Hard to Kill: Zombie Ideas That Need Slaying

As we come down the home stretch of the shitshow that is the 2024 Presidential election, it has become clear that our problem is not just Trump, or his legion of followers, or even the entire American political system, which has tipped over completely into plutocratic servitude. What is really crippling us is a dysfunctional set of ideas, a system of zombie ideas so entrenched that we literally can’t understand our current realities or a feasible path forward into the future. This leaves us floundering around in the playground of hyper-polarized culture war, increasingly angry and combative, blaming the other ‘side’ for blocking the enactment of what, in actuality, are impossible fever-dreams of delusion.

These zombie ideas need slaying, and that needs to happen fast, before the cascading and intertwined collapse of natural support systems forecloses on the project of human civilization. Before we look at the best method for killing off these obsolete ideas, let’s look at what they are. Here are the ideas that need to be swept into the dustbin, so that we can have a fighting chance at saving our planet, and thus, ourselves.

• Economic growth is good: this is the big one, as every industrialized country views growth as its most important goal. But economies exist in the natural, physical world, and eternal compound growth inside a finite natural system is impossible. When we say that consumer-industrial civilization is unsustainable, it is mainly due to the impossibility of perpetual growth. We will need different indicators for national health, replacing the phantasm of growth.
• Full employment: closely related to endless economic growth is the idea that maximizing jobs and paid labor should be a central economic policy goal. Work is seen as the primary catalyst for personal achievement, character formation, and economic discipline. But this lionizing of the work ethic is no longer applicable in our present situation. Mature capitalism, driven by technology and the evolution of business operations, relentlessly shrinks the economic value of labor, to the point where there is very little correspondence left between morality, hard work, and financial reward. A tiny fraction of the population reaps most of the benefits of our system, leaving the rest of us with table scraps and a widening swath of bullshit jobs (many of those on the chopping block as AI advances).
• Careerism: because the economic value of human skill and labor will continue to decline (it’s a global phenomenon, after all), careerism will have to go. Aside from a fortunate few who have the talent, good fortune, and opportunity to ‘do what they love,’ most of us have lost what little enchantment we might have had in the realm of work. Despite the ad nauseam urgings of our culture-makers, the vast majority of regular people cannot ‘follow their dreams,’ nor can most of us ‘do whatever you want to do, as long as you work hard and set your mind to it.’ These are wonderful-sounding platitudes, but they are not applicable to our current labor landscape. As I have described many times in this blog, the Lake Wobegon society, where everyone is above average, working in the wonderful jobs of the future, is utter delusion. Most of us scrape by, working in jobs that we hate or just barely tolerate. The labor market will not change. We have to change.
• Increased consumption is healthy: this is another close corollary to economic growth, and is better described as the engine of growth itself. GDP is, after all, simply a measure of all kinds of consumption, thrown together in the aggregate. Almost 70% of the US economy is driven by personal/household consumption. But again, endlessly increasing consumption on a finite planet is impossible, especially considering that we are already swimming in our own waste from prior consumption.
• Population decline is bad: because of demographic transition (richer societies all experience declining birth rates as people, especially women, change their life priorities), advanced industrial countries are starting to panic at their aging populations and the commensurate need to utilize migrants to fill crucial labor gaps. In the US, this ‘population panic’ is driving the current conservative push to re-take control over women’s bodies, forcing more reproduction via the hard route of banning abortion, and the soft route of shaming the childless as enemies of the state. But in reality, population decline is something to be celebrated and pursued. A huge part of our ecological overshoot is that there are just too many of us. Even if we had the greenest technologies imaginable, the planet still can’t support 8 billion people, let alone 10 billion plus expected by 2080. We need to do whatever we can to bring that number down fast.
• Single-family households are the ideal social building block: this is another biggie. In the US, the micro-household is held up as the epitome of normality and the pinnacle of a fulfilling life. But as I have detailed many times in this blog (most recently, in this post), this household format is the primary driver of ecological destruction, economic precariousness, and psychological illness, along with a host of other problems. It’s just too small.
• Individual achievement is the highest form of personal development: our society’s focus on careerism and personal consumption, along with the continued centrality of star culture, has made achievement the linchpin of personal fulfillment. The winner-take-all economy reinforces the idea that cooperation, humility, and other ‘softer’ virtues are for losers. We are warping our children by feeding them the delusion that they should all have these lofty hopes and dreams, even from an early age, dreams that can be fulfilled if they just put their minds to it, work hard, and believe. This is clearly not the case for most people, and the relentless pressure of over-forced individualism is profoundly damaging to children and teens.
• Manhood is about aggression, competition, achievement and triumph: I don’t like to use the phrase ‘toxic masculinity,’ but that’s the general neighborhood.
• Leadership is about strength, toughness, and forcefulness: this hasn’t turned out too well recently.
• Life must be extended at all costs: as our population ages, and more and more of our resources and energy go towards the care of our elders, the hyper-expensive and often predatory medicalization of the end-of-life is becoming problematic. Social isolation exacerbates this problem, and the intrafamilial stresses created by exorbitant and bankrupting medical care are increasingly unbearable.
• Car culture represents freedom and independence: it would be hard to overemphasize how the automobile has shaped American history and society. Indeed, many of our current problems stem from a set of adjustment crises surrounding the car. Brick and mortar businesses become obsolete as car traffic changes or disappears. Older city centers empty out as motor traffic moves out to suburbs and exurbs. Aging infrastructure becomes impossible to upkeep because economic inequality has stretched the tax base to the breaking point (regular people don’t have the money, and rich people can pay to hide theirs). In the big picture, the United States is an enormous country that was filled up too fast with junky stuff, mostly accomplished by, and designed for, the car. As fossil fuels disappear, this auto-centric albatross will totter and collapse.
• A Green Revolution/Green New Deal can save us: there is a short and uncomfortable answer. It can’t. See https://www.brightgreenlies.com for a good summation of the evidence.
• Activism and ‘causes’ will lead us to the promised land: they won’t. This is not to say that movements and activism have not made amazing achievements in the past, or even that they are not doing good and important work today. There are many noble people fighting the good fight, improving people’s lives and achieving justice for the downtrodden and marginalized. But ultimately, social change on a civilizational scale, which is what we need urgently, will have to be driven by a rapid change in our households themselves, the building blocks of consumer-industrial civilization. Unless that foundational household unit is completely remade, we won’t be able to stem the tide of ecological collapse.
• The marketplace has the answers and will work things out for us: the marketplace is driven by demand signals from the consuming units, which is us, our households. The market has no stake or purpose in fighting against our impending natural catastrophes. It only responds to price signals driven by us. We must act first.
• Politicians have the answers: I won’t belabor the ridiculousness of this idea here. See my earlier posts on conservatives and liberals for deeper background.

That’s a hefty list of ideological shit that needs to be jettisoned. If we had to tackle each one separately, it would be impossible to make a dent, even on just a couple. But fortunately, we don’t have to fight these zombie ideas one-by-one. We could do it all at once. How?

Well, here you’ll have to do some work yourself, by checking out many earlier posts on this blog. I don’t have space here to lay out the details, but the short form is this: we will need to change the household from its current microformat (US household size is now at just 2.5 people, with 30% of households being a single person) to a much larger format of around 100–150 people, what I have termed BHBs (Bigger Home Bases). The cultural shift to BHBs should be backstopped and supported via UBI (Universal Basic Income), to the tune of $1000-$1200 a month for all US citizens. And this massive economic shift would rest on a completely different understanding of the functions of taxation, federal spending, and indeed of money itself: MMT (Modern Money Theory).

But these major shifts will never happen from the top down. Our political and economic leaders would never entertain this type of project, so the only way to kickstart it is by creating a privately-funded set of BHBs around the country, maybe 15–20 in total, each containing around 150 people. Every BHB resident would get a monthly UBI, but the only other assistance would be non-financial (logistical help in contacting builders, zoning boards, insurance companies, etc.). These model BHBs would be heavily publicized in traditional and social media, and would be testing grounds for a new way of life. As Billie Jean King said, “you have to see it to be it.” These BHBs would operate on a simple charter, a commitment to reducing ecological impact, withdrawing participation in the outside workforce, non-exploitation of members, etc. The idea is that people would see this new household format in action, see it working, and then demand from US politicians that they get on board with UBI and MMT, to support the transition to this new way of living. And then, perhaps, the US would have more to bring to the table in international arenas, having a new set of socioeconomic behaviors that would be rapidly reducing ecological impact in real time. Other countries might even institute their own versions of household-reformatting, creating global momentum for ecological repair and rejuvenation.

But as I mentioned, do some of your own digging in this blog, and also check out the voluminous literature on UBI and MMT for more info on those ideas. Most advocates of UBI and MMT don’t put them together in their proposals, but I think that they fit together naturally, along with BHBs, to form a potent combination.

But to close out this piece, I want to dwell a little more on what people would seen in these model BHBs, how they would seen to be ‘working’. How exactly would these communities manifest success, and how would they tackle the suite of zombie ideas that we looked at above? Well, get ready for another bullet list, but this one is a silver bullet list, showing how BHBs could attack almost all of our problems at the same time.

• Mechanism for economic contraction: much larger groups sharing resources, reducing individual consumption sharply.
• Mechanism for population contraction: living as a group with more peer and intergenerational interaction would reduce the cultural and psychological pressure to have children inside nuclear family boundaries. In other words, people wouldn’t need to have kids just because ‘that’s what everyone does.’ Different group dynamics and life-goals would coil around the community, not just around flesh-and-blood relations.
• Robust support for child and elder care: these are two of the most expensive outlays in our current societal setup. BHBs could bring most of this in-house, saving money and enhancing personal interaction. Taking elders out of the hyper-expense medical sphere would be groundbreaking. The opportunity would be in place for seniors to die peacefully and on their own terms, surrounded by a large group of community loved ones.
• Upper hand returned to workers: UBI and the collective format of BHBs would sharply reduce the need for every single person to work in the paid labor market. People could hold out for jobs that they truly want, instead of being compelled to work out of economic privation. With workers being able to pick and choose potential jobs, employers would need to raise wages and/or significantly improve working conditions (pensions, perks, flex-work, etc.)
• Reduced ecological impact via reduced consumption: overconsumption is driven by every micro-household having to buy its own set of stuff. BHBs would sharply reduce consumption, via the same economic mechanisms that businesses use: central purchasing and division of labor. The phenomenon of therapeutic consumption (buying shit to make ourselves feel better because life sucks) would be reduced, as people cultivate more interpersonal relationships (which is good, because we are social animals that need lots of intimacy).
• Reduced fossil fuel use: with many people pulled out of the formal working sector, commuting travel would be sharply curtailed, as millions of people would just spend their days in the larger community, performing in-house functions.
• Inflation buster: with UBI and MMT only, there would be a risk of inflation, with more federal spending and more money in general sloshing around the system. But the BHBs would offset that inflationary pressure, because sharply reduced consumption would push prices down. And collective living in much larger groups would take a lot of pressure off housing market prices, as millions of smaller units would be freed up, driving prices down.
• Reduced loneliness: Obama’s surgeon general highlighted the epidemic of loneliness that is killing us. BHBs would basically eliminate that, by design.
• Reduced addiction to social media and the resulting depression (especially amongst teens): BHBs would offer actual human intimacy and interaction in copious amounts.
• Rebuilding of social skills: BHBs would foster cooperation, tolerance, empathy, team spirit, etc. These are things in short supply in our post-pandemic, polarized landscape.
• Reduced vulnerability of the elderly to scams: BHBs would reduce the need for older people to manage all their own technological and financial affairs. BHBs could centralize much of these needs into a kind of internal account management. Seniors could spend their last years just living life and enjoying their companions, instead of scrolling through scam emails and answering scam phone calls.
• Increased financial stability: along with the UBI and the reduced need to work, BHBs could foster debt reduction and consolidation, to allow for better financial planning for the future.
• Improved physical and mental health: with reduced consumption, and with stress and anxiety going down due to less job pressure and more social interaction, people in BHBs would be healthier and happier, in body and mind. Needless to say, this would reduce health care spending, and would be another inflation fighter.
• Incubators for personal creativity: with more time and energy freed up, people could pursue independent and group projects, like small businesses, artistic endeavors, and other creative outlets. Again, great for mental health.
• Food self-reliance: model BHBs would be chartered to reduce dependence on sprawling global supply chains for food. There could be community farms, gardens, root cellars, breweries, and other projects to keep food local and healthy.
• Redefinition of gender roles: BHBs would be chartered as non-exploitative and non-coercive. In that setting, people would have more autonomous power and more intimate dependencies at the same time. This would mean more security and freedom to be who you are, without the relentless pressures of job performance (especially in a world where the economic value of labor is cratering) and gender expectations (parenthood, manliness, impossible female double-standards, etc.). For men especially, currently undergoing an identity crisis due primarily to collapsing job prospects, which is then driving much of the Trump-MAGA toxicity, the opportunity to participate in community life and team projects would provide the opportunity to be impactful again without having to dominate others and/or earn lots of money.
• Shifting the national discussion away from polarizing issues: BHBs could provide a spark for a new national endeavor, a new way for Americans to be unified in pursuit of something tangible, instead of obsessing over the impossible fantasies of our political, business, and cultural ‘leaders.’
• Changing the function of government: if BHBs/UBI/MMT gain traction, the entire purpose of the US government could shift from maintenance of the plutocracy to direct citizen aid and ecosystem rehabilitation. I actually see UBI as a way to shrink the federal government overall, because it would allow the elimination of many programs predicated on maximizing employment and consumption. The UBI itself would be simple to maintain, needing far less bureaucracy than the panoply of employment programs and corporate subsidies.
• Positive model for the rest of the world: as mentioned above, BHBs/UBI/MMT could foment some popular pressure in other countries, with people demanding their own versions of the project. It could spawn a different approach to international aid, providing logistical support for countries to implement their own approaches to UBI. And if the US can use MMT to fund massive eco-rehabilitation projects inside its own borders, that approach could also be exported to countries struggling with their own despoiled ecosystems.

OK, that was a long post. But hopefully that lays out how a huge number of problems could be tackled with a relatively simple approach. Not easy, mind you, but relatively simple. Embarking on a national BHB/UBI/MMT project would be a huge shift, but the heavy lifting would largely be ideological, not logistical. And by starting with an eminently-doable set of model BHBs, the first step towards civilizational transformation could just be finding out if 150 people can get along and work together towards a common life and a common goal. I think they could, so I think that we can.

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on September 21, 2024.