An Exchange With Lewy14
My on-line friend and all around good guy Lewy14 and I recently exchanged posts at Discarded Lies. Since it captures many of the things I've been thinking about lately, I post the exchange here as well. Please do join the conversation.
KevinV (responding to a graph showing the incredible growth in box office receipts since the late 70s):
This graphic actually displays one of my main reasons for moving in my heart from pretty mainstream conservative to a more radical position.
When I was younger, I remember debating the market and culture with my friends on the Left and a few on the further Right. They always sounded paranoid to me and more than a little off-base. To my mind, the market operated within the bounds of accepted legal norms, social traditions and cultural markers that tended to mitigate its worst features.
Well, now that I'm older I've seen my own arguments in practice and, wow, was I wrong.
In fact, the market has run rough-shod over all of these things and is even now in the process of running right over my country's existence as a nation, in the name of cheap labor and retail sales.
Over the past three decades of my life, I've seen just about everything that I've cared deeply for or, in fact, loved, turn to shit by the famous invisible hand.
It didn't take the steroid scandal to see that baseball had run off the rails, with age old traditions tossed aside for the chance to market bad-ass baseball caps to gangsters. But, as the Wall St Journal will tell you, baseball has never been so healthy. Revenue and attendence are at record levels.
You didn't have to sit through the left-arty cliches and "Jon" Stewart's obnoxious smarminess last night at the Oscars to know that the movie industry is a mere shadow of what it once was. Yet, as this graph shows, business is booming.
It's the same in field after field. Restaurants are doing well but the food, atmosphere and service have never been worse. Governments have never had such fat budgets, but their ability to perform their duties is laughable. Schools have never been so well funded, and they educate next to nobody.
Across the board, the market has achieved levels of rationality and uniformity that have crushed any other voices, imposing a lowest-common demoninator outlook as the money men look to the next cultural atrocity to squeeze more dollars out of an increasinly brutalized marketplace.
Look at our TV shows, our movies, god forbid, our pop music: blood and criminal chic fairly oozes out of it all while the Davos-going businessmen behind it lecture us on global warming.
I don't know where it's headed, but I am no longer afraid or ashamed to say that I am an enemy of all of it and if I find a movement that makes sense and in which I can fight it, I will.
Lewy14:
Kevin, I can understand your frustration but I think you have the wrong culprit: the "root cause" is not the market but the general malaise (at best) and self hatred (typical) of America itself. There is no will to exist, no will to be. Howard Zinn won, we are bad, we need to go away.
Unless and until this changes, no amount of "market reform" (meaning coercive control over what you are allowed to buy and what you are allowed to sell, and at what price) is going to help the situation one bit.
If we rediscover what it means to be an American and actually desire to remain Americans, as opposed to post-martial European-style or the northernmost Latin American country or some kind of zoo where the crowd is angry and the Americans are on the inside, in cages, being laughed and cursed at--if we say no to all that and can remain ourselves, then the market isn't going to be an issue.
Consider Japan. They have a free market, but the collective behavior that permeates that market is cultural, organic, and not (always) legislated. The Japanese are, right now, looking into the abyss and figuring out whether they want to make it. I think they will. And in ten years Japan will be just as overrun with Hello Kitty and fancy cars and gadgets and everything else, but the people will be happier and the population will grow and they will have made a reckoning with history (not the one we'd have them make, to be sure), and they'll be a lot more confident and assertive on the world stage. Or not. But the market will have little effect.
I was going to do a point by point refutation of your list Kevin but I'll just say briefly that I don't see how the Government Budget or poor schools is the fault of the market, or how deprecation of the market culture is going to solve these problems.
Just what kind of "market reform" is going to restore our collective will?
KevinV:
In a sense, of course, you are exactly right: the market is merely a tool, a set of rules formatting the domain in which lawful economic activity may occur. In that sense, it makes no more sense to blame this particular tool for the things in our culture and national life that I despise than it would to curse the hammer I've dropped on my toe.
Put that tool in a different context of use--by the Japanese Civilization or, imagine, a revived American nation no longer radically alienated from itself--and its handiwork retains all altogether different character.
Of that, I have no doubt.
But even a most benign tool leaves marks of its passing and its constant use impacts the environment around it with its effects. In the case of free market capitalism, that effect is all around us.
Today, it is pretty much an academic consensus except amongst a few diehards that Marx was a bad political philospher and and an even worse economist. And so he is. But the man's works would not have had such a tremendous impact on our lives in the West and in the Orthodox Civilization unless he had at least a few truths to tell. Most of the Communist Manifesto is unreadable drivel, but on the impact of this particular tool, Marx hit that hammer square:
The result is all around us. Men and women have been reduced to market units, trained from birth to size each other up on the basis of use and worth to self. Marketing has trained the vast majority of our countrymen to regard anything of more than a year's age as "history," meaning, useless, to be disregarded. What was shocking yesterday is commonplace today and will soon be replaced my something even more "shocking" to get our attention (and our dollars).
In this environment, the very sinews of traditional life are nigh on impossible, the comforts earlier generations derived from living right, according to recognized values, is fading quickly.
Have you ever wondered why the criminal is so popular now? Gangster films, gangster television shows, gangster rap, gangster fashion?
Because the gangster is liberal democratic capitalism's last man, its most perfect creation: freed from anything other than an unerring sense for the relative values of commodities—-be they drugs, clothing or women—-the gangster buys low and sells high, taking what he wants. On what basis is he to be opposed?
Morality? Whose? Where can you buy it?
Tradition? Whose?
The word honor has long since had not any meaning to most, and walks around like a chicken with its head cut off thanks to the last remnants of the Jacksonians still with us in the (mostly) European-American middle class.
Idiocracy is not our future; it is here.
KevinV (responding to a graph showing the incredible growth in box office receipts since the late 70s):
This graphic actually displays one of my main reasons for moving in my heart from pretty mainstream conservative to a more radical position.
When I was younger, I remember debating the market and culture with my friends on the Left and a few on the further Right. They always sounded paranoid to me and more than a little off-base. To my mind, the market operated within the bounds of accepted legal norms, social traditions and cultural markers that tended to mitigate its worst features.
Well, now that I'm older I've seen my own arguments in practice and, wow, was I wrong.
In fact, the market has run rough-shod over all of these things and is even now in the process of running right over my country's existence as a nation, in the name of cheap labor and retail sales.
Over the past three decades of my life, I've seen just about everything that I've cared deeply for or, in fact, loved, turn to shit by the famous invisible hand.
It didn't take the steroid scandal to see that baseball had run off the rails, with age old traditions tossed aside for the chance to market bad-ass baseball caps to gangsters. But, as the Wall St Journal will tell you, baseball has never been so healthy. Revenue and attendence are at record levels.
You didn't have to sit through the left-arty cliches and "Jon" Stewart's obnoxious smarminess last night at the Oscars to know that the movie industry is a mere shadow of what it once was. Yet, as this graph shows, business is booming.
It's the same in field after field. Restaurants are doing well but the food, atmosphere and service have never been worse. Governments have never had such fat budgets, but their ability to perform their duties is laughable. Schools have never been so well funded, and they educate next to nobody.
Across the board, the market has achieved levels of rationality and uniformity that have crushed any other voices, imposing a lowest-common demoninator outlook as the money men look to the next cultural atrocity to squeeze more dollars out of an increasinly brutalized marketplace.
Look at our TV shows, our movies, god forbid, our pop music: blood and criminal chic fairly oozes out of it all while the Davos-going businessmen behind it lecture us on global warming.
I don't know where it's headed, but I am no longer afraid or ashamed to say that I am an enemy of all of it and if I find a movement that makes sense and in which I can fight it, I will.
Lewy14:
Kevin, I can understand your frustration but I think you have the wrong culprit: the "root cause" is not the market but the general malaise (at best) and self hatred (typical) of America itself. There is no will to exist, no will to be. Howard Zinn won, we are bad, we need to go away.
Unless and until this changes, no amount of "market reform" (meaning coercive control over what you are allowed to buy and what you are allowed to sell, and at what price) is going to help the situation one bit.
If we rediscover what it means to be an American and actually desire to remain Americans, as opposed to post-martial European-style or the northernmost Latin American country or some kind of zoo where the crowd is angry and the Americans are on the inside, in cages, being laughed and cursed at--if we say no to all that and can remain ourselves, then the market isn't going to be an issue.
Consider Japan. They have a free market, but the collective behavior that permeates that market is cultural, organic, and not (always) legislated. The Japanese are, right now, looking into the abyss and figuring out whether they want to make it. I think they will. And in ten years Japan will be just as overrun with Hello Kitty and fancy cars and gadgets and everything else, but the people will be happier and the population will grow and they will have made a reckoning with history (not the one we'd have them make, to be sure), and they'll be a lot more confident and assertive on the world stage. Or not. But the market will have little effect.
I was going to do a point by point refutation of your list Kevin but I'll just say briefly that I don't see how the Government Budget or poor schools is the fault of the market, or how deprecation of the market culture is going to solve these problems.
Just what kind of "market reform" is going to restore our collective will?
KevinV:
In a sense, of course, you are exactly right: the market is merely a tool, a set of rules formatting the domain in which lawful economic activity may occur. In that sense, it makes no more sense to blame this particular tool for the things in our culture and national life that I despise than it would to curse the hammer I've dropped on my toe.
Put that tool in a different context of use--by the Japanese Civilization or, imagine, a revived American nation no longer radically alienated from itself--and its handiwork retains all altogether different character.
Of that, I have no doubt.
But even a most benign tool leaves marks of its passing and its constant use impacts the environment around it with its effects. In the case of free market capitalism, that effect is all around us.
Today, it is pretty much an academic consensus except amongst a few diehards that Marx was a bad political philospher and and an even worse economist. And so he is. But the man's works would not have had such a tremendous impact on our lives in the West and in the Orthodox Civilization unless he had at least a few truths to tell. Most of the Communist Manifesto is unreadable drivel, but on the impact of this particular tool, Marx hit that hammer square:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The result is all around us. Men and women have been reduced to market units, trained from birth to size each other up on the basis of use and worth to self. Marketing has trained the vast majority of our countrymen to regard anything of more than a year's age as "history," meaning, useless, to be disregarded. What was shocking yesterday is commonplace today and will soon be replaced my something even more "shocking" to get our attention (and our dollars).
In this environment, the very sinews of traditional life are nigh on impossible, the comforts earlier generations derived from living right, according to recognized values, is fading quickly.
Have you ever wondered why the criminal is so popular now? Gangster films, gangster television shows, gangster rap, gangster fashion?
Because the gangster is liberal democratic capitalism's last man, its most perfect creation: freed from anything other than an unerring sense for the relative values of commodities—-be they drugs, clothing or women—-the gangster buys low and sells high, taking what he wants. On what basis is he to be opposed?
Morality? Whose? Where can you buy it?
Tradition? Whose?
The word honor has long since had not any meaning to most, and walks around like a chicken with its head cut off thanks to the last remnants of the Jacksonians still with us in the (mostly) European-American middle class.
Idiocracy is not our future; it is here.
