Hat tip to Surly for posting a link to this
EXCELLENT article by
Umair Haque .
SNIPPETS:
When I look at our societies, I see three obvious patterns. They tell me our societies aren’t going to make it. Not just because, well, those patterns are there…but also because as societies we don’t seem capable of understanding or acknowledging they’re there…we won’t 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 won’t 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. They’re about why we 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 (I’m not making that up), for rage, for violence? For bank bailout? But none to bail out…the 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% can’t 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. He’s a nice guy. His heart is in the right place. But that’s not enough to create a working society, much less economy. Every pattern I’ll 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? ... ...
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 aren’t good enough, pretty enough, tough enough, mean enough, selfish enough. You’re just not competitive enough to make it, son. We don’t value things like gentleness and humanity and decency — not really. They’re a sure way to get fired or demeaned or picked on or bullied, if you dare to show them, really. The story’s the same, from grade school to working life.
Full article: