re: #23 petesh

It’s the just-world fallacy taken to its narcissistic extreme.

Reflection on the larger patterns of the world would mean recognizing that, nay, there is no “you deserve what you have.” Not in the socialist redistribution sense, but in mix of chaos and determinism that has laid out, long-term, where effort and time and resources have been allocated. For any individual, that’s a terrifying existential notion—you are brief warp in a larger flow of time, subject to both the vast upstream of events and the splashes of random happenings with no meaning—for a society, it’s the kind of upheaval that prompts enormous disruption.

The Old Kingdoms Egyptians believed in the regular rise of the Nile and the intermediacy of the pharaoh. When the former failed and the latter was thus suspect, they experienced a crisis of identity and belief that’s recorded as lost, melancholy compositions in which poets and letter-writers doubt the the very foundation of their universe. Toyotomi Hideyoshi foresaw the practical results of a Japan open to the world, how it would facilitate that shaking-apart of the just-assembled provinces, and transformed the entire nation by closing it off. The cultural ramifications are still being felt—Japan did not become a colony, remained cultural distinct, but also began to experiment with being a colonizer. WW1 broke the back of Germany, twice—military collapse followed by economic collapse, and in that breach a small number of low men with high office “solved” the disruption by reaching for toxic nationalism.

The basic American myth is one of self-determination and meritocracy, it and has purposefully mutilated its history to maintain that narrative theme. That we all live in a post-apocalyptic landscape, that the original settlers saw the mass-death of natives as Providence even as they occupied their settlements, is overlooked. That slavery was a pivot in the labor economy, and a determining factor in politics until the Civil War—has been carefully and strategically disassembled in favor of a milquetoast “it was bad, it happened in isolation” reading. The extent of our own experiment with colonialism has been forgotten. The complex path of entry in the two World Wars has been glossed over as triumphalism. The even more complex reality of post-war economics—king of a ravaged developed world—simply isn’t discussed at all. Detailed understanding of the Cold War—with its proxies, its choice to side with dictators and fascists damn the consequences—is nonexistent: the threat of Soviet nuclear arms silences discussion of efficacy of means. Americans have consistently been told they deserve what they have.

The world has moved on, but the American mythology has persisted and become more and more frantic as less and less confirmation has been available. It’s no longer an international economy comprised of collapsing European empires, a failed-from-the-start Soviet empire, and hollowed-out ex-colonies trying to catch up with no capital. Automation means people’s labor matters less, that every worker is more interchangeable. Communications heading towards instant worldwide connection means that regionality isn’t a factor in labor; and this is multiplied by easy and cheap shipping across oceans.

And in the 80s—when the post-WW2 Myth was at its height—we started electing people the disassembled the practical mechanisms that gave us an advantage. And we’re dealing with the long-term consequences.

Which brings us back to that idea of the just world fallacy…because that’s the dark side of almost seventy years of Americans believing that the health of the nation was entirely earned through efforts and industry, and that anyone not participating must not being achieving*: it’s never been a generally-applied concept (a la Kant), it’s always been special pleading. So now that people who feel they should be succeeding—according to the Myth—are failing the answer is either (1) the critical-to-self-image Myth was bullshit, or (2) the world is conspiring to fuck them over.

*This note is very important: racism applied this all-encompassing just world fallacy, and the zero-sum thought that blacks/Asians/Hispanics could only do better at the expense of whites, long before white people started consistently applying it to themselves. Whiteness isn’t really a race, it’s an in-group that gets to own its successes but explain away its faults, contrasted with out-groups that are contaminants to social hygiene and collectively responsible for their faults. And whiteness recruits individuals and groups opportunistically to maintain this image of “we are individuals collectively defined by our individuality, but coincidental we have a collective identity defined by our pooled merit and successes”—which explains the appropriation of regional groups throughout history to create a “Western Civilization” out of myriad disconnected; the incorporation as-needed of liminal groups—the Irish and Slavs for example—for purely practical reasons; and the accumulation of “exceptional” non-whites that are used as bludgeons.

What we’re watching is individual incidences of a worldview collapse: they are doubling down because the story is integral to their being. They will accept less solid information, more outright lies, because the latter allow them not to confront their own limitations, or the limitation of the nation. Hence the sheer variety, and increasing baroque-ness, of explanations that claim an outside force—Simmelian strangers already present in the society, dangerous foreigners, international conspiracies. The sad thing is that to achieve this, they will simultaneously cling to symbols and deform the meaning of their symbols.