In humble opinion it is rooted in the way people think, which is to say, most people don't really think.
They "re-act", or make easy assumptions, and jump to conclusions, rather than think something through.
We're a culture of "assumptions," not critical thinking.
No one actually thinks about the fact, that binary logic can only handle so much before it breaks down under the strain of cognitive dissonance.
Record levels of homelessness, yet at the same time, no one ever thinks about the fact, capitalism has never, and will never, solve unemployment, poverty and homelessness, as long as we do not have a right to a job or economic rights at all.
The private sector and government sector [from local, up through national level] can't not create enough demand to ever reach anything near full employment.
It's much "easier" to think, "it's the individual’s fault." But they have no right to a job, and employers control the entire labor market. You can apply anywhere, but it is the employers choice, who gets a job or not.
The "laws of economics" is all based on flawed assumptions, but no one ever mentions this fact. They talk about GDP like it's a description of the state of our society, but it is not.
People just accept it as truth because they don't think it through, simply because they don't know how.
I'm genuinely curious what "having a right to employment" would ideally look like in your opinion?
Everyone has a right to try to earn a living, but legally forcing any individual or organization to hire someone they would otherwise be unwilling to seems like it would cause more problems than it would solve.
It is the other side of the coin of forcing someone to do business with someone they don't want to. For example, if a doctor has made bad judgement in your care in the past it is your right to find another doctor.
If most of that doctor's clientele make the same decision should we fight for the doctors "right to employment"? Even if nobody likes the work they do?
If we had laws guaranteeing employment how would they be enforced? Who would arbitrate what people are entitled to which jobs? I certainly don't see governmental bureaucracrats being any more in tune with what jobs require which skills than corporate ones are.
Note that I am not at all trying to imply that the status quo is anywhere near ideal. Only that persistent problems almost never have solutions that are both simple and practical in practice. If they did, they would be likely to have been solved by now.
Thanks for reading, interested in what thoughts others have!
First, our Constitution does not grants us a right to earn a lliving. Nor do we have a right to a job. We as citizens have no control over if we work or not, that decision is the employer's choice. Employers control the entire labor market and they decide who can work or not. Not to mention, most employers do not pay enough to actually “earn a living.”
Our Constitution has no provision for “economic rights” for citizens. A right to employment would look like a Federal Job guarantee that pays a “living wage.”
A living wage is a wage that can afford all the necessities and still have disposal income left over.
Unemployment, poverty and homelessness are “features,” not “bugs” of our economic system, specifically because we have zero economic rights.
Consider LBJ's War on Poverty launched 61 years ago and we have 2+ million more in poverty today than 61 yrs ago, with record levels of homelessness.
Capitalism has never, ever solved these problems, because it actually creates them. That is how the “system” is fundamentally designed.
The private and government sectors labor demand can not reach full employment because the “system” isn't designed to create full employment only maximizing profit, at the expense of society, and everything else.
I agree with the sentiments that poverty and homelessness are bad. I find I'm still confused about how -on the object level- you expect economic rights laws as you are describing to actually function.
In particular I would like to know what you expect the "nuts and bolts" of the Constitutional Right to Employment would be? These details are what tend to sink grand radical proposals, even if they make it into law.
-What kind of jobs? What sort of work would the program provide? Would it focus on infrastructure, environmental cleanup, elder care, the arts? Critically, who would identify the needed work and manage these projects in every community across the country?
-How is a "living wage" determined? The cost of living in San Francisco is vastly different from that in rural Mississippi. Would the "living wage" be a single national rate, or would it be adjusted for every county? If so, who would be in charge of calculating and updating it?
-What is the relationship with the private sector? If the government guarantees a job at, say, $25/hour (as a hypothetical living wage), what happens to private businesses that can't afford to pay that wage? For example, would a small local restaurant have to compete with the government for workers, and what effect would that have on its ability to stay in business?
-Who is eligible? Would this program be open to anyone who is unemployed, or would there be criteria? What happens if someone is fired from their guaranteed job for poor performance or misconduct? Would they be entitled to another one?
THANK YOU! UGH! I travel all the time for work and everywhere I go there's that same little suburban mall area pretending to be a neighborhood that has an Apple store in an Ann Taylor Loft store, and I often end up there because it's the only walkable place in the entire metropolis. I am forever desperately seeking small walkable neighborhoods with local mom and pop stores and actually unique and interesting restaurants and perhaps even a place that you can sit without having to pay a lot of money. UGH UGH UGH.
And all of this because the financial models for "difference" have been destroyed.
Thanks for the thoughtful article/read. Two aspects contributing to this are the “whataboutism” I see across social media and the rise of cancel culture.
For the former, if I see a post about a specific thing, there’s invariably people in the comments saying “well what about [this other thing that wasn’t mentioned that I like and now I feel left out of the conversation]?” There’s a general push by the masses to make all things, even niche content, feel relevant to everyone—resulting in a boring sludge of generic material for the sake of trying to make everyone feel included.
For the latter, I worry that so many people, brands, creators are afraid of getting called out, cancelled, protested against that forces them to align to this safe and stale sense of sameness. To risk doing otherwise is to risk negative consequences.
1. People resposting an essay saying some variation of "oh my god this is the single most important thing anyone will ever read". I see this all the time. I've read a few of the essays and they are almost always just ok.
2. The LinkedIn Speak / Style of very short, punchy writing in the Notes that ultimately doesn't say anything, or says something extremely trite. These posts and the bland introduction (usually with something like "I've been here for 4 days now, time to introduce myself!") get a lot of attention.
I think in part the Algorithms are a meta-culture who are reflecting back more and more blandness and creating this feedback loop that becomes ever stronger, and as social skills are more and more lost, is the only kind of socialization left. If it can be called that.
I wrote some more about this myself in an essay I published yesterday on here!
Yes - Han's "The Agony of Eros" & "The Expulsion of the Other" immediately came to mind for me, as well. Toward the end of "The Agony of Eros", he explains how the rampant use of data to predict human behavior in virtually all fields supplants the need for theory with its inherent risk & vulnerability. But few are willing to count the homogenizing costs of capitalism.
Now it seems that homogenization has been harnessed and crystallized and snuffed as if the purest sacred powder into the nose of society, it's called AI
What do you actually think that would solve? Violent revolutions almost always cause more issues than they fix, why would this one be different, what would we do differently after?
The American Revolution liberated this country from British tyranny, and the Bolshevik Revolution uplifted the peasants from serfdom and near destitution
The reason the suburbs all look the same is because of land use regulations, not corporations. It's just that corporations are the best at complying with the horrible rules that cities and counties define. So the unique people who are often eccentrics starting out and don't have a legal team or huge budgets are squeezed out of the environment.
This is why a city like Tokyo, which has no shortage of mega corps, feels like a beautiful dynamic place of heterogeneity and your local suburb doesn't. The rules make the difference.
Before I moved to America I wasn't a huge fan of American comedy. It is too rooted in catchphrases, repetition, familiarity; the breaking rather than building of tension. Moving here showed that it's an expression of the yearning for familiarity shared by millions of disconnected faces in a society that has few firm roots, or rather precious few cracks in the market for genuine roots to grow through and bloom. Every flower is cut and presented alone in its vase. Between these distances are holes that nuance falls into, never to be seen again. So things get more heavily drawn, more simplistic, more literal, more superficial. Social media has supercharged this, and also engorged that vacant society to the point that there isn't even any space left in which to experience the fact that there *is* space between us -- instead of this bright semaphor of previous generations of American entertainment, it's all now crushed into an extruded meat product, homogeneous and relentless and devoid of nutrition, with no room to breathe.
There’s something interesting in how uniform everything feels now like people are performing versions of themselves shaped by algorithms and group norms. Maybe it’s not that everyone’s boring, but that spontaneity has less room to breathe. Hard to ignore how much the structure of online life rewards predictability over depth.
The age of mediocrity! America has sold its soul, quite willingly, to the bland, the banal and the ubiquitous. Why seek out quality when we can get 3 times more stuff from Walmart? How many fast-food chains live in America? Even when we know how bad they are for us! Why stretch our minds and imaginations with new stories/concept when we can simply read/watch/listen to the same thing over and over?
Throughout its history, America has given much to the world, but this necessity for mediocrity is exclusively American. So few question it - another (ugly) big box store! Who decided Big Box stores should be ugly? And why is that acceptable? It's just as easy to build something architecturally pleasing as it is ugly or square.
This MOR (middle of the road) approach has seeped through every aspect of the American society. Although many talk about making America "great again", it would appear that most people in leadership roles have adopted the "America, good enough" attitude.
I'm British. When I used to travel around the US on business, 15 or so years ago, I couldn't believe how homogeneous and boring it all was in between the big and interesting centres like NY, Portland, SF.
I'm frustrated. I worked on my anticapitalism leaflet for years. I was finally pleased with it. And then along comes Trump, and people are talking about how capitalism without fascism is better than capitalism with fascism. I need to think about how capitalism causes fascism.
In humble opinion it is rooted in the way people think, which is to say, most people don't really think.
They "re-act", or make easy assumptions, and jump to conclusions, rather than think something through.
We're a culture of "assumptions," not critical thinking.
No one actually thinks about the fact, that binary logic can only handle so much before it breaks down under the strain of cognitive dissonance.
Record levels of homelessness, yet at the same time, no one ever thinks about the fact, capitalism has never, and will never, solve unemployment, poverty and homelessness, as long as we do not have a right to a job or economic rights at all.
The private sector and government sector [from local, up through national level] can't not create enough demand to ever reach anything near full employment.
It's much "easier" to think, "it's the individual’s fault." But they have no right to a job, and employers control the entire labor market. You can apply anywhere, but it is the employers choice, who gets a job or not.
The "laws of economics" is all based on flawed assumptions, but no one ever mentions this fact. They talk about GDP like it's a description of the state of our society, but it is not.
People just accept it as truth because they don't think it through, simply because they don't know how.
I'm genuinely curious what "having a right to employment" would ideally look like in your opinion?
Everyone has a right to try to earn a living, but legally forcing any individual or organization to hire someone they would otherwise be unwilling to seems like it would cause more problems than it would solve.
It is the other side of the coin of forcing someone to do business with someone they don't want to. For example, if a doctor has made bad judgement in your care in the past it is your right to find another doctor.
If most of that doctor's clientele make the same decision should we fight for the doctors "right to employment"? Even if nobody likes the work they do?
If we had laws guaranteeing employment how would they be enforced? Who would arbitrate what people are entitled to which jobs? I certainly don't see governmental bureaucracrats being any more in tune with what jobs require which skills than corporate ones are.
Note that I am not at all trying to imply that the status quo is anywhere near ideal. Only that persistent problems almost never have solutions that are both simple and practical in practice. If they did, they would be likely to have been solved by now.
Thanks for reading, interested in what thoughts others have!
Hi David, apologies for taking so long to reply.
First, our Constitution does not grants us a right to earn a lliving. Nor do we have a right to a job. We as citizens have no control over if we work or not, that decision is the employer's choice. Employers control the entire labor market and they decide who can work or not. Not to mention, most employers do not pay enough to actually “earn a living.”
Our Constitution has no provision for “economic rights” for citizens. A right to employment would look like a Federal Job guarantee that pays a “living wage.”
A living wage is a wage that can afford all the necessities and still have disposal income left over.
Unemployment, poverty and homelessness are “features,” not “bugs” of our economic system, specifically because we have zero economic rights.
Consider LBJ's War on Poverty launched 61 years ago and we have 2+ million more in poverty today than 61 yrs ago, with record levels of homelessness.
Capitalism has never, ever solved these problems, because it actually creates them. That is how the “system” is fundamentally designed.
The private and government sectors labor demand can not reach full employment because the “system” isn't designed to create full employment only maximizing profit, at the expense of society, and everything else.
I agree with the sentiments that poverty and homelessness are bad. I find I'm still confused about how -on the object level- you expect economic rights laws as you are describing to actually function.
In particular I would like to know what you expect the "nuts and bolts" of the Constitutional Right to Employment would be? These details are what tend to sink grand radical proposals, even if they make it into law.
-What kind of jobs? What sort of work would the program provide? Would it focus on infrastructure, environmental cleanup, elder care, the arts? Critically, who would identify the needed work and manage these projects in every community across the country?
-How is a "living wage" determined? The cost of living in San Francisco is vastly different from that in rural Mississippi. Would the "living wage" be a single national rate, or would it be adjusted for every county? If so, who would be in charge of calculating and updating it?
-What is the relationship with the private sector? If the government guarantees a job at, say, $25/hour (as a hypothetical living wage), what happens to private businesses that can't afford to pay that wage? For example, would a small local restaurant have to compete with the government for workers, and what effect would that have on its ability to stay in business?
-Who is eligible? Would this program be open to anyone who is unemployed, or would there be criteria? What happens if someone is fired from their guaranteed job for poor performance or misconduct? Would they be entitled to another one?
THANK YOU! UGH! I travel all the time for work and everywhere I go there's that same little suburban mall area pretending to be a neighborhood that has an Apple store in an Ann Taylor Loft store, and I often end up there because it's the only walkable place in the entire metropolis. I am forever desperately seeking small walkable neighborhoods with local mom and pop stores and actually unique and interesting restaurants and perhaps even a place that you can sit without having to pay a lot of money. UGH UGH UGH.
And all of this because the financial models for "difference" have been destroyed.
I am definitely boring these days. And also bored.
It's nice to see a bit of honesty now and then. Thanks.
Thanks for the thoughtful article/read. Two aspects contributing to this are the “whataboutism” I see across social media and the rise of cancel culture.
For the former, if I see a post about a specific thing, there’s invariably people in the comments saying “well what about [this other thing that wasn’t mentioned that I like and now I feel left out of the conversation]?” There’s a general push by the masses to make all things, even niche content, feel relevant to everyone—resulting in a boring sludge of generic material for the sake of trying to make everyone feel included.
For the latter, I worry that so many people, brands, creators are afraid of getting called out, cancelled, protested against that forces them to align to this safe and stale sense of sameness. To risk doing otherwise is to risk negative consequences.
The IWW framed an approach to a better society: build a new society in the shell of the old. It seems obvious but you gotta start someplace.
Weren’t the wobblies mostly hobos?
Not boring i guess
I'm seeing this a lot on Substack in a few ways:
1. People resposting an essay saying some variation of "oh my god this is the single most important thing anyone will ever read". I see this all the time. I've read a few of the essays and they are almost always just ok.
2. The LinkedIn Speak / Style of very short, punchy writing in the Notes that ultimately doesn't say anything, or says something extremely trite. These posts and the bland introduction (usually with something like "I've been here for 4 days now, time to introduce myself!") get a lot of attention.
I think in part the Algorithms are a meta-culture who are reflecting back more and more blandness and creating this feedback loop that becomes ever stronger, and as social skills are more and more lost, is the only kind of socialization left. If it can be called that.
I wrote some more about this myself in an essay I published yesterday on here!
Reminds me of Byung-Chul Han's work and also the Pete Seeger song, "Little Boxes".
Yes - Han's "The Agony of Eros" & "The Expulsion of the Other" immediately came to mind for me, as well. Toward the end of "The Agony of Eros", he explains how the rampant use of data to predict human behavior in virtually all fields supplants the need for theory with its inherent risk & vulnerability. But few are willing to count the homogenizing costs of capitalism.
Now it seems that homogenization has been harnessed and crystallized and snuffed as if the purest sacred powder into the nose of society, it's called AI
And this is why it’s time for a violent revolution yall
What do you actually think that would solve? Violent revolutions almost always cause more issues than they fix, why would this one be different, what would we do differently after?
The American Revolution liberated this country from British tyranny, and the Bolshevik Revolution uplifted the peasants from serfdom and near destitution
You can stick your violence. I'd prefer a peaceful revolution.
Then go be subjugated and lost to the boring vapidity of it all
The reason the suburbs all look the same is because of land use regulations, not corporations. It's just that corporations are the best at complying with the horrible rules that cities and counties define. So the unique people who are often eccentrics starting out and don't have a legal team or huge budgets are squeezed out of the environment.
This is why a city like Tokyo, which has no shortage of mega corps, feels like a beautiful dynamic place of heterogeneity and your local suburb doesn't. The rules make the difference.
Before I moved to America I wasn't a huge fan of American comedy. It is too rooted in catchphrases, repetition, familiarity; the breaking rather than building of tension. Moving here showed that it's an expression of the yearning for familiarity shared by millions of disconnected faces in a society that has few firm roots, or rather precious few cracks in the market for genuine roots to grow through and bloom. Every flower is cut and presented alone in its vase. Between these distances are holes that nuance falls into, never to be seen again. So things get more heavily drawn, more simplistic, more literal, more superficial. Social media has supercharged this, and also engorged that vacant society to the point that there isn't even any space left in which to experience the fact that there *is* space between us -- instead of this bright semaphor of previous generations of American entertainment, it's all now crushed into an extruded meat product, homogeneous and relentless and devoid of nutrition, with no room to breathe.
There’s something interesting in how uniform everything feels now like people are performing versions of themselves shaped by algorithms and group norms. Maybe it’s not that everyone’s boring, but that spontaneity has less room to breathe. Hard to ignore how much the structure of online life rewards predictability over depth.
When was it ever different ? :)
The age of mediocrity! America has sold its soul, quite willingly, to the bland, the banal and the ubiquitous. Why seek out quality when we can get 3 times more stuff from Walmart? How many fast-food chains live in America? Even when we know how bad they are for us! Why stretch our minds and imaginations with new stories/concept when we can simply read/watch/listen to the same thing over and over?
Throughout its history, America has given much to the world, but this necessity for mediocrity is exclusively American. So few question it - another (ugly) big box store! Who decided Big Box stores should be ugly? And why is that acceptable? It's just as easy to build something architecturally pleasing as it is ugly or square.
This MOR (middle of the road) approach has seeped through every aspect of the American society. Although many talk about making America "great again", it would appear that most people in leadership roles have adopted the "America, good enough" attitude.
I'm British. When I used to travel around the US on business, 15 or so years ago, I couldn't believe how homogeneous and boring it all was in between the big and interesting centres like NY, Portland, SF.
The UK is now the same.
I went to paris recently and it was all yuppies with laptop bags.
Didn’t use to be like that
I'm frustrated. I worked on my anticapitalism leaflet for years. I was finally pleased with it. And then along comes Trump, and people are talking about how capitalism without fascism is better than capitalism with fascism. I need to think about how capitalism causes fascism.