Jenga Society
Western societies seem unstable as of late, like a tower on uncertain foundations.
There seems to be malaise across the Western world. America is in rapid decline, caught between incompetent court rule and a cult-like obsession with software. The UK suffers chronic political instability while the constituent countries are drifting apart. Germany keeps electing uncharismatic centrists who are so enamoured with their centre-right or centre-left opposition that the only real alternative is far-right nationalists. And France has both fiscal and political headaches to share, before we even get to the massive unruly protests. What has gone wrong with the West?
Right wing Americans love to complain about the West, and Europe, and often claim that the continent is on a losing streak due to its embrace of foreigners. Left wing Europeans love to complain that billionaires and support for Israel has ruined everything. In reality, what we are seeing is the inevitable outcome of a decades long process run amok.
The societies we know now were created by and for the troubles of the sixties and seventies. Inflation, street protests, lacking growth, suffocating bureaucracy, and too much union power were identified as the causes for the hardships of the decade or decade and a half between 1968 and when neo-liberalism really started to gain ground. As Simon Reid-Henry explains in his excellent ‘Empire of Democracy’, those were tough times, and something really needed to be done.
What was done, sooner in some places than in others, and more thoroughly in some places than others, was to move away from the politico-economic system which had been in place since the post-war period began. In it stead, a new political economy was constructed which placed fewer requirements and burdens on companies, and changed the expectations about how and what the government was supposed to do. The new hotness became efficiency, at the cost of resiliency and redundancy.
In 1979 a more efficient state was badly needed, but all the gains from a focus on efficiency have been realised at least a decade ago. Western governments have for my whole political life lacked the kind of fat the neo-liberals sought to trim. On French radio, a student who joined the protests was asked why. His complaints included a lack of insulation at his school, and that there were rats in the building. There is no efficiencies to realise, no fat to trim.
With Reagan’s generation of neo-liberals dead and buried, and Blair’s at or above retirement age, there are not a lot of people who remember with urgency the kinds of issues the neo-liberal movement was a response to. Nowadays their solutions, ideologies, and premises are handed down to people who have known nothing else. Meanwhile, the total victory of neo-liberalism has left few who have different ideas not built with neo-liberal assumptions. Even outsider parties tend to identify problems, and ethnic groups to blame, but stop there.
If you’ll permit me a florid metaphor, the neo-liberal project has worked a bit like a game of Jenga. The tower is built ever taller by removing the redundancies on lower levels. At first it makes little difference, but with every new layer built on top, the base gets more and more unstable. Eventually you are forced to take out one piece which makes the whole edifice rock backwards and forwards, on the edge of falling over. That is the stage some of the Western countries are at, like France with its awfully mismanaged schools and America with its increasingly incompetent government.
It is up to us, and our leaders whether the tower will come down or not. But to improve things we need to dispose with previous assumptions and stock responses. Voters hate the wobbly tower, but removing pieces will never fix this problem, only and old and thoroughly fixed problem of a short tower.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about GPUs here or the rest of my writings here. I also have a section for longer reads I call essays here, I particularly recommend my series called The Bird & The Technoking exploring Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and its political and cultural implications. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by Joshua Miranda from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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