As you say at the end, this describes many countries. With just a few words changed, this entirely resonates with the UK. What is it with the Anglo nations that we’re all suffering the same?
It is a feedback loop. In those societies, the State must directly regulate human behaviours that were previously governed by social norms, peer pressure and intermediate institutions.
For example, there is no liquor licence for pubs in Japan, since people instinctively understand that getting obscenely drunk and shitting in someone's flower bed next door is the wrong thing to do. This would not work in Australia any more. The degree of social cohesion required for a light-touch system like that to work does not exist. In Australia, we require registered training organisations (RTOs) to provide Responsible Service of Alcohol training (RSA) to bar staff to instil the social mores which Japanese people hold naturally.
As the state encroaches, the instutitions that previously held sway wither away due to being starved of relevance, which in turn increases peoples' reliance on the state.
The truly perverse end-stage of this is the attempt to reconstitute civic society using government-funded NGOs. These NGOs pretend to represent communities but are not accountable to them, since they are funded by the government. It is almost comical how much their worldview is at odds with the people they claim to represent.
Incidentally, this feeds back into something that I've been thinking about a bit lately, this bit from Jameson:-
“In the United States, ethnic groups are not only the object of prejudice, they are also the object of envy; and these two impulses are deeply intermingled and reinforce each other mutually. The dominant white, middle-class groups - already given over to anomie and social fragmentation and atomization - find in the ethnic and racial groups which are the object of their social repression and status contempt at one and the same time the image of some older collective ghetto or ethnic neighbourhood solidarity; they feel the envy and ressentiment of the Gesellschaft for the older Gemeinschaft which it is simultaenously exploiting and liquidating.”
I learnt this week that in Vietnam you need a license to work in an office. Not to employ people (which is separate paper work), but to actually work in an office. Most of the world is even dumber than here
I glibbly and unsatisfactorily allude to this at the end. Lots of these issues are global. US seems to be bucking the trend. Suspect their federalism helps.
Great piece but you let Turnbull off too easy with his incredibly bad faith rollout of the NBN. If more people knew the details of this he would be a pariah.
Great and depressing analysis. One Nation and the Tories need to merge and form a conservative super party, and then read this article as a primer. We are in deep shiz otherwise.
There’s plenty here I agree with, especially decline by drift. But “the state is eating the country” lets capital off absurdly lightly. Housing scarcity, cheap labour, privatisation and resource rents aren’t just bungles. For the people who own things, they aren’t failures at all. The rest of us get told the ‘nation’ has somehow ‘lost’ its way.
I agree with that. I mention some of that. I should have also mentioned what a joke our private health insurance and childcare rebate schemes are, whivh are basically alao private rent extraction schemes
Yes, and that points to the deeper problem. Neoliberalism never really shrank the state. It turned the state into a guaranteed customer for private providers. Childcare, private health, aged care, employment services: public money goes in, prices rise, quality stays patchy or drops and the taxpayer foots the bill.
The biggest con is that the wealthiest then structure their affairs to avoid paying their share of that bill while owning the companies, funds and assets collecting the public money. They get the subsidy, the profit and the tax minimisation. We get the bill and the denuded services.
What changed that made this level of misgovernance permissible? There’s always been corruption but there is no accountability now, it’s like we lack the attention span to follow through.
Kvetch for PM?
As you say at the end, this describes many countries. With just a few words changed, this entirely resonates with the UK. What is it with the Anglo nations that we’re all suffering the same?
It is a feedback loop. In those societies, the State must directly regulate human behaviours that were previously governed by social norms, peer pressure and intermediate institutions.
For example, there is no liquor licence for pubs in Japan, since people instinctively understand that getting obscenely drunk and shitting in someone's flower bed next door is the wrong thing to do. This would not work in Australia any more. The degree of social cohesion required for a light-touch system like that to work does not exist. In Australia, we require registered training organisations (RTOs) to provide Responsible Service of Alcohol training (RSA) to bar staff to instil the social mores which Japanese people hold naturally.
As the state encroaches, the instutitions that previously held sway wither away due to being starved of relevance, which in turn increases peoples' reliance on the state.
The truly perverse end-stage of this is the attempt to reconstitute civic society using government-funded NGOs. These NGOs pretend to represent communities but are not accountable to them, since they are funded by the government. It is almost comical how much their worldview is at odds with the people they claim to represent.
Incidentally, this feeds back into something that I've been thinking about a bit lately, this bit from Jameson:-
“In the United States, ethnic groups are not only the object of prejudice, they are also the object of envy; and these two impulses are deeply intermingled and reinforce each other mutually. The dominant white, middle-class groups - already given over to anomie and social fragmentation and atomization - find in the ethnic and racial groups which are the object of their social repression and status contempt at one and the same time the image of some older collective ghetto or ethnic neighbourhood solidarity; they feel the envy and ressentiment of the Gesellschaft for the older Gemeinschaft which it is simultaenously exploiting and liquidating.”
I learnt this week that in Vietnam you need a license to work in an office. Not to employ people (which is separate paper work), but to actually work in an office. Most of the world is even dumber than here
I glibbly and unsatisfactorily allude to this at the end. Lots of these issues are global. US seems to be bucking the trend. Suspect their federalism helps.
Great piece but you let Turnbull off too easy with his incredibly bad faith rollout of the NBN. If more people knew the details of this he would be a pariah.
Banger of a post!
An absolute tour d’force mate, well done. Should be required reading
Great and depressing analysis. One Nation and the Tories need to merge and form a conservative super party, and then read this article as a primer. We are in deep shiz otherwise.
There’s plenty here I agree with, especially decline by drift. But “the state is eating the country” lets capital off absurdly lightly. Housing scarcity, cheap labour, privatisation and resource rents aren’t just bungles. For the people who own things, they aren’t failures at all. The rest of us get told the ‘nation’ has somehow ‘lost’ its way.
I agree with that. I mention some of that. I should have also mentioned what a joke our private health insurance and childcare rebate schemes are, whivh are basically alao private rent extraction schemes
Yes, and that points to the deeper problem. Neoliberalism never really shrank the state. It turned the state into a guaranteed customer for private providers. Childcare, private health, aged care, employment services: public money goes in, prices rise, quality stays patchy or drops and the taxpayer foots the bill.
The biggest con is that the wealthiest then structure their affairs to avoid paying their share of that bill while owning the companies, funds and assets collecting the public money. They get the subsidy, the profit and the tax minimisation. We get the bill and the denuded services.
What changed that made this level of misgovernance permissible? There’s always been corruption but there is no accountability now, it’s like we lack the attention span to follow through.
Maybe Indianizing the civil service will help?
(This is actually happening.)
Only solution is move to another planet and found "Norstrilia."