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.
