Why Our Societies are Disintegrating
The Faustian Bargain Between Billionaires and the Working Class is Ripping Our Societies Apart
Of the many dangerous trends that marks this new Dark Age, one of the most visible is social fracture. Our societies seem to be coming undone. They’re divided, riven, and ragged. The fabric of society doesn’t seem to work anymore. Values, norms, institutions — none of these seem to hold people together anymore.
We need to be united if we wish to solve our greater Existential Threats. Fighting rising extremism requires societies united against hate and brutality. But our societies are now divided into the hateful, the indifferent, and a fast shrinking number of the still sane and thoughtful. Greater challenges still like mass extinction and global warming require a united world — but we have one where the rich world won’t spend a fraction of 1% of its GDP to vaccinate the rest against Covid. And the greatest challenges of all — ecological collapse, which will snap apart our civilisation’s basic systems of air, food, water, and medicine like twigs — require unity on a wider scale still, across time, with our grandchildren and ancestors and between humans and all living things.
Good luck with that. Let me put this mega trend to you in a troubling way, then. We need societies united like never before — but instead, we have division, turmoil, and chaos. In increasingly severe and harmful ways.
And we see division spreading from corner to corner of the globe. In America, I recently read that Republicans now control 23 States — and are already attempting to kill democracy dead. In India, Modi’s fanatical religious supremacism meets mass fervour. In Britain, rabid Brexit nationalism prevails, and no stupidity is too great for Brits to bear.
There are many ways to put this. A liberal might say “the global order is coming undone.” A social democrat might say: “fascism is spreading.” A thoughtful conservative might say: “my parties have been taken over by fanatics”. And so on. The trend, though, is distressingly clear.
Division — and it’s not just growing in scale, but also in intensity. Trumpism in America was once a movement of a desperate, imploding working class. Now it’s bent on destroying democracy. China’s got millions in concentration camps. Russia happily assassinates critics while its paid mouthpieces grin on Fox News. Division of the worst kind is spreading. Not just contention — but genuine hate, vitriol, the wish to do violence, supremacy of racial and religious kinds, brutality.
All of that raises the question: why are our societies growing so divided? To my mind, a Faustian Bargain has been struck. Between billionaires and working classes. Working classes have been told to trade dominance — abusive power, authoritarian power, coercive and controlling power, especially over those lower down than them — for higher living standards and positive political power over those above them, like billionaires. Not coincidentally, it’s mostly billionaires who’ve told them that Big Lie. Working classes been told hate and spite and violence is the way out of this mess, not unity and respect and peace and love — and they believe it more and more very day, because, well, if you lived a hopeless and powerless and pointless life, you probably would too.
Let me explain.
The tsunami of hate rising around the globe is made of working classes. Leftists won’t like me saying that, but it’s nonetheless true. Globe trotting, affluent corporate middle managers, investment bankers, doctors, and lawyers don’t make up Trump’s or Modi’s or Duterte’s or Putin’s base. As much as pundits want you to believe they do, they don’t. There is a very, very clear relationship at work: the poorer people are in a society, the harder right they vote now. That is, poverty is the fundamental driver of hate.
Leftists tend to think poverty ennobles. They romanticise it — as much as they decry it. Alas, history teaches us different. Poverty has always been associated with hate. The Nazis, too, fed on the working class. Athens fell when it’s working class was seduced by fear — demagogues scaring it into submission. The story is old, and the characters change — but the moral never does. When people grow poor, they succumb to hate. Much easier to scapegoat another for your problems than own up your follies and mistakes. Poverty is not something to romanticize. It is a plague on humankind.
What’s happened today is something particularly dangerous. Billionaires have essentially convinced working classes to demand power instead of money. Not just any form of power — like democratic, consensual political power, or empowerment of others, or the power to make the most of themselves; all the good kinds of power. Billionaires have essentially convinced working classes that their only hope, interest, and purpose is power over. Power over those lower than them in the social hierarchy. Billionaires have convinced working classes their only interest should be dominance.
What’s wrong with that, you might ask, if you’re American? After all, American culture and thinking says everyone should only ever be interested in dominance. Everything’s wrong with that. If you’re only interested in dominance — power over others lower down than you in social hierarchies — then you’re not interested in equality, freedom, truth, beauty, grace, goodness, wisdom, justice, the past, the future, or democracy, to name just a few things that dominance costs.
Now, it’s easy to see why billionaires have pulled the wool over the working class’s weary eyes. Making them interested in punching down makes them uninterested in punching up. A working class turning fascist — trying to dominate everyone else lower than them, refugees, immigrants, minorities, immigrants — is also one that turns a blind eye to billionaires.
So, of course, billionaires go on getting richer. Because working classes turning so hard right that they’re basically fascist — like in America or India, or getting there, like in Britain — are so busy punching down, they don’t push for things like fairer taxes, or new forms of taxes, or wealth caps. They reject and abjure any form of collective action or even consciousness, told by billionaires that they are just atomised individuals — except to come together as a dominating force of fascist repression and subjugation, like Trumpists.
If you think I kid or exaggerate, let me give you a few examples.
Take America as the canonical example. Why does the American working class vote against the very things it needs most — healthcare, education, retirement, childcare, and so on? Billionaires have spent decades constructing a whole ecosystem of shadow institutions. First came the pundits, then came the thinktanks, then came whole “news” channels, then came the Facebook campaigns. Today, the average working class American lives in a bubble where he or she thinks that public healthcare is “socialism,” what really matters is everyone should carry a machine gun, and caring for anyone else is weakness, and weakness is rightfully death, so the weak should be eliminated.
The working class American doesn’t understand that he or she is the best pawn billionaires ever had — cannon fodder in a war against themselves. They get forever poorer, happy to be neo-serfs, while billionaires ascend to become richer than history’s emperors or kings.
Trumpist working class America has been brainwashed to trade money for power — dominance. Dominance over the rest of society — women, minorities, gays, refugees, immigrants. As long as they can subjugate them, they’re told they will be happy, comfortable, and safe. Never mind that this is a fiction — the working class believes it. So instead of demanding more money, higher living standards, and real political power, they turn to hate, violence, brutality, and stupidity. Take a look at Texas, where you can now carry a machine gun anywhere you want — but heaven forbid you get healthcare. All that’s essentially backed by billionaires from Zuck to Murdoch to the Kochs to a long, long list of malign figures who benefit from the chaos of a nonexistent society.
America exemplifies the Faustian bargain between billionaires and working classes — but Britain’s not too far behind. America has Fox News — a key driver, of course, of radicalising the American working class into stupidity — but did you know Britain just got its own version of Fox News? It’s called (LOL) “GB News.” And it’s even dumber than you probably think. It’s like a low-rent Fox News for sallow British fanatical conservatives and crypto-fascists. It’s a wannabeFox News.
GB News, of course, is a perfect example. It’s set up by big money, because big money is what it takes to set up a whole new “TV network.” TV networks, of course, don’t really make much money anymore — so why bother setting up one? Because the point is to radicalise the working class — faster and harder than even British tabloids have. If you want to make money, you’d invest in almost anything else — maybe just buy Apple shares. If, on the other hand, you want to politically destabilise a country — you set up a wannabe Fox News.
Britain’s already a country where the bargain between billionaires and the working class is in full, idiotic, effect. What was Brexit? A lie told by billionaires to the working classes. What did billionaires have to gain from it? They got a protected economy, in which they earn all kind of fat fees and have monopolies. That, of course, is effectively a tax on the working class — who’s already growing poorer, fast. Think of the fisherman who voted for Brexit, and doesn’t have a job anymore, or the farmer who did, and who’s about to literally lost the farm — and still backs Brexit.
Brits have been brainwashed in just the same way as Americans. They’ve been taught to trade dominance for higher living standards and real political power. Like America, Britain is a society crashing and burning into becoming a failed state — everything from income to happiness to trust to longevity’s falling. But instead of demanding higher living standards, the working class has been taught to settle for dominance. In America, the hated one, the working class’s scapegoat, is the Mexican — in Britain, it’s the European. In both places, “wokeness” is demonised, women and minorities are attacked and culturally stigmatized, and so on. The British working class is growing hateful and backwards at an incredible pace — because billionaires have taught it to be, and it doesn’t grasp that, like America’s working class, they are merely its expendable pawns.
The story’s the same across the globe. India, Europe, Canada. Everywhere, you can see this bargain between billionaires and working classes happening. The billionaires give working classes a set of scapegoats — and they create and license, with cultural mechanisms, like the laughable, ridiculous “GB News,” cultural norms of spite, vitriol, and venom. They teach the working class, with “thinktanks” and pundits and news channels and disinformation campaigns whom they should hate and why.
And the working class seems to delight in all this. They get something out of this bargain, too, which is why they take it. Beaten down, hopeless, all but having given up on the idea of a better life, they accept the notion that a scapegoat, at least, is something. At least you can have a punching bag, if you can’t have a better life. At least you have the thrill and deliciousness and dopamine hit of hate. At least the adrenaline surges through and you get a buzz and you feel the dominance flexing your muscles in spite.
You get something. You get a purpose. An orientation, a direction. A sense of worth and value. A social order, in which you’re above someone. And therefore, your life has a little meaning, again — even if that meaning is only to hate, to beat up on a scapegoat. Better than nothing. Which is mostly what neoliberals have offered for too long.
This bargain is working out very, very well. For billionaires, at least. The working class around the globe has been totally seduced by having scapegoats to hate, by having predatory dominance over those lower than them — instead of true political and social power over those above them, like billionaires. Even in strongholds of social democracy like Canada and Europe, the working class is being seduced by the dazzling temptation of dominance. Hate may be the most powerful drug of all.
The question is where that leaves the rest of us. The sane and thoughtful among us are a shrinking minority now. Our ranks seem to dwindle every day. These malign forces — the conditioning into hate, individualism, greed, selfishness, indifference — they claim new victims every day. They are almost impossible to resist — when your life feels hopeless, powerless, and meaningless. Sooner or later, the thrill, the pleasure, the rush of hate is too much to resist.
That leaves the rest of us with a Very Big Problem. We need a more united world — but we have one growing more divided, coming apart at the seams, being ripped apart by hate. That tells me — or implies, at least — that we’re probably going to make little to no progress on bigger problems, like global warming, mass extinction, ecological collapse.
And that, my friend, is a grim prospect. But at least you know. And I’d bet that deep down, some part of you is nodding along, watching the world turn to hate, out of fear, powerlessness, and hopelessness, as billionaires hoard the wealth, and then use that very wealth to corrode the minds and spirits of the average person, who then reject the timeless ideas of truth, beauty, goodness, and love. Can a civilisation like that last? You tell me.
Umair
June 2021