I drove through the old neighborhood the other day, where I grew up as a kid. It’s a very working class area of mostly 800 to 900 square foot homes, many with asbestos siding, located in what was a highly industrialized major industrial midwestern city. The housing stock resembles that which would have been found in Appalachia during the mid to early 20th century, and it is the Appalachians which migrated north to occupy these homes while taking jobs in the burgeoning auto industry. I live on the edge of that community today.
Twenty years ago most lots in the community contained homes, although about one in three were abandoned. Today, much of the creeping abandonment has been cleared-out. There are whole blocks that lie empty, deer and pheasant populate the area. Of the remaining housing stock, still, roughly one in three homes are abandoned.
Driving through the neighborhood will teach one more about economics than any college course ever could. It lays bare the nature of a competitive economic system where individual survival outweighs any consideration of the communal impact of the individual’s behavior.
Lives are destroyed in this process of “creative destruction” (Schumpeter), where people are forced to sink-or-swim in the economic arena, by creating new stuff which destroys that which was previously built. This creative-destruction applies not only when a new technology replaces a former technology, it happens also when new neighborhoods replace old neighborhoods.
In our community, like so many discarded communities, it started when city residents fled to the suburbs to jump onboard demand-induced escalating property values, or to escape periodic, mostly self-induced, racial tensions. Those left behind: there are always those left behind, were forced to either join the economic fight, hopefully win, or subject themselves, and their families, to declining property values and wages, blight, and even homelessness. This results in the inevitable class feature of a competitive system: there will be winners, there will be losers.
There are, of course, those who will always argue that anyone can prosper in a competitive capitalist economy. That may be true, but not all may simultaneously do so. To do so, would be highly inflationary and the Federal Reserve will step-in, as it is currently doing, and raise interest rates in order to tighten the money supply to reduce employment and wages. There is a rigid wage structure in the capitalist economies which cannot be overcome without inflationary results.
Meanwhile, capital accumulation, facilitated by the rigid wage structure, enables the highly inflationary militarization of society. Never mind that funds spent on militarizing society could more productively be spent through investment in the health and education of its people.
Militarization inherently leads to a dog-eat-dog world view, which naturally leads to a dog-eat-dog world. This survival-of-the-fittest philosophy forces an emphasis on self-preservation which requires an emphasis on the self. One might argue this is the reason we observe so many self-obsessed individuals. We are all guilty of this to some extent, survival requires it.
The emphasis on the self, by force of habit, is not readily shed once the individual achieves a sense of economic security. From there the self-centeredness moves into the domain of excessive consumption, detached from the concern of those left behind; the environment; or other broad social impacts.
This zeitgeist, the psychological detachment from the sufferings of others in order to ensure one’s own survival, inevitably accommodates war. Battles over ideology and resources outweigh concern over the sufferings of those who are actually subject to the cruelties of war. All of this begins and ends with an emphasis on the self, a self without regard for the communal impact of one’s behavior. This self-obsession is dictated and even celebrated by our current economic regime.
Let me qualify the above by stating that none of this is meant to condemn the soldier, also a victim of survival-of-the-fittest ideology, and who often join the fight out of highly idealistic motivations, or because the financial package of military service was the best available option and deemed necessary to get a good launch into our competitive world.
Perhaps not entirely on point, but close enough, I’ll close with the following quote from the German philosopher Immanual Kant. Kant, who wrote during the latter half of the 1700’s, had this to say.
“So long as the state waste their forces in vain and violent self-expansion, and thereby constantly thwart the slow efforts to improve the minds of their citizens by even withdrawing all support from them, nothing in the way of a moral order is to be expected. For such an end, a long internal working of each political body toward the education of its citizens is required. Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery. In such a condition the human species will no doubt remain until . . . it works its way out of the chaotic conditions of its international relations.”
It seems things have not changed much during the past couple and a half centuries. Disinvestment occurs in our neighborhoods and in our people, while the war machine continues to expand.