Our Societies Create Too Many Losers — And Almost No Winners
May 19, 2022
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The massacre in Buffalo. Akid, a young man, a self-described fascist stormed into a market — andshot ten people dead. More injured. It’s a tiny, horrific example of a disturbing trend. Fascism is seducing the world.
This example, as awful as it is, is also illuminating.Whyis fascism seducing the world? You can see it rising around the globe now. America, of course, but also from Europe to Afghanistan to India and China and beyond. What’s going wrong with our civilization?
I use the word “seducing” carefully, because that is exactly what fascism is doing. Payton Gendron’s story — the Buffalo gunman — is chilling precisely itlays this out for usin exacting detail. How did this kid, this nobody, this average young man, become…a self-described fascist…committing a massacre? By all accounts — even more disturbing — his parents areliberals, normal people, not the kinds of lunatics corroded by MAGA Trumpism.It’s an example worth understanding for precisely this reason: if fascism can seduce a kid like this…
How did it happen? Well, by now the story’s disturbingly familiar — at least on the surface. Here’s a kid whose life didn’t appear to be going much of anywhere. Like most young people in the States, he was aimless, without many opportunities, adrift in life. And then he found message boards. Which created a kind of moral crusade for him. He was “radicalized” — a word we say, but what does it mean? It means something like this: this kid came to believe that the cause of his woes was that his “race” was under attack, being “replaced” by subhumans, with the help of “liberals.” Suddenly, he had a cause. A great moral one.
Young people are like that. They grow attached to moral causes, because, well, they care. But that moral fire can easily be perverted, which is exactly what happened here. Maybe in another life, a kid like this would have, I don’t know, developed a passion for helping animals or planting trees. Instead, thanks to the immense radicalizing power of the far right — on the internet, cable news, everywhere, bombarding him a million times a day with lunatic “theories” like “the great replacement” — he developed an animating passion tosave the master race by killing the subhumans persecuting it.
Seduced. That’s the story on the surface, and by now, I’m sure you understand it, too. But let’s go deeper.Underneath all that, what really happened here?
Our societies create too many losers. And societies which create this many losers eventually end up engulfed by and drowned in a fascist tide. First let’s cover the what, then we’ll do the how.
What does “loser” mean? I mean the term objectively and subjectively. Subjectively means that many, many peoplefeel bad. Their primate minds understand they’re low in the hierarchy, and they feel powerless to ever rise up.Inequality is rife, life is a struggle, and there seems to be no good way to fix it. All this is why rates ofdepression and anxietyhave soared to the point they’re endemic — seriously, who’snoton antidepressants? It’s why suicide rates have reached epidemic proportions in certain social groups — like the white working class, whatCase and Deaton, two of America’s few good economists left call “deaths of despair.”
It feels bad to live in societies like ours because they make people losers. People feel that theycan’t win.That the system is rigged against them.It is.Think about young people for a moment. They’llnever be able to affordthe stuff of a “normal” life — homes of their own, retirements, savings, and that means even starting a family is next to impossible, which is why fertility rates are declining —whichfuels the conspiracy theory of “the great replacement.”
But the fall in fertility rates isn’t some evil conspiracy by the hated subhumans — it’s because far, far fewer couples or people can afford to start a family anymore. It’s the brutal economics of our societies at work — and how they’vefailed.
Our societies make peoplefeel like losers. The materialism they’re made of only rubs it in.Here are some billionaires jetting off to Coachella. Hey, Elon Musk bought Twitter —for fun! How many penthouses in the sky does Johnny Depp even have? Too bad, you can never afford a home of your own. The combination of extreme inequality amidst materialist individualism is a knockout punch to the human psyche. If you’re not one of the chosen few, you feel like a loser most of the time, and like I said, that’s why more or less everyone’s in therapy, on antidepressants, needs them, anxious, angry, upset,defeated.
That’s the subjective part, and it’s crucial to understand. Have you noticed that people don’tlook wellthese days? Like if you just sit at a cafe and watch people — like I do — something seems to bewrong with them? They’re dead in the eyes. They’re not really there. Their minds are focused on their anxieties. They’re preoccupied with money, becausemoney means status. And yet nobody is making ends meet. And that means that the primate mind in us goes into hyperdrive — the part of us that’s obsessed with status hierarchy. We feel threatened to the point of annihilation. That is ourmost primal fear: annihilation.
That is why people turn to theories like “the great replacement.”They areannihilation fantasies. They tell us something vivid, disturbing, and serious. People’s fears of annihilation are being triggered, over and over again. And some people — many people —can’t cope. Not all of us will turn into gunmen — but many of us are, most of us, are depressed, anxious, fatalistic. We are not well. A consumerist, materialistic, individualistic society made of extreme inequality triggers our primate mind — we’re always on the edge of losing what little status we have. And that triggers our primal fears of annihilation.
At this point, it’s all the right talks about — and all the left does, too.Annihilation. Our societies are essentially one great annihilation fantasy. But it’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because, like Gendron, if I believe in my paranoid delusional annihilation fantasy — I might preemptively try to strikeyou. This is all right wing politicsisnow: an annihilation fantasy justifying a preemptive strike against…everyone…from women to gays to minorities to kids.
Annihilation is all we seem to feel these days. That is a very, very disturbing sign to people like me who observe.When I sit at the cafe and watch, I can see the primal fear of annihilation on people’s faces, I canfeelit emanating from them in great waves — and then I know that it’s going to lead to stuff like massacre and far right politics rising. People, many of them, most of them, feel defeated, broken, empty, their eyes dead, their faces blank —like losers. That’s one reason I can predict all this stuff so accurately.I can feel it.Can you feel it too? I bet, if you stop worrying about your own preoccupations for a moment, you absolutely can — and for the empaths among us, this wave of primal fear sweeping the globe makes us feelill.
Maybe that’s too much, and you don’t feel it. That’s OK — it’s just an observation I wanted to share. Let’s keep going. That’s the subjective part. The objective one? It goes like this.
Those feelings aren’t irrational. In fact, the even scarier part is thatthey’re completely rational. Not the fantasy — just the feeling of being a loser. Why is that rational?
Because if one great trend sweeping our societies is pessimism and fear of annihilation, another one — the one driving it — isdownward mobility.Our societies are becoming places of downward mobility. Kids won’t enjoy lives as good as their parents, go ahead and choose any indicator you like. Home ownership. Savings. Debt. Here’s a really scary one —life expectancy. Covid’s chopped years off it, and climate change is going to lessen it further.Downward mobility.
Our economies have failed in this most serious of senses — even though almost nobody left ever discusses it much.
What’s the social consequence of downward mobility? It creates azero-sum game. If you win,I lose.Think about it. To a kid like Gendron — who became a killer — the rise of anyone else in society is an existential threat. That’s true for the right as a whole. It seems as if to them, anyone else having a better life — women, kids, gays, minorities, immigrants, even people just “like” them — is a rage provokingthreat. Why is that?
It isn’t just because they’re crazy. It’s because there is a material reality at work there. Our societies are downwardly mobile — and downward mobility really does mean that for one to win, another must lose. Think about it, just using simple math. Our “product” — our GDP of our little society — is ten, and there’s four people in it. Two and a half each. Now it declines — and it’s just eight. Suddenly, we only get two each. For me to get more, someone else has to lose. But is someone else is getting more, thenI’m getting less.
There is a material reality at work that is driving fascism. Our societies are downwardly mobile.When societies are downwardly mobile, only a zero-sum game can emerge. For you to win,I have to lose. And if you win something — rights, privileges, money, anything — I feel like even more of a loser, because I’m losing status, hierarchy, power,of which there’s now only a declining amount.
I’m not saying that killing people is OK — let’s not be children. I’m pointing that we have a serious and real problem.
In downwardly mobile societies, fascism emerges. For just this set of reasons. People feel like losers. Anxious, upset, depressed, fatalistic. They feel like losers because theyarelosers, socioeconomically.Nobodyis winning — except maybe ahandful of billionaires and their corrupt, bought politicians. Yet all that creates a zero-sum game.
The positive sum-game of a peaceful society can’t emerge in a downwardly mobile society — I win, you win, we all win.It’s not possible.In a downwardly mobile society, there’s only the feeling of you win, I lose. And underlying that is real material truth. A negative sum game is what’s emerged —we’re all losing. Money, status, hierarchy, power, resources, opportunities, potential.
All of that is why fascism’s so seductive. It offers people something toexplainall the above. Which is a set of dynamics that’s baffling to most people. Why is my life falling apart? Why didn’t I even get to have one? Why will I never live one as secure and stable as my parents? I’m losing status, hierarchy, power, opportunities, potential. My fears of annihilation are triggered. Along comes a demagogue — or a whole Fox News channel — and tells me those fears arereal, not fantasies. A “great replacement” reallyishappening. My moral sense is triggered. Traumatized, I go from flight to fight — and I develop the urge to hurt, injure, even kill.
Underlying all this is the bitter truth. Society is downwardly mobile. There is no win win possible. There’s only lose lose.The positive sum game of “we all win” can’t happen in a downawardly mobile society — it’s flatly impossible. Think about that for a second. All that’s left then is conflict.
Conflict means hate. Violence. Harm. Injury. It means all the things the far right now specializes in. It means annihilation fantasies as a form of politics. And it means, in the end, it’s simplest, form. Just like water flows downhill, conflict’s usual form for people to punch down on the most vulnerable, in their quest for lost status, power, resources, opportunities, potential. That’s Gendron, massacring minorities. It’s MAGA, hating. It’s thefar right GOP,turning America into a society of vigilante-informants, turning kids in for saying the word “gay.” It’s Modi’s India, Xi’s China, and beyond.It’s the world we live in now.
UmairMay 2022
