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A little reflection occurs to me every time I write about American collapse. Societies collapse in much the same way… there’s something like a universal way of collapse. Yet, the whole problem begins with the fact that human beings, having needy egos, find their own downfall difficult to accept. Perhaps, you yourself will object… you’re a mighty citizen of a proud society. Ah. Do you think the Incas, Mayas, Romans, or Nazis ever thought that they obeyed the laws of history? Of course not. Becoming a powerful society makes us vulnerable to collapse because it leaves us puffed up with hubris. We cry:
We shall never fall! Our thousand-year reign has barely begun!
To think one is above history is precisely where collapse begins… people who don’t understand how societies fall can’t do a whole lot to stop it. We begin the story of how a society falls thus… there’s an almost hysterical atmosphere of denial that it ever could.
Step One
The economy stagnates. Life becomes harder and meaner. An atmosphere of cruelty permeates. However, élites must deny stagnation… otherwise, they admit that they failed… in this way, society never repairs the social contract.
Step Two
Neighbour turns on neighbour for a constant share of a dwindling pie. They must compete more and more viciously to maintain the living standards of their parents and grandparents. Social bonds blow apart. Norms begin to disintegrate.
Step Three
Growing ever more anxious and desperate, seeking a truce in what has become an unwinnable battle for survival, people turn to strongmen, glorified thugs, revelling in indecency, thus flaunting their power over broken norms and failed social contract. If they live in a democracy, people turn to strongmen for the very safety democracy failed at giving them. This is the authoritarian moment. The moment at which decline implodes into true collapse… irreversibly, usually.
Step Four
The strongest tribe begins to exterminate the weaker ones (not illegally, but perfectly legally, in little steps of scapegoating, exclusion, blame, and expropriation). This is the poisoned womb of authoritarianism giving unholy birth to fascism. This thus preserves the illusion of constancy… that is, the insiders’ economic portions remain stable, but all that happened is that a society achieved it by excluding or eliminating whole social groups altogether, leaving more for the pure. This fact is a secret from the people, officially… but who can’t be aware?
Step Five
However, because simply exterminating the weak didn’t solve the original problem of stagnation, a society dooms itself to forever taking its neighbours’ harvests or falling apart. This is how fascism leads to atrocity, war, and mass murder.
Do you see how this all fits together, like pieces of a puzzle? Ignorance of this great and terrible cycle underpins so much human suffering that perhaps it’s the single greatest evil in history. Yet, our first tendency is to deny that it’s happening to us, isn’t it? Therefore, every step is harder and harder to untake… a gravity created by our own weaknesses… our needs for superiority, for belonging, for infantile security. Now, it’s easy to see how universal collapse was the case in Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, what’s harder to see is that it has also been the case throughout history… right down to today. All that really differs is what lights the spark of stagnation… the rest of the steps then follow predictably, if living standards do not rise.
In agricultural societies, this spark was literally often a failed harvest. Perhaps the rains or rivers ran dry for a season. Soon enough, they sacrificed virgins atop the temples. However, the gods stayed deaf. Tribes then went to war, to prove their worthiness to the gods. This was more or less the story of South America, India, and pre-imperial China, for millennia. In industrial and mercantile societies, the spark of stagnation was a shortage of raw materials. Hence, the drive for constantly-expanding empire and conquest. Nevertheless, as soon as those basic inputs dried up… whether cotton, sugar, or tea … then, again nations went to war (when they weren’t busy warring, they were putting people to work in fields, to stave off stagnation and collapse again). This was the story of post-Enlightenment Europe, in which men claimed to be people of reason, but the simple truth was they were just as much victims and perpetrators of the economics of collapse as ever before in human history, perhaps, even more so.
How do modern economies differ? It isn’t because they don’t run out of raw materials, like information… they do, eminently: the raw materials in our case are money, human possibility, and opportunity. They haven’t “run out” in an absolute sense, but in a relative one… they are in shortage because the top layer hoards them. We learned this much from giants like Keynes… no economy has to stagnate anymore. Harvests may fail and raw materials run out, but there’s a better way out of stagnation than war and violence. It’s to invest in economies at the precise moment they are failing, employ the desperate in realising themselves, and that way, avert the rage, fury, and despair that lead to scapegoating, tribalism, extremism, war, and ultimately, self-destruction. Those old agricultural economies might better have put people to work building aqueducts instead of fighting their neighbours. However, they didn’t… and we aren’t, either. Our mistake is to learn nothing from theirs. Do you see the genius of Keynes’ insight? It was to say that we can best stop collapse at its first step… the other four, if taken, are usually too late, each leading inevitably to the next.
Now that I have given you a tiny theory of collapse, let’s place America upon it, as an example. America grew short of the raw materials of a modern economy… money, possibility, and opportunity. The average person’s income began to stagnate in the 70s. They began to live shorter, meaner, more brutal and disconnected and inhumane lives. Any competent economist should have predicted, on this basis alone, an eventual crisis. That is, if not resolved, it’d lead to a textbook social collapse. Nevertheless, America doesn’t have many good minds left… so few did predict such… and no one listened to them very much.
Therefore, the fuse of stagnation lit the bomb of collapse. It inflamed America’s old racial wounds, as neighbour turned on neighbour, forced to compete viciously for a constant share of a shrinking social pie. However, to maintain a constant share of a shrinking pie is an impossible task for everyone in a society. So, just a few decades later, weary of this bruising everyday battle that life had become, Americans gave up, en masse, on democracy… trust collapsed, social bonds blew apart, turnout was meagre, and civic engagement was nonexistent. Instead, they turned to drugs, violence, escapism, and extremism for consolation. Eventually, along came a strongman… who offered them not just consolation but a solution. This was an authoritarian moment… an instant when decline implodes into collapse. Now, the rest might not be history… but that much certainly is, isn’t it? When you think about it, what’s striking isn’t America’s exceptionalism… but that no amount of power, might, or glory made it immune from history. American collapse follows precisely the same steps as every other great and memorable one in history. Nevertheless, why would we have ever thought otherwise?
Here is the point inside the point. I think about it a great deal these days, brooding, a little sadly. Americans are interested in the symptoms of collapse… but not the causes. In this way, they became something like tourists of democracy… not participants in it. How can a people who don’t understand collapse then address it, let alone rebuild the ruined institutions, norms, and values it points to? Collapse is a universal process of human societies. We’re no better than our ancestors, neighbours, or our descendants… we never will be. The sooner that we understand how, why, and when a collapse occurs… even though it conflicts with our own need to feel mighty, special, and privileged… perhaps, the less prone to it we’ll be.
30 January 2018
Umair Haque
Eudaimonia
Why America Should Have Had the World’s Best Social Contract (Instead of Settling For the Worst)
Tags: Capitalism, ethic, ethical orientation, ethics, liberal economic policies, moral, moral stance, morality, morals, national character, Neo-Fascist, Neoliberal, Neoliberalism, Nihilism, political commentary, politics, United States, USA
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I worry about Americans. It seems to me that they just aren’t aware as they should be that they could and should have the world’s best working social contract (with vibrant, robust healthcare, education, income, savings, safety nets, media) instead of settling for the most dysfunctional broken one (after all, even nations like Costa Rica and Rwanda are developing basic public healthcare). Hence, it appears to me that Americans believe in a series of backward myths about themselves, the world, and society. Recited constantly, they keep them in the dark, which is why they settle for the worst.
One of the greatest ironies in the world to me is that the very opposite is true… big countries can have by far better ones. How? Think about insurance, the bigger a pool is, the lower the cost for each member. Now, what does that really mean?
A small nation like Denmark or Sweden or even a medium-sized one like France or Britain can’t realise the same economies of scale that a big one like America can… there are only 10 million people, each of whom pays more to insure one another. However, American has 300 million people. Yet, by a long way, American healthcare is the most expensive in the world and delivers the least benefits. Precisely the opposite could and should be true… as there are more Americans to insure one another, it could be the cheapest in the world, with the greatest benefits, by a very long way. However, it requires a true public healthcare institution, like an American Healthcare Service, to make that true. That same principle is true for every component of a social contract, whether education, media, or safety nets… more people share the high fixed costs, so they’re (way) cheaper for a bigger society like America than a small one like Sweden. Then, isn’t it funny that American thought doesn’t ever seem to consider that?
LOL. What do you think your local Apple store is? If Apple can do it for gadgets, why can’t we do it for healthcare? Wal-Mart, Google, Amazon, and the government already do it every day without breaking a sweat. We know how to do it in spades.
Let’s say you’re a poor kid in West Virginia with no income, savings, mobility, opportunity, hope, life. You’ve seen your friends, in despair, with no futures, OD… you’re thinking about turning to drugs, too, but you harbour a great desire to help people like you, to be an abuse counsellor, only you have no idea or way to be one. Your only option is what capitalism can provide, insanely-expensive twelve step “rehab” programs that never address your severe trauma of living through collapse with real psychotherapy, not just “drug abuse counselling”, because that’s more costly than just putting you in a boot camp, so it goes untreated, and you cycle on and off drugs forever.
Now imagine that our AHS was there in your neighbourhood. It would need just such counsellors, right? Voila, supply and demand meet… you might get training for just the job they need… where they don’t right now because there’s a “market failure”, which is to say, a void. That broken town might come back to life. Now fast-forward five years into the future. That AHS needs managers, there you are… suddenly, and you have a career, and all it brought with it, opportunity, mobility, security, optimism, belonging, meaning purpose. How wonderful. Now multiply that by a thousand times, and ten million lives. How beautiful. That’s how a society and economy begins to heal, mature, and grow… when institutions, both public and private, allow lives to flourish.
Look. You’re going to get taxed either way, by monopolistic corporations or a government, and if you really can’t abide that, if you don’t want, say, water and roads, be my guest and move to Somalia. The question is, which one is a better deal? Let’s consider the BBC. I pay about two hundred bucks a year. What do I get? I get three TV channels and six radio stations. I pay about two hundred bucks a month in the States for a billion channels. Now, here’s the irony that’s often impossible for American to understand… less, in this case, is infinitely more. I click around in the States and rarely find something to watch, I decline porn, cop and surgery shows, it’s all mostly catastrophe vaudeville about the victims of late capitalism. However, I can watch the BBC endlessly, and so do you, maybe you just don’t know it, because its shows are rebranded for Americans, Masterpiece Theatre and so on. For that BBC licence, I get Blue Planet, Civilisation, all those cop and detective shows, the Great Bake-Off, movies, soaps, and so on. Do you see the difference? I pay a tenth of what I do in the States, and I get infinitely higher quality. So much higher quality that most of the shows ripped off by American media come from the Beeb… The Voice, The Bake-Off, etc. The level of quality isn’t just high, it’s beyond what capitalism can give you, whole categories of shows like documentaries by famed academics and writers and artists and wildlife docs like Blue Oceans exist there that can’t in America, all those cute fun Bake-Off style shows you love watching on Netflix, films tackling tough social issues, and so on.
Now let’s think about it from the BBC’s side. It only needs a fixed amount to produce all that stuff, those three TV and six radio channels. Crucially, that amount doesn’t change depending on how many people are in a society, right? So again, a BBC would be way cheaper in America than it is in Britain, simply because there are more people to pay for it, a hundred bucks a year, not even two hundred. Are you telling me you wouldn’t pay a hundred bucks a year for a BBC, instead of a few thousand to Comcast, now that I’ve explained it to you? (If you want to do both, be my guest… I do.) Here’s the point, not only does a working social contract cost less, the benefits are way greater too, social institutions provide goods to a quality that capitalism is simply unable to even usually dream of.
Have you followed me so far? If you have, we’ve learned that a working social contract is:
A deficit doesn’t matter much when people are giving up on democracy because they don’t have decent lives of dignity, belonging, and purpose.
I want to drive that home to you. Consider our poor West Virginia kid again. He gets addicted. His parents mortgage their home to pay for “rehab”… no AHS, remember? However, because there’s no AHS, too, “rehab” means a twelve-step program… all capitalism can provide … not real psychotherapy that addresses the profound trauma he’s lived through. Therefore, he cycles in and out of this subpar capitalist rehab. His parents are renting a little place now. He’s living on the streets. What was unaffordable for them… a working social contract or the lack of one? Multiply that by a million… what happens to a society? Now… people lose faith in the future, each other, and themselves. They give up and numb the pain away. Therefore, like any traumatised abused soul, they end up believing what’s backwards… what might save them is unaffordable, unattainable, and impossible, so going on this way, in this terrible suffering, is the only option that they have. Thus, democracy falls apart and people turn to authoritarianism… that’s the story of every falling empire, from Rome to the Reich.
How sad. How wrong. There are already millions of stories just like that. Imagine how different all these lives would and could be with a working social contract. America could and should have the world’s best one, as it’s one of the world’s biggest and richest societies. Nevertheless, Americans don’t quite understand that as their intellectuals, leaders, and thinkers have never explained it to them. Irony teaches us tragedy, and the tragedy of ignorance about the most fundamental lesson of all is the irony of American collapse… Americans settled for the worst social contract of all, but they could and should have had the best.
9 March 2018
Umair Haque
Eudamonia
https://eand.co/why-america-could-and-should-have-had-the-worlds-best-social-contract-instead-of-settling-for-the-17a153a39585