So, I had a weird discussion today. Not something that I would consider unexpected, but normally I don't run into people who are so shameless on this. Basically, the discussion was about rural voters in PA. There was some discussion on the poverty, and how democrats haven't done anything for the area for decades, and how we've heard about job retraining and programs for months, and then some smarmy neolib comes in and starts calling central PA voters "lazy" for not wanting to take the newer jobs available (most of which are crappy retail jobs that pay minimum wage that no one wants) and blah blah blah.
And...I'm going to be honest, this really got me going in terms of a "fighting words" impact. Because let's face it, I'm the epitome of one of these "lazy" people. I live in what can vaguely be called central PA (assuming we just mean anything north and west of King of Prussia is central PA, because that's around where the economic prosperity that is philly stops and you start getting into the dead zones) and I've been putting up with this my whole adult life.
Really, this post kind of really summed up how I feel about the economy. Not in the exact terms as I am more intelligent than most who ended up going for Trump, but I get the whole "there's no jobs here any more" thing. It's a common sight up in "central PA". Lots of rural mining towns that have gone dry. Lots of blight, lots of people doing meth. Even cities like Allentown, Reading, Lancaster, York, Harrisburg, Scranton, and Wilkes Barre arent what they once were. And those kinds of cities are more what I'm familiar with. I know when I graduated from college I watched the job listings day after day only to be dismayed by how dismal they were. Oh gee, another opening at walmart, another opening at starbucks. Another opening that demands I have years of experience for an "entry level" job that doesn't even have a college degree, or requires open availability meaning I have no life and I'm on call 24/7, or the job pays like $8 an hour. Or the job requires me to be passionate about something as mundane as...selling shoes. And we should jump through hoops for these jobs, fighting with hundreds of other applicants, trying to prove we're the best, while the "winner" goes on like "YEAH I GOT THE JOB! WOO!" and then they're expected to be "grateful" for the "opportunity".
It's BS. I really is. You can clearly see what motivated me to go in the political direction I did, and what basically radicalized me economically. And then you got these smarmy neolibs, the clinton supporters who live down near philly, and have their nice little corporate jobs, in their nice little offices, and make 6 figures, and go home to their nice little suburban homes with a white picket fence and a freshly cut green lawn. And these guys have the gall to start talking crap on us. They tell us that we gotta "learn to code", or learn a new skill. or we gotta move out of the hellholes we live in, and move to a better area, like the solution is as easy as "just moving".
And then these idiots wonder why people up here vote for Trump. I mean, I dont support Trump, but I get why, at least back in 2016, people voted for him. I kind of think if you STILL like the guy youre a lost cause, but i get why, at least in 2016, people voted for him. He talked about bringing the jobs back, and Clinton's campaign just abandoned us. She was the neolib who told us to "JuSt MoVe" and talked about job retraining and blah blah blah. And while we didnt have andrew yang to back it up with data in 2016, let me tell you something, job retraining doesnt work. basically, we're making people stop getting jobs in factories and mines and get jobs in fricking retail and food service. That's basically what this retraining is. And a lot of us, quite frankly, arent happy with these "opportunities". We dont have the actual middle class stuff we used to have. We really are dealing with a war on normal people, where the normal people's jobs are getting worse and worse, and the suburban and urban areas in the bubble have most "opportunities" (while simultaneously being unaffordably expensive). And yeah.
It's enough for me, that it radicalized me out of jobs where I started developing my own rudimentary form of human centered capitalism years before Yang even ran for president. "The economy exists for man, not man for the economy" (changed to humans to fit the more "human centered theme, and politically correct language of the 2020s, yeah, it goes back far enough I was using dated politically incorrect language). Basically, it's this exact phenomenon that made me come up with that. Seeing how we need to keep contorting ourselves into this economy that doesn't work for us, it just came off as cruel and socially darwinistic for me. I mean, that's what makes capitalism so efficient. The invisible hand is just natural selection at work. It's what is most adaptable survives, and those that don't adapt...don't. And while this is great for products and services, it's not as great when applied to people, as it means we keep this weird institutionalized struggle to survive within capitalism going even if it fails tons of people and makes life difficult and miserable for them. We should make the economy adapt to us, recognizing it only exists....to serve us. We shouldnt serve it so much. We shouldnt have to jump through hoops and learn the right skills and move to the right locations JUST TO SURVIVE. obviously , due to the nature of competition, those who are most tenacious and most willing to sacrifice and adapt will do the best, but clearly, there should be some dignified bottom for people to just survive. And this would greatly help these rural PA voters.
And of course, my second tenet, "jobs are a means to an end, not an end in itself." I developed this after we had all the "job creation" arguments around 2012 into the 2016 election. Mitt Romney talked about the glorious "job creators" who if only we give them more money and lower their taxes they'll create more jobs, while at the same time corporations were reporting record profits and STILL laying people off. And then you had obama talking about shovel ready jobs doing construction jobs on some crappy interstate project or something. And both sides seemed to argue about job creation and who does it better, but it seems to me that expecting people to work jobs to survive is the source of this whole problem. The jobs themselves are undesirable. They're hard, they dont pay well, the bosses are egotistical petty dictators who wanna run your life and treat you as slaves, and nothing about this leads to a happy existence to me. The more I look at jobs the more I realize that I don't even really want a job, or want to work at all. Rather, it's a matter of "having to", it's a matter of the economy forcing people, and we just keep insisting on creating jobs when unemployment happens rather than actually asking if jobs are what we need.
Of course I dont expect most trumpers to be intelligent enough to realize this, or smart enough to admit it, so they keep romanticizing the past notion of jobs of generations past through rose colored glasses, going on about how great the mines were or the factories (although I understand they sucked too). Honestly, they live in this weird mix of understanding the present is crap, while also thinking that the past of decades ago was somehow better. Even though it actually wasnt if you look at it objectively. Well, maybe it was, the new deal era seems romanticized with all of the union jobs with high pay and decent working conditions, but life just was...work 40 hours a week. It wasnt great. And that's what separates me from the trumpers, I fully recognize that even if there are elements of the past more attractive than today, I dont wanna actually go back to the past. And I kinda realize that maybe the answer isnt jobs. Maybe the real issue IS work itself. Maybe it's the fact that we insist on centering our lives around it. Maybe it's the fact that we treat a job as "more than a paycheck". I know even Biden says that. "A job is more than a paycheck, it's about dignity, blah blah blah." yeah yeah yeah, F your dignity, F your jobs. Jobs aren't the answer. Jobs just exist to make things and serve people. They arent great things in and of themselves, the idea, when one thinks about such an idea objectively, without our weird culture around it, actually kinda sucks. Why do we do this in the first place? Well, in the best case scenario, it's because we need to in order to make the goods and services we want and need. And in reality, it's in part because that's what we've always done and we fear change. But I don't, because I think the status quo sucks, I think the fixation on jobs is irrational, blah blah blah.
And yeah, that's why my "central PA" identity actually contributed to my human centered capitalist mindset. I put together a lot of what yang ended up saying in the war on normal people, separately from Yang, and came up with very similar solutions and a very similar philosophy. I just didn't write a book on it, but that's also why I say his war on normal people is the book I wish I wrote, because I understand the issues, I understand the trends, and I understand that we need a new way forward and obsessing with jobs isn't gonna solve these issues.
And this is, btw, why Hillary was as popular as a lead balloon here. Because she talked the same nonsense obama had been saying for years about job retraining, and not really offering any solutions that resonated. Trump was a demagogue in 2016, he still is now and an increasingly DANGEROUS one, but I can see why the uneducated were drawn to him like moth to lamp. Because he was talking about bringing back the past glory of the past era of the economy, and appealing to people in a way hillary didn't. Because Hillary and her supporters seemed to look down on these voters and tell them to "just move" and "learn to code" and all this other BS.
And yeah, it's shaming. As we know, the democratic party is leaning toward the so called "brahmin left", very educated suburbanites who make like 6 figures and who live picturesque lives, while they're kinda abandoning white working class voters from the middle of the state. I mean, they said so much in 2016, "for every working class voter we lose in the middle of pennsylvania, we can pick up two moderate republicans in the suburbs of philadelphia". Basically, the democrats, the so called party of labor and the little guy, are trying to abandon their working class voters to trump. And it's disgusting to me. because trump offers no solutions, but the dems are struggling to maintain working class coalitions. I think biden did make some efforts to win them back, but idk how successful he'll be. He isnt bad on policy, but he is lacking, and obviously we need someone whose views arent stuck in the 1950s in order to actually fix things.
I guess, for no, Biden is triangulating and trying to win back both the obama coalition while expand the clinton one. And we can see the results of that. He's not really doing a good job. He's kinda losing both groups right now and the democratic coalition is on the verge of collapse as trump becomes more and more openly fascist. it's really scary to see. But yeah.
All of this started in part because clinton and the dems had to abandon working class voters. They were tone deaf to them, they didnt understand their problems, they were big city centrist libs who didn't understand the problems of the rust belt, or care. We were little people. "just move, learn a skill." Sounds like the same skill shaming republicans do.
Speaking of which, let me talk a bit about that before closing this. Here's the thing. Conservatives, and for the purpose of this, neolibs are basically conservatives, are gonna blame the people no matter what they do. Didnt go to college? Shouldnt went to college. Went to college? Shouldve gone to trade school rather than get a useless degree. Live in an area with bad jobs? Just move. Why do you live there? Cant afford an area that's nicer? Well, that's your fault too somehow. I've kinda realized this, reading some of the more recent books on work ethic and meritocracy that my friend suggested to me, but yeah, the point of shaming behavior isn't really to have a valid point. Often times, shaming behavior under capitalism serves no legitimate purpose, but to blame the individual and absolve the system.
You see, it's never the systems' fault in these guys' minds. The system is perfect. The people are always at fault. And they'll even throw conflicting arguments in your face suggesting if only you did SOMETHING DIFFERENT, that you wouldnt be in the sorry state you are now. Rarely this is valid, and most of the time, it just puts the onus on the individual to change and adapt.
But, as you know, being a humanist, I dont see the system as this hard and fixed thing that cant be changed, I see it as a system humans created that can be adapted to human needs. And we SHOULD change the system. if you learn anything from my humanist perspective, let it be that. That all of this we created and we can change it to achieve different outcomes. And in my opinion, the system should change to serve the individuals. ANd how do we change the system to serve the individuals? By giving people a UBI, and universal healthcare, and free college/student debt forgiveness, and housing, and trying to achieve more work life balance from shorter work weeks, etc.
Our system just...enslaves people. it really does. And those it cant adapt to fit its needs, it ruins and makes them miserable. Our system is not designed for our happiness. It's designed to subjugate us to maximize productivity. We are slaves to this system. And we should change the system to serve us.
And that's what human centered capitalism is all about.
No comments:
Post a Comment