It’s too late folks. The cultural and political tectonic shift has happened and will continue to happen.
You mean Trump and Elon’s war on American Institutions? The shift backwards towards a nation mired in white supremacy and bigotry? An unmaking of the green economy? What are we talking about?
No. Just the opposite. The shift towards an equal society has been a century long cultural movement. It may be moving with glacial speed, but it has the weight of glaciers. Before it, it has pushed outdated notions of racial superiority, gender bias, homophobia and traditional binary gender associations. What is happening now, playing out in the MAGA movement, are the last gasps of a several disparate orthodoxies that have shattered and are attempting to coalesce in the rubble.
But they appear to be winning.
They might appear to be winning, now, but now is not forever. Take a look at our stories. Our stories have slowly changed to better reflect the real makeup of the world. And those stories we tell ourselves, and the way we tell them, are the DNA of our shared belief system. Stories are to humans what the hunt is to apex predators. They provide the social glue that enables us to function as a society, and our functioning society is what makes us the dominant life form on earth.
Ants are probably the dominant life form on earth.
Please stay focused. At the dawn of audio and visual media, those outlets were dominated by the gatekeepers of our stories. Generational truths told and retold by those demanding the social hierarchy to look and act a certain way. The first American blockbuster, “Birth of a Nation” was a wild-eyed racist screed. It reinforced the way some Americans saw ourselves. But it alienated many more, thus excluding hundreds of thousands of people from the Market. And the Market always wins.
Wait what…
The Market must and will find an audience, a consumer base, and sell to it. This is the way. And once an audience feels seen, it wants to see itself more. The Market, by definition, is hungry, and it must grow year over year. And to grow it must be inclusive, not exclusive. No one controls the Market though it is comprised of all of us. It is a self serving beast, pushing all who defy it to rubble before it. Once it finds a new niche, a new economy, a new pathway to profit, it perseveres, sometimes to our detriment. But usually to the benefit of all of us.*
I thought you were some sort of Socialist…
Oh I probably am! Like, a Democratic-socio-capitalist or something. And by the way the same is true for the green economy. Those of us who’ve bought hybrid or all electric vehicles will—not - ever - go - back—to 100% internal combustion engines. The feeling of skipping the gas lines, not being prisoners to the whims of corrupt oil producing nations, and of spending less money on gas in general, or of being smug about being very slightly better for the environment is, simply put, a one way street. Being free of Big Oil dovetails quite nicely with the American obsession with individualism. Wind and solar farmers will never give up making money had over fist with energy that simply never runs out.
Green energy is destined to appeal to American individualism. We didn’t stick to landlines or cable because we liked the providers, when cell phones and streaming platforms gained momentum, most of us cut the cord because it appealed to our sense of self-determination. The same will be true for neighborhood and even home based microreactors that will eliminate the need for power lines and expensive energy infrastructure. Solar arrays on rooftops that allow individual families power despite failing power grids, all while battery storage continues to improve in leaps and bounds.
A lot of great ideas have been politicized. Green energy is sometimes framed as a Liberal plot. But more and more Conservatives are embracing it because it simply makes economic sense. For example I love the idea Tesla had of giving away its charger technology to competitors so that an electric car infrastructure could quickly and efficiently take over ICE fueling stations. The fact that Musk is a Neo-Nazi doesn’t make this a bad idea. I doubt it was his idea anyway. History won’t remember he had anything to do with it. It’s well known that Henry Ford was a Nazi sympathizer, and his memory is shunned because of it, but his contributions to technology have not been. No one thinks about Nazi sympathizers when they use an assembly line. And nor should they. Volkswagen and BMW are doing fine despite their Nazi pasts because they’ve repudiated their origins.
What does the politicized technology have to do with the stories we tell?
Yes! This all brings me back to the stories we tell, and the momentum gained by the stories that are told. In 1997 the Ford Motor Company broadcast Schindler’s List on TV without commercials, in order to try to purge their history of their founder’s abhorrent views. Sixty-five million people watched that broadcast. This was not a moral choice on their part, not really, it was a market based decision. Since Ford’s time, public opinion, and therefore the Market, has shifted away from Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. A brief glance at Tesla’s current stock price will tell you that’s still largely true despite the modern resurgence of white supremacy. But again. White supremacist philosophy is exclusive by nature. The Market, when functioning without racist thumbs on the scale, is all inclusive.
It wants your money and it doesn’t care who you are.
Isn’t ‘money’ just a concept that functions because we all agree it should?
That’s everything, friend. The supermarket. Church. The Seattle Mariners. Chai lattes. We are the architects of our own civilization. Without our shared belief it fails. But my bet is it won’t. The Market, which in the end is all of us, won’t let it.
* I say "usually" a benefit to us all because there are many examples of the market screwing folks over. Housing costs is a pretty good example. But overall, the Market has raised the standard of living in every country on earth, except for those who actively suppress the it. But even Communist Countries, famed for market suppression, have because some sort of weird Communist/Capitalist hybrid. We lost the Vietnam war, but it turns out that might have been simply a battle for global trade. We lost the battle but if you look at our modern trade relationship with Vietnam, we won the war.