Accountability Pt. 2
Accountability Part 2
Apparently, I have more to say on this topic than I thought. It can’t all be contained in one writing session. So here’s part 2. Accountability is a beautiful and integral part of being human. It can be hard, but I wouldn’t wish an easy life on anyone. Struggles show us who we are and who we can be. They teach us in deep and meaningful ways. There’re no shortcuts to wisdom.
Anyway, here’s two more reasons I think accountability is becoming more and more difficult to attain in our culture.
Credit
Ok. This is going to go down a rabbit hole a bit like Alice in Wonderland, but bear with me, because there’ll be cookies at the end. I swear. Alice eats cookies at the end of that book…right?
Ok. So the cash we use every day is an example of fiat currency. “Fiat” is a latin word that means, “It shall be.” Basically, that means that the US dollar has value simply because we all agree it has value. It doesn’t represent anything. It is a sign without a signified (shout out to all my lit theory professors! And hopefully I used those terms right…). It doesn’t really represent anything – except maybe a collective belief in America…in ourselves, in each other. The dollar has no inherent value and no real or even metaphorical connection to any valuable material, product, quality, or idea. It’s illusory. Used to be, we operated under the gold standard, which meant that every US dollar was backed by gold, but we abandoned that officially in 1971 and in all but theory years before that. Which means that the value of the dollar is not bound by anything, so the possibilities are endless but so are the threats of collapse. That’s why we rely on the US Federal Reserve Bank to control the supply and maintain the value of the dollar. Doesn’t this all smack of socialism to you? Just saying.
Well, ok…so what about credit? Credit means that you don’t have the money to make a purchase, but that’s ok, because money doesn’t really mean anything anyway. It’s all about belief. Money has value only because we believe it does.
So you want to buy a couch, but you don’t have enough money. That’s ok. You can buy it with just a piece of plastic. Well what does that plastic represent? It represents the belief that the bank has in you that you can and will eventually have enough money to buy a couch. But there’s a cost to their belief in you. It isn’t free. You have to pay interest. So what’s interest? Interest is the cost of acting upon a bank’s belief in you. Interest is the amount of belief in the American economy that you owe to the bank in exchange for the belief they have in you plus the amount of belief they have in the American economy that they give the furniture dealer in your place so that you can “buy” your couch.
This transaction happens every minute. And so far, it’s been working out pretty ok. Although, in 2008, we suffered a setback. And there were a lot of causes, but mostly it was because people abused the system. People chose to purchase things, especially houses that they couldn’t afford and then defaulted. See…the problem with having money that means nothing is that everyone creates its meaning for themselves. As humans, we tend to look at money as what it can do for me instead of what it can do for everyone. So for some people, money doesn’t represent a collective belief in the American system but rather it represents how much stuff they can buy. And if they don’t want it to mean anything at all, then it doesn’t. There’s no gain and loss like the old days when I traded my prized sheep for a wheel barrow. We’re so disconnected from the affect of money, that it doesn’t mean anything to us. And there’s no real consequences. You duck phone calls for six months. And your debt goes away, because it never really existed anyway. So people buy garbage on credit they don’t need and can’t afford. And banks sort of do the same thing. They get a twisted view of what money represents, so they try to abuse it as well. They take all of your belief in the American way of life and they convert it into BMWs, lake houses, and $1000 bottles of wine. And when everybody abuses our collective belief and converts it into meaningless shit, we get a recession. Isn’t that just like America?
Our solution to this most recent recession was twofold. (1) we printed more money and used it to bailout the banks that were deemed “too big to fail” in order to stabilize our economy. So in a time of crisis, we used our collective belief in ourselves to bolster our own collective belief in ourselves – which inevitably will cause a devaluation of that collective belief, inflation. (2) We also established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to create a better world, a world where recessions like 2008 never happen again. The CFPB is an antibody set loose to find and destroy all viruses threatening to ruin our collective belief in ourselves. Our hero! Right? I don’t think so. In my humble opinion, the CFPB is more like an autoimmune disorder running amok and attacking not only viruses but joints and skin as well.
The CFPB was sort of created by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was our response to the financial crisis of 2008. The CFPB operates under the belief that financial products do not work for American consumers – a disbelief in the American system. They have over 1000 employees and operate under a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars every year -- which comes from the Federal Reserve Bank instead of the tax base so that they are not accountable to Congress in any way. The government is using 100s of millions of dollars worth of our collective belief in the American economy to fund an organization that is founded on the principle of disbelief in the American financial industry. What?! And do you know what they’re doing with all of our hard-earned belief in America? Here’s what they’re doing. They’re auditing banks and credit reporting agencies, which is fine, but they have rule-making powers, so if they see something they don’t like in an audit, they just freaking draft a new law. And then they also have enforcement power, so they just go ahead and find the bank in violation of this new law they just made up and fine them an arbitrary amount that they alone decide. Are you kidding me?! Isn’t that freaking scary? This Constitution-shredding madness is happening right now in the United States, in the land of the free. How could a bank possibly know how to prepare for an audit like that. And why on earth would we trust the CFPB to make more consumer-friendly decisions than US banks when they have no regulations to guide them, and they're not affected or controlled in any way by the marketplace or by Congress. We’re so afraid of our system collapsing that we’ve created a federal babysitting agency to make all our decisions for us. If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he’d croak. All of that belief in ourselves is turning to fear right in front of our faces! The CFPB thinks that you and I are idiots. They treat us like children who can’t be trusted to make our own decisions. And you know what? They’re probably right.
Here’s my point. We can’t hold ourselves or each other accountable for anything anymore, because we’ve stripped our currency of any real meaning, purposefully distanced ourselves from the tangible, material impact of our actions, devalued the natural loss associated with any gain, and mitigated the natural consequences of abusing our collective belief in the American system. And honestly, I think that’s why the recession happened. We lost sight of accountability. We just can’t track it anymore in a world full of ads and distractions and credit. And our response is to make us consumers even less accountable and to give financial institutions a good spanking for stuff they didn’t even do – stuff that we should all be accountable for. Way to go America!
Identity Politics
Ok. Don't click away. I think this is a serious and compelling issue in our culture today that needs to be debated. Wrapping your identity into a group that you identify with is just not a good narrative to build your life around. Not a good model to build your life toward. I'm not saying that there aren't injustices in the world. I am perfectly aware that the world is not a perfect place. But by my estimation, that's sort of the point of this whole human experiment. We all suffer problems. That's what connects us all, what allows us to learn and grow and empathize with other people. You can't go blaming other people or the government or the cosmos for your problems. You can't sit around and just wait for the universe to correct itself and make you and your values and your agenda the center of it. That's simply not a good way to navigate through this life. It's self-defeating. Having the government acknowledge certain rights for you and/or your community or the group of people you identify with is not going bring you fulfillment or miraculously add more purpose and value to your life. It's not going solve all of your problems. It's not going to help you become a better person. Rights are important, but I believe that responsibilities are even more important. The responsibilities you choose to carry are the things that most bring you purpose and fulfillment in this life. And from what I can tell, that's how humans are designed.
God made you to be strong. Don't live your life like you're a victim. You have the God-given ability within you to solve most of the important problems you will face in your lifetime. And if you solve the problems that you can, then you'll make yourself stronger and better able to handle the ones that you can't. You don't have to inhume yourself into some group or community. You don't have to conform to some ideology and lose yourself in the rhetoric -- that's heartbreaking to me. You don't have to be afraid to discover new things, to discover yourself, to challenge yourself, to fail and strive and pursue. Imagine the person you want to be. Imagine a better world and a better future and fight for that every day within your sphere of influence. Make the world better around you. You have the power to do it.
Breakdown of the Family
This is where I’m going to start sounding like an old curmudgeon. But I think the family is the heartbeat of a culture. Seriously. The family is the microcosm, the incubator, the elemental building block of society. If a child learns accountability, creativity, work ethic, etc within their own family, they are likely to develop into reliable, creative, hard-working adults. If we have a culture of families investing into their children and raising them to be confident, awesome humans, then we’re likely to have strong, thriving communities. If families are falling apart and/or not investing in each other, then we’re likely to have weak communities.
Ideally, kids should be learning valuable life skills in the home. They should learn to cook, sew, build and repair things, do laundry, be patient, empathize, communicate, listen, and hold themselves and others accountable. Because where else are they going to learn those things? And I just see this breaking down around me every day. Parents so often try to manage everything for their children and give them everything they want while protecting them from all possible challenges and struggles. I understand it’s all done out of love. But I think it sometimes prohibits our children from developing necessary coping mechanisms and constructing their own identities and learning to take criticism and to self-correct. We’re siphoning their intrinsic motivation and devaluing life lessons by using toys, games, sugar, and money as bargaining chips.
I know parenting is hard…especially in today’s world. I get it. I don’t think it’s possible to frame an argument that our government is not actively making life difficult for families. The US is the only First-World country in the world without federally-mandated maternity leave. And for a myriad reasons, two household incomes is practically a given these days just to stay afloat. Who has the time and the energy anymore to truly invest in their children with the depth and breadth that kids deserve?
Our focus is just on other things: work, friends, hobbies, and other responsibilities. So learning that should be done within the family is farmed out to boy scouts and brownies, computer apps and organized sports. These aren’t bad things at all, but we’re relying on them to teach our children valuable life lessons in our stead. And that’s pretty sad.
Our kids deserve better. We can do better.
