What makes the US unique is the extent to which wealth/success monopolizes life scripts and contaminates even other scripts. You can’t just set out to be a nurse or a monk, you must set out to be a rich and successful nurse or monk. Even if that’s an incoherent thing to want.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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End of conversation
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