This is something I cannot grok deeply. I can only run American “wealth/success calculus” in emulation mode. I know many wealthy and/or successful people as well as many destitute and/or unsuccessful people. W/S has low correlation with whether I’ll find someone interesting.
-
-
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
The “problem” America has with these things is that they let “undeserving” people get wealthy and successful, and prevent greater peaks being reached by bigger Big Men, not because they make the poor more miserable or prisons more terrible.
Show this thread -
America has more compassion for Bezos being harassed by Trump than people scammed by Trump University. More compassion for a well-funded startup being blocked from a market by a protectionist crony sector than people being actively hurt by the social costs of that sector.
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.