Tom Petty was Right
How to account for Americans
being the most anxious, fearful, and stressed-out people among the supposedly
advanced nations? Do we not live in the world’s greatest democratic utopia
where dreams come true?
What if the dreaming part is
actually driving us insane? What if we have engineered a society in which
fantasy has so grotesquely over-run reality that coping with daily life is
nearly impossible. What if an existence mediated by pixel screens large and
small presents a virtual world more compelling than the real world and turns
out to be a kind of contagious avoidance behavior — until reality is so
fugitive that we can barely discern its colors and outlines beyond the screens?
You end up in a virtual world
of advertising and agit-prop where manipulation is the primary driver of human
activity. That is, a world where the idea of personal liberty (including any
act of free thought) becomes a philosophical sick joke, whether you believe in
the possibility of free will or not. You get a land full of college kids
trained to think that coercion of others is the highest-and-best use of their
time on earth — and that it represents “inclusion.” You get a news industry
that makes its own reality, churning out narratives (i.e. constructed
psychodramas) to excite numbed minds.
You get politics that play out
like a Deputy Dawg cartoon. You get a corporate tyranny of
racketeering that herds spellbound citizens like so many sheep into chutes for
shearing, not only of their money, but their autonomy, dignity, and finally
their will to live.
Can a people recover from such
an excursion into unreality? The USA’s sojourn into an alternative universe of
the mind accelerated sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global
financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array
of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, including the burdens of
empire, onerous global debt, population overshoot, fracturing globalism,
worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the
specter of climate change — things that hurt to think about.
The sense of gathering crisis
persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into question our ability to
carry on “normal” life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that
attends it is so hard for the public to process that a dismaying number of
citizens opt for suicide. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening
and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. Bad ideas flourish in this
nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they dominate the scene on every
side.
A species of wishful thinking
that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting
magical rescue remedies to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism,
and suburbia that make up the crumbling armature of “normal” life in the USA.
The political Right seeks to Make America Great Again, as though we might
return to a 1962 heyday of industrial mass production by wishing hard enough.
The Left seeks the equivalent of an extended childhood for all, lived out in a
universal safe space, where all goods and services come magically free
from a kindly parent-like government, and the sunny days are spent training
unicorns to find rainbows.
The decade-long “recovery”
from the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 amounted to ten years of fake-it-til-you-make-it —
with the prospect nil of actually making it to something like economic and
cultural soundness. Are we too far gone now? Some kind of shock therapy is
surely in the offing, and probably in the form of a violent financial
readjustment that will alter the terms of getting and spending so drastically
as to topple the matrix of rackets that masquerades as the nation’s business.
That financial shock has been
coiling and coiling in the fantasyland that banking has become in the new zero
interest rate regime where notions that pretend to be money get levered into
new ways of destroying life on earth and the human project with it. At some
cognitive level the people of this land sense what is coming and the wait for
it is driving them crazy. Tom Petty was right: the waiting is the hardest
part, and a hard way to learn that a virtual life is not an adequate
substitute for an authentic one.
