Why America Imploded
What Americans Still Don’t Understand About Why Their Society Failed
umair haque

Oct 8 2021

If I said to you “a person who doesn’t invest in themselves probably won’t develop into a successful one,” you’d probably agree with me. Especially if you were American, where self-development is something of a cult. The sad, ironic, and perplexing fact is if I said to an American “a society that won’t invest in itself won’t develop into a successful one”…well, they’d either be baffled, or get angry, and pick a fight with me.

Americans love fighting. But facts are facts. And the central fact of this age is the simple statement above. A society that won’t invest in itself won’t develop into a successful one. Why not?

The simple reason — the superficial one — is that it won’t have the stuff of a modern society. Think of the canonical examples of successful societies, like Europe or Canada. They’re not perfect, no. But they’re as good as we’ve gotten at this grand civilizational project of building societies. That’s not my opinion — it’s an objective fact. Europeans and Canadians live not just the world’s best lives, but history’s. They live the longest, healthiest, wealthiest, happiest lives of all. They represent the best humanity has so far been capable of.

Why is that? Because Europeans and Canadians enjoy superb systems of public goods, which make up expansive social contracts — for which they’re renowned across the globe. If you’re lucky enough to be European or Canadian, you enjoy, as a basic right, in most cases a constitutional right, everything from healthcare to education to retirement to a place to live to even abstractions like dignity.

All that means that Europeans and Canadians have access to entire social systems which simply don’t exist in America. I can take a high speed train from Paris to Nice. It’s a beautiful journey. I can stop at the little towns dotting the coastline along the way, and no, not all of them are bastions of the super-rich, plenty are still just vacation spots for the middle and working class. In America? There are no high speed trains. In Europe or Canada I can simply…go to the doctor. Get an education. Retire. I don’t have to worry so much about — if at all — about going into lifelong debt about any of those things. In America? You only go to the doctor if and when you can brave the prospect of bankruptcy. Educating a child costs more than a home. Retiring? It’s something Americans just don’t do anymore.

Why do Europeans and Canadians have these super functional social contracts? Because they invest in themselves as a society. Again, that’s not my opinion — it’s bitter, brutal fact, at least if you’re American, because America doesn’t. Let me spell out exactly how big the difference is. Europeans and Canadians invest half of their economies back in themselves, in public goods like healthcare, education, retirement, every single year. Their economies are perfectly balanced in this sense.

Americans? They invest just 15% back in themselves every year. But that figure is too low. Too low for what? To have a functioning society. To have many kinds of public goods and social systems at all. An investment rate of 15% doesn’t get you any of the following: functioning healthcare, transport, media, education, retirement.

But how do you live without those things? Well, you live a life of despair, indignity, and degradation. Hence, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, two of America’s only good economists, point to an “epidemic of deaths of despair.”

What’s happened in America is something perverse, chilling, grotesque. Because they don’t invest in themselves, Americans are exploited at every turn. Instead of having functioning social systems for public goods like healthcare and retirement and education, Americans have…private ones.

But the private systems for healthcare and retirement and education that exist in America are squarely why Americans are poor.

Again, that’s not my opinion. It’s a fact. Americans have “negative savings rates,” which is economist-speak for “people who are born into and die in debt.” American life is one long, weird cycle of debt. Student debt turns into medical debt turns into credit card debt and so on. America’s a nation of debtors, which means its a nation of paupers, because, well, if you’re a net debtor, you don’t effectively earn or save or own anything.

The reason Americans ended up poor is that all the private systems they have — which are public in Europe and Canada — charge them astronomical, eye-watering amounts. Those amounts stagger the rest of the world. The famous — or infamous — million dollar medical bill. College tuition that’s double the median income — how can the average person afford that? The answer is, quite obviously, they can’t.

See the vicious cycle at work here. Americans won’t invest in each other — and that makes them poor. It leaves them defenseless to be exploited by predators. You have one life. You should do something beautiful and noble and good with it. Who really wants to…run an HMO…Americans-speak for a “Healthcare Management Organization”…that basically fleeces people at their most vulnerable? It’s not exactly something Leonardo or Einstein would have aspired to. Nobody does.

Nobody wakes up and says, hmm, let me be a criminal. Let me go and rip someone off today. People are, by and large, forced into that position. And what Americans don’t seem to grasp is that not investing in each other leaves everyone worse off, except a predatory class of elites, who have reduced the average American to being a pauper. Again, the average Canadian or European is not indebted to the same degree the average American is — not remotely.

What does living that way — like paupers — do to people, though? Well, it has an even more pernicious effect, which is completely invisible to most Americans. Social bonds don’t exist anymore.

What do all those super functional systems of public goods do for Canadians and Europeans? They don’t just keep them healthy and wealthy. They do something even deeper. They keep a society…a society. That’s because they are things everyone shares. We take the same high speed train. We use the same hospital. We go to the same universities. We rub elbows and shake hands and collide with one another. Public goods, because they’re shared, build trust.

Think of how different Americans really are now from Canadians and Europeans. It’s like they from different planets. Americans are angry, suspicious, hostile. Who knows with an American? They might be the kind of nitwit that carries a gun to Starbucks and thinks Trump was Jesus. You can bet, pretty safely, if you meet a random Canadian or European, they won’t be like that.

That’s because Americans don’t trust each other. They don’t trust anyone or anything anymore, really. Again, that’s not my opinion: trust has fallen catastrophically in every kind of institution, save…the military. Why would Americans trust anyone or anything? They live lives where the only goal and objective is to exploit as you’re exploited. It’s perfectly cool to be aspire to be some kind of dork who’s only real job is…ripping everyone else off. It’s not like that elsewhere. Those corrosive norms of greed and exploitation and selfishness reflect a catastrophic collapse of trust.

This one’s hard for Americans to really grasp. You can’t really touch it or see it. You can only feel it. And for those who’ve lived outside America, I imagine, it’s as real as winter. Come back to America, and the lack of trust, the hostility, the anger, is weird, palpable, omnipresent. It’s not like that outside America. At least not in most places, and especially not in Europe and Canada. Canadians are still renowned for being “nice”, and Europeans for being warm and gentle and friendly. They are.

America’s rapid descent into an impoverished nation has had a catastrophic consequence which is completely unseen. Americans don’t trust one another. They live in a society without social bonds. Sometimes, this rears its head in obvious ways — Trumpists who demonise immigrants and foreigners, the rabid hate consuming the GOP, the total breakdown between Red and Blue states, the way Texas is persecuting…women.

And yet what Americans don’t really seem to grasp is that all these forms of dysfunction are part of a larger pattern. Americans don’t have social bonds anymore. They don’t have social ties. Their society is imploding as a society. I mean that in the most elemental and fundamental way: a society, a network of people bound together by social ties and bonds, which consist, fundamentally, of shared experiences and goods and values and norms. Americans don’t have that anymore. They exist as individuals, simply trying to eke out another days’ existence, and then retreating to weird cocoons of reality TV to numb the pain of meaningless lives.

That sounds mean, and yet I mean it objectively. The collapse of social bonds isn’t, again, an opinion. It’s well documented. It dates back to the 1990s, which is, not coincidentally, the age when America’s middle class began to collapse. When life became a struggle, and the famous American Dream began to die.

What happened in the 90s? Well, the 90s were the decade when the costs of all the things we’ve discussed above — privatized goods which are still public in Canada and Europe — began to explode in earnest. The 90s are when healthcare costs began to skyrocket out of control. They’re when college tuition began to double every few years. They’re when the costs of basics like food and utilities began to surge. And they’re when like retirement, began to explode.

Why did that happen? Because of what happened in the 80s. The 80s was the decade when Reagan sold America — white America, anyways — a vision of a certain kind of dream. It wasn’t a nice dream — it was a nasty one: made of individualism, greed, and materialism. The idea was that everyone would have their own little castle, and everything in society was to be privatized. Quickly, it was — all the brakes and restraints were taken off business and capital and monopoly.

The result was that by the 90s, all the institutions which were to rip American life apart had emerged properly. “HMOs” — “healthcare management organisations”, instead of, say, an American Public Healthcare System. Today, those very HMOs charge the average American more than a third of their income just to…go to the doctor. Then came “401Ks” — Wall St had gotten its greedy hands on Americans’ retirement funds, instead of Americans having, say, a Public Pensions System, like in France or Germany. The result? Wall St took the money, and laughed all the way to the bank — and Americans began never being able to retire.

The 90s were the decade when this America was institutionally constructed — when a set of new institutions arose that were going to drive the average American to the brink of poverty and beyond. Bizarre institutions like HMOs and 401Ks gand “collee funds” soon enough gave rise to perverse oddities like “medical bankruptcy” and “student debt” and a class of elderly people working at Walmart till their dying days.

None of these institutions existed anywhere else in the rich world. Europeans and Canadians don’t have HMOs, and they don’t have 401Ks — certainly not in the American sense. That is because they don’t need them. They already have functioning social systems which provide healthcare and retirement and education. Only America developed these uniquely weird institutions. The very ones which were about to exploit them into ruin.

As these institutions gained power, Americans got poor — fast. Americans used to be net creditors, not net debtors, not so long ago. They paid off their homes and cars and credit cards and so forth. They didn’t die in debt. They do now, precisely because they do not earn enough to cover the costs of living anymore, so their lives are simply a carousel of indebtedness. Who holds the debt? Well, hedge funds and private equity funds and Wall St does. Who owns those? Billionaires do, more or less.

What does it do to live that way — to become poor, to have your income never meet the cost of living? It makes you anxious. Afraid. Stressed out. Depressed. Sooner or later, you lose your mind. To hate, despair, rage. You turn to fanaticism for some kind of way out, no matter how foolish or destructive.

And that is what happened to Americans. A huge, huge portion of them turned to the fascism Trump sold them. Many turned to fundamentalist religion — another hallmark of social collapse. Plenty grew addicted to drugs — the now infamous “opioid epidemic,” which, curiously, barely exists, just across the Canadian border. Suicide and depression skyrocketed.

The social fabric tore itself apart. Today, Americans will literally carry guns to Starbucks. No, not all of them — but it’s hardly unusual. Think about that mentality for a second. What does it really say? I don’t trust anyone. I want to kill everyone. It speaks of a kind of inchoate, desperate, insatiable rage, the degraded becoming the degrader in turn.

Europeans and Canadians aren’t like that. Not just because they can’t get guns, but because they don’t hate each other. They might think they do, but they don’t — America’s the real thing. Americans don’t like, trust, or respect one another. Why would they? They have nothing in common — no systems of social goods bind them together, they have no shared experiences, no shared anything anymore. And worst of all, they have to compete against each other. Each American is trapped in his or her own little bubble of degradation, made to fight against everyone else, for a tiny, dwindling morsel, of money, work, medicine, shelter.

A society can’t work like that. It has stopped being one. It’s just a place where everyone is out for themselves. Nobody has anything to give to anyone else. Hate and rage and greed rule, because if you can’t be cunning and ruthless and cruel enough, well, you won’t survive.

It’s a strange story. How America imploded. Greed made Americans poor, and poverty made Americans desperate. Society itself — bonds, ties, trust, respect, dignity — became a luxury as Americans grew impoverished. Today, Americans have nothing in common because they have nothing in common. I mean that in a literal way. They don’t have any shared systems or public goods, so where is there for them to meet, form social bonds, understand they’re part of the same thing? And so, along the way, Americans have come to believe that only this kind of life is possible or desirable — one where everyone aspires to the biggest predator in the pond, which leaves them understandably paranoid, afraid, and angry that they’re not, yet.

America isn’t a society anymore. I don’t know if it ever really was. It was an apartheid state until 1971. It tried, maybe, for a decade or two or three to be something beyond that. But it failed. Today, it’s something we don’t have a good word for. A bunch of people, trapped, by their own greed and selfishness and indifference, in poverty, hate, and despair.

If you doubt that, remember: Europeans and Canadians invest more than three times in each other what Americans do — and yet Americans will never, ever even remotely consider meeting that bar, no matter how desperate and lonely and ruined their lives become. They are dead set against that way of life, where things are shared, had in common, given freely, not taken, won, conquered, exploited, mentally, psychologically. The idea that life can only be a zero-sum game of dominance, me against you, each person for themselves — not an exercise in equality, dignity, truth, goodness, beauty — has been beaten into them, and they really believe it. If anything, Americans believe in all that more the more weak and feeble and powerless they get.

They don’t grasp that this way of life has had perverse consequences. That greed has led to poverty, that the quest for dominance has led to powerlessness, that selfishness has led to soullessness, that a group of people fighting over crumbs to the death, more fanatically every day, like sworn, ancient enemies, isn’t a society. The only thing Americans really agree on, funnily enough, is this: the institutions and values that control and degrade them — money and power, greed and selfishness, dominance and competition, are the very ones they’ll still defend.

Nobody much questions any of that, because if you do…you must be Unamerican. Suggest a real society is people gently, willingly investing in each other, like Canada and Europe, so they can all have things they share…not denying each other all that…out of spite, greed, and contempt…and most Americans will be ready to rage-shoot you with a big, dumb gun, even if it’s just one made of ideology, which, as any good Soviet could have told you, is no less dangerous than a bullet.

So…

What do you call all that? Stupidity? Folly? Tragedy? Destiny?

I don’t know. All I do know is this: that’s how America imploded.

Umair
October 2021