Truth Is Not Truth

PART 5: "Objectivity" is really just mainstream consensus.

---

William Nordhaus was the first economist of our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change, and according to his modeling wizardry, a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7°C and 3.5°C would make the global economy reach “optimal” adaptation. What is optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned into the late 21st century, and humanity can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and little economic sacrifices from wealthy nations. His work won him a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, and his ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics. But most climate scientists argue that the global temperatures warming from 3°C to 4°C would reduce hospitable and cultivable land to the point that it could total billions of deaths within the next eight decades or less, along with global shocks like rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, and mass starvation. It is unsurprising to see the powers-that-be recognize and reward the “factual” and “objective” economic models that determine the global economy can withstand climate catastrophe with little financial sacrifice. This is meritocracy in action. The earth will be uninhabitable, but so long as the economy keeps humming along, humans won’t need plants and animals since food comes from the grocery store.

Among the most exasperating aspects of being a progressive in America is that it is considered pie-in-the-sky economic illiteracy to support baseline social democracy as practiced in every other developed nation. The double standard is evident when the facts and figures and studies and analyses illustrate that the average American worker has experienced a decline in their standard of living since the U.S. underwent a fulsome embrace of supply-side economics. Americans work longer hours for stagnating wages. The nation is experiencing increasing rates of loneliness, suicidality, addiction, and financial precarity. Concentrating wealth and monopolistic corporate power are corroding democracy and the economy. The snide and dismissive response to these pointed critiques is this sort of patronizing discursive tendency that assures us these symptoms are not endemic to capitalism, of course, because this is not real capitalism, but crony capitalism—or these days, woke capitalism. Apparently, attaching a qualifier to the word “capitalism” somehow absolves it from its lurid and tumescent failures. Apparently, any evil committed in the name of socialism is a direct refutation of socialism as a philosophy and economic program, but any of the quotidian indignities we experience for the maintenance of free markets can be attributed to anything but capitalism.

So if all questions of macroeconomics and imperialism and institutional legitimacy are off the table, the only other option is to adopt Bush-era tactics of constantly whipping voters into a grift-amenable frenzy. The unique grossness of Trump, while mostly aesthetic, revealed the inherent con in Republican appeals: It is the divine right for the rich to snatch what they feel entitled to with impunity, and any effort of the government to remedy any past injustice is tantamount to Stalinist totalitarianism —and all of this is  complimented with a toxic heaping of white power and white grievance. The Democratic con is a little more opaque, but it centers around them purportedly supporting universal social programs, but with the signature caveat that these things are of course impossible unless we elect at least 80 Democratic Senators to finally defeat the filibuster and anyway must be negotiated with a demonic opposition party that is only legitimized through America’s irredeemable bigotry.

Republicans have, for a few generations, touted not just government but governance as inherently evil. When in power, they have reliably turned institutions inside out and against themselves until they have become robust and acidic satires of expert impotence, and so made their strange faith real. When out of power, Republicans give way to the Democrats who have accepted their opponents’ rancid priors as reality and their own job as fundamentally janitorial. It is obvious, amid the rubble Trump has made and the Biden Administration’s failure to reach across the aisle to Get Things Done, that a bit of concentrated pressure on a sufficiently rotten bulwark can bring down the whole gilded edifice. In the face of America’s rightward drift toward fascistic oligarchy, this would make the Democrats complacent at best and complicit at worst.

America is trapped in this boring culture war with no end in sight, leveraged by both mainstream Republicans and Democrats to offer a social critique of why everything sucks without confronting the systemic horrors baked into deregulated capitalism. MAGA chuds losing their absolute shit over the race of the Little Mermaid is blatantly idiotic because it misses the bigger picture, which is Disney switched Ariel’s bottom half from mahi-mahi to tilapia, and I will not stand for it (and neither can she)! But when Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema did her whole quirky YAAAS QUEEN SLAY KWEEN thumbs down to raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour, I also envisioned algorithmic journos farting out insufferable and identikit thinkpieces like, It’s sexist to criticize a woman’s mannerisms when Democratic men also voted “no” on this bill, that is just so besides the fucking point.

The most insidious aspect of Barack Obama’s legacy is his presidency hoovered people’s genuine base desires for hope and change and ground them into nothing, and this convinced rank-and-file Democrats that it is actually pragmatic and virtuous to believe that nothing can fundamentally change. If voters from mainstream Democrats to mainstream Republicans have accepted that government only exists to inflict and retroactively justify harm, then politics is nothing more than an escapist television program. Any “truth” recedes from whatever subjective rationalization justifies an intense attachment to either party, or even unencumbered capitalism in general.

As a person who observes politics, I am trying to move away from the instinct to emotionally invest myself in an outcome or to place my faith in a political party, because it’s essentially like rooting for the New York Mets: You know your team sucks and is run by a bunch of incompetent and greedy oligarchs, but you already went through the trouble of buying a jersey, so you’re going to cheer for them regardless. For Democrats, beating Trump wasn’t just a salient issue, but the most important issue. Under this framework, policy differences are subordinate to who you prefer to watch on television as the protagonist of whatever version of stage-managed decline we get. The prospect of voting for Michael Bloomberg—who presided over turning NYC into a racist police state and made weird Xerox comments about Black people and was literally a Republican through the Bush years and until 2018—was the deflating logical endpoint of Vote Blue, No Matter Who.

Likely from stupid luck and falling ass-backward into lightning in a bottle, Trump’s nonsensical blabber-mouthing dovetailed with a broader truth: Most Americans are struggling because both parties are pimping themselves out to the same job-exporting, wage-suppressing donors. Millions of individuals are justified, even if misguided, in feeling anxious and uncertain and frightened about the future. Those in power have nothing to offer in explaining how America can pull itself out of this shrugging and fatalist rut—they just have lavish rhetorical flourishes and cultural wedge issues.

The answer to Trumpism is not to tweet “believe in science.” There has to be action, guided by a simple, but powerful story that communicates some truth about the present and about the future. It must capture imaginations and center a problem, solutions, and a vision of a collective good. The idea now that we have no choice but continued decline and widespread cruelty writ large, that the only viable options are between a version that is happy about it and one that is sad about it, is a remarkable abdication of responsibility. But the upshot here is there’s a sense that this current order is reaching the end-stage of its natural life, which is terrifying but full of dreamlike possibility. Folks across history have put forth breadcrumbs that have led to a new metaphysics, and if successful, this will culminate in a shared system of belief and scientific reason. It doesn’t reject previous understandings, but rather unifies them into a more complete whole. A lot of the pieces are pretty easy to point to, and the project now is figuring out how to cohere it into a generative mass of symbols. In his book, The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber writes, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

At the beginning of the movie, The Founder, Ray Kroc is pepping himself up to be a milkshake salesman by listening to this Dale Carnegie record in his hotel room, and it’s just a spiel about how persistence is the key to success. As Kroc swindles the McDonald brothers out of their business, he takes credit for their fast food delivery logistics, he calls his first franchise “McDonald's #1,” he starts referring to himself as the founder, and he buys the McDonald’s name from them. Kroc succeeded through the efforts of harder working or more creatively minded collaborators who came up with ideas at every point and then took credit for them because he had the money. Capitalism is a magnet that pulls people like Ray Kroc up and pulls people like the McDonald brothers down. It is a system that, by definition, rewards people who are most interested in making money; it points like a North Star, a firmament for those who are most aware of their self-serving smallness and single-minded dedication to their own narrow interests, whose hollow and arid drive blinds them to abstract notions of value outside of material acquisition. The Founder gives us a funhouse refraction of how blank greed and compounding unaccountability warp and weaken people, and more importantly, how the front-office types who thrive in capitalism remake us in their image through, you know, persistence.

Examined from this perspective, Objective Truth was never that objective. It’s a justification for a flailing and failing status quo. The tangle of hypocrisies and contradictions and weird umbrage unravels cleanly when you remember that this is all mostly about preserving wealth and power. “Objectivity” is one of many subjective interpretations of reality following a lineage of interchangeable soft pink guys whiffing on high-fives in their luxury boxes. All this bloated, wobbling spectacle about truth and nuance and complexity is a way to sell their self-regard because their perspectives happened to win out in the marketplace of ideas and not-so-coincidentally made them rich in the process. The inability or unwillingness to reckon with this increasingly untenable present becomes more risky by the day. What we consider to be objective is whatever the default and institutional consensus happens to be at any given moment in human history. And if you’re still unconvinced, well, the idea of the sun revolving around the earth was once deemed objective.

---

PREVIOUS

On Liberal MAGA

---