The Poison We Pick

Children are forced to conform to the state's schooling program from a very early age, and those who fail to do so are labeled as such with bad grades and trips to the school office. They are humiliated in front of their peers and feel powerless and dehumanized. This record follows them through their entire schooling career. The religious and cultural traditions of their parents are ridiculed by the authority figures at school. School zones keep poor children out of good schools.

Wealth inequality will naturally arise in any system, but when gains go to the politically-connected or well-lobbied, then the state is artificially enriching those at the expense of others. This is not the functioning of capitalism but rather of cronyism and corruption.

Student loans are out of control precisely because the government got in the business. Higher education costs are out of control because of the excess money from the student loans.

The job prospects suck because of excess regulation in the economy. Entrepreneurs are not able to innovate as well due to so much red tape. Occupational licensing sets up barriers at all levels of the workforce, enriching the incumbents and limiting competition. Healthcare is so overrun with regulation it's laughable to mention the word "market" in the same sentence. Those are barriers put in place of market forces by the state.

The drug epidemic is merely the result of all these forces put together.

But actually, I think the Trump loose cannon wasn't sent because of anger against capitalism, but rather misplaced anger against things like immigration, diversity, and a move away from traditional religious views. Capitalism is seen as A-OK, it's just that The Liberals have rigged the system against Good Honest People.

Smartphones, TV, video games, online porn: they're in every developed country. They can't be the explanation for what's different about America. Decline of religiously-derived meaning? Most developed countries' populations place less importance on religion than Americans. Factory jobs squeezed by automation and cheap offshore labor? Canadian manufacturers have access to the same robots as American firms, and Canada has been a member of the World Trade Organization as long as the US has.

Inter-temporal comparisons also show that it doesn't make sense to blame the American opioid crisis on the decline of manufacturing jobs. The number of American manufacturing jobs peaked in the 1970s. "Rust belt" became a common term in the 1980s. But the opioid crisis is much more recent.

The alternative is to spend one's days doing anything at all--whatever a person may find pleasing. That may include playing video games for 12 hours every day. It may also include injecting as much heroin as the person can lay hands on. It might also include writing out a 1000-page mathematical proof. Or breeding rats to have better bladder control and better responsiveness to humans. Or designing a near-space habitat suitable for supporting a population of humans indefinitely. Or deciphering ancient scripts. Or building a roadworthy vehicle from scratch. Or building cosplay outfits. That kind of life completely blows the farm work out of the water.

A lot of jobs only get done because someone has to do them in order for everyone else to live. Those jobs compete with the things that don't need to get done, but people want to do because they think it's challenging, interesting, or fun. Nobody thinks that a job that can be done by a stupid robot is challenging, interesting, or fun. Boring, mind-numbing drudgery does not give anyone purpose.

It's not that people are bad at generating their own world views. They are bad at reconciling the colossal dungheap of comforting lies that have been fed to them for most of their lives with the objective reality that is starting to sneak past it, as lines of communication start to route around the gatekeepers that have traditionally been able to control the spread of information. The confidence and faith were never deserved in the first place. The story that could have previously been quashed by a local news editor, before reaching a national or worldwide audience, can now be spread instantly via social websites, and so too can the unfounded rumors of a malicious gossip. Before, people had to trust their kings, bishops, bosses, and touts. They had no alternatives--believe my bullshit now, or wonder forever what the truth might have been. Now, they are faced with a whole world filled with story-tellers, and are forced to decide whether any given person is trustworthy or not. For obvious reasons, the rulers that were formerly trust-because-you-have-to were lax in teaching those subject to their info-control about how to detect falsehoods or think critically.

The institutions formerly relied on most people believing them when they told plausible lies. They will be forced to educate people in critical thinking, now that everyone can be a believable liar on the Internet, because otherwise people will be more likely to disbelieve when the institutions tell lies, and also disbelieve them when they tell the truth.