GDP pt. VIII

Visible sainthood and "human capital"

The meaning of any given thing depends critically on the moment and manner of your encountering it. Within the realm of political theory, as elsewhere, people often say the same thing in different ways; and then we use the same term to mean opposite or near-opposite things, talking past each other and wondering why we’re frustrated with the political discourse. These facts and the confusions attending them have been used expertly by a ruling class that excels particularly in narrative management. Confusion about values and the language we use to define and negotiate them has permitted the oligarchical system to impose a new form of puritanism and moral tyranny, but with money-growth at its center. Our idea of politics-as-entertainment is such that we have confused being spectators and rabid fans with being participants. Our major media institutions, many of which hold entertainment, sports, and “news” subsidiaries, push this sports fan mode of politics constantly and relentlessly, and we so misrecognize ourselves today that we eat it up. It fits within a broader system of social confusion that benefits class power. Prevailing oligarchical political practice has yielded forms of subjectivity so toxic and destructive that we use phrases like human capital without thinking about it. We are all human capital, managing our little risk portfolios on behalf of capital, the modern god, whether that’s retirement or just trying to have food in 2025 America. We celebrate the commodification of human life as human capital, as our discourse ignores questions of class, poverty, homelessness, etc. Whatever that ideology is called, it is poisonous to human beings and communities.

The fourth branch of the U.S. government has been able to obscure its role in reproducing these social and psychological dynamics. This system is not well understood to supposed experts, much less the public masses. Part of the confusion regarding the progression of events is the popular, but incomplete and factually flawed folk version of history, which describes a wave of general deregulatory activity in the 1970s and ‘80s. There were certainly major deregulatory initiatives during the period and into the ‘90s, for certain industries (airlines, telecom, and others). But the broader trends in the decades since have been increases in the power and personnel of federal agencies and an extraordinary proliferation of new rules and agency powers. All of this has coincided of course with dramatic increases in inequality; the steady growth of an authoritarian police state; successive food crises; an explosion of new, illegal wars with no declaration from Congress; the gutting of the welfare state; the stagnation of the real sector in favor of an insane and thoroughly counterfeit casino system; overlapping crises of mental health and loneliness; the resurgence of white nationalism, open racism, and anti-immigrant animus; and the steady concentration of market power in a handful of global giants. These trends go with the administrative state, not against it.