RDH - Modern Life: For All but the Super Rich, It’s Not Really Worth All the Effort, Patriotism, and Fuss

Modern Life: For All but the Super Rich, It’s Not Really Worth All the Effort, Patriotism, and Fuss

April 4, 2007

In the first half of the twentieth century, things seemed relatively promising, even to hard-working middle-class Americans. Cars, airplanes, and motion pictures were all brand-new. Safe, reliable electricity illuminated our kitchens, living rooms, and bathrooms. By the 1920s, radio waves filled the air, expanding the boundaries of life and going a long way toward making loneliness obsolete. Telephones made small towns even smaller and lent a new sort of intimacy to cities. Soon, even relatively ordinary people could experience the delight of entering the kitchen at midnight and opening a refrigerator door to see, bathed in naked light, such sundries as jarred dill pickles, pimento-stuffed olives, chilled cream, and the sliced remains of yesterday's pot roast.

To top it all off, the arrival of vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and machines for washing and drying clothes—not to mention centralized climate control systems—seemed to promise a life of comfort and ease, at least in the home. Servants, once confined to the attic, moved out of the house and into the low-rent districts. They took factory or clerical jobs.

To this day, by the way, very few people understand why two worlds wars were fought between 1914 and 1945, and even less, why these wars were fought in such perfectly charming places as Paris, Rome, Munich, Warsaw, and even Tokyo.

I don't claim to know why either. But I suspect that it had something to do with the fact that, haunting the margins of this technologically enhanced good life, there were the untold legions of workers who didn't personally benefit from the new system but were nonetheless obliged to spend a good part of their lives propping it up.

So at the beginning of the twentieth century you had, for example, millions of Germans who vaguely realized that the migration from pasture to city was a little less of an adventure than it was cracked up to be. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, centuries of wildly successful adventures in the global marketplace produced a certain optimism, and even the working classes believed that what they had was worth fighting for.

"But what about socialism and communism?" The idea that some kind of socialism or communism is the answer to our problems is a ruse, devised to protect the fascist ideals of a select few. Human beings being human, and therefore naturally covetous, are incapable of living communally on anything larger than a small farm.

Germany and England, it so happens, were the primary combatants in the two world wars, and their goals in those conflicts represented the two basic approaches to the fundamental problem of modernity: (a) secure the good life for a select few, defined by race or nationality, and sequester all the rest in labor camps after exterminating the most manipulative and threatening individuals; or (b) clear the way for free citizens everywhere to defend their position, if they are at the top of the heap, or to fight their way up if they're not. The first idea is of course fascism; the second has been variously known as democracy or free-market capitalism.

Now that all that's out of the way, it should be clear that if the United States was a little reluctant to enter the fray—both times—that's because it had already fought its battles. First, it had secured its land from an enemy occupant for the benefit of a select few, and second, it had fought a very bloody war to abolish the feudal vestiges of its Southern, agricultural economy, clearing the way for a modern workforce continuously imported from abroad and working under the illusion of new opportunity in a New World.

Before I offer any recommendations, I would like to restate the problem of the twentieth century in blunter terms. The newly modern world, incapable of sustaining itself without an inexhaustible surplus of human and natural resources, jockeyed for control of these resources on two platforms: (1) fascism, which puts forth a myth of national or religious or racial or sartorial supremacy and therefore entitlement; and (2) democracy, which puts forth its own myth, that of equal opportunity for all. Both arguments proved to be enormously effective at motivating masses of people, but it was the second one, with its ability to flatter individuals irrespective of appearance or genealogy or religious affiliation, that would prove the greater force in the world.

Now that the illusion that the modern world is anything other than an enormous program of elitism has been dismantled, it is time for some recommendations. These recommendations are intended for the world at large, though specific examples have naturally been drawn from the American experience. They are divided by class.

"But what about my iPod?" You should be grateful for your iPod. Grateful to the hordes of people, many of them now gone, who in so many different ways made it possible for you to confine your play list to your hip pocket.

To the Super Rich: Hold Firm

Those of you lucky enough to enjoy huge reserves of wealth should first and foremost protect your resources with an iron hand. Aside from that one mandate, don't work too hard—not unless, that is, you are a great artist and you are convinced that your work will delight untold numbers of people, now and for generations to come. And don't bank on your kids. Children are notoriously inconstant, and they are rarely up to the challenge of protecting a vast legacy.

To the Lower Tiers of the Upper Middle Class: To Strive or Not to Strive?

For those of you who are caught between rich and not rich, my advice is to work to determine, with the help of a financial adviser, your chances of entering the realms of the super rich within some sort of reasonable time frame (e.g., before you turn forty-five). If your chances are poor, relax. Work less. If you have kids, cut out their paid extracurricular activities. Consider not sending them to college. If they have developed a taste for the privileged life, they will certainly be motivated to make it on their own. It's far nobler to be self-made than to be the pampered child of upper-middle-class parents.

To the Middle Class: Scale Way Back

If you work more than one job "just to make ends meet," quit the least rewarding one. Use the extra time to research the cost of living in various regions of the United States, according to your taste in climate. Move in to the least expensive home in the least expensive part of the country. If you own an SUV, trade it in for a certified, pre-owned Japanese sedan. If you have kids, eliminate their extracurricular activities. If they like sports, encourage them to organize neighborhood games. But remind them that the greatest games were played in the last century and that, in fact, organized sports are passé. If they like music, encourage them to sing and play an inexpensive instrument. And don't fool yourself, the days of classical musicians are over.* There's no shame in being self-taught. That's what YouTube is for.

To Everyone Else: Drag Your Feet

Do just enough to earn your paycheck, but stay out of trouble. Don't buy into the lie, on the one hand, that being poor is your fault, or that, on the other, you can somehow make a killing in the drug trade. Just relax and enjoy the rights that you do have, especially while you're young. No one, after all, can take your youth away from you before you get old.

*Except, perhaps, in China, determined as some small cadre of that nation is to outdo the West at being Western—a rather brilliant form of cultural criticism.