Capitalism and the Winners’ Society

Jeopardyhost Ken Jennings

I just did something I used to do frequently, but haven’t done for years: I watched a full episode of Jeopardy. Television has lost its allure in recent years, and Jeopardy’s appeal to shallow knowledge of inconsistent topics has become an emblem of modern society. Too many people know surface-level flotsam about nearly everything, giving us all a false sense of expertise on topics where we’re profoundly ignorant.

One player, working with speed and confidence, managed to rack up the largest cash haul on the stage, then he hit a Daily Double. He decided to risk it all on a question about corporate ad slogans. Yes, he risked it all--and lost it all. He went from being in the lead, to having nothing.

American capitalism loves winners. I’ve witnessed journalists, economists, and social media stans tripping over their own packers to lavish praise on billionaire CEOs. It’s often unintentionally hilarious to watch White boys without two dimes to rub together, invent phony narratives to explain why Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are epoch-making geniuses, not just winners of America’s greenback lottery.

Business writers I've reviewed on this blog have lavished praise on society's winners. They will perform seriocomic contortions to justify why, say, Jack Welch or Sam Walton are intrepid adventurers and the epitome of moneyed masculinity. To critics like me, these paragons of capitalism are highway robbers and guttersnipes who hoard the wealth created by others. But their fluttering groupies insist their favorite CEOs generated their wealth by rubbing two sticks together in the woods.

Elon Musk

Among these praises, one seems pointedly recurrent: billionaires deserve their riches because they risked their own seed capital. Risk looms large in billionaire mythology. Michael J. Sandel quotes philosopher Robert Nozick as saying that all wealth is the product of bold risk-taking and unique innovation, the outcome of intrepid individuals who somehow exist in an economic vacuum.

However, even if we accept the risk mythology, it fumbles on one level: we evaluate risks by their success. It's easy to praise Bill Gates or Steve Jobs for their success, when we don't simultaneously evaluate why the founders of Sun Microsystems and Commodore International flopped so ignominiously. When we only look at those who risked and won, it's easy to think risk leads to reward.

But for every world-renowned success, there are uncountable failures. Eighty percent of American companies fail within five years. A handful of actors become million-dollar stars, but most limp along on day jobs before leaving the industry altogether. For every Facebook, there's a bloodbath of MySpaces, Geocities, and Friendsters. Failure, not success, is the usual outcome for risky courage.

Watching Jeopardy, that one player who lost everything didn't give up. He slowly won back the money he lost, then in Final Jeopardy, gambled everything again. He turned out to be the only player to recognize a question about Dashiell Hammett, and finished the game with almost four times as much as the second-place finisher. In under thirty TV minutes, he went from wearing egg on his face, to becoming the reigning champion.

Bill Gates

But that outcome wasn't inevitable. He won, not only because of his own wide-ranging knowledge, but because the rules called a halt to the game before he had a chance to lose everything again. He benefited from writers who corresponded with his backlog of trivia knowledge. And he handled the buzzer effectively--something many past players have said isn't easy.

When Elon Musk and his giddy evangelists call him a self-made billionaire, they overlook the environment that created his wealth. As Giblin and Doctorow write, the monopsony economy that makes Musk's companies possible results from public policy and social order. Regulations written to prevent past economic abuses, become barriers to entry for small start-up entrepreneurs. Inequality festers unchecked.

This doesn't mean risk-takers don't deserve reward. Musk, Bezos, Gates, and others did indeed risk their, or their investors’, seed capital, and could've eaten dust. But that doesn't mean they work alone. They used others’ skills, labor, and time. They benefited from technicians trained in state schools. Many, like Musk, received direct government subsidies to offset the costs which their risks carried.

American rhetoric in support of capitalism emphasizes the goodness of taking a risk. But in practice, our economy doesn't reward those who take a risk, but those who win. And victory is always socially conditioned. Success means what customers pay for, not what billionaires prefer. There's literally no difference between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, except that one guessed right.

Artists and the Schizoid Personality

J.K. Rowling—great artist, bad person

I’m trying to write a vampire novel. It’s a cheap grab for marketable attention, yes, but I need to restart my long-delayed writing career. Therefore I’m trying to overstuff the novel with cultural motifs of capitalist resentment, misplaced sexuality, and status envy, the three benchmarks of mass-market vampire fiction. I find myself facing a problem, though. I simply don’t know enough about nonstandard sexual expression to write about it comfortably.

Sure, I know something about the fear, anger, and desperation which all monsters and their victims share. But since at least Bram Stoker, and certainly since Anne Rice, authors have used vampires as metaphors for sexual appetites so socially repellent that one must squelch them. Vampires are, by nature, dominant, violent, and voracious, preying on trust and innocence—all things I’m not. I’m doubting my ability to finish this project.

I’ve had this problem before. I’m more than competent organizing words in ways that readers find pleasing, and multiple trusted sources assure me I should seek wider audiences. But it’s a writing truism that stories require conflict, and for every protagonist with a goal, they require some antagonist willing to do anything necessary to impede that goal. Somebody must always, from the storytelling perspective, be the villain.

Especially in this age of Marvel craptaculars and Starwoid blockbusters, readers feel dissatisfied with ordinary human-scale conflicts. MFA workshops continue producing countless “literary” conflicts of the Kramer vs. Kramer style, which indie presses publish for prestige, and which seldom get a second printing. To snag enough readers to buy groceries, authors must mass-produce generational traumas, planet-destroying weapons, and truly demented monsters.

Roman Polanski—great artist, lousy person

And to write those monsters with the full dimensionality audiences have grown accustomed to, writers must occupy the monstrous headspace. One cannot write monsters without, at least occasionally, thinking like a monster. After all, truly terrible creatures like Dracula, Iago, and Lord Voldemort aren’t mere mustache-twirling villains in the Snidely Whiplash mold; their evil comes from someplace, and serves some motivation deep within the character.

Crafting fully fleshed monsters, though, means the monster’s thoughts live within the author. We see this sometimes in what authors affirm, or what they deny. J.K. Rowling, for instance, created Lord Voldemort, a thinly coded Hitler analogue. But in creating that character, she also incorporated Churchill-era war propaganda about an assertively fair-haired Britain becoming overrun with foreigners and, ahem, bankers. Then these beliefs spilled into her private life.

Shall I continue? Cinematic genius Roman Polanski wrote, directed, and starred in The Tenant, a thriller about encroaching urban paranoia and isolation, in 1976. In 1977, he was accused of—and confessed to—drugging and raping a minor, and has remained a fugitive from American justice ever since. Knowing what we do about sexual violence, the crime for which he got caught almost certainly wasn’t his first. Personal secrets undoubtedly drove artistic paranoia.

Many of Neil Gaiman’s best stories involve hurting women. Coraline, Stardust, and several Sandman plots all involve women fearing for their lives, going insane, or being held in captivity. Though Gaiman never went the full Green Lantern and stuffed women in refrigerators, he nevertheless motivated many of his best stories by causing fictional women pain. We now know that torture didn’t exist entirely in his imagination.

Neil Gaiman—great artist, terrible person

Art doesn’t emerge from whole, balanced, healthy minds. Like an oyster creating a pearl, the object of beauty begins with irritation and injury. Worse, in order to produce enough content to make a living in this media-saturated world, artists must do more than tolerate the irritation; we must prod it, feed it, and rip previously healed wounds open again. Even when it doesn’t produce literal violence, artists are unbalanced people.

When I describe artists as “schizoid personalities,” I don’t mean in the clinical sense. I mean in the older Greek sense, where the “schiz-” prefix refers to something torn or cut in two. The same prefix used in schizophrenia is the same root used in the word scissors, signifying something thoroughly torn, in ways it can never be completely repaired. Artists must tear themselves asunder to create fully realized conflicts.

And I must ask myself: am I willing to risk becoming torn likewise? Do I love art enough to create those thoughts within myself, knowing that I’m not immune to their lure? What if I create the monster capable of expressing such eloquent trauma—and then, like Rowling, Polanski, and Gaiman, I can’t control it? If artists aren’t unbalanced people when they begin, most will be so before they finish.

RFK Jr. is Maybe, Slightly, Right

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

It’s a matter of time before Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Elon Musk create an insuperable rift within the upcoming Trump administration. Musk believes that engineers and their technology will solve society’s problems with efficiency beyond anything government can accomplish, a philosophy called cyberlibertarianism. RFK, by contrast, distrusts science and technology, and wants to rescind 200 years of progress in physiology and medicine.

Left-leaning quarters of the internet have begun mocking RFK as part of our routine anti-Trump rhetoric. We ridicule his disdain for vaccines in the immediate wake of a pandemic made absurdly worse by an administration that hampered any efforts to curtail the spread. We disparage his fear of pharmaceuticals as indicative of his now-infamous brain worm, which maybe could’ve been prevented by medicine. Everything RFK says is automatically tainted.

Yet I suggest there’s something to his persistent appeal. People like RFK, and those like him who automatically distrust science, because he isn’t entirely wrong. RFK taps a fertile vein of public sentiment that realizes we’ve heard lies from people and institutions for years, clothed in the vestments of science, technology, and mathematics. Americans have become distrustful of authority, and not without reason. RFK simply identifies that distrust.

We’ve witnessed how industrialized pharmaceutical companies, the storied “Big Pharma,” have yanked patients’ chains for years. Nearly a decade ago, so-called “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli increased prices on life-saving diabetes medications, which weren’t rare or proprietary, simply to boost his own shoddy past investments. Malcolm Gladwell writes how Purdue Pharma created the “opioid epidemic” by targeting, not patients in pain, but doctors desperately lonely for human validation.

These highly visible forms of public manipulation only remain in public memory because they’re uncomplicated. More nuanced issues, like the sale of over-the-counter amphetamines as diet aides, or the whole fen-phen debacle, are harder to understand, and therefore harder to remember. We’ve wondered at shifting standards for diet and exercise: a few years ago, doctors told us small quantities of red wine were healthful. Now we’re told no quantity of alcohol is safe.

Elon Musk

What’s more, many of RFK’s concerns about food additives and processing reflect our own concerns. Many packaged and convenience foods are fortified with synthetic preservatives and wheat flour base to remain shelf-stable. Many are also fortified with synthetic flavor compounds, because the processing leaches out natural flavor. As Rampton and Stauber write, these additives are presumed safe only because they haven’t been proven unsafe, and are only lightly regulated.

And our government kowtows to the companies which produce these foods, pharmaceuticals, and other substances we put into their bodies. Across many years and both major parties, administrations have let industrial conglomerates like Pfizer, Unilever, Con-Agra, and Bayer run roughshod, only occasionally constrained when public outrage grows vocal enough to jeopardize politicians’ reelection chances. Almost like representatives care more about their donors’ demands than their constituents’ health.

This isn’t new, of course. Anybody who even fleetingly reads American history knows that, before the rise of antitrust regulation, the companies that manufactured drugs fortified their patent medications with arsenic, cocaine, and opium. Before Congress created the FDA, food companies stretched their packaged foods with sawdust and urine. Government stepped in to enforce baseline safety standards, but now hides behind regulations as opaque as the companies they purportedly regulate.

So yeah, RFK actually understands an important thread in American political discourse: the terror Americans feel at how much power these opaque corporations and government institutions have in our lives. We fear these corporate conglomerates, many of which own significant shareholder stakes in one another. We likewise fear the regulatory institutions which often appear as likely to protect as prosecute the corporations hurting us.

That doesn’t mean RFK is right, of course. His belief in the superiority of “natural immunity” over vaccines, to cite just one example, suggests he thinks people once shrugged off polio, smallpox, and the plague. This is goofy. Like belief in homeopathy or crystal resonances, belief in “natural immunity” only makes sense with a complete unawareness of the history of science and medicine. Thus RFK Jr. is worse than ignorant.

However, progressives ignore RFK’s underlying message at great political cost. Just as we disparaged the Wuhan Labs hypothesis simply because Trump said it, we’re now ignoring a history of institutional abuse of science, simply because RFK says it. If progressives want to reclaim these voters from the kooks who have hijacked it, we need to start by acknowledging their concerns. Because they aren’t wrong; powerful people have lied to us.

East Coast Jazz-Age Gothic Extravaganza

Riley Sager, The Only One Left: a Novel

The mansion known as Hope’s End has enough terrible stories to make Disney’s Haunted Mansion look sedate and staid. Amid the waning Jazz Era, a shocking triple homicide left an entire family of Back East elite dead and mutilated. Now Lenora Hope, the only survivor, paraplegic and mute, has decided to tell her story. Working through an outdated manual typewriter, she begins unloading on a poor nurse unprepared for everything.

This is Riley Sager’s seventh thriller under this byline, and eleventh overall, in only fourteen years—a veritable assembly line of paperback chills. Working at such a pace, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Sager uses genre stereotypes. Diving into this novel, I quickly recognized allusions, some more overt than others, to Edgar Allan Poe, Daphne du Maurier, and D.H. Lawrence. And that turned out to be just for starters.

In 1983, Kit McDeere knows the Hope’s End murders as merely a lingering urban legend. Pursued by her own demons, Kit accepts a caregiver job for Lenora Hope, mostly because she can’t find anything else. When Lenora proves to be, not a daffy patient just winding down, but a crafty schemer ready to divulge secrets she’s kept hidden since 1929, Kit simply isn’t prepared for the mass of horrors dumped in her lap.

Once lavishly appointed and luxurious, Hope’s End has become a time capsule of Gatsby-era nostalgia. Lenora’s dwindling household staff preserves the house, but also basically keeps her prisoner inside an upper-story suite overlooking the Atlantic. Kit gets drawn into the building’s faded grandeur, but also into Lenora’s story, which she types painstakingly with only her left hand. The secrets, and the decaying house, take on labyrinthine proportions in Kit’s mind.

Sager emphasizes the contradiction between the house’s aspiration, and its condition. It’s beautiful, but also literally falling apart. This proves to be a metaphor for the agreed-upon fictions that keep everyone behaving politely toward one another. The staff’s autocratic matron, Mrs. Baker, works hard to maintain the illusion that nothing has changed since 1929. This illusion becomes harder and harder to maintain.

Everything exists on multiple levels. Just as the house is a metaphor for the gentlemen’s agreements binding polite society together, the dirty secrets Lenora wants to divulge are metaphors for the traumas people need to express, but can’t. Kit reads Lenora’s long-buried secrets and becomes a crusader for justice denied for over fifty years, but that’s a metaphor for the doubts and self-blame she can’t address within herself.

Riley Sager

Within these interlocking symbols, one rule of mass-market fiction is: the more assiduously characters believe something on Page One, the more thoroughly they’ll find their expectations inverted on the closing page. We readers have become accustomed to twist endings and big reveals. Therefore, authors will wedge multiple twists into the narrative, because they know we’re keeping suspect lists and testing them against accumulating evidence.

Yes, Sager does that too. I mentioned three novelists above whose work Sager channels. As the story accelerates, though, it becomes increasingly clear Sager expects his readers to know story boilerplates mostly from Hollywood, and his narrative assumes a three-act structure familiar from Syd Field screenwriting manuals. I started noticing narrative conventions pinched from filmmakers like Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Robert Aldritch.

I don’t say this to disparage Sager’s storytelling… except when I do. In later chapters, Sager’s chapter breaks start occurring on big plot reveals or cliffhangers, sometimes so pointed that readers can practically hear the soundtrack orchestra playing a dramatic flourish. Seasoned readers start observing what film critic Roger Ebert called his Law of Conservation of Characters: every named character serves a purpose, and if we don’t know it, we just don’t know it yet.

Individual readers will decide whether this bothers them. The novel’s filmic qualities give it a galloping pace that keeps readers curious, wanting to have our unresolved questions answered. We find ourselves genuinely caring about these characters, and hurting when they’re disappointed. But as cantilevered revelations start accumulating, they start straining readers’ credulity. We start wondering, sometimes out loud: could they really keep such secrets for fifty-four years?

Probably not.

Readers’ ability to enjoy this novel will match the degree to which they’re able to remind themselves it’s a novel, not reality. If readers can enjoy the allusions to classic Gothic romanticists of yore, and the movies they may still have gathering dust in their VHS collection, they’ll probably lose themselves in Sager’s contrivances. The minute we start asking questions about plausibility, we’ll yank ourselves abruptly out of the book.

What Forgiveness Is, What Forgiveness Is Not

Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

Forgiveness is one of the most necessary, and one of the most difficult, aspects of the Christian experience. When neighbors, enemies, and earthly powers affront us, the Gospel calls us to forgive generously; but our human impulse is to nurse grudges and seek vindication. Essayist Lysa TerKeurst found this in her personal life, when her husband’s infidelity nearly imploded her marriage. So she went in search of what the Bible actually says about granting forgiveness.

I find myself divided about TerKeurst’s findings. Her conclusions are biblically sound, extensively sourced, and balanced by personal experience. She found that, whenever she couldn’t bring herself to forgive, her resentments turned malignant, wounding her far beyond the original transgressions she suffered. When she opened herself to the experience of Christlike forgiveness, she didn’t need to excuse the harm done, or compromise her boundaries. She just stopped carrying her old resentments around in her pockets.

However, I quickly noticed several elements missing from TerKeurst’s exegesis. For starters, though she describes insights she gleaned from her therapist, she cites nothing from science, and little from any extra-biblical sources. She name-drops St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Spurgeon in the text, hardly rigorous scientific sources. Her insights come mostly from personal anecdotes, and her text reads more like a memoir than therapeutic guidance. She assumes you can learn from her personal journey.

I also noticed the near-complete absence of one word from TerKeurst’s text: “repentance.” I don’t recall that word appearing until an appendix. Christians must frequently forgive someone who hasn’t repented or sought to amend their transgressions, because it’s more important to stop carrying that stone ourselves. But I’ve frequently observed that powerful people demand forgiveness before they’ve demonstrated a whit of repentance, placing the burden of transgression on the one wronged, and excusing the transgressor.

We’ve seen this recently in churches. Floods of accusations, not only against religious leaders who have socially or sexually abused their parishioners, but also against church institutions that papered over the abuse, have revealed decades of unhealed trauma. Insurrectionists bearing Christian insignia besieged the American government, then urged voters and legislators to “just move on.” Forgiveness has become an obligation the powerful impose on the masses, not a gift freely given to us by Christ.

Lysa TerKeurst

TerKeurst’s larger text contains important pointers and tools to enact forgiveness in our lives. Again, she roots these insights on her personal experience rather than larger psychological research, but pause on that. Her suggestion to, for instance, begin the forgiveness process by writing down the original transgression, and its long-term impact. After reading TerKeurst’s direction, I applied this exercise myself. I found that crystallizing the hurt into words makes it manageable, not vast and insuperable.

She also expounds about what forgiveness is not. Though TerKeurst accepted the struggle to reconcile with her husband, reconciliation isn’t an obligatory component of forgiveness. Sometimes Christians must unburden ourselves of others’ transgressions, but that doesn’t mean allowing those who hurt us back into our lives unconditionally. There’s a wide gulf between forgiveness, and being a doormat. TerKeurst dedicates an entire chapter to creating and enforcing boundaries to ensure the offender doesn’t hurt us again.

Perhaps the greatest shortcoming in TerKeurst’s reasoning reveals itself in one fact: after this book shipped, her husband returned to old habits, and she reluctantly admitted her marriage was over. I don’t say this to gloat. Rather, I want to emphasize the White Protestant fondness for forgiveness, separate from repentance, has consequences. God is loving and merciful, but God is also just, and Christians who elide the need for repentance miss part of the journey.

In the New Testament, the Greek word metanoia is variously translated as both “repentance” and “conversion.” In either case, metanoia signifies a transformation of mind, a complete reorientation of outlook in service of a renewed life. Metanoia doesn’t happen instantaneously, and it isn’t something someone professes verbally. Rather, repentance makes itself known in a life realigned to serve higher goals. Apologizing and accepting responsibility are good first steps, but repentance comes in a reorganized life.

Don’t misunderstand me. Though TerKeurst purposes to write a self-help book, she actually gives us a good memoir of spiritual struggle, one which yields valuable insights, even if—we now know—her struggle wasn’t complete. If we read it that way, we have plenty to learn from her experiences. But one of the necessary lessons is that forgiveness without repentance creates a downward spiritual spiral. Don’t carry burdens unnecessarily, but don’t rush to forgiveness either.