After the Future

Of Supermen and Last Men

From article in Seattle Times about the offers cities are making to attract Amazon's HQ2:

But the most far-reaching offer is from Fresno, California. That city of half a million isn’t offering any tax breaks. Instead it has a novel plan to give Amazon special authority over how the company’s taxes are spent.

Fresno promises to funnel 85 percent of all taxes and fees generated by Amazon into a special fund. That money would be overseen by a board, half made up of Amazon officers, half from the city. They’re supposed to spend the money on housing, roads and parks in and around Amazon.

The proposal shows a park with a sign: “This park brought to you by Amazon,” with the company’s smiling arrow corporate logo.

“The community fund projects would give Amazon credit for the funding of each project,” the proposal says. “The potential negative impacts from a project would be turned into positives, giving Amazon credit for mitigating it.”

Is it even legal to give a company direct sway over civic spending like that?

When asked about it, Fresno’s economic-development director threw the public interest under the bus.

“Rather than the money disappearing into a civic black hole, Amazon would have a say on where it will go,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Not for the fire department on the fringe of town, but to enhance their own investment in Fresno.”

You poor fools out on the fringe of town. All this time you’ve been paying your taxes, thinking it was for the broader public good. Suckers.

Seriously, we’ve got Congress slashing corporate taxes, business cash overwhelming elections and the Federal Communications Commission poised to turn control of the internet over to a few private companies. Now a single company is viewed as such a shiny prize that some seem ready to wave the white flag on the whole “for the people, by the people” experiment.

It feels like a dicey moment for the “civic black hole.“ Also known as democracy.

Do most Americans have any sense of what democracy as self rule means anymore? Do they care? is it worth the bother? Is there anything in it anymore that is worth fighting to preserve?

Late capitalism has made all of us into Last Men who elect Last Men to represent their interests in government. And those Last Men, because it's what Last Men elected by Last Men do, slavishly submit to corporate übermenschen like Bezos. It's the way of the world. Take to your knees and proffer your bowls of earth and water and you will live, kind of.

The Opioid Crisis

From Axios on Saturday:

• In 2015, white people among the 15 to 64 age group accounted for 80.2% of all opioid-related deaths, higher than their 61.9% share of the population. Native American people were the only other racial group with a higher share of deaths (1.1%) than their share of the population (0.9%). 
• Black people were the only racial group whose death rate trended upwards with age, with the oldest age groups (45 to 54 and 55 to 64) with the highest death rates (26.1 and 26.5 per 100,000 people).
• The demos with the greatest increases in death rates from 1999-2015 were white people aged 55 to 64 (488%), Native American people aged 45 to 54 (380%), and white people aged 25 to 34 (339%).

Some thoughts;

Lots of people find ways of living in American society in meaningful ways, but there are millions and millions of people who don’t, and it’s getting worse, and I don’t see how that gets turned around so long as the fundamental underlying problem remains meaninglessness. 

Meaning, as Aristotle told us, is not the province of Logos but of Mythos, which in most societies is the province of religion. But while there has been and still is plenty of good religion in American society, there seems to be more bad religion, and these days bad religion has given good religion a bad name. In doing so it has delegitimized  good religion and rendered it impotent in shaping any kind of healthy public meaning framework.

Late capitalism with its celebration of disruptive, creative-destructive, Ayn Randy style of winner/loser rugged individualism shapes in different degrees the mythos of political and corporate elites (i.e., Republicans and neoliberal Democrats) in this country. That is an ideology, but it functions as a bad, really bad, religion substitute. Nevertheless, it’s the only one in the precincts of the elite with any juice, and there is no good mythos (religion or ideology)  with legitimacy enough to provide a robust counterbalance. 

The political/economic system produced by this elite mythos creates of necessity more losers than winners, and when the losers don’t have some alternative mythos that affirms their dignity and gives their lives a sense of purpose, they often understandably spin off into depression, substance abuse, and rampage shootings, and resentment-driven politics. And this is why people in the rust belt hate cosmopolitan Liberals and vote for con men like Trump. Trump channels the resentment they feel from the contempt that is directed toward them by cosmopolitan elites, among whom HRC was exemplary in that deplorable respect. 

Meaning, or the lack of it, isn’t everything, but it is a much bigger part of what is contributing to our political and social pathologies than I hear spoken about or written about.