This was the last essay I completed.
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"A Problem of Nihilism: Essay 3"
In light of all that was going on back then, it might be easy to overlook the reaction that followed. Alongside a "white flight" from cities to suburbs came a white backlash against more progress in civil rights. For many, that would be bound up with increased resentment of taxes (since paying taxes is thought to subsidize "welfare"). And liberalized laws with more lax social norms would encourage fears of a moral decline in society (as mirrored in the abortion issue). Being conservative had suddenly become a cool thing to be.
Another less familiar aspect of those times was conglomeration, in which large companies sought to buy up other firms. In the antitrust laws, the goal had been to try to keep a single business concern (a "trust") from gaining a monopoly on the production of particular goods, such as steel. (And so being able to set the prices.) In conglomeration, a large company would buy smaller ones that produced goods other than those it did. Or two or more companies would merge, with each making different kinds of goods. There was thus no monopoly over one part of an economy. It did tend to be unproductive, though. It rarely created new jobs -- or even "new wealth" -- but merely increased the assets held by a larger enterprise. That was accumulating capital for its own sake.
As companies sought to buy up more and more of what there was to own, they drove out small businesses that lacked the resources to compete. The same thing would happen in farming, as smallholders could not compete with large corporate farms. So less actual competition would occur -- putting the lie to clichés about "the free enterprise system" -- while fewer and fewer people amassed more and more wealth. In time, they could gain a monopoly on most of the financial assets of an economy. (And become "too big to fail.") And aside from that, everyone else would have the same generic choices at "their" local branches of supermarkets and supercenters.
A parallel occurred in the television industry as merchants found ways to make money off the public airwaves. Previously, anyone who owned a television could watch broadcasts for free, as was the case for radio listening. But with cable TV, consumers would pay a fee for access to what seemed like a great wealth of channels. It soon became clear, however, that the people in charge of such things only had so much intelligence to go around. After a decade or so, lethargy had set in. Viewers wound up with regurgitations of "infotainment" and "reality TV." The result now looks so bland and dismal that we could easily believe there was a conspiracy to try to dull the senses to the point of muting all independent thought. (Or to induce people to kill themselves.)
