The Price of the Party
A journey through expat raves and third-world slums — exposing the hidden costs of globalization, and the winners who don’t deserve to win.
There’s a story called Those Who Walk Away From Omelas. It tells of a beautiful city on an island, where life is perfect. The days are sunny, there’s ample food, and people are filled with joy. The perfection comes at a cost. There’s a shadow underneath: in the bowels of the city and there, in a tiny little room, a child is locked. It’s completely inhumane, but it’s necessary for the city’s prosperity. And this child is kept locked, left to rot and die like an animal.
Most people who live in the city never see the child. They much rather live in blissful ignorance. They don’t want to go look the cost of their happiness in the eye. But every year, there are a handful who come down, alone, and visit the child. They watch silently from the bars for a little while, and then wordlessly go back home. And then they pack their bags, and in the dead of the night, they leave the city. They could not help but go looking for the truth, and once they found it, they could no longer go on living a lie.
What is the cost of globalization? Its benefits are well known. The eradication of poverty. The spread of equality. The rise in material comforts. The harmony of trade. The hundreds of war cut short. But there are costs, tremendous costs, that those of us who live in the developed world never have to see.
There are cities within cities, teeming with rats and people, in shanty towns and slums that a billion people live. Blue tarp roofs over walls made of scrap metal and corrugated tin. Slums in the richest cities around the world have striking similarities. The blue tarp, unreliable power, often stolen. And the stench, always the stench, of piss and shit, decay and death.
There are a billion human beings who live like this. This is an unintended consequence of globalization. This is its direct effect. For the people who live under blue tarp roofs do the jobs that globalization demands. Run the factories that churn out the goods. Drive the cars and sew the clothes of the people who live in the strata above them who buy those goods. To support the global middle-class, the one that all speak English and go to the same schools and think the same things. For them to have everything, people in slums must have nothing.
This is the first rule of globalization. Not everyone can have the same life. Not everyone can have electricity 24/7, not everyone can have running water, or sent a car, or an proper apartment, or a quiet place to sit and sleep. The first rule of globalization is that there isn’t enough to go around for everyone to live the way developed countries do, at least not more than a generation or two. Mumbai lags behind Hong Kong and Shanghai too. These places, with the corners that the Western tourist visits are quickly overtaken, the competition intent on a global meritocratic order. That’s why they’ve been in such a mad dash to catch up. They hurry, before there isn’t anything left.
India has been around for thousands of years. It’s survived wars and invasions and collapse and famine and starvation. Any calamity you can think of, natural or man-made, has happened in India, at some point over that time. Entire cities have been razed to the ground, populations sold into slavery, raped, and killed. India has seen the darkness of the heart of humanity, and she has survived.
But she may not survive this. I have seen it. Scrawny children splashing inside sewage, kids that blow the sewer outside their house. Their bodies and minds corroded by the environment they live in. We act as if poverty is a problem to be solved. It is not. It is a symptom. A symptom of a system that has already decided who gets to win. We are spawning a pygmy class, physically and mentally inferior to the global class, a caste both its servants and its supplicants. I have seen the street children, the destitutes too poor to steal, sleeping by the local constable so they can sleep in the shade. I have seen human beings turn on each other like dogs, the strong preying on the weak, all just to get ahead, a little ahead, then the next, by a dollar or a banana.
The second rule of globalization is that there are winners and losers. And you must be one or the other. You are either one of the few who live it, or you are one of the many who do not. Life is a competition to either jump from one bucket to the next, or to retain your position against the hordes who want to take it.
Life has always been competitive, but globalization has turned up the dial on its intensity, by a matter of magnitude, of tension. People no longer compete with just their neighbors for resources. But no matter who wins, will remain in their community. No, they fight against people they’ll never meet. People they will never meet, all around the world. Resource distribution doesn’t just happen household to household, or region to region, but by entire country. Either your country is winning, or your country is losing. And if you’re losing, like Niger, or Bangladesh or Haiti, you are, in a word, fucked.
Growing up I grew up hearing the tale of the winners. My parents, my teachers, my friends, they all revered successful people, and wanted nothing more than to be one of them. The winners won because they were special — this was the moral of the story. What they never said, but which was heavily implied, was that the losers lost because they deserved to lose. If the system was fair, it had to be fair in both ways, or it couldn’t be fair at all.
On a weekend trip to New York, walking through Times Square with my dad, he’d point out the city sweepers trailing gray dustbins: “If you don’t do well in school, you end up like that.” The lesson was clear. They were supposed to be losers because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do. They had a choice, and they screwed up.
This was the idea I came to India with, and almost immediately I was struck by how wrong it was. I met the losers — the real losers, of the global rat race, and many of them did not deserve to lose. They were hardworking, smart, resourceful. They have drive and persistence. And against all odds they struggle, inch by inch, trying to make their lives and the lives of the people they love just a little bit better.
And then I met the winners, the real winners of the same rat race, and they very clearly did not deserve to win. They were entitled, frivolous, arrogant, and stupid. They operated on a position of superiority, superiority around their money and space to make up for the hollowness at the core of their hustle. If I thought the lives I saw in Stanford were bad, I hadn’t seen anything yet.
The parties are a blur, because they’re all so much the same. Drinking and schmoozing and seeing and being seen. All was the constant recalibration of social hierarchy. The fine-graining of how to move up just one more level. Every conversation is the same: “What do you do?” means “How much money do you have?” Life is a party and we better drink up before it all runs out.
The international expats were even more intolerable. There was even less pretense at forming relationships here. Everyone knew everyone else always had one foot out the door. They were literally just looking to have a good time while they were there, the rest placed into “motives can be claimed.” They spoke no native language. The bureaucrats and international capital of foreigners who think they’re better than the place they live in, and the self-indulgent pity of those who know better.
That’s why many of them were there, or at least that’s what they told themselves to sleep at night. The World Bank guys, the Clinton Foundation aides, the diplomats and lawyers who shuttle from one destination to the next, like heat-seeking missiles looking for the party, the next drug binge, the next minister’s niece.
Life is a party, and they are the winners, so why not?
There’s one couple I remember from that first year in New Delhi. They were older than me, somewhere in their mid-30s. One of them was a lawyer, and every 18 months, they’d move. They’d lived in Syria and Africa and Indonesia before arriving in India. They had the lifestyle down pat. They didn’t act casually. At some point they’d zero in on the scene, and they’d party multiple nights a week, drinking and smoking and snorting their life away, among an obvious set of drunken winner army, a sea of losers.
The whole point of that expat life was to get fucked up. The fact that the life was temporary meant that the people you met, you were never going to see again. It made people live in a way that was unhinged. They were all figuring out their next move all the time. No one wanted to stay, and let the squalor steep in. No one committed to anything for more than a night, because no one cared about the future.
In comparison to them — their extravagance — the wealth were the locals. Humble, pious, hard-working – if not all 3. For them the struggle of life was real. They weren’t winners – they didn’t live life off a silver platter – but they were better people. They might have got an indiscretion of their own now and again, but they never really forgot how deep the debauchery went. And oh man, did it go deep indeed.