‘Survival of the shameless’. I heard that term this morning in a BBC podcast I was listening to with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, who is calling for a ‘moral revolution’. It was one of those simple phrases that landed in my body. My sense of the world, of my morality has always been instinctual rather than strictly intellectual. When something hits me as a ‘truth bomb’ I feel it. My throat tightens, I get goosebumps, I have this sense of ‘Aha!’. I felt the need to think deeply about the statement. This subversion of the Darwinian theory clearly articulates the future trajectory of a humanity that copies itself not by outrunning predators, but by becoming a predator, someone not averse to opportunism and corruption. It’s sociopathy in action. Survival of the shameless. Is compassion about to become extinct?
It was 5.15am on my way to the gym. The words stuck in my brain like a prickle. Later that morning a story flashed on my newsfeed. The Facebook post by the Daily Mail used an unrelated photo of Chris Hemsworth and Eva Pataky superimposed over an image of Byron Bay. This is clickbait. So I clicked. The story had nothing to do with the Hemsworths, it was about real estate. The header for the article was ‘The “Golden Grid”: Is Byron’s property market taking off again?’ Oh FFS, not that again.
It made me feel sick. That is shameless. Flagrant speculation. This is not a thing. It’s not news. This is a story ABOUT money, to other people WITH money, hoping to make MORE money. This is shamelessness in action. And it completely omits the other boom industry here. Homelessness. More and more people are living in rental stress. More and more people are spending nearly all their income to rent substandard accommodation. $400pw for a garage. $800 for a studio. Oh, and can you move out for summer? We’re renting it for $10k a week… Survival of the shameless. Yuck.
Sometimes the story in the story is the story that’s NOT being told. The absence of the shadow narrative. Like, there’s more people who have to use Link to Home – staying in 2-star hotels that now enjoy full occupancy, but there is no way forward for these people in crisis. Except for more crises. That story doesn’t look good in a real estate ad. No one wants blood on their hands when they’ve shelled out millions.
But it’s not the Hemsworth Effect. It’s crazy and unkind to make one couple the poster image for something they never caused. Let’s call it what it is. The Capitalism Effect. The Real Estate Effect. The Using Housing as Investment Effect. The Short Term Holiday Letting Effect, the Greed Effect. The Bad Government Policy Effect – via a tax system with a Favour The Wealthy and Send Ordinary People to the Street Effect
That in a nutshell is ‘survival of the shameless’. Because these stories of multi-million dollar property booms aren’t something to celebrate. They are something we should be ashamed of. Because the higher the needle on the ‘dollarometer’ goes, the higher the number of people sleeping in their cars. The more people feel they don’t belong because there is no longer a place for them. In a wealthy society, full of empty houses, empty rooms and what can only be empty hearts, that is shameless.
And it’s Christmas. A time to reflect on the Christian story that forms the dominant cornerstone of our cultural beliefs. In Bethlehem, where the property market was taking off, Mary, Joseph and Jesus were rough sleepers.
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