… people are beginning to be afraid of the state – but they are also afraid to be without the state
But I think, in fact, it is worse than that. There are many people – and you can often tell them by their fierce, defiant pronouncements that they have nothing to hide, they have done nothing wrong – who are in a dependant, abusive relationship with the state. They feel the bullying and their fear itself as evidence they are wanted and have a place in the world. Being pecked is reassurance that you are somewhere in the pecking-order. Seeing people who are outside the hierarchy of subjection as evil, a threat, and pleading one’s own inoffensiveness at every turn is a way of legitimising one’s own pigeonhole.
It is a nasty tendency. The feeble people who are trying to hide in the mainstream make up the lynchmob. And it is entirely equivalent to the morality of the prison-house, where violent gangsters are at the top and sex offenders are brutalised at the bottom, of an alternative chain of being. “You may think I’m scum, but at least I’m not one of them.”
(Hat-tip: Iain Dale, even if he was only advertising his magazine)
Well, in the US certainly there seems to be a renewed effort to regulate behavior – in essence, to treat the citizen as a minor in need of adult supervision. To the extent that the behavior of citizens fits that description, we will have earned whatever cushy prison-cradle the state shoves us into.
See “The regulated citizen”:
http://vulgarmorality.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/the-regulated-citizen/
Quite so Guy.
I am from a dirt poor background – I am, and have always been, poor.
Exactly the sort of background that the government says it “helps” with its government schools, government hospitals and so on.
Yet I do not know anyone who thinks the government schools and hospitals are good schools and hospitals.
And I know (and have always known) people on government welfare benefits – and yet not a single one of them thinks that government spending is “good for the economy” (by “supporting demand”) – a person has to be highly “educated” to believe nonsense like that.
And I do not know a single person on benefits who thinks the system is well run, or is “a hand, not a handout” or believes in any of the government lies what-so-ever. Everyone knows that the whole system causes vast damage – indeed I would go so far as to say that most people (and I mean most people on the estates and so on that I know) accept that it is driving this country to destruction.
Yet how many of these people would say “as none of this stuff works, indeed we all know it does vast harm, let us shut it down”.
Very few.
“What is the alternative?” is the, normally unspoken, objection.
And the same people know that the “compassionate Conservate alternative” of government finance of charities and other such is not a real alternative at all.
It does not deal with the problem of government spending – and “independent charitable groups” that accept government money soon become like the DSS accept that they soon get dominated by political activists.
Bringing ACORN (or such like) to Britain is not going to solve any economic or social problems.
In one way the United States has an advantage over Britain.
Its “mainline” churches are as Politically Correct and as useless (in both moral and social terms) as British churches.
But the non “mainline” churches are much stronger (and the non “mainline” faction of the Roman Catholic church is also stronger in the United States than it is in Britain) – stronger both in faith (no “when we use the word “God” we really mean the people, society as a whole”) and in action – feeding the poor, nurseing the sick, helping with their own money AND THEIR OWN HANDS.
Not just standing around saying “the government must do something” as the “mainline” churches do.
Also there is a stronger secular sense of community.
Not “community” in the sense of Marxist agitprop “Community Organizer”. But community in the sense of helping one’s neighbour – not even because of religious doctrine, but simply because it is the right thing to do.
Such behaviour is far from dead in Britain, but it is much weaker. To often here if a neighbour was starving to death (or was dying of sickness) most people would do nothing (“I should not poke my nose in someone else’s life” is not really about respecting independence, it is cop out from helping anyone).
“I did not know” – because they never bothered to find out.
Some of America is like that also – but the old traditions of community (civil society community) are less decayed in much of America than they are here.