The Reillusionment: Globalization and the Extinction of the Individual

By James Robert Strope

The end of the Enlightenment is the beginning of our subjection to the techniques of advertising. Science, religion, industry and business worship power, driving us into a period of mythmaking, justification and the enrichment of a class. We've been colonized.

In service to the global commercial oligarchy, the interchangeable corporate agent is replacing the Individual as a free and resourceful person.

Beneath the sentiment and scandal of the news, advertising manipulates psychological structure, creating the illusion of involvement, personal power and identity while charging us for the service. Be all you can be. Work for peace and justice. This book is written in the spirit of critical theory. James Robert Strope is a playwright and software engineer living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359393831

Book preview

The Reillusionment

Globalization and the Extinction of the Individual

James Robert Strope

Copyright 2019 James Robert Strope

All rights reserved

ISBN #: 978-0-359-39383-1

Introduction

This book is about the subduction of the Enlightenment beneath the global corporate oligarchy and the transformation of the freethinking individual into its loyal agent fascinated by the spectacle of progress while producing and consuming the coy objects of desire. 

The purpose of this book is to increase understanding of human personal and social behavior and to apply the understanding more broadly to what humans are becoming. To this end, a model is constructed that fits observations. The model is true only inasmuch as it provides a consistent grip on the evolution of culture. Being radical, the model might provoke a bad reaction but it ought to be criticized on its utility, consistency and correspondence with observation.

This book leverages developments in critical theory as the unitary individual is one of many personalities presented by the social person. Currently, the individual is simultaneously sanctified and profaned by advertising, which stresses the person bearing its individuality.

Presented first is a summary of the model and then articles illustrating applications. The article on Generative Religion arbitrarily crystalizes the model, provides examples and estimates limitations. 

The model plays in United Statesian domestic and foreign policy, its personalities and societies. 

A radical model should feel unfamiliar.  Please expect departure from rooted opinion, independent flight and decentering. For the critic, I recommend charity: Look for many good examples for what you read rather than exceptions. 

Structural analysis necessarily reduces the detail of the domain of data being analyzed.  If a system can be simplified, even over-simplified, we have a grip on it. 

Theses

In this work, the human being is a collision with cultural dilemmas. 

To deal with dilemma, a person deliberately or intuitively presents a personality appropriate to the circumstance.  The variety of circumstance demands a variety of personalities on-deck within a person. 

The personalities are created and managed by the family, school, workplace, advertising, casual conversation and spectacle. 

The personalities are harnessed by political forces, especially imperial imperatives, driven by the global commercial oligarchy. 

The personalities a person presents do not necessarily know each other.  There is no requirement for a central personality for each human any more than a need for a central government on the planet or a central point in the universe. 

Personality and circumstance reciprocate, reinforcing each other, simplifying the relationship and making it repeatable. The product of newspaper publishers is the reader, the regular customer, the addicted consumer of the news. Publishers reflect the desires of their readers, dangle desired objects, supply packaged worldviews daily and, over decades, reconstruct the news to account for changes in its interests.  As the newspaper, so every fiction we entertain. 

A person is a collection of regular customers, one per brand, a multitude engaged with a multitude of commercial and political products, socially constructed in acts of consumption with feedback that reinforces and stabilizes the loop.

We grip objects in the world indirectly with ideas, which enables handling, understanding and deceit. We tend to lose the distinction between idea and what it describes. We tend to live in a bubble of our own ideas. 

Ideas are part of your body, which feels damaged when the ideas are threatened. 

Wealth is the means by which influential people control society and the reason for the control, which creates a positive feedback where those with wealth acquire more wealth and control. 

A culture is its behavior against the background of other cultures. 

Why it Could be True

You have your own language originally learned in your family.

You have a system of ethical and political concepts learned in a similar way.

Your language, concepts, memories and talents physically reside in your brain.  Sharing thought is physically impossible. 

We can have agreement, a nodding of heads, a capitulation during conversation, an exchange of signals but we cannot have the same thought.  This means that our team projects must be managed over time, reviewing the definitions and requirements in the light of our goals, checking on the language and ensuring we don’t drift apart.

A word does not have meaning but instead has an area of usage and a history.  Language plays in the space of usage, the memory of the times a word was used, the images called up. 

Multiple-personalities follows analogously from the language model.  We are trained at every moment of choice to switch into a desirous mode of being, attracted and isolated by advertising and opinion.  The stress of desire is relieved by consumption. 

The history and future of the Individual, as a constructed personality, including its eventual decline and replacement, is evidenced in literature because publishers tend to reflect (as well as drive) the desires of their consumers and sponsors in their mass-production efforts.

Because the researcher-researched relationship is circular, each influencing the other, the group must frequently review its status to maintain its integrity or the group becomes confused. 

We don’t live in the natural world but instead live in our worldviews, which, being immaterial, can overlap, oppose and work together to get a grip on the material. 

The human biomass is larger than the biomass of all wild mammals combined.  Humans have an unnatural footprint, created by and for humans. 

Because some people have been diagnosed as having multiple personalities, then it’s possible that many more people have undiagnosed multiple-personalities that contribute to the performance of their everyday life. 

Method of Discovery

By analyzing the dilemmas in human behavior, the range of behaviors can be seen distributed between the poles of the dilemmas, most often self and community. Because we can represent concepts symbolically, we create chains of reasoning, meta-information, reactive processes, prescriptions and power relationships.  Humans are rational, deceitful, ignorant, generous, knowledgeable, irrational and affectionate depending on the mutable relationship between observer and observed, creating yet another dimension of play. 

The cunning pursuit of the objects of desire trap the person in the intersection of self and community, which might require the person’s sacrifice.  This dilemma can’t be resolved, as resolution would end the angst necessary to interpersonal interaction. The profane creature prowls the innocent world, bearing his undoing at every step.

Logic disallows contradiction but humans deal in contradictions.

Irony, which is the surprising juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, is effective in describing our dualistic environment. 

Why Say So

We should explore revolutionary experimental models as adventures in culture and as philosophical road work.

We should experiment with decentering, which is a transformation, a breakthrough that changes the way we see the world and our role in it.  It doesn’t have to be a happy story, but it might be. 

The experiment undermines the unitary individual.  A person is a society of contradicting personalities that feel threatened, defensive and aggressive, whose identities depend on a convenient enemy.  People with different social histories have different languages and opinions.  Opinions are held unconsciously and undeveloped until articulated. Hatred and fear cause each other.  After you peal back your superficialities, the boring things you’ve learned to say, the pretenses of being extraordinary or plain, the lies, the innocence and guilt, the forgeries, the borrowings and lendings, the threats, your optimisms and pessimisms, the fears and bravados, your solipsisms and your nihilisms, your hatreds, especially your hatreds, all your questions and all your answers, after finally tossing your baggage, there is nothing left. There is no substance.  Not only is there nothing to know, there is no one to know it. Only the void and convulsive attempts to populate it.

It’s not about who you are anymore.  It’s about your reaction. 

You are a verb, not a noun. 

Toolbox

This text provides a set of objects and operations with which to reengage the world under a new constitution. 

Neither nature nor nurture are epistemologically prior to the other but resonate, driving each other. 

That the Enlightenment is Over

In the West, universities emerged from monasteries, sites for the construction of monks and priests consistent with the Catholic world, including their role in it and the wider state of knowledge, such as Aristotelean and Islamic scholarship, practical church and secular politics and what to be silent about.  But scholarship rediscovered ancient manuscripts.  Friar Francis Bacon introduced the scientific method to Church scholarship while lovingly caressing the hand that fed him.  Erasmus gently chided the Church with his In Praise of Folly.  Galileo recanted his ideas to keep his head.  Savonarola and Jan Huss openly defied the Church and paid the price.  Madness is inappropriate anger. 

Harvard was founded as a seminary teaching Latin, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric and physics.  Eventually science, mathematics and their humanistic analogues won, the enlightenment triumphed and the paradise of knowledge was announced. 

But knowledge feeds power, a self-corrupting chimera rising surreptitiously from cultural wars, a doomed alliance smiling about the lack of permanence. 

Contemporary universities are centers of corporate and imperial power, devoted to serve their masters with technical developments and the personalities to implement them. Charged with systematic responsibility for cultural intelligence, they prefer their budgets, their international conferences and their honoraria rather than challenging their corporate and governmental envelope. 

For the students, it’s about getting a job.  The cost of university degrees ensures that the students immediately join the highest-bidding corporation, assume its vocabularies and serve its destiny. 

Nations that want to develop weapons of mass destruction are able to recruit the necessary scientific, engineering and management talent.  Robert Oppenheimer was sidelined when he moderated post-WWII nuclear weapons development while Edward Teller, Oppenheimer’s enthusiastic colleague, was put to work on the hydrogen bomb. 

All aspects of contemporary leadership contribute to the closing of mind in favor of science, technology, production, consumption and loyalty to the global commercial oligarchy, which trickles down to the citizen level, formerly enabled by liberal education and now merely instructed in employable and intelligent obedience in service to the accumulating system of power.  Critical thinking, formerly employed in ever-widening circles, is now employed by the citizen only in the narrow confines of the workplace and discarded in favor of worshipful cheerleading in leisure and elections. 

The Enlightenment, the progress of freedom and knowledge toward the apotheosis of the Individual, is decaying in favor of compliance with authority.  The project will end when the last of those who remember the word have died. History, if there still is a history, will include its tales and personalities as the barely notable residue of a quaint and curious lore. 

At the end of the enlightenment, loyalty rather than knowledge is key to success. One is loyal to brand (Harley Davidson, Coca Cola), team (Yankees, Manchester United), corporation (to which you are currently employed), party (Republican, Democrat, Nazi), celebrity (Lady Gaga, Howard Zinn), sports hero (Mohamed Ali), band (Insane Clown Posse, Beatles), religion, country (USA) and many other groups including yourself (the unique tribe of 1).  Knowledge springs fully-armed from loyalty, rolls up to the universal empire and unconscious slavery. Even the hardened rugged individual, determined to live without being influenced, serves the system of power. 

Prospects for Success of the Model

Negative in that the model is unfashionable in its analysis of the Sacred Individual. 

Negative in that it corrodes conventional discourse by articulating unconscious assumptions, perceptions and intentions and by finding chasms in conventional discourse’s supposed integrity. 

Negative in that this book tries to end the confusion of the mythical ideal with the real.  Myth creates reality today. 

Negative in that advertisers will oppose the work’s effort to undermine consumers.  Managers of crowd control techniques employed to homogenize the diverse populace watching the dancing celebrities will not be pleased to appear in the spotlight. 

Negative in that attacking the Individual, people will mistakenly label the effort as conservative.

Negative in that it tries to cause a no-foundation panic.

Negative in that humanity is divided into competing parties, even down to the personal level, which are the structural members of culture.  In the political environment, there can be no universal truths, only universal processes.  Truth has been replaced by loyalty.  Agreement becomes impossible.  Look for an enemy to hate. 

Revelations of the techniques of the global hierarchy can be detoured by the hierarchy, placed as slogans on T-shirts, sold back to the hungry public and employed in the next cycle of oppression. 

Positive because when an ideal gets exalted, chiseled in stone, set in the park for pigeons and finally abandoned as we fail to read its inscriptions, we can use the space for music. 

Visible Evidence

The fragmentation of personality is visible when you, as a choosing individual, must abandon your privacy and become subject to an authority. A demand for identification, such as airport security, effectively places you under arrest. While extolling your freedom of choice, companies may dismiss employees who work against the company, even outside of working hours.  Business and government increase security.  Institutions selectively enforce their rules in a system of rewards and punishments.  Insisting on freedom, the Individual must lower standards when confronting the community.  The stress is signaled by a shrug and the transition into an acquiescent personality and from that virtue into a pride. 

Spectacle mass-homogenizes personalities, as during the ritualized national anthem, honor-guards and other displays at sports spectacles, often financed by the US taxpayer via military recruitment budget. The pandemic desire for homogenization is everywhere in the insistent talking about the hated other, the incessant mobilization pressing for your vote, recreating your militant personality justified by its assertion, by pride alone. Homogenization would not be necessary without individuality. 

Pan-skepticism, that common attitude of cynical helplessness in the face of the big picture, indicates that the political division we have created has been effective to the level of the person upholding its ideas.  No matter what you do or say, you serve empire.  Empire is that which has already handled cases like you before.

What to Do

Kill your TV.  Television, especially in its new iteration of thousands of choices, is propaganda piped into your brain by the commercial oligarchy to get you to buy stuff and otherwise comply with the stampeding crowd.  The individuality of choice is so vast these days that every person can now uniquely customize what they watch, which reinforces what they already think they know about the world, reinforces their idea of themselves as knowledgeable centers of experience and knowledge and sneaks in the creeping tide of global culture, recruiting the TV consumer in service to the producers.  We have been willingly and enthusiastically classed as particular kinds of consumer, segmented, branded and shared among corporations.  Watch yourself scan the icons, narrowing the choices.  What classes did you invoke?  What did you immediately reject?  Who are you? 

Read hard books.  Read for transformation, not enlargement.  Reading merely to confirm your world view or to increase the facts and systems of facts at your disposal flatters your ego and prevents thinking outside the cultural box of the Individual. 

Watch how you interact with cultural artefacts, as each has a direction in which it wants you to move, an issue it wants you to serve.  Examine every news article, TV program, movie, advertisement and singing of the national anthem to see its ulterior recommendation.  While acting independently of your culture might be impossible, you can identify the sources of information that push you around. 

Who do you serve? 

Exercise critical thinking.  Identify closed systems. Discover formal logic.  Investigate art and other conventions.  Include yourself as an object of study and confess your flawed, bigoted and deliberately ignorant attempts to influence your peers.  Generalize. Compare classes you think are different.  Where did the classes come from?  Why are you classifying at all?  How do you know what to say? 

Find the edge of your convention.

List your dilemmas, contradictions, paradoxes and trauma points.

Treat all institutions as personality-manufacturing sites.

Itemize the set of masks you carry. 

In as much as we are the members of a society, we are constituted in its processes, which, during the Reillusionment, is designed and maintained by large business interests and propagated down to each person via the family, school, military service, workplace, church, spectacular entertainment and memorials.  Business has taken an interest in continually improving its processes by leveraging mass-production, mass-marketing and increased productivity. 

Analyze spectacle.  Myth is cheap when bundled with paid entertainment.  Having the technology of virtual spectacle, we are entering an intense period of global mythmaking.  Myth mass-produces personalities who pay for the service. 

Spectacles are events in time, an existential experiment that strengthens the observer’s relationship with his makers.  Interrupt.  Take a knee. 

The last ideal to fall is the idea of oneself as the skeptical observer. 

Paradox as Fundamental to System

Statements containing and derived from contradictions are logically nonsense.

It's going around that you can't prove a negative. But if you can't prove a negative, the proposition itself can't be proved. And if we can't prove it, why do we think it’s true?  Why do we repeat the formulation, which leans so disrespectfully on logic? 

Conversation is packed with logical and evidentiary impossibilities yet that is the way we live.  Half-truths, lies, advertising, political blowhards, platitudes, traditions, slogans, formulaic morals and unrepresentative facts are necessary to the life and law of social creatures. 

The thinking person is trapped in a thoughtless world. 

Dilemmas

Our personalities are socially-created to handle these dilemmas. 

Appearance and Reality

What we perceive is sense-data, not the things themselves. 

This enables illusion and deceit, as the deceiver plays with appearance to subjugate the deceived.  The underlying reality is less disturbed. 

This dilemma is uncomfortably solved with the view that the observer is intimate with the observed, such that the observer is created in the moment of observation.  A personality is created on observing a paradox. 

When the observation reliably predicts the observed or the status quo, the observation becomes law.  The observation can be kept around even when it fails. 

Statements have unconscious animi. 

Self and Community

When two selfish people reach for the same object, the collision creates fragments of personalities. 

The scandalous asymmetry between self and community: There’s plenty of other people in the world but there is only 1 me. 

Self and Self-Examination

Examining one’s self and discovering something new and profound, changes one’s self.  People who examine themselves are not the same after the exam.

Macaque monkeys who frequent human middens are delighted to come away with mirrors, walking away bipedally as they gaze into their reflections. 

Debt and Prosperity

Nations and their peoples borrow money to make money, which undermines ownership.  Your big-ticket purchases, such as houses, cars and college education, send you deeply into debt.  Ownership becomes mythical. 

If you have no debt, you have no wealth.

The Constructed Individual

Individuals consider themselves independent, self-original and self-created. 

However, personalities are created by cultures.  Contemporarily, personalities are mass-produced. 

The person is modeled in this work as the Dividual, a heterogenous mix of personalities. 

Culture is produced by the personalities it has produced. 

Citizen and Leadership

The citizenry, which has power over government via mass-action, including voting, has removed itself from power. 

Business and government propagandize the citizen into serving commerce and warfare. 

War and Peace

The citizenry finds itself in permanent warfare against its constructed enemies created by political power. 

Open and Closed

Human behavior is open but we try to enclose it by political, biological and sociological law. 

The attempts to enclose behavior eventually reopen it. 

Authority and Freedom

Authority can be overt or hidden.  Law has been internalized by the person, who enforces its will unconsciously. 

You are only free to obey. 

Customer and Waiter

While advocating freedom for yourself, you expect to be well-served as a customer.

You may hold in disdain those who do not serve your every desire. 

Art and Commerce

Art satisfies and frustrates commerce. 

Victor and Victim

The Victor’s job is to dismiss the victim, which can make the victim invisible. 

The Victor requires a Victim and can’t win without one. 

The Dividual

The premodern believed in one god and one path.  The modern believed in one god and many paths. To the post-modern, there are only paths.

In this work, there is no one on the path.  The person is a fiction used by instinct to modulate behavior.  And being a fiction, the person always seeks credibility, authenticity and reputation. The personal unconscious uses a palette of personalities to achieve its greedy ends. 

The individual is one of many kinds of personalities created in the face of objects and operations that include desires, resources, memories, values, physical and social locations and character, the last being the commonly improvised or ritualized set of intellectual and physical mannerisms and their vocabularies cobbled from immediate culture and associated with a particular person. The person is a carousel of personalities.  One of the many personalities associated with a single person is the Individual, which claims to be its own originator and to make its choices independent of authority.  The personality of the individual is currently highly valued but disappears in the face of authority and is replaced by a personality obedient to that authority. 

The instinct itself has several modes, including hunger, thirst, sexual appetite, the will to dominate, the will to speak and to the urge to join a group.  In this way, we are more alike in our instincts, while our more varied carousel of personalities, unconsciously tasked with satisfying the libido’s desperate hungers, are unique improvisations converging to more or less faithful imitations of our peer’s. 

While we are in the Age of the Individual, the independent choosing personality has always been in every society.  Early in the Enlightenment, the Individual was an existential personality, risking life, liberty and fortune in the exercise of choice.  Today, the Individual exercises choice only in the marketplace, risking only a tiniest of pleasures. 

The restriction of choice to the marketplace provides a handle for those institutions with an interest in crowd control.  The choosing individual is easily managed by advertising the objects of desire, educational opportunities and the job market.  The Individual is recreated in the

moment of choice.  While individual behavior is unpredictable, mass-market predictions are reliable enough to sustain business. 

What a falling off there was!  After the destruction of the idols used by the powerful to awe the peasants, after being promised godlike powers of freedom, the individual male shrank back into the ordinary person while being fed dreams of comic book heroes, beautiful women and powerful cars, but barely able to make a living, debt ridden, defeated and dying alone and afraid.  Women and minorities pressing for equality will be included into the hierarchy when successful, which does not necessarily make society better but only more inclusive in its hierarchy and in its repression of its created enemies. 

We can deny the importance of advertising, that it is background noise to be filtered out, but everyone falls for it sometimes because we are constructed by the ads.  Advertisers are highly skilled technicians who research what you say you want and then deliver it with its label and price-tag. 

The individual, the formerly undividable atom of humanity, has broken into a society of ephemeral creatures whose existence must be doubted as they affirm their individuality in a confusion of belief and denial. When contradiction is discovered, the person changes the subject and the subject changes its person. 

If you are your reputation, you are many people because many people hold you in differing repute.  Ultimately you are forgotten.  We build magic circles around ourselves to hide our vacuous existence. 

The individual divides on self-examination. The statement I am a clever person. divides me because the person making the claim is grammatically different from the person talked about.

Of course, the statement tries to construct an identity in that the two people are the same.

However, the statement implies an improvement in the person, a change from the unconscious to the conscious, creating another consciousness hovering over myself to make the judgement.  I am becoming conscious of myself as a clever person.  Person + Consciousness = New Person. 

Self-references can lead to turbulent contradictions, which are disallowed logically. I always lie. cannot be true. If I always lie, then my statement must be a lie and therefore not true. But if I always lie, it must be true. The statement must be false to be true, which is nonsense. To know thyself is

to know nothing.  All else is deception. 

Figure 1 Times Square NYC

If we study oxygen chemically we improve our knowledge of oxygen but we do not improve oxygen. When we study ourselves, we improve ourselves as the object of study and as the student, which means we change. This can be seen in psychology when therapists attempt to make conscious the unconscious patterns of pathological behavior with a view to improving the subject under study. Thus, the understanding of ourselves changes us and we are no longer understood. 

Descartes cogito, I think therefore I am, while uniting thinking and being into one mighty foundation, implies a division of the self.  Either they were historically different and now were brought together or were always together but no one knew it.  Thinking and being were previously different and then Descartes brought them together in the equation.  But in the subsequent self-reference where the person refers to herself, the division reoccurs.  Grammatically, the first person is the subject of the sentence and the second person the object-phrase of the sentence.  By thinking of myself, I am the person thinking and the person being thought about.  Equating the two is the impulsive reaction of the individual who always must be original, even self-originating. 

Transitive consciousness, to be aware of something in the world, is to perceive of something that is not yourself. To be conscious of oneself or of the world including oneself, is to change worldview and cause a reverberation in awareness, becoming aware of the change in oneself, the change propagating rhythmically and decaying monotonically over time.

Intransitive consciousness, consciousness without an object (I am!), arises from the traumatic encounter with paradox and contradiction.

Not only is there not a single goal and a single path to that goal, there is no single person to follow the path to the goal.  Each person is a multitude. 

The social evolution of the human has proceeded not just from technology but also from self-examination, who and what we think we are. 

The newest human is yet to be named.

Horizon

The horizon is unreachable partly because it is the limit of our understanding, as we can’t see beyond it.

We can’t get to the entire horizon but only approach a single point where we interrogate what we see when we get there. Meanwhile the horizon has moved. In this sense, the horizon is not a fixed limit but an ever-receding process that cannot be mastered but only approached, a risky adventure, our undoing and our salvation.

We interrogate the point to which we have newly arrived in familiar terms, which prevents seeing its strange newness and defers the revolutionary promise that humans prize beyond local, ordinary experience.

By innovative modeling, expanding or shrinking the meaning of words, by compounding meanings, by coining new words and by abandoning words for other representations, we find ourselves in a new world, which excites an invasive species.

In another sense, our physical and mental horizons don’t exist because they disappear on inspection. 

Examine your limitations to exceed them. 

Globalization

Globalization harnesses the free-thinking, self-oriented individual into the corporate team hauling the imperial war wagon into the future. 

The figure of the individual, that mighty singularity who pondered up the Self in the time of Shakespeare and Moliere and Descartes, who exceeded the ancient tyrannies in 1776, 1789 and 1917 and became god-like in the post-modern democratic ideal, was appropriate for the time and is even now transforming into a creature merely useful to the global commercial oligarchy. 

The Election Industry

If one political party drove progress for the electorate, we would see it in measurements of gross domestic product, public debt, household debt, murder rate, number of countries invaded and personal well-being as that party controlled the Federal government and improved the nation. 

In this work, party control of the Federal government means that 2 out of the 3 elected components (Presidency, Senate, House of Representatives) are in control of 1 of the parties. 

The US Congress has most often been either in the hands of the Democratic party or the Senate and House have been split between the parties.  In the 38 presidential elections since Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1864, possession of the White House has oscillated between Republicans and Democrats.  Control of the US government has largely been in the hands of the Democratic party interrupted by divided control and least frequently by Republican control. 

Figure 2 Debt vs GDP, Party Control of US Government.  The Balance.

In the graphic, some of the major economic events since 1929 can be identified, such as the heavy borrowing for WWII in the 1940’s and the Recession of 2008.  The URL includes interpretation. 

File:1979 $10,000 Treasury Bond .jpg

Despite changes in party control, the WWII debt was paid down to 36% by 1979 and has unevenly climbed back to 100% by 2013.  US public Debt-to-GDP ratio has fluctuated independent of party in control since 1929. 

Figure 3 Treasury Bill

Chinese, Japanese, Irish and Brazilian investors are the top holders of US public debt in 2018. 

A high Debt-to-GDP ratio is not necessarily bad.  Currently, the ratio is around 100% for most countries. 

US GDP is financed by public and household debt, in what can be interpreted as an ongoing stimulus package that supports Federal programs of entitlements and defense as well as household buying of real estate, cars, student loans and consumer goods, financed by banks via loans and credit cards. 

However, the American middleclass has experienced flat growth since the 1967 while the lower economic class is increasingly impoverished.  Upper-class income has doubled.  Wealthy Americans are getting wealthier while the poverty rate for Americans without children has almost doubled since 1979 despite oscillations of party-in-power. 

US inequality has increased since 1967 indicated by the flattening of middle-class wages, driven by the export of manufacturing jobs, especially to Japan and China, although American consumers recover some of this loss in lower prices. 

While the concept of austerity is politically forbidden in America, we are subject to unmentionable belt-tightening as