feuervogel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feuervogel) wrote2010-07-31 11:54 am
feuervogel) wrote2010-07-31 11:54 am
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I'm not just a bad American, I'm innately averse to capitalism.
One of my classmates at the Goethe Institut remarked frequently how completely un-American I am (he was Swiss/English). I guess this was based on the type of American people see on the teevee or in the movies or on the news, or on vacation I guess, where they're like "USA! USA! #1! #1!" and commence flag-waving at the drop of a hat. And I'm mostly like, "yeah, there's a whole lot of fucked up shit in the States." It's a true statement, and it doesn't mean that I hate America, no matter what the Limbaughs and Becks and their ilk were saying during the Bush years.
Pretty much every European I talked to was horrified, appalled even, that people can't afford basic medical treatment or go bankrupt after a medical emergency. Because in their countries, health care is cheaper and/or subsidized through taxes. They're also gobsmacked at how much university tuition costs, since a year's tuition at the average European public university is on the order of hundreds of Euros*, and UNC Chapel Hill is up to $9000 or so for in-state students. And that's one of the cheapest state schools in the country. (Out of state students pay almost double that.)
*In 1996/97, when I was a student at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany), a semester's tuition was DM180 ($100 at the time), and it included a semester pass for all local and regional public transportation services, which meant city buses, regional buses, and regional trains. I could take the train to Frankfurt/Main for free. (Blah blah paid for; a single-ride ticket on the city bus was DM2. You do the math.) From Frankfurt, I could go anywhere in the world (seriously; Frankfurt Airport is the largest on the continent). (ETA: And German students get interest-free loans (BAföG) to cover things like room & board & books.)
So the American ideal of rugged individualism, which leads way too easily into "fuck you, I got mine," is one I don't identify with or understand on a gut level. People should cooperate and work together, not stomp on each other and kick the guy you're climbing over in the teeth while trying to succeed.
I don't like games predicated on dicking your buddy (Illuminati! and Cosmic Encounter are the two that come to mind first). I don't like "humor" that's based on putting other people down, even if it's "just in fun." All too often, it's not used "just in fun," rather to actually insult or belittle the recipient; there's a reason it's called being the butt of the joke. (I don't enjoy "roasts," either.)
It's a mindset I don't understand on a fundamental level.
Pretty much every European I talked to was horrified, appalled even, that people can't afford basic medical treatment or go bankrupt after a medical emergency. Because in their countries, health care is cheaper and/or subsidized through taxes. They're also gobsmacked at how much university tuition costs, since a year's tuition at the average European public university is on the order of hundreds of Euros*, and UNC Chapel Hill is up to $9000 or so for in-state students. And that's one of the cheapest state schools in the country. (Out of state students pay almost double that.)
*In 1996/97, when I was a student at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany), a semester's tuition was DM180 ($100 at the time), and it included a semester pass for all local and regional public transportation services, which meant city buses, regional buses, and regional trains. I could take the train to Frankfurt/Main for free. (Blah blah paid for; a single-ride ticket on the city bus was DM2. You do the math.) From Frankfurt, I could go anywhere in the world (seriously; Frankfurt Airport is the largest on the continent). (ETA: And German students get interest-free loans (BAföG) to cover things like room & board & books.)
So the American ideal of rugged individualism, which leads way too easily into "fuck you, I got mine," is one I don't identify with or understand on a gut level. People should cooperate and work together, not stomp on each other and kick the guy you're climbing over in the teeth while trying to succeed.
I don't like games predicated on dicking your buddy (Illuminati! and Cosmic Encounter are the two that come to mind first). I don't like "humor" that's based on putting other people down, even if it's "just in fun." All too often, it's not used "just in fun," rather to actually insult or belittle the recipient; there's a reason it's called being the butt of the joke. (I don't enjoy "roasts," either.)
It's a mindset I don't understand on a fundamental level.
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Seriously, it'd be more awesome if as a society, we worked to build each other up, not tear each other down. But that's teh Ebil Soshalizms, so we can't have none of that in Murka.
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Do fees vary by region? This was in Hessen.
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It makes living in Pennsylvania very weird.
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I don't love that one of my friends is blind because she couldn't afford to have surgery to reattach her retina.
Pennsylvania and North Carolina aren't that different, in that regard. (The main difference is that PA loves football and NC loves basketball.)
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HOWEVER. UUUUUUGH. I hate that same thing. I think it's the background issue. You can't be a dick on Guam or EVERYONE WILL KNOW and they will cut you out of society and you will suffer so much for it. Yes, people do a lot of teasing, but it's very clearly fun and not negative. Ie. my Dad's nickname is "old man" but our culture is intensely respectful of age and he only has a nickname because of how much people care. It seems nasty, but it's actually slang for father or grandfather. The teasing is personal and full of smiles and physical affection and it is never about tearing people down--more about sexual innuendo and word play and elaborate cultural inside jokes.
But yeah, I love black humor, yes, but mocking people is for people who one intends to deride. And dicking people over is just not okay and not in my nature.
People also accuse me of being anti-American, hilariously, but I am enthusiastically pro-America--I just think a part of that is not just assuming America is the best because it's America. No resting on laurels! WE MUST ALWAYS BE AWESOMER, BECAUSE WE CAN BE. BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER, AMERICA. ... sigh.
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(Yeah, I make "get off my lawn, back in my day" jokes *about myself.* Not about other people.)
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I still shy away from people who seem to be outsiders, but that might also be that I'm kind of scared of younger white males in general. But anyways, it's nice to be treated like a human being and to earn a little bit of kindness for being a lady creature rather than a whole heap of shit.
There are still lots of bad things and I could write endlessly on stuff like our culturally shitty perspectives on romantic relationships, drinking and drug use, wariness of outsiders that borders on xenophobia, our lack of artistic identity, blah blah blah. But we have a culture that really super emphasizes respecting others and treating people the way you want to be treated.
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(Do I believe government is perfect? Hell no. But I believe that, at present, it's the best we've got to keep poison out of our food and schools funded. Can it be better? Hell yes.)
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It's just that where you've seen how capitalism lets people down and socialism can work out to benefit a large number of people, I've seen capitalism lift up places that were stuck in the fact that government was so big and controlled everything.
I think capitalism motivates people to do good things even if it's against their will, because they're getting something out of it. But that's because I've seen government totally unable to keep poison out of food, keep schools funded, keep the power running, keep the water clean and running, etc. etc. etc. because it was bloated, corrupt, and filled with nepotism and stagnancy. I never lived to see it become deadly, but I was raised and educated by people who had lived to see government turn bloody on its own people. Do companies have their competition assassinated? Probably, actually, and I just haven't heard of it.
Different backgrounds lead to different perspectives and different answers to the question of how to make the world we live in better.
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Yeah, government is bloated and sucky and full of nepotism; if I were in charge, it'd be a lot more efficient. I obviously can't speak to the history or culture of Guam, so I'll take your word on that. And I'm still pissed about the cat food laced with melamine (imported from China, and not inspected by the ... USDA? FDA? because the GWB administration gutted their funding, so they didn't have enough staff to handle it), and I think GWB's exercise in nation-building and revenge was a dick move when he started it.
I believe in workplace safety standards, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and regulations that protect workers and consumers. Historical evidence suggests that corporations and their CEOs, Boards of Trustees, etc, aren't going to make these things out of the kindness of their heart (Triangle Shirtwaist fire, The Jungle, elixir sulfanilamide...)
Are there problems in the FDA? Good lord, yes. Gutted funding is one of them. For most of the drugs that have had a lot of post-marketing problems, the investigation shows that the manufacturers aren't giving the FDA all the data and are hiding the bad studies. It's a big controversy in the medical field, because drug companies fund the drug studies that are published in JAMA, etc, and they won't write up the studies that show the drug in a negative light. (There's also a question of whether the journals reject articles that don't show a positive or neutral result. Which is problematic, to say the least.)
So even *with* regulation designed to protect people, corporations can still weasel around them. I don't know what to do to fix that, but I know that "take away the regulations" isn't the answer.
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/free-marketeer
Seriously, though, I don't get it, either. And even things like appeals to things that capitalists *should* like (such as improved workers' productivity, because they're not sick at work or at home/hospital) don't work. Because The Free Market Will Solve All Our Problems, amen.
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I have become much more socialist as I have gotten older. I consider it to be based on a couple of things. One is more experience with a wider world, including people in a wider range of economic, cultural, and health situations. The other is having studied a lot of psychology. A lot of what I was raised to believe about why capitalism and libertarianism would be best for people is based on models of how humans work that just don't mesh with what I've learned about studies on how humans work.
I understand how people might think things like, people will be happier and it's better for people to give to charities based on their desire to help others than it is to make them help others through taxes. But it just doesn't actually hold up that people are happier with an opt-in model for helping people. I don't have any evidence to support the idea that people who want to help are benefited by that model. I think if you had a society of angels where everyone wanted to help out enough to truly help, you'd still be better off with an organized system that requires you to give the money needed to help. That the people helping are benefited by such a system.
And countless other little stories about it's better if you do it of your own choosing just don't hold up. Why is it better? If it doesn't help the people better and it doesn't make you happier, why is it better? And I see many really good-hearted people who have some extra income and want to make the world a better place struggling to figure out how they can do that. If it were taken care of in an organized manner like in other countries, people wouldn't be staring at their budgets going, do I donate to heart disease or cancer? Or is my money best needed in some less common disease that might be ignored? And they get paralyzed by the options or they get depressed at having to choose. When what they really want is for people who need help to get help and research to be done to keep helping people. And we find that people in countries where this is dealt with for them tend to be happy that it is, proud that their country can handle it. They get the feel-good benefits of helping without having to have the struggles and pains that we force good-hearted people to go through here. And they have fewer people falling through the cracks.
Just over and over, I see that human psychology does not work with the models that I was raised to in childhood.
Although I do have trouble understanding how people feel that they'd rather be wealthier once their needs are met than be able to walk down streets that don't have starving homeless people on them. It's just that not having starving, homeless people is a hard thing to do even with money, because it takes organization. But I can totally see why some wealthy people really want their taxes raised. Because living in a better society is far more awesome than going from really wealthy to extra-really wealthy. But it's hard to get a better society without significant organization.
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I'm a lot more sympathetic to the anarcho-syndicalist mindset (than anarcho-capitalism, or Randian objectivism, or free-market fundamentalism), where you have a group of people helping each other out. It's almost Marxist, except that, being anarchist, it denies the existence of a state.
Unfortunately, on a scale as large as, say, the US, or even, say, Texas, it doesn't really work. I care on an abstract level about the well-being of people in Texas or Kansas or Maine, but not on the same level as I do about the well-being of people in North Carolina (and, more specifically, Orange County, NC).
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It doesn't have to work out that way. You can have groups that pull these things off excellently, but here's the problem... it's essentially the same problem you have with the large-family model of taking care of people...
You have someone who is different in some way. You can use modern forms of difference that are currently quite political such as being gay or childfree or it can be something else, just someone who is weird. That odd, bookish person who just doesn't quite get along well with others. The type of difference doesn't matter.
And then if that person needs help, the society doesn't necessarily bother to help, because they don't like that person. Or worse, the society actively ostracizes the minorities, such that they would be capable of being productive and independent (to the same extent others are) but because people black list them, they can't function. And this can be done for any reason. So, you can have perfectly decent people who are horribly oppressed, with no oversight that forces people to not discriminate.
Then you have someone who is growing up in this society and sees this happen. And they become afraid. They don't know exactly where the lines are between being accepted and getting to have a decent life or being ostracized and suffering horribly. So, they have to censor themselves to a stronger degree than their society would force on them, in order to be safe. Which leads to a very rigid and oppressive society with an abused minority.
It doesn't always do this, but historically, there are reasons people fled small towns. And it's very hard to get people to help people they don't like, which puts a huge pressure on people to be likable. A certain degree of social pressure is a good thing. But too much and for too arbitrary a reason is not. I support mechanisms of social ostracism and boycotts in a society, but I think that basic ability to live needs to not be at stake. So, the racist down the block should be ostracized from social functions and be forced to live with disapproval, but he shouldn't be starving to death because he's a racist asshole. And depending on the society, life might be horrible for the gay kid, but he shouldn't be facing a future of homelessness and starvation. You can, at least, mitigate some of the worst of human bigotry by a system of laws that forces a measure of equality and protection. It's hard to execute it well, because humans run it. And it has had numerous obvious failings. But it still seems to be the best system we have.
I do like small-scale cooperative groups though. They can be great when you can get them to work. Humans are social animals. We function best when we work together. And a cooperative group can allow people with different abilities to best help each other. And at their best, they also notice when someone needs help and they inform others and help it to happen. When that works, it's great. But without a system that guarantees that everyone with certain needs is guaranteed help, you can easily find someone in a system who has nowhere to turn to for help. And that's what I want to avoid. And while it seems really hard to do, several countries seem to have done fairly well at providing this. All of them have flaws. And all of them have some horrible situations that arise for particular individuals. But they seem able to do a much better job of it, so I know it is possible for us to significantly improve.
And I want that guarantee, because I want a society where people can be different in safety. That's a personal value. But it really means a lot to me. I don't want being weird to be something you weigh against your desire to live when your weirdness isn't even something that hurts others. And I think, again a personal belief, that it's bad for society to too strongly oppress difference.
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And forcing people to do anything (be it "don't be a bigoted asshole" or "be groovy to each other") is the worst, most awful thing anyone can do, ever. It's oppression!
Because where the freedom of the Haves to have more is impinged by the needs of the Have-nots to reach equality of opportunity, to a Principled Libertarian, maintaining the freedom of the Haves is the most important thing. Even if they don't see it that way, because they see it as "maximizing freedom," they're only maximizing freedom for the people who already have the most freedom.
Their blinders of privilege are showing.
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1) Once I do it's certain to become a very long and involved debate, and I really don't have the time for it.
2) The debates end up seeming very unproductive. It seems the only thing they accomplish is to make us both pissed off. It's certainly not a state that I enjoy being in.
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You think I *like* doing free education on what privilege is and how it affects, well, people who don't look like you? You think that doesn't burn me the fuck out? Because what I'm hearing when you say that is that I'm wasting my fucking time and energy, and yeah, that pisses me off.
But then, educating a certain set of people on the advantages they have simply because of the luck of the draw when they were born (not any inherent awesomeness of their own) is generally a losing proposition, so I don't know why I bother. Not like I'll ever get through.
Leora's responses are a lot more than "smash capitalism!" I don't know if you remember back on an fb discussion, but she's the one whose parents are Randian Objectivists and seriously hard-line Libertarians.
Read her comments. Think about them.
I'm concerned with the inequalities and suffering that's going on RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Taking away the safety net that exists, in the service of "freedom" (but only for those who already have gobs of money, of course, because that's how it would happen in the world I live in) would result in a lot of people starving to death.
Thought experiments are all well and good, but unless you live on one of Patri's seasteads or whatever, when you implement these ideas, you're subjecting a whole lot of real, live people to things that are highly likely to result in their death.
And that is seriously not fucking cool.
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I think you hit the nail on the head with the "rugged individualism" being the source of this OH NOES MY TAX DOLLARS CAN'T SUPPORT THAT! mindset.