Part of my draw to his work is that I used to dismiss it as excessively pessimistic. Of course he wrote in wartime. A product of Old World Europe, he made a name for himself as a scholar before the Great War. His education was of the highest prewar sort: all romance languages, all disciplines, the great books of all time, along with mighty technical knowledge. We’ll probably never see his likes again.
By the time the second war in Europe broke loose, his outlook had matured greatly from his earlier works on technical economics. He saw the impact of the rise of incredible wealth on the culture at large. Essentially, his view was that markets and capitalism lead to their own cultural undoing.
Yes, capitalism works. Manna falls as if from heaven, and people are no longer taught its source through any lived experience. Better lives, richer lives, more opportunities rain down on the population as if by magic, leading generations of people to believe that none of the blessings of civilization require anything like the ancient virtues. We are all along for the ride, and just enjoying its riches.
What does this do to human character? It trains people to believe that the ancient virtues are no longer operational. We don’t need fortitude, resilience, courage, and determination. A credit-soaked world no longer needs thrift, prudence, or sobriety. Instead, rising wealth of the sort we’ve experienced since the late 19th century trains people just to go along for the ride. Careerism replaces courage. Credentials replace talent. Erudition replaces wisdom. Indulgence displaces prudence.
This has a profound effect on policy, Schumpeter wrote. States come to believe that they can promise their populations anything and that normal accounting has been superseded. They create giant cradle-to-grave welfare states. They intervene in every conflict, domestic and foreign, as if there are no limits to resources. The culture celebrates recklessness, sloth, and opportunism instead of discipline and fortitude.
And what is the result, in Schumpeter’s view? The very foundations of prosperity are eaten away, giving rise to a form of socialism that works so long as the crisis is kept at bay. This shows up in various ways; for example, in higher education. The belief is that as many people as possible should get a college degree, which ends up flooding the labor markets with educated professionals with an entitlement mentality for whom there is no real market demand. So long as the wealth is extant, they end up creating markets for themselves: fake jobs in fake institutions doing fake things. No matter what else happened, the whole of life seemed like “a room without a roof,” in the words of Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy,” released in 2013.
Schumpeter predicted all of this in 1942, and it was why he was so doubtful about the survivability of capitalism and market freedom. There is much more to the book.
You can see the entire work as an elaboration on the following principle sometimes attributed to the Stoics: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Perhaps you can see why I dismissed the work when I was younger. I came of age during the great prosperity. I did not know it but generations were in fact being trained to go along for the ride, tempted to believe that the old virtues no longer mattered or, at most, were nothing but a pious indulgence suitable for homogenous religious communities but not the general culture.
There was never a need for moral courage, at least not habitually. To be sure, there have been people enlisted in the military, front-line workers, and many examples of extreme challenges in people’s private lives. I’m obviously generalizing but, speaking overall, the challenges of life itself have been minimized probably more than at any time in history. Capitalism worked, too well, one might say.
Schumpeter was even more correct than he knew. In 2020, the wealth seemed so automatic, so inevitable, so indestructible, that most nations in the world actually set out to shut down their whole economies in a new science experiment in disease mitigation, all while they waited for labs to roll out some magic cure that turned out not to work.
And how did most people respond? They went along. The churches were closed, as were businesses, schools, travel, and more. Supply chains were wrecked. Populations used to having “the system” take care of them did not know what to do. So most people defaulted to the norm: acquiescence, trust, biding their time, maintaining caution, and not disrupting the flow of life.
The path of maximum compliance always worked in the past. Why not now? And yet, a generation of school kids was ruined. People’s lives absolutely fell apart. Arts, culture, mainline religion, and so much more fell apart. Major media lined up to push official messaging. So did Big Tech. The upheaval utterly changed the functioning of life itself.
It was a fiasco for the ages, and guess what? Weak men did indeed create hard times, and those have hit everyone very hard today. It’s not making the news and the official data is still in denial but everyone knows it in their personal lives.
Our standards of living are falling, even dramatically, even at a pace no one has previously experienced in living memory. You know it in your bones and yet public culture hasn’t really admitted it.
All of this is backdrop to the real crisis of right now, and you know the substance of it: It is a political crisis now illustrated by an attempt on Donald Trump’s life. He was spared by the grace of God: a sudden turn of his head toward the screen caused the bullet to slice off the top of his ear but miss his head.
As if by a miracle, he survived.
But the story does not stop there. Having been shot at, and bleeding from his head, he rose to his feet and rallied the gathered crowd, while promising to fight on, and urging others to do the same. As security forces got him away from the violence, he fist-pumped the air one more time and then left.
In our times, we’ve rarely if ever seen anything like that. Those who said he was a mere actor, influencer, opportunistic politician, or businessman on the make saw a different man when faced with mortality itself. He exercised resilience, fortitude, and moral courage, all those ancient virtues that are so ill-practiced in our times but which ultimately drive history.
Most people I know, even those who completely oppose his politics, are still in awe of that scene. It rocked the world, and made history. This is even aside from the incredible images that came from the scene: the real-time videos themselves present a stunning display.
We in our times are so accustomed to a culture of inauthenticity, opportunism, performance, posing, careerist ladder climbing, and pettiness that it is startling to witness an authentic display of genuine fearlessness in the face of death. If I may say so: we needed this. Desperately. We all needed to remember and to know that it matters.
All politics aside, our times have deprecated and driven out the old virtues and toughness along with it. I’m convinced that an authentic display of exactly that is precisely what the world craves right now. We need it more than ever in our lives. Otherwise, we will continue to go the way that Schumpeter predicted, straight to the doom he foresaw for Western culture.
