Globalization: a Counterargument based on Love and the Individual

I have always supported globalization, but with caveats--including that the process from old to new not only consider, but protect the ones left behind.  Furthermore, government spending drives much of the modern economy, and its inefficient allocation of tax revenue has created mega-cities, which are easier to control and influence, but which do not necessarily increase individual or marital happiness.  Such inefficient spending almost forces established politicians to focus on larger cities rather than small ones, creating opposition from newer players in smaller cities who feel left behind and who have little incentive to cooperate with existing players.  Somehow, globalization has made it easier for international megacities to cooperate with each other than larger and smaller cities in the same state or country.

Even with this disconnect, why aren't people in developed economies happier? Part of it must be due to the lessening influence of the individual, and the individual's difficulty in actualizing the power of sincere and selfless contribution as cities grow larger.  Another part is more basic--the difficulty of finding compatible relationships.  I recently watched La La Land (2016)--a wonderfully bittersweet movie based in L.A.--and realized yet another issue with prevailing forces in developed economies: people, especially men, must often choose between careers and love.

Why do I focus on men? I suppose it's because women may not necessarily find true love, but they are rarely alone if they choose not to be.  Men who want to be fathers, on the other hand, seem to have resigned themselves to conforming to a world where their productivity and agreeableness are prized over their own self-discovery and needs.  Other men who see their roles diminishing on all fronts have decided they won't go gently into that good night and have found succor within fringe political groups.  Others just opt out.

In short, the 21st century is in danger of becoming a tragedy by forcing most of the most idealistic people to compromise their ideals to fit in or to find companionship.  Interconnectedness is breeding contempt and dissension as more people realize principles matter less than someone else's overall end goal. When individuals are not supreme--even if right--a sense of decency becomes too readily sacrificed on the altar of reasonableness.  Such compromise, if done by fiat, renders the populace prone to rebellion--first in small ways, then in larger ways that finally become too noticeable for the mainstream to ignore. At that point, as if by design, the disenchanted men and women, the ones left behind by forces outside their control, flee to places where they can feel free--or worse, they stay and withdraw.

In La La Land, the Ryan Gosling character drives away his true love and attempts to get her back, only to lose her again.  He ends up successful but alone.  The Emma Stone character ends up successful and married, but not with her true love.  No one has fled anywhere, but the moral seems to be that large cities force people to choose between being broke and idealistic, or settled and compromised.  If this is a reflection of modern love in America, it's time for a change in the economic system, which requires political changes.

Governments are realizing that happiness might not be easily measured in officially reported data, but tax revenue is often driven by whether people feel as if they can achieve their relationship goals in x rather than y city.  Indeed, taxpayers don't need to leave to new countries to disengage--they can simply move to other areas within the same country, up-ending local economic projections drastically, as so many cities--burdened with debt--depend on sales and other taxes requiring constant economic growth or at least a non-declining working population. Those new high rise condos going up in every major city? Who will buy them from existing and secondary owners without a steady influx of younger workers?

Economic projections, once disturbed, require more debt and thus fewer choices, or pit existing players against younger and newer ones, such as immigrants.  Worse yet, taxpayers who don't leave and who stay in areas that don't reflect their values tend to disengage emotionally from others not within their own groups, decreasing the positive impacts of diversity and dooming efforts to create cohesive communities.  Without community, what is the point of working 60 hour weeks or taking out $50,000 in student loans?

How governments interact with each other will determine whether worldwide prosperity is merely academic well-wishing or the next stage of cultural evolution.  Since it's obvious more ideas result from greater rather than less interaction, my wager's already been placed--as have the bets of trillions of investments and debt.  Democratic governments are quickly learning that if they desire to help their citizenry stay in their current globalized trajectory, they cannot ignore the individual, and they cannot talk down to those who do not share their opinions.   To protect continued migration of people and ideas, the future requires empathy as much as productivity.  Which countries will be up to the challenge?  Which ones will win the battle to create a place where Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone's characters meet, fight, fall in love, and stay together? 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2017)

Bonus: "We are an urban species. Homo urbanis is actively reshaping geopolitics, economics and climate action in the 21st century. And with good reason. While the world’s cities cover just 2% of the earth’s surface, they account for 55% of its population. What’s more, they generate 80% of the world’s GDP and over 90% of its patents. Yet they are also responsible for 75% of all energy consumption and 80% of CO2 emissions." -- from World Economic Forum, Katherine Aguirre from the Igarapé Institute, and others from the Global Parliament of Mayors and C40. 

Blast from the Past, Part 2, on Adversity and Affluence

Here's another letter I just discovered on my old Windows XP laptop--one I just happened to open today, the day after hearing Meryl Streep's comment, "Take your broken heart, make it into art," which she got from Carrie Fisher.  You may not believe me, but the only reason I opened the old, dusty laptop was because I needed an account number, which happened to be in a folder with other files, including multiple letters I had completely forgotten about.  One of them--a mishmash of several letters--is below. I do not remember with whom I was speaking.

Our conversation re: wealth and inheritance got me thinking about why I view wealth, especially inherited wealth, with skepticism, even an inhibitor of creativity and empathy.  It is of course not true that all persons with trust funds spend their days idle or plotting ways to make trouble--JFK is one clear example of that.  Overall, however, it appears creative rich people may be an oxymoron.  The majority of the great authors, thinkers, inventors, athletes, seem to have never been a part of the affluent mainstream.  Everyone from Shakespeare to Mark Twain to Michael Jordan started [without riches]. Now, the question is whether this is just romantic revisionism, or reality.  [Today, artistic endeavors in the "accepted" routes--whether at the Iowa Writers' Workshop or a university drama program--cost significant money, so the landscape has changed. A Lady Gaga may be more likely to come from familial affluence, given the significant upfront investment and time required to break into the entertainment business.] Even so, either result shows that Americans have always prided themselves on the rags-to-riches, bootstraps-pulling story.  The question is, "Why?"

With George W. Bush, for example, we will never know what would have happened had he been born with a different last name. With [Bill] Clinton, on the other hand, Americans seem to have loved him because the story of a man who stood up for his single mom in the face of domestic violence, became a Rhodes scholar, and then went from Arkansas to D.C., is an inspiration.  For whatever reason, people tend to like inspirational stories, something Hollywood knows very well.  Is it possible for someone to come from affluence and still be inspirational? 

It appears that affluence is not the primary guidepost of inspiration, but adversity.  The next question is whether adversity creates inspiration.  I believe it does, because a person who survives adversity has to go through something to succeed and learns lessons from that experience.  So perhaps the more interesting question is, "Does being affluent make it more difficult to be inspirational or creative?"  A new generation of Chinese-Americans may prove this question a simple one as well.

Perhaps being affluent allows one to be shielded from pain or adversity, and therefore halts self-searching.  Years ago, the exercise of self-searching was universally accepted as being important.  Not so long ago, it was clear that all of mankind was capable of heading in the same direction, that the establishment was something to be viewed with caution, that change was powerful, that too much money, especially in the hands of too few people, tended to create disaster, and that working for things like peace and world health and the destruction of nuclear weapons were good things.  Today, with affluence, we are shielded from pain--not only ours, but the pain of others in Africa, dying; of Palestinians in the West Bank, being shot; of refugees in Europe mistreated; and of people in San Jose, California sleeping in their own urine outside of law firms.  In this age of affluence, where Microsoft has billions in cash it doesn't know what to do with, why does it seem that people believe less in world peace, in the common good of mankind, in the idea of food on the table for everyone?

My argument is that this shielding from pain [though I'd now call it challenge rather than pain] has created a world more concerned with materialism than humanity; and as a result, humanity is more easily exterminated, divisions are more likely, and abstract values like community and love are more defenseless as people forget their history and concentrate on protecting their possessions.  Years ago, countries wanted to work towards world peace--witness Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations and the new U.N.  Today, we have Madeline Albright--a very intelligent liberal--saying that the U.S. embargo against Iraq, which kept out materials necessary for everyday life, such as chlorine (for clean water), was justified, and that the deaths of 200,000+ children was a necessary cost.  We have entered a world where children's lives are simply not viewed with reverence or respect, even as we fight at home for the unborn child.  The 60's gave us songs like "Imagine" that were blockbuster hits--the new millennium's song seems to be a fun, but meaningless, "Must be the Money."  [A song I enjoy but one that should have more competition from more substantial Lennon-style lyrics.]

When one views the hope America had just 40 years ago, and the kind of president America is comfortable with today--one can see the corrosiveness of affluence.  When one realizes that pain not only creates personal growth, but causes people to feel less grounded, and therefore more nomadic, one must realize that it is more likely that a nomadic person will want to learn another language, see the world, read the great works, search for something that will make him grounded--the answer oftentimes being the goodness of humanity, the belief that anyone can rise up and make himself into a better man, and that all life should be viewed with respect.

In the end, there seems to be something intrinsically powerful in a person who knows he has arrived where he has because of going against the grain, not primarily because of what his family is or has given him.  Though such a scenario certainly does not exclude help along the way, hard work and self-exploration carry a certain gravitas that persons with affluence often tend to lack, perhaps because affluence tends to isolate. Such isolation from the problems of the majority usually results in the most harmful poverty--something no amount of money could possibly compensate for.  Dubya will never be viewed with the same kind of respect as Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Ghandi, the latter two people concerned with the fate of humanity globally and who believed that humanity was capable of overcoming its faults.  My argument is that a lack of affluence has something to do with that idealism because it forces an inclusionary rather than exclusionary perspective.  And there is something depressing about a country that just 40 years ago elected JFK, believed in hope and peace, and is now content with Dubya, images of torture under his watch, Muslim attorneys being detained wrongly (Brandon Mayfield), an express policy of war first, questions later (preemptive strike), and outright lies regarding WMDs. 

The 60's were a good time to be an American.  People believed in ideals and ideas, believed that problems, such as hunger, disease, poverty, etc. could be mitigated and should be mitigated with the right amount of time and effort.  We have too many realists today, too many people who fail to realize that empires come and go, that America is only 4% of the world population, is only 200 years old, that humanity itself is a mere drop in the bucket of evolution, and a life spent defending widgets or the people that make them rather than progressive ideas, shall separate mankind from his true purpose of living an examined life, of attempting to help increase the sanctity of human life, and of making loneliness less prevalent. There is a whole realm of possibility for those who were poor and have pulled themselves out of poverty, or who have overcome challenges, whether physical or mental, because those people know what humanity is capable of. Affluent persons may realize these truths, too, but those who have suffered adversity know it as a part of everyday life and cannot ignore it and therefore yearn for greater things.  This is perhaps why adversity has created so much inspiration.  A world where people are less concerned with their fellow man than the price of gas or the balance in their bank accounts is a world that cheapens life, makes divisions between people easier to make, whether black and white or Muslim and Christian, and unsafe, because people, knowing that everyone, in the end, is out for themselves, will act accordingly.

(c) (Matthew) Mehdi Rafat