Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00020353
Socio-Enviro-Economic System
Needs fixing
Umair Haque ... Can the World Resist Being Americanized? Britain Got Americanized. Who’s Next? ... 9 min read
Peter Burgess
Can the World Resist Being Americanized? ... Britain Got Americanized. Who’s Next?
A woman in the UK holds a QAnon poster. Image Credit: Philip Sanderson
Who, you might ask yourself, would be painfully stupid enough to want to end up like America? The answer to that question is: Britain, for now. And maybe a whole lot of the world, shortly. One of the great questions of this decade is: who will be able to resist Americanization?
Take Britain as the bellwether example. Around 2005 or so, it had one of the world’s highest qualities of life — it was the envy of the world. Brits enjoyed the world’s finest public healthcare, courtesy of the NHS, the world’s finest public broadcaster, the BBC, and much, much more. Fast forward just fifteen years — the blink of an eye. And Britain’s a failing state. The NHS is being privatized, wrecked, shredded, doctors quitting en masse, American “health insurers” moving in for the kill. The BBC was turned into a Brexit-backing propaganda wing of the fanatical government. What happened to Britain? Americanization did. Brits don’t quite know it yet — well, maybe some do — but their future is now effectively living like Americans. That’s not a good thing. Americans enjoy the lowest quality of life in the rich world, and lives so aberrantly dystopian, they don’t even make sense to much of the poor world. But that is what’s on the cards for Brits now. They aren’t going to know what hit them when they begin getting “healthcare” bills for $125,000 for a routine operation.
To understand what I mean by “Americanization,” take the life of the average American. He wakes up. At 5 or 6AM. Maybe he heads off to the gym — he has to stay fit, or else. Then he goes off to “work.” Some soul-crushing “job”, which feels pointless — because it is. Its only real purpose is to make billionaires even richer — but they already have more money than they can spend in ten lifetimes. But he knows he’s one of the lucky ones. Thanks to this “job,” he has “healthcare,” “retirement,” he can educate his kids — or at least he has some semblance of those things. He has some minimal level of access to the basics, thanks to this job, from money to food to bodily security for his family — even if it means living in lifelong “debt,” in precisely the equivalent of a modern-day neoserf.
Without it? He’s simply left for dead.
But that’s not even the worst part. Question the average American about this, and they’ll do one of three things: a) get angry at you b) go into a long series of denials and justifications or c) give you the blank stare Americans are so famous for. (And, of course, that perfectly mirrors the trauma responses of fight/flight/freeze.) The average American has been brainwashed to see his subjugation as “freedom.” Which is if you try to liberate Americans from the systems that have destroyed their lives and society — racism, patriarchy, capital, and their values of money, brutality, selfishness, cruelty, aggression, hostility, rage — they fight tooth and nail against it.
What is Americanization? What am I trying to point out? Americans are essentially “resources” in a system that uses and abuses them. Their systems and institutions take their human possibility, and chew it up. American life is used to make money. For billionaires. Literally, as in human possibility put into a meat-grinder, so that money can be made. Americans don’t understand they live under the gun: their entire lives are subjugated, which means they’ve lived under the threat of violence. You have to get that “job” and make a billionaire richer, or you starve, you don’t get basic medicine like insulin, you can’t feed your kids.
And that’s the way that Americans believe it should be. They are true believers in their own subjugation, in living under the gun, in the threat of violence ruling every aspect of their lives, which are just brutal never-ending life-and-death contests for the basics they could simply give each other.
After all, all these things are public goods in the rest of the rich world, from Europe to Canada — money, medicine, healthcare, retirement, education, housing. They are public goods precisely because the fundamental belief that social democracies are built on is dignity — when I have dignity, then I can treat you as a friend, instead of an enemy, in a bitter, bruising battle for basics. Take away the ever-present threat of violence — and people can live in peace and friendship.
But America has never wanted that. Look beyond the immediate sensationalism of Trump vs Biden. What do you see? America has always wanted to Americanize the world. No, I’m not kidding. It has bombed or invaded more countries than any nation on earth — more than half the world. Its legacy of violence has left stains from Latin America to Africa to Asia and beyond. It’s “military bases” still stretch across the globe — meanwhile, Americans can’t afford insulin.
America has always wanted to Americanize the world.
What does that mean? America has always wanted the world to provide “resources” that it could turn into “profits” — which were then handed to billionaires. What is China, to America? It’s not a country, really, it’s just a pool of cheap labour, which is what Asia in totum is. What is India to America? It’s not a nation, really — it’s just a pool of “cheap services.” Why did America bomb or invade most of Latin and South America? To stop the threat of “socialism,” which simply meant people in those countries wanting to give one another the basics. America couldn’t allow that. People had to be made to buy them. Even if it meant unleashing death squads, as in Chile, or funding the very drug trade which would later consume America, too. Now let me formalise all that. Americanization means three things.
Economically, it means permanent austerity: America hasn’t increased its levels of public investment in more than half a century, precisely because it believes that public goods shouldn’t exist. Culturally, it means values of competition and aggression and brutality — public goods shouldn’t exist because people must be made to compete against one another for the very basics, like food, medicine, and money, and therefore, any level of cooperation is profoundly dangerous to the project of fragmenting a society into hostile, self-interested individuals — who are also, by the way, powerless.
Socially, it means extreme nationalism, if not fascism, which is what all the above amounts to in practice — a country that could care less about global public goods, like international law, or building system to feed and educate every child on earth, or stopping climate change, or preventing mass extinction. Because if you don’t believe in public goods for yourself, just brutal competition, well, then why would you believe in anything for the world, except hostility, aggression, and brutality?
All of that, in turn, rests on a certain philosophical foundation — not much of one, I’ll admit, more a set of anti-ideas than ideas. I often just call it the Nietzchean-Darwinian position. It says that the world is made of the strong and the weak, and the job of the strong is to subjugate the weak, because the weak are liabilities and burdens upon the strong. What this position really says is a) nobody has any intrinsic value, b) violence and brutality and cruelty and hate and selfishness are good things, and c) any kind of cooperation or gentleness or kindness is against the greater good, which is to be as aggressive and selfish as possible and treat everyone like an enemy.
Does all of that describe America to you? Does it explain why Americans live such poor, weird, cruel, dystopian lives — kids being shot at school, hundreds of thousands in “medical debt,” educating a kid costing more than a house, losing a job means the end of everything — and worse, want to live that way? By the way, don’t “not all Americans” me: Biden isn’t changing all that, he’s just offering a slightly nicer version of it.
But that all also describes what Britain has become. Britain, too, has become a place redolent of the Neitzschean-Darwinian mindset, which is why the NHS is being eviscerated, and nobody much cares, or why the BBC is now a state propaganda wing, less a true public broadcaster, and it’s accepted. Even the good Brit now has a sense of fatalism — while the bad one has adopted the American mentality hook, line, and sinker. Brits seem to believe more, by the day, in America’s values of greed, capital, selfishness, hostility, aggression, austerity, and rage, and less, in the European ones of gentleness, cooperation, care, consideration, investment, and warmth.
Britain has become Americanized — and now there is no way out. By the end of the decade, British life will be unrecognisable to most Brits. It will look less like the aspiring social democracy of the 90s and 2000s than America. Brits will have the same economic problems of mass inequality, lifelong debt, and stagnant incomes, the same social problems of hate, fascism, and ignorance, and the same cultural problems of the values of hostility and aggression and selfishness which produce all that lionised as the answer to the very problem they cause. Life expectancy, incomes, happiness, savings, social bonds, trust, and optimism will all continue to crater — just as they did in America — until there is nothing much of a society left.
But Europe seems to be heading in this direction, too. It is being rapidly Americanized. Its social democracies are on the back foot. Aggressive nationalists and outright fascists are making steep, deep inroads. And the same is true, to a lesser degree, perhaps, in Canada. In all these places, the cultural-social-economic triad of Americanization is setting in: austerity, economically, nationalism, socially, and individualism and materialism, culturally. Can Canada and Europe resist being Americanized?
I don’t know. I think the forces behind Americanization, though, need to be examined much further. What spreads Americanization? Well, America’s greatest export today is hate, spread via social media. Social media spreads American’s toxic values rampantly. Now everybody’s making the Instagram trout pout or showing off their perfect lives or perfect pecs. Now everybody’s at the mercy of crazy conspiracy theories spread algorithmically on Facebook and YouTube. We’re all culturally. becoming Americans, now. And that is not a good thing. Because Americans are the most backwards, selfish and violent people on the planet, by a very long way.
The other great force behind Americanization, of course, is “economics.” I put it in quotes because American economics is a crackpot science. It’s more or less all been disproven. No, wealth doesn’t trickle down, no, people aren’t better off without libraries and schools and hospitals, no, trapping people in debt for a lifetime doesn’t make them virtuous, it just makes them dumb, crazy, and vicious. But “economics” is what elites across the globe are trained and schooled in — witness Britain’s lunatic, comical descent into austerity. Britain didn’t pioneer those ideas, America did. Britain just applied them — with disastrous results. Just a decade and a half of serious austerity — and Britain’s on the verge of very American fascist meltdown.
The stakes are real, my friends. Should the world be Americanized, we will have a patchwork world of little Americas and littler Britains. Tiny little fascist countries, each viciously scapegoating the next for their problems, denuded of public goods, where human rights have been eroded, where things like healthcare and retirement and education for all are distant memories. With populaces too lazy and ignorant to think critically — and working too hard just to pay the bills, which can never really be paid off, to even know how. With elites schooled in dead, failed ideologies they can’t wean themselves off of — but which produce nothing but disaster in the real world.
And with cultures which have been hooked, narcissistically, on the Big Lie that being above the next person, in hierarchies of money, power, and status, is better than standing beside them, because nobody should have intrinsic worth, and the only point of life is to compete, since it’s just a never-ending battle to the life and death for the basics anyways. Everyone’s an enemy, an adversary, a rival, a competitor, taking the bread from your mouth, the money from your wallet, the future from you.
What happens when people fall, willingly, into that trap, because it’s seductive with money, glitters with the thrill of violence, roars with the chants of supremacy? They can’t climb out. Just take a hard look at America. So let me ask you again. Can the world really resist being Americanized? Umair March 2021 Eudaimonia and Co Eudaimonia & Co Follow 1.1K 30 Life News Politics Leadership Culture 1.1K claps 30 responses umair haque WRITTEN BY umair haque Follow vampire. Eudaimonia and Co Eudaimonia and Co Follow Eudaimonia & Co More From Medium More from Eudaimonia and Co Britain is Showing the World How Nationalism Implodes Into Fascism umair haque in Eudaimonia and Co Mar 14 · 7 min read 4K More from Eudaimonia and Co What Does it Look Like When a Society Commits Suicide? Brexit. umair haque in Eudaimonia and Co Mar 17 · 8 min read 1.8K More from Eudaimonia and Co Americans are Trapped in a Fascist Society umair haque in Eudaimonia and Co Mar 13 · 8 min read 2.4K Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore Share your thinking. If you have a story to tell, knowledge to share, or a perspective to offer — welcome home. It’s easy and free to post your thinking on any topic. Write on Medium About Help Legal