{"id":199236,"date":"2019-12-14T07:39:41","date_gmt":"2019-12-14T07:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=199236"},"modified":"2019-12-16T08:15:49","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T08:15:49","slug":"this-is-how-a-society-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=199236","title":{"rendered":"This is How a Society Dies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Umair Haque \u2013 Eudaumonia Dec 9, 2019<\/strong><\/h1>\n

When I ask my European friends to describe us \u2014 Americans, Brits, who I\u2019ll call Anglo-Americans in this essay \u2014 they shake their heads gently. And over and over, three themes emerge. They say we\u2019re a little thoughtless. They say we\u2019re selfish and arrogant. And they say that we\u2019re cruel and brutal.<\/span><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but think there\u2019s more than a grain of truth. That they\u2019re being kind. Anglo-American society is now the world\u2019s preeminent example of willful self-destruction. It\u2019s jaw-dropping folly and stupidity is breathtaking to the rest of the world.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The hard truth is this. America and Britain aren\u2019t just collapsing by the day\u2026they aren\u2019t even just choosing to collapse by the day. They\u2019re entering a death spiral, from which there\u2019s probably no return. <\/strong>Yes, really. Simple economics dictate that, just like they did for the Soviet Union \u2014 and I\u2019ll come to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet what\u2019s even weirder and more grotesque than that is that\u2026wel\u2026nobody much seems to have noticed. There\u2019s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on the joint self-destruction of the Anglo-American world. Nobody seems to have noticed: the only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust \u2014 every single social indicator you can imagine \u2014 are America and Britain. It\u2019s not one of history\u2019s most improbable coincidences that America and Britain are collapsing in eerily similar ways, at precisely the same time. It\u2019s a relationship. What connects the dots?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Let me pause to note that my European friends\u2019 first criticism \u2014 that we\u2019re thoughtless \u2014 is therefore accurate. We\u2019re not even capable of noticing \u2014 much less understanding \u2014 our twin collapse. Our entire thinking and leadership class seems not to have even noticed, like idiots grinning and dancing, setting their own house on fire. They are simply going on pretending it isn\u2019t happening \u2014 that the English speaking world isn\u2019t fast becoming something very much like the new Soviet Union.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what caused this joint collapse? How did the English speaking world end up like the new Soviet Union?<\/strong> To understand that point, consider the fact that you yourself probably think that\u2019s an overstatement. But it\u2019s an empirical reality. The Soviet Union stagnated for thirty years. America\u2019s stagnated for fifty, and Britain for twenty. The Soviet Union couldn\u2019t provide basics for its citizens \u2014 hence the famous breadlines. In America, people beg each other for money to pay for insulin and antibiotics, decent food is unavailable in vast swathes of the country, and retirement and paying off one\u2019s debt are impossibilities: just like in the Soviet Union, basics are becoming both unavailable and unaffordable. What happens? People\u2026die.<\/span><\/p>\n

(The same is true in Britain. In both societies, upwards of 20% of children live in poverty, the middle class has imploded, and upward mobility has all but vanished. These are Soviet statistics \u2014 lethally real ones.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Politics, too, has become a sclerotic Soviet affair. Anglo-American societies aren\u2019t really democracies in any sensible meaning of the word anymore. They\u2019re run by and for a class of elites, who could care less, literally, whether the average person lives or dies. In America, that class is a bizarre coterie of Ivy Leaguers pretending to be aw-shucks-good-ole-boys on the one side, like Ted Cruz, and Ivy Leaguers pretending to be do-gooders on the other, like Zuck and Silicon Valley. In Britain, it\u2019s the notorious public school boys, the Etonians and Oxbridge set.<\/span><\/p>\n

That brings me to arrogance. What\u2019s astonishing about our elites is how\u2026arrogant they are\u2026and<\/em> how ignorant they are\u2026at precisely the same time. Finland just elected a 34 year old woman as a Prime Minister from the Social Democrats. Finland is a society that outperforms ours in every way \u2014 every way \u2014 imaginable. Finnish happiness is way, way higher \u2014 and so is life expectancy, mobility, savings, real incomes, trust, among others. And yet instead of learning a thing from a miracle like that, our elites profess to know a better way\u2026while they\u2019ve run our societies into the ground. What the? Hubris would be an understatement. I don\u2019t think the English language has a word for this weird, fatal combination of arrogance amidst ignorance. Maybe cocksure stupidity comes close.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet our elites have succeeded in one vital task \u2014 what an Emile Durkheim might have called \u201csocial reproduction.\u201d They\u2019ve managed to reproduce society in their image. <\/strong>What does the average Anglo-American aspire to be, do, have? To be rich, powerful, careless, selfish, and dumb, now, mostly. We don\u2019t, as societies or cultures, value learning or knowledge or magnanimity or great and noble things, anymore. We shower millions on reality TV stars and billions on \u201cinvestment bankers.\u201d The average person has become a tiny microcosm of the aspirations and norms of elites \u2014 they\u2019re not curious, empathetic, decent, humane, noble, kind, in pursuit of wisdom, truth, beauty, meaning, purpose. <\/strong>We\u2019ve become cruel, indecent, obscene, comically shallow, and astonishingly foolish people.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s not some kind of jeremiad. It\u2019s an objective, easily observed truth.<\/strong> Who else in a rich society denies their neighbours healthcare and retirement? Nobody. Who else denies their own kids education? Nobody. Who else denies themselves childcare and elderly care? Nobody. Who else doesn\u2019t want safety nets, opportunities, mobility, protection, savings, higher incomes? Nobody. Literally nobody on planet earth <\/strong>wants<\/strong><\/em> worse lives excepts us. We\u2019re the only people on earth who thwart our own social progress, over and over again \u2014 and cheer about it.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

How did we become these people? How did we become tiny microcosms of our arrogant, ignorant, breathtakingly stupid elites? Because we are perpetually battling for self-preservation. Life has become a kind of brutal combat to the death.<\/strong> For jobs, for healthcare, for money, for the tiniest shreds of resources necessary to live. We wake up and fight one another for these things, over and over again. That is what our lives amount to now \u2014 gladiatorial combat. Meanwhile, elites and billionaires sit back and enjoy not just the spectacle \u2014 but the winnings.<\/span><\/p>\n

People who are battling for self-preservation can\u2019t take care of anyone else.<\/strong> If I ask the average Brit or American to consider paying for their society\u2019s healthcare, education, elderly care, childcare, increasingly, the answer is: LOL. In America, it always has been. Why is that? The reason couldn\u2019t be simpler. People can\u2019t even take care of themselves and their own. How can they take care of anyone else \u2014 let alone everyone else?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The average person is living right at the edge. Not at the edge of the middle class dream and an even better one. But at the edge of poverty and destitution. They struggle to pay basic bills and never make ends meet. They can\u2019t afford to educate their children, and retire, or retire and have healthcare, and so on. Let me say it again: the average person can\u2019t take care of themselves and their own \u2014 so how can they take care of anyone else, let alone everyone else?<\/span><\/p>\n

A more technical, formal way to say that is: our societies have now become too poor to afford public goods and social systems. <\/strong>But public goods and social systems are what make a modern, rich society. What\u2019s a society without decent healthcare, schools, universities, libraries, education, parks, transport, media \u2014 available to all, without life-crippling \u201cdebt\u201d? It\u2019s not a modern society at all. But more and more, it\u2019s not America or Britain, either.<\/span><\/p>\n

What makes European societies \u2014 which are far, far more successful than ours \u2014 successful is that people are not battling for self-preservation, and so they are able to cooperate to better one another instead. <\/strong>At least not nearly so much and so lethally as we are. They are assured of survival. They therefore have resources to share with others. They don\u2019t have to battle for the very things we take away from each other \u2014 because they simply give them to one another. That has kept them richer than us, too. The average American now lives in effective poverty \u2014 unable to afford healthcare, housing, and basic bills. They must choose. The European doesn\u2019t have to, precisely because they invested in one another \u2014 and those investment made them richer than us.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are caught in a death spiral now. A vicious cycle from which there is probably no escape. The average person is too poor to fund the very things \u2014 the only things \u2014 which can offer him a better life: healthcare, education, childcare, healthcare, and so on. <\/strong>The average person is too poor to fund public goods and social systems. The average person is too poor now to able to give anything to anyone else, to invest anything in anyone else. He lives and dies in debt to begin with \u2014 so what does he have left over to give back, put back, invest?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A more technical, formal way to put all that is this.<\/strong> Europeans distributed their social surplus more fairly than we did. They didn\u2019t give all the winnings to idiot billionaires like Zucks and con men like Trump. They kept middle and working classes better off than us. As a result, those middle and working classes were able to invest in expansive public goods and social systems. Those things \u2014 good healthcare, education, transport, media \u2014 kept life improving for everyone. That virtuous circle of investing a fairly distributed social surplus created a true economic miracle over just one human lifetime: Europe rose from the ashes of war to enjoy history\u2019s highest living standards, ever, period.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s changing in Europe, to be sure. But that is because Europe is becoming Americanized, Anglicized. It has a generation of leaders foolish enough to follow our lead \u2014 now remember the greatest lesson of European history, which is one of the greatest lessons of history, full stop. That lesson goes like this.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. People who are made to live right at the edge must battle each other for self-preservation. But such people have nothing left to give one another. And that way, a society enters a death spiral of poverty \u2014 like ours have.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. People who can\u2019t make ends meet can\u2019t even invest in themselves \u2014 let alone anyone else. Such a society has to eat through whatever public goods and social systems it has, just to survive. It never develops or expands new ones.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. The result is that a whole society grows poorer and poorer. Unable to invest in themselves or one another, people\u2019s only real way out is to fight each other for self-preservation, by taking away their neighbor\u2019s rights, privileges, and opportunities \u2014 instead of being able to give any new ones to anyone. Why give everyone healthcare and education when you can\u2019t even afford your own? How are you supposed to?<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Society melts down into a spiral of extremism and fascism, as ever increasing poverty brings hate, violence, fear, and rage with it. Trust erodes, democracy corrodes, social bonds are torn apart, and the only norms left are Darwinian-fascist ones: the strong survive, and the weak must perish.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    (Let me spend a second or two on that last point. As they become poorer, people begin to distrust each other \u2014 and then hate each other<\/strong>. Why wouldn\u2019t they? After all, the grim reality is that they actually are fighting each other for existence, for the basic resources of life, like medicine, money, and food.<\/span><\/p>\n

    As distrust becomes hate, people who have nothing to give anyways end up having no reason to even hope to give anything back to anyone else. Why give anything to those people you are fighting, every single day, for the most meagre resources necessary to live? Why give the very people who denied you healthcare and education anything? Isn\u2019t the only real point of life to show that you beat them by having a bigger house, faster car, prettier wife or husband?)<\/span><\/p>\n

    That is how a society dies. That is the death spiral of a rich society. In technical terms, it goes like this.<\/strong> A social surplus isn\u2019t distributed equitably. That leaves the average person too poor to invest anything back in society. He\u2019s just battling for self-preservation, and the stakes are life or death. But that battle itself only breeds even more poverty. Because without investment, nurturance, nourishment \u2014 nothing can grow. Having become poor, the average person only grows poorer \u2014 because he will never have decent public goods or social systems, let alone the rights and privileges and jobs and careers and trajectories they become and lead to.<\/span><\/p>\n

    A society of people so poor they have nothing left over to invest in one another is dying. It goes from prosperity to poverty, from optimism to pessimism, from cohesion to distrust and hate, from peace to violence \u2014 at light speed, in the space of a generation. <\/strong>That\u2019s America and Britain\u2019s story today, just as it was the Soviet Union\u2019s, yesterday, and Weimar Germany\u2019s, before that.<\/span><\/p>\n

    You can see how a society dies \u2014 with horrific, brutal clarity \u2014 in the self-destruction of America and Britain. <\/strong>The hate-filled vitriol of Trumpism, the barely-hidden hate of Brexit. Why wouldn\u2019t people who have grown suddenly poor hate everyone else? Why wouldn\u2019t they blame anyone and everyone they can \u2014 from Mexicans to Muslims to Europeans \u2014 for their own decline? The truth, as always, is harder. America and Britain\u2019s collapse is nobody\u2019s fault \u2014 nobody\u2019s \u2014 but their own.<\/span><\/p>\n

    They are in a death spiral now, but no opponent or adversary brought them there. It was their own fault, and yet they still go on choosing it. <\/strong>They don\u2019t know any other way now. Their elites succeeded at making the average person truly, fervently believe that battling perpetually for self-preservation was the only way a society could exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

    And though it\u2019s too late to escape for them, let us hope that the rest of the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa, learns the lesson of the sad, gruesome, stupid, astonishing tragedy of self-inflicted collapse.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Umair<\/span>
    \nDecember 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

    Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Umair Haque explains why he believes that both America and Britain have entered a cultural death spiral<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=199236"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":199238,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199236\/revisions\/199238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=199236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=199236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=199236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}