Until today’s era of faithless consumerism, Christmas was a holiday to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. It was a moment for convivial reflection, a time to commit once more to fidelity, joy, charity and that whole panoply of positive emotions that course through the Christian canon and ultimately turned a small band of followers into the most powerful religion in history.
Even the sales-and-deals turn of Christmas has its origins in reciprocity. Exchanging gifts is about deepening the ties that bind us all, looking back to pay it forward. It’s the same foundational cultural trait that powers up the startup world too, the reason Silicon Valley can’t be replicated. Nowhere is there a higher density of richly talented and richly wealthy people who are willing to take bets on projects with nothing but trust that it will one day all work out.
That spirit of Christmas is dying. The world is shrinking, resources are getting scarcer and it’s harder than ever to get what you want.
Apparently, what we want is oil, and it’s not for anointing the messiah. This weekend, the United States scarfed up Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in a surgical military operation that must be hailed as one of the most extraordinary successes in special forces history. Thanks to the wonders of this strange cosmic universe, Maduro and I now share the same gentrified borough.
The Venezuelan people have suffered mightily under Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez. For almost three decades, the two have impoverished one of the most entrepreneurial countries in the world — a country that also happens to sit on an extraordinary endowment of natural resources that would be the envy of all but a handful of nations. Upward of a million refugees — from a population of about 30 million — have fled the miseries and trepidations of an autocratic government and a shrinking economy. And that’s just to the United States — an estimated 7 million more have fled to neighboring countries.
You have what we want, and we are going to just take it.
That’s not why we captured Maduro, though, for that would be far too humanitarian and charitable for the new Christmas spirit. It was oil, spoken plainly by President Donald Trump. This is no longer the Bush administration and its soaring (if at times sputtering) rhetoric of freedom and democracy. You have what we want, and we are going to just take it.
It’s the international relations equivalent of California’s $950 theft limit, a marker that divides a misdemeanor from a felony and which led the City by the Bay to become the City that Locks Up the Toothpaste. There’s no loss prevention strategy in Venezuela, though, since there’s not much to lose, empty shelves being Bolivarian socialism’s lasting legacy.
Just take it. I wish this wasn’t a pattern in American life, but it’s commonplace. Ro Khanna, Silicon Valley’s left-progressive congressman and a man who could really use that locked-up San Francisco toothpaste, certainly understands the need to just take it. Over the holidays, in spat after spat after spat with venture capitalists, he vociferously defended a proposed wealth tax meant to fund whatever it is that California considers a functional government.
Apparently, after years of walking the Fisher Price-colored corridors of the startup wealthy with hat in hand asking for coins every biennial (a hat that was ultimately filled to the brim, I might add), he’s finally had enough with it all and has decided to just take it. One time only, of course! I guess he hopes we can all feel the warmth of collectivism during the holidays. Call it the Wrath of Khanna, the superior man who lost his mind to aggrieved vengeance and is now biting the hand that feeds him.
Biting the hand that feeds you, or just pocketing it. I grew up in Minnesota, a land noted for its Nice people. It’s really hard for coastals to understand what it’s like to live in a society where your neighbors will always do the right thing, where charity — religious or otherwise — is paramount in the lives of most, and where calls for food donations or blood drive flyers have to include a proviso apologizing in advance that they won’t be able to accept everything that will be donated. That was just Minnesota Nice culture, which continued long after I transplanted to the golden foothills of South Bay.
That culture of egalitarian benevolence is now in serious jeopardy. Feeding Our Future was the name of the non-profit that’s at the heart of the multi-billion-dollar Somali fraud story that has spread like wildfire since my colleagues at City Journal published their deep dive right before Thanksgiving (an irony missed by most). Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor and former vice presidential candidate, announced yesterday that he wouldn’t seek a third term because of the growing scandal, putting an ignominious exclamation mark on an otherwise decent man’s tenure.
Civilization isn’t the police and courts, it’s a glass house that’s wide open with a sign that says “no one is home” and nothing happens.
The response from my coastal friends has been sheer bewilderment at the stupidity of the Minnesota officials overseeing welfare distribution. Take it from a still-prideful home state lover — naivety is justly earned. Leaving your doors unlocked is only foolish if you believe it’s impossible to live in civilization. Civilization isn’t the police and courts, it’s a glass house that’s wide open with a sign that says “no one is home” and nothing happens.
Venezuela, California, Minnesota: these three stories are merely the leading headlines of a repeated pattern in our culture today. America’s enlightened ethos of can-do “just do it”-ism has become today’s darker “just take it” psychology of the Beltway robber, the Barbary petrol-man and the Bitcoin fraudster. Positive-sum economics has been slaughtered by the atavistic dominance of zero-sum or even negative-sum thinking. It’s every man, woman and child for themselves.
I just watched Park Chan-wook’s new film No Other Choice, a story about a down-on-his-luck blue collar worker who is laid off after 25 years at a paper company. He realizes that the perfect job still exists out there, but there’s only one position and a lot of highly-qualified candidates waiting to be interviewed. How far must he go to eliminate the competition, save himself and secure his livelihood?
It’s a thrilling, terrifying and at times downright hilarious romp. It’s also part of an increasing oeuvre of films that critique competition in modernity like Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform. These films observe this zero-to-negative-sum culture, but they either direct the blame for it to structural factors beyond individual control or naturally assume this culture is part and parcel with modernity. Absolutes have become relatives. Rather than trying to outrace others in the great game of life, we at some point realized we can just take a hammer to the engines of our competitors and watch as they sputter while we drive at whatever speed we want.
Competition is inevitable in any resource-constrained environment. Earth is no exception, and even becoming a multi-planetary species won’t release us from this basic law of economics. It’s how we address competition and its implications that determine the tenor of civilization. We can cultivate competition and the human desire for victory to frenetically recombinate brilliance and push forward the frontiers of technology and productivity. Alternatively, competition can be extraordinarily corrosive, undermining the will to work or invest and dragging everyone down together (see Venezuela, Country of).
America’s most important strength was — and always will be — its precarious meritocracy of the market. Good products generally beat bad products because consumers can suss out a better deal. Good ideas overcome incumbents because Americans are optimistic and willing to embrace better futures. Good institutions supplant bad ones because efficiency and performance matters to generous but impatient funders.
Just-take-it culture is an economic game of musical chairs, but the chairs are made of wood and the participants have flamethrowers.
All those safeguards have washed away. Consumers are cynical and desperately fighting capitalism’s dark patterns and enshittification. Pessimism has replaced optimism, entrenching narrow ideas over the potential of tomorrow. We no longer expect our government, courts, non-profit organizations and civil society to be fair but rather capricious, something best avoided rather than engaged.
“Just take it” has a double meaning, one that extends back to The Melian Dialogue of Thucydides. It’s the claim of the victor to what’s not rightfully his, and the submission of the loser acquiescing to a tragic fate. Two sides of the same coin, a penny that is fought over even as it is taken out of circulation.
Our energy to fight for a prosperous system is drained as we battle each other. Just-take-it culture is an economic game of musical chairs, but the chairs are made of wood and the participants have flamethrowers. What looks like an ample supply of seating quickly burns in an inferno.
Our present moment reminds me of Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale, which I read during my very first Lux partner offsite, sitting in earthquake-prone California below a hotel ceiling with a very concerning crack. The novel, which became a movie and an entire genre of multiplayer video games, is about a group of school kids sent to an island in which only the last remaining survivor is allowed to walk away and live.
The most poignant moment comes during a scene at a lighthouse in which a group of students desperately tries to create a small island of civilization against the murderous impulses of their classmates outside. Their small society works for a time, yet zero-sum thinking will come for them, too, even as they rebel against it. You can’t be good in a bad system.
It is hard not to feel anguish as we gaze at the grand expanse of history; millennia of evidence accumulated across innumerable societies and civilizations proves that the simplest yet most potent answer to what makes a good life is that positive sums not only exist, they are almost omnipotent in their ability to ameliorate the worst aspects of human existence and give our lives meaning. We still have that culture in parts of Silicon Valley, and it’s still the default mode for most Americans, even as it’s getting harder to sustain.
Why do we give Christmas gifts? Often the monetary value of these offerings are normalized within families, and so it can feel circular on that great economic spreadsheet of existence. But even if the dollar values are the same, those gifts come attached with emotions and ultimately memories. No net value was exchanged, yet incalculable value was created and offered. The magic of Christmas is the magic of civilization and what’s made humanity such a force for good: a gift economy means always being surprised that something better is in store. If I have faith in anything, it’s that we can, even now, still just do it.
No action taken to make things better is ever wasted. We, as a people, can choose to do better. We just need to believe that other people want it to be better, too.
Terrific writing as always