Greed, Excess and Sacrifice

It’s actually shocking to come across any plain-spoken “stating the obvious” reference to corruption as a corrosive, destabilizing force.

The reason I want to discuss Greed, Excess and Sacrifice is that these are the dominant forces shaping everyday life, but they receive near-zero notice: nobody talks about Greed, Excess and Sacrifice, just as they never talk about the extremes of corruption that now characterize life in the US.

I have written extensively about moral decay as the rot consuming the foundations of a stable social order, yet there is so little attention paid to the excesses of corruption that it’s actually shocking to come across any plain-spoken “stating the obvious” reference to corruption as a corrosive, destabilizing force.

Matt Stoller of thebignewsletter.com is one of the very few who address rampant corruption and its destructive effects:

“All that said, I think that an AI bubble popping could be worse than the dot com bubble, for a few reasons. The first is that we are a much more corrupt society, and so there will be less trust when a collapse happens and contagion is widespread.”

Source: What Would It Look Like If the AI Bubble Popped?

The driver of corruption is bottomless greed, which extinguishes fairness and truth as impediments to maximizing private gains. Since fairness and truth are the foundations of trust, unrestrained greed maximizing corruption fatally undermines trust.

Trust is the foundation of the entire socio-economic-political order, and with trust gone, that foundation gives way and the entire order collapses.

The core of corruption is the privilege of evading consequences is codified either formally with legal rulings / regulations or informally by co-opting or neutering the oversight and enforcement that places boundary conditions on bottomless greed.

With these guardrails removed, the greediest few distribute all the consequences, costs and risks onto everyone below them and channel all the gains to themselves and their cronies.

Excesses of greed and corruption are visible everywhere as the insiders in every fiefdom, public and private, scramble to secure the privilege of evading consequences by distributing them to the powerless many.

Excesses abound in every sphere of life. Billionaires don’t have mere $10 million yachts, they have $600 million yachts. Pickup trucks are now massive vehicles designed to impress, not to carry construction materials as in the old days. Exotic vacations now reach absurd excesses because old standards of “exotic” became affordable to the masses. Where there were displays devoted to snacks in supermarkets, now entire aisles are filled with nothing but a vast and ever-expanding variety of snacks.

The desperate reach for “novelty” has reached extremes of self-parody: bizarre excesses marketed as “new!” cannot be parodied because they’re already parodies of authentic novelty and value.

Virtually every aspect of life in the US has reached levels of self-parodying excess, yet nobody seems to notice. The boiled-frog / habituation to immiseration syndrome is the key characteristic of what’s marketed as “Progress.”

As we throw up our hands in helpless acceptance of systemic corruption and self-parodying excesses being sold as “Progress,” we’re ignoring the downstream sacrifices that are the unavoidable consequences of greed, corruption and excess.

Sacrifices generated by greed and corruption appear as both financial costs that demand sacrifices and work-life sacrifices of time, energy, attention and the corrosive grind of burnout and unpaid work we must now do to keep the basics of modern life functioning–tasks that were once done by corporations or the government that have been offloaded onto households.

Consider two examples: having your dog’s teeth cleaned now costs $1,500, and so does having your child’s teeth cleaned and coated with some “vitamins.” This is literally 10 times the cash price we paid 10 years ago. According the BLS Inflation Calculator, inflation has risen 40% since 2016, so having my teeth cleaned should have risen from $150 to $210, not $1,500.

“Her longtime vet, now part of a national chain, overcharged her $500 for her dog’s teeth cleaning and didn’t issue a promised refund.”

When we spend time with Millennial age friends, what we hear from those employed in the private sector are the sacrifices demanded by Corporate America and the crushing costs imposed on households–especially for “healthcare insurance,” which is often neither authentic insurance or healthcare.

We hear accounts of friends “being sucked dry” by Big Tech employers, friends burning out in tech jobs and opting to work at Target, holiday time (needed to pack boxes for a move) being refused because “this project is a priority”–and in Corporate America, every project is always a priority, so holiday allotments pile up unused. When asked about job security, managers say “I can’t give you any guarantees” of a job tomorrow, much less next month or next year.

We have Millennial friends who live and work in Europe because life in the US is now unaffordable to all but the well-paid / wealthy once “sickcare” insurance costs are included. Life is easier in other countries because essential civic services such as public transport, education and healthcare are kept functional and affordable.

We recently hosted Millennial friends with two delightful young children, and the husband lugged in two laptops which he set up on my desk because he needed to check in on his three IT-related jobs. He was able to sit down to lunch and then he had to go back to work. Over their 7-hour weekend visit, he had to work half the time.

As parents, our friends are well aware of the dangers of over-scheduling and over-entitling their children, even as they seek to give them the extra-curricular activities they view as foundational–music and swimming lessons, some athletic engagement–while noting the many excesses of youth athletics other parents accept as “the way it is.”

Another Millennial age friend is a union member employed by a state-university teaching hospital. They have job security but report that mid-level managers are being let go as consolidation reduces staff.

Many of our friends marvel at jobs that end after an 8 hour shift. They report that leaving an employer is not possible due to the generous healthcare coverage. Others say they’re still working to pay their $20,000 property tax bill, which even in Prop-13 California, rises 8% to 10% every year with various add-ons.

Work-life balance of the sort we took for granted 40 years ago is now a scarce privilege, as the privilege of evading consequences means the negative consequences now fall entirely on the powerless.

The top 10% who manage / control the narratives are far more likely to possess privileges that enable them to discount or dismiss everything stated above as the whining of people who don’t appreciate their immense wealth, while ignoring their own privileges are the most valuable form of “wealth” in a thoroughly corrupted society and economy.

The apologists for this psychotic blindness to self-parodying excesses of greed, corruption and sacrifice are many; as long as a handful of millionaires are being minted in the casino, all is well. In other words, as long as the casino still offers a few the opportunity to declare “I got mine,” the system is not just stable, it’s wonderful.

But this cheerleading psychotic blindness is just another manifestation of the rot consuming the foundations of our society. The cheerleaders must ignore the destabilizing rot because they have no answer to the consequences other than apres nous, le deluge–after us, the flood.

https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/can-we-talk-about-greed-excess-and