Why and How American Life Keeps on Falling Apart

Here’s a grim, startling, yet somehow perfectly unsurprising fact. US life expectancy just fell for the third year in a row. As suicides soar, as despair and ruin grow, Americans are living shorter lives. But that was hardly the only dismal statistic to be seen. The Big Three — life expectancy, incomes, and happiness — all fell or at best flatlined.

It was another year of American collapse.

My friends, I want to tell you a secret — one that American pundits, intellectuals, and leaders either don’t know, don’t care about, or won’t discuss. We don’t see this anywhere else in the world. There are almost no other societies in which life expectancy is falling. There are no other societies in which life expectancies, savings, incomes, happiness are all falling together. Save, perhaps, the most shattered of grindingly poor failed states. Together, these things mean that a society is collapsing — that it is unable to provide the most basic things for people anymore.

What defines America now is the very essence of collapse — the inability to provide the basics of life, whether decent healthcare, medicine, education, stable jobs, safety of basic forms (like at school), justice, even food and water, and so on — but I’ll come to all that. Year by year, Americans live worse and worse lives — while their counterparts in Canada, Europe, other rich societies, live better and better ones. The gap by now is so great that it’s striking: Western Europeans will live five full years longer than Americans. But that’s not all. Every day, those years will also be happier, richer, wealthier ones.

Think about that for a moment. Lives which are growing and lives which are shrinking feel very different, don’t they? So lives in other rich countries will be full of more peace of mind, truth, decency, care, meaning, purpose, belonging. American lives, by contrast, will be what they are now, only more so: controlled by fear, compelled by the threat of annihilation, full of anxiety, despair, panic, all of which boil over into rage, anger, and fury. The lives of people in these two kinds of “rich” societies have diverged almost completely. America has become a land of strange, bizarre, senseless contradictions. A wealthy nation of poor people. A rich nation of broke ones. A powerful nation of powerless people. A nation in which cruelty and contempt are held up as the sole values to aspire to, because all of life has always been thought to be one endless Darwinian contest. The survival of the fittest will lead to the greatest good! LOL — does it seem to have worked out that way?

The survival of the fittest is always at odds with the following things: a prosperous middle class, a society that cohered, a culture rich in wisdom and truth, a sense of belonging, a higher purpose, individuality, virtue, morality, honour, decency, and goodness itself. Hence, the survival of the fittest cost America all those things. The survival of the fittest precisely what we see happening in America today — the least “fit” are beginning to kill themselves off, having given up on any hope of a future in which their lives are valued, treated with dignity, lifted up, instead of trampled down and laughed at. The survival of the fittest led to the most money, for the most ruthless, selfish, greedy, and mindless, because those are the “fitness criteria” that America was always selecting for. But you can hardly have any other ones.

Maybe that is why American discourse, American ideas, American leadership mostly seems to think that all is well. American thought is — and has always been — just one long, boring, endless expression of the same fundamental idea, social Darwinism, whether it is economics, politics, or psychology. Hence, today, all that American thought says, over and over again, is the following. The economy’s booming! GDP is growing! The stock market’s soaring!! Woohoo!! Everybody’s going to get rich!! It is like watching an idiot laugh and cheer his own house burning down because he has been told that fire makes wood stronger.

The fundamental change Americans need to make is to make things which are in artificially short supply available to all, in abundance, freely. Things like healthcare, education, transport, media, decent food and water, retirement, income, savings, “jobs”, and so forth. To make all these things “public” (which doesn’t mean they can’t be private, as well). Without this change, there is absolutely no chance that American collapse will stop — ever, period. That is because a) unless Americans consume these things, their standards of living cannot improve, but only fall, and b) unless Americans produce these things, they will go on being at the mercy of low-wage dead-end, go-nowhere capitalist jobs.

These things — which are all the basics of life, if you notice — are in artificially short supply for a very simple reason. That is how profits grow. It is the only way profits can continue to grow. And the growth of profitability is the only real measure of success in America’s bizarre, utopian capitalist fantasyland. But the only way that profit can continue to grow is to keep the basics of life in artificially short supply, so that capital can charge people as much as it can for them.

How much is “as much as it can”? It is as much as people have — maybe more. Maybe as much as they will earn over a whole lifetime. Hence, Americans go into medical or student “debt”, which they are obliged to spend a vast portion of their lives “paying off.” This is a form of indentured servitude, more or less. There is no reason whatsoever that a person in a rich society should be “indebted” for healthcare or education, because these are things which should be available to all to begin with. That they are not tells us that the system is “rigged” — it is meant to entrap and exploit people, not to free them.

The result is something like this. Americans are employed to produce things which don’t benefit them enough, like Ubers — if they are lucky enough to have jobs at all — while there are not enough opportunities in precisely those fields which might lift American living standards, like healthcare, education, research, media, and so forth. Those things are in perpetual shortage, thanks to a constant quest for profit, remember? Meanwhile, the jobs that Americans do they are paid a pittance for, relative to the profits they actually produce. Then, because there are shortages of the things they need most, they are charged as much as they can possibly bear for those things. Decent food costs hundreds of dollars — a “whole paycheck” (and while many Americans will dispute that food could possibly be expensive in America, it is only because they have never really been abroad: people in other rich countries aren’t choosing between food and shelter.) Healthcare or education costs for Americans not just hundreds or thousands — but a huge portion of a whole lifetime’s earnings, which one must be indebted simply to “afford”.

Americans are being reduced to something like neo-peasants, year after year. They don’t know it, perhaps, and certainly, nobody tells them this ugly truth. But what else do you call people that must give away whole portions of a lifetime’s labour for the very things that should be publicly available to all? The peasant had to turn over the harvest to his seigneur, his lord — and was powerless to demand a fair share, or not to be exploited in the first place. But that is exactly and precisely where Americans are, too.

There is a big difference between paying anything resembling a fair price for a good — and being indebted for it your whole life long. The difference is that you can pay a “fair price” out of your pocket, and walk away feeling secure, safe, happy. But a predatory one will leave you having to go into debt, make you insecure, take advantage of you, ruin your opportunities and chances.

The systems that America built are not interested in giving anyone a fair deal. They are interested in exploiting as many people as they can, as fast and as hard as they can. That is the thinking that has always prevailed in America — a toxic, grotesque remnant of a nation built atop the horror of slavery. But today that exploitative mindset has — as greater minds warned — come full circle. Yesterday’s exploiters have become today’s exploited — the middle class white is the one whose life has declined the most.

And yet, mostly, America is a country in deep, profound denial of its own collapse — still. There are hysterical articles about the decline in life expectancy, sometimes about soaring suicide rates, sometimes about an imploded middle class, and sometimes about the fact that incomes haven’t grown for decades now. But there is absolutely no understanding how these things are connected — or that they are. Americans are largely still playing a game of denial about the scale and depth of their problems — “it’ll be alright”, or “it’s not that bad”, say those at the top, meanwhile those at the bottom are simply killing themselves because there is no way out of the calculus above. Americans have two decisions: stay live, and live a shorter, poorer, unhappier, life every year — accept your own exploitation, maybe even celebrate and champion it. Or die like an animal.

America is now in a Soviet place. It doesn’t have the tools, the ideas, the knowledge of history or the world, the understanding of its own past and how it led here, to understand its own plight — why its systems have all failed so catastrophically and ruinously. Hence, American collapse just goes on and on and on. Once upon a time, Americans believed the strange and foolish myth that exploitation and domination, that abuse and moral horror, would set them free. The funny thing is that — though the words have changed, the ideas haven’t — they still believe it. Enough of them, anyways, that nothing much can ever change for all.

Umair
November 2018