How the isms fail us
Margaret Thatcher’s famous “There is no alternative” (TINA) is a false dichotomy. Everyone immediately starts thinking of an alternative to capitalism like socialism, federalism, globalism or whatever other favorite economic ism.
TINA fakes you out by challenging you to patch our current system by better balancing power between corporations, bureaucracies, representatives, judiciaries, nations and people. So people discuss and even write books about alternative systems.
Unfortunately the real dichotomy we are facing is much more basic. It’s between people giving a damn and people not giving a damn.
The implicit promise that any ism makes is that through some system of rules the average participant can be freed from most of the burden of caring for the world beyond his immediate job and family.
Take the definition of capitalism for instance
an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
or socialism
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Nowhere does it say that in capitalism the country’s trade and industry could not be equally privately owned by everyone or that socialism has to mean centralized control by the few.
Any ism just naturally devolves into tyranny as most participants game the system to put in less and less effort while others game the system to amass the power that was abdicated.
All any ism has to do to retain power is make sure that people more willing to accept complexity are ranked above those that refuse. If you can turn accepting and studying complexity into a virtue then, as an ism, you’re home free. If you can, like Confucianism, have complex tests that directly put those willing to devote the most time to complexity ahead — then even better.
Now having been paid off the beneficiaries of this ranking are put to work keeping the ism alive instead of fixing it.
This dynamic is immediately obvious even with an ism like globalism. The United States amassed power abdicated by other countries spending much less on defense but also benefited from controlling the reserve currency of the world.
The shirking of responsibility comes in a diversity of forms. Some people might decide to just pay attention to local governance and ignore larger levels of organization. Others might decide to pay attention only to the higher levels of organization and ignore local governance.
Even the number of days a week we work might have more to do with claiming we are too busy to give a damn than anything magical about a 5 to 2 ratio. The bulk of the cover comes from the institutions of the isms themselves though.
What is a federal reserve system? Mostly its an institution that gives cover to the lie that the average citizen doesn’t have to understand or care how banking works.
After the events of 2008 this lie was so clear that no rational person could continue believing there was a system in place that made ignorance of banking reasonable. Yet most people continued to respect the institution of “The Fed” anyway because forming an informed opinion would require too much effort.
A socialist system might start out based on the same kind of software and process that Walmart uses to control just in time delivery of goods. Maybe that institution would be called “The Fed” also. But the fewer people willing to understand how an institution works the greater the chance it becomes corrupt.
Actually the federal reserve bank of Kansas City provides a full page of lesson plans of propaganda and outright lies mixed with some truth for use by teachers. But even the propaganda is not taught because its a point of pride to enjoy the freedom of not understanding banking at all.
And while the system runs well it is fun to be relieved of the burden of understanding ism details. Unfortunately by the time the system fails the level of ignorance to be overcome to help with the fix is daunting.
More daunting still as wave after wave of crisis caused by the system failure takes up more and more of everyone’s time. In the end the promised freedom of ignoring the details might be fleeting and much smaller than the responsible path.
So the isms fail us in the end. Ultimately other countries must spend more on defense instead of leaving it to the US or face the cost and inflation caused by a war like in Ukraine. Ultimately we will all need to spend much more time giving a damn or risk societal collapse. This is the real inescapable TINA — the bill comes due.