“Uhhh…I don’t know what to do. I need help!” It was my little 25 year old cousin, calling me from Germany, where he was doing an internship at some company, in between two years of grad school. Wracked by frustration and despair in the States, I’d said to him, simply: why don’t you try going to school elsewhere, and see how different life is? So here he was — finding out.

I asked, slightly panicked, “what do you mean you don’t know what to do?” Maybe he’d gotten involved with the wrong people on that trip to Berlin…

“I mean it’s 5pm, and everyone’s left the office. Everyone. They insisted I go with them. Now we’re all sitting here drinking beers in the square, in front of this old tavern. It’s like the whole city’s here! I don’t know what to do.”

I frowned, baffled. “What do you mean you don’t know what to do? What’s the problem? I don’t — ”

“Dude!” he said, real despair in his voice, which rose with stress. “Should I go back to the office? I mean it’s like everyone just leaves work at 5 and sits here in the square, drinking beer and relaxing and laughing and talking about life. This isn’t normal!! Not. Normal. Are they going to fire me tonight? Maybe they just want to get rid of me. Maybe they’re being nice to me because — ”

I laughed, suddenly understanding. None of this was remotely normal — for him. Born and raised American. New York City, Texas, Virginia, Boston. That puritan American work ethic inculcated relentlessly into him, from grade school to the Ivy League. Drinking beers at 5pm in the square? Nothing could be more perilous. To keep your job, that career you’d worked so hard for. Maybe even that sense of self as an industrious, self-reliant, true-blue American. And so there he was, my poor little cousin, going to pieces because… he was now faced with a tiny portrait of human happiness.

And having to fit into it. Only he’d been brought up to believe that misery was happiness — but when it wasn’t, he’d been so miserable had to leave, and yet now, when happiness was right in front of him, it seemed to produce something like a kind of massive cognitive dissonance, sudden emotional conflict, tiny breakdown. “This can’t be happening!!” Guilt-shame-confusion-fear. That’s how deeply capitalism had permeated him — but he hadn’t quite registered it.

“LOL, my dude,” I said, as gently as I could, “nobody’s going to fire you. This is perfectly normal for the rest of the world. It’s more normal to live like this than it is not to. Americans are the weird ones. Have you been to Spain or Italy yet? You see how these guys all leave at 5pm and drink and laugh and relax? Just appreciating life instead of working until midnight to try to cut each other down, so they can take the next guy’s job? Isn’t the lack of all that what you used to find depressing about the States? You have time and freedom to live like a human being now, not just be exploited until your dying day. So go enjoy it. Stop stressing like an American. And if that feeling, which is called the anxiety of freedom, tinged with guilt over letting go of a self you don’t need to be anymore, doesn’t magically turn into happiness in about a month, just call me back, OK?”

Reader, he never called back. He’s over there in Germany, sitting in the square, drinking his beer, and understanding the point of this essay, by living it, I’d bet. And that point is simply this. It’s not just that Europeans are happier than Americans (though they are) — it’s a little subtler than that.

People are happier in social democracies — it’s an old and famous observation. But the question is why. Now, I don’t just mean that in the way of economic statistics — the ones about happiness are a little weak to begin with. I think it’s a question better discussed qualitatively, not just quantitatively, philosophically and culturally, not just methodologically and quasi-scientifically. In the way of a lived experience.

Social democracy serves a kind of double function for society, which Americans don’t really understand because they’ve never lived under social democracy, and can’t seem to quite imagine what such a life would feel and taste and smell like, beyond dry charts and statistics and analyses. That double function is that it lifts living standards, by making the necessities of modern life accessible to all, in the form of public goods — healthcare, media, finance, education, and so on. But the effect of those public goods is that social democracy becomes a society’s immune to the ills of capitalism. Ills which can proliferate and spread and metastasize, until they cause the body social to go into multiple organ failure (fascism), or break apart a society’s mind (authoritarianism.) In other words, social democracy is an immune system against the ills of capitalism — in many ways, capitalism corrodes our minds, spirits, bodies, and hearts, unlike many Americans think — and that is why people have never been happier in human history yet than in social democracies. All that’s very abstract, so let me explain.

All that, I think, sounds like science fiction to Americans, because American thought cannot venture beyond the limits of capital — so they can barely imagine it, and when they do, they tend to think “well, even if a nicer, kinder, gentler society could happen one day, it’s not going to happen anytime soon!” So they minimize and deny probably the most powerful effect of social democracy altogether, because they believe, quite sincerely, that the only world which can exist is one in which capitalism alone prevails. But then we must ask if people are only ever there to be hostile, mean, vicious, and cruel, to one another — because under capitalism, we are just little adversaries, trying to extract the most from one another, but never really even keep much for ourselves. One of Marx’s greatest insights wasn’t just that economies were made of capitalists versus proles, the class war theme the American left loves — but that capitalists would set prole against prole, by making them compete for subsistence. That’s modern-day America in a nutshell. But is proles cleverly pitted against each other by capitalists all that people are doomed to be — or ever can be?

To answer that question, let me pin down a little what I mean by the “ills of capitalism”, by going back to my little cousin. In America, he’d routinely work — a junior exec of some kind, desperately clawing his way up the ladder — until 8 or 9PM. No one told him to, and if you asked him, he’d say no one “made” him. It’s true, no boss ordered him to. But capitalism left him with no choice than to spend most of his life at the office — and most of the rest of it worrying about “work” — hence he lived in a state of fear, anxiety, dread, guilt, shame, pretty profound unhappiness. That’s how most Americans live now, I’d wager (just take a look at skyrocketing depression statistics). But why?

Because in America, the very same thing which in Europe are provided freely to all — healthcare, education, media, transport, retirement, childcare, and so on — are things which people must compete for. Because these things are life’s essentials — not luxuries, but necessities — the result is that the average American is forced to fight a bruising, bitter, endless battle. With whom? With everyone. These things are attached to “jobs”, thanks to capitalism (good work, capitalists, good work) and so the average American is quite rightly terrified of ever “losing” a job, because then most of these things go with it, too. And so Americans are at the mercy of capitalism — they must sell their labour to capitalists if they wish to survive — but that means they are antagonistic towards one another, too.

Have you ever wondered why Americans appear to be such strange people, to the rest of the world? On the one hand, they are unbelievably cruel to each other — prole against prole. Who else lets their kids be shot at school, and their poor go without insulin, and never let their elderly retire? In today’s world, almost nobody, really. So capitalism breeding a kind of intense rivalry — by keeping life’s necessities from Americans, and forcing them to compete with each other for what is freely given to everyone in every other rich country in the world — goes a very long way to explaining America’s legendary cruelty. If you’ve been conditioned by capitalism to think of everyone else in society as a potential competitor for healthcare, education, retirement — then of course you will naturally feel a sense of hostility towards them, even if you don’t know you feel it. Antagonism will be as natural as air or water to you.

(And probably, because that sense of hostility is so intense, you will have to veil it. So in America — and only in America, really — I pretend to be happy, more or less always, even when I am in intense fear and dread and rage. I give you that fake American smile. “I’m so happy for yoowwwwww!!” My friends, nobody says that unless they are actually boiling over with rage and wants to lop off your head with an axe. So the inauthenticity which Americans are renowned for — the fake smile, the plastered-on grin, the meaningless small talk, everyone a Willy Loman — also comes from precisely the same place, which is capitalism conditioning people to treat everyone as antagonists, as rivals, and potential winners, of the necessities everyone must compete with everyone else for, every single day, over and over again, forever, until you’re dead.)

Now, this feeling — this sense of suspicion, hostility, rage masked as overeager and syrupy kindness, the constant atmosphere of fear and dread and anxiety, seeing everyone else as a rival, who might take away your job, and therefore your bread, healthcare, education, savings, income, even if you do it unconsciously, without knowing it, like most Americans probably do — simply does not exist to the same degree elsewhere, even remotely. It only really exists in America. That is a subjective judgment, perhaps — so ask your friends (but people who’ve really lived in both places, not just visited. Hence where Canadians are renowned for being nice, the French for being snooty, the British for their humour, and so on — only Americans are known for their violence and rage.) Capitalism has made Americans fight a perpetual contest with each other just for life’s necessities, and so, quite naturally, just as Marx, Durkheim, and Freud predicted, there is no sense in America that people are all in anything together, or even can be — everyone is just an isolated, fractured atom of appetite, trying to tear apart the next atom, before they are torn apart, too, in order to subsist.

Yet in genuine social democracies, the omnipresent feelings of hostility and antagonism and cruelty which are so obvious and potent in America simply do not exist, anywhere outside maybe jails or trading floors — at least as generally and constantly felt atmospheres, invisible and malign presences, things which linger in the air, everywhere that you go, and threaten to boil over, spill out, and explode, wrecking everything in their path. You can observe that very simply by looking at how much violence, abuse, and toxicity there is in Europe compared to America — how what is mundane and routine in America would be considered quite shocking and alarming elsewhere. Instead, replacing the sense of fear and dread that capitalism instills in us is a kind of empathy and warmth and regard — solidarity of a small and peaceful kind, if you like — and a kind of gentle confidence in ourselves, too. How so?

The answer I’ve come to understand, both through my own life, and through thinking these things over abstractly, is twofold — less predatory capitalism, which produces more, and more genuine, freedom and equality. It isn’t just that CEOs are paid less, so the gap between them and their workers is smaller — though it is. Social democracies allow people to learn to trust and respect one another because they are constantly rubbing shoulders with one another when they utilize the public goods that make up the “social” part of such a democracy — healthcare systems, universities, retirement systems, and so on. Whenever people use these things, they are genuine equals — nobody is given preferential treatment. So there is simply nothing to compete for. Nothing could be less true in America. Want healthcare? Keep that job. Want good healthcare? Get that promotion. Want stellar healthcare? There’s a whole VIP wing in every hospital to fight over.

So in a social democracy, I am not spending every single day of my life competing with everyone else in society for life’s necessities — which are kept away from me in carefully controlled artificial shortages which maximize capitalist profits, precisely to enforce this contract of hostility and antagonism towards people who should be my equals (that’s a crucial point, and I’ll return to it shortly.) Instead, society has struck precisely the opposite bargain. We will give each other these things — healthcare, education, finance, etc — so that no one has to compete for them. That way, we are not only rivals, bitter antagonists, enemies, all the time — who must pretend to make nice with one another, frenemies carrying knives behind our backs always. Because we are truer equals, we can respect and know one another with less suspicion, fear, rage, dread, and anxiety. We can be gentle and warm and kind to another now. Our society will be a happier and friendlier place. But only because there is less capitalism. We’re not spending our days terrified by the prospect of choosing between chemotherapy or a roof over our heads, in dread of being exploited by the world’s richest people for subsistence wages until the day we die, dreading how we’ll ever be able to afford to start a family, and so on.

Perhaps you think I’ve idealized the above for you. Have I? And yet isn’t the very fear and anxiety of subsistence and survival that Europeans designed their societies to minimize precisely what most Americans find themselves overwhelmed by now? 80% live paycheck to paycheck, 70% can’t raise $1000 for an emergency — at the very same time, depression and loneliness and drug use and suicides are skyrocketing. Hardly a coincidence. The ills of capitalism have left America a battered, smoking wreck — because if all you base your society on is capitalism, you’re going to get capitalism’s weird and terrible diseases, problems, and maladies, too. And of those, the most basic is precarity — because capitalism doesn’t care if you live or die: it wants you caged, kept, captive, not fully alive, but not really dead, either. That is how you do the most work, for the least price. Hence, Americans live right at the razor’s edge because that is where capitalism profits most.

Still, let’s name some more of those ills. Overwork. Competitiveness. Acquisitiveness. Cruelty, hostility, enmity. Fear, anxiety, rage. Stress, pressure, burnout. Mistrust, distrust, suspicion. Loneliness, disconnection, fragmentation. Meaninglessness, emptiness, futility. Greed, selfishness, egotism. They’re all related, a network of human despair, folly, and ignorance. But it’s not a coincidence that Europeans suffer these things far less than Americans, or that these things are beginning to rip through America like a great earthquake now — it’s because these things are the ills of capitalism, to name just a few. Social democracy is the best immune system we know of in history yet against such maladies — but American never built such an immune system. In fact, it worked hard not to build one.

Hence, the implicit social contract in America is, in many ways, precisely the opposite of the European one I’ve described above. You must spend every single day of your life — you will never retire — competing brutally with everyone else in society, for life’s barest necessities — healthcare, education, food, water, energy, retirement, childcare, etcetera. Not a single thing will be given to you — in fact, you must be ashamed of a “handout”, so that you internalize the logic of capitalist, even though you are just a prole. You must compete as much and as long and as hard as you are told to for every last morsel of bread. But here’s the kicker — there is absolutely no economic reason that you should compete with everyone else for life’s necessities because these things could be provided better than free. For cheaper than nothing.

What do I mean by “better than free”? I mean that if America employed those vast numbers of people forced to throw their lives away at low-wage menial service jobs, making them doctors, nurses, professors, therapists, and carers, then there would be transformative social returns — the money and time and energy invested in doing that would of course make America a wealthier, happier, saner place, in enduring ways. Hence, there is no good economic, social, or political reason that Americans should be forced to viciously compete for the things they are competing for. Not a single one whatsoever.

So why are Americans competing for life’s necessities, instead of providing them to each other for cheaper than nothing? Because ideology says they must. The only answer to every problem that American economists and intellectuals know is “more capitalism!” — and therefore people must go on competing for the very things that they could give to one another for better than free, for cheaper than zero, for a benefit, not a cost in the first place, no matter how abundant or plentiful they will ever be. Even if food costs nothing at all in some sci-fi future, capitalism will never give you bread for free. In the same way, even if healthcare or education benefits us all far more than they cost us, capitalism will simply never give them to everyone. It is not concerned with anyone or anything other than its own maximum profit, precisely this second.

So Americans must compete bitterly and more desperately every single year for necessities, in fact — precisely because capitalism tied things like healthcare and retirement and childcare to “jobs”, but never pays labour a penny more, only constantly raises prices in order to take all it can for itself. Hence, they must compete perpetually with one another not to lose their jobs — because there goes a life — but never quite see: there is no need whatsoever to contest these things at all in the first place. The result is that all the very same necessities of life in America now cost vastly more than in Europe — nobody in Europe pays $30,000 to have a child — and Americans must compete bitterly for them, to begin with. Do you see what a strange, bizarre, and foolish mess Americans have made of their society?

Who has really won the endless and bruising contest Americans are perpetually fighting with one another for the basic necessities of life, pitted against one another by capitalism? None of them, really. Capitalism has. What other great empire recently collapsed because ideology meant people were going without life’s necessities, even when they could have easily been provided to all? The Soviet Union, of course — and in a grand and gruesome twist of history, America is collapsing for exactly the same reason, and in the same way, too.

Perhaps, then, the kindest thing I can say to Americans is also a hard truth. The very same one I used to tell my little cousin before he left for Germany. Dude, you don’t even know how unhappy you are yet. It’s going to take you time to discover even that. On that day, call me — and we’ll talk about what happiness really is.

Umair

September 2018