Image from MIT Prof. Peter Temin’s new book “The Vanishing Middle Class” http://news.mit.edu/2017/america-economy-decline-middle-class-0313

If you want to see much more evidence of the above graphs, just look here.

Sales dipped after the crash, people were reluctant to spend, and companies needed to stay afloat in the recession. While some companies held steadfast, (a more recent example linked regarding technological unemployment) many decided the best policy was to fire most of the staff and let the few remaining take on more work with the promise of a huge payoff later… despite increased stress, reduced health/well-being, and chaotic work environments.

Years have gone by and while so many of us are spinning plates so that we can buy dinner, global deals are occurring in 5-star resorts as bankers, oil barons, real estate tycoons, MLM moguls and enterprise investors increasingly buy media and lobby politics, and the bosses, many who were bailed out, are buying lambos and going hunting or golfing. Should we be mad? What’s more… as many small and medium companies stagnate, the big ones ate up the little ones. Thats just “the game”, they say.

It seems as though some made a choice to step toward a more ruthless society rather than compassionate one and in doing so, seek to profit.

Startups used to have big teams, now they hire a small handful of people and burn through Venture Capital money. If you can’t get VC money, you’re supposed to leap past increasingly big barriers to entry. The corporate and entrepreneurial culture seems to have changed from creating something of long-lasting value to creating something fast, getting rich, and employing a sound ‘exit strategy’.

Entrepreneurial culture shouldn’t reward ruthless (unhealthy) competition that pushes others down and out for selfish gain. Yet in a few of my own experiences, of which I (thankfully) opted out of- despite the (very real) promise of riches — it sadly did!

In Silicon Valley, success seems to have morphed into a get-rich-quick game with a proper ‘exit strategy’ and not much else. Daily job alerts for openings near me are mainly Uber/Lyft, Life Insurance MLM’s, or a choice between Walmart or McDonald’s. Meanwhile, tent-cities pop up around the states and yet people earning unhealthy amounts in tech-hubs still can’t afford to pay rent.

Companies that are automating and hiring less are making more money— should we be surprised when machines or softwares are simply better at doing all the laborious hard work? That’s what they’re made to do.

Meanwhile, retail stores are closing at an alarming rate while Amazon and similar grow exponentially, all while entrepreneurs create gig marketplaces for “modern digital slave labor”, such as fiverr.com or 99designs.com… or IRL, Uber.

After staring at page after page of Uber and MLM Life Insurance job offers and occasionally applying to hundreds of local part-time gigs, I instead chose to keep going back to my entrepreneurial projects and for the past 10 years I’ve constantly had to ask myself to decide between: “Do I like or enjoy or even at least can tolerate this, am I good at this… OR… does it compromise my values? Is this moral? I don’t have to be good at it—or like it, I just have to do it anyways.”

There’s enough risk as is, we really shouldn’t also be forced to compromise our values as a prerequisite of “success,” of what appears now to be a only a glimpse of financial well-being, nevermind “success”.

When some of my projects failed, I kept going with others. Then, during occasional breaks and during my own daily manual labor tasks putting together decals, I found some time to use my spare mental energy to research and to think deeply about things, including the topics of this essay.

Apples to Oranges

Besides the above issues, the bigger problem in my opinion is that people in government positions, representatives (if that is still a thing), perhaps lobbied by corporate interests, decided (perhaps unintentionally but likely motivated by increasing profits) to apply this same plate-spinning policy toward government, which is by definition run by people, and fundamentally different than a corporation.

A large portion of America decided that it might be a great idea to treat government, which includes hospitals, clinics, schools, libraries, fire-stations, police services, clean water, roads, etc… and all the multitude of other important public services that we all pay taxes towards, to treat those like some kind of lean business in a hyper-competitive, dog-eat-dog kind of way, despite the very real ability of the government to appropriate and allocate funds based on the needs of the people.

Another term for this is terrible policy is called Austerity—the failed government form of the failed plate-spinning corporate policy.

Austerity is a choke-hold of important and necessary public services, squeezing the life out of them.

If you’re skeptical of the damage that austerity can do, you need only look at what happened in Flint MI.

Upon learning all this, watching the political mess in the USA, looking at all those growing economic inquality graphs, people like Bernie Sanders were pointing out issue after issue to millions of people.

Wealth Inequality Skyrockets

Tent cities began to pop up nearby and across the states, my business and my life were starting to be affected by politics, I met some unscrupulous profit-hungry individuals and was forced to take on morally-compromising projects and deal with morally corrupt individuals, our personal lives were starting to be directly affected by this culture and new kind of politics—I tried to avoid it, but all said and done at the time—I became very mad at Capitalism.

Do you remember those times? Well, they’re still happening.

It seemed as though greed had run amok and that there were just a few people to blame. What can we do?

Pointing Wrong Fingers, Part 1: The Elderly.

Who is to blame?

Many at this point would begin to point fingers at the elder generation, like the generation before them, “They’ve left us in this mess! It’s all their fault!” However, it is wrong to do so when the vast majority of them, just like you and I, were merely going about their day ensuring their own survival. Some media organizations have now decided it‘s a great idea to run dozens of opinion-pieces accusing the elderly or accusing millenials for ruining everything, pitting them against each other. This is obviously highly controversial, and what we saw was that controversy suddenly made a lot of money from ad networks very quickly, people got furious about everything and shared the links on social media, leading to more advertising revenue for many (already massive) media organizations.

This behavior is only getting worse. Blame and misdirection are running rampant. Increasingly, controversy and corruption are making more and more money.

Are your parents or grandparents really nefarious for looking after their own self-interest and looking after you while this is all going on? No. Absolutely not. It is discrimination to blame the elder generation, and it is wrong.

Pointing Wrong Fingers, Part 2 : The System.

Was the system to blame?

People at this point, as I did, would start arguing by saying: “We must do something, but what can we do?”

The first argument sounds like this: “Which is better, Socialism, Capitalism, or Communism?… what about Anarchism or x-y-z ism?” A lot of people start saying “Down with Capitalism! It’s the problem! It causes rampant greed and pillaging because of the extreme desire for profits!” If greed is caused by Capitalism. Then yes, Capitalism is probably the problem.

However, this anger is somewhat misdirected and only half the story.

Some things to keep in mind here are:

1) Many of us keep money (capital) in savings accounts, allowing us to have a choice when to spend or where to invest. If we didn’t have a savings account, we would still keep it in our wallet until we needed to spend it.

2) We live in a (now global) system of trade that is habitual. Before coins, people exchanged sheep or goats (and some still do).

Money is an intermediary and its value is based on how each member of society trusts that it remains as valuable as is necessary in order for a fair exchange. The other day, I sold an old canopy set in exchange for $10. I only did that because I knew I didn’t need it anymore and that I could later exchange that $10 for something else that I would need or want.

Right now, we can hate and blame money and how it is exchanged in a Capitalist system, saying that it causes greed all we like, but we still need that intermediate-value-holder called money, we still need to make trades, we still need to keep money in our wallet…otherwise we would all be bartering—or we’re somehow living on a Star Trek spaceship.

We don’t have a stateless or cashless society. Money is necessary.

Are greedy Capitalists to blame then?

Socialism & Communism put an emphasis on beliefs of a collectivist aspect of production being preferred over owning capital as an individual. That’s why you might hear some socialists say “we must seize the means of production” (ie. machines, robots, equipment, etc).

What happens if production is collectively run? Can we seize the means of production from the local dentist? Proponents will say “well, we actually see this happen successfully in cases like co-operatives like mondragon and worker-owned businesses.”

Capitalists will argue that this is taking away individual freedom, their focus will be on government enforcing things so they will say: “Government is taking away individual freedom!” I’m expecting lots of replies in this nature to this writing, either from capitalists or socialists.

The epiphany I had was that: Collectivists vs. Individualists… and Socialists vs. Capitalists… will argue forever, because what many Capitalists or Socialists or Communists or what-have-you fail to recognize is this:

People simultaneously appreciate both individual freedom and the merits and dignity of working/producing/creating as an individual… and simultaneously working/producing/creating together as a team to accomplish a common goal. People CAN and DO appreciate both.

The problem is that some appreciate the former more, and others prefer the latter more, because each of us are different and have different backgrounds. These ideas do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Of course, there are some… outliers… that hate both. Then there are some people who just enjoy arguing, and will do so until they go blue in the face, or until they make some money doing so.

This idea of simultaneously having individual freedom while working on a team as something we should probably appreciate much more, but it seems hard for some to grasp. Being a snare drummer in drumline taught me the simultaneity of honing your individual skill for the benefit of the team. The same can be said for many sports, such as baseball. Not everyone has a high respect for entertainers in a band, but the same lesson applies in sports, in the workplace, and so many other places. It is the reason so many people have so much respect for hard “work”. I put the word work in quotes because there’s something many people forget about the word.

In order to illustrate several points about work, winning, and simultaneity, I’m going to tell a short story about an important lesson I learned while in drumline. It’s an important lesson and it’s part of who I am, and I am thankful for the experience.

Some of us were quite arrogant about our position in the marching band, but the reality was that in order to produce a fine half-time performance and go on to win the tournament, everyone had similar work responsibilities: refine your muscle-memory, have some passion for what you were doing, and spend the necessary time to fail and then improve. You do this and we all win — and win, we did!

The definition of winning in this context was outperforming the other contestants by individually executing a strong performance and thus overall displaying an entertaining performance for the audience and judges.

It was hard work. We spent the time to refine. One of the best memories of my life was celebrating with so much pride that my drumstick broke after our 1st place win in the regionals (soon after I left, our band went on to be 1st in the nation and played at the White House).

Here’s what people forget about hard work, pride, and success.

It becomes very easy at that point to gloat and claim you did all this yourself. “Yeah, I’m the champ!”

The biggest lesson I learned about hard work and pride is: There’s no way to experience that same feeling of success without the multiple passionate and dedicated coaches, without everyone being dedicated in their own way, without having the necessary time for practice, without having the support of friends and family, without a safe place to practice, without people being honest with each other, without a bus to arrive at the performances, without the mutual respect and encouragement of coaches and members, without the necessary tools and equipment provided to us to help each individual succeed (and all the other foundational things I didn’t list), so that we may all succeed and have a feeling of purpose.

The biggest lesson I learned there was: success, work, and pride…isn’t all about the accomplishment, it’s also simultaneously about the journey.

You don’t have to succeed by pushing others down.

It’s simultaneously about your individual efforts and your team efforts. Hard work in order to succeed and feel pride and purpose is never only by ones own merits, there is always something or someone that has helped one succeed. We need each other.

There’s a lot of people I admire, wealthy people, too — who do great, wonderful, respectable things for society — but the idea of success that is purely based on money is the most selfish concept of success there can be.

What all this boils down to is that an individualist will argue with a collectivist forever because their worldviews conflict. If there is a revolution — hopefully non-violent— with the goal of taking power from a few individuals and giving it to collectivists — what is then to stop individuals in that new society from attempting to gain power and form new hierarchical structures? The table would just keep turning—like it always has.

Another point is: If you just can’t see how there are some good aspects in our system of trade, such as social-enterprises, social-entrepreneurship, NGOs, CBOs, credit unions, startups that overall benefit the community, businesses that overall benefit the community, or co-operatives, etc… there’s no reason for me to continue writing. I should really just stop here. But this leads me to the next point…

Pointing Wrong Fingers, Part 3 : Greed.

Is Capitalism bad, or is greedy Capitalism bad?

Many will argue at this point that the system has given so many people financial freedom, we’re living in the best society history has ever seen— well, many of us are anyway — to claim there is anything wrong with Capitalism and proceed to propose any solutions is to them considered naïve idealistic fantasy.

But they totally ignore how many aspects of Capitalism are failing so miserably, and can push so many down while doing so, and this is actually ignoring many of the growing problems.

Once again, is it right to blame people and call them nefarious psychopaths for looking out for their own survival and, by extension, self-interest? Most individuals simply prefer the path of least resistance, especially when they are just trying to survive on a daily basis.

Occam’s Razor says the simplest answer is usually the correct one.

The truth is that there are good and bad aspects of Capitalism.

Take social-enterprise and the growing #socialentrepreneurship trends, for example. Capitalism actually allows co-operatives, social-enterprise, and non-profits to function within it’s system of trade. Surely you’ve heard of goodwill.org!

However, many new social-enterprises struggle to survive in the first few years most likely because founders have to survive off instant-noodles and daily survival-anxiety, the scarcity mentality, barriers to entry, much like other startups and tend not to make nearly as much profits, at least at first. Many nonprofits are forced to emulate for-profit business models that emphasize meeting the desires of the board and overhead costs, instead of being able to focus on providing critical goods and services to communities.

Okay, so if Capitalism is capable of social-enterprise and companies that aren’t 100% about profits before people, why don’t we have far more of that?

Now some will say “it just isn’t as cool” and others will say, “GREED! That’s it then. Greed is the ultimate enemy, we must eradicate greed, and money causes greed!”

When I was much younger, I wrote a piece of music called “Destroy Greed.” I was angry about greed and it was a way to vent that anger. Many years went by and the same idea stuck with me — that many of the problems we face in the world may be due to greed. Many people would still agree with this statement. Years went by. I went through school. I started working. As I grew up I took on more of what we like to call “more responsibility,” that is, making sure you have enough income to survive “on your own”. I went about my days thinking “What can we do to solve many of societies major problems?” I started thinking about the root causes for so many problems, starting with greed.

I asked the following questions “What exactly is greed? Greed is very bad. Why are people greedy? What is the motivation behind greed?”

You can’t tell a greedy person that greed is the problem because that is saying ‘they are the problem’ — not the system we’ve tried to create to provide freedom for everyone.

If you had a leaky boat, would you say the boat is the problem, the captain is the problem—or try to fix the leak before everyone drowns?

Right now most people ignore the leak as if it doesn’t exist, and they keep blaming the captain while the entire boat is sinking.

The problem is not the existence of wealthy… or greedy people. It’s that our current societal culture seems to fuel egotism, and that’s probably because there is something very important missing from our society. We all have this feeling there is something missing, but what is it?

What’s really quite scary, is that the main driver of greed and egotism is to reinforce a person’s feelings of perceived superiority.

The motive of some to remain greedy is to feel superior over another because they are conditioned to do so. If money can be used as a tool to maintain power over others, then greed is used to increase that power and increase feelings of (false) supremacy. That sense of superiority, a display of egotism, is only emboldened by those who choose to accept it as real, even though it is merely a display. An act. A sharade. Something children do until they grow up.

There is something hugely important missing from our society, and it is causing a mental and cultural crisis: https://newint.org/columns/essays/2016/04/01/psycho-spiritual-crisis/

If culture is habit, then what we have now is a society that is increasingly habitually demoralized by constant competitive pressures. This can lead to far more problematic issues, like spiraling into dangerous addictions.

What we have today is an increasingly egotistical and materialistic society where everyone is comparing everything, putting others down to feel superior (social media isn’t entirely at fault, it’s merely a communication tool, but it amplifies comparisons via imagery and video) and trying to “one up” everyone. Advertisers and big corporations know this and that’s why they pay athletes and celebrities to speak highly of their products. Advertisers and brands make shareholders happy by playing into egotism heavily because the reality is that currently it works: people “buy into it,” and it makes more money.

When people have limited access to resources, greed automatically becomes tied to egotism and envy: “I’ve got this, you don’t, therefore I think I am more important than you!” Money in the eyes of the culture of our society is then being used as a measuring stick for power (and a metaphorical stick: fear of being homeless or starving). To be selfish in order to survive is a natural instinct. Selfishness is part of the human condition, we need to be selfish to look after ourselves, and we have done so ever since we started walking around on two legs… but where there is scarcity there is also egotism, envy, and greed, they are defensive mechanisms.

We need to face the fact that to be occasionally selfish is part of being human, and that greed may simply be a by-product of a less-than-perfect system among other nuanced reasons. Greed is diminishing the importance of other humans and encourages feelings of (false) superiority.

I know we have computers and smartphones and excess, but I acknowledge that not everyone has warm, clean water to shower in. I refuse to believe that since I do — and was, for a while, forced to be somewhat-aggressive to put myself in a better position to have access to those same things — that I am somehow better than other people. That should not be how things work.

Money and greed aren’t the problem: the problem is a false sense of superiority, which is a defense mechanism of artificial scarcity and a byproduct of scarcity mentality.

Some people seem to have chosen to step toward a future that is more ruthless because they stand to profit more from it.

We now have the capability for abundance, but in greed’s wake lies artificial scarcity, artificial limits to access to resources as a method of power, and thus increasing wealth inequality. We also come to see this mentality reflected culturally.

We see this mentality reflected in our entertainment through artificially created competition, and artificially created interpersonal conflicts, on ‘Reality TV’ for example, these forms of conflicts are designed to be controversial and could arguably be viewed as normalizing interpersonal conflict and conditioning the public for a more ruthless reality despite so much evidence to the contrary and despite alternatives.

“But often the shows are less interested in celebrating merit than in re-creating an ideology of ruthless individualism in our living rooms and Twitter hashtags.” — “Depicting a shortage-ridden world rationalizes zero-sum competition and exploitation as necessary responses. It naturalizes selfishness as survival. This is not merely indoctrination; the narrative fits easily with ideological constructions we’ve already absorbed and we are already living with, in response to the economic inequalities capitalism already sustains.” — Britney Summit-Gil is a PhD candidate in the communication and media department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

People are conditioned from an early age to seek out ‘fame and fortune’ (very much driven by egotism) and this mentality only makes ‘the greedy’ even more money.

The problem now is that this has gone on for so long that a large group of people have simply inherited such greedy ways of life and mentalities without even knowing it, until that way of life is threatened, of course.

Do they even know what greed is, or do they even care? The have the power, the time, the comfort, simply not to care at all. Some seem to have completely lost empathy for those not in that same situation.

Are those bad people? That’s highly debatable.

The truth however is, there may always be greedy people, there may always be people who want to feel superior, there will always be people who worked hard and will clutch onto what they created and not want to ever share… but that doesn’t mean we should as a whole society allow for widespread suffering, for widespread poverty, poverty as structural violence, poverty as worth-ism, because just a handful of people want to be greedy and feel superior.

I believe this lack of misunderstanding on how greed is connected to feelings of false superiority is why you get the two extremes (collectivists vs individualists) arguing endlessly about ownership: one feels that someone who worked hard for something should be allowed to “own it” — the other feels that “we should all work hard and all own it”…. these two types really, really argue!

Arguing endlessly like this gets us nowhere fast. While I am not arguing in favor of greed, the reality is that we should seek to allow for both situations to occur simultaneously without it being detrimental to anyone in society.

The reality here is that the solution to all these problems then cannot be system abolishment… or table turning. That’s endless. There need not be violent revolt and incarceration. There will be no such thing as equal outcomes. Some will always have more than others—because that is reality.

We probably won’t be able to eradicate greed or superiority… but we can significantly diminish the effects of both.

We need to create a society that allows for social mobility and ever-flowing changes in wealth and financial positions for everyone, instead of one that continues to stagnate and regress toward low mobility for more and more people, toward reduced wealth-flow for all but a few, and increasing wealth inequality for the majority for the foreseeable future.

There is a massive potential to hugely reduce poverty and suffering, which are both a result of artificial scarcity and it’s symptom: greed. First, we must accept that we have a problem…