Absurdity and suicide

The “one truly serious philosophical problem” is “suicide … precisely [the] relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd,” French author Albert Camus wrote in his fairly lengthy essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

The “relationship between the absurd and suicide” has unfortunately taken on global implications, particularly in recent months, with the United States’ economy in apparent turmoil once again. “Suicide” is perhaps too extreme language when describing the decline of the American economy.

As Giacomo Chiozza said in a recent Political Science Quarterly, America is “ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” and few individuals among us would deny that the wounds are at least largely self-inflicted. 

For instance, economist Dean Baker has shown that the deficit would be almost completely eliminated if the U.S. were simply to replace the current broken, privatized health care system with one similar to other developed countries, which consistently have lower per capita costs and produce better health results.

However, with the Wall Street financial institutions and large pharmaceutical corporations on the front line in Washington, the option is not even considered in the mainstream debate.
Instead, elites in the media inform the public that we must “win together or lose together” with a plan that “requires cutting because we have made promises to ourselves on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that we cannot keep without reforming each of them.”

Individuals familiar with the National Income and Products Account no doubt find the concepts of “togetherness” and “shared sacrifices” to be quite foreign to the current political and economic climate, with corporate profits at a record high of national income. And within corporate profits, the financial sector is also at a record high. 

Another self-inflicted wound was the financialization of the economy, which can be traced as far back as the 1970s. Economist Ha-Joon Chang recently wrote that without “reform to our financial system, whose dysfunctionality lies at the heart of this crisis … we will not overcome this crisis satisfactorily nor avoid similar, and possibly even bigger, crises in the future.”

Further, describing the current economic climate as “absurd” is evidently not far from mainstream opinion. A poll conducted by the Washington Post and the Pew Research Center revealed the American public overwhelmingly described the political charades with negative terms.

When asked for a single-word characterization of the “budget negotiations” that took place in Washington earlier in the month, “Ridiculous” received the highest word count with 66 responses.

A New York Times and CBS poll found a majority of the American population oppose cutting health care programs, with 69 percent opposed to spending cuts on Medicaid and 78 percent opposed to spending cuts on Medicare.

Moreover, 72 percent of Americans believe the best way of addressing the deficit is by taxing the very rich.

As the “budget negotiations” very clearly demonstrated, the disconnect between the desired policies of big business, the current Democratic administration, the Republican-led House of Representatives and those of the American public are out of step with one another.

The choices appear to be political democracy or absurdity and suicide.
       
­— mardunba@indiana.edu