The Taboo on Honestly Identifying Social Decay
When problems are clearly unsolvable with frictionless tech innovations or modest government policy tweaks, then identifying them becomes taboo.
The secular faith in America is relentless, euphoric optimism, preferably based on technological innovations that spread frictionlessly through the populace via "market demand."
In other words, solutions that require no real sacrifices or tradeoffs: the new innovation spread like magic, providing more comfort, convenience, novelty and status, plus improved productivity and of course, vast new opportunities to reap gargantuan profits.
This can-do spirit is useful, as it breeds confidence that all problems can be solved, once they're identified.
The downside is that when problems are clearly unsolvable with frictionless tech innovations or modest government policy tweaks, then identifying them becomes taboo.
I sense this taboo against identifying social decay throughout the zeitgeist / social-media climate. Mainstream economists point to how great the economy is doing, and studies showing people may feel the nation is faring poorly but they're completely satisfied with their own lives, i.e. everything's great and getting better.
Mainstream commentaries hype "solutions," no matter how farfetched or costly, because to admit the problem is fundamentally economic and social is taboo.
Many people put a partisan spin on various manifestations of social decay, but in my view the source is primarily economic and secondarily cultural/social.
As historian David Hackett Fischer showed in his masterful book The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, humans respond to soaring costs of living and resource constraints in the same way throughout history: their response to this rising economic-material stress is social decay and breakdown.
The economic-material stresses arise from 1) the expansion of the human population and per capita consumption of food, minerals, metals, wood, fuel, etc., 2) depletion of resources due to exhaustion of available deposits or decline of renewable resources due to climate change, and 3) diseases / pandemics borne by trade routes spread, reducing the working population.
This social decay and breakdown manifests in very familiar ways: rates of marriage decline, an increasing percentage of children are born out of wedlock, crime and social disorder increase, social mobility falls, people abandon what's no longer financially viable (farms, trade, etc.), beggars and diseases proliferate, and eventually people are forced by their inability to afford the basics of life to revolt.
These cyclical manifestations are recounted in The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper and Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker.
The proper context for this cycle of rising stress and decay / breakdown is humanity's limited palette of coping mechanisms for dealing with chronic economic-social stresses and insecurity (i.e. precarity). We turn to self-medication (food or drink that reduces our stress), distraction (entertainment), anger against the supposed sources of our stress ("the other"), rituals and rites, and as a last resort, abandoning whatever is no longer working and moving to some lower level of consumption and (hopefully) stress.
The problem is that all these coping mechanisms come with tradeoffs: we become addicted to mood-altering substances and behaviors, our ability to sustain the increasing stress / workload decays and collapses (what we now call burnout), we lash out at "the other" in frustration, and so on.
As our status in the social hierarchy drops, we slide into social defeat: we give up and become incapacitated.
Human famously habituate to just about any condition, even the most wretched (the Gulag prison camps, for example), and those who are still secure and comfortable find it easier to look away and hurry back to their enclaves rather than admit the social decay is terminal / unsolvable within the status quo, which is, after all, the source of the decay.
I have written many posts detailing the immense decline in the purchasing power of wages / labor over the past 45 years, a decline that accelerated rapidly post-pandemic and was quickly papered over with trillions of dollars of "free money" stimulus. None of this "free money" actually solved any of the sources of financial precarity or stress, they just served to "kick the can down the road" a few years.
I have also discussed the equally catastrophic decline in the quality and durability of goods and services, a hidden form of declining value / purchasing power, and the increasing insecurity of the workforce, outside of the few remaining protected sectors such as government employment.
If we cast aside the taboo on honestly identifying America's social decay, we come up with these obvious (and therefore taboo) manifestations:
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