Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  And arriving in Washington with no existing ideology except feeding his narcissism and enriching his family, Trump proved the perfect president finally to enact the full government-hating agenda. Robert Mercer, who’d funded not only Trump’s campaign but also Cambridge Analytica, the source of so much Facebook skullduggery, was a key figure—and a classic Randian. As one colleague explained, “Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make. A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare[,] he has negative value. [Bob] thinks society is upside down—that government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.” Another colleague explained of Mercer, “He thinks the less government the better. And if the president’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.”14

  In the meantime, Mercer and his pals were happy to assist with reorienting the Trump administration to serve their goals. “The vacuum in Trump not having his own network is filled by people who’ve been cultivated for years by the Koch network,” said one expert.15 Marc Short, the former director of the Kochs’ Freedom Partners investment fund, became Trump’s legislative director; Short’s major triumph was the huge tax cut for the rich that the Senate passed at the end of 2017. The win required massive lobbying from the Kochs’ network of donors—“the most significant federal effort we’ve ever taken on,” said the head of Americans for Prosperity.16 The bill will save the Koch brothers and their company more than a billion dollars a year. Days after it passed, they donated $500,000 to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s war chest, which actually seems like a pretty miserly tip. In 2018 they sent a memo to their wealthy donors taking credit for dozens of policy triumphs, from ending new overtime reforms to making sure that the discovery of Native American cultural artifacts didn’t slow down oil drilling. It’s true they didn’t much like Trump, and eventually, given his narcissism, the sentiment was returned. By August 2018, the president was tweeting that, because the Koch brothers opposed his wall and his tariffs, they had “become a total joke in real Republican circles.” But the joke seemed more likely to be on Trump. It was increasingly clear that the Kochs had milked the administration for what they really wanted (tax cuts, deregulation, Supreme Court justices) and were now looking forward to the Pence years.

  And their work was by no means confined to Washington. Many state governments have been transformed by the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council. Meanwhile, in cities and towns across America, the Kochs ran expensive campaigns opposing projects such as public transit, both because it dried up demand for the gasoline they sold and because buses and trains “go against the liberties Americans hold dear.” As a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity patiently explained, “If someone has the freedom to go where they want, do what they want, they’re not going to choose public transit.”17 Especially if there isn’t any.

  “We’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the last 50,” Charles Koch told his fellow billionaires in 2017. “The capabilities we have now can take us to a whole new level.”18 And so they vowed to fight on—as the 2018 midterm election entered its final stretch, more than a quarter of the outside commercials in congressional races were coming from just two Koch-sponsored advocacy groups,19 and the Kochs were also funding a “seven-figure ad buy” on behalf of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, apparently pleased that his vote promised what one scholar called “the end of the regulatory state as we know it.”20 Their to-do list included yet more “reforms” of labor laws and, above all, reductions in “entitlement” spending such as Social Security, spending that, of course, they argued America could no longer afford because of the deficits left from those massive tax cuts.

  Basically, they’d won.

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  But that win is not likely to last forever. Few wins do, and this one is particularly shaky because it rests on a fundamentally flawed sense of who human beings actually are. The idea that we are only individuals, that “there is no such thing as society,” that we owe each other nothing—none of that fits with our deepest nature.

  We are social creatures. I’m not going to bother with a potted history of our development as a species: cooperating to hunt game, developing language to make the hunt more successful. Suffice it to say that we evolved from the tribe, the band. Even Ayn Rand knew that, though she put her own nasty spin on it: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” she wrote. “The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”1

  Setting us free from our fellow human beings is a profound mistake, because we haven’t in fact evolved into some new creature. You can prove it easily: find an American who does not belong to any group—sadly, not that hard a task—and convince him to join a club or a society. The mere act of joining in with others halves one’s risk of dying in the next year. Recent research makes clear that social separation damages us: individuals with fewer connections have disrupted sleep patterns, altered immune systems, and higher levels of stress hormones. Isolated people have a 29 percent higher risk of heart disease and a 32 percent higher rate of strokes. It begins early: “socially isolated children have significantly poorer health twenty years later.” (Even Rand made sure she lived life within a small circle of acolytes, her adoring tribe.) All told, loneliness is as bad for you physically as obesity or smoking.2 It works the other way, too: “Study after study shows that good social relationships are the strongest, most consistent predictor there is of a happy life, even going so far as to call them a ‘necessary condition of happiness.’ … This is a finding that cuts across race, age, gender, income and social class so overwhelmingly that it dwarfs any other factor,” reports the journalist and cultural critic Ruth Whippman.3 Hell, it cuts across species: ants that are allowed to socialize live ten times longer than their isolated counterparts.

  Altruism, what Rand called “the poison of death in the blood of western civilization,” turns out to be a tonic instead. When neuroscientists study our brains, they find they “behave differently during an act of generosity than during a hedonistic activity,” reports the New York Times. Dr. Richard Davison, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, put it like this: “When we do things for ourselves, those experiences of positive emotions are more fleeting.… When we engage in acts of generosity, those experiences of positive emotion may be more enduring and outlast the specific episode in which we are engaged.” Not surprisingly, then, older adults who volunteer to help children with reading and writing tend to experience less memory loss—that is, the great personal terror for most of us, losing our sense of self, becomes less likely if we engage with others.4 Why does hearing loss increase your risk of dementia? Likely because hearing loss “tends to cause some people to withdraw from conversations and participate less in activities. As a result, you become less social and less engaged,” according to the Cleveland Clinic.5

  Even in corporate life, it turns out, those who “offer assistance, share valuable knowledge, or make valuable introductions” turn out to be far more useful for a business than those who “try to get other people to serve their ends while carefully guarding their own expertise and time,” according to the Harvard Business Review. In thirty-eight studies across 3,500 businesses, the journal found that “higher rates of giving were predictive of higher unit profitability, productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction, along with lower costs and turnover rates.”6 That’s square in the heart of the capitalist hurly-burly. Indeed, the Nobel Prize for Economics, once awarded to James Buchanan for his theory that most of us are parasites, was more recently awarded to Elinor Ostrom, the great theorist of the commons. What she found, across societies and historical eras, was that communities were quite capable of commonsense cooperation—the “tragedy of the commons” was usually not a tragedy at all, as long
as no one decided they had to have it all. From lobster fisheries in Maine to irrigation systems in Spain to forests in Nepal, Ostrom found that “the schemes were mutual and reciprocal and many had worked well for centuries.”7

  * * *

  It’s not that the hyperindividualists are wrong. It’s that they’re half-wrong, and that’s what makes them so dangerous. We do aspire to a certain amount of what Rand called “privacy.” If you spend time in, say, rural China, you will visit plenty of homes where many members of a large family share a home or small compound. People will often sleep many to a room, and sometimes the family pig will sleep there, too. In that world, building an extra room so that a husband and wife can sometimes be alone—that’s worth a lot. The economic literature on happiness makes it clear that up to a certain point, more income equals more liberation of this kind, and hence more satisfaction: one can leave one’s village on a trip, which for most of human history was almost impossible. But the literature also makes it clear that past a certain, and surprisingly low, level, there’s not much linkage between more money and more happiness. And in part that may be because money leads to too much “privacy.” Postwar America spent most of its fortune on a single project, building bigger houses farther apart from one another, and the result was that people ran into each other less: the number of close friends claimed by the average American dropped by half.8 Now we’re pursuing the same project with our array of screens, as the psychologist Jean Twenge points out in her recent statistical portrait of young people currently in high school and college, whom she calls “iGen.” These kids spend far less time hanging out with friends than any generation in history, and the data show they’re uniquely unhappy as a result.9

  There’s actually a kind of natural balance between public and private that wise people have always recognized. Adam Smith can be said to have launched the movement that ended up with the Kochs: his landmark work, The Wealth of Nations, provided the first explanation of how pursuing one’s own interest could end up increasing the general prosperity. But that wasn’t Smith’s only book. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he points out that “how selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.” Self-interest was not the most admirable of our traits. Instead, Smith listed “humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit … the qualities most useful to others.”10 But the economic tradition that grew up in his wake largely scorns those insights. Because markets have proved to perform so brilliantly at their particular task of creating wealth, economists have largely forgotten that there are other tasks.

  In truth, this crudeness seems to affect most deeply those who study economics: researchers found that third-year students in economics rated altruistic values such as helpfulness, honesty, and loyalty as far less important than freshmen did. “After taking a course in economic game theory, college students behaved more selfishly and expected others to do so as well,” they observed. And economics professors, it turns out, “give significantly less money to charity than their worse-paid colleagues in many other disciplines.”11 This is the world where think tanks debate whether it’s cost-effective to save the Arctic, and where the Wall Street Journal runs a headline such as HOW DO YOU PRICE A PROBLEM LIKE KOREA: ANALYSTS ARE TRYING TO WORK OUT WHAT HAPPENS TO MARKETS IN THE EVENT OF AN ALL-OUT NUCLEAR WAR. (In case you’re wondering: in the event of a “potentially uncontained military conflict in which the global superpowers get involved,” the yield curve on Eurobonds would “likely flatten due to weaker risk appetite.”)12

  Because this is so contrary to our nature, eventually even the U.S. political system will work its way back to some kind of balance. The Koch brothers may well have hit their zenith. Political scientists crunching the polling data said that the Kochs’ two signature laws (the attempted repeal of Obamacare and the successful tax “reform” package) were the “most unpopular pieces of major domestic legislation of the past quarter-century,” the journalist Michael Tomasky points out. Of the nine most popular recent laws, he observes, “eight pursued what could broadly be defined as liberal goals, like gun control and environmental protection.”13 For the last few years, America’s most liked politician, by far, has been a socialist, Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on the antilibertarian slogan “Not Me, Us,” and who holds up Scandinavia as a model. Denmark and Sweden and Norway, of course, are what this “balance” I’ve been describing looks like in practice: a market system with a strong commitment to social justice, the lowest levels of inequality on the planet, and, by most measures, the happiest citizens, people leading private lives, but not leaving others behind. You’d have to look hard to find a case of hookworm in Bergen or Aalborg.

  The road back to balance will be long, and many people will suffer unnecessarily along the way, but the Randian view of the world is simply too disconnected from human nature to dominate us forever. Perhaps our electoral systems are strong enough to reverse the craziness: the midterm elections of 2018 represent a good start. (In early 2019 newly minted Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for nearly doubling the top U.S. tax rate on income over $10 million, and lots of people applauded.) Perhaps the power of money in our political life is so great that it will require something that looks more like a nonviolent revolution. But half lies have half-lives. Humans will rise to the occasion, in America and in all the other places that have, for the moment, been knocked off kilter.

  * * *

  Except there’s a problem, a big one. There’s too much leverage in the system.

  In the past, when the ideological pendulum swung hard in one direction, there was time and space for it, eventually, to swing back. The Gilded Age robber barons (or, if you’d prefer, the captains of industry) pushed wealth, and hence political power, as sharply their way in the late nineteenth century as have the libertarian billionaires of our time. Statistics are harder to come by, but the estimate is that four thousand families in the 1890s had as much wealth as the other eleven million households in America. And so, that inevitably gave rise to the Populist and Progressive movements, and the income tax; inequality abated during the Progressive Era, only to rise again during the Roaring Twenties, only to fall sharply with the New Deal, the Second World War, and the mass prosperity that followed. Much harm was done along the way, but none of it permanent, at least in the largest sense—certainly none of it threatened to end the human game, not because the robber barons were less venal, but because they lacked sufficient leverage to make change on that scale, and because people stood up to them.

  Or think about the Second World War—it was the greatest military conflagration the world had ever seen, with millions dead and whole continents turned upside down, but eventually the tank tracks eroded back into the landscape. Farmers still hit the occasional unexploded shell with their plows, but the world moved on, because there wasn’t quite enough leverage to knock it entirely off its course. We were lucky—Hitler came close to developing nuclear weapons. Whether because of Heisenberg’s treachery or simple incompetence, the Nazis didn’t quite get there, but given another a year or two? We know how we would have reacted, because we dropped the bomb on Japan though the war was nearly won. Nuclear war with Germany might have been leverage enough to fundamentally and permanently alter the globe.

  Global warming turns out to be the perfect example of too much leverage. The men who gained ideological power beginning in the Reagan years, a great many of them directly connected to the oil and gas industry, were in control at precisely the moment when they could do the most damage. In the years since 1990—the years since, say, the Exxons and Kochs of the world started launching the various “think tanks” and front groups to poison the debate with what they knew was a series of lies—the world has emitted more carbon dioxide than in all the decades before. And this turned out to be the crucial carbon dioxide. We know now that 350 parts per million carbon dioxide is the most we could safely have
in the atmosphere, a number we’ve rocketed past in precisely those years. It didn’t necessarily need to be that way. In a world with slightly different physics, 800 parts per million might have been the breaking point—in which case, we’d still have room to recover. If someone grabs the steering wheel when you’re a mile from the cliff, you have time to wrestle it back. But as it turned out, we were on the edge of the abyss.

  This leverage doesn’t just guarantee a shift in climate; it also locks in new forms of inequality that can’t be undone even by revolution. As the temperature climbs, it’s the poorest who suffer most, a suffering that isn’t going away. When the peak temperature in leafy suburbs can be lower by as much as fifteen degrees, “landscape is a predictor for morbidity in heatwaves,” in the words of one study, which found that African Americans were “52% more likely than white people to live in areas of unnatural ‘heat risk–related land cover.’”14 Imagine what it’s like in a refugee camp, or a prison. It’s hell, is what it is.

  And again, the people who were telling the lies knew they were lies. This wasn’t a hard conspiracy to organize—just one hundred firms in the fossil fuel industry account for 70 percent of the planet’s emissions. But it wasn’t based on simple greed, either. Self-interest mixed perfectly with ideology. Remember the CEOs gleefully handing one another copies of Atlas Shrugged and the billionaires who had grown up in the fever swamps of the antigovernment movement? These guys thought they had cracked the code of history. Climate change was, for them, inconceivable because it would get in the way of profits—the Koch brothers run enormous pipeline networks; they are among the biggest leaseholders in Canada’s tar sands—but also because it marred the purity of their belief system. The antigovernment forces had, at some level, no choice but to deny global warming, because tackling it would have required governments to take strong action—at the very least, to set a price on carbon so that markets could then work their putative magic. They believed more strongly in their particular economic fantasia than they did in physics or chemistry, and so they churned out an endless series of deceptions.