The Price of Weakness is Death in American Life — But it Shouldn’t Be
Why The Bad Guys Always Win in America, and How that Made a Failed Society
One of the things which makes America so peculiar as a society — at least to the rest of the world — is the way that “weakness” is treated. I put that in quotes, because, as we’ll discuss, it doesn’t mean what it should: America’s undergone a kind of social disintegration which leads to perversion and nihilism, the sense that nothing matters, except power, will, money, greed.
Let me explain what I mean.
In America, the price of weakness is death. That’s not a joke. One small mistake — and you can lose it all. Be kind to a stranger, show up late for work, lose your job — lose your healthcare, savings, home. Pay a bill late, and there goes your “credit rating,” which is rigged against you anyways, and now you can’t afford to live.
American culture and society are permeated with grotesque examples of weakness equalling death. Kids are made to pretend to die in “active shooter drills” — replete with being covered with fake blood. Kids, remember? The most vulnerable people in society? Elderly people are made to work to their dying days, putting in shifts at megastores, which pay such a miserly wage that their employees are, ironically, on food stamps. Nobody much can afford healthcare, and so “medical bankruptcy” is a common experience. Weakness is death, and your life is always — always — at risk. If not from the physical violence of guns, then the casual bullying of the workplace or the schoolyard, or the profound deficits of the basics, from healthcare to decent food to drinkable water to money itself.
Because weakness is death, showing any kind of weakness is the most despised trait an America can have. But “weakness” in America has a certain definition. Warmth, empathy, friendship. Telling the truth. Being kind and gentle. Not putting yourself first. All these things mark you as a sucker, a rube, someone who’s not street smart to survive the brutal realities of American life — and death.
How did these values — brutality, indifference, cruelty, greed — evolve to become cherished, prized aspects of culture and society? They’re acculturated and socialised into Americans from the day that they’re born. I often tell the story of how, in third grade, they showed us a movie about a homeless woman. She pushed her meagre belonging around the barren streets in a cart. I began to cry, empathising with her. The rest of the kids laughed. The teachers pulled me aside and asked me: “Why are you so weak?” I was being acculturated and socialised into a culture of brutality and cruelty. As every American is, from a very, very young age.
Brutality and cruelty are taught in every step and stage of American life. At school, when you’re bullied, harassed, tormented, and mocked, for being anything but a musclebound goon, the teachers will look the other way. At college, life is run by fraternities — remember those musclebound goons? The fraternal brothers become, in professional life, investment bankers and so forth, who basically run the economy. Who’s left out of this picture? Anyone that’s not one of them — women, minorities, men who aren’t musclebound goons, anyone who might, heaven forbid, want to think, create, feel, emote, wonder, imagine, rebel.
School, college, work. Think about American life for a second, step by step. At school, you do “active shooter drills.” You’re traumatized, taught that life has no worth or value, that everything can vanish in an instant, that nobody can protect you from harm because nobody cares about you. Then you go off to college — where the same lesson is driven home again: the fraternities can bully and prey on you and anyone else and get away with it, over and over again, raping women, harassing everyone, drinking themselves silly, because if they can throw a ball, they’re God’s gift to humanity. Then you go off to work, where it’s totally normal and acceptable for your boss to yell at you, scream at you, demean you, belittle you — and that’s after you’re not paid enough to live a decent life on.
None of this is remotely acceptable anywhere else in the world. That’s the part that Americans don’t get. Go to school or college in Canada. It’s a happy thing — not a desperate, fear-inducing jungle, where only the most violent and stupid kids survive. That’s because it’s different. Bullying is cracked down on, hard, and at colleges, frats don’t really exist much. Go to work in Europe. Your boss can’t yell at you and demean you and belittle you like in America. They’d be fired instantly. America’s steady, omnipresent acculturation and socialisation — its normalization — of violence and brutality doesn’t exist in the rest of the world.
Except, of course, in failed states. Go to Russia, Iran, El Salvador, maybe, or Saudi Arabia — and you’ll find cultures like America, where brutality and violence are respected. But in the civilized world? You’ll have to look far and wide.
Why is that? Why is weakness — which means showing any vulnerability, caring for anyone or anything in a deeper way than as a mere means to an end, including yourself — so despised in America? Why are Americans like this — to the point that even many Americans despair at the rest?
The simple fact is that American life really is unsurvivable if you show weakness. Imagine the same sequence of life I outlined above — but this time, you’re weak. You go to school, and the most violent, greedy, aggressive, hostile kids are already being lauded as future stars of sports or capitalism or whatever — and instead, you’re a sensitive soul who wants to read poetry and gaze at the stars. Bang. You will get killed. You will be beaten, harassed, mocked, tormented, every single day, over and over again. Heaven forbid you’re different from the conformist norm of violence.
Now imagine you go off to college. You’ve survived school, somehow — the sensitivity and grace and sense of wonder hasn’t been fully beaten out of you. You’re still curious, empathetic, kind, warm, friendly. You have real feelings — not just an Instagram account or a six-pack. What happens to you? It’s like school all over again, but worse — you get preyed on by the most violent, hostile, and aggressive, only this time, they’ve organized themselves into little wolf packs called “fraternities.” They have the institutional right to abuse anyone they want, and get away with it — especially people like you, who are weak. Bang. There goes your life.
Let’s imagine, somehow, that you survive all that. And before you tell me I’m exaggerating, go ahead and think about how many of your friends didn’t. I lost, what, three friends? Five? Depending on how you count it. Suicide. Psychosis. Drugs. All three. Because they couldn’t take the relentless violence. The bullying, harassment, torment, beatings — the way it was egged on with a smile from the people who were supposed to be protectors, the way there was no protection anywhere, at all. By the time I was, what, 25? I barely had friends left, because so may were gone.
But I digress. Let’s imagine you survive both school and college, somehow, intact, as a functioning human being — you haven’t had the goodness and decency and warmth and curiosity and sensitivity beaten out of you. You go off to work. You have to pay the bills to live. And guess what? Remember how the violent and greedy had organized themselves into wolf packs called “fraternities” in college? This time, they’ve done it again, only worse. The greediest and most violent and abusive have organized themselves into little wolf packs called “hedge funds” and “investment banks” and “corporations” — and they’ve been given the formal socioeconomic powers to abuse and exploit anyone and everyone they like.
If you think I’m kidding, or exaggerating, then let’s think about the American economy again. There’s no real shortage of any of the following things: medicine, houses, money, education, retirement, and so on. All these things are kept in artificial scarcity. Why? To keep profits up, which means to keep the average person indebted. To control the average person and keep them bound by a sense of fatalism, powerlessness, helpessness, in despair, working around the clock, just to pay the bills, to pay off this months’ slice of “debt.” Who is keeping the whole economy in a condition of artificial scarcity? The guys running the banks and funds and corporations, effectively — the most greedy and abusive in society. The ones who are happy to earn billions by denying millions of vulnerable people basics, like insulin or food.
Do you see what I mean a little bit? An economy in which artificial scarcity is perpetually “produced” — used — so that a tiny few get mega rich also means that those tiny few must be the most violent and greedy in society. After all, everyone else is living a worse and worse life as a result, being deprived, growing poorer. That’s what happened in America. The average American’s life fell apart, imploded into a new underclass of poverty and despair, because violence, greed, and brutality are the only things that matter.
The twist, of course, is this. The average American also believes in the idea that weakness should equal death. Americans don’t vote for public healthcare, transport, basic income — anything that might alleviate the burdens of living in a failed state. They don’t just not care about each other — they’re hostile to one another.
Why is that? Well, the answer is that many — maybe most — Americans do have the goodness and decency beaten out of them, by just the process of acculturation and socialisation I’ve described to you. For some, it happens in grade school. You see the bullies win, and you decide to be one, to the extent you can. For others, it happens in college. You join that frat — and you’re taught to be a little predator. For some, it happens at work. Your boss demeans and belittles you enough that you believe it — and you become that boss to someone else.
Or maybe the stress and pressure of always being in debt, never being able to pay the bills, just finally breaks you. You begin to regard everyone else with hostility, anger, rage. You can’t trust, can’t empathize, can’t tolerate difference.
Life in America is an adversarial thing — you’re forced to compete with everyone else for a tiny, tiny slice of all those basics kept in a condition of artificial scarcity. And soon enough, that’s torn social bonds apart — people who are at each others’ throats just to survive will hardly be friends. They’ll value being hostile, aggressive, cruel, selfish — because that is what self-preservation takes.
None of that is mere theory, by the way. Social bonds have collapsed in America, spectacularly, documented in grim, compelling fashion by many, like Robert Putnam. America is home to a skyrocketing rate of suicide and despair, especially amongst young people — that’s because they’re the most vulnerable, but they’re living in a society where weakness equals death. America is a place where a tiny few get incredibly rich — but the average person is now part of a new underclass, living in unpayable debt, like peasants. Those things are not imaginary. They are all symptoms of being a shatteringly failed state.
How did America end up like this, though? What was the prime mover of these strange attitudes — which nowhere else in the world holds, really?
This is the price of being a supremacist society. I don’t just mean “white supremacist” — though that’s certainly part of what I mean. I mean that America has always been a place home to a kind of theory of personhood. Only some people deserve to live. Live in dignity. Live with respect. Live in freedom. Live at all.
That was the belief underlying slavery. It was the belief motivating centuries of genocide of natives — the longest Holocaust in history, really. The idea that only some people deserve to live is the central foundation of American thinking. Unfortunately for Americans, it never changed — and now many of them are the people who don’t deserve to live.
Flip it on its head. America is a place, a culture, a society which believes that life has no inherent or intrinsic worth. Everything is a privilege, and nothing is a right — nothing modern, at least. Healthcare, retirement, a little bit of money — these are all seen as privileges. Not rights. Nobody deserves them by virtue of just being alive, of being a person. An American will tell you that — or at least most Americans will — with a kind of weird, smug, dissociated sneer — dissociated because at some level, they have to contend with the fact that even they don’t have them themselves, because of this perverse belief.
What that tells us, with absolute precision, is that in America, life itself has no inherent or intrinsic worth. Why is it that the only real right Americans have is…to buy guns? It goes back to the idea that some people don’t deserve to live.
Why don’t they deserve to live? They’re not like us. They’re lazy. Dangerous. Corrupt. Malign. They’re coming to steal our wives and take our land. (Wait — didn’t we take their land? Never mind.) They’re coming to get us. Weakness is death.
They’re weak. They deserve to die. They are only good for being enslaved. We can take all that is theirs, and laugh at them. Here, we’ll offer them a bead and a dollar bill for a whole state. Ha ha!
But the flip side is, therefore: we cannot be weak. The one thing we must never be is weak. We must always be ruthless, cunning, violent, greedy, brutal, selfish, indifferent. All those things are what strength really is — the ability subjugate and trample and exploit and brutalise anyone weak enough to make themselves vulnerable. A native. A woman. A child. Anyone.
Do you see how that toxic belief shapes America to this day? How it made it a failed state?
The tragic thing in all this isn’t just that it’s foolish, it’s that it’s wrong. A mind, culture, society, person like the above — it can never grow. What do you become without empathy, warmth, friendship, curiosity, sensitivity, kindness? Nothing. You can’t form relationships, you can’t assign any meaning to your life, you always value yourself in external terms, like money or sexual partners — bang: the nihilist void awaits.
Strength comes from the things Americans call “weakness,” which they’ve made equal death, because they are all forms of vulnerability. Curiousity makes us intelligent, learned, wise — but it takes admitting you are not the smartest. Empathy gives us relationships, which give us happiness — but it takes not being the centre of your own universe. Warmth gives us a sense of meaning, by making ourselves part of a larger moral community — but it takes genuinely caring about others, not just treating them as means to and end. Honesty gives us truth, in return — but, of course, it demands integrity. Humility gives us groundedness — but it takes the courage to step off the ladder of competition, and kiss the dirt.
All these things are forms of weakness in American life. Only a fool tells the truth, acts with integrity, is curious, is warm and empathetic and kind. Hey! Who knows what that might cost you today? A job, a chance, a follower, a fan, a like, a wage, work, mobility, resources? It’s a liability, all of that. And the stakes are real. Who knows what that one tiny misstep might cost you? Healthcare? An income? A promotion you need? Savings you don’t have? It is life and death, every single day. There’s no room for weakness, because weakness equals death. You’ve seen it your whole life. The bad guys win in America — they always do. The bullies, the vicious ones, the abusers, liars, cheats, scoundrels, bastards — the predators.
You have one choice, and only one, really. Do you want to be the prey? Or do you finally want to learn the lesson this time — and find someone weaker to prey on, which means at least you get to live another day…even if it’s killing you inside, in some deep, hidden place that the real you is screaming out from?
And so the vicious cycle of collapse keeps on spinning, one life at a time, human possibility receding into the distance of what it could have been.
Umair
April 2021