I'm Back, or, "Realism, The Economy, Possession, and Chuck Palahniuk"

It's been forever since I've written something. This is for a number of reasons. Catch-up post to come later this week, I promise! Now, for something completely new.

I wrote this essay for a class, a history class. It may or may not be any good-- I'll let you all be the judge of it.

Realism, The Economy, Possession, and Chuck Palahniuk

 

The economy is not getting better. Newsreels show “Occupy (Your State Here)” signs and label the protestors and demonstrators unfairly as “a bunch of college kids upset about not having saved enough for tuition”, according to FOX news personality Carl Cameron. Men and women in Guy Fawkes masks ask the world via Youtube to reconsider their stances on what is truly valuable. Women more qualified than I are being denied entire careers while I stand content at an $8.20 per hour rate chocolate store part-time arbeit. People are growing more and more upset with the wars we, the people, are paying for. The economy is not getting better.

Newspapers and magazines continue to dub it the “New Depression”. Critics, skeptics, economists, and politicians are rebutting and saying it is not as bad as the disaster of the 1929 Great Depression, where most stocks lost somewhere around 80% of their value before bottoming out in 1932. However, many are yet left wondering whether the “New Depression” is a feasible title for our current situation.

To find common threads between the two events, one needs to look at a handful of aspects: The public’s reaction to the plummet, the reason they reacted that way, the reason for the crash, and how it was (or can be) repaired.

So, how did the public react to the stock market crash? Simply, they scraped by as best they could. Some tried to riot, some tried to find work, some tried to find food. Many members of these groups failed. The streets outside the New York Stock Exchange were said to have been “littered with the husks [bodies] of those who felt like all had been taken from them”.  Unemployment rose to a staggering 25%-- and that’s just in the United States. Other countries, especially those who relied on hard industry such as mining, logging, and hunting, had to place embargos upon themselves until they figured out the situation.

We see echoes of this today. The news shows do not tell us, but many have taken their own lives. People are obviously scrambling for jobs. Many say that the European Union is falling apart. The recent recession, in combination with a slew of natural disasters (such as Japan’s Great Tsunami, Chile and Haiti’s earthquakes, and blizzards throughout many parts of Eastern Europe) have made many feel as though their entire lives are at a standstill.

So, why are they reacting so violently, if modern economic theory states that it will repair itself, heal, improve, and America (along with the rest of its trade partners) will get back on track? There are two root causes. One is the economic and political influence of Reinhold Niebuhr.

Niebuhr was as stark a realist and a known attacker of utopianism. In modern terms, his motto might have been “Look in the mirror!” in terms of where our responsibilities lie and where we ought to direct our energy to solve problems. This was somewhat of a bold move, as Niebuhr was a theologian. Before his commentary, many (though not all) pastors, preachers, ministers and priests would spread the idea that Man’s energy, concern, and responsibility should be directed towards Heaven, toward the Divine. Niebuhr wrote that politics, both of the self and of society, is completely driven by self-interest and the desire for personal gain. Machiavelli would have been proud.

Now, the majority of Niebuhr’s writings that reference this stark realism come almost 15 years after the great Depression—The influence doesn’t solely belong to him. Many of those ideas were in place before he began his writing. Their precise origin is hard to pin down, but Timothy J Marsden states that Niebuhr’s writings are “A culmination of sorts, the kind that bring together foreign thoughts to form something rightly Niebuhric”.

Even if Niebuhr had a direct impact on WWII-era thinkers and theologians, there must be something deeper than one man in order for negativity so stark and vivid to proliferate among victims of the Depression. The second, deeper reason we rely so heavily on the economy is the Human Condition itself.

We like stuff. Things. Doodads. The whole point of life in modern Western society is to excel so you can get money so you can get stuff. Food, yeah, and water too, but stuff is what we really aim for. Chuck Palahniuk wrote in his famous novel, Fight Club, “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy [that which] we don't need.”

This deep-seated desire to possess comes with an equally deep-seated fear of losing that which we possess. So, a political structure that is viewed as being realist (whether it is or is not) influences each of us to be equally dedicated to our own personal interests—Namely, our interest in stuff.

So, the victims of the Great Depression were at the mercy of a political structure designed to make them centered on their material wealth as well as their own internalized habit of clutching to the material to make them feel secure in their position in life.

What actually happened to cause the Great Depression, and for that matter, any economic recession? The answers are less esoteric than one might think. Most economic depressions are linked to mistakes of groups of people as well as uncontrollable events such as failing businesses, deaths of certain people of influence, and even natural disasters.

 The Great Depression, for example, was amplified tenfold in the Midwest down through the Mississippi Valley by the savage drought that created the Midwest’s Dustbowl. There were no crops to grow, no water to give to the earth, and as a result, a full third of the thousands of square miles of farmland in the Mississippi Valley were rendered barren, dead, and abject.

Similar to the circumstances of today’s Occupy movements, people felt that banks were to blame, with due cause. Throughout the course of the 1930s alone, over 9000 banks failed. Many deposits into these banks were uninsured, and as a result, when they failed, those who had made deposits simply lost entire life savings.

As a result of these lack of funds, the natural thing to do for anyone with a lick of sense is to trim the fat and only spend for the bare necessities with what little they had left. Oftentimes, what little they had left was not enough. Soon, still-famous photographs of lines for bread and soup running out of frame were thrown into every front page newspaper and poverty was at an all-time high. There was no money left with which to stimulate the economy.

Now, this is a situation of necessity. Aforementioned “things” in this context were indeed necessary for survival, but the emotional distress that was so widespread amongst the coasts had pushed an almost unnatural desire for possession beyond its limits. The rich remained wealthy and yet they still felt cheated in life, and many rich families who lost a fraction of their wealth (while still a large amount of money and property) had many members commit suicide.

When such disasters happen, there are certain measures that can be taken to help reduce the impact as well as reverse the terrible state of the economy, and according to economist Paul Krugman, it may be as simple as hitting the “rewind” button and doing the exact opposite of what we’re doing right now.

“Spending cuts have led to job cuts, and job cuts have led to spending cuts, and we’re caught in quite the vicious circle”, Krugman told Yahoo! Finance writers Daniel Gross and Henry Blodget. He and fellow economist Trevor Wingham III agree that the best way to reverse a recession is to slowly grow our way out of it, by introducing very modest inflation in baby steps.

            Another solution is to shift production to other industries. Many economists theorize this is what singlehandedly saved the United States from complete economic shutdown during the second World War. 12 million citizens joined the military, and that alone took care of almost 75% of the 17 million unemployed men in the United States. However, if sending citizens off to war is counted as a viable solution to an economic recession, the value of world peace is obviously called into question. There must surely be a way to resolve the problem and avoid dropping atomic bombs on civilians.

            Robert Taft, Robert Wason and Alfred Sloan, all pioneers of open market at the time spoke out against a regimented economy and instead proposed cutting tax rates in order to stimulate more entrepreneurship within the US Economy. Modern sociologists and socioeconomists say a replay of that tactic may be what pulls the US out of its current recession.

            The Occupy Movements have been calling for a more transparent economy, tax breaks, and more freedom for entrepreneurs and small businesses for as long as they’ve been up and running. It is possible that a group of university students and down-and-outs could have touched upon a key tactic to help put the States back on track. It’s true, it’s one simple point, and it’s nowhere near a silver bullet, but as a sign in Occupy Minneapolis read, “What do we want? Just to start moving.” The economy isn’t getting better, but it could.