One of the biggest problems America has is that the 'middle class' sides with the rich against the poor, instead of with the poor against the rich. I put the 'middle class' in brackets because realistically, there is no middle class anymore. The rich are so much richer than everyone else that there are only two classes, the hyper-rich and everybody else. The hyper-rich could be classified as the top 1%, the top 10%, or even the top 20%. It hardly matters. The point is the 99%, the 90%, or the 80% are so much poorer that they are in no way 'half way in between' the rich and the poor, as 'middle class' would nominally designate. Let's assume the top 20% of Americans are rich, for argument's sake. The remaining 80% are relatively poor. They are far poorer than what you would expect from a country making $50,000 per capita this year. You would think all 80% of Americans would resent this fact and wish to make common cause for a greater share of the goodies. For instance, in 1980 the top 1% of Americans made around 9% of the income in this country. Now they make 27% of the income, all on their own. This comes directly out of the pockets of the rest of us, who are all making less than we did thirty years ago, and have far less in savings and far higher debt loads than we had thirty years ago.
Marxists have struggled with this question for a long time, and it is by no means a new phenomena. They labeled the problem 'false consciousness.' It's when people act against their own economic interests for the sake of inflating their status or ego, and in doing so enslave the whole country to our hyper-rich capitalist masters. Recall when Lenin mocked the West with the pejorative that we would even sell them the rope they would use to hang us with? Well it's the same internally. The 'middle class,' afflicted with false consciousness, would even vote for the rope capitalists use to hang them with, so long as it chokes the poor to death first.
False consciousness is based around a series of factual errors that try to take the economy and turn it into a karmic universe. People want to believe that rich people are good people, and poor people are bad people, and everyone is getting what they deserve out of the system. They will then manipulate the facts in their own heads, completely contrary to reality, in order to fit this ideal.
Delusion #1: "I'm rich." Anyone in the bottom 80% is not rich, they are poor. The incomes of the bottom 80% cannot afford the American Dream. If you want to own a house with a room for every family member, a nice yard for your dog, two cars, one for each of the two adults in the house, cell phones for everyone in the family, nice furniture, nice clothing, a safe neighborhood with a good public school, enough money to support at least three kids all the way through college and graduate school, full coverage health insurance, a retirement fund, family vacations in the summer, funds to pay for children's out of school activities like soccer or piano, dental care and braces for the kids, etc, etc, the bottom 80% simply doesn't cut it. The more money you make, the more likely you are to live in an expensive city like New York City, the less useful your money is. It is simply impossible to afford a large home that could comfortably house a large family anywhere on the East or West Coast. This is a pleasure reserved to the mega rich alone. Alternatively, if you live in the middle of the country where many things are cheaper, wages are considerably lower and so again it's hard to make ends meet. Though these expenses are certainly extravagant from the point of view of a starving Ethiopian, they are by no means gaudy or wasteful to what should be the first world. No where in here do I list a private yacht, a sports car, a shoe collection, fast food restaurants, cigarettes, or any other wasteful expense. The expenses listed above are bare necessities and what should be expected for a middle class lifestyle. If people can't afford this, they simply aren't the middle class. They aren't the American Dream. They're the poor, just like everyone else.
Delusion #2: "I'm paying taxes to the poor." This false consciousness is extremely obnoxious. A good deal of hatred towards the poor is based around the lie that everyone else is somehow shouldering their load. Taxes do not go to the poor, first off. Almost all taxes go to social security, medicare, and the military, all 'middle class' institutions that benefit everyone, rich and poor alike. The remaining spending is a mere trickle of public funds and most of it dissolves away into a sea of well-paid public workers instead of ever reaching any actually poor end user. Even for the lucky few poor people who qualify for food stamps, section 8 housing, TANF, or some other government program that the 'middle class' can point towards as parasites, there is absolutely no way a single member of the 'middle class' had to pay a single dime for their sake. This is because just the spending on social security, medicare, and the military per middle class beneficiary exceeds the total amount of taxes they've given to the government over their lifespans. Every single one of these programs is in a massive deficit. This means they are paying more out than they are getting in. This means that the middle class is putting every single cent of their tax dollars into paying for their own benefits and it still doesn't even come close to paying the bill. Around half of the US budget is paid for by government borrowing, but not half of the US budget goes to aid to the poor. Ipso Facto, it is impossible for middle class taxpayers to be paying for benefits to the poor. Even this is an exaggeration because the middle class barely shoulders any portion of the burden of taxes. The federal government collects payroll taxes, which hit everyone, including the poor, alike. It also collects an income tax, which most people don't have to pay, or pay extremely little on after all of their deductions, that only really hits the rich. Furthermore, it collects a capital gains tax which only hits the rich, a corporate income tax which only hits the rich, and an estate tax which only hits the rich. The trivial sum of money the middle class has to pay for in taxes barely contributes to the federal budget, a budget wherein half the money is printed out of thin air to make ends meet. So we are talking about maybe 30% of 50% of the budget is even collected from the middle class, or 15%. It's disgusting whenever these people, who haven't even contributed their share of government benefits they receive in tax dollars, keep complaining about their pitiful 15% contribution going to the poor, when in fact they are tax parasites themselves.
Delusion #3: Anyone can get an education if they study hard, and anyone with an education can get a high paying job, therefore the poor only have themselves to blame. This is a double lie of false consciousness. IQ is genetic, not environmental. IQ, more than any other factor, determines whether you can succeed in higher education or not. This is why we give SAT tests to prospective students before accepting them to college. The SAT test is not a test of memorized knowledge, it is a thinly veiled IQ test which is completely different from the tests you would take in school based on reasoning and comprehension skills. The SAT test has been a reliable predictor of later college success for decades and has an almost perfect correlation. Those with high scores, four years down the road, have high degrees from high schools, and those with low scores, four years down the road, are dropouts, if they were ever accepted in the first place. Whether dumb people study hard or not, they'll never be able to understand the material, and dumb people were born this way so you can hardly blame them for not 'getting' the material presented in college. It's as unreasonable to demand dumb people understand quantum physics as demanding giraffes learn how to read by studying harder. We were all born unable to fly. It is genetic that we can't fly. Therefore, we never go around blaming people for not flying because they aren't flapping their arms hard enough. Why, then, do we have this double standard where suddenly you aren't flapping your brain enough if your brain can't soar up to a Phd? It's time for people to realize a basic scientific reality that our brains are built differently at birth and there's nothing we can do about it, a fact established by identical twin studies for the last century. If twin studies aren't good enough, just wait a few months, in China they are sequencing the genomes of high IQ geniuses and comparing their genetics to normal people off the street, and when their sequencing is done they will tell us directly which genes these geniuses have and the rest of us don't. At that point, all room for debate will have utterly slammed closed on this issue.
Second, a recent survey came out showing that 50% of new college graduates, people carrying enormous debts due to student loans, were still unemployed or employed in a job that made absolutely no use of their education. These people cannot pay their loans back and will never make a 'profit' from having gone to college in the first place. What do you say to these people who did exactly what you asked of them, worked extremely hard, and got absolutely no reward at the end of it? Are they also somehow to blame? In a country that has had no new net jobs since 2000, why do we keep saying this is the land of opportunity? There hasn't been a single job opportunity for anyone in the last 13 years, this in a country with 40 million more people than lived here in 2000. The truth is, most college degrees offered are in fields that provide no useful job skills anyone would want to hire you for. College degrees that are in high demand, like becoming a doctor or an engineer, require vastly higher IQ than any average American can hope to qualify for. So even if there are job openings in some fields that would pay high wages, they are unavailable to most college graduates, who are only intelligent enough to major in something much easier like 'social studies.' Even worse, since every high-skilled job infers having access to massive amounts of capital, the limiting reactant of high skilled jobs is not trained employees, but the capital needed to make their work useful. A doctor needs a hospital full of expensive drugs and machines to do his work. A jet pilot needs an F-22 or an F-35. An astronaut needs an international space station. A physicist needs a Large Hadron Collider. A mathematician needs a University to teach in. An architect needs a skyscraper to build. An engineer needs a golden gate bridge to build. In each and every case, the skilled worker is dealing with a mammoth project that far exceeds his meager pay, and represents the investments of millions or billions of dollars. Even with the federal reserve printing money out of thin air at a blistering pace, there isn't enough capital to keep all of our skilled workers occupied doing their fancy, high-capital jobs. In fact, only 1/3 of Phd's are doing a job related to their field of mastery, the rest are probably flipping burgers like the rest of us. Even if we doubled the amount of people who could be doctors given the proper facilities, we could not actually double the amount of doctors employed in America. This is because patients can't afford health insurance as it is, so even if they want a doctor they can't actually hire any, and there wouldn't be any hospital that could provide all the auxiliary goods and employees necessary for the doctor to work with. Increasing the education of our populace is useless until we increase the basic wealth of the country, so that A) people can afford to buy expensive services that provide for high-paying jobs, and B) the nation can afford the infrastructure/investment capital to empower people's dreams. And the basic wealth of the country does not come from people learning random junk in college -- it comes only from things like food, water, metals, fossil fuels, lumber, etc. Actual products that form the actual backbone of our entire way of living, whose presence or absence directly defines whether we are rich or poor. Everything else is just fairy tale nonsense. We will never be richer, no matter how much money we print and assign ourselves, until we have more of these basic products per capita than before, or learn how to use them more efficiently than before. ((Something we have been doing, by the way, for decades, which is a very good thing.)) True breakthroughs in wealth depend not on everyone receiving higher education, but explosions of new resource acquisitions.
Across history, look at these examples. How did the world get richer? At the very beginning, we got richer when we learned how to domesticate plants and animals. We turned their labor into our wealth by having them raise food for us, which we then ate at the end with minimal effort. Then what did we do? We started relying on wind and water power to grind our grain, taking the effort of nature and freely availing of it for ourselves. We then sailed around the world using wind and water currents not of our making, with wood not of our making, and nails that we mined up from the crust of the Earth, which were forged in furnaces fueled by wood or coal not of our making, and got richer by discovering more domesticated crops and animals than we ever had before. With the additional bounty of extra crops, all of which we could plant in new zones, we increased our agricultural base. Land that previously couldn't be farmed or grazed suddenly could be, giving us more wealth from the efforts of our crops and animals than ever before. The cattle industry in America, for instance, was entirely due to the spreading of domesticated animals from Europe to America, which previously had no cattle. (Or pigs, or sheep, or horses, or. . .) Ireland, on the other hand, received a staple crop that they'd never been able to grow before, the potato, in a land too far north to (prosperously) support wheat farming, opening up the entire island to cultivation. We then only needed one more invention, the steam engine, which allowed us to start doing everything by machine power based around fossil fuels (which were abundant and easily accessible at the time), to increase our productive power to nigh infinity all across the world. Nowadays almost all wealth comes directly from fossil fuels, and the entire rest of the economy simply orbits around who has oil, natural gas, or coal and what they're willing to sell it for. The entire world economy booms or busts depending solely on the price of oil. Where in here was education the source of wealth?
Was it when we tamed cattle? Was it when we scattered corn seeds across the ground? Was it when we mastered fire and started burning the trees around us for energy? Was it when we dug up coal from the Earth with picks and shovels? Please, do tell me, where in this timeline of economic revolutions did we ever rely on effete eunuchs studying Confucius or Greek philosophers studying geometry in their famous Academies? When was education anything but a plaything for the rich, a leisure activity no different from what television is today? And when were the educated behind any of the revolutions in the economy up until this point? Even the computer revolution was enacted by a high school dropout, Bill Gates. The light bulb was invented by Edison, a high school dropout. The airplane was invented by a pair of brothers who sold bikes for a living. Education has never produced anything but 'educated people.' Productivity is 100% due to geniuses with inspiration to forge their own path, who see something no one has ever thought of before, and as a result no one could ever have educated them in in the first place.
Delusion #4: Pay is equal to productivity, it represents how much good you are doing for society. This is absolutely absurd. Stay at home mothers, who are creating the next generation of mankind, aren't paid a single dime under capitalism. Children, who are turning themselves into the next generation of productive adults, aren't paid a single dime for doing so. And yet these two jobs are obviously more productive than anything else anyone else could possibly do on Earth. Furthermore, the amount of people who have led to enormous booms in the economy who themselves ended up destitute and bankrupt are legion. Inventors of all important parts of the computer, all important devices like telephones or light bulbs or cars, all of these people have been penniless in their old age, even as the economy grew by trillions of dollars thanks to them. Poets and authors and painters who today are revered as the best ever, died penniless, starving, and sick in various attics, having never been rewarded in their time. Volunteers work for nothing while saving lives, putting out fires, tending to the sick, looking after kids, or doing any number of valuable and necessary jobs. And for every person who is undervalued in this economy, there is another person who is overvalued. Any public worker receiving a government salary is artificially overpaid. Since they don't have to compete in the marketplace, they are not subject to economic laws. Any worker in any field that requires a license is making use of a government monopoly to be overpaid, since licenses artificially limit competition. Anyone who benefits from a natural monopoly is being overpaid, since it's absurd to say people who just happened to live precious mineral deposits, oil deposits, or real estate deserve a single dime due to it. Anyone who benefits from a pretty-much-natural-monopoly is being overpaid. For instance, if you already run the city's fiber optic business, it is prohibitively expensive for a competitor to build an entirely new fiber optic line all throughout the city and attract new customers. You can always under price such competition because you barely have to pay anything to maintain your service, while they have to pay for the costs of building their service in the first place. the same is true of an airline business. There's no room anywhere in the city to build a new airport, an airport too far away from the city is too cumbersome for anyone to use, and therefore any air carriers who have contracts with airports where their planes will be supported have a monopoly. It's impossible for any other airline industry to even get a wheel in the door.
Advertisers who con people into buying products that they don't actually want and definitely don't need are not producing anything, they're just leeching off everyone else. The same for insurance salesmen who don't actually pay out any claims. The same for providers of medical care that can't actually extend someone's lifespan. There are so many businesses that make money off the gullible, from real estate salesmen to used car salesmen to lawyers to credit card companies to bankers to brokers, that it's simply legendary how quickly fools and their money are parted. Is it somehow productive to fleece people into buying overpriced mortgages they can't afford or luxury cars they can't make payments on? No! And yet this is exactly the basis for a worker's pay in this field.
In Little Women, the most beloved member of the family was a girl named Beth. She was basically an invalid, too sick to go to work or to school. But she did chores around the house, was a beautiful pianist, and always had a kind word and a loving smile for the rest of her family that took care of her. She died while still a child, with the humble dream of just trying to make those around her a little happier than they otherwise would be. She never earned a dime in her life. According to false consciousness infected American middle class members, she wasn't worth shit.
Delusion #5: Unemployment is only 8%. Anyone who wants to work can find a job. Only a few lunatics, drug addicts, criminals, or terminally lazy people don't have work in America.
Here's the truth. Out of this country of 311 million people, only 119 million have work. In other words, only 38% of Americans work. The remaining 62% of Americans do not work. Almost 2/3 of Americans do not have a job. Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512091/is-this-why-google-doesnt-want-you-to-drive/
Okay, now that you've opened your eyes a little, let's review this fact. The mega-rich, the top 20%, are definitely going to occupy 20% out of this 38% who are employed. This means the remaining 18% of jobs are scattered loosely throughout the remaining 80% of Americans. In other words, we are playing a musical chairs game where less than one in four 'middle class' Americans can get a job even if they wanted one. The majority of 'middle class' Americans are unemployed. No, let me stress this a bit more, over three fourths of the 'middle class' Americans you see around you are unemployed. Combine this with the fact that America hasn't had a new job since 2000, and you get a job market where no one is employed and no one can be employed for the past two decades. The poor aren't to blame for being poor because they won't 'get a job.' There were never any jobs to be had in the first place. The illusion of illusions is that there were any jobs from the very beginning. How on Earth does the nation spin out such ludicrous lies as 8% unemployment when in fact we have 62% unemployment? Well, they use a variety of tricks. First, they don't count seniors or children, both of whom in the past were quite capable of work and of course could also easily be working today, since most work doesn't even involve manual labor anymore. This is an extremely arbitrary decision which just hides the fact that there are so many people not working for no viable reason. Second, they don't count people going to college or any other job training or trade school, despite the fact that again, these people could easily do jobs if allowed to work at them. Third, they don't count people who have been out of work for an extended period of time, as though they somehow just vanish off the map even though they have not actually died yet. Fourth, they don't count people who devote themselves to home life for the sake of their families, even though they most certainly are disengaged from the economy and unemployed in the marketplace. Fifth, they don't count the people in our jails or drug dealers who will soon be in jail, even though they most definitely are not doing productive jobs. The list goes on and on, but basically, they have found a way to act like everyone is working when in fact most people aren't.
On top of this, hours worked in this country have halved since 1900. The amount of hours one works in a year is a far more accurate measure than the loose term 'employed' or 'unemployed.' According to Peter Drucker in his book New Realities, the hours worked measure has halved since 1900 for the average worker. This situation has only been exacerbated by the recent recession. People are working fewer hours in record numbers compared to any point in the past. Their 'employment' is only nominal, because the majority of every week they are in fact not working at all. If you added in the underemployed to the unemployed, would there be anyone left in this county aside from the megarich, top 20%, who work at all?
Through false consciousness propaganda, we have been taught to believe that the unemployed are simply the scum of the Earth, and their plight is their own fault, by being singularly and uniquely wicked. How does this compute with the reality that 62% of Americans are unemployed and do not work? How does this compute with the reality that of the 38% of Americans who do have work, most aren't working over 30 hours a week? I would really love to know how everyone is wickedly lazy in this country, and everyone has only themselves to blame. But look how cleverly they have spliced and respliced the numbers, so that the majority, the unemployed, feel like they are the tiny minority, and therefore never combine their votes to display their true strength or argue for their own self-worth. Instead, everyone is somehow led to believe that employment is the norm, and that they must side with their employed friends the mega-rich against the evil unemployed, the parasitical poor.
There are probably countless more delusions that feed into the false consciousness that defines a 'middle class' in America where there actually is none. But my point is solid enough with the ones listed above. What's important to realize here is that people want to believe they are middle class and better than the poor, when in fact all facts show that they aren't. Why do they want to believe this? It goes as far back as chimpanzees or lions or wolves. Everyone wants to be the alpha. They want to have as high a rank in society as possible, and their happiness depends on being higher than someone else. As such, psychologically, it is more rewarding to side with the mega-rich and pretend you are one of them than it is to side with the poor, even though you actually are one of them. People prefer this psychological bonus, of posing as an alpha in the mirror and to their friends (who are commonly fooled and actually respect you when you aren't worth an iota of respect), to any economic gain that could be garnered through standing in solidarity with the lower class. Who wants to be rich if it comes at the price of looking poor in the mirror and in front of your friends? People would prefer to be poor while looking rich to themselves and others. It is like a mad, universal Portrait of Dorian Gray. It doesn't matter that at home, the portrait of our lives falls into deeper and deeper darkness and depravity. It doesn't matter that the true picture in our houses is one of unemployment, debt, depression, divorce (the leading cause of which is financial trouble), and despair. What matters is that our outward looks remain blissfully carefree, pure and vibrant. This pact with the devil that was once a curiosity of just one bohemian in the 1800's is now the defining feature of modern American life. While living lives of quiet desperation at home, fearful of losing their homes to foreclosure, fearful of losing their jobs due to plant closure at any moment, fearful of getting sick and not being able to afford the health insurance co-payments, fearful of their savings being devastated overnight by a real estate plunge or stock market collapse, fearful of being stuck in a bad neighborhood where their children are bullied at school but unable to afford any better home that has a better school they could send their children to, fearful of getting married when half of marriages break up in divorce, and grimly stating in surveys that they do not feel their lives will be as good as their parents' lives were, we still pretend that we are somehow the 'middle class,' the 'upper middle class,' while going ever deeper into credit card debt just to pay our electricity bills.
Like all satanic pacts, all we ever get is superficial benefits while lacking any substance. By playing this game of 'I'm okay, it's the poor who are to blame,' we get oodles of empty self satisfaction based on factual errors and spurious reasoning. But we continue to fall behind in every actual measure of quality of life and standard of living. Wages are down, employment security is down, debt is up, divorce is up, birth rates are down (what is a more basic measure of your well being than the number of children you can support? In colonial America, families could easily support 13!), health care coverage is down, tuition costs are up, the price of food and gasoline is up, on and on and on. Any measure, on anything, even polls of basic happiness are worse off than we used to be. The only people economically and socially better off than we were in 1980 are the hyper rich. The rest of us have been played for fools. And Satan is laughing all the way to the bank with the souls of the 'middle class,' who traded in their compassion and dignity that could have stood for truth and justice with the 80%, but instead betrayed themselves and their humanity by preferring their own status in the pecking order.
It's perfectly reasonable for the mega rich, the super productive, the ridiculously smart, to accumulate all the fame and fortune in America for themselves. There's no point blaming them for succeeding at every ambition they put their minds to. It's as natural for them to get rich and famous and win prizes in competition as it's natural for a scorpion to sting its prey. The blame in this country cannot be attributed to the rich acting in their own interest and lobbying for ever lower taxes on themselves. The blame is squarely on the middle class, who despite their nature, embraced a pack of lies instead, and sided with their own natural enemy, all the way to the gallows the rich had prepared for them. They are like those valiant proletariats who proclaimed loyalty to Stalin and communism all the way into the firing line where they were executed for being an enemy to the people. Never mind what the elites have decided for you, never mind that they are currently liquidating you before your very eyes, what matters is that you're in the right crowd and seen to be rubbing shoulders with the right kind of people. Hail Stalin and the next five year plan! We who are about to die Salute You!
It's madness. And it's evil. The rich are sane and good people, naturally acting in their own self interest. Sort of like a guy who, if proposed to by ten different women who are all fine with him taking them all to himself, cannot be blamed for going along with such a wonderful dream. He isn't the one to blame in this scenario. The one to blame is the guy on the sideline, himself single and unloved, insisting on the right of polygamists to monopolize as many women as possible, so that he can think to himself that he's going to be one of the lucky few, and women look at him as one of the guys who thinks he's big enough to have a harem. For such a ridiculous side benefit, he trades the actual chance at an actual wife and child away. He won't get to sing a single little girl a single happy birthday. He won't get to play a single ball game with a single little boy. He won't get to sleep a single night with a single partner devoted solely to him. But he'll have the illusion of ten wives and a hundred children to comfort himself with at night. If this trade isn't satanic, what trade is?
No comments:
Post a Comment