Collapse

[Chris]

I don't remember if I've linked this thread here before, but you might want to take a look at it:

Remote Viewing: Timeline until the Year 2100

I see a lot of upheavals ahead, even big ones. I'm not sure about a total collapse however. What you are talking about is the kind of one which happened during the final cataclysm of Atlantis and that truly was an "end of the world" type of scenario for civilization back then. Even then mankind survived and even was thriving later on in other places until things start to become more degenerated as time passed.

If a big collapse would happen then most of us would die. Perhaps some might survive, but what kind of a life that would be? It would be basically mayhem all over the place. Interestingly certain astrologers are saying that after 2025 a new phase for humanity will start. If actually a new source of renewable energy is found then it could turn things around a lot. However, as it's said in that thread there too, we can't just be complacent about it. We have to be active and be the change in the world, if enough people wish to have a better world and actively participate on creating one then we possibly can have a good timeline even in the near future. Is it probable? Maybe not, but if no one tries anything then we will descend more into this degenerate technological Orwellian and Huxleyan dystopia. It's already bad enough.

Interesting timelines, thanks.

Personally, I don't expect a major worldwide cataclysm and collapse as in the end of Atlantis, rather a local civilizational collapse and reset as in the fall of the Western Roman empire.

At least initially. We will see if any of that comes to pass. Certainly, there are signs that a collapse scenario can take hold and accelerate any year now.

[Emil El Zapato]

My thought for the day, big changes come in small packages and it really is an evolution, not a revolution. The revolution occurs at the tail end of the decades and even centuries of incremental changes brought about by a 'trend' in positive social consciousness which, of course, is bastardized by those in a position to 'get more for me'. Human nature at its most basic and animal low plugs on creating groups and people like Trump and today's conservative parties. But we march on with hope in our hearts and minds. Bottom line is that we are evolving to a better tomorrow. Glitches like the last few years happen and inevitably go bye-bye when all the people who were not dropped on their heads from a 2nd story window as kids have had enough.

[Aragorn]

My thought for the day, big changes come in small packages and it really is an evolution, not a revolution. The revolution occurs at the tail end of the decades and even centuries of incremental changes brought about by a 'trend' in positive social consciousness which, of course, is bastardized by those in a position to 'get more for me'. Human nature at its most basic and animal low plugs on creating groups and people like Trump and today's conservative parties. But we march on with hope in our hearts and minds. Bottom line is that we are evolving to a better tomorrow. Glitches like the last few years happen and inevitably go bye-bye when all the people who were not dropped on their heads from a 2nd story window as kids have had enough.

I would agree with the first part of what you're saying ─ evolution instead of revolution ─ but I cannot agree with the second part. From my perspective, there has for many years already been a slow but steady buildup of far-right momentum, and not of any enlightenment or "evolution for the better". The far-right is getting stronger and more vocal every day, whereas the traditional ruling caste of politicians ─ who are not left-wing at all, but will profile themselves as such in the media when it suits them ─ is also gradually showing more and more of its incompetence. This in turn strengthens the purveyors of the far right and draws more undecided people over to that camp. So ultimately, I believe we are in for a far-right takeover.

And by the way, I am not talking of the United States of America. The same thing is happening here in Europe. It's not a strive for idealism, but merely a power struggle between the headless chickens in government and the headless chickens in the streets. And whoever wins, we're fucked.

[Emil El Zapato]

I would agree with the first part of what you're saying ─ evolution instead of revolution ─ but I cannot agree with the second part. From my perspective, there has for many years already been a slow but steady buildup of far-right momentum, and not of any enlightenment or "evolution for the better". The far-right is getting stronger and more vocal every day, whereas the traditional ruling caste of politicians ─ who are not left-wing at all, but will profile themselves as such in the media when it suits them ─ is also gradually showing more and more of its incompetence. This in turn strengthens the purveyors of the far right and draws more undecided people over to that camp. So ultimately, I believe we are in for a far-right takeover.

And by the way, I am not talking of the United States of America. The same thing is happening here in Europe. It's not a strive for idealism, but merely a power struggle between the headless chickens in government and the headless chickens in the streets. And whoever wins, we're fucked.

It would be hard to argue that ... but I'm trying to remain optimistic.

[Chris]

My thought for the day, big changes come in small packages and it really is an evolution, not a revolution. The revolution occurs at the tail end of the decades and even centuries of incremental changes brought about by a 'trend' in positive social consciousness which, of course, is bastardized by those in a position to 'get more for me'. Human nature at its most basic and animal low plugs on creating groups and people like Trump and today's conservative parties. But we march on with hope in our hearts and minds. Bottom line is that we are evolving to a better tomorrow. Glitches like the last few years happen and inevitably go bye-bye when all the people who were not dropped on their heads from a 2nd story window as kids have had enough.

This is the collapse thread. I'm talking about devolution not evolution

I would agree with the first part of what you're saying ─ evolution instead of revolution ─ but I cannot agree with the second part. From my perspective, there has for many years already been a slow but steady buildup of far-right momentum, and not of any enlightenment or "evolution for the better". The far-right is getting stronger and more vocal every day, whereas the traditional ruling caste of politicians ─ who are not left-wing at all, but will profile themselves as such in the media when it suits them ─ is also gradually showing more and more of its incompetence. This in turn strengthens the purveyors of the far right and draws more undecided people over to that camp. So ultimately, I believe we are in for a far-right takeover.

And by the way, I am not talking of the United States of America. The same thing is happening here in Europe. It's not a strive for idealism, but merely a power struggle between the headless chickens in government and the headless chickens in the streets. And whoever wins, we're fucked.

Sadly, I fully agree. Scary times we live in. Looks like the 1930s all over again.

[Chris]

An excellent summary of what ails America, why society is collapsing, why the average person can't make ends meet and why the antiwork movement is so important and gaining ground.

https://eand.co/how-greed-made-ameri...ry-458e47f1ce0

How Greed Made America a Poor Country

How America Became the World’s Newest Poor Country — And Fascism Became Inevitable

Here’s a little question or two about the American economy. I’m going to give you three guesses. Ready?

My lovely wife is a doctor. She burned out treating Covid patients, and wanted to take a year or two off, and be close to her elderly dad. She’s taking a break to do research. Now she’s at America’s finest hospital, a place which is a household name worldwide. They recruited her because she has degrees from some of the world’s finest medical institutions. She has her own office there. She directs a team of several people. They run studies to save kids’ lives.

Guess how much money she makes?

I’d bet that you probably guessed north of $100K, maybe $200K. You’re — very — wrong. She makes something in the region of $50,000. Sound like a lot? A little? We’ll get to that.
Now guess how much the hospital administrators make.

Maybe this time you guessed around $150K, or $200K. Wrong again. They make in the millions of dollars, every year.
This hospital is a “non-profit.” LOL. Why should the “administrator” of any non-profit be making more than a million dollars a year? When people who are doing real work, which means saving kids lives, not just shuffling numbers in spreadsheets and taking a cut, are making a fraction of that?

Does that sound sane to you?

Why am I telling you this? So you feel bad for my wife? Well, maybe you should, because when she looked up the inequity, let me tell you, she was incandescent. But not really. It’s an example — an especially egregious one — of what really broke America.
Greed.

It is impossible — flatly impossible — for the average American to make ends meet. I can tell you that as an economist, one of the only really good ones America’s ever had. Americans grew poor because their economy failed them. But a poor society can’t afford many things. Things which matter. Like democracy, truth, reason, goodness, decency.
Societies faced with sudden descents into poverty implode into authoritarianism, just the way American is. Greed broke America in this larger, truer sense.

But Americans don’t really understand it yet, I think, just how extreme and out of control greed really is in America — and how, paradoxically, it left society poor. Too poor to afford to even be a functioning country or democracy anymore, in the end, and so America’s just imploding now.

Let’s do a little math first, to prove the point that it’s impossible to make ends meet, and then I’ll teach you a little bit about how what’s normal in America is completely and totally abnormal in the rest of the entire world, more or less.
The median American income is about $35K. That is what millions of Americans earn. For a “household,” meaning in economic statistics, a family of four, it rises to about $60K.

It is impossible, and I mean impossible, to live on that level income. That is a median income more suited to a poor country than a rich one. But let’s prove it.

Rent? The average rent for an apartment was $1124 in 2021. That’s $14,000. That’s half of the average person’s income eaten up by rent alone. Now we have…all the other expenses of life. Let’s start with the other big one in America: healthcare. The average cost for a family paying for healthcare was almost exactly the same: $1152. Bang. Another $14K. That’s the average American’s entire income gone, on just rent and healthcare.

But maybe you object — my employer pays for my healthcare. Or maybe I don’t even want healthcare (LOL, you mean you can’t afford it, I get it, we’ll come back to that). Sure — it’s not going to make much difference in the end. The average American spends about $1200 “out-of-pocket” even if they’re insured by their employer — let’s call it $1500, because that’s surely an underestimate. That leaves us with maybe about 14K of income per year for the average person — and we still haven’t gotten to most bills.

You need a car in America, to get much of anywhere. You need insurance for it. The average monthly car payment is $600. Let’s call insurance another $100. That’s $700…a month. Or $8400 per year. Suddenly, we’re left with about $5K to cover everything else you need in life.

Water, electricity, gas to put in the car. Internet. A mobile phone. The average water bill’s around $100 per month — bang, another $1200 gone — and now we’re down to just about $3800. Internet and a phone? Call them another $100 per month. Now we’re down to $2600. Electricity? Another $100 per month. Now we’re down to just $1400. Average annual cost of gas to put in that car? It’s about $1100.

Now you’ve got just $300 left.

But you still have to feed and clothe yourself. Your kids. Pay for random stuff like maybe a toy here and there, a treat. I’m sure I’ve left plenty of stuff out that isn’t remotely a luxury — like paying off student loans.

The point I’m trying to make should be crystal clear by now — not least because you’re probably living it. Making ends meet in America is flatly impossible. It cannot be done. My lovely wife’s income is so low that it doesn’t even cover her expenses — car, travel, a hotel every now and then because she’s asked to work overtime regularly.

The economic effect of all this is somewhere between a joke and an embarassment. I’m subsidising this world-famous billion dollar institution which pays its “administrators” millions, because my wife isn’t even paid enough to cover her basic living expenses. Think of how ridiculous that is. The reason those administrators earn millions is because I’m effectively paying them to employ my wife — after they get a cut of overcharging Americans for operations and medicine. But this story isn’t personal — it’s social. Those economics — people can’t make ends meet — are absolutely fatal for a society.

If you can’t make ends meet — a whole society — then what’s the point? Why bother getting educated? Why bother being part of the hard work of democracy? Why bother trusting anyone else? Everything soon enough begins to break down catastrophically, and society stops being one.

America’s a poor country now, and that’s why it’s collapsing. Let me explain a little further.

Even if you move up the social ladder, and “buy” a nicer house, and a nicer car, because you have a slightly bigger income, how is that achieved? Through debt. America is a debtor society. Americans are in massive, massive debt — lifelong debt. Americans die in debt. These are forms of debt which simply don’t exist in the rest of the world — “medical debt,” “student debt” — managed by weird, sinister institutions which don’t exist in the rest of the world, either, like “credit scores.”

But to be a debtor society is aberrant. It is not normal. At least not in the sense of being a modern, functioning one. Because it means that a society of people like that is too poor to afford things like democracy, truth, reason, sanity, care, goodness, decency, and so on. Yes, I mean that, and I’m going to prove it to you shortly.

First, I want you to understand just how norms of greed produced this paradoxical situation of poverty.

Let’s come back to my wife for a moment. When she applied for the job, she was shocked at how little they offered her. I told her that’s just how America is, and she should make a counter offer. She’s a noble person. She wants to help kids, to heal people. The money didn’t matter to her. And she’s not a very good negotiator — especially when it’s angry looking mean misogynistic dudes on the other side of the table. They offered her just 30K to begin with, I believe. She managed to up it. But.

See how…exploitative this is? How disgusting? To offer a person as little as you can? For doing work you want them to do…for you? You are seeing how far you can push them, how much you take from them, how much you can cheat them. Maybe “cheat” is a strong word. But the people making her this paltry offer — not even enough to pay for things like buying a car and driving it back and forth and having a place to live — were making millions.

Now think about it. There’s my wife with all her degrees and knowledge and passion and so forth. What’s it all worth in America? Not even enough to live on. So how bad is it for someone who doesn’t have all those degrees? Just some average person who, decently enough, just wants to be a plumber or teacher or whatnot? How does that make a person feel? Where does it leave a society? When cheating others is a norm, when you can never have enough, even if you have millions upon millions, even when more or less everyone else has too little…can a society really function? You see, in Canada or Europe, she’d do fine — they’d offer a decent salary with good benefits and so on. The idea that it’s OK to begin from a place of exploitation would be considered deeply immoral and antisocial. But not in America.

That level of greed — the extreme level, where I exploit you as hard as possible and smile — is considered normal in America. There is nothing much wrong with it. It is a social norm in that sense. It’s just the “way things are,” acceptable, even justifiable.
But this is profoundly, totally, completely abnormal almost anywhere else in the world. If a hospital administrator was making 25 or 50 times what the average employee at the hospital was — millions — it would be a national scandal in most other countries. People would be shocked, and bewildered, and ask things like: “are they embezzling money? Then how did they get to take so much?”

This situation, obviously, isn’t just about hospitals. It’s about everything. My wife, despite being an academic and a doctor with multiple degrees, is, in this job, just a schlub. She’s just a commodity to be exploited by a class of “administrators” and “executives,” who are totally, utterly ruthless when it comes to greed. Their greed is literally world-beating, and they don’t consider it greedy to earn millions for doing nothing of value, they just consider it.…normal. They feel entitled to it. This norm? It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, except maybe when it comes to war criminals. Those are strong words, but I mean them. Again, in most of Canada and Europe this level of greed would be literally quite incomprehensible.

But in America, it’s systemic. And it’s what made America a poor country. Think about, I don’t know, Amazon. It employs armies of people — who can barely take bathroom breaks, who are managed down to the microsecond by algorithms. They earn a pittance. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is so rich he could vaccinate the planet single-handedly (spolier alert: he hasn’t and won’t). Google’s notorious for stiffing “temp” workers, who are legendary for being stiffed across the economy. Adjunct professors make barely enough to live on, and teachers are paid like paupers and then asked to risk their lives during Covid.

The average person in America has been completely, utterly, totally failed by the economy in a way that a modern society hasn’t seen since the Soviet Union or the Weimar Republic. But you know what happened to those? One collapsed into Nazi fascism, and the other, into authoritarianism.

That link between economic stagnation and social collapse? It’s not a coincidence. This is the part where I teach you why societies which impoverish themselves, like America has, can’t afford things like truth or goodness or decency or democracy. It should be obvious, though, and I bet many of you have already figured it out.

What can’t my lovely wife afford, on her paycheck, which is basically less than minimum wage? Well, she can’t afford to fund a working society for anyone else. She’d like everyone to have healthcare, and she’d definitely have voted for Bernie or Liz Warren had the Dems had the stones to put them forward instead of Biden. But it doesn’t matter. Because on an income of $30K, or even $50K, there is not enough left over in taxes to pay for a functioning society.

We didn’t cover taxes in the example above. If we did, the average earner at $30K would pay the government $2,500. That would have put us deep in the red — even deeper — in the example above. But it would also have had a pernicious secondary effect, a hidden one. That is not a large enough payment to fund a working society like in say Canada or Europe, made of public healthcare, retirement, transport, education, and so forth. It just isn’t…enough.

You’d need to either tax the rich way, way more, and cap their incomes, even if informally, through norms that disdain greed and hold it in contempt and shame and disgrace, as happens in Canada and Europe. Or you’d need to charge the average person around 50% of their income — but at $30K, which isn’t enough to live on in the first place…well, it’s even less so.

You cannot have a modern, functioning society with these failed, Soviet economics. America is in what’s known as a poverty trap. It needs desperately to become a modern society, but can’t become one, because the average person can’t afford it. This is the same trap the Soviet Union found itself in — and that is why it collapsed.

Democracy dies this way, as a result of a nation falling into poverty. Why? Think of even my wife, the educated doctor. When she gets home — overworked, asked to work weekends, given little to no time off, because, remembers, she’s just a schlub to this world famous hospital — the last thing she has any real energy or time for is democracy. A nation of people in that position — overworked, underpaid, given no time off — are too weary and tired and harried to sustain the exercise of self-governance. That is why democracy fails to catch fire in poor countries to begin with. Nobody much can afford it.

But darker waters lie ahead, too. What dies next, because a nation is too poor to afford it? Well, things like trust do. When you work your bones away, for a pittance — and yet elites earn millions for doing nothing of value, just shuffling numbers, and taking their cut, like my wife’s so called “administrators,” why would you have much trust in the system? This is where the Trumpists are — and on this point, who can blame them? America’s working class really was betrayed. It was abandoned to predators, by greed, left impoverished, and as a result, it has no trust left in governance, institutions, systems, or elites.

As trust dies, what happens next? People give up on truth and decency and goodness. Everyone else has been turned into a rival, an enemy, a competitor, for a tiny amount of money, food, income, shelter. Relationships can’t form in such a way. Bonds break.
When you’re out there, working your bones away for not even enough to live on, what do you feel? Anger. Rage. Humiliation.
And you look for reasons. To explain something. Why are you nobody and nothing? Why is it that no matter how hard you work, or how honest you are, you end up humiliated, nose ground down into the dirt? You turn to fanaticism. Fundamentalism. Extremism. This way lies social collapse, at an even more fundamental level: radicalization.

What do the humiliated want? Justice, in the form of revenge. This is where America’s working class is. They are out for blood, because they want vengeance. For what? For being humiliated, for so long, abandoned and forgotten and left impoverished and hopeless, by people less honest and decent than them. Ground down into poverty — while elites, like “hospital administrators” and “lobbyists” and “exceutives” bank millions, billions. They are led to aim their rage at scapegoats, by demagogues — because humiliation makes your mind stop working. All you want is revenge, because that is the only thing that will give you life meaning, make you feel like you mattered at all.

That is how a society dies
.
That is how America died.


If I ask my wife’s “hospital administrators” something like “hey, aren’t you guys ashamed of this? My wife makes a pittance for doing real work, while you guys pull in millions for shuffling numbers and taking a cut? And pretending all this is about people’s health?” They’ll look at me like I’m the crazy one.

Because it’s not shameful to be this greedy in America. But it should have been. It is in the rest of the world. It’s considered a moral failing, a sign that you’re a defective human being, that something is seriously wrong with you. Nobody wants anything to do with you. You are a laughingstock, a social buffoon, a disgrace, a failure as a person.
But in America, it’s OK to be greedy, not shameful. It’s what’s taught at Ivy League schools and justified by both sides of politics. The problem is that norm of greed left most of society itself humiliated. Because the most ruthless and selfish and greedy ran unrestrained over everyone else, until there wasn’t even left to live on. The impoverished who were ground into dust, meanwhile, finally exploded, humiliation seeking revenge.

That is the inside story of how America died. Everything else is just details, really. I wonder, though, if America will ever really get it.

Umair

January 2022

[Emil El Zapato]

An excellent summary of what ails America, why society is collapsing, why the average person can't make ends meet and why the antiwork movement is so important and gaining ground.

https://eand.co/how-greed-made-ameri...ry-458e47f1ce0

How Greed Made America a Poor Country

How America Became the World’s Newest Poor Country — And Fascism Became Inevitable

Here’s a little question or two about the American economy. I’m going to give you three guesses. Ready?

My lovely wife is a doctor. She burned out treating Covid patients, and wanted to take a year or two off, and be close to her elderly dad. She’s taking a break to do research. Now she’s at America’s finest hospital, a place which is a household name worldwide. They recruited her because she has degrees from some of the world’s finest medical institutions. She has her own office there. She directs a team of several people. They run studies to save kids’ lives.

Guess how much money she makes?

I’d bet that you probably guessed north of $100K, maybe $200K. You’re — very — wrong. She makes something in the region of $50,000. Sound like a lot? A little? We’ll get to that.
Now guess how much the hospital administrators make.

Maybe this time you guessed around $150K, or $200K. Wrong again. They make in the millions of dollars, every year.
This hospital is a “non-profit.” LOL. Why should the “administrator” of any non-profit be making more than a million dollars a year? When people who are doing real work, which means saving kids lives, not just shuffling numbers in spreadsheets and taking a cut, are making a fraction of that?

Does that sound sane to you?

Why am I telling you this? So you feel bad for my wife? Well, maybe you should, because when she looked up the inequity, let me tell you, she was incandescent. But not really. It’s an example — an especially egregious one — of what really broke America.
Greed.

It is impossible — flatly impossible — for the average American to make ends meet. I can tell you that as an economist, one of the only really good ones America’s ever had. Americans grew poor because their economy failed them. But a poor society can’t afford many things. Things which matter. Like democracy, truth, reason, goodness, decency.
Societies faced with sudden descents into poverty implode into authoritarianism, just the way American is. Greed broke America in this larger, truer sense.

But Americans don’t really understand it yet, I think, just how extreme and out of control greed really is in America — and how, paradoxically, it left society poor. Too poor to afford to even be a functioning country or democracy anymore, in the end, and so America’s just imploding now.

Let’s do a little math first, to prove the point that it’s impossible to make ends meet, and then I’ll teach you a little bit about how what’s normal in America is completely and totally abnormal in the rest of the entire world, more or less.
The median American income is about $35K. That is what millions of Americans earn. For a “household,” meaning in economic statistics, a family of four, it rises to about $60K.

It is impossible, and I mean impossible, to live on that level income. That is a median income more suited to a poor country than a rich one. But let’s prove it.

Rent? The average rent for an apartment was $1124 in 2021. That’s $14,000. That’s half of the average person’s income eaten up by rent alone. Now we have…all the other expenses of life. Let’s start with the other big one in America: healthcare. The average cost for a family paying for healthcare was almost exactly the same: $1152. Bang. Another $14K. That’s the average American’s entire income gone, on just rent and healthcare.

But maybe you object — my employer pays for my healthcare. Or maybe I don’t even want healthcare (LOL, you mean you can’t afford it, I get it, we’ll come back to that). Sure — it’s not going to make much difference in the end. The average American spends about $1200 “out-of-pocket” even if they’re insured by their employer — let’s call it $1500, because that’s surely an underestimate. That leaves us with maybe about 14K of income per year for the average person — and we still haven’t gotten to most bills.

You need a car in America, to get much of anywhere. You need insurance for it. The average monthly car payment is $600. Let’s call insurance another $100. That’s $700…a month. Or $8400 per year. Suddenly, we’re left with about $5K to cover everything else you need in life.

Water, electricity, gas to put in the car. Internet. A mobile phone. The average water bill’s around $100 per month — bang, another $1200 gone — and now we’re down to just about $3800. Internet and a phone? Call them another $100 per month. Now we’re down to $2600. Electricity? Another $100 per month. Now we’re down to just $1400. Average annual cost of gas to put in that car? It’s about $1100.

Now you’ve got just $300 left.

But you still have to feed and clothe yourself. Your kids. Pay for random stuff like maybe a toy here and there, a treat. I’m sure I’ve left plenty of stuff out that isn’t remotely a luxury — like paying off student loans.

The point I’m trying to make should be crystal clear by now — not least because you’re probably living it. Making ends meet in America is flatly impossible. It cannot be done. My lovely wife’s income is so low that it doesn’t even cover her expenses — car, travel, a hotel every now and then because she’s asked to work overtime regularly.

The economic effect of all this is somewhere between a joke and an embarassment. I’m subsidising this world-famous billion dollar institution which pays its “administrators” millions, because my wife isn’t even paid enough to cover her basic living expenses. Think of how ridiculous that is. The reason those administrators earn millions is because I’m effectively paying them to employ my wife — after they get a cut of overcharging Americans for operations and medicine. But this story isn’t personal — it’s social. Those economics — people can’t make ends meet — are absolutely fatal for a society.

If you can’t make ends meet — a whole society — then what’s the point? Why bother getting educated? Why bother being part of the hard work of democracy? Why bother trusting anyone else? Everything soon enough begins to break down catastrophically, and society stops being one.

America’s a poor country now, and that’s why it’s collapsing. Let me explain a little further.

Even if you move up the social ladder, and “buy” a nicer house, and a nicer car, because you have a slightly bigger income, how is that achieved? Through debt. America is a debtor society. Americans are in massive, massive debt — lifelong debt. Americans die in debt. These are forms of debt which simply don’t exist in the rest of the world — “medical debt,” “student debt” — managed by weird, sinister institutions which don’t exist in the rest of the world, either, like “credit scores.”

But to be a debtor society is aberrant. It is not normal. At least not in the sense of being a modern, functioning one. Because it means that a society of people like that is too poor to afford things like democracy, truth, reason, sanity, care, goodness, decency, and so on. Yes, I mean that, and I’m going to prove it to you shortly.

First, I want you to understand just how norms of greed produced this paradoxical situation of poverty.

Let’s come back to my wife for a moment. When she applied for the job, she was shocked at how little they offered her. I told her that’s just how America is, and she should make a counter offer. She’s a noble person. She wants to help kids, to heal people. The money didn’t matter to her. And she’s not a very good negotiator — especially when it’s angry looking mean misogynistic dudes on the other side of the table. They offered her just 30K to begin with, I believe. She managed to up it. But.

See how…exploitative this is? How disgusting? To offer a person as little as you can? For doing work you want them to do…for you? You are seeing how far you can push them, how much you take from them, how much you can cheat them. Maybe “cheat” is a strong word. But the people making her this paltry offer — not even enough to pay for things like buying a car and driving it back and forth and having a place to live — were making millions.

Now think about it. There’s my wife with all her degrees and knowledge and passion and so forth. What’s it all worth in America? Not even enough to live on. So how bad is it for someone who doesn’t have all those degrees? Just some average person who, decently enough, just wants to be a plumber or teacher or whatnot? How does that make a person feel? Where does it leave a society? When cheating others is a norm, when you can never have enough, even if you have millions upon millions, even when more or less everyone else has too little…can a society really function? You see, in Canada or Europe, she’d do fine — they’d offer a decent salary with good benefits and so on. The idea that it’s OK to begin from a place of exploitation would be considered deeply immoral and antisocial. But not in America.

That level of greed — the extreme level, where I exploit you as hard as possible and smile — is considered normal in America. There is nothing much wrong with it. It is a social norm in that sense. It’s just the “way things are,” acceptable, even justifiable.
But this is profoundly, totally, completely abnormal almost anywhere else in the world. If a hospital administrator was making 25 or 50 times what the average employee at the hospital was — millions — it would be a national scandal in most other countries. People would be shocked, and bewildered, and ask things like: “are they embezzling money? Then how did they get to take so much?”

This situation, obviously, isn’t just about hospitals. It’s about everything. My wife, despite being an academic and a doctor with multiple degrees, is, in this job, just a schlub. She’s just a commodity to be exploited by a class of “administrators” and “executives,” who are totally, utterly ruthless when it comes to greed. Their greed is literally world-beating, and they don’t consider it greedy to earn millions for doing nothing of value, they just consider it.…normal. They feel entitled to it. This norm? It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, except maybe when it comes to war criminals. Those are strong words, but I mean them. Again, in most of Canada and Europe this level of greed would be literally quite incomprehensible.

But in America, it’s systemic. And it’s what made America a poor country. Think about, I don’t know, Amazon. It employs armies of people — who can barely take bathroom breaks, who are managed down to the microsecond by algorithms. They earn a pittance. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is so rich he could vaccinate the planet single-handedly (spolier alert: he hasn’t and won’t). Google’s notorious for stiffing “temp” workers, who are legendary for being stiffed across the economy. Adjunct professors make barely enough to live on, and teachers are paid like paupers and then asked to risk their lives during Covid.

The average person in America has been completely, utterly, totally failed by the economy in a way that a modern society hasn’t seen since the Soviet Union or the Weimar Republic. But you know what happened to those? One collapsed into Nazi fascism, and the other, into authoritarianism.

That link between economic stagnation and social collapse? It’s not a coincidence. This is the part where I teach you why societies which impoverish themselves, like America has, can’t afford things like truth or goodness or decency or democracy. It should be obvious, though, and I bet many of you have already figured it out.

What can’t my lovely wife afford, on her paycheck, which is basically less than minimum wage? Well, she can’t afford to fund a working society for anyone else. She’d like everyone to have healthcare, and she’d definitely have voted for Bernie or Liz Warren had the Dems had the stones to put them forward instead of Biden. But it doesn’t matter. Because on an income of $30K, or even $50K, there is not enough left over in taxes to pay for a functioning society.

We didn’t cover taxes in the example above. If we did, the average earner at $30K would pay the government $2,500. That would have put us deep in the red — even deeper — in the example above. But it would also have had a pernicious secondary effect, a hidden one. That is not a large enough payment to fund a working society like in say Canada or Europe, made of public healthcare, retirement, transport, education, and so forth. It just isn’t…enough.

You’d need to either tax the rich way, way more, and cap their incomes, even if informally, through norms that disdain greed and hold it in contempt and shame and disgrace, as happens in Canada and Europe. Or you’d need to charge the average person around 50% of their income — but at $30K, which isn’t enough to live on in the first place…well, it’s even less so.

You cannot have a modern, functioning society with these failed, Soviet economics. America is in what’s known as a poverty trap. It needs desperately to become a modern society, but can’t become one, because the average person can’t afford it. This is the same trap the Soviet Union found itself in — and that is why it collapsed.

Democracy dies this way, as a result of a nation falling into poverty. Why? Think of even my wife, the educated doctor. When she gets home — overworked, asked to work weekends, given little to no time off, because, remembers, she’s just a schlub to this world famous hospital — the last thing she has any real energy or time for is democracy. A nation of people in that position — overworked, underpaid, given no time off — are too weary and tired and harried to sustain the exercise of self-governance. That is why democracy fails to catch fire in poor countries to begin with. Nobody much can afford it.

But darker waters lie ahead, too. What dies next, because a nation is too poor to afford it? Well, things like trust do. When you work your bones away, for a pittance — and yet elites earn millions for doing nothing of value, just shuffling numbers, and taking their cut, like my wife’s so called “administrators,” why would you have much trust in the system? This is where the Trumpists are — and on this point, who can blame them? America’s working class really was betrayed. It was abandoned to predators, by greed, left impoverished, and as a result, it has no trust left in governance, institutions, systems, or elites.

As trust dies, what happens next? People give up on truth and decency and goodness. Everyone else has been turned into a rival, an enemy, a competitor, for a tiny amount of money, food, income, shelter. Relationships can’t form in such a way. Bonds break.
When you’re out there, working your bones away for not even enough to live on, what do you feel? Anger. Rage. Humiliation.
And you look for reasons. To explain something. Why are you nobody and nothing? Why is it that no matter how hard you work, or how honest you are, you end up humiliated, nose ground down into the dirt? You turn to fanaticism. Fundamentalism. Extremism. This way lies social collapse, at an even more fundamental level: radicalization.

What do the humiliated want? Justice, in the form of revenge. This is where America’s working class is. They are out for blood, because they want vengeance. For what? For being humiliated, for so long, abandoned and forgotten and left impoverished and hopeless, by people less honest and decent than them. Ground down into poverty — while elites, like “hospital administrators” and “lobbyists” and “exceutives” bank millions, billions. They are led to aim their rage at scapegoats, by demagogues — because humiliation makes your mind stop working. All you want is revenge, because that is the only thing that will give you life meaning, make you feel like you mattered at all.

That is how a society dies
.
That is how America died.


If I ask my wife’s “hospital administrators” something like “hey, aren’t you guys ashamed of this? My wife makes a pittance for doing real work, while you guys pull in millions for shuffling numbers and taking a cut? And pretending all this is about people’s health?” They’ll look at me like I’m the crazy one.

Because it’s not shameful to be this greedy in America. But it should have been. It is in the rest of the world. It’s considered a moral failing, a sign that you’re a defective human being, that something is seriously wrong with you. Nobody wants anything to do with you. You are a laughingstock, a social buffoon, a disgrace, a failure as a person.
But in America, it’s OK to be greedy, not shameful. It’s what’s taught at Ivy League schools and justified by both sides of politics. The problem is that norm of greed left most of society itself humiliated. Because the most ruthless and selfish and greedy ran unrestrained over everyone else, until there wasn’t even left to live on. The impoverished who were ground into dust, meanwhile, finally exploded, humiliation seeking revenge.

That is the inside story of how America died. Everything else is just details, really. I wonder, though, if America will ever really get it.

Umair

January 2022

As Jaime Brockett said: 'It's all about (trading wives, Cadillacs, and diamonds)' I would add smoking cigars and drinking champagne. The only Americans that don't see the total absurdity and immorality of greed are the conservative ones. They are deluded enough to believe that 'next year' they will be joining the Champagne party. It's a delusion that many culturally privileged whitey's have banging around in their shadow subconscious. Time to call on Dr. Jung

[Dreamtimer]

Greed rots.

There was supposed to be a morality tail with the movie Wall Street. The villain wasn't supposed to be the hero. But he was.

"Greed is good!" "Sleep is for wimps!" Those actually became lines people would use. And people started becoming sleep-deprived. And more materialistic.

It was the age of Madonna and Material Girl. Glorifying the champagne class. Nouveau Riche. Showing off your money. Buying cars with cash. Cocaine.



And boy did we rot. We went to bed every night having eaten candy.

[Chris]

To be fair, it's not just an American thing, plenty of places around the world are just as bad or even worse in terms of unbridled greed and capitalism. China, for one, or Russia.

It seems to be a thing that great empires do, they exploit people both internally and externally. Smaller countries are often better run and provide a higher standard of living and more compassion, precisely due to this.

This is also why I don't think the eventual breakup of large Unions of countries, such as the USA, China, Russia, UK, etc... will be bad all around. Plenty of people will benefit, because their corner of the world will be much better run and democratic than the imperial centre ever was. Just look at the likes of Estonia or Lithuania prospering and providing a good life for their citizens as opposed to Russia or Kazakhstan, let alone the old Soviet Union. Smaller is better in this case.

[Wind]

To be fair, it's not just an American thing, plenty of places around the world are just as bad or even worse in terms of unbridled greed and capitalism. China, for one, or Russia.

USA had the monopoly on that for the longest time. Russia and China have had the taste of that greed only for the past three decades.

You Can’t Say American Psycho Didn’t Warn Us

Patrick Bateman, the status-obsessed Wall Street investment banker who moonlights as a serial killer in American Psycho, has three heroes: fellow mass murderers Ed Gein and Ted Bundy, and Donald Trump. In Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel, Bateman keeps a copy of The Art of the Deal on his desk and gazes longingly at Trump Tower — “tall, proudly gleaming.” Then he shifts his gaze to the black teenagers standing in front of it and contemplates murdering them.

In Mary Harron’s cruel and glittering adaptation, which came out 20 years ago this month, Trump is referenced only sparingly, but his shadow lies over every scene. When Bateman admires his biceps in the mirror while having sex, when he silently rages with envy over the sight of a colleague’s new business card, when he tells a date that she will be ordering the peanut-butter soup with smoked duck (before quickly adding that “New York Matinee” called it a “playful but mysterious little dish”), he is conjuring a certain type of man — vain, jealous, absurdly petty, materially wealthy but culturally bankrupt, and above all else, obsessed with what other people think. In the New York of the 1980s, that personality reached its apotheosis in the form of the young, glamorous Donald Trump. Yes, glamorous. Before he was an overripe orange spewing conspiracy theories, he was “tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth,” a playboy who belonged “to the most elegant clubs,” as the New York Times gushed in 1976.

American Psycho’s relationship to Trump doesn’t end with Bateman’s emulation of the man. Over the years, as Trump’s stature has risen to previously unimaginable heights, so has the film’s. At the time of its release, it polarized critics, earning a few positive reviews but also wide condemnation. “Even people who liked it wouldn’t have considered it an important film,” Harron told me in a recent interview. Now it regularly appears on lists of the greatest horror films of the 21st century. Looking back, it can be seen as an eerily prescient skewering of the social conditions that allowed Trump to get to where he is now. Throughout the movie, Bateman is desperate to confess his crimes, but no one will listen. When he tells a model at a nightclub that he works in “murders and executions,” she tells him, eyes glazed over with boredom, that the guys she knows who work in “mergers and acquisitions really don’t like it.” When he tells his lawyer that he’s killed 20 — or maybe 40 — people, the guy thinks it’s a joke. (The real punch line is that Bateman’s lawyer doesn’t recognize him, confusing him for one of his look-alike colleagues — a pervasive face-blindness that seems to afflict most of the characters in the story.)

In the end, even the detective investigating one of the murders, played with brilliant ambiguity by Willem Dafoe, is cheerfully determined not to finger Bateman as the suspect. Bateman is psychotic, but so is the culture that surrounds him. Every person he encounters is so insanely self-absorbed, so consumed by their own quests for status and wealth, that they aren’t just indifferent to his murderous rampage; they refuse to acknowledge it. Rewatching the film, you may find yourself thinking of a claim Trump made while he was running for president: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” (Trump was making a point about loyalty, which is where the similarities between Trump and Bateman end. No one pretends to be loyal to Bateman; most people can’t remember his name.)

But the fanatical self-absorption that Trump represented in the ’80s has only strengthened its grip on American life since then, a fact that’s never been clearer than in recent weeks, as Trump and his friends, many of them products of the very institutions that gave rise to Wall Street’s culture of unfettered greed in the 1980s, have used the greatest crisis of our time to funnel staggering sums of money into the coffers of the world’s wealthiest companies. Meanwhile, the body count is rising. But you can’t say that we weren’t warned. Bateman told us in the starkest terms that we were living in a world of murderous greed and indifference. Of course we were incapable of hearing it. That was Harron’s whole point. “This confession,” as Bateman concluded at the end of the film, “has meant nothing.”

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyO1fcvPCVQ

[Chris]

To me, Trump's election was no great surprise. He represents everything America really values, greed, unbridled wealth, narcissism, brashness, etc...

In fact, even before the election, if most people outside the US had to point to a quintessential American, someone famous that in their mind embodied the stereotypical American, Trump would have topped that list.

I don't know if he's actual psychopath, but he certainly embodies a lot of those traits associated with psychopathy. In fact, the capitalist system pretty much pushes psychopaths to the top of society and celebrates them.

[Wind]

I don't know if he's actual psychopath, but he certainly embodies a lot of those traits associated with psychopathy. In fact, the capitalist system pretty much pushes psychopaths to the top of society and celebrates them.

I don't think he's a psychopath, he's not intelligent enough. He is certainly is a malignant narcissist though.

[Emil El Zapato]

To me, Trump's election was no great surprise. He represents everything America really values, greed, unbridled wealth, narcissism, brashness, etc...

In fact, even before the election, if most people outside the US had to point to a quintessential American, someone famous that in their mind embodied the stereotypical American, Trump would have topped that list.

I don't know if he's actual psychopath, but he certainly embodies a lot of those traits associated with psychopathy. In fact, the capitalist system pretty much pushes psychopaths to the top of society and celebrates them.

I don't think he's a psychopath, he's not intelligent enough. He is certainly is a malignant narcissist though.

New trick ... ... the intelligent psychopath is really a myth mostly because the early FBI profilers mainly John Douglas were able to aggrandize their status by having Sherlock Holmed their personal Dr Moriarty. It happened only in the movies and books written by such as Douglas (I never met him but he did go to the same undergraduate school ... a little choice self-aggrandizement )

The fact that Trump is completely lacking in conscience easily qualifies him as a psychopath. To add a note, some documented psychopaths have been special education worthy and many are 'disorganized types' which essentially means they are stupid and/or mentally ill. And Trump fits that type well despite maintaining a sense of 'organization'. In his case it is nothing more than reptilian instinct.

[Aragorn]

Greed rots.

There was supposed to be a morality tail with the movie Wall Street. The villain wasn't supposed to be the hero. But he was.

"Greed is good!" "Sleep is for wimps!" Those actually became lines people would use. And people started becoming sleep-deprived. And more materialistic.

It was the age of Madonna and Material Girl. Glorifying the champagne class. Nouveau Riche. Showing off your money. Buying cars with cash. Cocaine.

Madonna, "Wall Street" (the movie), and "Miami Vice". And it wasn't just in the USA. We had that happening over here as well. Drug dealers and pimps became the heroes, the discotheques were full of people with cocaine up their noses, and girls were unashamedly admitting that they were only going out (and sleeping) with guys who were showing off their wealth. And they behaved like genuine bitches around guys who didn't.

One night in the parking lot of a then well known discotheque in this area, my friends and I witnessed a well-dressed guy leaving the place with a hot looking girl. The guy pulled out the keys to a Mercedes-Benz, but the car's alarm went off, and he didn't immediately figure out how to stop it. The girl said "I presume that's not your car?", to which the guy replied "No, it's my dad's car." Her reply was "In that case, you can drive home alone", and she went back inside.

It was also in those days ─ the late 1980s ─ that I was dating a young nurse who, even though she was very much in love with me, broke off our relationship in order to marry a doctor who was also after her. I ran into her again at some venue about nine years later, when she was on a "girls' night out" with some of her old friends. She was still married to that doctor ─ his name is also Frank, by the way ─ and they had twin little girls, but she told me she wasn't happy. Deep down inside, I wanted to tell her "I did tell you that you wouldn't be happy with him when you dumped me", but I didn't want to rub it in, and so I didn't say anything and just listened while she lamented about how her marriage was failing.

---

In fact, the capitalist system pretty much pushes psychopaths to the top of society and celebrates them.

Yes, very much so. The system breeds sociopaths and narcissists, and then rewards them. And that is why I cannot feel any admiration or sympathy for people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and others like them. They did not amass their billions by being nice guys, and it's easy to donate a couple of hundreds of millions to whatever charity or cause and be labeled a philanthropist by some magazine when you're shoveling billions into your safe every year, made off of the blood, sweat and tears of other human beings.

---

The fact that Trump is completely lacking in conscience easily qualifies him as a psychopath. To add a note, some documented psychopaths have been special education worthy and many are 'disorganized types' which essentially means they are stupid and/or mentally ill. And Trump fits that type well despite maintaining a sense of 'organization'. In his case it is nothing more than reptilian instinct.

In this case, I will completely agree with you for a change. Trump is far from intelligent, but he is sly and he knows all the dirty tricks for manipulating people into getting him what he wants. And he wouldn't have been anywhere without the support and money of his family, added with the support from the Italian mafia in New York.

[Dreamtimer]

The materialism has always been a turn-off. For me anyway. It's been depressing and frustrating to watch. Because while the eyes are on the money and the bling and the 15 minutes of fame, the values and underlying integrity have been eroding.

The most moral, ethical and caring president of my day is the least celebrated or popular, Jimmy Carter. Yet he's done more good for the country than any other president in my lifetime.

It's sad and frustrating.