America — A Swindler's Paradise

Source: Decline of the Empire

America has always been a strange place. We are famous for our sense of entitlement, of believing we are special, even blessed. In fact, Americans feel they are so deserving of a life of ease and wealth that they will trample over others, using any means necessary, ethical or not, to get achieve it. This might be considered the cultural shadow-side of our immature, flawed character. As Morris Berman says in Why America Failed: An Overview, “More” is not a real goal; it has no actual content.

I got the idea for the book from a number of sources, but one of the most important was a book published in 2004 called Freedom Just Around the Corner, by Walter McDougall at the University of Pennsylvania, a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. I want to stress that McDougall is a very centrist historian; there is nothing left-wing or radical about him.

But in the opening pages of his book he says that what most characterizes America, going back to the late sixteenth century, is hustling. American English, he writes, has more than 200 synonyms or related expressions for the word ‘swindle’, and when two Americans get together, they pretty much understand that the other person has an angle or agenda and is trying to promote it. We are a people relentlessly on the make, we are all encouraged to develop “The Brand Called You” and market it. It reminds me of the comment made by the comedian Chris Rock, that in the United States, when you are talking to someone, you are actually talking to that person’s agent.

We Americans don’t realize what a strange, and indeed perverse, way that is to live, because if everyone is doing it, it just becomes normal…

Berman’s compelling thesis is that America is, and always has been, a Swindler’s Paradise.

… Reaganomics, also known as greedism, was not born in 1981; more like 1584. The result is that for more than four centuries now, America has had one value system, and it is finally showing itself to be extremely lopsided and self-destructive. Our political and cultural system never let fresh air in; it squelched the alternatives as quaint or feeble-minded.

Appearances to the contrary, this is what “democracy” always meant in America—the freedom to become rich. This ideology is so powerful that we don’t even recognize it as such, but it certainly explains why socialism was never able to gain a foothold here, because the ideology has been the same for rich and poor alike. As John Steinbeck once remarked, in the United States the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

In any event, the result is that we are now in a situation of irreversible collapse. The American Dream, as the Cornell University economist Douglas Dowd wrote thirty-seven years ago, is a twisted one. We treat Bill Gates as some kind of national hero, when the truth is that any system that allows one person to accumulate $50 billion, and leaves fully two-thirds of its population living from paycheck to paycheck (assuming they can even find a job, that is), is pretty sick. As many of us know—from Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times to the Wall Street protesters—in terms of collective wealth, the top 1% of the country owns more than the bottom 90%. This puts our social inequality on a par with Egypt and Tunisia, in fact.

Consider the fact that every religion, and every civilization worth the name, has as its central tenet the notion that you are, in fact, your brother’s keeper.

But the ‘hustling’ way of life enshrines just the opposite: it says that virtue consists of personal success in an opportunistic environment, and that if you can screw the other guy on your way to the top, more power to you. “Looking Out for No. 1” is what really needs to be on the American dollar…

Berman’s assertion that the central tenet of every religion and civilizaton worth mentioning is you are your brother’s keeper is a tad optimistic in my view, for there are have always been hierarchies based on wealth or status ever since food surpluses arose in the early days of agriculture. Inequality appears to have been our species’ natural response to wealth; hunter-gatherers never had to deal with the happy problem of having surpluses in food or anything else. Socialism failed, in part, because rigid hierarchies were not—could not—be wished away. One party? Two parties? What’s the difference?

Nevertheless, Berman’s view of America dead-on. The deeply flawed culture Berman describes has gotten much, much worse in the last 30 years after the rise of Reaganomics, also known as Trickle-Down Economics. These economic “theories” were thinly disguised ways to make the twisted American Dream—the accumulation of great wealth for some, however fraudulently achieved—a reality. Fraud is ubiquitous today.

I should note that most Americans are not double-dealing bamboozlers. Outside of a brief stint in Italy, I’ve lived in this country all of my life. Most of the Americans I met were hardworking and honest. That said, America mythologizes those who, either by Nature or Nurture, are driven to follow the principle that More Is Better, that Greed Is Good. We raise them up as exemplars to be emulated.

Greedism was raised to the level of a “moral principle” under which societies could be organized. Ayn Rand made “rational” arguments to defend that principle, concluding that altruism—for example, government action to build the national highway system or redistribute the income through tax policr—was counterproductive and dangerous. The way Rand figured it out, being your brother’s keeper was immoral. We hear this argument in one form or another all the time nowadays.

Rand proponents will say that our previous “liberal” altruism led to bankruptcy (e.g. “entitlements” debt). That’s just plain wrong. Imperial ambitions and corrupted government led to our literal bankruptcy. The special interests, the elites, wound up with almost all of the wealth, and with government’s connivance, sold the rest of us down the river. America is morally bankrupt.

A fish will be the last to discover the water it swims around in. So it is with Americans. They have no idea just how strange and indeed, perverse their way of life has become. In the past, I have put this another way: America has become one giant game of Survivor. It is easy to see now who is surviving and who is not.

Bonus Video

Ayn Rand was bat-shit crazy

Read more at Decline of the Empire