THEORY OF THE END - Part 5: The "Equality" Problem
The fifth part of a series exploring various theories on the end of human civilization.
[Note: This is part 5 of an ongoing essay series. If you have not read the other parts, I highly recommend doing so either before or after reading this one.]
II. The “Equality” Problem
Marx once wrote in “Capital” that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.” In “The End of History and The Last Man,” Francis Fukuyama interpreted this as follows:
The Marxist realm of freedom is, in effect, the four-hour working day: that is, a society so productive that man's labor in the morning can satisfy all of his natural needs and those of his family and fellows, leaving him the afternoon and evening to be a hunter, or a poet, or a critic.
Of course, as we covered back in Part 2, the attempted application of Marxist theory in the structuring of human society has never led to this promised freedom. Instead, we saw a rise in the standard of living for those in capitalist countries, while those living in ostensibly Communist ones floundered. Fukuyama continues:
… if the "necessary labor time" required to satisfy basic physical needs was four hours on average for workers in socialist societies, it was on the order of an hour or two for corresponding capitalist societies, and the six or seven hours of "surplus labor" time that rounded out the working day did not go only into the pockets of capitalists, but allowed workers to buy cars and washing machines, barbecues and campers. Whether this constituted a "realm of freedom" in any meaningful sense was another matter, but an American worker was far more fully liberated from the "realm of necessity" than his Soviet counterpart.
On this point, it is difficult to argue that Fukuyama is incorrect. An often-stated irony of American life is that our poor can be quite fat. It’s evident that, for the majority of Americans, our most basic needs are, at the very least, accounted for. But are people happy with this state of affairs? The fact that Gallup reported “new heights” for rates of depression in 2023 suggests that this is not the case. They write in their article on the topic:
The percentage of U.S. adults who report having been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime has reached 29.0%, nearly 10 percentage points higher than in 2015. The percentage of Americans who currently have or are being treated for depression has also increased, to 17.8%, up about seven points over the same period. Both rates are the highest recorded by Gallup since it began measuring depression using the current form of data collection in 2015.
We can’t assume that this era of mass depression is entirely due to the material conditions of the populace, especially considering that 2023 was only a few years after the Coronavirus pandemic (which was discussed at length back in Part 3). However, the Gallup article admits that the depression rate had already been “slowly rising in the U.S. prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,” meaning the pandemic was far from the sole cause.
I would argue that the economically-oriented nature of modernity has been one of the prime driving forces in all of this. Even though, as Fukuyama noted, our basic needs are more easily met these days, the length of the work day does not seem to be diminishing, and expectations around work are still quite taxing, both mentally and physically. Our social and private lives are too often consumed by economic matters, to the point where even the idea of formulating a healthy “work-life balance” becomes a farce.
In fact, “work” has dominated our lives to such a degree that a new term was coined to help properly illustrate it: 4HL, the “4-hour Life.” The man who popularized this term, Paul Skallas, laid out the details of the “4HL” on his blog “The Lindy Newsletter”:
A modern employee, let’s use a white collar office worker as an example, will usually get around 8 hours of sleep, will work around 8 hours a day, spend 4 hours commuting going to the gym, having meals, and then end up with 4 hours to him or herself during the day. So they own 4 hours. We can call this class of people 4HLers. It may seem vulgar to reduce a person’s life to the amount of hours he has free in a day, but then again, how many hours you have to yourself is kind of a big deal. Time is an important concept to a 4HLer. He is obsessed with time. He has to be. His livelyhood [sic] depends on it. So he has an alarm clock, because he has to wake up at the same time everyday, he has to take lunch around the same time everyday and get off of work around the same time everyday. He has deadlines that are due and he has to be reliable. It’s his job to be reliable.
Life in the 4HL is contrasted with life in the “12HL,” which consists of individuals who are self-employed and can decide for themselves what they do with their time. Thus inequality is not necessarily restricted to the realm of material goods and the satisfaction of bodily needs, but extends also to freedom of time; a temporal inequality, if you will.
This is not a new observation, however. In Franco Berardi’s “After the Future,” written back in 2009, he attributes the lengthening of the workday to the switch from physical labor to “cognitive labor” as the economy became more informationally oriented in order to perpetually increase levels of production:
Cognitive labor became the leading sector of global production, taking the shape of the economy-driven ideology and identifying itself with the entrepreneurial function, participating at the forefront of mass financial capitalism (dotcom-mania). In the meantime the length of the working day, which had been in decline up until the end of the 1970s, began to increase again after the world victory of liberalism. The free time gained through a century of workers’ struggle was progressively subsumed to the rule of profit and transformed into fragmented and diffused labor. Social energies were progressively subsumed to economic competition. Those who didn’t run got run over. Society started running frantically and many broke down.
Berardi explains that “cyberspace,” which is the perpetually-expanding technological infosphere that the modern economy has made its domain, is theoretically unlimited. On the other hand, what he calls “cybertime,” or the social attention of the human brain (which perceives reality chronologically, i.e. in units of time), is quite finite. Due to this limitation, it was necessary to make “time” the primary commodity of the information age. Thus “capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers,” Berardi states.
[Note: I also wrote about this topic in Part III of my book “The Mad Laughing God,” which you can read here.]
Francis Fukuyama also foreshadowed these developments (two decades before Berardi outlined their effects) with a passage in “The End of History” which reads as follows:
Technological innovation and the highly complex division of labor has created a tremendous increase in the demand for technical knowledge at all levels in the economy, and consequently for people who — to put it crudely — think rather than do. This includes not only scientists and engineers, but all of the structures that support them, like public schools, universities, and the communications industry. The higher “information” content of modern economic production is reflected in the rise of the service sector—professionals, managers, office workers, people involved in trade, marketing, and finance, as well as government workers and health care providers—at the expense of "traditional" manufacturing occupations.
But there are potentially dire consequences to this economic structure, as the demand for cybertime outweighs the supply, meaning cybertime has cyberspace forced onto it, being essentially colonized by the realm of economic production and wearing down under the strain. Berardi continues:
But cybertime (the time of attention, memory, and imagination) cannot be speeded up beyond a limit. Otherwise it cracks. And it is actually cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyperproductivity. An epidemic of panic is spreading throughout the circuits of the social brain. An epidemic of depression is following the outbreak of panic. The current crisis of the new economy has to be seen as a consequence of this nervous breakdown.
The encroachment of cyberspace manifests in many ways. Advertising is the most apparent of these, plastering its bright colors and hollow smiling faces across miles and miles of cityscape and interrupting all forms of entertainment by blasting saccharine ukulele music. As we speak, corporations are trying to figure out how to use drones to project advertisements onto the sky. If a method is invented to reliably transmit advertisements into the dreams of individuals, expect it to be utilized to the fullest extent. We can’t let those 8 hours stay unproductive, can we?
The smartphone has also essentially brought the office to everyone’s pocket; now they have no excuse for not monitoring their email and being on-call 24 hours a day. You are always at work, even when you’re asleep in your bedroom, a perpetual metaphysical “wagie cage.”
Social media as well is a product meant to generate profit for its company through both the sale of advertising space/time as well as the harvesting of user data, and many users also utilize it in gaining traction for their products, thus social media usage is a kind of commodity. This is not a blanket condemnation of all of the individuals involved in these practices (if I were to do so, I must include myself in said condemnation, as no one would read my writing without my promotional efforts on social media), but merely a statement of how things work.
With all of this essentially unpaid cognitive labor in consideration, the 4-hour Life begins to look more like a 1-hour Life, if that. There is, however, another component to inequality in our current age: that being the seeming abandonment of big goals like raising a family or owning a house in favor of bursts of hyper-consumerism via the purchasing of collectibles or designer goods.
Due to the steep increase in home prices we’ve experienced across many developed countries, young adults are feeling more discouraged than ever in terms of home ownership. Moreover, romantic relationships can be more complicated and difficult thanks to the various new anxieties and expectations injected into the social milieu via the introduction of the digital realm and various new economic woes.
The method that Millennials and Generation Z seem to have developed in order to cope with these circumstances is to buy small luxuries in accordance with their consumption-based identities rather than save up for things that feel unattainable from their vantage point (we will explore “consumption-based identities” in a later chapter). This practice is sometimes known as “doom-spending,” which an article from the site Robb Report called “Young People Are ‘Doom Spending’ on Luxury Goods. Here’s Why” explained like this:
While historically, trends show that when economic times get tough, people save more, younger generations are flipping that on its head. With a high cost of living, hefty student-loan debt, and a tough labor market, many people don’t think they’ll ever be able to buy property, have kids, or retire with a loaded bank account. Since that all feels out of reach, the money that may have been put toward those traditional markers of adulthood is simply being spent now.
As the above passage suggests, this situation has functionally locked many young adults out of what has been, for several generations, conventionally viewed as an “adult life.”
But ironically enough, it is not this state of affairs that most political protests rail against. As referenced in the previous chapter, much more political activism is now focused on comparatively trivial matters of identity. The most visible and well-monied of the factions involved in this kind of activism is the “Pride” movement, recognizable via their frequent use of the rainbow “Pride flag” and its seemingly unlimited variations.
Up until a decade ago, the primary aim of the Pride movement was the achievement of “marriage equality,” i.e. the right for homosexuals to marry each other. Yet once this matter was essentially settled through the supreme court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015, the “Pride” movement did not disperse. If anything, it only became more active in proceeding years, raking in money from countless organizations for the purpose of holding “pride parades” every June (which, for some baffling reason, is now called “Pride month” by governmental and corporate institutions across the country).
The primary driving force behind Pride’s intensification has been the adoption of “transgenderism” as a political cause. The formalization of “transgenderism” can be traced back to Germany’s pre-war Weimer republic, in particular “The Institute for Sexual Research” (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) in Berlin, headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. A 2021 article for Scientific American entitled “The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic” elaborates on the various experiments performed by the institute:
The institute would ultimately house an immense library on sexuality, gathered over many years and including rare books and diagrams and protocols for male-to-female (MTF) surgical transition. In addition to psychiatrists for therapy, he had hired Ludwig Levy-Lenz, a gynecologist. Together, with surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt, they performed male-to-female surgery called Genitalumwandlung — literally, “transformation of genitals.” This occurred in stages: castration, penectomy and vaginoplasty. (The institute treated only trans women at this time; female-to-male phalloplasty would not be practiced until the late 1940s.) Patients would also be prescribed hormone therapy, allowing them to grow natural breasts and softer features.
What the article fails to mention (likely on purpose) is that one of the recipients of this “transformation of genitals” surgery was a man named Einar Wegener, who also went by the alias Lili Elbe. Einar received not only a primitive vaginoplasty through the institute’s efforts, but also an experimental uterine transplant which ultimately led to illness and a prolonged painful death. In spite of these gristly details, the story of Lili Elbe is held up as a triumph for “trans rights” by the Pride movement to this day.
The modern conception of “transgenderism” started as something of an oddity that was closely tied to the realm of mental illness. Under the name “transexualism,” it was categorized in the 1987 third iteration of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM-3) under “disorders usually first evident in infancy, childhood, and adolescence” and described as follows:
The essential features of this disorder are a persistent discomfort and sense of inappropriateness about one's assigned sex in a person who has reached puberty. In addition, there is persistent preoccupation, for at least two years, with getting rid of one's primary and secondary sex characteristics and acquiring the sex characteristics of the other sex. Therefore, the diagnosis is not made if the disturbance is limited to brief periods of stress. Invariably there is the wish to live as a member of the other sex.
The latest revision of the DSM has removed “transexualism” entirely and replaced it with “gender dysphoria.” The purpose of this was to normalize those who attempt to live as the other gender by classifying their feelings of discomfort as the issue rather than the behavior which results from it. At this point, the implied proposal to the general public was that they should treat “transgender” individuals as members of the other sex as a way to ameliorate a form of intense mental agony, something that much of the population seemed agreeable to. Playing pretend at such a level was a small concession to make in order to ease someone’s suffering.
However, the creep of “trans rights” expanded onwards, and eventually this agreement with the public was no longer sufficient. People could no longer pretend that “trans women” were women, they had to actually believe they were women. “Trans women are women” became the new catchphrase parroted throughout social media and countless op-eds, and the idea that gender was “assigned at birth” rather than “observed” was suddenly a hot talking point.
“When we say women, that word always includes trans women,” writes the Human Rights Campaign on their website. “There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. A woman’s gender identity is her innermost concept of being female. A trans woman’s gender identity doesn’t define or caveat her womanhood, it simply describes her journey to womanhood.”
This is further complicated by the simultaneously espoused idea that “trans” individuals do not necessarily have to conform with the gender identity they claim to hold. From the website for the organization “Advocates for Trans Equality”:
Being gender non-conforming means not conforming to gender stereotypes. For example, someone’s clothes, hairstyle, speech patterns, or hobbies might be considered more "feminine" or "masculine" than what's stereotypically associated with their gender… transgender people may be gender non-conforming, or they might conform to gender stereotypes for the gender they live and identify as.
As the earlier quoted passage claims, one’s gender identity is an “innermost concept,” meaning it is a quality that is only to be felt by the “trans” individual in question and expressed in the manner in which they personally feel is appropriate. Thus “gender identity” is reduced to a vague psycho-spiritual state, consisting of “vibes” and impulses thought to be derived from an ill-defined “self.”
This is all turned on its head, however, when the Pride movement discusses its current pet project, that being the validation of “trans” identity and the provision of “gender affirming” medical interventions for children, something that the greater public would have instantly rejected as abominable just a couple decades ago (and very many still do). Whenever this initiative is opposed, the conversation around “transgenderism” instantly reverts back to the subject of mental illness. Rather than assisting the children in the pursuit of a nebulous pseudo-spiritual gender enlightenment, it becomes a matter of supplying them with “life-saving medical care.”
This all points to the seldom stated fact that there was, is, and will be no consensus on what “transgenderism” actually is because the fight for “equality” has become the purpose in and of itself and all rhetoric is inevitably bent in service of it. Francis Fukuyama indeed predicted that people would eventually add new “rights” to their conception of Liberal Democracy, writing in “The End of History”:
… almost all liberal democracies have seen a massive proliferation of new “rights” over the past generation. Not content merely to protect life, liberty, and property, many democracies have also defined rights to privacy, travel, employment, recreation, sexual preference, abortion, childhood, and so on. Needless to say, many of these rights are ambiguous in their social content and mutually contradictory. It is easy to foresee situations in which the basic rights defined by, say, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were seriously abridged by newly minted rights whose aim was a more thoroughgoing equalization of society.
However, what he (understandably) did not know at the time was that the object of these new rights could also be entirely fabricated. This is due to the nature of human desire. Since the object of desire is not present in the objective world, then the ultimate aim of desire is the realization of a fictional duplicate of reality. As Clement Rosset once wrote:
The world acquires as its double some other sort of world, in accordance with the following line of argument: there is an object that desire feels the lack of; hence the world does not contain each and every object that exists; there is at least one object missing, the one that desire feels the lack of; hence there exists some other place that contains the key to desire (missing in this world).
Due to the narrow confines of modernity, the fight for “transgenderism” has been one of the few socially acceptable means for foisting one’s will onto others. It is not only the sexual and aesthetic aspects of transgenderism which appeal to many of its adherents (although those certainly play a role), but also the idea that they can bend those around them to their whims.
The ability to force others to accept the view of the world that you have created is, in essence, a powerful domination of those individuals; resulting in a kind of gratification that extends well beyond that which can be derived from getting the state to provide you with material goods. This is not to assume that there are not mentally ill people who honestly struggle with what has been labeled “gender dysphoria,” but they have long been left in the dust as the raison d’être of the push for “trans rights.”
One effect of the proliferation of the “trans” wing of the Pride movement has been the emergence of several similar groups. For instance, the “non-binary,” who claim to have no gender. What exactly this is supposed to look like in practice has never been properly established, but that’s not the point. It is, in fact, another power game played via a psycho-spiritual concept for the ultimate purpose of self gratification.
Another group is the “Therians”; those who say they have the souls of animals or mythological creatures. We do not have to concern ourselves with arguments for or against this faction, as it is not taken very seriously by the vast majority of the population, but I wanted to acknowledge its existence for the purpose of illustration. It’s also worth noting that the reasons for the proliferation of these groups are not limited to those explained here, and we will explore more of them later on in relation to the problems of “desacralization” and “atomization.”
It may be baffling to some why so many Leftists in modern America focus on the strange psycho-spiritual stuff found in the latter half of this chapter to the detriment of the more material problems outlined closer to the beginning. This confusion is understandable, as Leftism is ostensibly Materialist in outlook. But this can be reconciled when we view the modern incarnation of Leftism through Ted Kaczynski’s understanding of it as a psychological phenomenon. He elaborates in his manifesto “Industrial Society and Its Future” as follows:
When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types.
The psychological profile of the Leftist, according to Kaczynski, is characterized by two prominent features: first is a sense of inferiority that is “so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable.” Second is oversocialization, which is more prominent among highly educated Leftists like those in academia. Oversocialization can be viewed as the product of a societal system that is so restrictive it mentally squeezes individuals to the point of breaking. “For example,” Kaczynski says, “we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not.” Thus the oversocialized person is burned with a morality that cannot be fully adhered to, exacerbating their sense of inferiority and powerlessness.
The combination of these two components leads to Leftists who attempt to gain power over others (usually those they view as strong or superior in some way) by “rebelling” in ways that don’t actually encroach upon the already established values of our society, but instead operate in tandem with them. Kaczynski continues:
The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals.
More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.
When we observe modern Leftism through this lens, it becomes clear why Pride has taken such a prominent position among its ranks, as well as why Leftists were so ready to allow the Marx-influenced framework that we now know as “Wokeness” to develop into what is essentially a form of consumerism (once again, see “The Mad Laughing God,” Part III for more on this). Their complaint is not that the fundamental beliefs and values of our secular hyper-consumeristic civilization are invalid, but rather that society has not done its duty in delivering the promised fruits of these beliefs and values, thus the system’s legitimacy is only partially put into question.
However, lest Francis Fukuyama potentially feel a sense of relief at this revelation, let’s not forget this particular passage from “The End of History”:
While voters in democratic countries may affirm free-market principles in the abstract, they are all too ready to abandon them when their own short-term, economic self-interest is at stake. There is no presumption, in other words, that democratic publics will make economically rational choices, or that economic losers will not use their political power to protect their positions.
If the Leftists described above do end up inflicting damage on the ideological makeup of our nation, it will almost certainly be the Liberal and Democratic aspects that end up on the receiving end of the hammer first. So while Fukuyama saw inequality as a “less fundamental” potential contradiction than others, it’s now clear that such a dismissal will only become less tenable as we move forward into the future.
Thank you all very much for reading, and I hope to see you all in Part 6.
To be continued…