In our last install we considered what could happen if all the bread and circus distractions died down long enough for common people to share in their economic insecurity?

“Emptiness is not something to fear but to explore as a spiritual reality that leads to detachment from self-interest and greater compassion for the world.

Fr. Steven Paulikas, The New York Times, April 11, 2020

That cleansing embrace of that blank canvas sounds nearly as courageous as it does naive for anyone teleporting within the vicinity of “now.” In fact, if I had…

(1) Read up on the future in the maternity ward where I was born, and

(2) Been magically transported to 2020, I would have …

(3) Done a 360 degree crawl back into mom’s womb.

Future shock set in when what do you want to be when you grow up becomes the answer to a test score. And those answers are limited to a shrinking number of professions that are drawing from a declining range of cognitive strengths, artistic skills, and uniquely human traits.

What if the same career ambition could be expressed as social stability, and not mere social status? This promising societal aspiration starts with a wholesale rewrite of the social contract number one. That’s where Father Paulikas’s brave, defiant act of detachment begins. That’s from where we assess our relationship to our communities, peers, and juries without prejudice.

Playing by the same set of rules is a sound set of rules because the same ones apply to you and me. Other agreements are on the table. But this is the only one we’ll need to understand across that table our mutual commitment to social contract number one.

Only problem is that the contract is voided, no one’s in charge, and our responsibility to each other is decided by someone with no skin in the game. And when the contract is voided there are no winners and losers. Just suckers who never had a chance of winning. Also, your handshake is channeling my inner germaphobia. Perhaps we can lock our gazes in with an iris scan? What are the terms and conditions for lying through our irises?

Given this loss of mutuality, personal responsibility is being tested in ways not previously relied upon to form agreements, let alone social cohesion.

Coordination used to be how humans in groups navigated their way through anticipated changes. But it’s also how we coped with the unknowable, as-in… if I take a bullet from the enemy, my loved ones will accept my death as a noble sacrifice in the defense of family honor. In these pandemic times there have been many great and minor sacrifices. But not in the public spirit and inner solace offered by a shared understanding of a common good. These virtues are not available to us in 2020.

In the past the enemy was foreign. The threat concerned more than enlistment or rationing or conforming to a defensive crouch while the storms of hostility roared overhead. It was the threat of what could be taken from us:

• • from our freedom to assemble,
  • to the abundance in our supermarkets, and
  • the shape-forming potential of our futures.

These fascist/commie/[blank] fundamentalists were all gunning for our way of life.

Now that the threat has advanced to a largely domestic one, the cupboard of American treasure is largely a rite of privilege, not a under the lock and key of such former givens as…

• • An entrepreneurial spirit,
  • Expanding middle class,
  • High quality public education,
  • Widespread home ownership, and
  • The fruits of a well-earned retirement — the grand prize afforded to anyone with a lifelong appetite for hard work.

Food fight!

Our wounds are self-inflicted these days. The petty slights of self-involved indignation are now serviceable as both: (1) social media business model, and (2) the national conversation. We’re lashing out impulsively for optimal reaction. Somewhat like how a virus tempts an immunity system to over-correct in its compromised state. And we’re not defending our honor when we’re returning incoming fire with table scraps.

More importantly, we’re not defending an American Way of Life. Those defenses are way down in a time of declining life expectancy, climbing obesity rates, downward economic mobility, overpriced housing markets, the highest rates of chronic disease among our peers, a safety net in the shredder, and one uninsured medical condition away from an incurable credit report.

But before we figure out with what’s worthy of defending and from whom, let’s ease up on the gas? Perhaps a slice of humble pie served ahead of the bacon cheeseburgers and the chest-thumping? Maybe even a little gratitude for the small graces that have endured, or even strengthened under the strain of our COVID exile?

Here are a few collective blessings we’d all be well-advised to consider ahead of the next flash point for intolerance:

• • COVID is worse than the flu, less contagious than the measles, moves stealthily through populations dense and scattered, and about as lethal as a dirty bomb dropped in any single population center on earth today.
  • Your internet has gone down several times since the virus hit. But not for months at a time. (Can you imagine?)
  • The Pacific Coastal fires and the Gulf hurricanes have lived up to their “Hell AND High Water” billing in the coming attractions of climate changes to come. And most of us still possess the time, resources, and intelligence to rebuild … elsewhere.

Are We Done Here? (What Sounds Like a Plan and Sounds off Like a Platoon)

My wife calls it the 5-5-5 rule. That $5 dollar garment will ship for an additional five dollars. Upon arrival, it will be worn five times before it enters the pile-on of pre-washed un-wearables. Planned obsolescence is what happens when we flush our last trip to the printer cartridge store down the pipe of shredded fashion statements. Unplanned unemployment is what happens when the middle person is removed from the transaction. That job is not coming back. The newly disintermediated are not the cartridge repair guys of the future. There is no return policy for faster and cheaper when there is no “better.”

So what would better look like if we surrounded it with stable/merit and compensation? Would we publicly fund more of those “good paying jobs” the party bosses used to crow about at the ribbon-cutting? Didn’t think so. Do we elect a government that takes a healthy whack out of the trickle-free revenues that accrue to the great dis-intermediators? Now there’s a lifetime income funding source. Trickle-up the fruits of federal revenues and the cash gets spent before the capital can be hoarded.

That sounds convincing, to a point:

• • Only, what happens when the takers so far exceed the givers that the U.S. Treasury becomes a credit risk?
  • Will yesterday’s corporate tax cuts turn into tomorrow’s reparations, and loan forgiveness, and free day care for essential service workers?
  • Will emerging coalitions crumble under rapidly shifting centers of power? More acrimony and tribalism … is that even possible?

Forks in Roads Once Off Limits to Us

Here are seven ways that can play out as a shopping list for problem-solving. It’s all on the table. Even the table scraps. The only non-negotiable in this future is score-settling.

1. Loosen the margins:
   The pandemic economy let’s those of us with the luxury of work-at-home status to ponder its leading mismatch: The irony of essential workers drawing marginal wages. What would happen if we expanded both? The ranks of the essential and the rewards for the privilege of being pivotal to a functional society? What could be less marketing-driven or disposable than a living wage to keep the rest of us fed and looked after? That might not boost the fortunes of capital. But it might dignify our mutual understanding of the need for community, expanding windows of public service, and survival of our better natures.
   
   
2. Bridge the generations:
   In the sixties it was the gulf between the insurgent baby-boomers and the war handed them by the greatest generation. Nowadays those same boomers are standard-bearers of a graying nation. The new gap is based on a long delayed transfer of power and property from the ownership boomers to the resulting generations, with no sure lock on their own self-financing destinies. For starters, we boomers need to admit that we’re old, cranky, and medicated. Perhaps it’s not just golfing, cruises, and keypad access to a fiefdom of gated estates? Maybe retirement is for giving something back. Maybe that transfer is a wealth of experience to share beyond the next of kin?

   
   And while we’re on a lifetime of self-service, let us not forget the the rise of individualism and institutional distrust was birthed, nurtured, and ultimately flourishing under the Boomer Nation of today. Cradle to grave. The working class. The privileged. The stars and stripes of all political persuasions. It’s all about me.

   

3. Stop addressing our adversaries by their social media accounts:
   Putting the needs of our base ahead of our adversaries is an entirely understandable impulse. Posturing to the converted? This drags down the chances for reconciliation with our opponents. We need to re-invent the smoke-filled backroom as a safe space. We need to go screenless. We need to face each other. Repeat back the concerns we hear. Share back how that squares with our understanding. Confirm where we’re closing the awareness gaps. Disagree on the best way forward. Agree that these views stem from honest differences, not from selling tickets to rage parades.

   
   “Protesting is good and needed, press conferences are good and needed,” says Councilwoman Alondra Cano, in discussing community solutions to New York City policing policies. “That third space is needed where we are committed to each other, and not the camera.”

4. Trust won’t return before the arrival of a new social contract:
   Accountability is what happens when social contracts are honored. The better ones aren’t enforced by a huge pile-on of legal codes but by the honoring itself. The carrot is reputation. The stick is ostracism. It’s an arrangement where everybody wins with no specific winners. Social contracts don’t enforce victories. No one runs up their own trust scores.

   And no one is taking from a limited trust pile. Under the cover of trust can can protect large, sweeping allegiances to social mores and ethical conduct: Civility, common decency, the benefit of the doubt, etc.
   
   Accountability is the highest projection of what’s escaped through a crack in the tax, penal, and police codes. Add oaths of office to that list. No one likes to go to the back of the line.

   Accountability serves at the pleasure of a cognitive-borne contagion called insecurity. Withholding rates recede and advance. Economic insecurity however is a one-lane highway with no passing lane. We’ve driven down that road for half a century. With no signs of abating. Problem-solving needs to be protected from Twitter, permanent campaigning, and corporately-funded political parties. We need government to facilitate solutions without pitting the solvers against the insurgents.

   Branding problems aside, government needs to break free of its problem versus solution conundrum. That’s the first step in figuring out a new core strength unique to big trust governing: how to play matchmaker between problems and solutions. In any size or flavor, a big trust democracy asks the obvious:
   – A stampede of social problems angling for the top fixation slot.
   – What are the gaping holes that need the most expedient filling in our fraying safety net?
   – How do we fix that problem by strengthen the net?

5. Skin the the Game is Under the Control of My Personal Responsibility:
   Masking the significance of top-down decision-making is at the root of “the great abdication.” The disowning of the impact of those weighted decisions on the shoulders of those who carry their consequences. For too long, authority has been consigned to the faceless, omnipotent powers of “the market” or “the algorithms” or the neighbors we never see with the wrong yard signs.

   
   While we have no direct recourse to address those above-my-pay-grade executive decisions, we can single handedly cast a ballot. And it will count exactly as much as the votes of the candidates whose authority we reject or favor. This is what holds us to our history and pegs us to a future where owning up to consequences becomes a collective responsibility again.

   

6. Tolerance is the cost of doing social contracts:
   In olden, settled times we had a system of checks and balances. It was the rock, paper, scissors form of mutually enforced deterrence from the tyrannies of one person, body, or party domination. These days, voters are given an all-or-nothing choice:

    – Either your team clubs your opposition over the head, or
   – You blockade every move they make to step over you.

   There is no tolerance built into this unaccountable system. Only the seeds of unflinching contempt and deal-breakers for negotiating on unresolvable terms. Add any hinting of compromise to the enemies list.

   Is that because our domestic enemies are so menacing or because our tolerance muscles have grown flabby? Could it be as simple as a screen-based engagement that no longer requires our in-person presence to engage in respectful disagreement?

7. The digital natives are restless:
   Selling out used to be an accusation aimed at performers who profited outside their coterie of fans and fawning critics. Nowadays it means acknowledgement of opposing views and a striving to strike a balance. And why shouldn’t the base hold out for a better deal? They have no history of deal-making where two sides can look each other in the eye and face the mirror the following morning. Knowing that means needing to draw the new social contract…
   – Within the conflict-seeking urgency of the news media, and
   – Without the public trust in the institutions required to make that contract a binding one

Shopping List Item #1:

Have today’s Technopolies Underwrite Tomorrow’s Guaranteed Minimum Incomes

Okay. Now it’s the government’s turn to find suitors who can unleash their engineering teams to design the delivery system. But unlike an Amazon warehouse or an Apple factory or a Google data farm, the designer gig is a tax write-off, not a new profit center. Strictly pro bono, and sorry, no product placements.

And the job placements? Why that would include generous staffing counts from the ranks of those essential marginals. Yes, the folks otherwise be swapped out for robots once the solution train leaves the social problem station.

What if big tech doesn’t get on board the big trust wagon? That’s where Bezos, Zuckerberg, and associates can leave the generosity of their current brackets in place. Or this: The feds can pry open their transaction cows to fund income guarantees for those same essential marginals who could otherwise be working on the social solution railroads of tomorrow. What could be better leverage for the disenfranchised than payment for our digital identities? They may have been stolen legally. But that doesn’t indenture us to surveillance capitalists. That doesn’t bind us to the broken contract.

In Closing

As noted at the outset, a past that’s always in flux is a delay on the future. Nostalgia for the settled scores of former glories is more than the gibberish of cultural dementia. It’s a full-throated cancellation notice on the construction of future times that eclipse the selective memories of the infirmed and the entrenched.

The aging baby boomer confronts a world they have leveraged for personal gain to a degree unfathomable to prior generations. The time afforded by accruing wealth gives retiree-age the resources they need to support the efforts of future generations to make and honor their own promises. These are the markers of promises to keep in a century that is neither new nor on the cusp of greatness.

It is a future where the boomer can sunset our claims and privileges, and open our unspent endowments up to the inheritable promise of an inhabitable future. That must be our true legacy. And we will share in the faith that we tried to leave this world better than we found it.

Funny thing about the authoring of our collective history books. It’s one thing when we acknowledge that the selecting, composing, and retelling of battles and conflicts is in the voice of the victors. That’s a core conflict in itself, replayed as both “settled” or “disputed” in referential loops. Now add the rose-colored glasses to this reading of history. That’s where our memories filter out to the sacrifices, traumas, and injustices we carried to prevail within our victorious narratives. Adding a selective memory to a collection of questionable outcomes forms one shaky foundation; specifically for…

(1) unifying efforts to build a future worth living in, and

(2) for human cooperation in general.   

Which confederate statue is the reflection of local pride in regional sovereignty? Which is a hideous reminder of white supremacy?

You have your opinion. I have mine. Should they conflict, there’s little chance we’ll be persuaded otherwise. So let’s seek common ground on your rightful respect for my wrong-headed views.

Let’s agree that conversion is both tedious and self-defeating. Instead let’s focus on issues where we both win and share in that same victorious narrative. We can tackle the harder stuff once the base level trust level is restored.

I Want to Go Home But I am Home, © Alanna Rutledge, 2020.