The walls are closing in, America
You can’t keep running away.
Earlier today I got a text of a kind all too familiar to me lately:
Before I even get into it, I just want to say that this was offered for a domicile that is part of a city-managed public housing project. There are city contractors that come around on a regular basis to trim hedges and deal with stray tree branches, and they also mow the lawns and occasionally pressure wash the driveways. The lease agreements forbid tenants from hiring their own people to do this stuff. But yea, expect a hapless 20-year-old on Ritalin to know all of that and see how it goes.
I don’t know how perceptive you are when it comes to the world around you, but this is no ordinary solicitation. This is what I call the ‘helium flash’ of the American economy, analogous to the runaway fusion of helium our Sun will experience in about 1.2 billion years. Per Wikipedia:
Low-mass stars do not produce enough gravitational pressure to initiate normal helium fusion. As the hydrogen in the core is exhausted, some of the helium left behind is instead compacted into degenerate matter, supported against gravitational collapse by quantum mechanical pressure rather than thermal pressure.
Gravity is money, and gravitational pressure is money compelling people to act. Gravitational collapse is the expulsion of economically active people from the system.
Degenerate matter is what young people have become, as quantum mechanical pressure is intrinsic and for us is analogous to the fountain of youth – they simply act, regardless of how objectively bad things are. Thermal pressure is the more conventional systemic nudging of people to glom onto what’s most profitable, and is dominant for older, more established people who in our analogy have ‘escaped’ to the outer shell of still-burning hydrogen.
However, a property of degenerate matter is that increases in temperature do not produce an increase in the pressure of the matter until the thermal pressure becomes so very high that it exceeds degeneracy pressure. In main-sequence stars, thermal expansion regulates the core temperature, but in degenerate cores, this does not occur. Helium fusion increases the temperature, which increases the fusion rate, which further increases the temperature in a runaway reaction, which quickly spans the entire core. This produces a flash of very intense helium fusion that lasts only a few minutes, but during that time, produces energy at a rate comparable to the entire Milky Way galaxy.
When you’re 20 years old, being degenerate hasn’t much consequence. So turning up the heat in your life is something you can live with, up to a point. We are reaching that point, and this explosion of door-to-door salesmanship is the telltale. This is the last stand for the most valuable and productive segment of America’s population; there is no ‘next stop’ after this. Next stop is between a dog’s hindquarters to be frank.
It is beyond banal for me to observe that things have gone to shit in America. Everybody knows this and everybody who cares to talk about it at all says so. What’s less banal is to properly assign responsibility for it; for the most part, Americans of all ages and statures are still content to play the blame game. They’re so addicted to it that they usually can’t even recognise someone who is trying to find productive fault – to them, it’s just another someone laying the blame to where they think it belongs. Hence the obsession with ‘both-sidesing’ every conflict they encounter – objective reality does not exist, and so objective morality goes out the window with it.
The reason that this delusion has been so widespread and unshakeable is because of the historical American wealth – our problems have been far too immaterial for far too long, and we have raised four successive generations of people who live their lives on pure executive fiat. The first to grow up like this have grandchildren now who don’t know how to give a shit if their lives depended on it—and their lives quite often do. We’re still running on the old software that christened shit like Live Aid in the 1980s – where not only did people act as if American consumerism could be pointed at world problems like some kind of directed energy weapon, but in a strange, reality-defying sense it actually was. We don’t live in a world capable of that anymore.
I’m no stranger to business and I just got done running a political campaign from zero with help from essentially nobody besides my husband. I got a fuckload of SPAM in my inbox from vultures trying to sell me SMS and email campaigns for tons of money I don’t have that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to receive even if I did, and I got zero volunteers and four donations that paid for the campaign business cards and nothing else. All the while my husband is doing roofing sales—something that has become a very similar door-to-door grift to the tree trimming thing mentioned at the start—and we’re running headlong into the same personal failures I bore witness to every day while running for office. Nobody gives a shit about anything. Everyone is pretending. Everyone of note is shamelessly corrupt. Nobody wants to confront this even though there’s no other way to solve it. Cowardice rules the day in America and American cowards only have themselves to blame for why criminals feast every day in our country.
If there was any conciliatory point to my campaign besides trying to win—and I was the only earnest candidate on the ballot, mind you—it was getting people to realise that they can’t keep bullshitting themselves like this.
It’s frustrating because it comes across to their immature minds like I’m trying to chastise or bully them into giving me something that I want, and they always remain suspicious of me even though I have no ulterior desire and never, ever get anything out of them in the end (because duh, I’m not trying to). Their heads are so far up their asses that all they do anymore is walk around being paranoid that everyone is trying to screw them over, resolving to be truly, originally woke in whatever way is fashionable in their subculture, and then they get totally reamed by somebody else anyway. Democrats are always faithfully en garde against Republicans and the Trump administration, only so that Paul Barringer can swoop in from behind and absolutely mog them and all they want to do about that is fight to remain in denial. Republicans do the exact same thing while their enemies from within feast with impunity. There’s no earnestness anywhere, because God forbid you look uncool for five minutes in a time when the generation of Cool is in charge, running everything into the ground.
I wish I could walk through these people’s thought processes with them just once to demonstrate how genuinely stupid and broken they are. I know why they do this. Every time I’m just seeing someone covering their homework like that one guy on Idiocracy did during Not Sure’s IQ test scene. “You’re not gonna get one over me!” Yes, you’re right, I’m not. And now that you’ve been proven right and I have obtained nothing from you whatsoever, do you want to talk about why you’re still not getting what you need elsewhere? Or are we gonna keep talking in circles playing mind games about this? Congressional budgets are riding on these decisions you think I’m here to grift on.
People need to realise that just because they’re drowning in demagoguery doesn’t mean demagoguery is all there ever is. They need to know what it looks like when someone gives a shit, and that’s the hardest thing, because to be honest, it’s probably true that no one ever gave a shit about them in the first place.
The threat in all of this is not coming from me or anyone like me. The threat is coming from reality. Look at the bond market:
When U.S. government bond holdings drop, their yields via interest rates rise to compensate. As with the Federal Reserve, interest rates are a lever that directly affects the heat of the economy. We know what higher interest rates do to the economy: they hasten the collapse of debt instruments, which we have been abusing relentlessly for decades to prop up an increasingly hollowed-out economy for American workers.
You don’t need the blatantly cooked JOLTS books or the latest CPI report to bear witness to this. This article opened with young people badly soliciting public housing projects for shrub trimming. These people are not even trying to go to college. They’re not going into trades. They’re not going into anything. They’ve been 100% abandoned by the stewards of the American economy who chose to ship their livelihoods overseas quite consistently for decades.
The reason that the youth aren’t rioting right now is because they’re doing as their parents taught them: lying to themselves and pretending their lives are just peachy to keep up pretensions of attractiveness so they don’t lose everything by appearing broke. The American youth have a pretty impossible dilemma: be honest one time and lose everything as people realise you’re broke and start avoiding you like a leper, or compulsively lie about your livelihood and try to prevent the mask from becoming a permanent part of your face. Neither of these options are healthy or conducive to success or happiness, but it’s what older generations have essentially mandated onto everyone as a hidden entry fee for their hilariously corrupt economy. “Just do X,” say the 50-year-olds who could—and often did—just walk in to get a job, or start hustling one day and their chutzpah carried them because everyone wasn’t permanently glued to their phones in public and otherwise locked into their bedrooms yet.
The older people have no insurance policy against the flip for this either. They’re 100% reliant on people being pliant and self-betraying, giving into bullshit legalisms about the rules that have been disingenuously twisted to disfavour them, or just being too cowardly to ever defy something that hurts them. This is why some of the worst actors in global geopolitics are building bunkers: they have no intention of trying to stop this oncoming mayhem, and in fact they often want to encourage it so they may profit from it at a safe distance. Zuckerberg anticipates war, and like a good millennial he treats it like an action movie where he’s going to be a supporting cast member in some Top Gun rip-off and all the peons are extras who don’t matter. Gen X is even more pathetically movie-brained about this. Total unreality, and billions of dollars are moving to make it happen anyway.
The first people to confront this reality will be those with the incentive to do so. On balance, that’s probably gonna be the people with the least amount of mortgages or HELOCs. It’s probably not gonna be people who went to trading firms because they hit every arbitrary mark with grades and school selection.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not here for that old world. That old world has been trying to kill me more or less since I can remember. I’m here for the new one, and I gotta admit, I’m pretty damn early aren’t I? Typical…