’ve sat on the following for… well, a couple of years now, waiting for either the “right time” to come or for someone’s shitty take to goad me into rage-posting it. But there never will be a right time. Or, rather, any time is the right time, because the dynamics I’m complaining about show no sign of slowing down, though they may shift their focus.
In short — please stop trying to save the world. More specifically, stop trying to save the world from each other.
Forgetting the obvious
I’d like to float the suggestion that maybe you’re all overlooking your common enemy?
I dunno, it’s just a bit conspicuous that while everyone’s busy trash-talking each other about vaccines, social programs, gender identity and race, there’s far less talk of… say… eating the rich.
Hmmm 🤫 👀 😊
Not that I’m here to advocate for eating the rich, either. I merely invoke the catchphrase in an effort to remind you all that “divide and conquer” is the oldest trick in the book.
The mutual hatred between conservatives and progressives is a bigger problem than any of their respective pet causes, and the pandemic has served as a lever to foment that hatred among the many to the benefit of the few.
Even if you’re skeptical of that claim, it should be obvious that plenty of fat cats nonetheless benefit from your rancor, paranoia and self-righteous preening — and they’ll continue to get away with it as long as you mistake those vices for activism. While your cause célèbre shifts every few months, theirs remains pretty fixed. And persistence is key to long-term success.
A map of the road to hell
Obviously, the “unprecedented” global disruption triggered by Covid was going to have major effects on just about every aspect of politics, trade, culture, economics, etc. etc. etc. But for a hot second there was some hope (at least on my part) that its enormity would also dwarf our everyday squabbles and promote greater unity — as, for example, 9/11 (very) briefly did.
You don’t need me to tell you that such unity never really manifested. If anything, the pandemic and its fallout only accelerated the trends toward binary thinking that already dominated our politics and culture. It seems to have driven the wedge deeper economically too. That’s no coincidence — in fact, the economic problems have caused the other ones.
Some economic backstory
You could say the whole mess started at the end of World War II, when the U.S. emerged as the leading global superpower. This new status established the dollar as a global reserve currency — one that other nations would use in common and would serve as the basis for their currencies.
While that cemented America’s role as a world leader, it ironically also set us up for the classic double whammy of debt and inflation. It turns out that being head honcho is expensive, and holding the world’s reserve currency even more so. In addition to all the military and foreign aid engagements that the job entails, we now had to make sure there’s enough of our cash to go around for the entire world.
This would have been manageable if our domestic output kept enough money flowing back to us in the form of exports. But that’s pretty hard to manage when you’re busy being the world’s babysitter/sheriff.
So it was only a matter of time before we had to print more dollars to keep up with everything. Which brings us to (fanfare please) Nixon’s move to detach the dollar from the gold standard, thus turning it into a fiat currency.
(if you really want to dunk your head into the causes and effects of fiat currency, check out this deep dive into the history of money. But long story short: it was implemented as a means for the central bank to inject more cash into the economy during rough patches — like, say, a muhfuggin’ pandemic — and therefore make that rough patch easier on everyone).
This new power would prove to be a godsend for many Americans; but its price— as you’ll observe in the above chart — is a little something called inflation. I probably don’t need to explain what inflation is; but its downstream effects are very much worth noting.
How inflation makes great kindling
The fun (read: not fun) thing about inflation, if you didn’t already know, is that it widens the wealth gap. No pedophile lizard people or lemur-murdering oil tycoons required.
This is because although inflation raises the price of everything, it does not raise those prices at the same rate (all else being equal):
- Consumer goods tend to rise most quickly and noticeably. This is a drag for everyone, but at least the wealthy have a cushion against it. Not so for the working class, however.
- Wages tend to rise more slowly than the price of goods, which prevents the working class from keeping up with the higher cost of living, often driving them further into debt as a result.
- Many investable assets (real estate, gold, oil, and even stocks) tend to gain value — so those who own such things will actually make money off of inflation. And those people, overwhelmingly, are the upper classes.
So it’s a pretty clear-cut story of the haves and the have-nots. But the huge twist is that this mess was not caused by fat greedy evil white men in waistcoats, at least not primarily. Remember where this all started — with the Allied (and particularly US) victory in WWII.
How good intentions make bad paving
Since Internet discourse is built on dubious, inflammatory statements that are technically correct, let me try one of my own: we’re literally in this mess because America beat the Nazis so hard.
Now, since I think the Internet school of discourse is shitty, let me restate the above idea as a more widely-accepted truism: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Finally, since widely-accepted truisms are kind of pointless as a thesis (remember every English composition class you ever took), let me go full Goldilocks on this and try the less pithy, more boring, more informative middle-ground approach.
Specifically, there are two lessons that can be teased out from between the clickbait and the cliches:
1: Benevolent policy can have disastrous downstream effects. Fiat currency, for example, enables central governments to support their citizens during times of hardship in a way that would be impossible otherwise. But it does so by delaying (not solving) a fundamental scarcity problem, and will eventually punish those same citizens via inflation as a result.
If you disagree with my conclusion here (or even if you don’t; but especially if you do), then now is a great time to look at the second — and more important — principle I mentioned above:
2: Never, ever, ever, ever just “trust the data.” On the one hand, it’s ridiculous of me to claim that the Greatest Generation is to blame for our current woes because they kicked Hitler’s ass too hard. On the other hand, it’s not. Data is just data — but meaning (from which we derive morality and therefore judgment and therefore conflict) depends on what data is included in a given analysis, and how it’s interpreted. There is no picture without a frame, but a frame is inherently a limit.
A great big cultural hat trick
With the stage now beautifully set for tragic, inevitable, unintended class warfare, here is where things get really fascinating and/or nauseating.
Despite the economic context neatly teeing this up, things haven’t devolved into another pseudo-Marxist throwdown. Yes, we still talk that “eat the rich” talk occasionally… but it often has a bizarre undertone of being directed at our neighbors rather than actual one-percent-ers.
This makes no sense at first glance, but remember: we’re in the 21st century now and the rules have been updated!
Everyone wants their own punching bag when things start going south. Always have, always will; human nature, no news here. But now for the crazy 21st-century update: thanks to social media, everyone can have their own punching bag. In fact, they now expect it.
But there just aren’t enough billionaires to go around. When everyone is piling into Elon Musk’s mentions at once, your personal rage against him starts to feel less fun. Fortunately for that misanthropic streak we all have, there’s an easy way to project our financial frustrations onto a bigger target:
i d e o l o g y ! ! !
Turning your anger toward political, cultural or philosophical problems will greatly expand your scapegoat options once the Musk mosh pit gets too crowded. Somewhere out there, you will inevitably find a sub-genre of soyboy or Greta Thunberg or Andrew Tate who fits your exact vision of everything that’s wrong with humanity. Once you find them, go to town.
This, I think, is why people can’t just agree on eating the rich any more. Ask one side, and they’ll tell you our widening wealth gap is caused by a kind of proto-socialism that favors its enforcers (easy to conclude if you read Animal Farm in high school). Ask the other and they’ll tell you it’s capitalism run rampant (equally easy to conclude if you read The Jungle in high school).
Both are correct — and this, too, works out brilliantly to the benefit of the 1%. The lower-class resentment that would otherwise be directed squarely at them gets diffused onto their proxies: the lower class. Once half of the country is convinced that the other half has been brainwashed into being the fat cats’ drooling flunkies, they’ll expend all their energy tearing into said other half rather than the actual fat cats.
After all, people who are just as wealthy and powerful as you (that is to say, not really) are a much easier target than those who are more so. You just need to convince yourself that, in this case, it does not count as punching down.
By the way, human nature
Let me reiterate that I am not arguing for the guillotines to be brought out. Quite the opposite, in fact. Any kind of warfare — be it military or cultural, between races or classes or political parties — will only perpetuate the cycle, because no victor will be enlightened or virtuous enough to break it by means of their own diktat.
Call me a cynic, but I’m convinced that the vast majority of people instinctively act in their own self-interest much of the time. Barring that, they’ll act in the interest of their tribe or family, however that’s defined. This applies even to those who sincerely strive to do otherwise. It applies to me, and you, and those in the upper echelons of science, government, media, etc.
The difference with that latter group, of course, is that they have the ability to steer entire nations and cultures with their decisions. But they will inevitably end up pursuing their own self-interest in doing so — sometimes on the basis of more or less flimsy rationalizations, sometimes without realizing it at all, and sometimes (though seldom) with outright, self-aware malice.
Neither good intentions nor check-and-balance systems can fully prevent this from happening. When you get a bunch of individuals in power, all under their own pressures and incentives that may or may not overlap, this self-serving effect is just as likely to snowball as it is to be caught and corrected. Whether one happens or the other is kind of a coin toss.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s common fucking sense.
In any case, I don’t really believe in conspiracies, at least not at the level of global control. The odds are vastly against the formation of any oligarchy whose individual members are all sufficiently disciplined, organized and unified to pull off world domination.
But still — everyone tries to exert control, and the scales will inevitably tip in favor of some rather than others. And there’s an inertia to that control as well: to those who have, more will be given, and from those who have not, even what they have will be taken away.
Eventually, of course, this dynamic strains to its breaking point and the whole thing snaps back — the mighty are cast down, the lowly raised up, etc. etc. And then it starts again.
These observations are not remotely original. Yet it’s bafflingly easy for us to ignore the pattern and indulge in the delusion that our tribe will prove to be the exception, once it finally gets the power it deserves.
Have none of you read Tolkien?
Fear your neighbor
If global response to the pandemic has further concentrated power among those who already had it, then those in power will probably favor courses of action that preserve this “new normal.” I don’t think this is controversial.
Consequently, they will try to come up with some kind of moral rationale that supports those courses of action — the better to convince others and themselves. And they will inevitably succeed in doing so, because data is infinitely interpretable.
But such action, and the rationale that undergirds it, cannot maintain traction without widespread support. Public discourse becomes the foundation of authority; in other words, the powerful derive their power from the beliefs of normies like you and me.
In short, you are very likely being exploited — albeit unconsciously, for the most part — by those who lead the many monolithic yet diffuse institutions on which you depend. This includes those in government, finance, commerce, media and, yup, religion.
Progressives in particular should be more sensitive to this, as suspicion of the establishment is literally the starting point of their philosophy. But conservatives should also look more askance at their own preferred “experts” and “peer-reviewed studies” — still, their reluctance to do so is at least more in character for them.
But if you want, sure: keep assuming that your Fauci fanboi classmate or anti-vax redneck neighbor is the problem.
Hell, I’ll even give you an excuse to ignore me — and thereby maintain your comfortable stranglehold on perceived moral absolutes — by smearing myself with the heresy outlined below.
Finally, a resolution and an appeal
I, James Powers, do here explicitly affirm my belief that the jab (or whatever other line in the sand is being drawn at the moment) is a matter of individual conscience, and that any given person may have perfectly understandable reasons for either approving or rejecting it.
This is not to say that all such reasons are equally valid. But everyone makes their choices for a reason, and should be given the benefit of the doubt until that reason is clearly understood. And, perhaps paradoxically, I hold a deep, willful contempt for your conviction to the contrary — probably while still liking you as a person, incomprehensible as that may seem.
Sadly, I expect more than a few of you will have long since decided to not engage with me any further and thereby risk infecting your ideological purity.
And I suspect the smart ones are most likely to react this way. I’ve been baffled over the past few years by the arrogance, self-righteousness and naivete on display from people I otherwise know to be extremely intelligent, empathetic and critical thinkers.
If you think there is one neat narrative to tie everything up (e.g. “people who get the vaccine are spineless government pawns” or “those smooth-brained hicks would sooner chug horse de-wormer than do what they’re told”), well… whatever. I have no illusions about changing your mind; in the end, I’m just here to vent my spleen like everyone else.
But like — come on.
At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, we’re in really difficult, REALLY confusing times where it makes PERFECT SENSE to give your fellow working-class American the benefit of the doubt, rather than immediately and pathologically assume the absolute worst about them. Seriously boggles my mind how so many people seem to find that approach controversial.
Anyway, this is the part where you say, “oh looooook! Another spineless MODERATE touting CIVILITY because he’s not WILLING to face the TRUTH.”
And then I say, with all the uncivil venom and righteous indignation that I can muster on my part –
Fuck that.
Not “fuck you,” by the way. Fuck THAT. There’s a big difference.
