The Vomitorium

In ancient Roman architecture, a corridor or passageway under the stands that leads gladiators into the combat arena is a vomitorium. A popular myth (arguably more folk etymology) is that a vomitorium is a room set aside by overfed aristocrats to vomit one’s stomach contents, making space for additional gluttony. Since neither meaning is especially well recognized and at the risk of further muddying the waters, let me suggest another possible use for the term: the set of dynamics that consistently functions to spew forth or vomit up a small number of socioeconomic “elites.” Such folks aren’t particularly elite aspirational figures despite all the attention heaped on them. Pressures of celebrity and character distortions that accompany absurd wealth make for plenty of abuse and suffering at such lofty extremes. It’s lonely at the top, no? Plus, absolutely no one can be trusted. Nonetheless, normies are witness to a veritable parade of people in our severely overpopulated world thrust forward and upward. The heights to which the uppermost among them rise are frankly obscene, and it’s a reliable pattern for those who climb the putative ladder of success to pull the ladder up behind them and then turn around to blame those left below for their fates, heedless of their own hoarding and peerless alienation from their brethren.

No doubt some work very hard for their achievements, though they are frequently the beneficiaries of family wealth and connections, genetic gifts (e.g., extraordinary beauty and athletic prowess but perhaps not intelligence), and plain old dumb luck. No one really blames someone from a severely disadvantaged background for leveraging their gifts, though awareness and resentment of nepo babies is gaining traction. One notoriously undeserving, unaccomplished nepo baby was famously described as “having been born sliding into home thinking he had hit a home run.” It’s next to impossible to identify anyone who comes from such an extremely advantaged position devoting their energies honestly to the public good; I can’t think of anyone. I suppose retreat to modest (or even immodest) anonymity is the principal alternative to living large as a shithead.

If there is blame (rather than envy) to be assessed, I put it on late-stage capitalism. Limited episodes of excess and debauch in the U.S. have occurred in the past, such as the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, but they arguably pale in comparison to the boom-and-bust cycles that have so concentrated wealth and power over the last 50 years. Charles Hugh Smith describes how everyday life has decayed precipitously over that period. His entire post is worth a read, but for sake of brevity, I excerpt four structural drivers he identifies to demonstrate how (in my words) we have created our own dystopia:

1. The balance between labor and capital has been skewed to capital for 50 years …
2. Process and narrative control have replaced outcomes as the operative mechanisms and goals of the status quo …
3. The dominance of monopolies and cartels has fatally distorted markets and politics, undermining the foundations of everyday life …
4. The dominance of digital communications in everyday life has increased the unpaid shadow work we’re forced to do … [emphasis redacted]

Whereas Smith opines that elites are incapable of unwinding the dynamics that deposit them on top of the shitpile and it’s therefore up to labor to agitate and restore balanced conditions that made everyday life enviable during the heyday of the American middle class from the 1950s to 70s, I don’t find that reform remotely within the realm of possibility. A host of ahistorical conditions established the middle class following WWII but no longer exist and are frankly unrepeatable, primary among them cheap, abundant energy. From my doomer perspective, a more accurate assessment is that capitalism has reached its endgame, namely, self-cannibalization, a characterization more typical of socialism than capitalism. This stands in stark contrast to claims that under Bidenomics (crap term for a crap economy!), economic indicators (by the cooked numbers) are quite rosy and those who weren’t disgorged through the vomitorium should be happy. Of course, reports on Bidenomics are gaslighting, memes, narratives, and no one who shops for their own groceries, had their overpriced vehicle repossessed, or struggles to pay their rent/mortgage is fooled, not that that reality stops the Biden campaign and its media handmaidens from incessant repetition of that claptrap.