The problems of the United States, and of some other countries in the West—maybe most, are deeper than are usually acknowledged. I’ll start with this claim:
Crimea is more truly part of the Russian realm than California is part of the Anglo-American realm.
American leaders are ignorant, functionally stupid, and maybe innately stupid; they are the enforcers of a system which doesn’t allow for important reforms inside the US if those reforms don’t match the stated goals and beliefs of the mobs organized by those leaders, call the members of those mobs social justice warriors or cultural-Marxists if you will. Some of the American leaders may agree with those strange goals and irrational beliefs, but nearly all of them are dependent upon that mob to keep better men and women out of office and to move forward with projects maybe intended to consolidate the Empire and its power-center in Washington. In fact, we become less of a coherent country each month as the pace of processes of diversification and imposition of alleged social-justice tear the country apart and increase the distrust which is incompatible with such programs as national medical insurance or welfare or the other traditional programs pushed by most big-government advocates in the 20th century.
These American leaders are struggling to hold onto power though they can’t deal with the domestic problems the United States faces, indeed the entire West is in trouble for similar reasons; the centrifugal forces in Scotland and Catalonia and northern Italy are not identical to those in California (and maybe other regions or states of the US) but they are quite similar. I don’t think we’re in some sort of “Small is Beautiful” phase of history—human communities of loose sorts will continue to grow from more tightly knit local communities—call it distributivism or (anti-?)federalism if you will. The proximate, though certainly not ultimate, cause of the deep fragmentation of the Western countries and regions is the incompetence of their leaders as I discussed in my previous posting: Not a Deep-State But a Chaotic Battleground Where Barbarians Fight for Power and Wealth. For those who wish to get a still different perspective on this issue, see one of my earlier essays: Why Does a Developed Country (the United States) Have a Gangster/Warlord Ruling Elite More Suited to a Rising Barbarian Country?.
The underlying causes of our immediate domestic problems seem to be three from a certain perspective:
- The United States and the United Kingdom (other Western countries—???) operate under a system which I think to be, at least, something like rentier capitalism: see Rentier Capitalism—Veblen in the 21st century by Michael Hudson (economist).
- The established or existing middle-class (loosely defined), which is the most important element in nearly all modern societies, has a decreasing stake in a game which seems to benefit mostly the rentiers and some clients, often imported, of public and private social agencies as well as a mob of sorts made up of some quite unimpressive members of a pseudo-progressive intelligentsia.
- There seems to be fewer possibilities each year for the children of the existing middle-class to find their own places in the middle-class or for the less prosperous workers to join the middle-class.
The second and third items in the above list can be subsumed under the first, but I find it easier to understand these ideas if they are unbundled and I assume this is true of others. If nothing else, this sort of constant re-packaging of ideas dealing with complex aspects of reality will act against the mind’s hardening into literalistic attitudes.
We have the spectacle of a ruling class with such limited understanding of their own particular problems, a still more limited understanding of the problems of others and of greater communities, as to be committing self-serving acts of a suicidal type, as if they were teenagers slashing themselves or taking handsful of pills to “show the world I can be a responsible and freestanding adult. You should be listening to me and doing what I tell you to do.”
In fact, the ruling class of the United States and probably those of other Western countries understand something isn’t working but they aggravate the problem of the incoherence in each Western country and the West as a whole, by waging war upon major blocks of their own citizens (the “deplorables”) and by bringing more alien peoples into the failing countries of the West.
Maybe we can suggest to these rulers that they look up Asabiyyah which is an Arabic word originally meaning:
social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness and sense of shared purpose, and social cohesion.
The great Tunisian philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun) abstracted and refined it to mean:
the fundamental bond of human society and the basic motive force of history.
We Americans have no such thing as asabiyyah. Our leaders, like unto those in Orwell’s 1984, are trying to create something like loyalty of the citizens toward themselves and the increasingly criminal American government by fighting wars against alleged enemies overseas. Matters are, of course, more complex and more complicated than this—no doubt confusing our leaders still more—but those who wish to understand need to work things out layer by layer before trying to produce a more global understanding; trying to jump to simple understandings will simply lead to literalism, a hardening of the brain-arteries.
The criminality of the American government is mostly restricted to the gangs of small percentages of civil servants and appointees and military personnel, aided and abetted by our elected representatives and external `forces’ on Wall St and Madison Ave and in various corporations. And public intellectuals and Hollywood filmmakers and others. A lot of people but only a small percentage of the American population. I don’t have a feel for matters in the UK, France, etc. Of course, the system works so that morally well-ordered human beings might be helping advance the causes of the criminals among us but currently concentrated in the American centers of power; for example, retired CIA officers have made it clear the criminals in that agency are a small percentage of the total workforce and likely a small percentage of covert operatives—most covert activities are criminal at some level, but sane national leaders know how to play games with `normal’ ways of stealing each other’s secrets and with the results of being caught.
In any case, these criminals apparently have no feel for their own country. They have no strong bonds to the country they rule—not even the military men, so far as we can tell. They are struggling to control what they don’t understand and apparently hold the strange (Roveian?) idea that they can simply move forward and do something to impose their will on the world. They don’t have to gather their breath and then learn a little about the country they rule or about Syria or the African countries subject to a stealth invasion by the American military. These leaders who know that will can overcome mind and muscle alike can just make decisions and take strong actions—for example, to kill more innocent people in Syria and to free the criminal covert operatives in the CIA to smuggle more drugs and weapons and to create more terrorists groups which seem to have ideas about reality very similar to those of the Bushes and the Clintons and Barack Obama and all those wonderful folk who’ve been in charge of the FBI and CIA in recent years.