Karl Lagerfeld, White Mansplaining & Utopianism
Abandoning Life’s Illusions and Seeking Deeper Understanding
Within the last year, I have encountered multiple people in the under-40 age set posing what they perceive to be an urgent and pressing question (to Bill Maher’s consternation), “What are we going to replace capitalism with?” As Ayn Rand herself would point out, what we have isn’t even capitalism, a World of heavily mixed economies with gobs of public sector spending, however corrupt they may be, with programs like Social Security and Medicare (if those aren’t socialism, I don’t know what is). But, such details aside, there remains in strains of popular discourse a willful ignorance to take into account what the humans that comprise modernity are like, and how they and the economic system can be remade.
If you read through “progressive” writers and social media postings, you will often find that the World as it is causes these people great despair. Freddie DeBoer writes about how in Utopia, Ferraris would not be allowed. Lisa Duggan says that if we could sort out progressive political causes, then we would have something to live for. Various forms of activist Instagram posts inform other people what they must think about a given issue or another. This leads to a World of non-belief in reality, giving the believers “refuge from the terrors of the inner life,” a religion of sorts.
If your understanding of what the political process can accomplish encompasses a misunderstanding of human nature, the political process will not ever make actual progress. If we are to move beyond a “Utopia of Scolding,” which Dostoevsky pointed out in his own time isn’t going to win anyone over to your side, maybe we could unite to stop spending trillions on things like wars in Afghanistan. If you think the “Revolution in Human Consciousness” and the “withering away” of capitalism is pending, I invite you to check out some Grant Cardone videos, or perhaps look over this sales video for the new Estates at Aqualina, starting at $4.2 million in Miami. People want things from the World; at the core of the Progressive political bent is that those people should not want what they want, and it is going to be the Progressive protectors who will save all of the oppressed goodies from the evil baddies stuck in “false consciousness” in a grand dichotomous oversimplification of how the world is. George Orwell said of his younger self, “I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong.”
Kurt Vonnegut, no capitalist, penned Harrison Bergeron to point out that you can’t create equality by tearing people down, putting buzzers in their ears for thoughtcrimes and sandbags on their legs to make them less able (John Rawls be damned). Until one week ago, I had no idea who the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was; I encountered him after looking at advertisements for the aforementioned Godawful luxury condo atrocity, which he designed in part. Here he is because these photos are amazing:
Apparently Mr. Lagerfeld made some quite insensitive remarks over his years, sometimes with slivers of truth. “The worst is ugly short men. Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life - to be born short. I have never been friends with a short man in my life. Don't trust them; they are mean, and they want to kill you.” While I think it is most possible that the overwhelming majority short men go through life without wanting to kill others, I can attest to the fact, as good friends with a man who is six foot five, that his market value in the dating world is quite high. From ladies shouting at him in sidewalks and crosswalks to grabbing him as he walks by in bars and other public spaces, I can easily see how this man’s great height could create resentment amongst those without it. And, if you’re paying attention, you can see how a lot of popular discourse is, when it boils down to it, some combination of resentment and vanity, a desire to strike back and make ones mark on the World that has so rejected them and insists on its contrary values.
An inclusive America is one where all are welcomed and valued, from MAGA Trumpers to recent immigrants. The discourse of division has Americans becoming unhinged. Tucker Carlson says there is nothing to hold the nation together without whiteness and Christianity. A tall Hispanic man wears a t-shirt with a Loteria card on the back of Trump, “El Loser.” A white man and a Hispanic woman get into a disagreement outside a taco spot about Biggie Smalls versus Kendrick Lamar being the Greatest of All Time, which ends with the Hispanic woman resorting to character assassination, “You’re a white mansplainer! Get out of here and go to some hipster spot!” A food truck states on a sign, “If you support Trump, don’t support me.” Stooping to the level of a divisive president that seeks to create division only worsens matters; the point of political leftism, at the very least, is to recognize our shared humanity and to bring people together. This is something journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi understand, daring to stoop to talk to the evil enemy in an effort to – gasp – try to convince them of something.
I am continually told by progressive types, unsolicited, that people need to have more empathy. And, people should have empathy. But, they should also have understanding, more than anything. As Paul Bloom explains in his Against Empathy, there comes a point where empathy is a bad thing. If there is a cat in a tree, is it really a good use of public resources to spend $25,000 to get it out? People should have empathy for those less fortunate than others, but the rub of this diagnosis is the prescription. If we have empathy for the people of Bangladesh, do we put the entire country on a plane so it can live here instead? Empathy alone is not enough to take all the factors of an issue into consideration.
Thomas Sowell’s brilliant Knowledge and Decisions illustrates that what one says one will do is not the same thing as what one actually does when push comes to shove. If you were down to your last twenty dollars, what home appliance would you sell first? You don’t truly know until it happens. I just found this out firsthand when my second cat died; I had two brothers for sixteen years. I had long planned that once they died, I would begin travelling the World, free from the bondage of changing cat litter and having to take care of cats. Two weeks later, I went out and got two new cats; home just didn’t feel like home without cats. The point being is that people can wag their fingers and scold until their face turns blue about what other people should do and what they would do, but it’s all words until something comes to pass. What people do with their money seems to suggest that most people, once they acquire money, like to spend it on themselves; eventually, if they’re lucky, they figure out how to give back somehow.
If it causes you despair that people want things from the World, you should work to re-evaluate your life interpretations. If you have a monopoly on truth of what life is for, I should certainly like to hear it. I am sure there are countless millions of “progressives” who would rail against Chik Fil A and then bite into a bar of child slave chocolate guilt-free; the World is so massive and complicated, it is impossible to ordain that one knows all ways of “rightly” acting at all times. The fact that there is not a magical economic system that lifts all boats equally is a reflection of many underlying realities. The process of maturity and increasing life awareness is one that is different for everyone. Tell the same set of facts to five different people, and you will have five completely different interpretations; Tolstoy called it the “[E]ndless variety of men’s minds, which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to two persons.”
There is a particular kind of willful ignorance associated with all nature of utopian schemes. I will give the following example, “Vision Zero,” a program in Los Angeles to reduce traffic deaths to… zero. This is a program I full-throatedly get behind, as someone who rides a bike exclusively as a means of transportation in Los Angeles, but it is the name and the stated goal that are somewhat preposterous. As with all Utopian scheming, zero deaths takes no account of human nature into consideration. Some people are, in fact, morons. They are morons on bicycles going the wrong way on the street, they are morons on electric scooters blowing stop signs, and they are morons walking in front of trains, jaywalking across busy streets, and standing in bike lanes (I could go on). So, while I fully support making the streets safer and reducing the deaths of abuelas and children trying to make it across Wilshire and Alvarado, if the goal of a utopian scheme is to completely eliminate something, the scheme will always be left wanting, because, in the words of a older Filipino immigrant I know, “People are not robots.”
This progressive willful ignorance is particularly pervasive as pertains economic issues. Where I live, there have been protests and outrage directed at Kroger, which permanently closed multiple Ralph’s locations in response to the city of Long Beach, California enacting Hero Pay for grocery workers, an hourly pay hike during the Coronavirus Pandemic. Businesses, even ancient, hulking behemoths like Ralph’s need to turn a profit, especially in a low-margin grocery business; no profit, no business. But, they are made out to be the Enemies of Happiness in a zero-sum World of Goodies and Baddies; we do not like to accept the current constraints of reality. The most hated word of Noam Chomsky and Audre Lorde alike is “profit.”
“THE WORLD SHOULD NOT BE SO,” they say. This is a good impulse to have so that the World doesn’t descend into a game of “Big Fish Eat Little Fish;” Manila doesn’t seem so great to me. Karl Popper, no Socialist, thanked Karl Marx for his contribution to our discourse that society owes something to the downtrodden, but that, “[Marxism’s] feeling of social responsibility and its love for freedom must survive.” Certainly, not everything in the World is just, things need to change, and actual progress should be made. But we must seek all the reasons for what actually happens and why instead of reducing everything to “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys.” Popper saw what is happening today, but saw it in 1945. “One of the dangers of Marx's formula is that if taken too seriously, it misleads Marxists into interpreting all political conflicts as struggles between exploiters and exploited.”
“Much of the intellectual legacy of Marx is an anti-intellectual legacy,” says Thomas Sowell, “It has been said that you cannot refute a sneer. Marxism has taught many—inside and outside its ranks—to sneer at capitalism, at inconvenient facts or contrary interpretations, and thus ultimately to sneer at the intellectual process itself.” The purpose of the intellectual process is not to figure out the World; the purpose is a vanity-project to CHANGE THE WORLD, in their image of how it should be. Thus, you have “Progressives” who hate actual progress and loathe any attempts to call out progress made thus far as heresy. Careful consideration and moderation are for Bad Guys; what is needed is thoughtless action. Unfortunately, some principles are conservative because they must be so. We cannot walk on our hands and generally do not try to eat through our rectums, despite an episode of South Park once parodying such an idea. There is such a thing as human nature and it does in fact have some guardrails; not everything is a social construct.
We should strive to make the World a better place, to ensure equal protection for all citizens by the law, and to make genuine progress. Political scientist Yascha Mounk explains, “In the last years, a righteous impatience with the continuing reality of racial injustice has increasingly pushed some people to denounce the principles of liberal democracy as hypocritical, or even to make group rights the building block of society. This is a moral as well as a strategic mistake: The only society that can treat all of its members with respect is one in which every individual enjoys rights on the basis of being a citizen, not on the basis of belonging to a particular group.”
In a country of hundreds of millions with everyone competing for status, the human impulse to be good results in people surveying the landscape of cultural ideas for available options. For some this might result in the adoption of religious values. For others, it might involve adopting a surrogate, taking a stand in a World of “conservative” baddies and “liberal” goodies. (Make no mistake, I do not want to live in Josh Hawley’s America). But in this quest, both sides lose sight of nuance, “[L]ife’s greatest prize.” If we abandon nuance, we abandon democracy, because we lack understanding for the causes of our good and our bad. There is racism. There is patriarchal tyranny. But there are also reasons for prosperity, a hard-earned lesson for the Soviets and Mao Zse-Tung. And the more we embark on a quest to understand the World, the better poised we are to make effective decisions and, in theory, rule ourselves.
If you want more from the World for others, you can start by doing something about it. Move out of your fancy apartment or nice house and into a dump; take the savings and give it away to charity. That might not sound so appealing to you. Wanting The State to solve all social problems while also maintaining current living standards for all is not a practical reality; as George Orwell pointed out, socialism would be a very different World indeed. Draining Jeff Bezsos’ bank account alone will not solve many social ails (though some antitrust enforcement might help). Try to help people you know learn how to fish so that they might hold their head high instead of bowing their head low on the receiving end of fish alms (though some may never conquer their demons). Practice the Golden Rule, and treat others with respect and love, even those you do not agree with or find enjoyable; little things can make a big difference in someone else’s day. Most importantly, increase your understanding of yourself and your understanding of the World, letting go of self-serving and one-way interpretations that do not accurately reflect “what is.”