Cosplaying the Apocalypse
America is not a "capitalist hellscape," and it's counterproductive to say that it is.
If you’re on Twitter, you might have seen this post from Washington Post technology columnist Taylor Lorenz that went semi-viral this week.
I had a hard time getting this tweet off my mind. And when something — especially something as minor as a random social media post — sticks with me like that, I usually try to figure out why. Eventually, I realized that it was bothering me for two interrelated reasons.
The first is that the tweet is incorrect on nearly every count. Each point Lorenz makes is either factually wrong or distorts the world in a very particular way to fit her narrative of an American hellscape. Misdiagnosing the problems that we’re facing in such dramatic fashion has all sorts of harmful consequences. It makes people feel hopeless and depressed; it takes away any feeling of personal agency; and it leads people to craft policies and solutions that don’t match the real problems society is facing.
The second reason I couldn’t get this Tweet out of my head is that it made me genuinely feel bad for Lorenz. The idea that she truly believes that “u have to be delusional to look at life in our country rn and have any amt of hope or optimism” is awful. Even more depressing is that Taylor represents a sizeable cohort of people who genuinely feel that life in America is horrible and feel no hope for the future. If you need convincing of this, just take a few minutes to peruse the Reddit sub-communities A Boring Dystopia (which has 770,000 members) or Antiwork (2.5 million).
Given the prevalence and consequences of this kind of doomerism, I thought it would be worthwhile to go through the points that Taylor raises.
we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape
during an ongoing deadly pandemic
w record wealth inequality,
0 social safety net/job security,
as climate change cooks the world
Let’s take them one by one:
we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape
When Lorenz references “late stage capitalism,” she’s employing an idea of Marxist origin. The phrase is a reference to Karl Marx’s idea that history follows a scientifically proven progression in which capitalism is doomed to become so fragile and intolerable that workers will revolt and eventually create a global communist society. “Late capitalism” is the stage that comes before the system’s ultimate collapse.
This worldview seems, at best, ahistorical. For one thing, the 20th Century’s greatest communist experiment — the Soviet Union — was an absolute catastrophe that seems to disprove Marx’s theory of inevitable communist triumph. For another, American capitalism doesn’t seem particularly close to collapse.
The second half of Lorenz’s claim — that America is a hellscape — has no grounding in anything measurable. Just look at any basic indicator of human flourishing, and it’s clear that right now one of the best times (if not the best time) in all of human history to be alive:
Moreover, America is one of the best places to live in this time of incomparable prosperity. Just look at the poverty level in the U.S. relative to the rest of the world.
In sum, the idea that we’re living in a hellscape is all vibes without any relationship to the material conditions of contemporary life.
during an ongoing deadly pandemic
This claim is technically true. According to the World Health Organization, we are still in a pandemic. But that is likely to change quite soon: at the end of January, the WHO acknowledged that the “pandemic is probably at a transition point” due to the levels of global immunity and that the WHO will probably transition out of the “emergency phase” of the pandemic this year. The U.S. government is taking similar steps and will be ending the national emergency in May.
But in a more fundamental sense, the pandemic of 2020 and 2021 is long over. The total number of deaths per day has fallen to an average of 300 to 400. Of course, each of these lives lost is a tragedy. But on a societal level, the death and destruction we’re seeing today doesn’t come close to comparing to the depths of 2021, when 2,000 to 4,000 Americans were dying every single day.
Moreover, the vast majority of people dying today made a choice not to get vaccinated. And while there are unfortunate instances of people who physically cannot take the vaccine or are immunocompromised and still at risk, these are the exceptions rather than the rule. They are deserving of care and sympathy, but do not represent a society-wide crisis that the pandemic did just one or two years ago.
w record wealth inequality,
Wealth inequality decreased in 2022. In fact, the share of wealth held by the top .01%, 1%, and 10% of society peaked in late 2012 or early 2013. Meanwhile, the share of wealth held by the bottom 50% of society has been steadily rising since 2012.
Besides, much of the concern with wealth inequality is misguided. The world is not zero-sum, and there is not a finite amount of human well-being that must be distributed. I’m less worried about the gap in wealth than I am about the overall quality of life for those at the bottom and in the middle. If the economy is strong, and the rising tide is lifting all boats, I’m happy.
On that count, things look pretty good when we look at the net amount of wealth held by the bottom 50% of society:
0 social safety net/job security,
This is the most egregious and easily disprovable falsehood in Lorenz’s tweet. Spend one second looking at the federal budget, and it’s clear that we spend over a trillion dollars per year on a federal safety net through programs like Medicaid, SNAP, TANF, the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Unemployment Benefits. And this doesn’t even take into account Social Security, Medicare, or money spent by states.
Plus, in contrast to common belief, America dedicates more money to these programs than we ever have before. As a share of GDP, social spending has been climbing steadily since the enactment of the New Deal in the 1930s.
In terms of job security, I also think Lorenz is going more on vibes than on any hard economic data. Both the national layoff rate and the national unemployment rate are very low. In fact, they’re both lower than they’ve been in decades. What this means is that people who want jobs can get them, and people who have jobs can keep them. Of course, there are exceptions (the tech industry, for instance, is experiencing heavy layoffs), but on the whole, the idea that young people don’t have job security is not grounded in anything tangible.
as climate change cooks the world
Climate change is absolutely a problem. Scientists already say that the planet is already 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, and this is already having an impact on our environment and living conditions.
But “cooks the world” is absurd hyperbole that obfuscates the good news that the worst-case scenarios for climate change seem to be off the table. Projections that we would see temperatures rise by 4 or 5 degrees by the end of the century now estimate a rise of somewhere between 2 and 3 degrees. While this will cause some level of environmental destruction and human suffering, it’s not going to lead to the kind of global apocalypse that people were predicting just a few years ago.
The reason for the turnaround is some combination of countries taking aggressive action to curb their carbon output and incredible technological developments that have made reusable energy cheaper and more convenient. Together, these factors are why the use of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions are projected to peak before 2030.
In the context of the U.S., specifically, we should note that the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed last year, is the single largest investment the country has ever made in stopping climate change. It invests hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize clean energy and is a big part of why we’re on target to hit our goal of cutting emissions by over 50% of 2005 levels by 2030.
The Downside of Doomerism
I’m not arguing that everything is perfect in America. Lots of people struggle with very real problems, and we should be working to solve them. But hyperbolizing and doom-mongering about them does a disservice to ourselves on both a personal and society-wide level.
From an individual perspective, it is deeply unhealthy to exaggerate the awfulness of the world. An entire branch of psychological treatment known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has been built around this insight. The core of CBT is learning to recognize illogical and harmful thought patterns — including catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, disqualifying the positive — that can be going on in the background of your mind, trapping you in negative emotional cycles without you even knowing.
Lorenz and other doomers like her are doing exactly what CBT tries to teach us not to: indulging in harmful psychological distortions and encouraging others to do the same. That’s why it’s sad, but not altogether surprising, that Lorenz follows up her initial tweet with one that shows her struggling to find “any amt of hope or optimism” about life in our country.
In addition to the concerning mental health implications, imagining that every ill that afflicts us in our personal lives is a result of external conditions robs people of personal agency. Why would I go out and work to make my life better if such efforts are doomed to fail in a capitalist hellscape? I’m bound to suffer no matter what I do, so I may as well suffer here in my room playing video games than out in the world working hard to build something or improve my lot in life.
From a society-wide perspective, the downside to Lorenz’s brand of doomerism is even more clear. Misdiagnoses will lead to mistreatment. In other words, if we think that America is suffering from Problem A and craft public policy to treat Problem A, it will be a big waste of time and resources when we discover that the real issue is Problem B. Lorenz herself is likely doing this very thing by waving away the harmful consequences that phones (and social media by extension) pose to teenage mental health — an issue that has been extensively researched in recent years and seems more convincing by the day.
The big takeaway here is that cosplaying the apocalypse is damaging to us as individuals and as a society. To make the world a better place, we need to first understand it and believe we can change it.
When Lorenz insists to her hundreds of thousands of followers that America is a hellscape and that having hope is delusional, she might feel the thrill of moral righteousness, but she’s ultimately making herself — and the rest of us who share this country with her — worse off.
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— Seth
Another relevant question for Lorenz and people like her, "compared to what?"