This Is Our Culture on Steroids

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Authority in America is something like the picture of Dorian Gray. As democracy stretches its muscles, as increasing numbers of people have “access” to just about everything, as more opportunities are created for resentniks and mediocrities to hurl excrement at niches they covet but cannot breach with talent alone, the face of authority grows more and more decrepit. But a scandal a day keeps honest analysis away.

Yes, professional ballplayers taking steroids is a bad thing. Occuring in the precincts of the all-American game, it is like a slur on the American way of life. The metaphor of the “level playing field,” after all, could come right out of baseball. Tattered as that ideal might be, we can’t shake our expectation — bred in our American bones — that the people we’re competing against don’t have a secret edge over us, and that if they do, they’ll be disqualified. Steroids cannot be tolerated in baseball, because baseball holds this universal resonance for us as a symbol of fairness and equality. Yet why should baseball stop being a metaphor for American life once baseball falls short of being a sunny reflection of American life? Doesn’t rotten baseball hold as much symbolic power as idealized baseball?

In fact, the steroid scandal is emblematic of the way we live now. In the same way that impossibly exorbitant salaries for professional ballplayers have increased the pressure to succeed at all costs — that kind of money brooks no setback or inadequacy — unprecedented prosperity has pushed many people in two mental directions. One is the feeling that breaking the rules is justified because the rewards are so great, and also because breaking the rules as a matter of business maneuvering is acceptable in a culture where business values are more dominant than they have been since the 1920s. In fact, recall that emblematic figure of the 1920s, Jay Gatsby — his false hope like a steroid on a fabricated life, which rested on illicit activity — and his closest business associate, Meyer Wolfsheim, who fixed the 1919 World Series. Plus ça change. (Come to think of it, why not an all-steroid league? It would re-level, as it were, the playing field — and once one player uses steroids, everyone has to use them — and it would give strength to figures who have long had to shoulder a superhuman, Gatsby-like symbolic burden.)

The other prevalent mental trait is the feeling that everyone is breaking the rules. For the true effect of the endless exhibition of public dishonesty is not the widespread impression that rule-breakers always get caught and punished. Rather, it’s the widespread impression that everyone — and especially exemplary people of consequence — is getting away with murder. What the culture of shaming really does is produce a culture of shamelessness.

There really is something off-kilter about this new prosecutorial and persecutorial culture: As society becomes more permissive, society also becomes less tolerant of people who gratify themselves beyond the boundaries of what is permitted. Yet this only seems to be a paradox. Public exposure and shaming now constitute a special new type of shameless gratification. There is certainly something shameless about Senator Mitchell, the man who broke the steroid scandal but who also refused to give up his position as a director of the Boston Red Sox, a move that would have helped him avoid the appearance of bias. Mr. Mitchell himself seems to be using the steroid called “narcissistic self-deception” pretty heavily. When he turned down President Clinton’s offer of a spot on the Supreme Court, he gave the self-sacrificing impression of doing so for the sake of a higher good — he said wanted to work on getting the country universal health care. When he resigned from politics a few years later — so much for health care — he gave the impression of being too good for the dirty expediencies of politics. But perhaps he was merely too expensive, since he immediately began working as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco.

Just about everybody, it seems, is on one kind of steroid or another these days. They’re trying to find a way around reality with steroids that boost their career, or conceal their motives, or propel them into a crowd that magnifies their personal power. The Stephen Glasses, James Freys, Jayson Blairs, J.T. Leroys, and Scott Thomas Beauchamps inject themselves with the steroid of fake facts. The religious fundamentalists have the steroid of fanatical self-righteousness, and the scientific fundamentalists who react to them have the steroid of, well, fanatical self-righteousness. The political bloggers make use of the steroid of implacable outrage. The libelous, or seductive, or predatory Internet user rides high on the steroid of an “avatar.” And there is the steroid of political messianism boosting the pro-Iraq War crowd, and the steroid of cynical groupthink juicing up audiences addicted to the “comedy” news shows. And there is that most American steroid of all — the one that seems to give you a way to triumph over your own limitations — the credit card.

Indeed, the realm of economics is where the “steroid era” has been the most explicit, and the most consequential. It’s where some people cheat with steroids, and other people are cheated by steroids. The subprime mortgage crisis is a situation where “trainers” — dishonest mortgage brokers — dispense the steroid of phantasmal cash to needy victims, in exchange for the latter incurring deeper and deeper concrete debt. The entire asset economy of the past two decades is a steroid-based economy — people bet their existence on the value of their home, which vanishes like a wisp of smoke when the economy dips, as it’s doing now. Is it any wonder that, as an economy built on illusion-producing tricks falls, reputations resting on illusions fall with it? In this context, the spectacle of public shaming is a powerful catharsis, and an effective mode of denial. But the fault, dear readers, is not in our tainted stars. It’s in the culture all around us.

Mr. Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob” will be published in January.


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