America’s Moral And Economic Crisis

June 19, 2024

America is in the middle of a very serious moral and economic crisis — and these two crises are deeply interconnected.

An Axios article titled, “Never back down: Rich and powerful exploit post-shame society,” exposes some interesting information about this. Zachary Basu writes:

America is reaching the pinnacle of a post-shame society forged by Donald Trump and reinforced by powerful patrons. Nearly 50 years after Richard Nixon resigned before ever being charged with a crime, the GOP is a month away from nominating a convicted felon to be president. Polls suggest the race is extremely close. While he may represent the most extreme example, Trump isn’t the only one who has realized a lack of shame can be a crucial survival skill.

Put aside the fact that our “post-shame political society” actually arrived with Bill Clinton — when it turned out you could overtly make the case it was fine to mess with the interns because that was just a “sex issue.” “Post-shame society” has been in place for a very long time in the United States.

The real question in the United States is: Why don’t we have a guilt-based society?

Cultural anthropologists distinguish between two different types of societies when it comes to your internal feelings about anything you have done wrong: guilt-based societies and shame-based societies.

Guilt-based societies are internally directed; they are typically linked with Judaic and Christian moral systems. These would be systems in which you feel guilty before God because you have violated God’s moral scruples. A person feels an internal sense of guilt, whether or not anybody knows about what they did.

A shame-based society is one in which the society sets the standard, and society makes you feel ashamed and makes you “lose face.” Cultural anthropologists closely associate shame-based societies with countries like Japan or China. The idea is that you will be shamed into doing what is right.

Over the course of the last several decades as religion has declined in America, guilt-based society shifted into shame-based society, which has now shifted into a post-shame society. We were once a guilt-based society; people felt an internal obligation to act morally at the political level. That meant, politicians felt an actual sense of responsibility to solve the problems they were charged with solving.

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Politicians didn’t have to be shamed into acting morally; they felt an internal moral compulsion to try to do things that they’d been tasked with doing. They felt a moral duty to do the right thing.

With the decline of religion and a belief in moral absolutes, society shifted to a shame-based society, and political correctness replaced our moral system — and God. People would shame you into saying certain things or acting certain ways.

That has reared its ugly head in wokeness — the idea of shaming someone in public if they didn’t use the proper pronouns; say untrue things about America being a white supremacist society; put dumb lawn signs out that state, “In this house, we believe…”; or post a black square during Black Lives Matter to proclaim solidarity with people who were rioting.

If you didn’t, you were publicly shamed. We became a shame-based society because all your actions were directed toward the public and what the public thinks of you.

Now we have reached the reaction to that, which is the post-shame society. Basu is correct that we are a post-shame society, but I don’t think it revolves around Donald Trump.

I do think it has to do with our entire rootless, Godless system. Once you have a society that casts out God in favor of societal shaming and then replaces societal shaming with the blowback to that, the standards of the society are plainly wrong.

Thus, we won’t return to internal feelings about a moral God and what He demands of us. We’re going to practice moral relativism in a society that has a really bad set of standards, which means we will just have no standards at all.

You end up with shamelessness on every single side of the political realm. That means our politicians become frivolous, shameless, and stupid, and they don’t care about the actual problems facing the United States of America on a broad scale.

That is why I’m quite pessimistic about the possibility that our politicians actually solve our problems because they don’t feel they are somehow implicated in our country’s problems on a moral level.

They don’t feel a higher moral impulse to do what is right, simply because it’s right. Today, very few Americans — unless they are regular churchgoers, people who are deeply ensconced in religious community — feel an internal compulsion to do the right thing anymore.

Particular politicians may be interested in solving problems from time to time, but overall, the general kind of arc of the political universe in the United States bends towards foolish frivolity, toward bread and games as the Republic dies from the inside.

This directly relates to economics.

There is a chart from the Federal Reserve that shows the federal government’s national defense consumption expenditures and gross investments. The entrance payments on our debt now exceed what we spend on national defense every year.

This is a very real problem. If what we are paying to bondholders, many of whom are foreign bondholders, exceeds what we are spending on our national defense, that is the sign of an unstable and sick governmental structure. It means that we are not going to have the actual resources in order to arm up, to face a hostile world, to keep the seas free.

We are not going to have the ability to ensure shipping lanes. We’re not going to have the capacity to defend Taiwan; a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would disrupt the semiconductor market and amount to a global depression of extreme severity.

Meanwhile, Jonathan van Ness from “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy” is at the White House gallivanting around in a dress. There are still families of the soldiers killed in Afghanistan who have never been to the White House.

The national debt is now so extreme that it will exceed $50 trillion by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. They projected yesterday the federal debt will exceed 122% of the United State’s annual economic output by 2034. The deficit will swell to $1.9 trillion this fiscal year and keep growing until the overall national debt hits $50.7 trillion a decade from now.

The budget in the United States continues to expand. Medicare and Social Security are running low on funds. Within just a few years, the interest on the debt is going to exceed the payments we owe for Social Security.

This is a bipartisan problem because our frivolous political class doesn’t feel any sort of guilt-based moral impetus to solve serious problems. Instead, they push those serious problems into next week for the purposes of winning today. And then, once they win, what are the actual demands that are made upon them? Fairly minimal.

It is the job of our politicians to telescope and balance our present needs with the needs of the future. But our politicians don’t want to do this anymore. They’ve abdicated any sort of guilt-based obligation to do the right thing simply because it’s the unpopular thing.

Nobody actually wants to take responsibility for solving the serious problems that face the country. Few of our politicians are capable of even looking down the line at the serious problems we face because there’s no internal compass driving them to solve the problem.

And that is a genuine bipartisan problem.