Discover more from DARK FUTURA
Many people from Western countries notice something intangibly alluring when they excurse to the ‘third world’. Something they can’t quite put their finger on, a quality of life that isn’t “better” on the surface—in the classical sense—but increasingly tugs at the hem, like an unruly child who may seem annoying at first, but quickly turns quaintly adorable.
The average person isn’t equipped to describe, precisely, this difference. But they feel it in their bones, drink of it in the air and atmosphere, and it leaves them gripped by an unexpected passion after the embers of the trip have cooled; an urgency of nostalgia soon forms to experience it again.
What is this indescribable magnetism which seems to draw people to countries stitched ostensibly of chaos and disorder? One recent thread on Twitter elegantly evoked this umwelt:
Being in Mexico for work has reminded me how there are tradeoffs, good and bad, in low and high trust societies. Guadalajara is a nice city, and unlike tourist friendly places like Cancun, which are designed around being very navigable and accessible to foreigners, it's just a place full of people living and working.
There are reminders that it's not entirely safe everywhere, such as the high amount of police and security, or physical measures like gates and fences and walls. But on the flip side there is a certain refreshing feeling to the absence of mass regulatory capture. The US feels very fake and inorganic by comparison with its ever present franchise chains.
Closer to the industrial area, the residential neighborhoods have cafes and small lunch restaurants open in residential driveways under canopies. Everyone is out and about, walking or eating or chatting on the phone. Every car I've seen is a manual, motorbikes are everywhere, and the city just feels a bit more alive yet lazy and relaxed compared to most American ones.
Although depending on where you go, there are symbols of crushing poverty as you head out from the economically viable areas. But what stands out most to me is the way manpower seems to work at businesses. There are people there to diligently attend to things everywhere. It's very cost inefficient but so much nicer, even at work there is a woman who puts in a full day running a cafeteria in the break room and cooking, while otherwise constantly sweeping up everything.
I kind of get the feeling this is what manpower felt like in America before the 50s, McKinsey and it's consequences have been a disaster for Americans. Tolerable inefficiencies might cost money but they make an atmosphere feel way less pressured. I feel like in the US we have the worst of both worlds. A focus on squeezing every penny out of everything, total efficiency minmaxxing, and heavy regulatory capture. Maybe we don't enjoy things, we just consume them.
What is at the heart of this reflection? Is it a general feeling of relaxation and low anxiety, the freedom from stress that he’s describing? Is it the physical lack of ‘franchise chains’, and their unsightly blight on the environment, which seems to stoke his aesthetic pleasures like a cleansing bouquet?
The feelings expressed are infact fleeting, and difficult to equate or unravel—but they are ones that many people have increasingly felt and attempted to convey. The poster takes a more structuralist approach, naming corporate ‘minmaxing’ as the culprit, with McKinsey as the iconic figurehead whose influences on American corporate culture—and by extension, society itself—are deep and indelible.
Another way of practically describing what has happened in many Western societies is: overoptimization.
Fellow Substack writer Freddie deBoer’s thoughts on this happened to converge with mine this week:
His piece attempts to trace the invisible thread of overoptimization as it slowly pervaded every crevice of our society over the past few decades. From the more overtly obvious tacks, like Ebay resellers going cold because people have gamified the algorithms to drive the boutiquers out of business, to the more insidiously unspoken spells these changes have wrought over us.
It’s true, as he writes, there was once a time even dating apps like Tinder held a sort of quaint innocence in stumbling through the fields of suitors, in a more organic and perhaps stochastic fashion. Now it’s been gamified with minmaxing ‘tactics’ to use in breaking through the algorithmic portcullises which remove the ‘human’ element from the equation, and turn ‘dating’ into something which feels synthetically ‘by-the-numbers’. Some have even designed apps to automate the mass-messaging of the largest pool of girls in order to whittle them down to actives.
Traveling and sightseeing, too, have been “overoptimized” to create cookie-cutter experiences meant to herd and ‘process’ as many humans as possible through a pre-made gamut of ‘sights’, designed more to give tourists their coveted Instagram photo-op, then shove them along. Mount Everest, as Freddie cites, has become an epitome, nay, a summit, of this. The ‘holy mountain’ has in recent years devolved into a tourist trap, corralling thousands of barely qualified pensioners and thrill-seekers into getting their artificial ‘hype moment’ on the peak, even when it entails scrabbling over the stiffened corpses of their less fortunate travelmates.
This is, as ever, the commodification of ‘experience’.
But this isn’t meant to be the typical milquetoast screed about the ails of modernity’s commodification of all things sacred. Rather, I want to explore the deeper underlying mysteries of why Western societies have begun to make us feel like there’s something missing.
The earlier reflection by Aristophenes mentioned a city just on the brink of danger, lacking ‘mass regulatory capture’ to the extent that businesses operate with enough laxity for things to feel organic and natural; breezy cafes on sidewalks or operating out of garage enclosures without jackboots cracking down on every little code violation. Of course, some Westerners will gall at that, preferring their rigorous standards of Puritanical safety and sterility. There are extremes, the revulsion to which is understandable: infamous videos of unhygienic street food vendors in India serving up little more than slop come to mind.
Putting aside the extremes, there does appear a happy medium: a society with one foot in the ‘danger’ without falling into it. Russia, to many extents, can be described in this way: American expats like Tim Kirby have complained that rural Russian towns can at times find themselves littered with dog manure after winter thaws because local municipal regulations aren’t strict about cleaning up after your dog like in the U.S. Over time, though, he found himself appreciating the freedom in such an unstifled low-regulatory environment; the serenity of not being hounded with the ‘statute’ enforcement overkill that strangles and suffocates American cities as a way to skim citizens’ pockets for the sake of enriching bureaucratic leaches.
Reflecting more deeply, one can’t help but wonder precisely why American cities feel so different. The American way of life revolves around perpetual advancement: the undying pursuit of the fabled ‘American Dream’, amounting essentially to the banality of material wealth. In what are commonly deemed ‘third world’ countries, the lack of widespread ‘opportunity’ for profitable careers tunes life to a different cadence. People are apt to simply ‘settle’ into basic, lower tier jobs as a way of life and be satisfied for it; the lack of alternative brings quiet contentment.
That means the street vendors and cafe busboys are more happy to do their job, their spaces providing a friendlier, more inviting and easygoing atmosphere. In the U.S., “service” these days often feels unfriendly or disengaged because your garden variety waitress is really a ‘Hollywood starlet’ in disguise, your supermarket cashier is an aspiring rapper with glitzy big city dreams; even the grumpy bus driver is just ‘moonlighting’—it’s just temporary, he says, as he mentally unspools his side hustles rather than concentrating on what he deems a career that is “below him”.
Sometimes such examinations stem from a privileged, elitist, or colonialist mindset: “Boohoo, those Mexican waiters serve me with so much more respect than the poor American schlubs in my town.” That’s why my attempt is to sketch a broader, more applicable societal comparison than merely the admittedly superficial contrast of service quality. The finer distinction is in that grand chase for the now illusory ‘American Dream’, something vital is lost. People are inculcated to be ever-dissatisfied with their lot, and it has bred a culture bereft of stillness, no appreciation for the presence of the moment. Everyone is busy mentally casting for those faraway dreams as they muck and rake through their arrhythmic lives, discontent with shame. It’s the reason passionate street vendors like this are a rare sight in the U.S.:
In the U.S. in particular, lower tier jobs are associated with shame and failure. This reflects on up through the chain with the upperclass ‘betters’ looking down on tradesmen below them. The feedback loop creates a kind of cultural egregore of hidden shame which manifests itself into perversion, disillusionment, anomie, stratification, etc. Bottom-rungers are forced to dissemble, often lying about their professions; I’ve known people to list their aspirational pursuits, rather than their day job, when asked about their living.
In the so-called underdeveloped countries, people take pride in their work, no matter what it is: thus the ubiquity of smiling street artisans, as in the video above. These people have little to feel ashamed of: culture and society do not pump daily denigrations toward their work’s stature. There are many sources of such propaganda in the U.S., most notably the toxic cultural corrosion machine of Hollywood. In America, movies and pop culture glorify and glamorize the rich and famous, mocking the down-trodden or blue collar, fortifying the myth of ‘success’. In other countries, such professions have rich cultural and historical ties, remaining respected within the family and community. Western “community” has nearly ceased to exist due to the influx of forced migration and other odious progressive policies; small businesses likewise ablated by unrestrained Big Corp monopolies. Of course the job of neighborhood cobbler will lose its sheen when shoes are designed for obsolescence by giant sweat-shop-farming conglomerates, meant to pump oceans of cheap, unfixable crap at bottom prices.
‘Overoptimization’ propels us on a neverending fiscal race toward shareholder enrichment, stripping us of the gift of ‘moment’. We’re left discontented with our meager lots, with culture strangled by the imposed conceit of perpetual need and want. Institutions are designed to saddle us with scarcity, deprivation, and FOMO, habituating us to a controlling concoction of tension and distress. Since the culture-warpers have likewise usurped traditional values, like the importance of family, the gaping hole left in our lives is invariably backfilled with the empty struggle to succeed in the game of ‘perpetual progress’. Everyone is always ‘heading somewhere’, though they know not where.
In ‘underdeveloped’ countries, this phenomenon is blunted. Since people aren’t fed hopeless illusions, they’re apt to simply settle into an existence of contentment: the tranquility of present living. They know nothing ‘greater’ awaits them, so they make do with what they have, appreciating the small things and fleeting moments. This is why when visiting such countries, Westerners often experience a slowing of time, one they usually don’t have the vocabulary or training to articulate. They’ll use euphemisms like “things feel dreamy” or “relaxed”, understanding at the instinctively cellular level that this is how things were meant to be, how life was meant to be lived.
Some could analogize it to Buddhism, or at least how it’s superficially understood by faddish Westerners: the release from ‘desire and ambition’. But there’s no need to exploit extremes; it’s not a simplistic duality of West: bad, underdeveloped: good. It’s about what can be taken away, what lessons ingrained. It’s true, the Western system is largely built on a McKinseyian overoptimization whose ethos privileges efficiency with no consideration for the social or societal costs.
One could argue improving corporate efficiency has some kind of trickledown effect by enriching the economy, making the citizens prosperous. But left unchecked, this process continues its runaway cascade to the point of absurdity, when any ‘stakeholder’ benefits have long been wrung out. For instance, the following certainly jolts the parent company’s bottom line, but how could it possibly benefit the local native citizens?
Virtual fast food workers from the Philippines are being hired for $3 per hour, compared to New York's minimum wage of $16 per hour. "You can hire 5 virtual workers for the price of 1 in-person worker" This just shows how bad policies like this hurt the middle and lower classes in America.
The other much larger issue is simply one of culture, of the nomos itself. We know an elite class of parasitic social engineers tirelessly works to deracinate and uproot culture, historical ties, and traditions in the West to create empty vessels programmed by rote to chase material wealth because they know nothing else. Historical ties are being effaced, tradition disparaged and discouraged, creating a perfect blank slate to be programmed for exploitation by the predatory capitalist vulture class. And I don’t mean that in the Marxist dialectical sense—we know the elites do not subscribe to true capitalism or Marxism, and I myself am not a proponent of either. I simply use it as an identifier for the global rent-seeking financiers, the Old Families who—by virtue of their generational power, wealth, and influence—effectively function as the string-pullers of our stricken world.
In the West, these comprador elite have worked tirelessly to elide tradition, sublate instinct, and remythologize us as broken idolaters seeking satisfaction from the most shallow of material and libidinal impulses—ones which happen to conveniently play into their enrichment schemes and power monopoly. The “underdeveloped” countries retain their roots, their links to tradition and familial ties, their mythologies. They aren’t rent asunder by artificial divisions like the contrived identity politics psyop, which leaves their societies in a state of relative concinnity. Of course, they’re often conversely plagued by other problems—things like organized crime in the case of Mexico; so this isn’t meant to be an idealistic apologia of the Third World. Even the original Twitter thread above mentions the trade offs between these alluring provincialities and the albatross of ‘crushing poverty’ and crime which sandwiches them.
It is meant more to evoke the sense that we live in an artificial construction which continually seeks to sand off our rough vestigials, to polish and mold us into Noviops of the future, perfectly docile organs of rent-extraction. When we excurse to the inhospitable borderlands of Empire, we find ourselves intoxicated by the feeling of timelessness, the floating buoyancy of freedom from the great acceleration, the steered progression of modernity’s inexorable psycho-machine. It’s likely why more and more pensioners find themselves retiring abroad these days. They seem to find things go a little more their pace, reminding them of a time long past, before America and the West were swallowed whole by corporate greed, stripped away by the giant life-sucking excavator of global finance and capital.
Have you had similar experiences traveling abroad? Or are such whims merely the selectively impure idealisms of faulty, retrogressive nostalgia?
If you’re a Westerner living—or having lived—in a country shackled by the imposed ethos of the globo-banking-cabal, share your thoughts and experiences about traveling to the hinterlands of Empire. Do you agree there is an intangibly irresistible aura in the way of life there? Or are we just fetishizing poverty while projecting our desperate ideals onto a convenient, ready canvas?
If you enjoyed the read, I would greatly appreciate if you subscribed to a monthly/yearly pledge to support my work, so that I may continue providing you with detailed, incisive reports like this one.
Alternatively, you can tip here: Tip Jar
I'm so far in the hinterlands that I officially live in a country that doesn't exist :) And yes, it is superior in every way to the United States.
As for the rest, this is an interesting article, but it's more of a 1000-ft view thinkpiece than an effort to really dig into the deeper roots of what's at the foundation of this (genuine) experience that people are having that "woah, poor people over THERE seem to be living better lives than me."
Not my article to write, so all I can do is show you the pillars:
1) The term "Third World" is incredibly outdated and from a colonial era mindset. It automatically frames a given country as LESS THAN another one. Furthermore, it isn't even based on anything objective. Even the purchasing power parity indices (aka hard numbers) don't align with what people who use the framework of "First/Third World" think applies to a given country. Much more accurate is Global South/Global North.
2) The 1950s weren't when the USA resembled Mexico. More like the 1750s. Back when a guy like Daniel Boone could wrestle a bear and make moonshine in the cabin he built himself before becoming a lawyer and then serving in Congress.
3) What makes people of ALL countries and ALL regions happy is working with their hands. Not their finger(s), but their whole hands. Swiping, clicking, gesturing, and tapping = unhappy. Touch typing = happy, along with, of course, all the other thousands of occupations that require use of both hands, from sweeping floors to sculpting to machining precision parts to bushcrafting to camping to gardening to knitting, et al. If you want to suck the soul right out of a person's body, give them a job that doesn't require the use of their hands (very much). That may sound simplistic, but look at literally anyone you know who he is happy with their job/career/occupation and you'll see that I'm right.
3b) It just occurred to me that there's a way to prove this - some (mostly younger) surgeons now use robots (the most popular is called "DaVinci" for some reason) to assist/perform some procedures, while other (mostly older) surgeons go strictly with their hands and haptic feel to perform the exact same procedures. Guess which cohort has less career burnout/turnover and fewer post-surgical complications?
You've got a good instinct for what's going on in our reality. Just need to bury your nose deeper into the stratum, my friend, instead of getting lost in the clouds.
In the western world, supposedly we are free, except for where there are rules or laws. Turns out, there are rules/regulations/laws for EVERYTHING. This is what happens when societies get a bit bored and comfortable.
In the developing world, they are too busy keeping "danger" at the door. And so you look around wondering where all the structure and order is, but then realize you've forgotten what freedom actually is.