It should go without saying that the capitalist
economic system has made every human on the
planet materially better off than ever before
in history.
It could take more than an entire video series
to catalogue each & every way that humans
have progressed since the rise of capitalism
when it comes to education, medicine, and
even more basic necessities like food and
water.
It’s an unfortunate reality of the current
political scene that this fact is constantly
rejected, especially at a time when serious
discussions are becoming necessary.
Challenging that capitalism has delivered
us nearest to universal human prosperity is
to lose focus.
That doesn’t mean to say that capitalism
is the only ingredient in a fulfilled society.
New challenges have arisen because of that
same prosperity it produces in abundance.
One thing we all understand is that happiness
isn’t just how many shows you can watch
on multiple flat screen TVs or how many digits
are in your country’s GDP, but rather the
social connections we forge, our own sense
of importance within a community, and some
feeling of purpose during times so rapidly
changing.
The two largest conservative commentators
had one of the more useful conversations surrounding
the rapid social change we’re seeing.
Taken together, they represent a rising awareness
within the American people--one skeptical
of the rapid changes in our society versus
a more hands-off embrace of the breakneck
speed of free market innovation.
Tucker Carlson’s primary mission is to diagnose
what’s causing the decline of the basic
building block of any community: family.
Firstly, it’s important to understand the
way our society has changed in the past century.
It’s evolved to favor the cognitively gifted
who develop the complex systems that make
basic necessities affordable.
Tracking with the past decades of rapid innovation,
a significant segment of the population are
rendered intellectually incapable of meeting
the demands of these new industries.
Throughout history, being especially intelligent
did not grant you special privileges.
Mostly everyone had the ability to support
families working in a factory line, farming,
or performing manual labor.
Today, the rapidly expanding tech sectors
of the economy require people to wrestle with
complex systems whether it be cognitively
demanding ones like programming and mathematically
intensive ones like accounting.
Shapiro’s defenses of the capitalist system
as it is echoes the arguments made by Steven
Pinker in his books The Better Angels of our
Nature and Enlightenment Now.
Pinker himself relies heavily on the data
from Human Progress, which documents all of
the massive gains made in astoundingly short
periods of time--such as reducing global extreme
poverty to just 10%, not to mention the precipitous
decline of violence--both at home and in war.
Those are real gains, and not ones to be made
light of.
If we narrow our focus to the West, we understand
that even most of those who are below the
poverty line have luxuries that few members
of royalty had just a century ago.
But someone like Tucker argues that’s a
less important metric.
The primary goal, he argues, should not be
economic growth, but the protection of community.
The preservation of our communities is the
largest challenge we face today.
A primary threat to that stability is the
focus of one debate between he and Shapiro
surrounding wide-scale automation of the driving
industry, which threatens to displace the
4.4 million mostly men whose income depend
upon that or who would support families with
these jobs.
Noting that it is the largest source of employment
in the country for high school educated men,
Carlson worries about what that would mean
for them and their families if it were to
suddenly be phased out in the coming decades.
Shapiro countered with the fact that there
are over 7 million jobs ready to be filled,
the highest in 20 years, but glosses over
the reality that a significant proportion
of these have a high intelligence barrier.
Are we meant to believe that normal Americans
like truck drivers can become, let alone succeed
as, programmers?
This much is seriously questionable.
He relies on the common response to these
concerns by reminding us that this has been
a universal historical response.
The argument goes that whenever there’s
a massive technological innovation on the
horizon, the instinct of people is to find
a reason to halt it in order to protect their
industry.
Which is fair in the context of horses, buggies,
and cars, but the challenge of as-of-yet unseen
opportunity doesn’t exist in the same landscape.
One can imagine more jobs would open up that
maintain and build on the systems of automated
cars, but that baseline of skill is beyond
what truck drivers could be retrained to do.
This is because our rate of growth is totally
incomparable to what we saw before the 21st
century.
Ray Kurzewill, the leading figure in Google’s
machine learning sector writes:
An analysis of the history of technology shows
that technological change is exponential,
contrary to the common-sense “intuitive
linear” view.
So we won’t experience 100 years of progress
in the 21st century — it will be more like
20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate)
[...] Although exponential trends did exist
a thousand years ago, they were at that very
early stage where an exponential trend is
so flat that it looks like no trend at all.
So their lack of expectations was largely
fulfilled.
Today, in accordance with the common wisdom,
everyone expects continuous technological
progress and the social repercussions that
follow.
But the future will be far more surprising
than most observers realize: few have truly
internalized the implications of the fact
that the rate of change itself is accelerating.
The fact that this will affect mostly men
is more important than it may seem.
Young men especially who see no way up for
what they see as unfair reasons are the ones
who drive revolutions, who seek to replace
the entire system with something--anything--new.
This is at worst.
At best, they check out of society altogether
and turn to destructive means of escapism.
This is where we now find ourselves.
It may be easy to view the same victims of
this growth who voted for the likes of Ocasio
Cortez and Donald Trump as losers threatened
by change, as many do.
They are threatened by economic progress,
but they aren’t “losers” for a lack
of will.
They’re so-called “losers” because they
were born into a system that no longer values
the abilities they actually have, and in response
they turn to those who offer them an alternate
system that will give them the security they
now lack, no matter how misguided.
Take for instance Kevin D. Williamson of National
Review, who makes a few core acknowledgements:
“The life expectancies among non-college-educated
white Americans have been plummeting in an
almost unprecedented fashion, a trend not
seen on such a large scale since the collapse
of the Soviet Union and the social anarchy
that prevailed in Russia afterward.
Trump counties had proportionally fewer people
with college degrees.
Trump counties had fewer people working.
And the white people in Trump counties were
likely to die younger.
The causes of death were “increased rates
of disease and ill health, increased drug
overdose and abuse, and suicide…”
In numbers astonishingly and previously unseen,
people are choosing to stop engaging with
the system altogether.
If they find the answer in demagogues, the
onus is on us to answer the question of why
they are doing so, and it can’t be with
mockery or scorn.
Those final two are supplied by that same
writer:
“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale
communities is that they deserve to die.
Economically, they are negative assets.
Morally, they are indefensible.
Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen
crap.
Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust
Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories
about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs.
[...] The white American underclass is in
thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose
main products are misery and used heroin needles.
Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good.
So does OxyContin.
What they need isn’t analgesics, literal
or political.
They need real opportunity, which means that
they need real change, which means that they
need U-Haul.”
It’s of course true that addiction to opioids
and welfare are rampant in Trump country.
It’s also probably true that it’s for
those reasons that when Trump promises them
things he can’t deliver they are mobilized
to support him.
But what Williamson bluntly states and what
Shapiro implicitly believes misses the point:
at what point in our national progression
did middle America stop gathering at their
communities’ churches in favor of popping
pills?
It wasn’t sheer selfishness, as Kevin D.
Williamson claims, even if that’s a part
of the story (as it almost always is).
It’s much easier to cite selfishness or
laziness than for intellectuals to concede
the reality that some people don’t have
the mental ability to become physicians, pharmacists,
or software engineers.
This fact is considered radioactive by mainstream
culture, if only because of how harsh it is.
That inability understandably prompts many
to look for an easy fix in the form of a government
willing to hold back the tide of rapid change.
Tucker Carlson identifies what causes this
appeal of populists as different as Bernie
Sanders
and
Donald Trump.
Without an external, existential threat, coupled
with an increasingly preachy elitist class,
the wide swathes of Americans who no longer
believe in the system are given voice by populists.
The effects of these populists’ proposed
solutions, whether positive or disastrous,
is irrelevant to this group of people.
Shapiro puts forth in this discussion that
the rejection of Judeo-Christian faith has
caused the decline in community, but the question
arises of what caused the death of God.
A number of possibilities come to mind.
He argues in his written response to Tucker’s
Fox monologue that America’s spiritual,
physical and mental deterioration can be laid
at the feet of “individual decisions by
individual human beings, by cultural forces
militating against religious virtue and in
favor of radical redefinition of human relationships,
and by governmental intervention that has
skewed incentives.”
On its face this makes sense, but it isn’t
as though those cultural forces sprouted from
the ether and spread by sheer word of mouth.
As argued before, it isn’t hard to see how
skewed incentives have come courtesy not just
from government (even if that’s true as
well,) but also from market forces.
This could be by virtue of pornography, which
has all the convenience of sexual gratification
and none of the effort, and media conglomerates
broadcasting that cultural assault into every
American home.
Not to mention the sexual liberation that
has so recently reshaped the culture because
of birth control and the automobile, which
were only made possible through capitalist
innovation.
It’s a very atomized, libertarian viewpoint
that “skewed” incentives can only come
from government bureaucracies.
After all, if it is merely government that
can be blamed for these crushing consequences,
it would only be a matter of electing new
leaders, undoing harmful policies, and deconstructing
the administrative state.
If spontaneous human behavior is to blame,
that’s obviously a much trickier matter.
No man is an island unto himself, nor are
his choices, regardless of how much we’d
like that to be true.
He continues writing: market capitalism has
not destroyed our social fabric.
Lack of values did that.
If market capitalism exacerbated that problem
through materialism and consumerism, that’s
because we chose to make it so.
Shapiro’s thinking here is far too simplistic.
In a strictly literal sense, we “chose”
to make it so, yes.
He thinks that these nefarious cultural forces
are what’s preventing people from seeing
the benefits of religion, but that doesn’t
change the fact that seeing something and
having the incentives to embrace it are two
separate things.
With constant temptations bombarding the average
person via their pocketed super-computer,
expressly tailored to their unique interests
and subconscious profile, the incentive structure
has never been so opposed to a religious lifestyle.
And that fact has nothing to do with the Frankfurt
school infiltrating our schools or media executives
meeting the demands of people’s basemost
urges.
That, too, is a choice, but it isn’t in
the self-interest of the consumer creating
the demand in the first place.
In the same way that market absolutists miss
that prices and market efficiency can’t
produce meaning, strict, atheistic skeptics
haven’t learned that reason doesn’t give
meaning either.
Both are tools and apparently quite effective
ones, but if they aren’t tied to a transcendental
ideal it’s a tool without a function.
Our society’s glaring existential crisis
has made obvious that so far it’s been a
self-destructive one for our communities.
Neuroscientist and public intellectual Sam
Harris, for instance, is carried away by his
blind faith in this rationalistic ideal.
He misses that not only is there a huge subset
of the population for whom reason itself is
far too abstract.
Reason just has not offered us a - reason
- to get up in the morning.
If you’re the rare person for whom reason
is itself enough, all the better; but it’s
a fool’s errand to believe that you can
impose that on a societal scale, especially
a society in which a large minority can’t
even figure out kiosks.
Further, this double standard seems to be
lost on Harris, who otherwise understands
the subject of IQ very well.
He acts as if it’s absurd that a Christian
religious narrative could be the most effective
consolation for people limited by mental disorders
or low intelligence.
But it’s hardly the case that only these
kinds of people have benefited from religious
belief, given that white collar workers are
not immune to this pandemic of mental unwellness.
The data clearly bears out that highly religious
Americans are happier and more involved with
family.
They have a strong sense of gratitude, which
allows them to see past the transient materialism
that is mass marketed to the public.
The idea that we can reprogram humans to become
cerebral, rational beings mirrors the belief
that a few sociologists can re-engineer the
biological differences between men and women.
It’s no coincidence that every society in
history has developed a deep religious identity,
and the idea that some brand of empiricism
concocted by a group of intellectual urbanites
is going to uproot that is frankly utopian.
It’s not hard to imagine a future that resembles
secular, hyper-modernized South Korea, with
its insane levels of technological innovation,
fanatical work culture, plummeting birth rates,
and runaway suicide epidemic.
A report from Reuters paints a bleak picture
of the direction we seem to be heading:
Once a country where filial duty and a strong
Confucian tradition saw parents revered, modern
day South Korea, with a population of 50 million,
has grown economically richer, but family
ties have fragmented.
Nowadays 1.2 million elderly South Koreans,
just over 20 percent of the elderly population,
live - and increasingly die - alone.
Yoon’s former husband, whom she divorced
40 years ago, relinquished responsibility
after being contacted by the hospital and
told of her death.
Her only son was unreachable as he had long
broken off all contact with his parents.
Nothing foundationally separates us from the
South Koreans.
In fact, they have an average IQ that is notably
higher.
What binds the social bonds of Western civilization
is the religious foundation it’s culture
and governments were shaped in the image of.
One secular, prosperous people are going to
face the same crisis that any another have
if they abandon those values.
Foolishly, the racially-obsessed corners of
the political sphere believe that ethnic homogeneity
is the be-all-end-all in a country’s societal
health, but overwhelmingly homogenous countries
like Japan and South Korea are deeper in this
quicksand than we’ve ever been.
These countries meet the criteria of what
fringe ideologues on both the left and right
say will usher in utopia: free healthcare,
massive technological innovations, and racial
homogeneity, and yet their societies face
graver existential crises than we’ve ever
seen.
Conservatives like Ben Shapiro are often ready
to blame those kind of secular academics and
degenerate media producers for the decline
of Judeo-Christian faith, but many within
this sphere are recognizing this may be a
limited analysis.
Jonah Goldberg, a prominent conservative columnist
acknowledges as much:
He presses further in
a column, suggesting capitalism may play a
role in this social decay:
“capitalism has its limits.
It creates wealth, but is utterly silent about
what should be done with that wealth.
It provides avenues for accomplishment in
certain spheres, but engenders a culture — on
the left and the right — that often looks
with skepticism or hostility at people who
want to measure their accomplishments in terms
not easily monetized ... Because of its insatiable
and ingenious capacity to translate human
wants and desires into products, it has the
tendency to commercialize things best not
commercialized, from sex to Christmas to childhood
itself.”
Capitalism is a morally neutral system.
Foundationally its a structure of incentives;
that is the very nature of supply and demand.
Those incentives work when they direct you
toward the best product for the lowest cost,
but it has nothing to say about what constitutes
a good, virtuous life.
Removed from that central religious guideline,
a whole array of bad actors will always move
in to sell tickets to Pleasure Island.
Feminists adopting the idea that the altar
of money creation is the most valuable thing
a woman can strive for is certainly an example
of this.
Women are demonstrably not happier than they’ve
ever been despite being overwhelmingly accepted
in the workforce, and that dynamic has hardly
made men happier, either.
This is not to say that women joining the
workforce is necessarily making them unhappy,
but it does contradict the carefully packaged
lie that it’s an ultimate aspiration for
lifetime fulfillment.
Surprisingly, beyond a certain point, you
can only go on so many vacations and sip on
so many margaritas.
On the note of workforce gender differences,
that’s what has gotten Tucker Carlson in
such hot water, having cited studies that
demonstrate the biological truth: women
are hypergamous.
Some guys will probably rush to dismiss this
because their wife earns more than them and
they’re perfectly happy.
That’s great, and it stems from the fact
that people are still individuals, but biology
isn’t defined by fringe exceptions.
Before the introduction of women to the workforce,
the average man was just competing with other
men for money and status; now he’s competing
with both men and women.
Naturally, that isn’t a reason to oppose
women in the workforce, but it’s an added
societal complication that is unprecedented.
After all, the number of men women can find
desirable shrinks, and men who are either
unable or unwilling to attain those positions
will grow resentful, bitter, and depressed.
Whether they lack the willpower or the cognitive
horsepower, the outcome’s the same.
“Will grow depressed” is maybe not the
most accurate description, considering that
process is already well underway.
Fundamentally, this is caused by the cult
of market success overtaking our previous
moral foundation: the notion that raw economic
gain is what nourishes the human soul rather
than something higher.
In their mad frenzy to adopt male forms of
competition, women are finding that status
and more money than they need isn’t returning
the kind of meaning they were told it would
by Women’s Studies professors.
As men realize how much more difficult it
is to be minimally attractive to women, they
will have no reason not to check out of the
game.
It’s not as if they have any shortage of
alternative habits to make.
Video games are progressing rapidly, and transitioning
toward virtual reality.
Pornography’s exaggerated depiction of human
sexuality hits all of the right neurological
buttons immediately.
No need to develop a personality or accumulate
valuable skills if you have to work beyond
your cognitive or industrious limits, just
turn on your computer and go.
After all, it isn’t as though we have a
subconscious that is any different than the
one we evolved with.
Surely, we can’t distinguish between the
heightened visuals of a pixelated woman and
an actual one, but people obviously can’t
get the same emotional fulfillment from the
former.
It’s a cop-out that the market all too eagerly
supplies, free of charge and in boundless
abundance.
The chief aim of life and the core building
block of community which is building a family
is effectively disincentivized by commercialized
visual sex.
Without religious conviction, communal belonging,
and economic security, the path forward is
murky, but it begins with the understanding
that neither market worship nor ingratitude
for its fruit is the answer.
Religion and spirituality undoubtedly will
play a role in the solution to this communal
crisis.
Clearly, the human need of that is embedded
deep within our neurological psychology, if
the newfound power of psychedelics is any
indication--it’s ability to reduce death
anxiety and treat addiction being the most
urgent examples.
Even so, those benefits cannot be sustained
without a tight knit social network.
Whatever the case might be, it’s an unfortunate
reality that the tribalistic elements of our
politics are dominating the conversation.
Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson’s discussion
marks one of the first major and balanced
attempts to refocus the disagreements on what
actually matters to the vast majority of Americans.
