In 20th century science fiction, there is one particular story format that is often employed and is usually a fan favorite — the alternate or parallel universe, where the characters are the same but the roles are switched. In the alternate universe, the good guys are bad and the bad guys are worse. This idea of entering a darker, more sinister reality with no escape has been explored in television series like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, and even comedy sitcoms like Seinfeld for years. It’s an idea most of us are familiar with. As a literary device, it is useful for examining our darker sides. What would we be like under more difficult circumstances?
You don’t need to be a sociologist or an anthropologist to realize that our society has undergone a shift in tone, particularly in the last five years as the disintegration of the economy has accelerated. While many Americans are learning to deal with a stagnant economy, others are struggling to survive and keep from being homeless. This isn’t America. This is Dark-America, our shadowy underside where our more aggressive and perverse instincts are nurtured.
Briefly, lets recall just a few of our current economic problems. Medical bills account for 62 percent of bankruptcies in 2007, up from 48 percent in 2000. Over 78 percent of those individuals actually have health insurance. In an attempt to come up with quick cash, many Americans are selling their burial plots — quite literally digging into their retirement funds. Roughly 20 percent of Americans are currently struggling to afford food, just under the all-time record set back in 2008. A stunning 50 million people are on food stamps. And on and on it goes.
The culture has already devolved further than was comically predicted in the dystopic Running Man novel (1985). Animal Planet has Bigfoot searches. History Channel has Ancient Aliens. Classic movies have been replaced with reality shows. TLC (The Learning Channel) was once a government funded cable channel created in 1972 and featured documentary content. It was privatized in 1980 and today it broadcast “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” which brings in over three million viewers.
Sad as all this is, what signals a paradigm shift is not the coarsening of societal tastes or changing financial circumstances, but what one must do to survive is getting uglier and uglier. “The American Dream” may have been a myth, but it was credible enough that many hard working people became successful. In America, if you worked hard and saved all your life, you could expect to retire on the 5 or 6 percent interest your savings account provided. In Dark-America, inflation adjusted interest is at negative rates and to see any yield at all, you need to tell your broker to invest in corporate America’s “military robots,” the legal-drug cartels, the private prison system — anything that parasitically harvests what’s left of the country’s wealth. Those who refuse to take part get nothing.
In a system of dwindling resources, those who act aggressively retain what power they have, even as the society as a whole suffers, while those who are sincere, honest and conscientious fall farther behind. Anthropologist Edward Hall writes about this phenomenon in his book, Beyond Culture. He uses the example of the village commons in England during the mid-20th century. The commons or village green was an area of land used by the community for grazing livestock. It was a collective resource everyone used and no one person owned.
“As heards increased, the overgrazed land became less productive so that heardsmen had to increase their stocks in order to stay even. And thus the commons was destroyed. The tragedy was that profits accrued to the opportunistic herdsmen who exploited the commons the most, while losses were shared by all the users. Those who exercised restraint were doubly penalized.”
In a world of vanishing resources, everyone suffers, but the most dishonest, the most parasitic, and the most aggressive can keep their jobs for a little longer. Today, our commons are everywhere: the air, the sea, and the forests, but also our jobs which are subject to competitive struggles. Professional sports stars who take performance enhancing drugs enjoy financial opportunities not available to the clean athletes. Under pressure to perform, even non competitive jobs like teachers and school administrators are encouraged to fake tests scores, while those who remain honest often lose their jobs.
This kind of surrender of ones personal integrity just to get by is increasingly present in all sorts of careers. Prosecutors are urged to bring in more convictions even at the cost of justice. Realtors make sales to anyone with a pulse. Government workers make up employment data. Journalists invent stories and quotes. Plagiarism is rampant in and out of academic institutions. Honesty and reliability, the glue of any society’s institutions, is breaking down.
In America, the people are fundamentally good, if naive as hell, but in Dark-America, there are no rules left and only fools remain honest for its own sake. There’s no need to watch out for your evil-double. Now, we’re all are our darker selves.
