Bob Riley

The irony of Vivek's post is that his wrong analysis of how American culture is broken illustrates in itself how American culture is broken. I mean, how out-of-touch must one be to think people will embrace a vision where childhood must be optimized for corporate success, with less sleepovers, hanging out and fun (what he calls "mediocrity") in favor of shareholder-value-maximizing "excellence"? Especially when addressing Americans who have seen their lives destroyed en-masse by the same corporate priorities that produced this vision of "excellence". The average American family isn't choosing between math tutoring and sleepovers - they're choosing between paying for basic necessities while both parents work multiple jobs. His examples unwittingly prove the opposite of his point: shows that he describes as corrupting American culture (Friends, Boy Meets World, Family Matters, etc.) celebrate friendship, family, and community values - exactly what the US has lost in their rush to optimize everything for economic output and create an hyperindividualistic and consumerist society. That's probably why they're popular: they reflect a lost world that people aspire to go back to. He mentions China as the motivating factor here, because apparently the solution to avoid having their "asses handed to us by China" is more capitalism, treating people even more like cogs who must compete in "the global market for technical talent." That doesn't only betray a misunderstanding of what Americans want but also of China. China themselves largely hate the extreme competitiveness of their system: the people hate it and the government hates it, they all want to move away from it (hence the government banning the tutoring industry). And in any case this isn't what made China rise - China rose with a largely uneducated population, as mass university-level education is a very recent phenomenon there. No, I'm convinced that China, at a very fundamental level, rose so unprecedentedly fast for the very reason that it is one of the very few countries in the world which culture wasn't completely denaturalized by the sort of neoliberal dystopia that Vivek seems to idealize. In China's socialist system the market doesn't trump all, individualism doesn't reign supreme and, at a broader level, they still stay faithful to many of the ancestral values that have sustained their civilization for thousands of years. That's the culture that underpins it all and makes it work, not the fact that Chinese kids do too much homework. All in all, this is what makes this debate so revealing: Vivek, in trying to diagnose America's problems, has instead unwittingly illustrated them. The belief that every human activity must be justified by its contribution to GDP, that collective bonds are mere distractions from the pursuit of "excellence," and that the solution to the problems created by predatory capitalism is, somehow, more predatory capitalism.