Another Lie Destroying the Country

The more I read or watch the news or hang out on social media, the more I see how the United States is being destroyed by the lies we tell ourselves and each other and what the media tell us.

I wrote about the first lie last year. Americans have convinced themselves that we are all irrevocably divided. The truth is we are more united than we think we are. If one looks only at issues, Americans are quite united. We agree on far more than we disagree on. Positions the corporate media and the government like to say are "far left" are actually mainstream. The problem is not disagreement on issues. It is tribalism and the worship of the cult of personality. Americans vote for people, not issues.

The lie I want to talk about today is somewhat related to the concept of division. It's one of the drivers of this division. It is a divisive concept in itself.

The lie is black and white thinking.

Too many Americans believe that there are only two paradigms of economic and political systems. There is only capitalism and communism. One is good and one is bad.

This mode of thinking tends to sit with Americans who remember the Cold War. That means Generation X and older. However, younger pundits on the right use Cold War scare tactics to lure younger voters to the right. It is an old trick for the wealthiest among us to find ways to frighten the underclass into supporting policies that keep them poor and funnel more money to the wealthy.

Most Americans have a poor understanding of what communism is. The generally accepted paradigm of communism is that of Karl Marx. He believed the oppressed classes will one day grow tired of the exploitation by the wealthy. They will  rise up and destroy the upper classes in order to create a society where all assets are shared. There would be no government, no history, and no social classes. He believed the massive inequality of capitalism would drive humanity to create a world where there were no "haves" and "have-nots". 

On the other side of the coin, there is capitalism. This is the idea that if humans are allowed to pursue wealth unfettered, then everyone will have a chance to succeed. The system encourages individualism rather than cooperation. It appeals to our better selves that if all of us participate in the system, we will be rewarded for our hard work.

On paper these are nothing more than economic frameworks. They are the visions of intellectual thinkers. Like any other hypotheses, they do not always live up to expectations in the real world when they are applied. 

The original concept of western capitalism has concrete benefits I think everyone can agree on. Society needs investment. It needs innovation. It needs entrepreneurship. These are the things that have made the United States the country that it is today. Americans are known for thinking outside the box and having a can-do attitude. This country has produced wealth through hard work and problem solving. Wealth and power do not have to be inherited through property and titles as they did in countries that preceded us. 

Unfortunately capitalism doesn't appeal to our better selves in the real world. It is a perfect world where those who are allowed to make as much money as they want will want to fairly share the wealth with those who helped enable the to make that wealth. Unfortunately, It has been proven again and again that the ownership class will not use increased wealth to pay workers. They will not contribute their tax dollars to invest in the infrastructure that makes their businesses possible, or to the military and police that protect them. Nor will they contribute to the education system that enabled them to have the knowledge they need to have their businesses, or educate the people who work for them. 

We learned this lesson in the Gilded Age. It was the Gilded Age that inspired Karl Marx. The wealthy hoard wealth. They don't pay back the people who enabled them to succeed and continue to enable success. This eventually contributed to Black Friday and the Great Depression. One would think the country learned its lesson, but Americans have short memories. We had a more equitable system (at least for white people) for a few decades, but greed took over once more. The wealthy and powerful have been chipping away at those protective systems for the past fifty years.

The United States now has a tiny class of people who are making more money than they could ever spend in this lifetime. There is no necessity they ever have to worry about. There is no luxury that is out of their grasp. They could pay their workers triple the living wage. They could feed and house the world ten times over. All they do is hoard and hoard and hoard while education dies and infrastructure crumbles. 

But on the other side of the spectrum, pure Marxism may sound fair on paper, but in the end isn't going to work with human nature. At first glance it seems equitable to say each member of society gives according to his ability and receives according to his need. After all, most of us will have varying levels of both need and ability throughout our lives. A child has no ability, but much need. That child will grow into someone who can give more before she grows old and can no longer contribute, but still needs to survive. There is no guarantee this can be equitable for everyone. What is someone is healthy and vigorous and never feels sick or becomes injured and this person also never marries or has kids? This person could spend his life working hard and receive little in return. What about the little luxuries in life some of us work hard for such as a vacation or investing in a hobby? The real fear of communism comes from the idea that individuals will never be able to fully enjoy the fruits of their labors.

The paradox of our society is that we have yet to learn how to strike a balance between being able to not only survive, but to thrive, given what we contribute and what we earn.  Most Americans work hard and get little in return while those at the top who hoard everything.

I talked about this pervasive fear of communism is poisoning politics in a previous post. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Cold War and the Soviet Union see the word "communism" and it calls to mind a grim, soulless society where choices are limited, citizens have to wait in long lines to buy necessities, and dissenters are sent to brutal prison camps. We were convinced the Russian Army would kill us all on a moment's notice. As a kid I wondered how much longer I would live before the bomb dropped. All this was because of communism.

As I became more educated about history and economics and politics, I realized the issue isn't communism. The issue was dictatorship. Josef Stalin wasn't evil because he was a communist. He was simply evil. His brand of communism was the tool he used to rule. If we take a step back and look at Russia, the communist era was part of a long history of authoritarian rule. Tzarist Russia was not a paragon of freedom and open markets. The current rule of Putin and his oligarchs is also not a system most Americans would enjoy living under. To say Stalin and his communist successors were evil because they were communists is like saying Tomas de Torquemada was evil because he was Catholic. Hitler was a fascist and a Catholic. I don’t think he would have been any less evil if he were a communist and a Protestant. It's all part of an oppressive system that used the tools at hand to hurt people for its own ends.

The unfortunate legacy of the Cold War is that it created a boogeyman for us. Americans are so afraid of totalitarian rule as defined by the Soviet Union, that we fear anything that we believe even resembles Marxism. Every right wing politician shouts it from the rooftop. Every Republican voter blathers on about it in social media. The biggest threat to society is the slippery slope of socialism.

So what is socialism? What does the word mean? The definition I learned in school was, "The means of production are run by the government." Again, what are the means of production? (Transportation? Infrastructure? Education? Communications?) What should the government run and what systems are best handled privately? We now have an issue in the United States where various groups of citizens can't agree on any of it. The Soviet Union wasn't truly communist, but it did practice an extreme form of socialism where the government controlled all aspects of public life. On the other side, contemporary European countries still have private industry as well as government run education and healthcare systems. Their citizens still enjoy personal prosperity and personal freedoms. Socialism seems to be an undefined spectrum, but here in the US, citizens fear the word as a black and white divide between freedom and totalitarianism.

I wish we could do away with word "socialism" altogether and find a framework that falls between the two extremes. Private investment and free enterprise are important. However, there are some institutions that should not be run for profit. Education is too important to only be left to private systems. Healthcare in the United States is a mess. If the government can administrate Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, it can administrate a healthcare system for everyone. Transportation is also crucial to our daily lives and should have public investment. Some have tried to redefine this as "democratic socialism" or "social democracy", but Americans run away from any term that implies collectivism. I am reminded of the late ultra-right-wing British PM Margaret Thatcher who once said there is no such thing as society. 

The irony of the whole communism vs. capitalism debate is how Americans have always feared communism removes freedom of choice but our choices are disappearing under this dystopian capitalist system as well. Corporate America is removing our choices bit by bit.

In our current system, we have massive corporate consolidation. A successful independent business can make a quality product. Then a bigger corporation comes along and decides to undercut the prices so consumers gravitate to its product instead. The old company goes out of business due to low sales. Another tactic is for the larger company to acquire the smaller company and eliminate competition that way. The larger company will then cut corners on production and produce an inferior product that costs more money. They also cut corners with their workforces, laying off as many employees as possible and paying their workers the lowest possible wages knowing their workers are happy to have any salary at all. Corporations are forcing Americans to have a hand-to-mouth existence, which is a form of psychological torture.

Have you ever used a product and said to yourself, "They don't make them like they used to?" That's unrestrained capitalism at work. Corporations don't need to keep making quality products. Almost everything we consume is owned by a handful of giant corporations. That is also true of our media. A handful of giant corporations control everything we read and watch. Journalists no longer strive to hold the government accountable. They serve the billionaire corporations they work for. American capitalism has taken many of our choices away. We are not slaves to the government as we would be under Soviet-style socialism, but we are all beholden to Big Banks, Big Food, Big Media, and Big Tech.

The saddest part of all of this is that most Americans agree with what I am saying here. Most of us agree there is a problem, but nobody wants to do what it takes to fix it. Why? Because fixing it would be "socialism" and socialism is communism and communism is totalitarian dictatorship. Americans can't get over the belief that eventually unrestrained capitalism will work for everyone. Keep lowering taxes (and watch the infrastructure decay and education fall to pieces), keep deregulating everything (and watch the air become unbreathable, the water become undrinkable, and our finances become endangered by bad banking practices). Keep allowing a handful of people to make obscene amounts of money. Eventually it will trickle down to the rest of us. We have been waiting a long time. How much longer do we wait for the Great Pumpkin, Linus?

The sad reality is we will never find the right system. No economic or governmental system can work for large societies. Empires fall because they grow too big. The United States is a huge country populated by over three hundred million people. There are different economies, different lifestyles, different types of land, and different climates. We all have competing needs. There is a good chance the American Empire will fall (although not likely in the tongue-in-cheek way I once said it will).

If we want to save this country at all, we need to find a better way of doing business. Black and white thinking will only accelerate the collapse.