The system is failing even for those well positioned to ride the success of (but not hold stake in) the general market. The first upper-middle class runners are coming across the line to find nothing there. How does that effect the tipping point? Is this a marker of a Late Stage?

Does anyone even subscribe to the American Dream anymore? Maybe there isn’t a big pack running behind these first place white men to find a cliff at the finish line.

Is it the last remnants of an experiment burning out, or is it just the first car to crest the rollercoaster?

Or is the suicide stat meaningless and the power structure still favors inherited white male privilege so significantly that it’s dumb to grasp at minor perceived cracks forming? If this then what’s the stat about?

  • Sprolicious [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I think this analysis misses relies upon two misguided premises:

    1. I could be wrong, but I think that economic incentive has already been so divorced from "success" in america that it's really only culture issues animating average people, and has been since the eighties.

    2. We're already well into the dysfunctional state of capitalism; line go up don't real, labour doesn't generate meaningful value, not preventing climate death, etc.

    Jeff Bezos, for example, doesn't see himself in Joe Sixpack, despite them both, but for material conditions, being straight white men.