This is Part II of Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Class. A series examining different-yet-connected economic dislocations, social imbalances, and structural forces that erode the center.
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 doing so, 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 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.
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 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 to art? You incrementally lose the ability to sell Hound Dog-style tunes to a generation with economic anxiety, just like Smells Like Teen Spirit doesn’t go viral for a population achieving the American Dream. Elvis exudes a vibrant wholesome optimism that feels corny and contrived now. Nirvana’s depressive jams are saturated with apathy and indifference. Zoomers are the zenith of this: the less you care, the cooler you are.
We don’t have feelings because we have art; we have art because we have feelings. Emotions precede the art. And our situations precede the emotions.
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 different planets. Apparent in the dramatic change in dress, speech, and even physical shape of the people then and now (we’re now orb shaped and obese). Different environments produce and consume different art.
You cannot sell nihilism to a society on the rise. A culture ascending doesn’t stomach despairing stories. And a civilization in decline will not absorb a hopeful, uplifting message. Art mirrors the soul of its creator and spirit of the times.
Art is an extension of culture. Culture is a property of its people. People are products of their environment.
The environment dictates the expression of what we feel, how we coordinate, and communicate. Art channels collective sentiments and wouldn’t be consumed if it didn’t resonate; the demand comes first, the art comes second. Demand is an extension of need and circumstances.
Sure 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… but you fundamentally cannot market melancholy 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, self-directed decisions made by sovereign individuals? We evolved within collectives, exist within collectives, and are not immune from the health of that collective. Western myth insists everyone’s an individual, nature sees it a bit differently.
Touching Soul, Touching Senses
When art speaks to you, it articulates something deep down you already sensed and were unable to convey. Art reveals beliefs and aesthetics inhabiting you
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.
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 a verbal one.
Human fulfillment can be broadly placed into two categories: the kind that stimulates your soul and your senses. You need a blend of both for a balanced 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 holds hedonistic pleasures above all else. The prevailing art of a period and what it values is a derivative of a civilization’s disposition. A concurrent or lagging indicator, not a leading one.
Social media doesn't cause narcissism any more than Nirvana is responsible for nihilism. They provide a lens into whatever spiritual poverty already exists. 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, not cause:
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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 all related.
Why did manufacturing start to vacate the US? What made other countries preferrable when America was so overwhelmingly dominant?
China, Germany, and other chronic surplus nations 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 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 edge. Similar dislocations are found in other surplus nations, like Germany. It leads to a race to the bottom for labor’s share of income, all in the name of ‘efficiency’. Globalism means you compete by paying people less.
Structurally underpaying workers is a huge manufacturing advantage, and why entire industries uproot, move abroad, and in the process eviscerate the way of life for the middle class. 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, 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? Is ther 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 margins, who cares what the GDP 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 this disconnect endures. Sometimes when you knock over Chesterton’s Fence, it takes a while to see what you’ve done.
-------------- RESUME --------------
Populists don’t produce political demand; political demand produces populists. Just as music, art, and culture are not responsible for societal ailments, but symptoms of it, so are the politicians we get.
Populist politicians would have no meaningful constituency if the polity was not in need of their political goods and services. 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 problems that spreadsheet thinking can’t identify.
The market for a political platform emerges from its environment. A shift in environment facilitates a shift in the utility of certain political beliefs over others and how well they sell. Promoting 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.
Political platforms are a response to demand; where is that demand coming from? Look to the habitat, not the politician.
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 priority. Time preferences shortened, whimsical pleasures prized. Middle-class wages slowly decimated. Divorce rates rising. A single income now 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 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, 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. Optimization erodes the middle.
When nations are solely understood as expected-value calculations, then becoming the best GDP input you can be is your telos. Lead by ‘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 an economics book? If you fill your head with a fake science, then you too can understand why residing in a country-sized, low-trust factory floor is good, actually.
A society’s galvanizing 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.
Global trade policy touches art.
A Cost for Imbalances
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 eventually shape the well-being of men, women, and how a country comports itself. We are witnessing this in America, as protracted imbalances have frayed the fabric of the US industrial base and middle-class mode of existence. This carries externalities that go beyond income.
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. To harm one is to harm the other. To help one is to help both. To advantage one is to advantage none.
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 meaning. All it sees is one big factory floor. When this false god is your idol, the only stimulation you’ll find is of the senses.
A trait that makes us more conscious than animals is the ability to enjoy and produce artistic meaning. 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’s efficiency obsession defiles this gift and deteriorates swathes of society in its sole pursuit of the cheapest labor humanly possible.
When you deny that a nation serves as a home first, GDP calculation second, what you worship becomes corrosive. “What’s the expected value?” becomes the only pertinent question. 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 eudaimonia withers, it births the hollow-eyed despondency and populist uprisings we see today. 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. The byproducts of declining purpose coupled with the pursuit of nearsighted sensations.
Globalist economic thought is equivalent to a nutritionist telling you: “Here you go, have some Pepsi 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.
A spreadsheet civilization trades Cathedrals for department stores and next-day delivery. A fitting monument to their highest values. 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.