More Thoughts on The Society of the Hustle

We were born into a society with a reward system that is inverted, ethically speaking. The personality types that are most heavily discouraged and censored in cultures with long-standing wisdom traditions are those that are most lavishly rewarded in this society. To me, this indicates that there is really not all that much to be done to revolutionize (thereby offering some kind of salvation) this system, in the absence of a complete abandonment of its founding system of values — a system of values that historian Morris Berman summarizes as: “the hustle.“ Under a system built around the hustle, the great objective of the individual life is wealth accumulation - generally speaking, by any means necessary. I would like to emphasize the crushing and tragic sadness that I and others experience as a direct consequence of being born into an ethically inverted culture. The value system is a type of hell that thrives upon producing other hells — hells of war, addiction, chronic mental/emotional crisis, mass species extirpation, ecological devastation, human displacement, the vanishing or at least the banishing of the sacred, the monetizing of everything possible.

And it is a society born of a glitch, an aberration. Most people are not as broken and venal as Donald Trump or Jeffrey Bezos, for example. However, as mass scale agriculture took off in the wake of the Neolithic Revolution, such sociopathic personality types made a play and started to amass power built on surplus food and wealth. The remarkable thing is that such people were successful in acculturating others into their own illness. In the case of the Americas, truly demented souls like Chris Columbus crossed the sea, but, most significantly, he and similar British marauders were able to then acculturate others into their value system. It really is a striking achievement, considering the value system assimilated by otherwise normal people is one based on the proliferation of misery – both internal and external. Maybe we will live to see the day when the other story reasserts its power and people leave behind the greatest mistake in human history.