The Poor Side of Armageddon

My jaw hit the floor Sunday night when I learned President Trump had accused medical professionals of stealing resources. Speaking specifically of N-95 respirator masks, he asked rhetorically, “Are they going out the back door?” He went on to postulate: “I think maybe it’s worse than hoarding.” Professional journalists stepped in to say explicitly what Trump only implied, that in-house theft was depleting America’s medical resources.

Because I work ahead, I’d already written Monday’s blog entry, which stated that I’d have to re-evaluate all my assumptions about secular apocalypse. I lavished praise on humanity’s demonstrated generosity during this challenge. “Humans, the broader society currently agrees, are natural collaborators,” I wrote, “who persist against unequal odds because we have one another.” Humanity, I’ve realized, isn’t fundamentally adversarial and neoliberal.

Except, as Trump’s statements demonstrate, the wealthy and powerful among us persist in believing society is a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we had the national spectacle of legislators claiming women would hoard menstrual supplies if they weren’t prohibitively expensive. Apparently the fear of hoarding, or “worse than hoarding,” motivates certain powerful people’s economic and political ideology.

This fear isn’t entirely unreasonable. Considering Americans panic-buying toilet paper and eggs, clearly we’re vulnerable to the same swarming behavior that has periodically driven up the price of tech stocks or housing futures, right before a crash. There’s something to the idea that ordinary people, possessed by fear, will engage in hoarding, or “worse than hoarding.” Fear is a powerful motivator, and people will clutch any shield against perceived threats.

Hoarding, though, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People rushed to buy toilet paper because they saw other people rushing to buy toilet paper. Fueled by constant repetition of panic behavior on cable news and social media, people internalized this motivation, because humans share one another’s emotions. This fear response is the mirror image of the collaboration I praised yesterday: we trust one another, and therefore trust each other’s fears.

When the President, and other powerful people in highly visible places, accuse ordinary citizens of theft and hoarding, some audiences take these accusations seriously. This isn’t faulty reasoning or illogic. Humans are naturally inclined to trust, and we’re especially inclined to trust people we regard as wealthy or powerful. That’s why reasonable leaders seek to calm fears in moments of distress, because humans naturally entrust our emotions to other people.

I suggest President Trump assumes nurses are hoarding resources, because he knows he and his fellow mega-rich also hoard resources. Just as all thieves assume everyone steals, all resource hoarders assume their behaviors are commonplace. Like most people, the wealthy assume everyone shares their motivations, and derives reward from the same outcome. In this case, he assumes everyone feels gratified by having and controlling stuff.

Capitalism itself is grounded on an authoritarian control of resources. Smarter historians than me have described how Europe’s transition from feudal economy to capitalism happened because the aristocracy brought back chattel slavery and privatized previously public resources, particularly pasture land. Though capitalist societies have abandoned the plantation system, we still hear the drumbeat of privatization: of infrastructure, of military, even of water.

Donald Trump became one of America’s (putatively) wealthiest citizens by controlling swaths of real estate in America’s most expensive city. His treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, is a former investment banker, somebody paid to maximize return on money. Even some of Trump’s most aggressive critics, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, became prominent by controlling overwhelming shares of their particular industries. Gates has been accused of buying impunity against market manipulation.

Just because some rich people oppose other rich people, doesn’t make them your allies.

Concisely put, despite limited-range changes in our economy, the wealthy remain wealthy because our laws of ownership protect resource hoarding. Americans don’t sell people anymore, they just sell the produce of people’s labor. Then they become angry when they suspect, even incidentally, that ordinary people might hoard resources, even without evidence. Toilet paper, eggs, and N-95 masks are sins to hoard. Because the rich already hoard money, land, and capital.

In lobbing accusations against nurses, President Trump reveals his own vulnerability. He projects his motivations onto strangers. He fears other people will hoard resources for profit, because that’s what he’s always done. And in creating this fear, he makes it a reality, as some people, fearing others’ motivations, rush to buy TP first. That’s the opposite face of this apocalypse: while ordinary people share and persevere, the rich reveal their true motivations.