How the Close of the Frontier Brought About Our Cultural Collapse

From the 10th Anniversary Edition of Juggernaut: The Rise and Fall of an Economic Behemoth.

In July 1893, at the peak of the World’s Columbian Exposition, 32-year-old historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a speech that brought to light a single, stunning point of consideration: The frontier had closed, and all of civilization was bound to change because of it.

The superintendent of the census had confirmed it in his report: “Settlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.” The free land had all been taken, settlement had all but been completed, and Manifest Destiny had been fully realized.

According to Turner, this meant an entirely new way of life. The frontier had always been an integral part of the American character. As he put it, “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” Those conditions gave the American people qualities unique to frontier life, such as rugged individualism, adaptability, and inventiveness necessary for survival in the wilderness, and led to the kind of economic and industrial vigor that made the United States one of the greatest powers in the world.

But the frontier was much more than just a rough wilderness that gave the pioneers in Indiana, Iowa, and Idaho a rugged appreciation for life. The open frontier in the West was the key to an open economy throughout the Occident, and, as such, had a greater if subtler significance to Americans on the Atlantic seaboard and the Europeans of the Old World as well. As the door to free land, the frontier had been the door to freedom, giving anyone who chose to venture westward the ability to say ‘No’ to any prevailing system, to escape oppression or exploitation, and to make a life for himself. With such a threshold, all the bonds formed and enterprises undertaken at its foot would be on equal terms and so would be voluntary and just. As Turner put it in his treatise The Frontier in American History, “So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.” Self-sufficiency secures self-rule.

The American character and that of the entire Western civilization had been formed on the notion that if one did not like the constructs and institutions that he found himself in, or if he for any reason thought they were unjust or exploitative, he could move on and build his own society. Just as it had been with John Winthrop and the Plymouth Colony, if society was restrictive or oppressive, the solution was to move west and found a new society that would better suit a people’s convictions.

Even within the Plymouth Colony, this principle was exhibited. When one of the members, Roger Williams, found his morals to be in conflict with those of the colony’s leadership, he was not persecuted and burned alive as might have been done in the Old World. Rather, he was able to flee and start a life on his own. It was not in any way easy, but the principled man endured a harsh journey through the New England winter to settle miles away in what later became Rhode Island.

Such was the American way from the founding—whenever society would bear down and oppress its people, its people could always flee to make a better life somewhere else. Not only did this provide those who fled with a sense of freedom and self-ownership, it also put stress on the society from which they fled to be more tolerant and to sustain more just social contracts.

As we have seen, it was this self-rule, spread throughout the West, which gave rise to a reformed understanding of property, profit, and value, which eventually opened the door to the trade and industrialism which defined the modern era. In the 1890s, the close of the frontier had set into reverse the grand chain of events that made all of modern life possible. The close would undermine the conception of property, bring back into doubt the profit motive, and reaffirm an objective theory of value, ultimately eroding the social constructs that make trade and industry work. Just as the open of the economy brought on the great expanse in freedom and opportunity in the four hundred years following the discovery of America, the close of the economy would bring about a great contraction in freedom and opportunity in the century or so after the close of the frontier.

Turner’s conclusion was as jarring as it was eye-opening: The frontier had closed and, with it, so had the economic competency that Americans and indeed all Westerners had come to take for granted. Without the frontier, Americans and Europeans as a whole no longer had a natural source of political sovereignty on which to depend. At some point in the following decades, Turner surmised, the choices and freedoms that Westerners had been granted with the discovery of the New World would diminish and take with them the dynamism of the modern era. Without self-sufficiency, there could be no self-government, and without self-government, none of the advances that the modern era had seen could remain viable. Individualism would lose its potency, and so too would private property, the profit motive, subjective value, trade, and cooperation in general. Slowly and subtly, as the American West had been conquered, territory by territory, the Occident had arrived at the very place from which it had departed four hundred years before.

It could be said that the close of the frontier in the 1890s was the undoing of Columbus’ voyage and discovery of the New World in the 1490s. In effect, the close set into reverse the revolution of thought and practice made around 1500 and would return the West to its previous condition of bondage. Soon enough, the people, like their predecessor serfs, would again have to accept the ways of those in power, the lords of modern times, without so much as an alternative.

The End of an Era

The average American of Turner’s time would balk at the notion that the close of the frontier meant an end to their way of life. To them, America was at its peak. Industry was booming more than ever and people were more prosperous than any people in the history of the world. It might be agreed the close of the frontier meant that there was no way to reject the system and start a new country, but an industrious farmer could still purchase a plot of inexpensive land to make a life of his own and an inventive engineer could still make it big with an innovation. The frontier might have been closed, but technology and human ingenuity would provide an endless fount of opportunity within the existing society.

Indeed, the pivotal time seemed to be one of great dynamism and productivity. The artistic innovations brought about by the various pressures of the age were fresh and creative despite their restless tenor, and they led many to regard the age as a ‘Belle Époque’. With regard to the period’s new techne alone—the automobile, the electric light, the radio, and the airplane, among countless other sensations—there seemed to be no limit to the Western imagination. With these and other advances, it was as if civilization could improve indefinitely, and, as idealists William Godwin or Marquis de Condorcet might have had it, would soon attain perfection at some point.

At the turn of the century, an argument could well be made that, even though the frontier had come to a close, the new economy presented Westerners and especially Americans with an infinite galaxy of opportunities. As Joseph Schumpeter perceptively pointed out later, the rapid extension of technology constantly opened doors to new industrial frontiers, which afforded the typical American much more appealing prospects than the frontier of the Wild West ever could. The simple fact that one could innovate and expand into infinitely intricate arenas of technical growth suggested that there was no limit to one’s productive powers or those of the nation altogether.

The immense progress experienced in the period cast doubt on Turner’s otherwise reasonable hypothesis that the close of the frontier meant the end of an era. As a whole, Western civilization was wealthier than ever before, people were richer than kings of times past, and there seemed to be an endless supply of work for anyone who wanted it in the growing industrial metropolises. Opportunity seemed inexhaustible, even if the free land had been exhausted.

To be sure, the end of the era would not be obvious to anyone reveling in the spectacles of the time. As it was with the discovery of the New World and the opening of the economy, the revelation of the close would unfold slowly and by turns. The significance of the event would not be grasped for decades, possibly generations, until, at least, its consequences could no longer be ignored. And, as it was with the opening of the economy, the inertia of the old way of doing things would carry the culture well past the time of the fateful occurrence. The people of the West, imbued with the capitalist ethos of free enterprise and cognizant of its virtues, would continue to conduct business as they always had even as the foundations of that ethos were being eroded. They would still promote it when alternatives came to view and fight for it when it was challenged. It might be said that free enterprise lives today, not because of a natural playing out of socio-economic forces, but thanks to a diehard contingent who stubbornly keep it propped up despite the gravitational pull.

Nor should it be said that the close of the frontier was absolute or that the resulting close in the economy was definitive. Whenever considering complex systems such as a society’s economy, it will always be a matter of degrees. Before the close, there were plenty of restrictions on the individual and the ability to strike out on one’s own did not come without significant risks. After the close, there were plenty of opportunities to strike out on one’s own. But, generally speaking, before the close, it was much easier to engage in free enterprise, and, after, it became more and more difficult. And, the more difficult it became to set out on one’s own, the more difficult it became to reject the prevailing system, and therefore the less pressure that was placed on those controlling the system to engage in just exchanges.

A glance at Systems Theory sheds light on what happened. It can be assumed that a given economy is a subsystem within the broader system of the environment. A subsystem is considered to be open when resources flow in and out of it from the parent system. When there is in the environment some amount of free land and there is an absorption of that land into the economy, then the economy can be considered to be open. If there is no frontier or free land to be absorbed, then the subsystem economy is considered to be closed. The fact that it is closed means that the possibilities are restricted to what is available and already in play within the subsystem. Whereas an open economy could derive new wealth and opportunities by absorbing the free land beyond the frontier, the closed economy must recycle the wealth and opportunities within. Not only does this affect the whole subsystem in terms of the quantity of materials available, more importantly, it alters the quality of the elements and flows within. Elements that were formerly defined by an external source of materials must be redefined, and, as such, the flows between the elements are altered to reflect that change.

This is not to suggest that a closed economy is necessarily unproductive or that new wealth cannot be generated within it. As Schumpeter explained, technological frontiers can produce new wealth even within a closed economy. But in a closed economy, everything is controlled, and the fact that it is controlled changes the dynamic in a fundamental way: In order for a person to be industrious and to create wealth for himself, he must do it through other people, whether it is through other individuals, a company, or the government.

In any subsystem economy, an individual interacts with other individuals, companies, and the government in a variety of exchanges—paying for and receiving services, providing and receiving payment for goods, et cetera. When the economy is open and the individual has a source of free land to which he can turn, he has the ability to opt out of the exchanges. When the economy is closed and he has no source of free land to which he can turn, he cannot opt out. He must engage in the exchanges to survive. This subtle difference means that those who control the means of production—large organizations, corporations, governments—have a new advantage over those who do not—individuals and families. The effect is to undermine the self-sufficiency and self-rule that characterized the open economy.

A systematic view reveals five major shifts that occur as a result of the close of the frontier: (1) Interdependency, in which the close of the frontier eliminates the possibility of rejecting the prevailing system and forces those within to take part as a matter of course, (2) an emphasis on the medium of exchange and return to an objective theory of value, (3) the crystallization of the economy into a zero-sum competition in which one can only win at the expense of others, (4) the incentivization of monopoly control and rent-seeking, and, finally, (5) the exploitation of individuals and consumers by those with a monetary advantage. From interdependency through the objective theory of value to competition and monopoly and ultimately exploitation, the process takes us from the close of the frontier to the close of the economy, from an open economy to a closed system.

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To examine the difference between the experience of an open economy and that of a closed economy, let us compare the condition of life in the West before the close and that of life after. We can do so by conducting a thought experiment in which the great individualist philosopher Henry David Thoreau flourished fifty or sixty years later in the early twentieth century and tried to live in the woods as he did in the 1850s, perhaps with the same intentions of getting closer to nature and escaping the confines of society. Whatever his rationale might be for breaking free, could he do it? In the twentieth century, does he have the freedom to say ‘No’ like he did in the mid-nineteenth, or is that freedom just an illusion?

Politically, the twentieth-century Thoreau does have the freedom to say ‘No’ to the system—he is politically free to do as he pleases and has been granted a Bill of Rights that prevents the state from restricting his movement. He can avoid the new inventions of the day, the electric lights, the automobiles, the planes, the radios, et cetera; he can avoid the bustle of the subway and the crowds at the local bar and any other disagreeable gathering place if he is so inclined.

But, if he is to live in the world at all, he must live somewhere, and that means he must occupy some amount of land and produce at the very least some sort of sustenance. In a closed economy, these simple needs mean that he must obtain some amount of money for housing and groceries, which means he will need a full-time job. To get a job these days, he must go to school and thus fund his education in some way, either by loan or some kind of part-time employment. To secure these types of occupations, he must engage in some level of communication for which the radio, phones, cars, and other techne are essential. This is not to mention the clothing and other accessories he needs to impress potential employers and school administrators. And so on, in the modern industrial city, one’s needs multiply ad infinitum.

In short, to exist at all these days, one must take part in the system as it stands. He must participate in the various channels of development from school to career to retirement and all the in-betweens that have developed in the modern world. Even if he were extreme and moved out into the country to live on the land like Thoreau did at Walden away from the things of man, he could find no haven in his flight. Out in the country, he would still be affected by the industrial world—by the pollution and development that would constantly encroach on his property, not to mention the taxes and regulations that would be imposed on him by the government some thousands of miles away. If his plot was in any way attractive, it is likely that he’d eventually be kicked off whatever piece of land he chose by some developer or the government, or be required to pay some sort of fee for the privilege of staying put. No matter where he lived, the system would be there, waiting for him.

The joke around election time rings true: Voters fearful of their candidate’s defeat threaten to move to another state or country if the other side wins. Of course, no one moves, and the reason is clear—they have no free land to go to. Other countries offer no real shelter from American ways, as they’ve all become Americanized anyway. The frontier had closed a century ago, and there was no longer free land to which one could escape. The disgruntled voters have to stick it out and accept what they know is a corrupt system. As Milton Friedman expressed in his Capitalism and Freedom, “If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations.”

As long as the land is all controlled, the choices an individual has will be limited and subject to the owners’ dictates. Faced with such a predicament, our Thoreau finally arrives at the only conclusion possible, deciding that as long as he is going to be burdened by the system, he might as well put himself in the place where he can profit most from it. That is, he will try to take advantage of the system to the greatest of his abilities. He will go to the best schools and get the best jobs and arrange the best life possible, quite as if his choices could be judged on their objective merit. In the end, however, he is only choosing between this or that fixed option and can only succeed in the way that the system has arranged.

The consumer culture that seems so abundant in freedoms is not unlike the child psychology technique that urges parents to give their children choices between two options when, for instance, dressing for school, in order to make the child feel engaged in the decision-making process. The child is the one putting his finger on the outfit, and so he feels as though he has a choice. In reality, the two options are just two versions of the same thing—both of the parent’s design—and the child is no more in charge than he would be if the parent made the decision by himself. Similarly, modern day consumers and voters must feel like they are making choices, but in reality they are just adhering to the system’s design.

The problem with this psychology is that superficial choice has replaced true discretion. The child is conditioned to refine his taste by judging superficial elements in relation to others—this color or that, this style or that. But he is not taught how to administer sound judgment—what would be appropriate in this situation or that. Sound judgment can only be harnessed if the child looks at the purpose of the decision objectively, outside of his confined selections. It may well be that the parent has given the child the best two options, but unless the child knows what makes them the best, he will not be able to appreciate them or replicate the decision on his own.

Consumers in the modern economy reflect this pseudo-decision-making in that few if any look at the choices they are making objectively, that is, when opting out entirely is a possibility. Most will base their decisions on the surrounding alternatives and be content that they have the freedom to do so. They will most certainly not look to the real value of a certain decision or consider how it relates to life in general. Recall the behavioral economics example from before: The wine connoisseur buys the $75 bottle, not because it is worth $75, but because it is next to a bottle selling for $60 and one selling for $120. He doesn’t know what makes it a good choice, just that in comparison to his other choices it stands out as the best.

The phenomenon is seen throughout our culture, in practically every retail situation imaginable, but also in other business interactions, social and romantic relationships, education, the arts, media, religion, and, naturally, government. A prospective college student knows that going to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton will give him a good education, for example, but he has no idea what a good education entails or why these institutions provide it over others; a voter knows that electing this politician will help this or that industry, but he has no idea what makes a good public official or whether they should help any industry at all.

The modern citizen is not concerned with what is proper, what is good, what is just; he is concerned with what is acceptable, what is better, what is workable. When a system is closed, an individual’s decisions are not made from the ground up; they are made under relational pretexts and cannot possibly be based on merit.

The Effective Demand Trap

The obligatory nature of the closed system altered the economy in a subtler and more disruptive way: Wealth is distilled into the medium of exchange—money. When an economy closes, the people within that economy grow dependent upon each other. In a highly interdependent society, one can only satisfy his needs and wishes through other people—his hair must be cut by the barber, his meat procured by the butcher, his bread made by the baker, and so on. And, since those other people require money in exchange for their goods, an individual can only satisfy his needs by first obtaining currency.

In short, one can only survive and thrive by obtaining and making use of money. As a result, money is elevated above goods and services as the only most immediate source of well-being. With it, one is wealthy and can attain anything he wishes; without it, one is hopeless and destitute. Ultimately, wealth itself and the ability for any given individual to attain it are directly dependent upon money and one’s ability to obtain currency. From the point of view of the average participant in the economy, the close of the economy causes Marx’s Money Nexus to be borne out to its ultimate conclusion, in which money is the all-important aim and its procurement the end purpose for all exchanges.

This is how the close of the economy can make an abundance of wealth artificially scarce. Because the money supply is naturally controlled and limited, everything that is dependent upon it is effectively controlled and limited, including wealth itself, because the only way one can access it is through the use of a scarce supply of money. This is true notwithstanding the fact that wealth, in terms of goods and services, can be virtually boundless, just as it must have seemed in the 1890s and may well seem today. Yet as long as one can only gain access to that infinite supply through the use of money, then the wealth itself is controlled by other people and thus limited as well.

And so we see that the problem was not, as Malthus suggested, that the resources were limited and could not keep up with the growing population; it was rather that the resources were all controlled and that those in charge of them would reasonably check their use. Here we find the basis for concerns about overpopulation and the scarcity of necessary resources. Certainly, natural resources such as land, food crops, petroleum, and clean water are all quite abundant in the world and can be procured satisfactorily despite a nearly exponential growth in population. The fact is that they can all be contained and thus controlled, and so it seems as though they are limited and at risk of exhaustion.

This is why reports of the imminent expiration of natural resources are always granted such credence. Resources are plentiful and perhaps even limitless in all meaningful ways, but since they can be controlled, they can seem limited and thus scarce. For example, Americans have heard for forty years that oil reserves will run out within years; though, decade after decade, it hasn’t happened. Despite the fears, reserves have increased to the extent that we now have more oil available to us than ever before. And yet, because the supply is wholly owned, and, in large part, owned by foreign countries, oil reserves seem limited and fears of exhaustion continue to plague us in an energy-mad economy.

What can be said is that scarcity is a function of accessibility, not necessarily of mere existence. When a resource’s accessibility is limited for any reason, it is scarce, whether or not there is an abundance in nature. There might be an infinite amount of baobob trees in some garden on a faraway planet, but since that planet is unknown and inaccessible, baobob trees are understood to be endangered. The same goes for all resources—land, water, petroleum, and so on. Ultimately, scarcity begets fear of exhaustion, whether a resource is limited by Mother Nature or by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Since an interdependent society means that all resources can only be accessed through money, it is as if all resources are controlled and limited as money is. They could be infinite, but as long as it is only possible to access them through money, they are scarce, and the result is a closed economy.

The significance money plays in an interdependent economy can best be summarized by the paradox of effective supply and demand. In the early nineteenth century, French economist Jean-Baptiste Say had postulated a theory that stated that money was neutral in trade, that goods were exchanged for other goods, and that money served only as a conduit in the process. But, as society grew more interdependent, money grew more vital. As the economy’s exchange of wealth grew more dependent on money, its neutrality diminished.

It was Sismondi who first stressed the fact that it is not enough for one to simply want food, clothing, and furniture for a trade to occur; one must also have the ability to purchase them. In an interdependent society, that ability rests increasingly on the possession and application of money. In other words, it is not supply and demand that matters in a given economy, but rather the supply that is available for purchase and the demand that is redeemable through purchase. The close has meant that regular old supply and demand are basically meaningless and that effective supply and demand, or supply and demand accompanied by purchasing power, are what really matter. Without this effective supply and demand, producers cannot find buyers, buyers cannot find producers, and the economy cannot find its equilibrium.

At its core, the problem of effective supply and demand represents the source of one of the great paradoxes in all of social matters: poverty in the midst of plenty. It is a mystery apparently endemic to capitalist economies. From as early as Sismondi’s time, the Business Cycle was seen as a precarious force that at times left many without means of income and therefore without the necessities. Even though the capitalist mechanism was busy producing goods in abundance, multitudes went without food, clothing, and shelter. The desperate question was rife: If Capitalism and machine industry were so productive, then why did so many people go hungry and homeless? If there was such an abundance of goods and services in the new economy, how could there be want at all?

The answer lies in what might be called ‘The Effective Demand Trap’. In the modern economy, productivity is so high that only a very few need to work to produce food, clothing, shelter, and the like for the entire population. The better and more efficient the production process becomes, the fewer workers are needed. Moreover, what is typically a gradual evolution in the improvement of production processes is accented from time to time with excessive booms of investment and production that make output even more abundant and thus make workers even less necessary. The less workers are necessary, the fewer jobs there are and the more the working class suffers unemployment. Without income, the working class is unable to buy the goods that they have produced so efficiently.

One might assume that technical progress must be beneficial and rewarding to all—the more productive we are as a people, the less work needs to be done to attain the high standard of living we seek. The utopian dream of minimal work for everyone and hours upon hours of leisure becomes a simple matter of course. In the end, Capitalism and machine industry are the vehicles that get us to that utopia.

Of course, to obtain food, clothing, shelter, et cetera, consumers must be able to pay the producers who make them and so need money to that end. The plan, naturally, is for the consumers to work to obtain that money. But, after periods of excessive production, it is not always necessary for everyone to be employed. The result, as Sismondi and others found, was unemployment, which leads inevitably to a lack of income and thus the inability for the people to pay for the necessities they demand. Needs go unsatisfied while stockpiles of goods go to waste. Ultimately, the result is poverty in the midst of plenty. 

The extent to which this problem can occur is seen in an historical sketch of American agriculture. One estimate has shown that, in 1776, no fewer than 19 of 20 workers in America were needed to work in agriculture to feed its three million inhabitants. Two hundred years later, industry had so improved that fewer than one out of 20 American workers were needed to work in agriculture to feed its population, which had blossomed to 300 million. If agriculture is in any way representative of industry in general, the trend is clear. Greater productivity means less need for workers, and less need for workers means fewer jobs and ultimately lower purchasing power. Goods are produced in increasing abundance, though there are fewer and fewer consumers able to buy them.

As Keynes later showed, the real scarcity in the modern economy is not in food, clothing, or shelter, which are all made abundant because of the efficient production techniques; rather, scarcity lies in employment and the wide diffusion of money, without which none of the necessities can be obtained. Though industrial economies can output goods in wild profusion, the producers still need to be paid money in return for those goods. So what is needed is not the production of more goods, but full employment and more money so that consumers can purchase those goods. Only with these, it is thought, can the economy as a whole work efficiently.

In the twenty-first century, we know how impossible the vision of a utopian society is because we have extended the principles of effective supply and demand to their extremes. To obtain leisure at all, to be able to afford a night out or a vacation in the Caribbean, one first needs to obtain money; but to obtain money, one needs to work; and when one is working, by definition, there is no leisure. The more leisure a people requires, the more they have to work and the less free time they can afford. And so the work-leisure catch is a self-perpetuating cycle in which a people must continually increase their workload to pay for the increasing demands of leisure.

Eventually, time becomes the scarcest resource there is. Swedish economist Staffan B. Linder showed mathematically how this dilemma materializes. In his 1970 work, The Harried Leisure Class, Linder makes the point that consumption takes time just like production does. In order for a people to enjoy all the fruits of their labor, they must allot a given amount of time for eating and relaxing, for travel and tourism. The more productive and efficient the people are, the more leisure they can afford. At the same time, the more productive and efficient the people are, the less time they have to participate in the leisure they have allowed themselves.

In the modern economy, as Linder points out, we hardly recognize the limits of consumption time. Like the nineteenth-century utopians, we assume that increased productivity will allow for infinite occasion to relax. Says Linder, “The very term free time suggests a failure to realize that consumption time is a scarce commodity.” It is not free after all and comes only at the expense of work time, which is necessary to purchase free time.

The Economic Crucible

As money grows more essential to a given society, its value grows as well until a point where it becomes the central focus of all economic actions. But this evolution from a simple means of exchange to the actual goal of exchange, as it is in Marx’s Money Nexus, is more than just a shift in the perceived value; as touched on earlier, it is a shift in the notion of value altogether. That is, as money becomes the goal in a given economy, value in that economy changes from something that is subjective and personal to something that is objective and universal.

When this happens, the entire capitalist system is turned on its head. Generally, the upshot is the upheaval of the individualist framework in which all parties can gain from cooperative exchanges. When money is seen as an objectively valuable good, everything is viewed in relation to it and only one party can gain in a given exchange—the party which obtains the greatest amount of the objectively valued good. Anyone else in the exchange necessarily loses out. Ultimately, when value is objective, cooperation is no longer possible because gain for one means loss for all others.

As we will see, the more useful money has become as the means of economic exchange, the more the pursuit of wealth becomes a closed endeavor with a single aim. When everyone is striving for the same thing, the pursuit becomes competitive and one person can only get ahead at the expense of another. The upshot is what dramatists call a ‘crucible’, a condition in which the motivation to compete is greater than the motivation to run away, the necessary frame of conflict.

The close of an economic system is illustrated expertly and entertainingly in the 1980 Jamie Uys comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy. The movie opens with a vignette about a tribe of primitive African Bushmen who live harmoniously on the lands of the Kalahari. They reside there happily unaware of the civilized world outside, until everything is turned upside down when an empty Coke bottle magically drops from the sky, as if it were from the gods. They immediately find the gift useful (they can cure snakeskins with it) and fun (one of the elders gets his finger stuck in it). Everyone in the tribe is thankful for the productive tool that the gods have given them, which to the tribe is the most useful and productive thing in the world.

But gradually, ‘the thing’, as the Bushmen call it, gains too high a demand, and fierce competition arises for its use. One of the tribesmen wants it to help with his cookery and another wants it to help with his art; the children all want to play with it. Shortly, the tribesmen discover that there is not enough usage to go around. Selfishness leads to antagonism, which ultimately leads to fighting. The conflict escalates until the Bushman who came upon the bottle is convinced that he must throw it off the end of the earth to return it to the gods.

The astute comedy shows how easily a tribe of gentle people can turn vicious. The only thing that changed in the Bushmen’s situation was the Coke bottle—the sole item that everyone wanted. Prior to the discovery, the tribesmen all had what they needed and cooperated with one another in production and trade. With the addition of the bottle, cooperation became impossible. One person’s use of it meant that everyone else necessarily could not use it. And so the conflict brewed.

Because it serves as a sole item that everyone wants, money works in a similar way. Money provides a single goal that can satisfy everyone’s needs, whether it is curing a snakeskin or vacationing in the Bahamas. Whereas without money, a people can produce and trade harmoniously, just as it was before the African Bushmen found the bottle; a society dependent upon money necessarily begets competition, antagonism, and the occasion for fighting, just as it was after the discovery of the bottle.

Implications of this competitiveness are far and wide. In general, it can be said that the shift brings us to a condition where mutual gain becomes difficult and almost impossible. Artificial scarcity begets competition and competition begets accumulation and thus more scarcity.

In the late nineteenth century, American activist Henry George devised a theory on economic inequality later termed Georgism, which stated that, as population grew and technology advanced, people grew more and more capable of holding land and thus monopolizing it. As a result, land became more and more scarce. George saw this scarcity of land as the primary reason for the class struggle and the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. His effort culminated in a campaign to counter the monopolization of land by means of a land tax and the confiscation of economic rent.

In a later reflection, George recited the revelation he experienced upon an 1871 horseback ride overlooking San Francisco Bay: “I asked a passing teamster, for want of something better to say, what land was worth there. He pointed to some cows grazing so far off that they looked like mice, and said, ‘I don’t know exactly, but there is a man over there who will sell some land for a thousand dollars an acre.’ Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege.”

While competition for land and other resources had always existed, throughout the modern era it had always been backed by the inherent ability for participants to opt out of the contest. This subtle possibility made the competition on all counts elective and therefore voluntary. Thus, there was a natural constraint to the rivalry that ensured at least some degree of civility in its practice. Once the frontier closed, this natural check was dissolved, and competition was bound to intensify.

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By the turn of the century, the implications of the close had begun to surface, causing open-eyed observers to send up warning flags. The argument was that, in a system such as the modern economy, encroachment and intrusion were inevitable. Only the powerful could succeed, and the weak would have to submit. In the early twentieth century, the thought was that might made right. Of course, the thoughtful recognized that this was nothing new. Indeed, it was nothing more than a return to the pre-modern hierarchy of power laid out in the feudal kingdoms. Just as it was in medieval Christendom, so too would the confinement of the new age bring about a defined chain of power. At the top were not kings and lords, but rather financiers and industrialists, so-called ‘robber barons’ by twentieth-century American commentator Matthew Josephson. At the bottom were not serfs but rather the ‘proletariat’, the impoverished working class named by Sismondi in reference to the Ancient Roman proletarius, the lowest class of the empire.

No fewer than three excellent Belle Époque treatises endeavored to demonstrate this return to feudal ways: Achille Loria’s Economic Foundations of Society (1899), Vilfredo Pareto’s Rise and Fall of Elites (1901), and Hilaire Belloc’s Servile State (1912). All three dealt with the themes so dominant in politico-economic discourse at the time—the close of the economic system and what that meant for the capitalist way of life.

In a treatment that echoed Henry George and Malthus before him, Italian economist Achille Loria argued that the newly closed system was the major influence on all central institutions of modern civilization. With a focus on three cultural institutions in particular—morality, the law, and politics—Loria showed how the close limited alternatives and conformed behavior so as to favor those in power. “The normal increase of population,” he asserted, “eventually results in the appropriation of all lands cultivable by labour alone, and the economic system then undergoes a radical transformation. The labourer now loses that liberty of choice which up to this constituted his safeguard against the usurpations of capital, and henceforth he has no means of livelihood other than to sell his labour to the capitalist for the wages which it pleases the latter to determine.” In the confines of the closed system, the worker is bound to the owner, the proletarian to the robber baron, as serf to lord.

Bound as he is, the worker has no real alternative to the owner’s dictates. Even if he is politically free, he is economically restrained to the will of the men in power; he is a servant with or against his will. Naturally, the worker has the freedom to refuse his labor and in so doing sway the terms of the working agreement, a freedom that the slave technically lacks. But, in the case of the worker, there is a limit to his ability to bargain since he is bound by time and place to come up with subsistence. Whereas the owner has no pressure to make the deal, the worker has the threat of hunger or homelessness. Like the serf, the worker has no real alternatives, and so must accept the owner’s terms or else.

This is the principle behind Pareto’s notion that the rise in authoritarian rule is only possible with the sanction of the victims. They are the ones who drive the exploitation because, after all, they are the ones who are making the choices. Modern economics is of course made of contracts between workers and owners, who conduct business as partners in a company as it might seem. As Belloc puts it, however, “The vast bulk of so-called ‘free’ contracts are to-day leonine contracts: arrangements which one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation.” In a closed system, even voluntary actions are to some extent involuntary.

Nor were the new restraints limited to the economic realm. Loria, Pareto, and Belloc all saw the emerging hierarchy as the threshold to an absolutely polarizing system. Not only would the lower and upper classes be separated by comparative wealth, but that divide would become institutionalized and eventually lead to differing legal and administrative rights altogether—a truly feudal system in the modern economy.

As a sort of reversal of Turner’s dictum, it was argued that the absence of free land would mean a lack of competency, without which political freedom would be rendered indefensible. Just as economic freedom secures political freedom, so too would economic bondage secure political bondage. Belloc makes the point clear: “To control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist.”

By 1912, when Belloc published The Servile State, he could already document at least one major step toward formalized exploitation in his home of Britain in the form of the progressive income tax. Though it was designed as a way to redistribute wealth in favor of the lower classes, the income tax was the first major comprehensive legislation established across the liberal West that converted a largely spontaneous economy to a planned political system. The following century would be in large part a continuance of that process, with the political class growing ever more powerful until it controlled all aspects of daily economic life and therefore all aspects of political life as well.

As Marx had predicted, and as Loria, Pareto, and Belloc warned, the ascent of the State and ultimately the victory of Socialism as the rather imminent consequence of the closed economic system. A distinction lay in their perceived causes. While Marx attributed society’s march from Capitalism toward Socialism to deterministic material forces, Loria, Pareto, and Belloc saw the movement as being a logical progression given the crucible of the modern economy, which, in some ways, made the path to serfdom even more disheartening. It was only natural for men, once exploited, to desire a formal incarnation of their servitude, to control their slavery by whatever minimal means they had available. They paid attention to the crisis itself, and the crisis was one of volition.

The Dawn of Dystopia

Within a mere ten years of Turner’s Columbian Exposition speech, Turner was able to document four major events that verified his conjecture and completely altered the United States’ socio-political landscape. As he pointed out in 1903, the Occident had already begun to see the effects of this new paradigm. The first event was the exhaustion of the supply of free land and the close of the frontier; the second was a concentration and control of capital in several primary industries; the third was the introduction of American imperialism and the conquest of foreign nations; and the fourth was the division of American political parties along the lines of Socialism. This last was just the precursor to even more profound changes that would take place in the following decade.

As Walter Prescott Webb outlined in The Great Frontier, the close “meant many things: That the excess of land furnished by the frontier no longer existed in relation to population; that the bars to immigration from the Metropolis to the frontier countries would go up everywhere; and that the excluded nations who had formerly had an outlet for their surplus populations would demand living room, and failing to find it, would radically alter their forms of government and undertake to gain by force the privileges to which they had long been accustomed.”

Altogether, the pattern during the twenty years between 1893 and 1913 is one of closure, confinement, and the inevitable reaction to these conditions in the form of competition and conflict. Throughout the West, escalating interdependency bred an intensifying feeling of being trapped, of there being no place to go, a feeling which invariably intensified the motivation to compete—with other people and other peoples. Borders were pressed, sovereignty questioned, and conflict brewed at home and abroad.

War is, of course, the most prominent expression of this sense of being trapped and of having to compete for survival. As such, it cannot be a surprise that the time in question saw a number of significant conflicts brew up seemingly out of nowhere, in contrast to the extensive period of relative peace and calm that preceded it.

The 1898 Spanish-American War, which spanned the globe with theaters in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific and included the previously isolationist United States, was but a single marker. The Second Anglo-Boer War lasted from 1899 to 1902, crises in Morocco occurred in 1905 and 1911, a clash in Bosnia occurred in 1908, and the Balkan Wars flared up in 1912-13. And all of this took place before the Great War of 1914-18.

Assassinations had become a trendy mode of political protest and agitation. Within five years, the president of France, Sadi Carnot; and of the United States, William McKinley; the Empress of Austria, Elisabeth of Bavaria; and the King of Italy, Umberto I, were all victims of the conscienceless deed by so-called ‘anarchists’. In 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the pivotal event that plunged all of Western civilization into a century of war.

After the 1890s and the close of the frontier, the sense of confinement had become a driving force. From that point on, peoples and nations were so restricted that it seemed the only way to grow and prosper was by expanding into already occupied territories. When this expansion could be done relatively peacefully, it took the form of imperialistic conquests of undeveloped nations; otherwise, it took the form of attacking and invading other civilized countries. Increasingly, the world was coming to grips with the notion that the only way to succeed was for others to fail. The buildup of military might and the incessant political posturing between the nations of the West in the period before the Great War were the direct and inevitable consequences of a culture accustomed to freedom and expansion suddenly cut off from growth.

Consider all the good minds that had expressed support for and actively engaged in the militarism and warfare of the day. Previously, salvation could be found in escaping society as it stood and making a life on one’s own; now, the only way to find salvation was to ram up against neighbors and wage war with them. Roland N. Stromberg’s Redemption by War provides a gripping account of the seemingly contradictory fact that, in 1914, intellectuals of all stripes found war to be the best and most justifiable means of growth, economically to be sure, but also spiritually.

The conflict was not limited to geopolitical battles. It could be seen perhaps most clearly in the cultural arena, where the Occident’s finest minds assumed the lead in an overt rejection of style and customs through support of the war, naturally, but in other, more veiled forms as well. In painting with the Impressionists and Cubists, in theater with the Symbolists, and in literature with the Naturalists, the theme was not only doing away with the culture that infringed from all around but taking to pieces all that had been built. The most earnest of the artists were the most destructive.

It is no wonder why the period begot a troop of artists who proudly called themselves ‘Decadents’ in honor of the cultural decay that they saw taking place around them. The double decade that straddled 1900 was the time of Oscar Wilde’s literary manhandling, where everything is seen as its opposite; of Nietzsche’s contradictory philosophy, where everything is inverted; and of Rimbaud’s cultural destructiveness, where only negation exists.

In the sixteenth century, the discovery of the New World had led to new rules, practices, and customs; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the close of the frontier put an end to that new way of life. The possibilities and dreams that had marked the era would all conclude at some point in the following hundred years by either dwindling out or being intentionally cut off. It was as if the documents of that time were reflections of the socioeconomic transformation taking place all around.

Such a view naturally gravitated toward the pessimistic, and, just as the opening of the frontier brought about a new literary genre of optimism and possibility in the Utopia, the close of the frontier brought about the opposite genre of cynicism and limitations, the Dystopia. The foremost example, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, was fashioned after its sixteenth-century counterparts, though it maintained a sarcastic tone. Erewhon chronicles the discovery of a new land that is like the utopias of the early modern era but turns out to be a false discovery, only revealing the way things are in the England of Butler’s time. As such, it is a mock utopia or, as it might be said, ‘utopia’ spelled backward.

While it is not known whether Butler intended to christen a new literary genre when he wrote Erewhon, the farseeing Briton drove home a convincing point: The era of Utopia had come to an end; it was no longer desirable to fashion a society in which everything could and did work properly—that dream had gone. In the late 1800s and beyond, it was only possible to denounce society as it was without the benefit of providing an alternative. In fact, there were no alternatives. The system had closed, and all that was left was what was already in existence.

From the 10th Anniversary Edition of Juggernaut: The Rise and Fall of an Economic Behemoth, published June, 2021 by New Classic Books.