Liberal Materialism

If your worldview is built on the notion that the deprived must be made whole - that wealth-distribution curves represent inherent repression (via specific or institutional racism, classism, misogyny, etc), you will angrily bridle at the observation that "money can't buy happiness"...or any other assertion that perspective trumps circumstance.

Extreme left-wingers would use Marxist vocabulary to scorn this notion as a bourgeois effort to anesthetize workers so they can be easily exploited. More moderate liberals would frame it less formally, but the thrust might be similar: people who feel deprived should never be told to smile and accept. Fuck that, and fuck you.

This meme has hardened into bedrock, though the goalposts keep shifting. "The Poor" no longer connotes sick/hungry/homeless misery. As the First World has grown vastly richer (in terms of comfort, security, health, information, leisure time, entertainment, travel, communications, etc.), there's far less wretchedness. You, yes you, are unimaginably wealthy. So inequality, in itself, has become the new stand-in for "deprivation".

There's good sense in condemning the truly extreme income inequality currently afoot, but if you've been watching the goalpost readjustments, the big picture is apparent: until we all have Macmansions and Playstations - until we're all equal - the work will not be complete. The ditziness of that mindset doesn't bother me nearly as much as the shallow materialism.

For a child of the 60s, it’s all disorienting. Liberals are supposed to be the anti-materialist hippies! Happiness is a matter of perspective, not circumstance. Internal riches - freely available to all - kick ass, while external riches (above/beyond basic needs) lead to jadedness and depression. Some of the poorest people I've ever met have been vastly more happy, equanimous, and wise than many of the wealthiest people I've ever met (does Donald Trump - with all the assets and power one could ask for - strike you as healthy, happy, and content?). The key to happiness is to want what you get rather than get what you want, and to learn to cease one's perennial neurotic sniffing around for what's missing.

That's my hippy side speaking, which is supposed to feel liberal! Yet such anti-materialism is anathema to the current Left. To them, such notions stem not from wisdom but from an out-of-touch, smugly comfortable white middle-aged male who's got his and preaches deprivation from his high-handed conviction that he knows what's best for the rest of us. Spirituality's a crock (our political enemies call themselves "religious", so to hell with both babies and bathwater from that angle) and introspection's worthless. Only materialism can satisfy. It's a foundational human right! We fight not for bread and shelter for the disadvantaged, like our righteous forebears, but for their right to smart watches and Beemers. The have-obscenely-much will be compelled to share their Riedel stemware with the have-slightly-less-obscenely-much. Vive la revolution!

I find this all so baffling that I have little to say (aside from reaffirming my Centrism)...but I will point to a parallel.


The arrogant, irritating, opaque, uncivil but inarguably brilliant Nassim Taleb has been Twitter raging for a while now about the meaninglessness of IQ testing, which he considers unrigorous pseudoscience. He's wrapped up his arguments in an academic paper that, as usual, loses me the moment it descends into fervent math...which Taleb would insist makes me a blithering idiot.

Taleb's very much against the metric of IQ, but he also scoffs, generally, at the sort of rotely calculative faculty IQ aims to measure. He puts far more stock in the approach of "Fat Tonys", his term for street-smart, inarticulate, clever/resourceful wiley SOBs who thrive only when they have "skin in the game", as opposed to the weenies who traffic in sterile academic hypotheticals.

The irony is readily apparent: Taleb is a brainiac who deprecates brainyness; an intellectual elitist raging against intellectual elitism. Predictably, he's drawn criticism from people who see him as poo-pooing the very faculty that brought him success, thereby "keeping the people down" or whatever. That line makes no sense at all here, but, to return to my point, this is the trendy response to anyone who dares to devalue the overvalued from a position of experience.

For example, I recently spotted this vapid and snarky interjection in Taleb's timeline:

It's funny to see someone with a genius level IQ like Taleb literally deny the importance of the metric, when he himself no doubt has a very high IQ, and would not have the cognitive abilities or success he enjoys without it.

...and I tweeted back:

Short people assume tall people have it good, and will snark at tall people insisting otherwise.

See also "Our Albatrosses are Red Herrings".