Post Traumatic Shopping Disorder

[elfs]

Every generation that has produced another thinks that the future is going downhill compared to its own.. Tablets written in ancient Sanskrit contain complaints about how prices are rising, children are disrespectful, and everyone is a gossip. Several ancient Greek plays complain in much the same voice. And today the pundits are everywhere explaining why we're all headed downhill. Next century is the Chinese Century, when the autocracy of the Chinese combined with their pseudocapitalist system, authoritarian fingers embedded deep into the orifices of the economic system.

After my weekend at the mall I'm tempted to join them. As I watched my poor fellow shoppers suffer the indignities of interior designers influneced by Skinner and Torquemada, assisted by McLuhan, and equipped with the latest neuroscience, I watched all these tormented figures and wondered, "Where does all this wealth come from?"

A lot of answers float through my head. Issues about how cheap access to energy has created communities and neighborhoods that cannot survive without that energy, for one. From past industrial innovation, which our current severe anti-intellectualism is fast trying to doom. But the best quote that I found comes from Andrew Bacevish (and a hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for it):

The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.

There's a lot to dislike in that quote. Phrase like "...in an age of consumerism..." and "...the cheif desire of the American people..." make it stand out, but (and I know that's a dangerous word), walking through that mall I couldn't help but feel that Bacevish was putting his finger on something.

I mean, was anyone in that mall generating, you know, wealth? Or were we merely pushing money around, from one cash-strapped entity to another, without real regard for our well-being? Is here a universal sense of mortality salience in the air?

I'm generally an optimisitic guy. And usually, I believe that free systems will produce the best possible outcomes. The Chinese have an innovation problem, and it takes Western-style innovation to create answers. Bjorn Lomborg has an editorial in which he claims that every dollor spent in research and development of low-carbon alternatives is worth ten dollars implementing existing technologies. The same is probably true of any industry. But the Chinese are good at adaptation. They could never invent CHO bioengineering, but they can probably implement knockoffs eventually, and maybe without the troubles they had with Heparin.

Today, I can easily see the US becoming a third-world nation, the majority of its territory slowly cannibalizing on its own corruption-infested fat, while powerful, bordered city-states supported by international cash, and defending with private armies their water and electricity supplies, supply rare pockets of Western-style research and development to the rest of the world. A train from one city-state to another through this American landscape passes hundreds of billboards with messages like "Darwin knows there's a God now!" and "God said, I believe it, that does it." (This isn't an original observation; actually, a train ride from the Washington Metro zone to Miami does resemble this!)

Well, at least the Enlightment will limp along for awhile. A kind of hothouse Enlightenment, protected from the harsh, cold twin realities: of autocratic voraciousness on one side and intellectual laziness on the other. Like most hothouse products, kept alive only because it's economically useful to someone.

Wow, there's a whole book or two in there.

And double-wow. My trip to the mall must have traumatized me quite a bit. Three posts in a row to process all that.

Comments

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

I mean, was anyone in that mall generating, you know, wealth? Or were we merely pushing money around, from one cash-strapped entity to another, without real regard for our well-being?

Most likely, plenty of people in that mall generate wealth, but what probably got you so overwhelmed was that next to nobody was doing it *THERE*. (here's a sad thought, possibly the only people doing so were working on laptops in starbucks) Modern shopping centers are places where wealth goes for redistribution, not to be made... that's not Economically Viable anymore.

Most of our nation's wealth (and this is me with no economics degree pontificating on What Sounds Right To Me, which is one soapbox up from What I Heard From Some Guy In The Pub) is in our ideas. We do some good High Tech, and there's still a lot of farming, lucky us that all that fertile plans soil was scraped down out of canada, sure... but we've long been a nation of people having Big Ideas, and then being willing to chase them. Thing is... Big Ideas aren't all that common. Maybe they are, but finding them in concert with a person or group willing to put forth the effort to bring them to fruition isn't.

We've got fertile soil here for ideas, and for some reason, they often flourish here. Some venture capitalist or sleep-deprived, obsessive compulsive inventor will make sure that a Big Idea makes its way out onto the stage at a better rate than most other places. Partly, it's because we attracted a lot of outside brains, because they wanted their Big Ideas to have a chance, and lots of other places either don't have the infrastructure, or the folks in charge don't want the boat rocked by anything new. Partly, it's social structure and an economy filled with people who can see the dollar signs behind a big new idea, in all the ripples it'll make. (I remember a news story on the lady who started making pins to decorate Crocs with. She's a millionaire now.)

Lately, we've been shoving lots of those people away. If the USA is going to crumble and fall like every superpower before it, it'll probably be because we stopped growing ideas. People will always have new ones, and they'll change the world. We have been staying ahead of this game because they've been having 'em here, growing 'em here, and and we get to be in on the ground floor, the first harvest, pick your metaphor. When an idea comes from your relative "here", it's more easily accepted than one from outside. A big chunk of the middle east hasn't like any Big New Idea that's come along since 1300AD or earlier, and look where that's gotten them. Outside of oil wealth and the drug trade, they've got nothing the world wants, and no drive to change that.

I think of all the people who never have a Big Idea that comes to fruition, and of all the people who just generate/circulate other people's wealth... It's what everyone was doing in the mall, and that one-way current of financial exchange, most of it frivolous and pointless, can be overwhelming. Without that environment, though, that slew of dollars pouring into the pockets of somebody else, it'd be harder to fuel the economic machine that spits out new ideas in the form of Useful Shit. It was an emerging middle class that kicked us from dark ages into renaissance, and they did it by shopping. How crazy is that? Suddenly, a market existed of people who didn't toil their last breath in the field, but wasn't exactly royalty, either, and the beginnings of a modern economy sprung up to deal with it, and feed it the art, philosophy, music, science, exploration and learning that it craved.

What's in the mall is mostly shit. People, merchandise, atmosphere, take your pic. Sometimes a pile of manure grows some damned pretty flowers, though. I think that with one, you get the other.

That's enough ad-hoc philosophy for the moment, i still need to exercize, shower, and monitor a corned beef that's cooking. (now with fixed HTML markup)