Symptoms vs Cause – The Two Giant Elephants in the Room

 

My Parisian friend, Alexis Nolent, tells me that the French describe the explosive polarized frenzy that is leading the United States, several European nations and elsewhere in the developed world, as people who are “chauffés à blanc” (white hot, but really meaning reaching the boiling point). There is a growing feeling among Europeans that the United States is on the brink of another civil war, amplified by the proliferation of well over 300 million civilian guns (including, accorded to the NRA, 15 million AR-15 military-style semiautomatic assault rifles). Dems vs Republicans as compromise has just vaporized.

It is easy to lose yourself in the seeming immediate causes of this explosive political polarization teetering on the edge of ultra-violence. People and governments tend to be reactive, and oddly it is tyrants who take advantage and become change-driven, proactive, using fear to gain power. However, the elephants in the room are rather clearly Malthusian population growth and climate change. Everything else is derivative from those forces.

Too many people, and nature is required to cull the herd. Pandemics, war and starvation. As resources dry up, burn, get flooded, eroded or blown away, those who have circle the wagons… those who don’t migrate and/or foment wars and civil strife. It’s not TV or Social Media. They are symptoms of the fear and anger at change. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, posited in the Bible (in both the New and Old Testaments), have been a salient part of our culture for millennia.

Massive seismic change is terrifying, especially when that change defines who gets access to the dwindling resources. And who loses access. People form “them vs us” groups as a way of circling those wagons, creating identification and shared values… planning who survives and who is expendable.  The assumption is that there is not enough for everybody, so we need to define the losers and let them go. Incumbent losers, those who know their time is passed, soon see themselves as having nothing left to lose. They will follow zealots, shoot and kill those who disagree with them… but in the end will perish after wreaking their own destruction. It’s been the same story throughout history. Nature is smiling. Death works.

Population growth fuels other changes, particularly when technology is the perceived solution. Artificial intelligence, for example, is about to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs as well. Capitalism – particularly laissez faire pro-business neoliberalism – cannot deal with that reality. A huge impact. And remember, we choose economic growth – as evidenced by a top-weighted GDP metric – as the symbol of a society that is successful. GDP aggregates economic value, pretty much ignoring what’s in the middle and at the bottom. Looking at the stock market as a metric of success is particularly strange given how few Americans actually determine their economic well-being from the market. Employment numbers rarely address those squeezed out of the job market and don’t give true average buying power any weight at all.

We govern to maximize our chosen metrics. GDP is no longer the salient metric of success, but it is still the universal measurement of winning. Climate change cannot be stopped or reversed as long as GDP is the Holy Grail. Why is economic growth good? If you are poor, you want better. If you are rich, you want to enhance your collection of successful symbols. But growth consumes resources, uses energy and accelerates climate change. We need another metric, which can include economic well-being, but which looks at other standards of sustainable quality.

Oddly, leaders who do nature’s bidding – by facilitating pandemic spread and stirring passions to the point of mass violence – are playing out the “cull the herd” scenario, even as they may believe they are simply amassing personal political power. They blame. They encourage hatred and divisiveness. Hitler blamed Jews. The Spanish Inquisition blamed heretics. Stalin blamed fifth columnists and anti-communist subversives. Mao blamed the bourgeoisie and foreign influence. Trump blames immigrants (and non-white minorities) and China.

Trump is sowing nature’s destructive seeds right on cue. He seems to be nature’s anointed killing machine, both in terms of allowing a virus to maximize the casualty rate and in terms of inciting people get to angry enough to kill each other in droves. We can also see this in Poland, Hungary and in a slowly growing way, even in France. It’s easy to blame a religious group or another country or racial/ethnic community – history always does that – but again, it is necessary to separate symptom from cause. Trump is the master of nasty labeling, blaming others, sowing distrust and dividing people who used to get along. He is a symptom, a willing soldier in nature’s quest to cull the herd, but he is hardly the cause.

You only have to watch a Trump rally to watch his malevolent and divisive message at work. But as the world slowly turns its back on the United States, Trump is making that increasingly popular international anti-US approach that much easier. Trashing Trump’s America seems to be becoming a global phenomenon, with very few exceptions. Is Trump trying to unify? To bring global forces into a coordinated effort to battle obvious enemies to all humanity? Quite the opposite; he is using global challenges to blame and further isolate the United States. To show his power to the planet. On September 22^nd, when addressing the United Nations, Trump pushed the rest of the world even farther away. It was a blame fest. Even as China’s handling of the pandemic was/is vastly more effective than that of the United States.

“As the United Nations marked its 75th anniversary with a pandemic-era summit conducted virtually, President Trump used the occasion Tuesday [9/22] to excoriate China, accusing it of ‘unleashing’ the coronavirus on the world even as U.S. deaths from the disease passed 200,000.

“Trump, who’d advertised for days on the campaign trail that he would be tough on China, took on the fellow member of the Security Council at the U.N.’s annual General Assembly, with the world’s leaders looking on via video screens. While Trump railed against Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged cooperation… Using a term widely seen as xenophobic, Trump said Beijing must be held accountable for the ‘China virus.’

“The world’s death toll is on track to reach 1 million. While one-fifth of the deaths and confirmed cases of infections are in the United States, Trump made wildly exaggerated claims about how well his administration has tackled COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus… ‘In the United States, we launched the most aggressive mobilization since the Second World War,’ Trump said in relatively brief remarks recorded at the White House and delivered remotely. He claimed, contradicting his government’s top scientists and medical experts, that a vaccine will soon be distributed and the virus ‘defeated.’” Los Angeles Times, September 23^rd. “Defeated”? Even as Trump’s own senior medical advisors say otherwise. Nature must be overjoyed. The world’s major superpower is leading the charge towards “people-culling” dissention.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and without major social adjustments and global cooperation, we can sit back and watch the violence rise, diseases spread, droughts wreak starvation and the global death toll mount… and autocracy rage.