Do we aspire to isolation?
Unlearning the dreams of the rich
I was on a train ride recently, traveling north from New York City up the Hudson River. The commuter line takes you on a beautiful route, snaking along the partially frozen water on one side, with little towns and beautiful homes eventually coming into view on the other side, once you get past the city and the suburbs outside them. But, from time to time, as the train moved up the Hudson Valley, I would look out the window and see hills rising above the river, hills dotted with mansions. On both sides of the river, an hour outside Manhattan or so, are some of the more expensive properties in the country. On beautiful land, with stunning views, sit the mansions (often second homes) of some of the wealthiest people on Earth. And, as the train passed them by, the thought came: Is this really what we’re aiming for?
It’s tough to give a hard no to that question. Do I want a beautiful house with some land around it? I mean yeah, I’ll take it. But I want to be growing food on that hypothetical land. I’d want as many friends living in that mansion with me as possible. I’d want the old barn used for hosting communal events. Those people in the mansions in the hills have a different vision, as far as I can tell.
For centuries the rich and powerful have aspired to separation. Clubs that the masses cannot enter, gardens whose beauty the masses can’t enjoy, palaces miles away from the rest of humanity. If you go to the hills above New York City, you’ll see that they’ve aspired to isolate themselves from all of us for centuries. Alongside the current mansions of the rich and famous are older, palatial houses that the robber barons and the ruling class from even earlier eras occupied.
One example is Clermont Estate, now a historic site, which used to be the property of the Livingston Family:
The Livingstons were given hundreds of thousands of acres by the King of England. Of course this was native land, but the rights of the existing inhabitants were trampled and the family eventually owned about one million acres in New York State. The current historic site is merely the remains, the beautiful manor and sprawling gardens overlooking the river are just a tiny fraction of their former estate. It’s just a glimpse into the vast wealth they used to construct a little utopia for themselves, at the expense of the indigenous people and countless workers and poor farmers.
You and I might take a look and envy this fortune, might want a home in the rolling hills with gardens and views of the river, but I would argue that the dream of wealth and the removal it affords people is really the dream of a better world in disguise. We want the security wealth brings, we want the freedom that comes with money, and we do want distance – distance from the pain and uncertainty of life under capitalism. But if we fail to interrogate what sits underneath the desire to strike it rich, we risk pursuing isolation and perpetuating the society that breeds this rampant loneliness that’s always being discussed.
The isolation you and I might suffer from isn’t, in truth, the result of our individual decisions. We’ve been afflicted by systems that target all of us on a mass scale. Gentrification, the influx of capital that raises rents and makes buying a home more and more expensive, pushes people out of the neighborhoods they grew up in. Local institutions like community centers and cheap diners and dive bars and after-school centers also tend to suffer or go extinct in the process. At the same time neoliberalism has attacked, all too successfully, organizations like unions and community groups and other centers of people power. These massive, international systems have alienated us to further the profits of corporations and the 1%.
And we’re conditioned to respond to this tsunami by carving out our little corner where things are okay. Meanwhile, society deteriorates further, not because of some force of nature but because a small sliver of the population and the systems that benefit them are tearing the fabric of our society apart for profit. We’re conditioned to respond with an individualism that permits this destruction, and even fosters more of it.
Our conditioning runs deep. We’re told, implicitly and explicitly, that we have to do a lot of this life alone. Maybe our immediate family is included in that vision, but the premise remains that each of us is an island. The countless ties to others, to neighborhoods and society at large and people around the world through political and economic connections and systems much larger than ourselves, are not given primacy. The reality that we are but a small part of many networks that are much bigger than any one of us is not a primary lens through which most of us have been taught to see the world, and our place in it.
The highest goals and aspirations we’re taught to hold are similarly limited. The frame, the picture that comes to us when we picture our dream life, again holds just us and our families. Maybe we aspire to a luxurious retirement on a beach somewhere, maybe we just want to see our kids lead happy lives. These goals aren't bad, in and of themselves. But the reality is that we need reframing right now. The trajectory of the world, of the climate, of fascism is forcing us to think differently. The reality is that if we continue to think of ourselves as disconnected, as isolated agents, the rich and powerful who use and understand and benefit from global systems will be able to dominate us and unilaterally impose their twisted vision upon the world.
Are the billionaires, the Musks and Trumps and Zucks, exempt from the isolation that capitalism and individualism breed? No. I imagine these men and others like them have no real friends, have no real community and very little joy. But they have small armies working for them, and they have a degree of class solidarity that we frankly need to emulate. They can often come together to put aside their differences, as they’re doing right now, in order to maximize their self-interest.
There are many, many more of us, and putting aside our differences to come together and do what’s best for ourselves isn’t as easy. Prejudice, a lack of organization, repression and more get in the way. But one step we can take is to stop aspiring to be our oppressors. We want freedom, we want stability, we want safety, but even though a handful of ordinary people might win the lottery, the progression of late capitalism means that fewer and fewer and fewer of us can get the security we want by mimicking the ruling class. Economic mobility has been declining for 50 years straight.
Maybe even more importantly, we shouldn’t just aspire to economic or class mobility. Because if we’re chasing and envying those with more than us while looking down on those with less, where does that leave us? Alone. This is the world the billionaires want. They want us divided, isolated, and doggedly trying to serve and perpetuate a system that doesn’t serve us.
In “Planet of Slums” Mike Davis writes about how the age of neoliberalism has meant, among other things, the deliberate proliferation of the idea that everyone can be a little entrepreneur. This idea has been packaged and sold to us as part of the logic of the “gig economy.” If you drive Uber, you’re an entrepreneur! If you rent out an Airbnb, you’re an entrepreneur. But, as Eddie Ongweso writes: “The gig economy doesn’t actually exist. By skirting US labor laws, a host of companies can misclassify their workers as independent contractors, exempt them from basic rights or social welfare programs, and then pay them less than minimum wage in many cases.”
And misclassification means it’s a lot harder for you to get a union. Some gig workers, like delivery bike drivers in NYC, have organized in these tough conditions and formed an amazing union 65,000 strong. And Uber drivers and others are organizing too, but it’s a tough fight and the conditions inherently mean they have their work cut out for them. The conditions of their jobs also mean that organizing requires an extra mental leap, an ideological overcoming of the lie that they’re entrepreneurs rather than extra-exploited workers.
The truth is a lot of us have to overcome that. The modern fantasy that we’re special hustlers has to be brought down to Earth, where it doesn’t look so pretty and where the truth, more often than not, is that we’re ordinary workers whose only recourse is to band together like everybody else.
That’s the whole thing in a microcosm. We’ve been pushed apart by design, we’ve been cut off and alienated and given dreams of isolation. And we respond to our conditions, humanity is great at responding to our environment. For us that can mean accepting isolation, diving into individualism, and trying our best to thrive in this fundamentally harmful system. Late capitalism pushes us away from one another and has led to a society where it becomes easier and easier to not care about one another. Not only that, but in this isolated society we find people becoming more likely to care about nothing at all. Because we constitute each other. We’re such profoundly social animals that we risk being nothing without each other.
And that’s where we find ourselves. At the end of the line, at the point where some people care nothing for one another, some people care about nothing at all, and some of the most powerful people on Earth actively want to hurt us. Those of us who are determined to care, determined to value one another’s lives, have to build something radically different. We have to know that the real, long-term stability and happiness we seek will come from reshaping society. That’s not to say we shouldn’t pursue security right here and now, but rather that we should also pursue the structural changes that are the only real guarantee of the security we’re after, the only real guarantee of having a society that allows us to be connected, to be stable, and to be happy.
Individualism, isolation, and greed might let one of us win the lottery once in a while, although even that is happening less and less frequently. Communalism, collectivism, and putting people ahead of profits means that, with long-term organizing and consistent work, all of us can win. At the moment this world might look like a zero-sum game, but that reality has been manufactured, and we can tear down the systems that have given us lives of isolation and build something infinitely better brick by brick, block by block, connection with one another by connection with one another.
Relevant reads:
Kelly Hayes “Must-Reads, Resources, and Some Thoughts Sustaining Ourselves” : https://organizingmythoughts.org/must-reads-resources-and-some-thoughts-sustaining-ourselves/
Excellent piece! Indeed, our society needs a radical restructuring, perhaps starting with sharing this article with people we know and following R. Nader’s suggestion to make Congress representatives of the people, rather than representatives of corporations.
I agree with you, Joshua.
Pre Covid, I worked and lived part time at an ashram where living spaces and meals were shared, and it had a profound effect on me. It inspired this short post about how I'd like to live, with a lot of shared space. https://ideasbigandwild.substack.com/p/a-new-dream-of-home