Wolfy Chai

It is in our human nature to look for groups or identities to adhere to. While hive mentality is not a concept that is isolated to America, when combined with capitalism and gluttony, it results in a very specific set of cultural outcomes. For example, alcohol / drug culture, materialism, wastefulness, and mindless consumption habits.

There are very specific segments of society that serve as resistance to the norms. However, it appears, as other people have also pointed out, that there is no longer much of a concerted opposition. Not one that acts as a material political or cultural force at least—that is, one that makes an actual difference.

Historically, there have been social movements that have resulted in changes such as the Civil Rights and women suffrage movements. Those movements were often the result of decades, if not centuries, of fighting.

In contrast, modern movements seem to rise and burn out much more quickly. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street erupted. The expectation was that real change was on the horizon. The people wanted to break up the big banks and corporations that were “too big to fail.” However, the effort was not sustained, and the dissenters quickly faded into the background. This of course was aided by a massive effort of intelligence agencies and big banks to crackdown on dissent.

In the age of social media, trends seem to be dictated by whatever is viral or fashionable. However, the level of notoriety is not often correlated with which events and happenings are the most egregious. For example the genocide in Gaza has been broadcasted on social media and has consumed the full attention of nearly every news platform. In contrast, another US-backed genocidal catastrophe that has been going on longer and has resulted in more deaths and starvation is the “famine” in Yemen. Similarly, major human rights abuses are concurrently going on in Myanmar, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The words used to describe different events matter as well. In less Instagramable places like Yemen, the media labels the situation as a “famine” while in Gaza it is a “humanitarian crisis” or a “genocide.” The word choices aren’t harmlessly selected; they send a clear message—human life is more or less important depending upon who is being starved and killed and how “visible” the offenses are via social media.

This is all to make the point that just because an issue has more notoriety does not mean that the issue is more important. Nor does this mean that you are suddenly more pious or righteous for supporting certain human rights violations. It just means you are more vocal in supporting movements that the mainstream media and social media elects as being more important.

American society tends to treasure drinking, smoking, and unhealthy eating. These concepts might seem unrelated to the ideas that were just outlined. I argue that in a lot of ways, they are similar. What people decide to believe in and get emotional and vocal about is largely dependent on a bandwagon effect that similarly penetrates all of these aspects of American society. People do what others do. The more people who are doing the same things, the more acceptable that activity becomes.

People do what is “cool” and popular. Decisions to care about certain causes are largely superficial virtue signals that lack substantial independent critical thinking. One example that captures this idea is boycotting. Many people have decided to boycott Target for dropping its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. However, Target has been substantially financed by the notoriously unscrupulous investment firm BlackRock for years. Additionally, the credit and debit cards consumers use at any store are almost always from big banks that heavily invest in pro-discriminatory politicians, fossil fuels, wars, and private prisons.

The reality of the world is that things are complicated, multifactorial, and multifaceted. To make good decisions requires deep thinking and consideration that most people do not invest much time in. Additionally, making sound decisions requires a diligent commitment to unlearning and abstaining from propaganda talking points—a minefield that is not easy to navigate.

This does not excuse the obvious need for basic common sense and critical thinking. One must come to accept that reality must be questioned and that legitimate inquiry is necessary if they wish to still have any agency at all. Moreover, society more broadly must push back on the mainstream media swiftly labeling any of these inquires as “conspiracy theories.”

On the other hand, things become trending for a reason. Even if the reason others jump on the trend is for ego purposes, at least they are spreading awareness. We must remember that the inception of a trend comes from a single group of people who decided to advocate for something. Similarly, anything has the potential to go viral. Someone just needs to decide to fight for something. If you care about something, don’t be afraid to speak up. You never know how far your message might be carried.

Things cannot simply be sorted into the “left” or “right” paradigm. Nor does any and all perspectives have to fit within that manufactured paradigm. Both sides are illusory, as evidenced by the fact that one cannot exist without the other. Because they depend on each other for a definition, their definitions are subjective and dynamic. As mentioned previously, the truth is often more nuanced and complex.

One policy that used to be “right-wing” is now a “lefty” position. For example, all of the major environmental legislation establishing government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of major legislation like the Clean Water Act were done during Republican presidencies. Now, environmental policy has become a “politicized”, partisan issue when it was not in the past. The same trend is continuing now in reverse with the Make America Healthy Again agenda.

Like so many other issues in recent times, policies get politicized not out of adherence to settled, clear, and consistent principles, rather; because one side decided it needed to manufacture a disagreement. They disguise the lack of meaningful and material differences between the two sides in order to detract from the reality that both sides are just two factions of the same party. The end goals are largely the same—corporation monopolization and the consolidation of wealth to the top 1 percent of society at the expense of everyone else.

Whether a policy is left or right has more to do with its designated party affiliation than with its actual substance, values, and philosophical alignment to that particular side of the political aisle. This trend is mirrored as it pertains to comparing authoritarian versus libertarian ideologies. In fact, the left versus the right designations often get conflated with what are actually differences in authoritarian versus libertarian. Thus, critiques about a policy often times has more to do with the latter dynamic rather than the former.

I do not often engage in these paradigms and only do so to discuss the flaws in this type of thinking. While I tend to find the libertarian versus authoritarian paradigms to be much more meaningful subjects for policy debates, the roots of conservatism and liberalism aren’t as clear. I am not convinced that anyone has managed to reasonably match the two with a clear philosophical perspective that is applied consistently in the real world. More importantly, the “philosophies” often shift depending on the political favorability and the administration that happens to be in office at the time.

Moreover, the left versus right axis of the political compass allegedly focuses on economic differences while the y-axis focuses on social differences. If we are using this as a reference, most people flip the two. The economic perspectives of the right allegedly value free enterprise, free market, and competition etc., yet, the actual policies have more commonly resulted in crony capitalism—private-public partnerships which subvert the fundamental tenets of the “free market”, or monopolization to crack down on competition.

When it comes to the vast majority of all the largest companies, the government is involved each step of the way. Whether it be through publicly funded government research leading to privatized patents, the government military industrial complex entanglement with big tech, the leasing of public water resources in Florida to corporations like Nestle who make profits off of selling the water, to the nearly 700 billion in taxpayer bailouts to corporations after the housing bubble of 2008. Not only that, the whole process benefits from organized crime, which keeps the debt-based economic model going—or at least up until this point.

Additionally, both left-wing and right-wing policies have resulted in the creation of massive externalized costs borne on the taxpayer. Recently it has been reported that the energy consumption of data centers to support the AI “revolution” has resulted in a 267% hike in electricity bills in the surrounding areas. The price is being passed on, or externalized, to consumers who are footing the bill despite the vast financial resources these data centers have access to.

In the food sector, the government massively subsidizes animal agriculture even though production is often higher than demand. The price of higher subsidies for animal goods is being borne, again, by the tax payer. Many other government subsidy policies work in the similar fashion. Right-leaning environmental policies advocate for less liability for externalized harms and costs even when doing so would be contrary to a free market system. This is all to say, a free market system does not exist, nor has it ever existed.

The new goal it seems is to ensure that people own nothing. Even if you are lucky enough to own a home, corporations are acquiring the rights to the land where housing is built so that owners have few actual rights and have to pay rents on the property perpetually. The government is attempting to find new places to stuff its debt. Private equity funds are finding new ways to purchase and strip corporations of their assets for quick returns. Anything and everything is being monetized, nature included, to keep the system of wealth extraction in place.

Unfortunately, most people have gone along with these games that have been played for decades. They buy into the consumerism model. They listen diligently to the endless advertisements that alert them of their need to buy new things they never even realized they needed! They are passionately devoted to their big banks. They do not realize that the price of goods is yet another illusion influenced by manipulation. One such manipulation is that from subsidizing the cost by outsourcing cheap labor, slavery, and employing environmentally catastrophic mineral and resource extraction practices. Another manipulation comes from the use of price controls by corporations to ensure that the selling price sits at whatever price will give them the most profits, even if that means needing to manufacture a shortage.

To survive this, I argue that as a society we need to become less materialistic and more realistic. If everyone were to live as an average American, we would need 5.1 earths’ worth of resources to sustain our population. Elites know that the model is not sustainable. Their solution is impoverishment, complete control, and depopulation. Let us take back our power and choose earth stewardship, supporting local governance, and guaranteeing everyone access to the essentials for life: clean water, shelter, and nutritious food.