When culture no longer includes you in its vision for the future, despair is the predictable outcome.
In 1998, two Canadian psychologists, Michael Chandler and Christopher Lalonde, published an unusual paper on the psychology of suicide. Examining the widely varying suicide rates among 196 Indian tribes in British Columbia, which vary by a factor of a thousand between tribes, Chandler and Lalonde propose that an awareness of what they call “self-continuity” was protective against suicide.
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They then suggest that this individual sense of continuity in time is enmeshed in belonging to a culture that precedes us as individuals and reaches into the future.
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Examining the 196 tribes of British Columbia, they construct an index of cultural continuity that includes some measures of self-government (like running their own police, fire departments and schools), successfully making legal claims of ownership over traditional lands, as well as the presence of cultural centers or facilities on tribal lands. Combined, these measures are strongly predictive of lowered levels of suicide at a tribal level, which Chandler and Lalonde take as supportive of their theoretical framework.
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Sixty-three percent of the rapidly rising total number of suicides in the US in 2017 were white, non-Hispanic males, who only make up 30 percent of the nation’s population. 2017 also saw over 72,000 fatal drug overdoses, a rate over 16 times higher than in the 1970s (when drugs were already considered an epidemic) and a significantly heightened number of deaths due to alcoholism, both of which are also concentrated among white males, comparable only to American Indian men in their combined likelihood of drug, alcohol, or suicide deaths.
Reaching back to Chandler and Lalonde, one wonders whether white men, like American and Canadian Indians before them, find themselves lacking in both self-continuity and cultural continuity. In the words of Michel Houllebecq, speaking broadly of Western decline to the Paris Review a few years ago, “The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.”
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A friend who predicted Trump’s electoral success early on had a simple explanation: people are bored. This was also, he argued, why people were overdosing on opioids and drinking themselves to death and killing themselves in rapidly increasing numbers, an analysis he punctuated by successfully drinking himself to death in the couple years afterwards. Being aware of statistics does not stop you from becoming one.
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Trump’s election was, according to some, the End of the End of History, just as 9/11 was to be before it. In both cases, though, the apparent weakness of our political system and national security state belies how the world order becomes even more integrated after these supposed cataclysms than they were before. The End of History continues on its happy course, leaving Rust Belt men dropping fentanyl and fat neoliberal economists praising the wonders of socialism in its wake. Whether or not a southern border wall ever gets built, in most ways 2019 seems like 2016, only much more so. The constant popping of yesterday’s news, as evanescent as soap bubbles, obscures much larger structural changes in how we live and what use the society and economy has for us.
The fundamental change of our time is the End of the Bourgeois Era and the end of the monogamous heterosexual family as the key unit of economic organization. But this seemingly cultural and political, (ostensibly feminist) metamorphosis of the family has macroeconomic and technological forces behind it. The industrial revolution and its aftermath occurred in large part because men could sell their labor in competitive market economies and use that sale to support increasing standards of living for their families. The post-medieval economy allowed for an explosion of production in large part because European and then global markets were never demand-constrained. Increasingly fluid financial markets meant that what was produced could be sold. What has changed in recent decades is that the mobility and automation of productive processes, combined with a glut of the supply of financial capital, results in a macroeconomic production function that is demand-constrained rather than supply constrained. This is no country for old men, but even the young are valuable more as consumers than producers.
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The global economy, already a super AI, would happily turn us all into paper clips, as long as afterwards we kept buying in bulk. This is the nature of the despair of living at the end of history. We find ourselves extraneous to the future on its way to coming about. Even as a rapidly adaptive set of cybernetic technologies monopolize our attention with ever-greater efficacy, our individual contribution to those technologies and the economy they structure is ever more attenuated, and our individual connection to any individual or cultural past and future appears ever more elusive.
This new society, given enough time, might likely select for those most resistant to this despair, to those who see value for themselves irrespective of the value of their labor and a path to the future regardless of the fog before us. That vision could be illusory or a matter of faith, and given enough time our present demographic trends appear to be favoring deep religiosity and conservatism at the level of genetic selection even while immediate cultural trends are towards millenarian secularism and self-actualized selfishness. It is the Amish and Mormons and Ultra-Orthodox Jews whose stubborn traditionalism appears to be winning the future, at least in terms of numbers. In the meantime, it seems the rest of us will keep watching, with rapt absorption, as various kinds of nothing happen in the news.
For all my friends, family and acquaintances: I am asking for financial assistance for my son, Jeremy Larson, who is dealing with a grave me
Please help us help him! 💔 Jeremy has always been the quirky, quietly kind soul that I immediately got along well with. He's the Gallahaut to my Marmaduke, and he doesn't deserve this struggle.
03-Jul-2018: ‘High Horse Remix’, single by Kacey Musgraves
Label: MCA Nashville.
Kacey Musgraves’s thirteenth single was just released on the label MCA Nashville and can be found on Spotify. The single is already getting noticed by Last.FM users.
Even if you have never heard of Kacey Musgraves, you should be aware that Kacey Musgraves has received the 55th Annual Grammy Awards.
03-Jul-2018: ‘High Horse Remix’, single by Kacey Musgraves
Label: MCA Nashville.
Kacey Musgraves’s thirteenth single was released on label MCA Nashville and is now available on Spotify. The single is already getting noticed by Last.FM users.
Even if you never have heard of Kacey Musgraves, you should be aware that Kacey Musgraves has received the 55th Annual Grammy Awards.
