The point is to thrive, not just to survive

This video of a discussion between Anand Giridharadas and Chris Hedges is worth the hour you’ll invest in it.

The segment starting around 40:00 was fantastic. It’s about how we don’t appreciate the heroic amount of work required to keep civilization going—work done by states, despite corporations—so that many of us don’t have to think about survival at all, and can focus on thriving.

We are being encouraged to dismantle these things because those who have benefitted greatly —and continue to benefit—are now telling the story that too many “moochers” are benefitting from these things, when that was the whole point.

How the 'Epstein Class' Fails to the Top | The Chris Hedges Report (w/ Anand Giridharadas) by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

“Anand: “Look, I don’t fault people for saying and doing what they need to do to feed their families, but there’s gotta be a limit “

“Chris: [forced to utter a chuckle so heartfelt that I laughed right along with him]”

“A big part of what I try to do in Winners Take All is remind people of how extraordinary public problem-solving is. And, the way public problem-solving works, when the government solves some big social problem, it goes into a bucket of things we are never grateful for ever again. We never think about again.

“When is the last time in the United States of America, except for some occasional story in the news, when is the last time you thought about the safety of food when you go out to eat, right?

“Anand GiridharadasMy family’s from India. Even if you’re a pretty prosperous person in India, thinking about the safety of food is a daily you you you have to do this all the time. Not washing your vegetables properly in India, it’s a matter of life and death. Right? Knowing which restaurants you can eat at, which you can’t, which use filtered water, which do boiled and filtered water, which use Himalaya, bottled water, even just for cooking. You have to know these things to like survive.

“It’s just a huge amount of mental energy just to be safe living in India. I lived in India for six years. These calculations are like big part of life. We used to be like that too in a sense, right? Every every place used to be like that at a certain point in history. At a certain point, we invented food safety. We got an FDA.

“[…] Every single piece of meat started being inspected by the federal government. So on and so forth. Restaurants, you got the department of health going up to restaurants, checking all these things. You don’t look at the ratings online because you just trust. And it’s true. You are right to trust that there’s some giant regime that you don’t even understand that is taking this thing that used to be one of the greatest challenges of human existence, which is dying because of the something in food, right?

“It brought down like a huge fraction of us who ever lived. This giant thing that is still in many parts of the world something you have to think about all the time to survive. We have eliminated that in the United States and many other prosperous countries. We’ve eliminated that. I’m giving you one example of one thing that government does that you don’t think about very often that is a game-changer. Now, do what I just did for Social Security. What was it like to be old before? We know from the 1930s the level of malnutrition and starvation among especially the elderly was very very high. What was it like to be without electricity?

“[…]

“As soon as government solves a problem, […] it gets no credit anymore. And so you got these Silicon Valley guys, who who have invented some app for, you know, getting a latte a little bit faster, and they feel so triumphant about their capacities as problem-solvers. And you got your Social Security administration over here that’s doing like Nobel Peace Prize-level work every year, right? And it gets no credit.

“And this basic problem is at the heart of so much what we’re talking about. We don’t even realize what government does. Business people don’t realize the amount of their commerce that is enabled by the kind of court system that you and I pay to maintain. Right? And so this ignorance about and disregard for public endeavor, for what government does, for the solution of common problems through common institutions, this ignorance is a big part of the story of what went wrong. And I think we have to help revive in people the the ideas and the stories of what government actually does.”