Kevin Simler

Note that obsessive focus on wealth/success is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. More individuals will be wealthy and/or successful as a fraction of the population and the society in aggregate will also be more wealthy and successful. But median is not the same as maximum.

You’ll have more billionaires and rockstars per capital and higher GDP and growth perhaps. But you’ll also be more cruel to your poor, sick, dying than societies with less individual/collective wealth/success. You’ll have bigger social costs, snowballing faster.

You will de facto criminalize lack of success or wealth. Your ability to solve for anything else (wisdom, compassion) will atrophy, because those are skills too. Privilege literally means private law. That will become the only kind of law. Public law will become prison yard law.

Solving for wealth/success will look like breaking out of prison. If you’re not born to privilege, you’ll be born into increasingly prison-like situations, designed to contain, coerce, punish, tame. What I call breaking smart in more optimistic writing will become breaking out.

All countries have their share of transient problems, acute crises, chronic structural problems, and existential paradoxes. But the US probably has the most severe collective mental health problem among countries I think I grok. And the root cause is a wealth/success monoculture.

All this just makes me sad. The hard part is that America is highly attached to its wealth/success orientation as both a great national strength and the root of its exceptionalism narrative. It is hard to accept that your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness.

Arrested development is *always* rooted in a sense of one’s strength. It is hard to move past this condition because it’s hard to notice when a strength stops being a strength and turns into a limiting self-perception. I have no suggestions. America will either grow or die.

Btw, inequality, wealth concentration, cronyism, financialization of everything: all these are not “problems”. The are natural consequences of W/S values and enjoy basic moral sanction. If wealth+success = good, anything that favors it can at worst be inefficient, not bad.