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The moment someone asks you if you understand how society is decadent, how "America" is the next Rome, or how we are coming to the end of the chain, you should probably slap them for being so cliché as to be meaningless. This anhedonic morality is about as interesting as a flaccid penis and about as useful. And yet, sometimes the metaphors of the "Great Beast" consuming and consuming at the center may apply to day-to-day life of Suburban America.
I recently found myself in the economic middle-class, almost literally overnight after being a "rat flat" poet for most of my adult life. So, I did what everyone in my neck of ex-woods is supposed to do and called a realty agent to procure a McHome for me and my wife. Traveling about my county, which consists of a small town and what would have been farmland just five years ago, I noticed that the town was emptying out and large houses that all looked nearly exactly the same where popping up in what used to be farmland. The realty agent said that this was a sign of my county's "rising affluence."
Really? Perhaps it's too much training in semantics, but I wondered how this would sustain our affluence. This county has no industry and increasingly, no farmland, which means its future would be in commuting and in the realty value. So is this really affluence?
So now we take a trip to Economics 101: Affluence, and by that I mean sustained affluence, is dependent on wise use of capital. Suburbia, then, which is a waste of resources on several levels, is contra any meaningful definition affluence, because it wastes energy and farm land (although we in the USA have an abnormally high amount of arable land) and depletes energy reserves. The time preference of the US (in classical and Austrian economic terms) is low, and while many in Von Mise Institute magazines will say that low time preference is a sign of affluence, it is also a sign of unsustainability. If you are not aware of the possibility of your future, you prefer the present at the expense of the future. Remember that while the future is not, strictly speaking, "real," tomorrow's present definitely is a reality if you get to tomorrow. Depleting your resources will kill your economy and kill your culture, and we in US suburbia aren't even depleting our resources in the production of food or capital, but in over-sized housing. All this is fairly obvious.
What is not obvious is that this may not be sustainable even in the near future. Oil markets fluctuate with political turmoil (regardless of the actual amount of oil involved in any area of turmoil) and thus also have food markets dependent on that oil (for both petrol-based fertilizer AND for transportation), making suburban growth a largely idiotic idea. The outsourcing mentality here is staggering—we can get our food from Chile, which we could grow here, but don't—we must drive to another town to get that food, and that food was grown with petroleum fertilizers to minimize the land used. The phrase it's oil stupid becomes almost redundant.
Looming on the horizon here where I live—this beast has already arrived elsewhere—the near imminent deflation of the sub-prime and even low-normal mortgage and housing market will, at the very minimum, start to neutralize the growths of the realty market. Perhaps this will spread into the larger market, and spread into the not-so-obviously related markets, especially when combined with energy and ecological problems in the developed world.
To quote Robert Anton Wilson, "Reality is what you can get away with." Perhaps it is time to realize that suburbia's current cannibalization of capital is something that will become increasing hard to get away with.
Derick sincerely believes that everyone needs to dance around their house naked at least once a week; in addition to that, being declared an ethicist has made him a general misanthrope. Most good ethicists are. He loves tomatoes and thinks that loving such fruit is profound. He does not like to speak in third-person because he understands that it is a sign of true insanity, but so is literature. He has vowed no longer to be witty in biographies that are included in literary journals of any medium.