America and the Cult of materialism
America’s long fairytale with money I’m afraid will have an unhappy ending. Critics of America have described our obsession with money as the dead-end of materialism, and I’m afraid they’re right. Without any deeper beliefs or without a common culture, one can’t help if the American life is a pointless go-round, with the exception of taking as many overhyped iPads and consumerist garbage to the grave with you as possible. The pursuit of wealth seemed once to have instrinsic value as the rightful outcome from invention - we think of people like Edison and Ford. Things have changed. A year ago, President Obama described that half of the wealth we “created” in the aughts (2000’s) was paper wealth from high finance. Easy come, easy go. Capitalism might have one day been embodied by a magnificent eagle but today is more accurately depicted by a vulture. Today, we marvel at financial windfall irrespective of how it was made- if it was based on shorting subprime mortgages based on insider information, we marvel no less at the billions made and the mansions bought. In a sea of diverse cultures, it seems the one thing we Americans can agree to respect and defer before is wealth. No matter if it was made ethically or not.
The more time I spend abroad, the more depressing the American culture seems each time I revisit. There is a spiritual emptiness to the place - a kind of hollow opportunism that colors everything. Even when I see generosity, it seems always accompanied by a kind of off-putting piousness that seems to be the impetus for the action in the first place. But I suppose one can’t be surprised that in a country where people who make minimum wage buy iPhones as a status symbol. It makes me cringe to think that America sees itself as spreading its values to the rest of the world, given our misplaced priorities, when the rest of the world might be fine to keep their sense of humility, decency, their devotion to family - values that are worth preserving and which America jettisoned long ago as unworthy and old-fashioned.
