Hello, Friends.
It’s been some time since I’ve written. For those of you who joined this newsletter for writing related to private equity, I’m moving that all to Linkedin: Private Equity Relationship Culture
My writing and use of that platform will continue to evolve in coming weeks, so please follow me there if that’s your primary interest. (I won’t be offended if you unsubscribe here.)
Here, on Substack, I’m going to explore other core interests. While these interests are intimately related to the forms and consequences of economic life, they don’t address the inner workings of private equity.
A Spiritual Unspooling?
Senator Chris Murphy, in describing “The Spiritual Unspooling” of America, points to “four sources of our unease”:
A loss of control over economic and family life
An acute loneliness and disconnection from community
A frustration with the pace and nature of change
An exhaustion with suffocating consumerism
Looking forward in this newsletter, I’m interested in exploring the shape and reality of this “unspooling”: the hidden and not-so-hidden forces behind it, the implications for our politics and our social life, the consequences for us as individuals or as diverse socio-economic groups, and the solutions proposed by a variety of wild actors, from the techno-utopians to the populist right, and from post-liberals or democratic party technocrats to diverse spiritual or religious leaders.
I’m also interested in how we segregate these issues — isolation, political upheaval, liberalism, addiction, declining health outcomes, income inequality, the decline of religion, DEI — when perhaps we need to bring them together in a never-ending effort to see the whole.
My own view — stated here cryptically — is that much that we commonly take to be helpful is, upon scrutiny, harmful, and much that has been maligned may indeed prove helpful.
I’m rigorously consequentialist in my assessments: I don’t care what you believe or intend but only how your actions and policies actually shape the world.
While it may sound saccharine, my primary and final concern in this writing is to find and share diagnoses, ideas, and solutions or action sets that ease suffering, isolation, alienation, and economic hardship. Our time is brief and we’re all in this together.