If you ask most men in the Roissy-sphere what brought about America’s wretched dating environment, they’ll usually trace it back to liberalism. As they see it: women’s suffrage gave the female sex too much power, birth control allowed them to sleep with low-bred alphas, no-fault divorce turned women into a spoiled class, and a supposedly paternal government encouraged bad behavior in women. In their minds, it’s all the liberals’ fault, and the left is responsible for selling out “beta” men whom previous generations of women depended upon.
To quote Roissy on the matter:
From the time of the “sexual revolution” (which was really a “sexual devolution” back towards pre-agricultural mating norms when 80% of the women and 40% of the highest testosterone men reproduced) women have been more free to choose mating opportunities based on their gina tingles and the economic and social empowerment granted, respectively, by their pointless humanities degrees and the disintegration of traditional slut shaming mechanisms. The life of serial monogamy and alpha cock hopping has never been more attainable for the average American woman, and the result has been predictable: Women are substituting the beta males they no longer want or need for marriage with a Big Brother Daddy government to help them foot the child-raising bills that their PUA, drug running and serial killer lovers won’t.
How accurate is this? Well, I generally disagree with placing the blame solely on liberals, but the Left certainly made some mistakes. The current-day family court system is a man-hating disaster, and divorce law is in desperate need of revision. Also, the creation of a “sexual harassment” culture– in which a woman can freely accuse a man of “making her uncomfortable”, leading to catastrophic social harm for the man– has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s worth noting, on that issue, that it’s not even the sexual harassment laws or lawsuits that are the problem. I don’t know anyone who’s been sued for sexual harassment, and most cases of it that I’m familiar with are those in which the man is clearly guilty. The actual laws may be reasonable, but the culture that results, in which the “bogeyman” of a boorish, uncouth, “creepy” male is made cultural currency, has been a massive pile of buttfail.
On the other hand, it’s worth noting that the left-wing “sexual revolution” of the 1950s-70s did not, alone, produce the mean-spirited and perverse “alpha” culture we see in heterosexual dating today. Let’s look back to the ’60s and examine what that decade’s cultural movements were all about. Anti-war protests. Hippies. Marijuana. LSD. “Free love”. Impractical utopias. Woodstock. Rock ‘n’ roll. As it were, hippies embraced nakedness and some were comfortable having unattached sex. Lots of sex, with a lot of different people. Polyamory. This was, however, much closer to the “everyone belongs to everyone” mentality of Brave New World than the mean-spirited and status-obsessed hypergamy of modern dating.
Let’s compare three casual sex cultures to examine how they are different. First is the gay male casual sex culture, which is more aggressively sexual but, in general, much less mean-spirited than its modern straight counterpart. Their casual-sex culture is about sex, plain and simple– nothing more and nothing less. (Gay men seeking loving relationships do not generally look for them in that scene.) Second is the modern straight casual sex culture, which lacks the reciprocity of the gay counterpart, the gay one being remarkably respectful in comparison. In the straight “hookup” culture, there’s an obvious lack of reciprocity; the man wins by “getting” sex, while the woman wins by denying it, except to a man of very high (“alpha”) social status. It is about status and popularity more than it is about sex. The “hookup” is just the currency of exchange between men and women, of very low intrinsic value apart from its status-oriented benefits. It’s conspicuous consumption of sex. Third, for this comparison, is the distinct and now utterly dead “free love” subculture of the 1960s. For the most part, this culture wasn’t about status at all. Say what you want about hippies, but we can all agree that their men aren’t “alpha”. It wasn’t about sex or status, per se, although the desire for sexual pleasure was certainly a part of it. It had a distinct reason for existing.
What was it about, then? Well, “love”– but not of the romantic kind. Many of the free-love advocates were just kids, in their late teens and early 20s and inexperienced with love. They didn’t know what romantic love was, having never experienced it, and they assumed that it was like a sexualized friendship or camaraderie. (They were, of course, very wrong.) Moreover, they did not want to turn sexuality into a status-seeking carnival. They wanted to abolish notions of status entirely, starting with monogamous relationships, without adequately examining why such relationships existed, and what they were about. From their perspective, marriage was bitterly unhappy and boring, akin to a sort of soft slavery. I’ll note that it’s difficult to fault them entirely for this perception, because 1950s culture was so sanitized and sterile that these people had barely a clue what was going on inside of a marriage, and widespread sexual reservedness meant that the incredible, life-altering upsides of a great marriage were hidden. Marriage was, and still is, like intelligence work in this regard. The successes, no matter how astonishing and beautiful, are closely-guarded, subtle, intimate and private. The failures are public.
Free love, as it turns out, is about as practical as taking LSD every day– in other words, an utterly terrible idea that might appeal to a just-opened but naive mind. The hippies believed that their Aquarian camaraderie could be transformed into a sexual relationship, but most of them quietly realized they were wrong. Human nature is nothing like bonobo nature. Inevitably, most of them would discover a special person with whom they did want an exclusive, permanent sexual and romantic relationship. “Free love” was abandoned, like a hippie commune that its members outgrew, as these people aged into their mid-20s and began experiencing romantic love for real. Love isn’t free or cheap. It’s costly, beautiful, dear, and difficult.
As impractical as “free love” turned out to be, I find it difficult to detest this culture with the same fervor that I hold for Sex and the City culture. The holy indignation that I have toward modern “alpha” pricks and sluts I would not direct at the free-loving hippies. They tried something impractical and stupid in their early 20s, it failed, and they moved on from it. What’s to hate about that? Nothing.
Something nefarious began in the 1970s, accelerated in the 1980s and ’90s, and damn near destroyed the country (and might still) in the 2000s. Americans fell in love with elitism— and not the meritocratic “elitism” of the era that put men on the moon, but an empty elitism of status-seeking, cutthroat competition of questionable value, and consumption as the national religion. Gilded Age 2.0. Studio 54. “Greed is good.” Yuppies and coke orgies. The Bateman days. Rank-and-yank. Enron. Sex and the City. “A boot in your ass, it’s the American way.” The conversion of Ivy League colleges into recruiting agencies for investment banks. Ad nauseum. Winner-take-all elitism became sexy and cool, despite its corrosive effects in the long-term and on society. In other words, it’s the new smoking, and we need desperately to kick the habit.
It’s often said that AIDS killed the casual sex culture that was born in the 1960s, and that a new one was born in the late ’80s with the advent of anti-retroviral drugs. Wrong. The casual sex culture never died, and its 1970s local minimum had nothing to do with AIDS; it occurred before AIDS had even been discovered, in the early ’80s. What actually happened is that the “free love” culture of the 1960s died out on its own, just because it was so impractical and sloppily thought-out that it never had a chance in the first place. Excluding a few ivory-tower radical feminists– trolls before there was an internet– free love’s exponents abandoned it and began falling in love, forming proper families. However, the rise of status-obsessed and mean-spirited elitism came shortly after and spawned a new casual sex culture– one in which people are treated as commodities with no intrinsic worth, but valued solely because they’re desired and exclusive. This more recent casual sex culture has infinitely more to do with Reaganoid heartless conservatism than with 1960s liberalism.
Unfortunately, game is not going to die as quickly as “free love” did. The most obvious difference between these two expressions of casual sex is that game succeeds on its own terms. Free love was borne out of good intentions. Many of its adherents and exponents were people of good moral character who, when they saw their ideology’s weaknesses and failures, abandoned it. Post-Reaganoid “winner-take-all” hypergamy is borne out of hateful intentions and, for the most evil people who keep it going, serves them extremely well. Only a revolutionary upswelling of “radical goodness”– an aggressive promotion of love, romance, kindness, and sexual propriety– can end it.
Liberals and conservatives are different in temperament and personality. Not sure if you have seen this:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200612/the-ideological-animal
It turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children’s temperaments. They weren’t even thinking about political orientation.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects’ childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3.
Conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
The study’s authors also concluded that conservatives have less tolerance for ambiguity, a trait they say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, “Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think,” and “I’m the decider.” Those who think the world is highly dangerous and those with the greatest fear of death are the most likely to be conservative.
Liberals, on the other hand, are “more likely to see gray areas and reconcile seemingly conflicting information,” says Jost. As a result, liberals like John Kerry, who see many sides to every issue, are portrayed as flip-floppers. “Whatever the cause, Bush and Kerry exemplify the cognitive styles we see in the research,” says Jack Glaser, one of the study’s authors, “Bush in appearing more rigid in his thinking and intolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, and Kerry in appearing more open to ambiguity and to considering alternative positions.”
(Personally I am a mix of liberal and conservative traits, liking both order/rule-following and creativity/ambiguity. The problem with liberal vs. conservative as polar opposites is both sides begin to see the other side as “evil” and “wrong,” when merely “different” as a descriptor would suffice.)
Cless, I’ve been meaning to write something on this topic. People forget that the West went through TWO sexual revolutions in the past half-century. The first was the “free love” movement of the 60’s – the second was in the 90’s, and focused on sexual harassment and domestic violence laws (VAWA, etc.). Most people, including myself, are guilty of lumping the two together. I’m tempted to think that the shifting sex ratio (women outnumbered men in the 60’s, but men outnumbered women by the 90’s) had a role in this.
Hope:
That “study” you cite was discredited years ago.
http://blog.lordsutch.com/?entryid=598#extended-598
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2003_07_20_dissectleft_archive.html#105901829821047356
One of those pages (lordsutch.com “Your source for almost nothing of value”) links to the other, a blogspot.com page. There are few secondary sources on John Jay Ray outside the blogosphere, but there are plenty of references to the Block study and Jack Block.
Can you give me a more authoritative and research-backed refutation of the 20-year study on child behavior vs. political beliefs later in life?
Only a revolutionary upswelling of “radical goodness”– an aggressive promotion of love, romance, kindness, and sexual propriety– can end it.
Well, the social conservatives tried to end it but their methods are too stringent for we normal humans. Chastity until marriage doesn’t make sense when most people are marrying so late.
I agree with you completely. I am chaste, and expect the woman I marry to be chaste, but my definition of “chastity” is more liberal than the traditional one. “Chastity” means that she doesn’t have sex outside of a loving context, and preferably (although it’s not a stringent requirement) in a long-term relationship.
@Black&German
Social conservatives could have done it a lot better if they made masturbation acceptable, allowed for teachings of basic relationship skills, and encouraged healthy physical expressions of love.
There is actually more embracing of these things among Christians. They are starting to understand that sex is a healthy part of a good marriage, and that they can’t adhere to Puritan codes in modern times.
@Ferdinand Bardamu, I don’t belong to any political party. I am really interested in seeing good studies on what shapes political beliefs.
Articles like this one which discusses biology / genetics as it relates to political beliefs sound interesting, but as always I am interested in seeing the issue from multiple sides.
Cless,
I think the key you are missing is it’s women who are the most interested in status. Given a small society like a small village or a hunter gather group most men like structures where almost everyone has the same status. When you get into bigger groups chicks start pushing for their men to have higher status, to be famous, powerful, ect. In the long run, men follow what gets them laid and status is what women wanted.
So when you look at history what changed was women coming into their power and changing the rules from the relativity flat system of free love to a hierarchy of status whoring.
Eh, not quite, Cless.
The 60s generation assiduously destroyed thousands of years of sexual mores in the space of a generation — on purpose. Were they young, idealistic and misguided? Yes, they were. But they were also sickeningly self-indulgent — what mattered most was the supposedly new world they were creating for themselves and others, and who cares if it wrecked mores that have served the human race for millenia. That self-centered, self-indulgence is what set the stage for what happened next. Sure, the hippies had their “ideals”, but they were relentlessly self-indulgent in pursuing them. The culture and mores and wider effect be damned.
That culture of self-indulgence was retained after the idealism was lost. It was simply translated into non-idealistic arenas, like greed, status, combat sex, and so on. But underlying all of it was the same self-centered, me-me-me nature of the 60s generation, and the boomers in general. Never has there been on the face of the earth a generation of humans that has been so utterly self-indulgent, so utterly contemptuous of everything outside of their own wants and desires than that generation. They created both the 60s AND the 70s that came later. They fed both cultures and sustained both cultures by means of their self-indulgence — the only thing that changed was what they were indulging — that changed from indulging their ideals in their hippy-dippy 60s days to running hard on their investment portfolio in their 40s during the 1980s. It’s the same people. The character of Gordon Gekko, in his 40s in the 80s, was probably a hippie in his 20s in the 60s, or at least he participated in that culture.
The AIDS thing *did* tamper down casual sex a lot, Cless. It hit when I was in my teens in the 80s and it had a significant impact on casual sex, for gay and straight people alike. What emerged on the other end of the AIDS thing was the culture of the late 80s and 90s, which was indeed more focused on money, status, and “getting ahead”, whether that came to education, money, sex or what have you. But that culture would have been impossible if the boomers had not diligently destroyed human sexual mores in the 1960s-70s. It does not matter that they disagreed with that later, personally — the damage was done. And is still being done. Without sexual mores, you have either a free-for-all (what was tried in the 60s and which doesn’t work) or you have the market system, like we have now, which is harsh as hell on a lot of people.
However, once the mores genie is out of the bottle it’s very hard to put it back in. One can wish for some of these mores to come back, but that is wish thinking, in my opinion. Without a culture that supports consensus values (and our culture does not do that — it supports a diversity of “personal values”), you will always have things sliding to the lowest common denominator that people *do* share — which happens to be basic appetites like lust for power, status, sex and so on.
Not thousands of years, but closer to 300. Still, I agree with you. It was a terrible thing.
Perhaps the hippies were a bit self-indulgent and weird, but the ’60s left (rather distinct from the “hippie” movement) was not, nor was the anti-war movement, and nor were the Civil Rights activists, many of whom risked their lives.
The Boomer generation puts its best foot forward in the ’60s and its worst one from the ’80s onward.
It’s tough to speculate on a fictional character, but I doubt this. I think it was different people within the same generation. George W. Bush was never a hippie. He was a flaming coward, but no hippie and not a part of the student left.
What is true is that most of the current-day right-wing neoconservatives were on the left in the 1960s, but they weren’t the hippies or civil rights activists. They were the communists who wanted to overthrow the U.S. government entirely. As they aged and went from powerless to powerful, they swung from authoritarian, subversive leftists to authoritarian, status-quo right-wingers… which is actually not that much of a change.
It sped up the downfall, but casual sex was on its way out anyway, with the proven impracticality of “free love”. Were it not for the rise of mean-spirited elitism in the 1980s, casual sex would have probably died out by now.
I generally agree, but what would have prevented the ’80s yuppies from destroying sexual mores, had they not already been damaged by the ’60s-70s?
I agree with you fully. It’s horrible.
The 60s flower children participating in “free love” might have had good intentions and meant no harm. However the Marxists promoting the idea knew very well that the sexual revolution would eventually lead to the breakdown of the traditional family. I believe things have played out exactly as they intended.
Also it can’t be understated on how much the welfare state had hurt decent men who would have made good husbands and fathers. I know from personal experience. A woman I was interested in LJBF’d me. The more I got to know her the more I saw how she was extremely critical and judgemental of all non-alpha males. One day she decided she wanted a baby. Instead of searching for a husband she decided she was “going to go to the club and F the best looking guy I can find”. That’s exactly what she did. Of course she went on every welfare program you can imagine. Then she had a second child from another random alpha male and went on even more welfare and food stamps.
I know other women who had children from criminal bad boys and also went on welfare. I’m convinced that if the welfare state didn’t exist for single mothers women would choose much different (and better) men than they choose today. Welfare allows women to indulge their most base, primitive selection instincts with no consequences when things go wrong. It’s no coincidence that we have so many single mothers today and a one party leftist government.
I don’t think the ’60s communists (who morphed into the modern neoconservatives) were ever pushing the sexual revolution, at least not publicly. Although many communist regimes have worked to wreck the family, 1960s American Communists were more oppressive and harsh toward the hippies than the mainstream.
This is a hard problem. I have no qualms about thrusting bad boys and the women who sleep with them into poverty, but their children are another matter. Granted, most of these kids are not going to amount to much, given their parents and parenting, but it seems wrong to put yet another disadvantage into their lives by letting them fall into abjection. I generally believe that women who sleep around are unfit mothers and should have their children taken away from them, but I don’t know who would want to adopt their kids.
Also, wouldn’t you agree that a disabled (unable to work) and physically unattractive woman with a child and no hope of finding a mate should have access to welfare programs? Marrying a “provider” beta male is not an option for her.
Obviously, I come from a privileged perspective, but most of the worst offenders I see in sociosexual dysgenesis are well-educated, upper-middle-class white women to whom welfare programs are irrelevant. Their parents will bail them out no matter what happens, and they know this. This was as true in 1940 as it is today, but they preferred refined gentlemen back then and they chase alpha losers now. What changed? It can’t be blamed on welfare programs.
I’m convinced that if the welfare state didn’t exist for single mothers women would choose much different (and better) men than they choose today.
I agree. I think the welfare state definitely plays a role in this.
It’s possible, at least in the lower classes. However, in the US, the welfare state is irrelevant to people middle-class and above– (1) they don’t qualify for the programs, and (2) their parents would bail them out– and these womens’ tastes in men are just as terrible as anyone else’s.
I think the erosion of culture– the real culprit, at least from an upper-middle-class perspective– is generally unrelated to the welfare state.
How would you restructure or change the welfare state in order to prevent sociosexual dysgenesis? I have some thoughts on the matter, but it’d be interesting to hear others’ opinions.
But didn’t the erosion start at the bottom and work it’s way up? At least with black people that is the case.
The Earned Income Tax Credit is a step in the right direction as it rewards gainful employment. But there’s still a marriage penalty, I believe. And start judging tax and financial incentives based on their result rather than on whether they “seem fair”. Fairness should be irrelevant.
Health care reform would help. My sister has “pre-existing conditions” and is covered by my parents’ health insurance. If she were to marry her boyfriend and father of her 2 children, she’d lose her current health coverage and be unable to join his. This is a common problem but something rarely discussed.
I agree with you. There are a large number of reasons why we should reform the current system. We need at least a public option, if not single-payer. Another is to bolster small-businesses, because small pools and individuals get screwed in the health-insurance racket.
The health insurance miasma is such a wreck that the only way to keep it working is to regulate them within an inch of their lives (no rescissions, no pre-existing conditions). At this point, health insurance becomes a commodity rather than a huge profit center, and a public option doesn’t seem so radical. (Hell, in Europe even the conservatives support universal health care.)
Aaaah! Don’t get me started because I’ll never stop!
Yeah, actually I vote conservative in Bavaria (c’mon, I’m Catholic) and I think universal health care is a no-brainer. I’ve got one of those gold-plated health insurance’s here and it’s a complete dud compared to plain-ole-plain-ole German health care. And the sheer amount of paperwork I have to deal with is a nightmare. Stress pur.
And the quality of the care itself leaves something to be desired. My daughter was running a high fever one night and we went to an urgent care clinic and, after waiting for over an hour, we finally got called to the front desk and they handed us a stack of paperwork to fill out that. That was it. I just BLEW UP at those bitches. Luckily, I lost my mind so completely that I was cursing in German (my native tongue) and they didn’t know what I was saying. If they had known they probably would’ve thrown me out. I think they were also just stunned at the sheer weirdness of a black woman screaming at them in German. LOL!
We’ve not been impressed. Even when the professional was competent they seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time filling in forms, ordering useless tests, etc. instead of actually helping us.
Another example was when my husband went to the emergency room for some stitches in his thumb. He sat there for 3 freaking hours and then they sewed him up (badly) and told him to come back to the emergency room in one week to have the stitches removed. What kind of stupid thing is that to say? He just went to our family doctor instead. Wait: 5.4 minutes.
Also, I went to the German ER numerous times and never waited more than 15 minutes. Hello? It’s the ER, right? Shouldn’t emergencies be fast?
And what kind of 3rd-world health system lets women give birth in the ER? And then sends her home the same day despite an epidural. That happened to a friend of mine. She gave birth in the ER right next to another woman giving birth. It’s like something out of Niger. Why don’t we just squat in the fields?
Sometimes I get bills for something and then I call up and they tell me that my doctor has re-submitted my claim and that they’ll send out a new statement. Happens at least once every few months. I received a $714 bill for an immunization last month. Blew my mind.
We’re lucky because if anything ever happens and we can’t get treatment here we can just pull out those German passports and head back. I’ve known a few people who have had to do that. It’s one of the many reasons we’re considering going back in a few years.
It’s possible that they could have done so in the 80s, but I think that’s doubtful. Overturning the sexual mores took a revolution, complete with people dedicated to that cause. If the pre-existing sexual mores had persisted into the 80s, I think it’s unlikely that they would have been overturned by the people in the 80s, because one thing that people in that time were *not* about was activism and revolution. It was the post-revolutionary period, filled with narcissism and political apathy — people were not in a revolutionary mood, at that time, they were in a more “focus on me getting ahead” mood. So while it’s possible that the narcissistic 80s crowd would have unwound sexual mores itself, I honestly doubt that. It’s not that easy to do casually — it requires a revolution of the sort we saw in the 60s and 70s to do it. For the same reason it’s not really easy to put the genie back in the bottle once she’s been let out of the bottle and is pole dancing — sex is a very powerful force, and it takes a large social effort (or other large outside influence like war, famine, disease, etc.) to change the rules around sex quickly, in either direction.
I think this is basically right. The welfare state exacerbated the social changes, but didn’t cause them itself, because the changes are culture-wide. So, for example, while hypergamy and casual sex permeate the entire culture, and cause problems everywhere, in the welfare state part of the culture, the welfare state aspects exaggerate the impact of the cultural changes. If we look at inner city welfare state communities, for example, we find that these are typically characterized by extremely low family formation rates, high levels of unwed motherhood and lots of casual sex with hypermasculine men going on. The reason for this is that it is in these communities where the larger cultural trend towards casual sex/hypergamy meets the welfare state, which itself *adds* to the list of reasons to avoid marriage and settling down (when the state is a better financial husband than any man who is available). This leads women in these communities to select men on other criteria (reflecting the overall problem, but in an “on steroids” kind of way), which in turn leads men to “develop themselves” in terms of those criteria and so on. It is both a reflection of the broader cultural trends away from relationship stability and long-term selection as well as the direct impact that the welfare state has had on obsoleting poor men.
I have some problems with the idea that “self-indulgence” is the cultural problem we need to solve.
People have always been selfish to some extent and altruistic to some other extent. I doubt there is anything fundamental to human psychology that has changed here in the last century. Beyond a certain point, it is simply unreasonable to expect people to not behave selfishly.
You’re saying that the culture now glorifies selfishness, and that this is new. At the same time I can think of other cultural trends that seem to point in the opposite direction, such as MBAs going on to found NGOs rather than working on Wall Street. Overall, I’m not really sure how to measure this aspect of our culture over time. I can fully believe that from 1950 to today selfish behavior has become more accepted, though.
But I’d also look at the incentives. Perhaps people have always been behaving selfishly, for the most part, and we’ve changed the rules of the game such that, in the dating sphere, selfish behavior takes a different, and far uglier, form. The obvious example is birth control and shotgun weddings. Back in the day, the alpha cad would have had a kid pretty quickly, and he would have ended up married and largely taken out of the pool. So there was a clear disincentive for a selfish individual to engage in excessive casual sex.
The welfare state is another example of incentives. So is the breakdown of community in modern anonymous urban living. Etc.
It’s hard for me to break down how much of the changes have been incentives vs. cultural.
I’m not scared of selfishness by itself. See Adam Smith. Selfishness can be a force for good. I’m only scared of selfishness when it’s channeled into negative-sum activities.
Back to the culture. To associate all of this with the conservative movement… I think this is not terribly credible. Look at Reagan back in the 60s and 70s: his fight against campus unrest, his attacks on welfare queens… Reagan wasn’t a radical. He was simply trying to restore the established pre-1960s order. He was clearly libertarian in temperament, our most libertarian president since Coolidge, but with a clear element of traditionalism also.
Were there economic excesses in the 80s, or in the last few years? Sure. The economy always goes in cycles of overreaction, that’s been happening for centuries, and in the very long run, it’s no big deal. Someone comes up with a good idea (junk bonds; mortgage securitization), and then it gets taken too far. The stock market always overshoots too high and then overshoots back too low.
Overall, the economic changes of the late 70s that continued in the 80s under Reagan and the 90s under Clinton were a very, very good thing for the US and for the world as a whole. Indeed, the Reagan Revolution may be dead in the US, but it’s quite alive and well in many other parts of the world. On the whole, economic policy has shifted in a very positive direction relative to 40 years ago. So to the extent that you’re attacking those economic reforms, I have to most strongly disagree.
You’ve got to keep status-seeking behavior clearly separate from wealth-seeking behavior. The former is socially harmful. The latter is socially beneficial. When the government frees us to engage in wealth-seeking, when the culture glorifies wealth-seeking, when the personal rewards of greater wealth increase, I’m inclined to see that as a good thing.
The tricky bit is that there’s overlap between status-seeking and wealth-seeking. But not always. Warren Buffett doesn’t care about status, and the coke-snorting i-banker probably doesn’t care about wealth except insofar as it boosts his status.