When I first started writing about the imminent collapse of the nation-state, readers started asking me, “But why do you discount the possibility that the civil society might have anything to say about these changes?”
I don’t believe that a civil society is compatible with the society of consumers but I’m always ready to recognize my mistakes. So I’ve been on the lookout for evidence that a civil society exists and that it is willing to suffer some minor discomfort in order to retain some vestiges of the nation-state. When the nation-state model collapses for good, the social stratification will soar. Everybody realizes it and expresses concern. Is anybody ready to do anything about it, I wondered?
The answer is a resounding NO. I was right this entire time: the civil society is a myth. There is no way whatsoever to get anybody even just to consider holding on to what was good about the nation-state. My poignant posts on the destruction of the public university were met with stony indifference on the part of people working at that university. The suggestions on the steep inheritance tax, forced “volunteering”, the destruction of professionalism and labor unions by bored amateurs, etc are all greeted with an invariable, “But it’s more convenient this way.”
And that’s fine, I guess. If everybody is ready for the nation-state to go, I don’t want to be a silly old Luddite who fusses about a welcome change. There are many attractive qualities in the new state model. For one, the variety of goods and services will really soar once the concept of worker rights recedes into oblivion. The fortunate will be able to live more intensely than ever, shifting from one location, profession, identity, etc into another. The highly mobile, brilliantly educated class will have the best kind of existence ever experienced by anybody in history. Everybody else will be happy, too, with their plasma-screen TVs and smartphones. The social ties will be broken, and “me and my convenience” will be the most popular religion. And social activism will mean “making losers contort eagerly and ridiculously by throwing them some crumbs.” The next big political protests will be organized by a bored millionaire who will find it entertaining to force the equally bored workers to put on a show of political activism.
Come to think of it, it’s all here already, and everybody is perfectly happy.
Clarissa's Blog 
“I don’t believe that a civil society is compatible with the society of consumers.”
Maybe they want to consume some attention-seeking “Look at me, I’m a good person”-identity. Of course until it’s convenient to them, like the hyperliberal immigrant-supporter charity I met recently who basically grant a complaining platform to the local fascists. Well, okay now I get what you say. Maybe that’s not a real civil society, just a fake one.
“Come to think of it, it’s all here already, and everybody is perfectly happy.”
Of course with the convenient help of the Happy Pill. Maybe one day the attention-seeking fake charities will hand them out for free.
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“Of course with the convenient help of the Happy Pill. Maybe one day the attention-seeking fake charities will hand them out for free.”
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\ the hyperliberal immigrant-supporter charity I met recently who basically grant a complaining platform to the local fascists.
Wanted to ask about the meaning of this sentence. What does “grant a complaining platform” mean? Give something to complain about to the fascists (because of charity’s very existence), without really helping immigrants?
\ “Of course with the convenient help of the Happy Pill. Maybe one day the attention-seeking fake charities will hand them out for free.”
And what will happen with children of those people, if they don’t even get (state paid for) school education?
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“And what will happen with children of those people, if they don’t even get (state paid for) school education?”
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I just heard about a childhood friend of mine. He’s from a nice Jewish family, and they were always significantly better off than we were. But even as a small child, I knew that something was deeply wrong with Misha’s mother. Being around her felt like being at a nuclear waste dump.
And today I heard that Misha is now a drug dealer back in Ukraine.
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@el
I meant the “complaining platform” literally. They intend to provide helpful information to immigrants, they run websites which are full of fascists comments, and the social group they want to “protect” is ousted in about 2 seconds. They refuse to moderate the site, because they are hyperliberal and think everyone has the right to express his or her opinion. They collect donations for the support of immigrants. Technically they use the donations to support the fascists. They also organize programs like this: Last week I got a newsletter in which they invited immigrants to join their Twitter “debate” with the fascists. Yeah, great help thanks, because I don’t meet enough idiots IRL.
“And what will happen with children of those people, if they don’t even get (state paid for) school education?”
Good question. Antidepressants kill the libido btw. Maybe they’ll only do drugs, not kids.
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// Technically they use the donations to support the fascists.
How? By letting them to comment on the site? I want to understand since what you describe sounds very strange.
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“How? By letting them to comment on the site?”
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Yes, exactly, but not just that. They also expect me and others to fight with fascists (who were collected by them) in our free time to promote their useless organization. It’s not the kind of help anyone needs. The whole “fight” was deliberately made up by them to give them a reason to exist and collect money.
It’s not strange though. That’s how these “charities” work. They are never really about the immigrants, or the handicapped, or the elderly, or the homeless people, or whoever. These noble goals are always just excuses for lazy people to collect donations from well-intentioned people, then screw them up (and many of them won’t even figure it out). I can also tell stories like that (or even worse) from Hungary, so it’s not just the West. Or the “charities” who collect donations for the healthcare of African children, then they use these poor kids to test new medicines on them. Or the green charities who collect donations for reducing car traffic, then buy Audis for their own executives from the money they collected. I didn’t want to make my comment about immigration though, I just used it as an example to illustrate the fake civil society the post suggested to me. I could have used other examples as well, for example how charities for the homeless people misuse donations in Hungary, but this was the most recent example that came to my mind.
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My poignant posts on the destruction of the public university were met with stony indifference on the part of people working at that university. The suggestions on the steep inheritance tax, forced “volunteering”, the destruction of professionalism and labor unions by bored amateurs, etc are all greeted with an invariable, “But it’s more convenient this way.”
How much of that is learned helplessness?
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“How much of that is learned helplessness?”
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People surmise, correctly or incorrectly, that fighting all of this marks them as unemployable, insubordinate cranks. If they even get to that stage in their thinking, that is. There is this idea that white collar workers don’t need or want unions because they are all individually awesome or whatever and if you want a union you’re some kind of throwback blue collar loser. I’m also reminded of this:In The Name of Love. People in interviews are never supposed to say, “I’m doing this for the money” even for cashier jobs at Walmart.
Unless you are so rich that your grandparents give you money and you “live off investments” a union would help.
— When I walked out of a temp interview for a mortgage processor because I refused to sign a non-compete at the desk, I was not applauded. I was roundly mocked and called stupid by my friends and family.
— When I walked out of a work for a job that decided they wanted me to go to two different places and file two different 1099s (not disclosed in the interviews) for the princely sum of $10/hr and they couldn’t be bothered to fumigate the place let alone have a computer, they tried to avoid paying me because it was “training”. I made them pay me. My mother was horrified and told me to go beg them for another chance at this amazing opportunity.
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Most of the things I’m proposing are not even done in the workplace. Ultimately, everything comes down to what I said: nobody feels like being inconvenienced. I applaud you for standing up for your principles. I’m very used to being the only person who has anything to say about these things. It is what it is: everybody is fine with these changes.
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Do you know how many people showed up for the Mike Brown vigil at my school? Nine. We have 30% black students and are located a stone ‘s throw from Ferguson.
And it isn’t like people didn’t support us or had conflicting convictions. Would that it were so! No, most people supported us. It’s just that the weather was bad, the protests were at lunch time, it was the end of the semester – in short, it just wasn’t convenient.
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That’s incredibly disappointing.
However, most people who supported the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s didn’t end up protesting in the streets either. Most people living in the colonies did not fight in the Revolutionary War or take a stance.
The proportion of people who act to bystanders is always low. How many of your students can afford bail or have families that can or will come up with
bail?
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First of all, I’m not blaming students. I’m blaming my colleagues. Also, what does bail have to do with any of this? This was a completely peaceful, quiet vigil that implied absolutely no danger whatsoever.
We are now trying to organize a series of events, talks, seminars, etc on race on our campus. The response, once again, is minimal.
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First of all, I’m not blaming students. I’m blaming my colleagues. Also, what does bail have to do with any of this? This was a completely peaceful, quiet vigil that implied absolutely no danger whatsoever.
We are now trying to organize a series of events, talks, seminars, etc on race on our campus. The response, once again, is minimal.
Faculty? For not showing up and participating? Ok then. It is marked though how the police have overreacted to any kind of peaceful vigils with no implied danger by claiming mortal fear and throwing the book at people. I assume the risk to faculty, especially the tenured, is minimal. Although from your earlier posts it seems like a lot of faculty won’t stand up for things directly related to their self interest.
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Believe me, the only risk attendant on that activity for anybody was having a shorter lunch break. There was no police in sight.
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\ From what I understand, the website becomes a place for fascists to congregate, organize, and spread their propaganda. And it’s all done with pro-immigrant donations.
And I used to think fascists are the ones who tend to be stupid…
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These “charities” are not that stupid. They consciously use both the fascists and the immigrants for their own goals. They divide and rule. They know very well what they are doing, and they realize a HUGE profit on it. This is the fake civil society that is so prevalent these days (see my longer comment above).
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“They know very well what they are doing, and they realize a HUGE profit on it. This is the fake civil society that is so prevalent these days ”
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The majority seem to have been defeated, in America especially, by appeals to their worse natures. They actively contend against a universal health system in the US, and drag down their own public school systems by embracing ideologies against teaching. It seems that many want to become or remain sick and stupid. In America, they also want to shoot each other a lot. And there are people who say that if you vote you give a sign that you believe in the voting system, so you must never give that sign.
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There’s a contrary point of view, based on economics, that there is a breaking point. There’s a level of inequality that will produce massive civil disorder. The underpaid and maltreated professional military will throw its support to a charismatic leader who promises change. We’ve seen this before, in the Roman Republic, in Weimar Germany and in a host of other places. Why does ISIS thrive? Or Hamas? The taproot is inequality. Both Marx and Adam Smith saw a path leading to chaos. Neither realized that the course of least resistance out of chaos might be fascist.
To say “the system sucks” is to say nothing. “System” is an abstract concept; it’s as hard for people to get emotional about it as to get excited about a nanoparticle.
People don’t like to accept responsibility for their own failings. To some extent, that’s a good thing. The one who accepts total responsibility has no hope or desire. However, as I’ve said elsewhere, virtually everything in nature has multiple causes.
There are speed bumps on the road to chaos. Whites will become a minority sometime in the next 30 years. A majority of those in poverty will be white, and that will change the demographics of crime. (Those are Census Bureau projections, already published.)
Before that happens, we may reach a point at which the majority of voters are Catholic. The advocates of private white schools in the South or charter schools elsewhere may find voters shifting that funding to Catholic schools. The Protestants who want to mix religion and education may not be as pleased when Catholicism becomes the dominant voice.
I’m 60 now, and I doubt that I’ll live to see much of this, but it will happen. I suspect we will have additional problems involving water supply, quakes and meteors on top of whatever additional problems humans can create. It’s going to be interesting, but it’s not going to be pretty.
Dylan published “The Times They Are A-Changing” in 1964. That song needs to come out of cold storage. It truly means more right now than it ever did then.
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Depressing and cynical. But mostly true, I suppose. I really don’t have much to add. I think fascism is the nation-state of last resort. The masses of people can be kept in line as long as they have black beans and bread, and entertainment. So said my high school civics teacher.
One additional item that we tend to take for granted will become important and possibly decisive. Water. Any regime that can deliver and guarantee water will be powerful.
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