Allies all, or creators of the hate that we denounce in others - Part TWO The Economic Dimension of our “End of History”

  

The U.S.’s relative political stability since its birth has been both a blessing and a dangerous lullaby. We have been fortunate never to have experienced the true fragility of democracy firsthand—a naivety that explains our alarming collective complacency in the face of systematic erosions of fundamental freedoms and rights.

We fail to recognize the insidious nature of these incremental attacks, unable to perceive the profound implications of each compromised right. We do not understand how democracies can unravel—not with a sudden, dramatic collapse, but through a gradual, almost imperceptible dismantling of institutional protections and civil liberties.

This ignorance is our greatest vulnerability. Without a visceral understanding of how hard-won democratic freedoms can be lost, we risk sleepwalking into a future where the foundational principles of our society are fundamentally transformed, perhaps irreversibly, before we even realize what is happening.

 

Part 2: The Economic Dimension of our “End of History”

 

A couple of decades ago, Francis Fukuyama posited that we were reaching the "end of history," suggesting that liberal democracy represented the optimal or final form of political and socio-economic governance. Since then, Fukuyama has revisited and refined his arguments to address both the resurgence of authoritarianism and territorialism as counter-models to liberal democracies, as well as the internal challenges these democracies face from identity politics and populism. 

I wonder instead if we have reached the end of history with regard to the capacity of normative frameworks to achieve ethical and sustainable development, precisely because we cannot escape otherness, greed, and self-interest, nor comprehend the socio-contractual complexities of social life, and therefore are doomed to reenact our darkest failings. 

It is with that sense of foreboding that several interconnected trends, themes, and crises increasingly concern me. These trends are:

• Normalizing replacing the legitimacy of norms and values with the (il)legitimacy of power and of influence through the erosion of normativity (1).
• Ascribing both substantive and economic value so poorly in our society.
• Embracing and celebrating the morally ambiguous “making-it” paradigm (2).
• Shrinking the space within which we welcome others, by turning away from each other, cancelling each other, and by embracing otherness through a zero-sum "us-versus-them" mentality that tears our social fabric apart.
• Passively accepting the aggressive, relentless, and unchecked commoditization of our attention, of our personal data - including our biometric data, of our privacy, and of our very existence.
• Acquiescing to the premise that the morality and nature of capitalism should never be questioned, even when under the guise of capitalism, corporate, economic and financial practices have shifted from rewarding free enterprise and creating opportunities for self-determination, to: 
• furthering the enclosure of our environmental and intellectual commons.
• the commoditization of public goods, of personal data, and, increasingly, of ourselves.
• expansive rent-seeking practices and subscription-based services and goods, some of which were either in the public domain or considered public goods not so long ago. 
• a growing income and wealth inequality.
•  the furthering of systemic inequities and privilege.
•  A narrow and poor understanding of the concept of sustainability. 
• Ignoring that sustainability must be tethered to and measured by intergenerational justice. 
• How unethical moral hazards, and immoral harms, are deepening systemic inequities and income inequality by shifting cost, risk, liability, and harm to those who did not create them.

These interconnected concerns and crises are a manifestation of the flaws in our economic governance models, the foundations of our normative frameworks, and of our imperfect understanding of sustainability and inclusion.  

The erosion of normative legitimacy in favor of power dynamics represents a fundamental shift away from shared values toward “might-makes-right” paradigms. This undermines the social contract upon which democracies are built. I fear we may be witnessing a fundamental breakdown in our capacity to develop ethical frameworks that can overcome human tendencies toward self-interest and othering. 

In this chapter, I analyze the economic dimension of our end of history. The increasing primacy of market logic over other value systems effectively subordinates ethical considerations to success metrics defined primarily by wealth and influence. Moreover, when aspects of human existence previously considered inviolable become marketable assets, we risk reducing people to mere economic units.  

I struggle to find one adjective to define our current form of capitalism and model of socio-economic ordering. Sometimes it is cannibalistic, premised on us exploiting each other, with wealth being created by engineered cravings in processed foods; addictions in pharmaceutical drugs; technology addictions (3); mining our personal and biometric data to exploit and condition consumer behaviors; or simply by shifting harm, and who bears the risk, the cost, and the collateral damage for wealth aggregation, commerce, and even for innovation. Recent studies had highlighted the severe and deepened mental health concerns caused by social media, particularly in children, and the exploitation of women in platforms such as OnlyFans and TikTok through the manipulative and predatory behavior of individuals that operate within these largely unregulated spaces. It begs the question, does innovation serve us, or are we serving it?  When did engineering and targeting addiction become acceptable?  And who is bearing that cost?

Immoral harms or unethical moral hazards seem to have become the norm in our current model of economic governance. I define these as the costs, risks, liabilities, or harms of economic activities deliberately shifted away from those who create or benefit from them onto individuals or communities who must bear the full measure of their cost (4). They are no longer anomalies but features of a system that has moved away from true capitalism toward something that prioritizes wealth extraction over sustainable value creation and equitable distribution of both benefits and burdens.

Ethical and sustainable economic governance must measure and preempt unaccounted-for harms created by corporations and private actors without bearing their cost. These harms include environmental damage, privacy violations, usurping and monetizing natural resources, enclosing the commons of the mind, and ignoring long-term public interests such as economic, physical, and mental welfare.

Sometimes it is locust-like, premised on exploiting and ravishing our natural resources, always enclosing, always diminishing, and irreparably damaging our environmental commons. When did it become acceptable to privatize public goods such as water rights, shorelines, and other natural and public resources? Why do we accept business models that neither consider sustainability or intergenerational justice, use, and possession?  Why do we accept business practices that irrevocably damage our environmental commons, or that mine our natural resources without regard to climate transition or energy sustainability?

Sometimes it is Ponzi-slash-pyramid-like, celebrating the Gordon Gekko glamorized mantra that “greed is good”, and developing and rewarding unethical social-engineering approaches to hustle, phish, deceive, or otherwise obtain an advantage at the cost of someone else.

Instead of promoting the creation of wealth or added value, we are developing an economy premised on siphoning (someone else’s) wealth, through the commoditization of everything, and through rent seeking practices and subscription-based services and goods. More concerningly, and because of the “making-it” paradigm, we are teaching our children that all is fair in this world all long as you win, regardless of who suffers and bears the cost. 

Sometimes it is all the above. Think of the hustle economy, and how we celebrate and accept a form of socio-economic model built of job insecurity and lack of employment rights. When did being a “hustler” become a good thing? 

This is not an attack on capitalism, it never could be. Our current system of socio-economic ordering is not true capitalism - it is something else. It’s something unsustainable ethically, morally, and environmentally. We are siphoning away our commons, and with time, our very existence. We must develop sustainable governance frameworks that measure and preempt the unaccounted-for harms created by market actors without bearing their full cost. 

I firmly believe that one of the ways through which we can escape our end of history is to embrace ethical capitalism, which I define as an economic system in which:

1. The factors of production remain privately owned, but accountable for their impact on our environmental, intellectual, and financial commons and on intergenerational equity. 
2. Private enterprises are accountable for the provision of the long-term public interests that their activities impact. 
3. Individual owners of capital are free to make use of it as they see fit as long as they are aligned with sustainable and equitable economic growth and bear the costs of the all moral hazards they produce. 

I believe that this understanding of unethical moral hazards, or immoral harms, intersects with competition law theories in modernity or post-modernity narratives, and with ethical aggregation theories in tort law, particularly with regard to negligence.

As it is, with regard to the economic dimension of our current crisis, it seems we cannot escape the end of history until we embrace the true concept of sustainability—one that incorporates intergenerational justice, ethical responsibility, and the preservation of both our natural and social commons.

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1.  Normativity here refers to the set of rules, norms, and principles the govern society - as informed by our social-contract and shared values. These shared values get turned into specific laws and rules that guide how we interact in different situations - like rules about business deals, what happens when someone gets hurt, or how we treat each other's property.

I use the term normative frameworks much like Joseph Raz described legal systems, although without gravitating towards institutional positivism. Normative frameworks comprehend the legal principles and values that might permeate any given sovereign polity, such as self-determination, human dignity, non-discrimination, equality, and proportionality. They also encompass the more specific legal institutions and norms that pervade each area of law within the legal system, which serve to crystalize the over-arching principles and values by furthering them, and in some cases creating justified exceptions for them, through straightforward rules and processes that allow for human interaction in all the different areas of societal life. Good faith and the duty of care are examples of overarching principles and values within a legal system, which in certain areas of life and human interaction have fostered legal institutions and norms, such as negotiorium gestio and agency rules in Roman and Civil Law, or the modern standards of tort negligence that arose out of Donoghue v Stevenson, and in the aftermath of the Paisley snail. Raz noted that “Laws guide human behavior, help people in planning and deciding on their future course of action, and provide standards for evaluating past or planned actions”, but both the role and the rule of Law in that regard can only be legitimately maintained if we don’t forget the importance of normative frameworks.

2.  There is a tendency in this country to ward off judgment of anyone, and even of right and wrong, in favor of the "making-it" paradigm. In a Schrödinger-esque kind of way, you are either a genius or a failure depending on when and if you make it. Success has become increasingly divorced from ethical considerations or genuine contribution, with the end result (wealth, fame, power) justifying almost any means. The problem with the "making-it" paradigm is that it has been replacing careful scrutiny of true added-value, equity, conscience, sustainability, morality, and legitimacy in many of our leaders and influencers. This is particularly troublesome when making-it, as it often does, comes through asymmetrical power-dynamics, systemic privilege, bullying, or at the cost of others. While "making-it" is an essential part of Americana and of the American Dream, it used to be about talent, creativity, ingenuity, service, courage, and even selflessness. 

3. A set of behavioral and mental disorders that accompany the technological advances that define the digital age, such as social media addiction, smartphone addiction, online shopping addiction, online porn addiction, and internet gaming disorder. While we could boast that our smartphones are increasingly more sophisticated, yet they are equally surreptitiously fueling both technological dependency and the attention economy. 

4. Some Examples: environmental damage caused by corporations without bearing the remediation costs; privacy violations and exploitation of personal/biometric data; privatization and monetization of what were previously public goods or resources; enclosing the commons of the mind through intellectual property overreach; business models built on engineered addictions (in food, pharmaceuticals, technology); exploitation through the "attention economy"; the shift to an economic model that emphasizes "siphoning wealth" rather than creating value; disregard for intergenerational justice and long-term sustainability.