The New Religious Cult Hiding In Plain Sight
We are now on the verge of another upheaval similar to NAFTA and the era of globalization, though perhaps more intrusive and devastating
During a 1992 presidential debate, three men stood on stage. Two men were convinced that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and globalization would be the dawn of a new economic era in which all Americans would thrive and prosper. One man, however, had a different vision, a darker, albeit realistic outlook on the future, which, in hindsight, turned out to be so accurate it almost hurts to read it now, over three decades later:
We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It’s pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor ... have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south ... when [Mexico’s] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.
These were the words of the most successful third-party candidate since 1912, Ross Perot, who was ridiculed by economists, business leaders, Clinton, Bush, and many Republicans for being an alarmist.
Perot and Bush lost, Clinton and globalization won, and NAFTA went into effect on the first of January, 1994. Before he signed it into law in December 1993, Clinton declared that “NAFTA will tear down trade barriers” between Canada and Mexico, “and create 200,000 jobs in the U.S. by 1995 alone.” He also promised that NAFTA would not only drive economic growth but that it would also be a “force for social progress.”
Still, there is much debate about the role NAFTA played in the years since it was implemented. Were the job losses as high as critics like Perot made them out to be? Was automation, robots, and high-tech software, which increased manufacturing productivity without the need for more workers, the bigger foe than the trade deal itself? Or was it foreign competition and the rise of China?
But the fact remains that NAFTA and globalization amounted to a jarring upheaval in American society for many citizens who saw their towns and cities gutted throughout the early 2000s by the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flood of prescription opioids and fentanyl. Clear winners – like Silicon Valley – and losers – the Detroit factory workers with families to feed – emerged in the 21st century, and the era of globalization did not, as Clinton, Bush, and the American ruling class argued, lead to some promised land for every single person in this country. It was a false dawn. GDP rose, but the pain of an Ohio family whose dad lost his job and overdosed on OxyContin was not measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
We are now on the verge of another upheaval similar to NAFTA and the era of globalization, though perhaps more intrusive and devastating: the AI revolution. Despite signs that AI may not be as transformative as advertised by our tech overlords, we are nonetheless barrelling forward into the Brave New World, with data centers cropping up across the country and Wall Street pumping eye-popping sums of money into the industry.
However, beneath the headlines and podcasts you read and listen to every day, ancient forces are swirling and driving the behavior of the supposedly “rational” people in charge, whether they are White House officials or Silicon Valley executives. These are forces that have stirred on Earth since the dawn of man and the creation of religion, forces that animated the Communists and Nazis, forces that compelled our Founding Fathers to start a new country. Revolutionary movements have come and gone, empires have risen and fallen, and there is nothing new under the sun. Leaders have promised utopias — as Clinton and the ruling class did in the 1990s — that never came to fruition, or that actually made our world worse off than before; promises that were broken by tyranny, bloodshed, and naked corruption. It’s all happening again, and no one seems to be noticing.