Diagnostics No.1; An Inadequate Response to Crises

Currently, the term “crisis” is becoming somewhat clichéd, with its meaning gradually detaching from its true implications, while taking on a more political connotation. By definition, a crisis demands an urgent and extraordinary response, prioritizing the issue above all other immediate concerns (Berlant, 2011; Shakurova, 2020). For instance, if a child is bleeding heavily or a house is on fire, addressing the crisis must supersede all other concerns. It is nonsensical and unreasonable to merely acknowledge a crisis and continue with usual activities, or to only partially respond while trying to “balance” the crisis with other concerns. Recognizing a crisis is not a response to crisis. One does not finish up a business call or finish an email before taking a bleeding child to the hospital or to exit a burning building. Doing so would be inefficient, dangerous, and ineffective in managing the crisis. It would be irrational.

Yet we are given “rational” economic reasons as to why society and governments will not respond to various crises. If such things truly are a crisis, and yet the response includes “balancing” something like profit interests before responding, then that is not a rational sequence of logic. Imagine waiting until the economic conditions were appropriate to move out of a burning building or rescue a bleeding child and seek medical care.

The U.S. is grappling with multiple interrelated crises, including the rise of illiberalism and fascism on the political right (Brown, 2019; Doody, 2020; Duménil & Levy, 2005), the erosion of the middle class (Buck, 2008; Chomsky, 2017; Leicht & Fitzgerald, 2013; Ludwig, 2021), and the imminent threat of extinction for much of Earth’s life due to human activities (Kolbert, 2014; Portner et al., 2022). The term “crisis” is applied to these overlapping issues, which are urgent, alarming, and worsening over time. While labeling these issues as crises is correct and reasonable, as they are severe and life-threatening, the unreasonableness arises not from the labels but from inadequate responses or lack of action. Actions that are taken often result in ineffective, half-hearted (though often profitable) solutions that ultimately allow dangerous situations to persist and fail to address the problems at hand. Objectively, this is an erroneous logic, yes?

What stuns me about Americans is their absolute inability to respond to crises. This is seen most recently in terms of the pandemic – half the nation is carrying guns and taking horse paste, while the other half is spending all their time trying to rationalize the balance between living and economy – as if dying for the economy is somehow a reasonable debate. Such outlandish warpage of intrinsic values has increasingly bled into all areas of American life. From the acceptance of student and medical debt to the bizarre carnivalesque relationship with violence, particularly gun violence in America.

For comparison, I look at France or Israel in the present moment, where mass protests have arisen over policy changes. Where genuine political resistance actually attempts to threaten the power and the stability of the raison d’état. Such a popular uprising has only rarely occurred in the U.S., and even then, such resistance was easily subsumed into the corporate capitalist state and effectively de-fanged (Fisher, 2012).

The astounding lack of response to the climate crisis, for example, is not only irrational but also dangerously self-destructive. Numerous political, economic, and social justifications are offered to explain the inaction, but none of them hold up when considering the disastrous consequences and inevitable outcomes predicted by scientists. In fact, these excuses are quite unreasonable, they are unsound. The only thing more unsound than such rationalization is the unsoundness of the mind required to accept self-destructive delays. This observation is neither a political stance nor a biased judgment; it is a logical and succinct evaluation. Thus, when the identification of crises is met with irrational excuses for inactivity, a disconnect arises. Since neither the facts of the situation nor the necessary solutions are unknown, there must be some other factor explaining why crises are not met with appropriate responses.

Yet, for all of the faults of the American political subject – it is also unfair to blame mere ignorance or intellectual laziness of the American citizen for this. The American citizen is exposed to more corporate propaganda, infotainment, and advertisement than any other form of cultural media. Additionally, US society is intentionally kept from truly comprehending history, largely as a practice established to occlude the history of enslavement, genocide, and white supremacist racism upon which the entire nation was founded. So the average American consumer has little knowledge of history, and almost no political-economic training, all while consuming massive amounts of corporate propaganda. It is no wonder they are etherized against adequate political response to direct threats of crisis.

The fact is that the climate crisis is driven by a specific kind of human activities that occur for extremely specific reasons (Alexander & Gleeson, 2018). Of course, I am speaking about the consumer lifestyle under the umbrella of the capitalist mode of production (Alexander & Gleeson, 2018). While consumer society, driven by the forces of the capitalist mode, has indeed given modern life certain scientific and technological advances and benefits, this has come at an ever-increasing and unsustainable cost to society, democracy, and ecology (Alexander & Gleeson, 2018). Now consider that extinction is only one of several impending crises and that few elements of society are adequately meeting crises.

A Closer Look

In the present form, our political economic system, defined as “neoliberal” capitalism, has heightened the negative effects of exploitation and extraction under capitalism while simultaneously restricting the benefits to fewer and fewer people in the form of wealth and social power (Brown, 2015; Davies, 2014; Harvey, 2005; Kunstler, 2005). Environmental degradation and billions of tons of carbon alone are only one feature of the unsustainable trajectory of neoliberalism. The increasingly corrupt (but legal) exploitation of the US government and the institutions of society is another (Brown, 2015; Brown, 2019; Harvey, 2005). Neoliberalism, therefore, totalizes the situation, creating and accelerating the unsustainability of human society while corrupting the juridical systems and institutions that have the power to respond to crises (Brown, 2015; Klein, 2007).

Hoping the government intervenes to address climate, or any other crisis, is a fool’s errand under such conditions. Both the neoliberal economy and the systems of juridical power, at least in the US, must be dismantled and reconfigured before anything meaningful can be achieved through the political economy. That is why nothing is being done. As such, the response to the crisis falls to the citizens; citizens who have not shown any signs of widespread awareness or response to the crisis. They are either under the wrong impression, believing that government (or technology) will suddenly save the day, or they are unaware of the full scope of the problem, or likely both.

Neoliberalism is defined in one way by the means by which the economy comes to displace systems of governance (Foucault, 2008) and how this implicates sovereign power into an economized matrix of statistical growth, decline, and perpetual accountings of profit, and profit loss, which fundamentally pollute the discourse of public democracy (Davies, 2014; Foucault, 2008). So, the mechanisms of political power expression, that is, how society expresses its collective power to enact change in response to a crisis, have been swapped out for a mechanism that only responds through economized rubrics. Under economized rubrics, the best policies in the world will never see the light of day if they are costly or unprofitable, no matter what the majority of citizens want or need (Brown, 2015; Chomsky, 1999; Davies, 2014; Duménil & Levy, 2005; Gilens & Page, 2014; Harvey, 2003).

Today political power is so outlandishly tilted in the favor of a handful of people in the top .01% of society that the body politic can do little to nothing to prevent itself from becoming the victim of virtually all the negative outcomes of unsustainable neoliberalism: from wealth disparity to pollution, to ecological destruction, and tyrannical abuses at the hand of the corporatized states  (Brown, 2015; Gilens & Page, 2014; Harvey, 2005; Kunstler, 2005; Ludwig, 2021; Schettino & Khan, 2020). More than half of all political contributions for both parties, come from the wealthiest citizens and their respective interest groups (Brown, 2015; Heideman, 2021). It is decidedly not in the citizens’ interests to continue to believe that they have any say over the system of government beyond a corporate-sponsored, limited set of options, and the emptiness of identity politics, none of which are avenues to crisis response nor change (Chomsky, 2017; Giroux, 2014; Klein, 2007).

Although this post does not offer any solutions to the issue at hand, it is crucial to provide an objective perspective and shed light on the situation. The ambiguity surrounding the definition of words like “crisis” and the prevalence of illusions that keep American citizens in a state of complacency are just the starting points for a series of posts that aim to explore the present moment from a social scientific standpoint. In any case, this should serve as an initial diagnosis of the social problems that I am passionate about addressing professionally. Thank you for reading, and please feel free to leave a comment.

References and further exploration:

1. Alexander, S., & Gleeson, B. (2018). Degrowth, post-capitalism and well-being: A geography of sustainable economies. Routledge.

1. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
2. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. MIT Press.
3. Brown, W. (2019). In the ruins of neoliberalism: The rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. Columbia University Press.
4. Buck, H. (2008). Reversing the erosion of the middle class. In Social issues in America: An encyclopedia (Vol. 1, pp. 551-557). M. E. Sharpe.
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17. Heideman, P. (2021). Behind the Republican Party Crack-up. Catalysts Review, September 2021.
18. Kolbert, E. (2014). The sixth extinction: An unnatural history. Henry Holt and Company.
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20. Leicht, K. T., & Fitzgerald, S. T. (2013). Middle class meltdown in America: Causes, consequences, and remedies. Routledge.
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23. Schettino, M., & Khan, H. A. (2020). Income polarization and the rise of the superrich. Journal of Economic Issues, 54(2), 347-356.