November 8, 2024

Man does not live by bread alone.

Two anecdotes.

A few years ago, I was asked to help a small Latino media brand get into premium content. As always happens, they had no money. So I scoured YouTube for on-brand voices and brought a few in as licensing deals.

One of those voices, a young man, from one of the most important parts of California, the “forgotten” Inland Empire, told me his dream was to become like Joe Rogan.

Now, that’s a loaded statement. And the easy reading is most likely the correct one: he wants to be paid very well to talk to people.

Oprah Winfrey was and is very much like Joe Rogan and vice versa. (I once rushed through a movie script that began to bite at that very idea, that Winphrey’s shtick was both harmful and restorative.)

The second anecdote is much simpler: our boys are in their second year of catechism and every few weeks the parents are called to a meeting to talk about upcoming events, etc.

One such event is a dinner that the children share with the men who live temporarily in our church’s homeless shelter. The families of the kids in catechism are asked to contribute with food. This year, the organizer of the event (a volunteer, as all the teachers are) made a point of stressing that she understands food is expensive, etc.

I would say she belabored the point. And I’ve spent the last ~35 years of my life doing one thing, over and over again, listening carefully to how people talk, reading carefully what they write, etc.

I believe she adopted this verbal flourish quite simply because it’s in the air. (She made no such emphasis last year!)

It doesn’t matter to what extent it’s still true. What matters is that the idea is in circulation.

Man does not live by bread alone.

As I’ve written here before, the truth as we humans know it is a carefully produced thing. It has to be established, tested, verified, etc. It takes time and costs money to make the truth. (The inner workings of a virus or a black hole are unknown to us without such efforts, etc.)

Many who vote for, or even identify with, the US Republican party have a belief that the markets are very good at establishing the truth.

I neglected to say “free markets” because, well, that’s exactly the rub: such fact-finding depends on true competition. And one of the things that companies do — all companies — is maximize whatever opportunities they have to reduce competition. It’s not in their interests to have to "leave it all on the field.”

A simpler way of saying this might be that de-escalation requires a third party intervention — a referee. And no player will proactively play fair if they believe their opponent is cheating and will get away with it.

The US Republican party has put as their representative a person who does not believe in the truth. This is, as you know, a well documented fact. Well-educated Republicans may choose this poison as a way of crippling a more muscular FTC but such poison spreads quickly.

Reality doesn’t care about your rationalizations. Fervor doesn’t erase fundamentals. From Lysenkoism to the Great Leap Forward to MAGA, authoritarian movements that play games with reality for “tactical” gains will fail upon prolonged exposure to reality.

Of course, it won’t be my former colleagues who will face the consequences. It will be millions of people whose lives will be darker, whose hopes will be crushed, whose bodies will be broken, whose families destroyed.

As for those of us who believe in referees, who believe in science, who believe in free and fair competition, who believe in free and fair elections: we’ll need to get much, much better at myth-making.

Because the facts are never enough.

Man does not live by bread alone.

In the USA, COVID required sacrifices of a society that had not been asked to make any sacrifices for decades. It’s still too early to tell just what scars that period has left on our body politic and I’m not even sure we’ll have the scientific means (the time, the money, the expertise, the willpower) to fully establish it.

But the vaccine denialism that the Republican party has endorsed and championed points to a very, very dark future.

The Biden administration’s cure for the economic ills that followed was full employment. It should have added price caps.

Because of the enduring myth of the free market, and the degree to which our elites are captured by corporate groupthink, the rationale for such such caps would have required a powerful voice and a full chorus to champion. It’s impossible to prove a counterfactual but I’ll leave you to speculate how that would have worked out.

Now, we are confronting a revanchist, plutocratic takeover of all branches of the federal government. And while many will be focused on plunder, more than a few are dead set on destroying the means for a return to democracy, a return to the free market, a return to science.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, I’m sorry to say that you have not done the reading.

JD Vance compared Trump to Hitler, but it’s largely because Americans have had the luxury of being grossly uninformed — lazy and disinterested. Berlusconi, Orban, Putin were and are much more fitting analogies.

We can also look to Poland, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc and so forth for clear examples of what is ahead.

Fair play is an anomaly in the history of human affairs. We’re regressing to the norm, with supercomputers to assist in our chicanery.

It’s not a coincidence that price gouging by supermarket chains contributed to America’s rejection of the Biden Administration.

Selfishness is a vicious cycle. Low trust societies don’t mature into high trust ones without fundamental changes in how they talk and thus understand the world around us.

Man does not live by bread alone.

I apologize to my non-Christian readers for today’s refrain. But I think the example of Christianity is worth studying.

Christianity is, famously, the religion of losers.¹

You don’t have to take my word for it. Our “mascot” is a man being tortured to death by the state, betrayed by his own people.

And, yet, Christianity survived.

For centuries it has been the faith of the outcast, the minority, the powerless.

It is a religion that enshrines meekness.

For Americans, it is the religion of Martin Luther King Jr.

It was not long ago that the base of the Democratic party was living under apartheid. It was not long ago that the ideologues of the Republican party were championing the Confederacy.

These are understatements.

You may or may not have a religious life but I am certain, absolutely certain, as a matter of scientific fact, that a political movement that does not put forth powerful myths of sacrifice and solidarity will not survive contact with American fascism.

Talk soon, take care,
Jose