This will probably not be well received, considering how people responded to it in the Abusive Policing Thread when presented by someone else, but the (social, I'll ignore the environment but not because it's not important) problems people complain about in modernity are for the most part their own doing. It is the result of the rapid approach of final supplanting of the Gemeinschaft of society by Gesellschaft, and all of us, including me, are complicit in it. I see many people complaining about how they barely know their neighbors, that there's no real communities for the average person anymore, or how everyone is sociopathically self-interested and can't be trusted to act right on even the most basic levels, or some combination of all of those things. They do this, but they simultaneously strive to annihilate the institutions that supplied those needs in the past in all that they do. I say "why not go meet your neighbors then?" and the reply is always no because they don't actually want to meet their neighbors. They expect them to be terrible people, or even to have something bad happen to them if they so much as knock on the door - and I almost can't blame them for getting that impression, because chances are very good that they'll be seen as suspicious for doing so! As community goes, it's much the same story. Churchgoing, for example, is seen as (or at least proclaimed as) virtuous but terribly old-fashioned by some and as a backwards and malignant evil to be left behind by others. But, ignoring the teachings of the Church and speaking solely from a sociological standpoint, the institution is still a critical element of social glue. It is one of the only situations left where people of all ages and professions come together and interact as equals in a friendly setting, and it provides a reinforcement of a whole people's common identity. It also provides a support network not contingent on anything other than membership in the church. Family and neighbors once did this too but it ended up atomized in the West, first by the move from extended to nuclear families with little contact with relatives outside the household as the norm, and progressing further from there.
Other markers of common identity - national identity, secular traditions, common ideals, and ethnicity; aka culture - are likewise ingredients for creating an actual nation. These things are what keeps people who otherwise have very little in common with each other working together for the betterment of all, and these things are all deeply eroded. What makes western nations nations is in fact being systematically destroyed. Normally that sort of thing only happens when conquerors seek to erase a conquered people, but here for some reason it's westerners themselves who destroy their own institutions. Many in Europe are uncomfortable even seeing their nation's flag flown, and the United States, though not quite as demoralized, is trying very hard to catch up. Massive influxes of foreigners to both places only worsens the situation, as it leads to common people having even less in common with their neighbors and everyone else they interact with on a daily basis than they did before. So, is it any surprise that peoples that increasingly have no will to live are dying, and even invite their own demise? No, it fucking isn't. But diagnosing a problem isn't too difficult, the question that must be asked is
why it's happening. Then, having answered that question, what can be done about it?
As to why, it's certainly a complex, multifaceted question. MSH is right when he talks about the scope of the issue, and decides to just call it The Crisis in the OP. Part of the problem, I think, is globalism, in two aspects. You used to hear the term "global village" thrown around in sociological circles, but it's sort of fallen out of favor lately. The man who coined the phrase envisioned the Global Village as being a disharmonious place, as people were effectively forced into contact with others with whom they can barely even agree on the basic facts. Nenjin touched on this idea in this post:
But it seems to me that in reality the opposite has happened. People are now able to self-segregate on a level that would have been considered absurd twenty years ago, and would have been entirely inconceivable thirty or forty years ago. Their community, their village, stops being their neighbors (and to a lesser degree their countrymen) and instead increasingly becomes the scattered but like-minded individuals they associate with online. Some people fall more into this trap than others, but there is a generational trend in this as people start growing up in a world where the internet is more and more ubiquitous (and as mainstream online platforms are starting to deliberately exploit this tendency), and it's not an encouraging one either. That may seem hypocritical given my calling mass migration a problem in the previous paragraph, but consider that foreigners are just as vulnerable to this trap as the locals are. Even though their societies at home are actually healthier in many respects than those here and they bring some of their Gemeinschaft with them they still self-segregate, and so end up feeling embattled on more levels than just those that come with the territory of being in a foreign land even as they flood in to take advantage of its economic success. The ultimate effect of this is that people end up looking for community in places that cannot provide it, and peoples with increasingly little in common are forced to live with each other but do not interact, and so we get all the negatives of diversity (and I don't just mean immigrants, but different sorts of people regardless of origin as well) with no benefit to the average person. But this trend didn't start with the widespread adoption of the internet. Arguably the success of counterculture movements that sprung up as baby boomers reached the age of majority, who sought freedom through the erasure of social obligation and tradition, are responsible for actually creating these conditions.
The other aspect is more economic. A global economy means that it is increasingly possible (and extraordinarily profitable) for work to be done overseas. The upper class has always had the least loyalty to their homelands in aggregate, but with the cultural erosion culminating in the above combining with the massive opportunities presented to them to empower and enrich themselves makes it more attractive than ever before to disconnect themselves from society and become part of a growing global class of rootless cosmopolitans. This group, as most do, knows its own interests, and it is able to leverage its massive resources to get governments to align to those interests. This class of people has effective control over international finance, mass media, big business, and much more besides. Some people believe that there are conspiratorial power groups (Illuminati, Jews, Freemasons, Skull and Bones, etc.) but the worst part of it is that
there doesn't need to be. These people could work toward their own personal interests completely organically and without collusion, and the result would be exactly the same. That result is a society increasingly (and increasingly
openly) geared toward the service of a very small slice of the population, often at the expense of all the rest. This is why wages have not meaningfully risen in the last 60 years, why the wealthiest are wealthier than the poorest than they've been in the last 120 years, why the relative condition of labor has stopped improving in some areas and even rolled back in others, and why the poverty rate hasn't meaningfully shifted long-term in the last 40 years even as spending on welfare has ballooned as a category to become the US government's greatest financial commitment. All despite new technologies making the economy more productive and efficient than it's ever been. Those that have an actual say in these things simply have everything to gain from defecting in our societal prisoners' dilemma and nothing to lose.
Globalization isn't the
only issue. I agree with the people talking about fatalistic outlooks, although I might argue that it's just an outgrowth of more fundamental problems. I also agree that the pressures put on society by the environmental crisis cause damage to it. But globalization
is something that I think is both a very important component of the problem, and something most people here would overlook or even disagree with me on. As to what to do? I have no idea. The best I can come up with is to somehow convince the people to force the government to break the power of the international elite if they want to preserve their own power, but by now much of the government
is the international elite, and activism is either pointless bullshit, channeled into culture wars, or stomped out.
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Topic: MSH Mantles Karl Marx -OR- The Crisis Discussion And Essay Thread (Read 7900 times)