Have yourself a merry little white-pill Christmas

Buck up, buddy, it’s not so bad!

Photo by Umesh Soni on Unsplash

The metaphor of the "black pill" was first popularized by the incel-related blog Omega Virgin Revolt. In this parlance, being red-pilled means believing concepts like male oppression and female hypergamy, while being black-pilled means coming to believe that there is little that low-status or unattractive men can do to improve their prospects for romantic or sexual relationships with women.

This metaphor was extended to political matters, where, after being red-pilled (recognizing, and then rejecting, the dominant political narratives), one can then become either black-pilled (pessimistic or apathetic about the future), or white-pilled (hopeful about the future or believing change is possible.)
Wikipedia  

Doomed, anonymous henchman: Have we started the fire?
Bane: Yes, the fire rises.
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

I’d like to believe I’ve been retailing red pills since I started this humble weekly blog two years ago. But I’ll concede that some of my red pills could appear to have an obsidian tint from a certain angle and in a certain light.

But I’m not here to harsh anyone’s festive buzz mere days before The Big Day. So let me serve up a special holiday treat – an entirely white-pill Precariat Musings! Quite possibly the first in the 97 weeks I’ve now been doing this.

We’ve avoided WWIII
Regular readers will be aware I have a somewhat darker view of China’s ambitions than those pundits who continue to insist China will soon morph into a slightly more Oriental version of Denmark and become an amiable, not-at-all-mercantilist member of the community of nations.

But let’s look at the scoreboard here – China didn’t move on Taiwan in 2023 and many people smarter than me argue it is unlikely to embark on any military adventurism in the next few years. There’s even a chance Xi could be moved on. Especially if his senior comrades come to believe he went too far too early with the ‘wolf warrior’ chest-beating and opt to hew back to more of a hide-and-bide approach.

We’ve avoided a recession
Everyone, including me, expected the Western world to slip into recession in 2023. But as the year ends, the unemployment rate still has a three in front of it in Australia and many other nations. It’s been almost half a century since we’ve had full employment. As Ross Gittins pointed out recently, it’s rather lovely living in a society where everyone who wants a job can find one. And one where employers and managers must think twice about belittling or slave-driving an underling.   

We may be on the brink of a technological Great Leap Forward
A lot of world-changing tech was rolled out between 1860-1960. But contrary to appearances, world-changing technological breakthroughs have become rarer since that golden century, albeit with some attention-grabbing advances in communications technology.

Any other week of the year, I might be tempted to voice some scepticism about techno-optimism. But let’s get into the holiday spirit and assume the likes of Marc Andreessen aren’t simply gilding the lily to protect their class interests. Let’s further assume that we just might be on the brink of fully automated luxury communism. If that’s the case, humankind could be about to experience something approaching the Garden of Eden. A society of unimaginable abundance where humans don’t need to work much, if at all.

Neoliberalism is collapsing
I was born in 1971. Twelve years later, Bob Hawke was elected. Australia – a little later than some nations and a little earlier than others – then succumbed to neoliberalism, though the term then commonly used in this neck of the woods was economic rationalism. I’d long wondered if, after having had a brief but intoxicating glimpse of a pre-neoliberal society, and having lived all my adult life in a neoliberal society, I’d live long enough to see a post-neoliberal society.

For good or ill, it seems I just might.  

If you define neoliberalism as the free movement of goods, labour and capital across borders, it would be difficult to argue even the US – the spiritual home of neoliberalism – is particularly neoliberal nowadays. It’s certainly a hell of a lot less neoliberal than it was as recently as the Obama administration. And it may soon become even less neoliberal still. No matter who runs in or wins the next presidential election.

We’ve collectively spent the past four decades worshipping the free market, having spent the five decades before that worshipping the State (to a greater or lesser degree). I’m hopeful that, just as we discovered that leaving too many things to the State wasn’t a good idea in the late 1970s, we’re now beginning to recognise that leaving almost everything to the market also has its downsides. Not least the resulting wealth inequality and the political instability that inevitably brings with it.  

Suppose this wasn’t the season of goodwill to all men. In that case, I might point out that those of us in the bottom four quintiles of the income distribution noticed some time ago that neoliberalism had some flaws, and it’s those in the top quintile who have, at least since 2007, been demonstrating that it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.

But I’m simply not going to sink to that level of juvenile snark at this special time of the year.

Merry Christmas, thanks and take out a subscription to CHOICE!
After an eventful year, I’m running on fumes, so this will be a mercifully short Musing.

But before I take my leave, I want to thank everyone who has read, commented on, slagged off, or in any way engaged with this modest little newsletter during 2023.

I understand better than most just how much content is churned out every second of the day. And just how much of that content instantly disappears, without leaving a trace. (A situation I fear will get much, much worse in 2024 once the organisations that used to employ my colleagues and I work out how to more comprehensively automate their content-creation processes.) Anyway, if you’ve taken the time to read and maybe even LinkedIn like one of my end-of-the-week think pieces this year, rest assured I do very much appreciate it.

Speaking of my employment circumstances, I have been doing some (short-term, contract) work for CHOICE since June. Like all Australians, I’d always assumed CHOICE was on the side of the angels. Having spent a fair bit of time wordsmithing there during the last six months, I can assure my compatriots that this is indeed the case.

I don’t think I’m speaking out of school in noting CHOICE, like many organisations, is facing a challenging future in a post-ChatGPT world. CHOICE gets some government funding, but its noble consumer-advocacy efforts are almost entirely bankrolled by its members. Please click here if you’d like to learn more about becoming one of those members. Or if you believe a friend or family member might appreciate a gift subscription for Christmas.

And on that note, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

PS – I’ll be taking at least the next couple of weeks off, but Precariat Musings should be back sometime in mid to late January. See you on the other side!