Increasingly Dilapidated San Francisco Represents a Microcosm of American Decline — Stephan Richter’s Non-Partisan Essay Is Worth Reading for the Causative Themes it Weaves

© 2011 Peter Free

 

23 August 2011

 

 

Stephan Richter’s The Globalist is one of the few consistently intelligent online publications

 

Richter’s recent essay about San Francisco’s decline relates to multiple national themes.

 

The article is too rich (and too cleverly integrated) to dissect piecemeal without trivializing it.  I encourage readers to take a look at it in its entirety.

 

 

One of Richter’s ideas, however, stands out — America’s lack of commitment to society as a whole

 

One of Richter’s prominent statements about disrepair’s causation so accurately mirrors my own, that I quote it at length:

 

[W]e are being told that the spending habits of the past in the public sector were far too generous and wasteful, unsustainably so.

 

However, that is not just a consequence of union rules and high labor costs, as is so often argued.

 

No, most of these projects are won and executed by private-sector firms, who all made a pretty penny on the stuff they built while the going was good.

 

Corporate inefficiency and wastefulness, a Republican thing in political terms, is just as much to blame as the unions, which are the Democrats' political liability. The fact is that both sides conspired to reap the maximum benefits for their respective political camps from the public trough.

 

And yet, this collection of extremely smart people, given to thinking about big, practical challenges and hyper-complex systems, can't even get their act together to establish and maintain state-of-the-art infrastructure?

 

The best answer, most likely, is found in the rock-bottom preference of many either wealthy or smart Americans for outright libertarianism.

 

Their rationale is simple: As long as I fend for myself, why should I worry about matters of collective action, collective rationality?

 

Underneath this dilapidated state of the infrastructure, there is a deliberate, almost devilish toying with the risk of societal collapse — not only of not caring about the public good, but almost of enjoying to play it this riskily, of not making investments in the future.

 

People here seem to enjoy a distinct incongruousness in their lives. The equation of “my home = my castle = my retreat from society (and my car is the same thing on wheels)” still holds.

 

As a result, everyone who is subscribing to this formula, whether they recognize it or not, is a refugee.

 

In other words, Americans, perversely and deliberately, are treating themselves as internally displaced people, right in the midst of their own society.

 

© 2011 Stephan Richter, A Lament for San Francisco, The Globalist (23 August 2011) (paragraphs split, emphasis added)

 

 

Retreat from the concept of society partly explains the American public’s complacent disregard for its fighting military youth

 

In my view, we have “internally displaced” ourselves away from the very ones who fight to keep us strong.

 

The wars in Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq continue because the non-military public does not care to contemplate what death and injury in service to the nation actually mean.

 

 

If our exaggerated libertarian philosophy persists, American “exceptionalism” will come to mean national poverty, rather than national excellence

 

It is ultimately not possible to wall ourselves off from society and the nation at large, without aiming the United States directly at second and third world status.  The ultra-selfish mindset that emphasizes one’s personal castle over the nation’s wellbeing will eventually destroy the physical and community infrastructure that supports us as a powerfully competent nation.

 

Libertarianism is a political philosophy for people who are intellectually and experientially incapable of foreseeing the 21st Century consequences of their unworkable philosophical inclinations.

 

 

The psychodynamics of accustomed wealth contribute to the “out for myself” separateness problem

 

I wrote here about a recent psychological study that allegedly reveals the comparative selfishness of people who are accustomed to wealth.

 

According to the study, wealthy people’s grasping attitude contrasts with the “we’re all in this together” generosity that socioeconomically poorer people display.

 

If accurate, the research bodes poorly for America’s ability to pull itself together.

 

 

Spiritual wisdom forgotten

 

The world’s great spiritual traditions all direct our attention to the seamlessness that binds, rather than separates.  In contrast, our national attention seems to have gone rather ostentatiously toward separateness.

 

That is both curious and revealing in a nation that generally considers itself to be predominantly Christian.