If things are so good, then why are the vibes so bad?
Internet leftists love to tell you that things have never been worse. Internet libs will quite reasonably point out that we live in the wealthiest society in history, where average people enjoy a standard of living in most ways surpassing that of ancient kings. Moreover, living under capitalism—particularly the kind we’ve achieved now with Osha and a semi-functional welfare state—doesn’t seem so bad once your really internalize how nasty brutish and short most humans’ lives were in the past. Sure, we need to have a conversation about how we let a crew of unreconstructed Confederates, Nazi sympathizers, and theocrats cordyceps a mostly serviceable right-wing movement during the latter half of the 20th century, but that’s hardly something to be fixed by communism (with it’s own history of being taken over by SoCon despots), right?
I was reading Byrne Hobart’s takedown of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs today. I found it quite enlightening, and since it’s a short read I’ll just link and let the piece speak for itself—suffice it to say that I found it largely enlightening.1 It just goes to show you should never trust an anthropologist. Still, even if I don’t have much sympathy for Graeber and his whole deal, it would make me foolish and uncurious in precisely the same way Hobart criticizes him for were I to discount the energy behind the success of Bullshit Jobs and its ilk. The vibes are unmistakably off in this civilization, and they have been since before 2016 and maybe even before 2008. This warrants investigation. I have some ideas about why, and some vaguer ideas about what to do about it, but I want to pose the question to my readers before tackling the question next week. Accepting, for the sake of argument, that things are broadly good but the vibes are kind of bad, why?
Media
This week I started reading Master and Commander on the recommendation of an endlessly frustrating podcast, and I’ve got House of Flame and Shadow cued up for when I finish that. This is what I mean when I say I’m genderfluid.
I do think Hobart is implicitly too optimistic about the private sector and too quick to blame the problems of large organizations generally on the state.