Like you do, perhaps. Our societies means Anglo ones: America, Britain, Australia perhaps. You can judge for yourself if your society is on the list. What underlies all this? How did we get here? To things like today: a fresh-faced new government advisor supports eugenics, because he thinks minorities are genetically inferiorall of which, of course, isa literal form of genocide as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. He was hired.by the wayfor hisblog comments. What the? What on earth?Genocide stalking the halls of powerby way of the comments section?
Such stuff isnt just horrific. Its surreal and absurd.It makes the jaw drop like a stone and the head spin in whiplash. Its now just as if we now live in a dystopia written by pedophiles, wannabe basement-dwelling fascists, militant authoritarians, men who put kids in camps, silent majorities who shrug at it all, elites who wonder what the problem is, billionaires who profit in glee at all the above, and other assorted forms of human failurewe do. But I digress.
When I look at our societies, I see three obvious patterns. They tell me our societies arent going to make it. Not just because, well, those patterns are therebut also because as societies we dont seem capable of understanding or acknowledging theyre therewe wont own up, confront, recognize, admit them. All that put together is the stuff of something very much like an inevitable social collapse. How do you treat a patient who wont admit how sick he really is? My patterns link the hard stuff to the soft stuff economics, politics, society, to values, priorities, what we genuinely consider worthy. They are subtle things. Theyre aboutwhywe make and go on making the astonishingly foolish choices we do.
The first thing I see when I look at our societies is a pattern of staggering economic mismanagement.How is it that we had endless money for wars, for aggression, for intelligence agencies to launch covert plots to install dictators (Im not making that up), for rage, for violence? For bank bailout? But none to bail outthe working class, the middle class, the average family? How is it that hedge funds get endless free money from the government, every single nanosecond of every single day but literally a full half of American work low-wage jobs? What the? You see what I mean by staggering economic mismanagement.
And yet elites, as a whole, refuse to own up to this.Just today I saw Barack Obama tweeting how successful his economic policies were. Sorry, reality says the opposite: 75% of Americans struggle to pay the bills, 80% cant raise a tiny amount for an emergency, incomes have stagnated for decades. Hardly the stuff of an economic miracle. But when Barack says it, you probably believe it. I get it. Hes a nice guy. His heart is in the right place. But thats not enough to create a working society, much less economy. Every pattern Ill speak about is a hidden one we refuse, as a society, to own up to it. And so what can we do about it?
Underlying that pattern of staggering economic mismanagement is a set of values.We value, as a society, violence, cruelty, aggression, hostility, over and above everything else, especially their opposites: kindness, decency, gentleness. What kind of society do those values build? Can they yield anything but the dystopia we live in?
The second pattern I see when I look at our societies is a history of shocking institutional failure, built on moral degradation.Were the societies who built an international slave trade. We literally plundered a continent for its people, and made them our slaves. We then put them to work, and created the kind of society so horrific that escapees were hunted down by informers and police. Can you imagine? Or have you blocked it all out?
(Go ahead and tell me what moral atrocity ranks up there with building a centuries long slave trade that engulfed the planet. But morality isnt, as we think, a thing of no consequences, a thing to have on a Sunday, and then forget about on Monday. That is our big mistake, perhaps our biggest.)
That history of horror shapes us to this very day: it deprived us of ever being able to build the institutions of a functioning modern democracy.Why are we literally the only societies in the rich world without working healthcare, education, retirement, and so on? Why do what of those we have degrade by the day? Because the residue of slavery haunts us: too many (white) people think: I wont invest in them! Theyre dirty, filthy subhumans! Why, their grandparents were my grandparents slaves! Maybe they dont say it. But they certainly think it. Its hardly a coincidence the societies which pioneered the global slave trade and then segregation are today the ones without decent public goods, which require a whole society to cooperate, and accept one another as equals. Its a relationship. Slavery and segregation were to mean that America would never develop any functioning modern social systems, really.
And yet that thread of institutional failure, too, we refuse to accept and own up to.When have you seen the obvious link above discussed seriously that a) public healthcare, retirement, college, childcare etc are what make a society civilized, and b) our barbarisms long hangover is what prevented us ever becoming a civilized society? I havent ever, really. Maybe its hinted at, or intimated. Maybe we go so far as condemning our brutal and sordid past. But we dont really own up to the social consequences of our history of horrific immorality: that such immorality had profound real-world effects. It left us institutionally stunted, underdeveloped, broken, unable to treat each other like human beings.But societies who cant build institutions to treat each other like human beings can scarcely ever progress beyond exploitation, abuse, authoritarianism, tribalism, and hate. Wait isnt that exactly where were trapped?
The third pattern I see is a kind of shattering mismanagement of social norms and expectations. Who else in the world denies their neighbors things like healthcare, education, and retirement? Nobody especially nobody in societies that have the means. Yet we do. Why is that? Why are we so indifferent to each other? So cruel, so aggressive, so hostile?
Probably because we are too busy teaching our kids, and each other, that the only point in life is something like this: to be more competitive than the next person, so you can accumulate more stuff than them, so you can make them envious, so you can feel supreme. The point of life isnt to care for your neighbour, to do great and beautiful things, to write a world-changing book or make a life-changing discovery its to make more money. Why? Because thats how you show you are strong. And weakness is death. Because only the strong deserve to survive, after all.Capitalism and patriarchy and supremacy intertwine to make the survival of the fittest our deepest and only true moral law.
Thats what I mean by a kind of shattering mismanagement of social norms and expectations. Weve internalized that value, most of us: that the weak deserve to perish, and the strong survive. We might not think we have, and we might not say we do, but our actions belie us. We grin at our reality shows and long for our perfect pecs and boobs and sigh wistfully over this billionaire or that celebrity. My God! Arent they a perfect person? Well happily spend a small fortune on the plastic stuff of self-aggrandization. But invest in healthcare or retirement for all? LOL.
So we go on dehumanizing ourselves, and everyone around us, as a necessary consequence. We buy into the systems of our own undoing. Sorry, you arent good enough, pretty enough, tough enough, mean enough, selfish enough. Youre just not competitive enough to make it, son. We dont value things like gentleness and humanity and decency not really. Theyre a sure way to get fired or demeaned or picked on or bullied, if you dare to show them, really. The storys the same, from grade school to working life.
Weve become societies of bullies, in other words. But societies of bullies are also societies of cowards.And that cowardice is easy to see. Were happy to call out celebrities for using the wrong pronoun. But calling men who puts kids in cages fasciststhats over the line. Were happy to spend hours a day on Facebookwhich makes us feel miserable and unhappyand who do we take our fury out on? Each other and ourselves, mostly. We dont stick up for people much. We dont put ourselves on the line. Why bother, when the stakes or life or death? Ah, but that is the precise moment we accept that rule of the strong over the weak, too. Cowards and bullies, united in predation.
Were the worlds great materialists, and materialist individualism of this kind has been our downfall.It has led us, through greed and selfishness, to settle for the moral law that the strong should survive, and the weak perish. What other destination can materialist individualism yield? When enough of us say: the only that counts in life is my happiness, and my happiness is a function of how much stuff I havethen by definition, our society cant be a place that has things like healthcare, retirement, education. We cant really have a democracy, in which equality, freedom, and justice are valued. We cant have a society in which things like inherent self-worth exist and are given by all to all.Societies of bullies and cowards, competing to accumulate more things they cant afford in the first place, like the ones weve become, are doomed to exploit and abuse and prey on each other all the way down the abyss. And that is where we are self-evidently heading, fast.
Let me sum up my thre patterns.We mismanaged our economies, because we valued violence and aggression and cruelty over simply, gently, wisely, investing in each other. We mismanaged our institutions and moral possibilities because we valued comfortable denial and numbing complicity and dim-witted pleasure over growth, forgiveness, self-understanding, the struggle of becoming something truer and better, the test of maturity. We mismanaged our societies because we chose individualism and competitiveness and greed over cooperation and fellowship and generosity. Those choices have now caught up with us. How are we to unmake them?
Those patterns outlive any one leader.Or party. Or institution. They are so, so deep in us its hard to see what could excise or extricate them. They are inoperable tumours of the soul, not just little flaws in the mind. They arent simple or easy or straightforward to understand much less transcend. Is there a blade sharp enough to cut them out of us?
That is why I dont think our societies have much of a future, my friends.Societies dont often rise to the challenge of reinventing their foundational values, their defining sets of priorities. Rome was brought down by its callousness and hunger for empire in the end. Soviet Russia, by its craving for power and control.
What about us?I dont think that we are going to transcend what by now are so visibly our foundational values: hostility, aggression, cruelty, violence, selfishness, greed, individualism, materialism, pleasure-seeking over truth-telling. They seem to be the only things we really, genuinely care about as societies, cultures, people. Give enough of us enough of those and there is no level of degradation and despair we wont settle for. And so I think the real story of our collapse is that those old, old values are toppling us, eroding our foundations, while corroding our pinnacles. And we are becoming dust in historys wind. Perhaps, in the end, that is all we deserved.
(Umair Haque writes for Eudaimonia and Co where this perspective was first posted.)
-cw
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This is What a Society Without a Future Looks Like - City Watch
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