21st Century Nihilism

    “Millions who should be ranged against the American oligarchy are distracted and divided – just as their leaders want.

     The biggest beneficiaries of [the four years of] Trump’s charade are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.

     Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent Rand study, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47tn richer.

     A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker $42,000 per year.

     The upward redistribution of $47tn wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.

     Monopolies expanded because antitrust laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to bust unions.”

(Robert Reich, https://tinyurl.com/yxb92nsf)

The essentially nihilistic character of the vacuous individualism at the root of free-market capitalism naturally provokes a chaotic nihilism in the workers (who are both both exploited and community-deprived) from the labor of whom the investor class expropriates the wealth of nations.

And the nihilism contained in our only planet’s plundering and garbaging that is the other source of wealth also provokes the nihilism of the mass anti-progressive movements like nazism, populist fascism, and trumpism.