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Severing ties to these theatrics was easy. But for some time afterward, I retained an intense hunger for devotion itself. For about five years—the end of high school, the beginning of college—I turned my attention inward, tried to build a church on the inside, tried to understand faith as something that could draw me closer to something overwhelming and pure. I kept a devotional journal, producing a record of spiritual longing that was fierce and jagged and dissolving. I pleaded for things I still find very recognizable. Help me to not put on an act of any kind, I wrote. I told God that I wanted to live in accordance with my beliefs, that I wanted to diminish my own sense of self-importance, that I was sorry for not being better, and that I was grateful for being alive. It’s hard to draw the line between taking pleasure in God’s purpose and aligning God’s purpose with what I take pleasure in, I wrote, between entries where I tried to understand if it was inherently wrong to get drunk. (At my school, you could be expelled for character-based spiritual offenses such as partying, being gay, or getting pregnant.) I stood between both sides of my life, holding the lines that led to them, trying to engage with a tension that I stopped being able to feel. Eventually, almost without realizing it, I let one side go.
Recently, I found myself doing this again—this time in the desert, that perennial seat of madness and punishment and epiphany, in a house at the top of a hill in a canyon where the sun and wind were incandescent, white-hot, merciless, streaking and scintillating across the bright blue sky. I left the house and walked down in the valley, and started to feel the drugs kick in when I was wandering in the scrub. The dry bushes became brilliant—greener—and a hummingbird torpedoed past me so quickly that I froze. I experienced, for the first time, Weil’s precise fantasy of disappearance. Each breath I took felt like it was echoing clangorously, an impure reverberation. I wanted to see the landscape as it was when I wasn’t there. I had tugged on some fabric and everything was rippling. I had come to that knife-edge of disappearance. For hours I watched the blinding swirl of light and cloud move west and I repented. At sunset, the sky billowed into mile-wide peonies, hardly an arm’s length above me, and it felt like a visitation, like God was replacing the breath in my lungs. I sobbed—battered by a love I knew would fall away from me, ashamed for all the ways I had tried to bring myself to this, humiliated by the grace of encountering it now. I dragged myself inside, finally, and looked at the mirror. My eyes were smeared with black makeup, my face was red, my lips were swollen; a thick whitish substance clung stubbornly around my mouth. I looked like a junkie. I found a piece of paper and wrote on it, after attentively noting that the ink seemed to be breathing: “The situations in my life when I have been sympathetic to desperation are the situations when I have felt sure I was encountering God.”
Fyre Fest sailed down Scam Mountain with all the accumulating force and velocity of a cultural shift that had, over the previous decade, subtly but permanently changed the character of the nation, making scamming—the abuse of trust for profit—seem simply like the way things were going to be. It came after the election of Donald Trump, an incontrovertible, humiliating vindication of scamming as the quintessential American ethos. It came after a big smiling wave of feminist initiatives and female entrepreneurs had convincingly framed wealth acquisition as progressive politics. It came after the rise of companies like Uber and Amazon, which broke apart the economy and then sold it a cheap ride to the duct tape store, all while promising to make the world a better and more convenient place. It came after the advent of reality TV and Facebook, which drew on the renewable natural resource of our narcissism to create a world where our selves, our relationships, and our personalities were not just monetizable but actively in need of monetization. It came after college tuition skyrocketed only to send graduates into low-wage contract work and world-historical economic inequality. It came, finally, after the 2008 financial crisis, the event that arguably kick-started the millennial-era understanding that the quickest way to win is to scam.
The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can. The story is as old as the first Thanksgiving. Both the con man and his target want to take advantage of a situation; the difference between them is that the con man succeeds. The financial crisis of 2008 was an extended, flamboyant demonstration of the fact that one of the best bids a person can make for financial safety in America is to get really good at exploiting other people. This has always been true, but it is becoming all-encompassing. And it’s a bad lesson to learn the way millennials did—just as we were becoming adults.
The recent shift in the broader social understanding of sexual assault has been so dramatic and so overdue that it has obscured the fact that our systems still mostly fail on this particular topic—that, as demonstrated by the Kafkaesque Title IX bureaucracy, these systems are unequal to a crime that our culture actively manufactures. No crime is confounding and punitive the way rape is. No other violent offense comes with a built-in alibi that can instantly exonerate the criminal and place responsibility on the victim. There is no glorified interpersonal behavior that can be used to explain robbery or murder the way that sex can be used to explain rape. The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed. The fact that feminism is ascendant and accepted does not change this. The world that we believe in, that we’re attempting to make real and tangible, is still not the world that exists.
Andrew was new to Texas, and I thought I was leaving for Peace Corps any minute. Freed by the mutual acknowledgment that this would be temporary, we glued ourselves to each other, and then six months passed in this way. One morning we woke up on a deflated air mattress in my friend Walt’s apartment, hungover, with light filtering through the dust like magic, and when I looked at him I felt that if I couldn’t do this forever I would die. A few days later, we went to DC for, of all things, a black-tie fraternity reunion. I got wasted and went outside to savor the taste of several delicious menthols, and then came back inside reeking of smoke, which Andrew hated. “I’d quit for you,” I told him, “but…” My departure for Central Asia was, by then, just two weeks away. Andrew, who is a sweet boy, started crying. We went back to our hotel room and admitted that we loved each other. I woke up surrounded by cans of Budweiser, which I had drunkenly used as cold compresses for my tear-swollen face.
Stories about what we now call “the homeland,” its origins and unfolding, do not, conventionally, feature capitalism. Other tales about the country’s history usually take priority. Favorites include, perhaps first and foremost, the New World as the incubator of liberty and democracy in the Western world. Others emphasize the nation’s embrace of people from a global everywhere, America as the nation of nations. Another is heroic and tracks the conquest of frontiers, both physical and spiritual, a legendary odyssey requiring fortitude and audacity. Organically tied to that one is the apotheosis of America as the land of entrepreneurial genius, derring-do risk-taking, a business civilization resting on a human landscape of indigenous inventiveness. The last tale does indeed spill over into a celebration of capitalism, but less as a form of political economy, more as an epiphany of the self-made man, cleansed of the social abrasions that real capitalism inevitably trails in its wake.
Freedom anchored in acts of self-reliance and the mastery of the market, of nature, of the libido, of other people can be intoxicating, functioning like an aphrodisiac. Even if its social reach recedes as capital accumulation becomes the exclusive terrain of only the mightiest conquistadors, the dream abides.
The New Deal, or the Keynesian social welfare and administrative state, was something new under the American capitalist sun. It civilized the laissez-faire regime by regulating finance and industry, by recognizing certain collective rights of the organized working class, by establishing a minimum level of material survival, and by licensing the state to intervene into the marketplace, using the levers of fiscal and monetary policy to even out the wild oscillations of economic boom and bust that threatened to undermine the social order fatally. Although this outcome preserved the basic framework of capitalism, it also required a sea change in the way ruling circles behaved; in the scope and powers of the central government; in the reigning ideology crafted to explain and justify the New Deal order that was so at odds with the social Darwinism of an earlier epoch; in the internal composition of the Democratic Party; and in the degree to which capitalism was obliged to make more room for democracy. Whatever the severe limitations of this new world, these were not inconsiderable changes from what the country was accustomed to and they point to the malleability of capitalism.
In the 1820s and 1830s, as artisans, journeymen, sailors, longshoremen, and other workers organized the early trade-union movement as well as workers’ political parties, one principal demand was the abolition of imprisonment for debt. Inheritors of a radical political culture, their complaints echoed that biblical tradition of Jubilee mentioned in Leviticus, which called for the cancellation of debts, the restoration of lost house and land, and the freeing of slaves and bond servants every fifty years.
Falling into debt was a particularly ruinous affliction for those who aspired to modest independence as shopkeepers, handicrafters, or farmers. As markets for their goods expanded but became ever less predictable, they found themselves taking out credit to survive and sometimes going into arrears, often followed by a stint in debtors’ prison that ended their dreams forever.