Touching Soul, Touching Senses: The Art You Deserve
The environment dictates the expression
This is Part II of the essay series Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Class
It was written while listening to this song (a favorite of mine).
Prelude
Many nominally independent, unrelated things — such as art, political candidates, and culture — flow from dislocations you wouldn’t expect. We believe these are top-down choices: meaning outputs of unique, agentic human decisions.
In this assumption, we overlook the bottom-up nature of existence: a vast majority of the actions, beliefs, and stances we adopt are inputs from our environment, imposed on us by circumstance.
For example: it’s highly unintuitive to think sustained trade imbalances influence our artistic preferences. Or that a nation’s manufacturing base substantially informs its culture. These are not as unconnected as they appear.
Art does not inform society, but emerges from it; it’s a symptom, an output, not an input. It all starts with the eudaimonia — well-being, purpose, fulfillment — felt by its people.
Environments Dictate Expressions
Art does not breed culture; a culture breeds art. Culture does not inform an environment; an environment informs a culture. The fish at the bottom of the ocean didn’t create that pressure, that pressure created them. What's true for abyssal creatures echoes for humans in that we don't choose our adaptations, our circumstances shape them for us. The environment dictates the expression.
The disposition of a people is downstream of the comfort, prosperity, and purpose they collectively possess. A society has agency in respect to shaping its environment, but it does not have agency in respect to what the environment imposes upon it while inside it. You can work to find light bulbs in a dark room so you can see; but when you’re in a dark room, you cannot see. This illustration is not unique to the room.
Sad times beget sad art, uplifting times, uplifting art. What was Picasso going through during his Blue Period? Was the art responsible for his depression, or was his depression responsible for his art? The answer to this question is not unique to him, and it scales.
It’s inverting causality to believe expressive output from Nirvana, David Foster Wallace, and the like were responsible for the nihilistic malaise that crept in around the 90s. I’ve seen frequent bemoaning of the grunge movement as responsible for the anomie and ennui-infused listlessness that the period is known for. This is misguided.
Symptoms do not produce illnesses; illnesses produce symptoms.
This distinct 90s vibe shift was rooted in a national orientation that went from emphasizing eudaimonism, to hedonism. From lionizing production, to extolling consumption. A mindset that prioritized pleasure, in lieu of purpose. This is when it started to be cool, to be sad.
A melancholic society seeks melancholic art. A once-upbeat people become forlorn as they elevate hedonic sensations over eudaimonic soul. What changed? The environment. How? Let’s review.
Product-Market Fit (PMF): For Business and Art
Picture Elvis-style music being produced in the 2020s. Now imagine Nirvana-esque grunge performances in the 1950s.
Now envision if you’d still know the names Cobain or Presley if this were the case.
I assert you would not. I believe they would have failed miserably had they tried to sell these products in different surroundings. The essence and spirit of those decades feel like they’re in such complete contradistinction to each other we might as well be talking about different countries. The messages that Elvis and Nirvana offered had no PMF in each other’s eras. Why?
In 1957, the average American was 27 years old, married with children, and likely working in manufacturing. By 1991, that same statistical American was 33, increasingly likely to be divorced (half of marriages end in divorce around this point), and watching the factory job that could support a family on one salary evaporate into the Pacific. How is this related? You incrementally lose the ability to sell Hound Dog-style tunes to a generation with economic anxiety, just as Smells Like Teen Spirit won’t go viral for a populace that evangelizes the American Dream. Product-market fit is a concept for more than just SaaS businesses.
Elvis exudes a vibrant wholesome optimism that feels corny and contrived now. Nirvana orients itself around an apathy that permeates its depressive poetry. Zoomers are the zenith of this: the less you care, the cooler you are.
The predominant creative and artistic output of a time reflects the sentiments of its people, because otherwise they wouldn’t consume it. If you think art informs culture and not vice versa, pick artists/performers from the 1950s and consider honestly if they’d be successful if they came out today with the same message and songs.
These environments, despite being on the same physical soil, are basically alternative planets. It’s apparent in the dramatic change in dress, speech, and even physical shape of the people then and now (we have a certain gelatinous, orb shape to us currently). Different environments incubate different art; the latter springs forth from the former.
You cannot peddle nihilistic art to an inspired society; you cannot promote inspiring art to a nihilistic nation.
Art is an extension of culture —> Culture is a property of its people —> People are downstream of their environment. The environment dictates the expression of what we feel, how we coordinate, and communicate; art channels collective sentiments and expresses them. Art would not be consumed if it did not resonate; the demand comes first, the art comes second. Where does the demand stem from?
We must reflect honestly why certain messages resonate over others, and why that shifts with circumstances.
You can retort that consent can be manufactured and consensus manipulated (a top-down argument), but some things simply cannot be sold to a healthy person. You can massage, encourage, and influence, yes… but you fundamentally cannot market depressive products to a healthy, viral young man who exercises and has his way with his girlfriend 5x a week. Why does a society collectively become less healthy, depressed, and stop having kids? Just a bunch of independent decisions made by sovereign individuals? Come on now. Consider you may not quite be the being of unalloyed agency that Western canon has made you out to be.
Touching Soul, Touching Senses
When you enjoy art, you do so because it articulates something deep down you already knew and were unable to convey in the same manner. When art speaks to you, it exposes a truth or aesthetic inhabiting you. Art reveals beliefs.
This isn’t confined to creative expressions. Jordan Peterson and Nassim Taleb are famous for similar reasons: they’re tellers of ancient truths, repackaged for modernity. They aren’t saying anything new, but reminding you of wisdom that humanity reliably forgets in 80-year cycles. Peterson's “clean your room” is Marcus Aurelius with a Canadian accent; Taleb's “skin in the game” is Hammurabi's Code dressed in probability theory. Almost nothing is truly new, only forgotten.
In a culture deracinated from the roots that allowed it to prosper, the oldest ideas can feel the most revolutionary. So unaware of bedrock axioms that Bronze Age wisdom sounds like disruptive innovation! These are old, new ideas that register when you’re in need of their message. They are Lindy in the deepest meaning of the word.
That’s what it means when something speaks to you: it takes a subconscious awareness and makes it conscious. It turns an embodied understanding into an articulated one.
Human fulfillment can be broadly placed into two categories: the kind that stimulates your soul, and stimulates your senses. You need a degree of both to lead a balanced, happy life.
Artistic stimulation is when you encounter a message that resonates with your beliefs, morals, or aesthetics. It echoes in you. It touches your soul.
Hedonistic stimulation is when you encounter a sensation that ignites your flesh. It arouses or excites you. It touches your senses.
When a society is sanguine, it prioritizes artistic stimulation; when it’s decaying, it seeks hedonistic flames above all else. The prevailing art of a period and what it communicates is a derivative of a civilization’s disposition, not the progenitor of it. Collectively, art is consumed because it captures the thoughts and spirit of your kin; it’s a concurrent or lagging indicator, not a leading one.
Social media doesn't cause narcissism any more than Nirvana is responsible for nihilism; it simply provides a more efficient delivery mechanism for whatever spiritual poverty already exists. We get the internet we deserve: a dopaminergic slot machine optimized for engagement rather than enlightenment.
Similarly:
“We don't eat because we have farms; we have farms because we eat.
We don't socialize because we have parties; we have parties because we socialize.
We don't go to the bathroom because we have toilets; we have toilets because we go to the bathroom.
We don't conduct business (trade) because of corporations; we have corporations because we conduct business.
We don’t have babies because of cribs; we have cribs because we have babies.
We don’t have property because laws exist; we have laws because property exists.
These things make the natural action they're in service of easier, more efficient, and civilized, but are not responsible for them existing in the first place. They recognize the phenomenon and facilitate it, they do not create it.”
From Property Rights, Toilets, and the Way of the Dog:
… and we don’t have feelings because we have art; we have art because we have feelings.
Emotions precede the art; the art is not the cause, but manifestation. A sort of ironic, post-modern discontent began to take hold in 1980-90s America, and carries on today. The grunge movement was only a proxy for it.
Symptom:
-------------- PAUSE --------------
During the 80s and 90s the fiscal deficit began to expand, the petrodollar, eurodollar, and their network effects essentially gave the US dollar a bottomless pit of demand, causing the deficit to functionally not matter from an insolvency lens (mechanically explained here). US manufacturing and the middle class began to be gutted and outsourced. These are directly related.
Why did manufacturing start to vacate the US? What made other countries preferrable when America was previously dominant?
China, Germany, and other chronic surplus nations often intentionally depress domestic wages below their productivity levels through industrial policies. This creates a substantial competitive advantage for their manufacturing sectors because it reduces labor’s earning power, and thus makes manufacturing cheaper in those countries; this makes their exports comparatively cheaper, and thus more competitive.
Companies cluster their factories and supply chains accordingly, based on wherever the labor inputs are lowest. We call these gross-margin herding effects “globalism”, as the more accurately named “business clustering effects based on surplus-nation wage manipulation that seeks the cheapest labor inputs possible” is bad branding.
The average Chinese worker is about 20% as economically productive as the American one, and if he was paid 20% of the wage, that’d be perfectly fine and would yield no competitive advantage. However, he is paid only about 10-15% of the US wage: this is a substantial discrepancy! Similar dislocations are persistently found in other surplus nations, such as Germany. It leads to a race to the bottom for labor’s share of income, all in the name of “efficiency”. You compete with this by paying people less.
Structurally underpaying workers is a material manufacturing advantage, and in large part why corporations uproot entire industries, move abroad, and eviscerate the way of life for the middle class in the process. All in service of improved gross margins.
The long-term side effects of McKinsey-minded medicine:
BUT, this means the trinkets became cheaper, and that means everything became way better! We know everything became better, because the spreadsheet-calculated GDP went up, and the trinkets are now cheaper. That is all there is to know.
But wait, am I making money at the same rate? Is my purchasing power increasing such that I can consume more of those trinkets while still affording a house? Can I support a family on one income like in the 1950s? You know, as in an actual quality-of-life increase to go along with that sweet, sweet Bain and Co. spreadsheet growth? I know it helps in theory, dear economist, but does it help in practice?
Is my well-being enhanced alongside those iPhone unit economics? Because if not, what are these low-price widgets doing for me exactly...? If life isn’t improving alongside it, who cares what the spreadsheet says?
HUSH. The middle class are really happy about this, actually, they just don’t know it yet. Someone should tell them everything is only getting better.
This began in the 1970s, and the ramifications of it are slow to manifest; their second and third-order effects accumulating as the situation endures. Sometimes when you knock over Chesterton’s Fence, it takes a while to see what you’ve done.
-------------- RESUME --------------
Just as music, art, and culture are not responsible for any societal ailment, but symptoms of it, so too is the political climate and the politicians we get. Populists don’t birth political demand; political demand births populists.
Trump is not the cause of any strife or division, rather he is a symptom of it. There would be no PMF for his nationalist, protectionist platform if it weren't communicating something many felt at a spinal level was critical to address obvious problems, ones that spreadsheets failed to identify. Populist politicians would have no meaningful constituency if the polity was not in need of their political goods and services.
The market for a political platform emerges from its environment. A shift in environment facilitates a shift in the utility of select political beliefs over others, and thus how well they sell. Political platforms have PMF, too. They are a response to demand; where is that demand coming from? Look to the surroundings, not the politician.
Political stances have different utility in different circumstances. Selling socialism in poverty is like trying to grow sunflowers without any soil; promoting conservatism in prosperity is like trying to grow sunflowers in the winter. The political and artistic are both downstream of the habitat of its inhabitants; this is what I mean by ‘the environment dictates the expression’.
Eudaimonia. Hedonism. Purpose. Consumption.
A market for bleak art followed as eudaimonic, self-actualizing purpose became an afterthought, and hedonistic myopic consumption became the national pastime. Time preferences shortened, whimsical pleasures prized. Middle-class wages slowly decimated. Divorce rates skyrocketing. A single income increasingly incapable of raising a family on its own. Yet we’re assured all is well, because the GDP says so.
According to McKinsey, Yale, and The Economist, men don’t derive a significant part of their identity and sense of personal worth from their jobs, because we can’t measure holistic well-being in our expected-value models. Ugh!
BUT, we can measure how many Taco Bell Doritos Locos and PlayStations you buy (part of the GDP calculation), so stop your complaining, the globalism will continue until morale improves. We are GROWING, don't you want to GROW; this is the ideology of the cancer cell, as well as Harvard Business Review.
Consumption is the north star of globalism, because that’s the only lens through which a supply chain understands the world. Nice for your bottom line, corrosive to the human condition.
When nations are solely understood as expected-value calculations, then becoming the best GDP input you can be is your telos. ‘Experts’ who don’t recognize a nation as a civilizational container, only as a production zone with border walls made of Excel columns. What do you mean you don't see it that way? Have you even read a book? Consider reading just one book, then you too can understand why residing in a country-sized, low-trust factory floor is good, actually.
A society’s orienting force is hedonism when it sees a bigger GDP as its moral apotheosis, and cheaper trinkets as the most noble thing it can achieve. Structuring its industries, labor, society, purpose, and existence around the efficient production and consumption of trinkets. You are not happy when you ACHIEVE you are happy when you CONSUME.
If the material is your sole measurement of success, then the material is what’s sold to you under a false promise of happiness. The economic models say you’re gleeful now, so shut the fuck up and be grateful nothing is built here anymore.
Wait, why are the men getting sadder? Why is the art so blue?? A mystery, truly.
A Cost for Imbalance
To understand the impetus for these issues look at the conditions, view the situation bottom-up. A prolonged, glaring trade deficit and vacating industrial sector produce Nth-order effects that are difficult to discern, but undeniably felt.
The downstream effects of globalism and trade asymmetries impact the well-being of men, women, and how a country comports itself. We are witnessing this in America as enduring asymmetries have altered the fabric of the US industrial base and middle-class mode of existence; it carries externalities that go beyond income.
When dealing with a dyad: to harm one is to harm the other. To help one is to help both. To advantage one is to advantage none.
When it comes to men and women, the masculine and feminine, who derives their sense of eudaimonism from providing, and who derives it from nurturing? The men suffer first, the women suffer second; if you affect one, you affect the other. The stats on female happiness are degrading too.
Closing
A society is deprived of dignity when its citizens are reduced to cog people in a margin-maximizing supply chain. Globalism perceives nations and humans as fungible units of gray goo, it has no concept of country as a human vessel with desire for well-being and purpose; all it sees is one big factory floor. When this false god is your idol, the only stimulation you will find is that of the senses.
A trait that makes us more sentient beings than animals is the ability to enjoy and produce artistic expression. To be able to achieve eudaimonic joys, and not only hedonic pleasures. All creatures do hedonism, but only one has been given the gift of eudaimonism. Globalism defiles this gift and destroys swathes of society in its sole pursuit of the cheapest labor humanly possible.
When you deny that a nation serves as a home for people who are unique and native to it, and instead become a GDP cog-person maximalist, whose telos can be distilled down to “growth is growth and more is more” — all decisions made by asking “what’s the expected value tho?” — what you worship becomes corrosive. To only value the spreadsheet is to worship the spreadsheet. You always worship something, even if it has a number sign, so be careful where you direct your reverence.
When a society's purpose withers from lack of eudaimonia, it births the hollow-eyed despondency and populist uprisings we see today. What caused the environment to transform? Did you know Detroit used to be the fifth-largest city in America? Once a legitimate global manufacturing powerhouse. Why is it called the Motor City again? That place is an absolute pit now. You’ll find this all across the American middle, while Brookings Institute assures you it’s fine. These are the byproducts of declining purpose coupled with the pursuit of nearsighted sensations.
Globalist economic thinking is equivalent to a nutritionist telling you: “Here you go, have some high-fructose corn syrup to help you hydrate, here are some processed Cheetos to fuel you. What do you mean these preservatives and pre-packaged foods aren’t nourishing? Look at the nutrition facts, you're nourished! How satiated you are can be found in this number I made, you see.” Fuck you.
The art we deserve isn't only the art we consume, but the art we're capable of creating. A spreadsheet civilization produces spreadsheet art: technically proficient, emotionally vacant, optimized for engagement metrics rather than human worth. Trading Cathedrals for Amazons: not the river, but the warehouse - both are fitting monuments to their culture's highest values. One reaches toward heaven; the other promises next-day delivery. Guess which one produces transcendent art?
A society gets the art it deserves, because it reaps the fruits of what it decides to worship.
"The root of 'addict' in Latin is the word 'addicere', which means religious devotion. We all worship and have a religious impulse; we can choose to an extent what we worship. But the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing, simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different.”
- David Foster Wallace
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There's a Simpsons scene that you may like as it relates to a lot of what you're saying here. In the episode, Lisa manages Bart's little league team, implementing all the sabermetrics spreadsheet wisdom, which improves the team but which Bart deeply resents. At the end, Bart decides to steal home to win the big game while Lisa stammers about how statistically impossible this play is until she's finally overtaken by the moment, saying "it's the most exciting play in baseball" before breaking out in cheers for her brother. It's really a beautiful scene. Like you said, life (like baseball) is not a spreadsheet.
Dear Dmitry,
There is an ecosystem of artists, an unknown underground, and the successful ones that we see copied the unknowns and yes, are able to make it when the culture is ready. Elvis with bluesmen who often toiled in obscurity for decades....THEN its time has come to the culture when it's sanded down and offered to the greater culture at large. Even Elvis' hips were too much at first... until they weren't.
We used to have genius gatekeepers who knew when culture was ready, or thought they knew.
But now, yes, everything is for a paycheck which changes the dynamic, and the secret weirdos can't live cheaply and there's no more underground as we've been priced out everywhere and everywhere is for sale.
So your theory is only taking in the age of internet, which has made us all whores.
However I believe people get tired of crap culture at some point, and that's when the thinkers and artists already on the fringe become the pretty people again because we get desperate for a new idea story or way out or around. Then they'll be copied by someone more relatable palatable and famous, and it will seem that they came out of pop culture, when they were carrying other underground ideas forward that had already been discussed much earlier and tested in the underground few know about.
I'm not at the beginning level myself; I just know to look for them. The weirdos no one knows and people think are mad.
I know one or two in real life, and John Michael Greer is an online example. He's considered hella pretty now.