When the lowest common denominator prevails
Laissez-faire works until it doesn't. What if it is a feature of the social contract?
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad… Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it... We sit and watch our TVs while some newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything’s going crazy…
I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to write your congressmen… Right now. I want you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell. I want you to yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” - Howard Beale, Network, 1976
Nearly 50 years after Howard Beale's rant, we are confronted with several current rage-worthy social crises that are undermining the middle class: homelessness, untreated mental illness, drug addiction and abuse, crime, and a lack of general competence in dealing with any of them. The first four of these are frequently correlated. The fifth has a whole lot to do with the first four spinning out of control.
Our high-tech, research-driven, 21st-century pinnacle-of-human-achievement strategy for dealing with these ills has, a few twists and turns aside, primarily consisted of looking the other way. The advantages to this laissez-faire approach are that it requires next to no effort, demands very little in terms of effective allocation of resources, and is politically viable since it requires no action—something that’s easy for most political leaders. The laissez-faire approach is a low-bar strategy whose advantage lies in its ease of implementation. The results aren’t pretty, but they are doable.
But there’s an end to doing little and hoping for the best, and I think that we’re just about there. There is only so much laissez-faire that a society can apply to serious problems before daily life devolves from order into chaos. When chaos is upon us, and when the institutions of society, traditionally our best hope for addressing problems, are populated with amoral hucksters who exhibit the self-serving ethics of used-car salesmen, we’re all kind of screwed. That’s us, right now.
The past two decades have been a little rough in terms of shaping my outlook on the world. Almost every institution I believed was essential to improving our lot—science, education, the professional class, government, and the media—to my great dismay, failed us in times of great need.
Then, into the subsequent chaos came Donald Trump. About this, you may think what you want, but Trump, as dubious as he indubitably happens to be, isn’t the culprit in our dystopian trajectory; he’s a result of upstream failures that made him, or some other rage hustler, inevitable. Without Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden; without 9/11, the Iraq War, and the 2007 financial crisis; without COVID and waves of illegal immigration; without crises of drugs, homelessness, and crime; and without academic fraud, professional fraud, and wokeness, there wouldn’t have been an opening for someone like Trump.
As I’ve struggled to wrap my mind around these failures and understand the flow of events surrounding them, I’ve come to realize that Trump is most succinctly explained as a raised middle finger from the people who bore the burden of these missteps to those who are largely responsible for them.
You didn’t see 9/11 coming despite ample warning and the best intelligence in the world, started a catastrophic war subsequently found to be based on lies and deceit, took money to look the other way during the events leading up to a disastrous market crash, took money and created legislation to ensure that the opiate crisis ensnared as many Americans as possible, lied about COVID, buried truths (and truthsayers) that challenged your preferred narratives, insisted that carpenters should pay off the loans of college students, distilled every social problem into an oppressor/oppressed paradigm, ignored victims of crime, maintained that teachers and school counselors were better judges of whether little Sam is actually little Suzie than parents and pediatricians, and you thought that could accomplish all of this with impunity. Our response is Trump. Perch on it.
But I don’t think that things have to be the way they are right now. I reject the notion that the lowest common denominator is the inevitable cost of living in a free society. I don’t believe that indolence has to be woven into the fabric of affluence. I refuse to believe that the mores, morals, and standards of living concocted by the illuminati in academia, nonprofits, and government and advanced by the media are the last word about anything.
I think that there are better leaders out there than the usual suspects. I think that our professional classes can regain trust as soon as they eschew nonsense (no matter how profitable) and police their own ranks. I think that academia, while currently in critical condition on life support, can be saved.
The media is the only institution I think may be terminally knackered. I don’t see a path forward for them that doesn’t involve tar and feathers. At least CPB is off the taxpayer dole. Small victories.
So yeah, I think that we can do a lot better. But we need to stop waiting for someone brighter or better than us to show us the way. We need to learn how to lead ourselves.
I still think that the world has a lot of potential. I still believe that the ceiling for humanity is quite high. The problem is that the floor is quite low. And until we realize that gravity determines outcomes without our intervention, we’re going to continue to live near the bottom. When it comes to our actual proximity to the nadir, ignorance is bliss—which explains its popularity. That’s why looking the other way is a perennially inviting strategy.
I get it. Awareness, in this context, isn’t a gift; it’s a curse. If I believed in God, I’d lay odds that awareness and the banishment of bliss were the real punishments for taking a bite out of the apple. Getting kicked out of the garden was just piling on. Awareness blasts away the patina of surety in the social covenant and social contract. It’ll get on top of you in a hurry if you let it.
But awareness also reveals that we must quit waiting for others to act and do what we must to improve our lot. It’s either that or face the consequences of looking the other way when we ought not. Just ask anyone who knew Colden Kimber.
Kimber, a 28-year-old student and bicycle mechanic, recently encountered a deranged man ranting at a group of women and children at a train stop in San Francisco. “You think you are better than me,” the man raged. “You are scared of me.”
So Kimber, a 6’4” semi-professional cyclist, did what anyone who was brave and good and gave a shit about others would do and intervened by stepping between the assailant and some kids. Kimber never laid a hand on the assailant. For his effort, Kimber was stabbed in the neck. He bled to death in front of his girlfriend and two children, ages 8 and 14, whom he’d shielded. You think that Daniel Penny went too far? I wonder what Colden’s friends and family think?
The assailant, as you might suspect given the location and circumstances, was a mentally ill man “well-known to local authorities,” who was found hiding a few blocks away. He wasn’t too difficult to spot, being covered in his victim's blood.
How much more of this are we going to tolerate? How many crazy people committing crimes are too many? How many junkies getting high in public are too many? How many pharmaceutical companies reaping riches from addictive drugs are acceptable? How much professional malpractice should we accept as just the cost of doing business? How many media figures who can’t find their way from their heads to their asses with their hands are we going to continue to listen to? How many fraudulent academics and flawed studies will it take to inexorably erode our trust in science and education? How many self-serving politicians, who would sell out their own grandmother to win an election, are tolerable?
And what if all of this is a feature of the social contract rather than a bug?
If you discern an emerging theme here, you are absolutely correct. For thousands of years, the powers that be and their lackeys have gotten fat by sowing the seeds of discord among the rest of us. This serves them well because we blame each other when the things they wrought get out of hand. Add a dollop of religion, because dulling the senses with coca leaves also results in decreased productivity, and a docile, exploitable populace emerges without the worry of raising an army to protect against pitchforks if the supply of coca leaves runs short.
Left, right—none of that really matters. Greedheads versus everyone else is the real game. Consider the opiate crisis all by itself. Chris Dodd (D) and Rudy Giuliani (R) both accepted a lot of money to allow opiate addiction and death to proceed, unabated. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tom Marino, Orrin Hatch, Mike Rogers, and Marsha Blackburn, among many others from all across the political spectrum, took money from pharmaceutical companies they were supposed to be writing legislation to regulate. They got richer while ordinary Americans got addicted.
What, exactly, was the distinction between D and R in any of this? Money trumps ideology every day. Ignore that at your peril.
Big Pharma spends billions of tax-deductible dollars on manipulative ads for expensive drugs that may or may not work as advertised because studies concerning the safety and efficacy of drugs are nearly always funded by the companies themselves. Pharma needs those tax deductions to bribe doctors, medical associations, federal regulators, and politicians to keep the money train running. There is no end of takers for what Big Pharma has to offer. It’s all a matter of dealing with a few inconveniences.
Every time I see another discarded needle in the park where my kids play, it reminds me of who the real asshats in the world happen to be. I assure you that we all have much more in common with our neighbors, regardless of the political signs still in their front yards a year after the election, than we do with the Sacklers and others of their ilk.
Before Trump, neither political party had done much for decades to address the issues they perpetually ran on, even when provided with clear majorities. This is because if you actually fix anything, you can no longer use it to raise money. The entire pre-Trump power structure in this country depended upon a weird, unspoken form of détente. Name-calling is OK, but actual consequences are no good.
No one got sacked over 9/11. There’s been no accountability for the Iraq War. Exactly one person went to jail over the 2007 financial crisis. The guilty pleas, which allowed pharmaceutical executives at the center of the opiate crisis to avoid jail time in exchange for fines, were an unfunny joke. Mexican cartels became rich when millions of illegal immigrants were encouraged to enter this country along with drugs and human trafficking because politicians were convinced that they were minting new supporters. The businesses that hired these people weren’t overly curious about a glut of workers willing to perform incredibly dangerous and difficult tasks for less than minimum wage and no benefits because it was good for their bottom line.
The left/right thing that divides America is the magician’s trick of misdirection. What the rich and powerful don't want you to see is that the real game is pimping our asses from cradle to grave. That’ll last until we decide to do something about it.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.
I really like this article I could easily do a thousand word response! One story though would be my father's response to common sense and lack of competency. He told all of his superiors and administration with all of their degrees that he was going to wrap all their ass's in a ball and kick it! They couldn't do a damn thing about it, because he was the only person who could fix and keep all the systems running.
Well, there it is!