Weekly Musings 46 11-27-11
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A Rising Sense of Betrayal
As I ponder the dissolution of the Status Quo arrangements that are widely viewed as inviolable and permanent, I have been thinking about the emotion of betrayal as a key driver of the frustration which is beginning to bubble up, and which I expect to reach a low boil in 2012 as the wheels fall off the "recovery."
Betrayal seems to cover two distinct but overlapping emotions. One is the betrayal of trust experienced by someone who has been conned or misled by an intimate: a business partner who discovers their partner has absconded with the company funds, or a spouse who discovers his/her mate is cheating. The betrayer must maintain the facade of trustworthiness to avoid detection.
A second variety of betrayal is more generalized, for example, the sense of being betrayed by institutions that you served faithfully. This is the sort of betrayal that I think is becoming widespread in America.
Examples of this sense of betrayal are:
"I went to college with the expectation this would guarantee me a decent job, and this turned out to be false."
"I did my duty and gutsed it out for years, and now the institution has kicked me in the teeth."
"I faithfully pay my taxes, and yet the services I'm supposed to get for all that money are being cut even as my taxes keep going up."
"I went to the doctor and they charged me $2,000 for some tests that aren't covered by my insurance. What a ripoff."
The common thread is that an implicit or explicit "social contract" that required obedience, servitude, sacrifice, etc. in exchange for some benefit has been violated or broken. "I did my part, but they're not doing theirs" might be a good summary of this sense of betrayal.
As the Status Quo overpromised entitlements, benefits and "special relations" across the entire spectrum of American life, then we can predict that virtually everyone will feel betrayed as their piece of the social contract is trimmed, cut or modified.
There is a critical difference between these two kinds of betrayal, and it may shed some light on the social dissolution ahead.
In the first kind, the promise made is absolute, not contingent: we agree to share and share alike, we agree to be monogamous, etc. In other words, there are no cases in these contracts which allow for cheating or lies.
Our social contract has a very few such absolutes, and these are in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence's claim to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Some of our collective frustration and betrayal arise from a sense that these rights are being encroached or mooted by an increasingly powerful and unreachable Central State. But much of it is arises from entitlements that were always contingent, but which were presented as absolutes.
This misprepresentation is the core of our rising sense of betrayal. The Central State would be well served to "come clean" and stop trying to con us that all these hundreds of trillions of dollars in entitlements will ever be paid in today's dollars.
We would also be well-served if all the implicit contracts--that a college degree carries some sort of implicit guarantee of middle-class income, for example--are also explicitly identified as contingent.
In other words, when you promise the moon to get someone's approval, and then you cannot deliver the moon, then they feel betrayed, no matter how impossible the "contract" might have been.
Betrayal is a very difficult emotion to deal with and get past; the sooner we dispense with the false promises of "absolutes," the sooner we can let go of our collective sense of betrayal and move to a healthier and more realistic assessment.
Dissolution Is Sacred
I had an interesting conversation the other day with a friend who is extremely well-versed in the Greek classics and Greek history. He touched on a number of points which have reverberated around my mind since.
One is that Plato saw dissolution, like death, as sacred. Another is that Plato's "Republic" was an attempt to systemize an idealized reflection of the soul in the political realm.
For better or worse, we are fated to live through an era of dissolution and transformation in the decades ahead, and I find it interesting to consider that dissolution of the Status Quo as a necessary and "secular-sacred" process. In this view, it is not a failure, or an embarrassment, it is simply a natural cycle that offers up a rich source of reflection and meaning.
If the body politic is a reflection of the soul, then what can we say about the Soul of America, Europe, China, et al.? Clearly, the soul of America is ill and conflicted, and perhaps we can draw a "diagnosis" from another classical Greek idea.
At least some thinkers in classical Greece saw three basic classes in society: an aristocracy, an intelligensia and the people.
Since the wealthy were presumed to be less motivated to loot the public coffers than the poor citizens, they were entrusted with safeguarding the State and public good.
The intelligensia's primary task was to frame the problems and challenges facing society and the body politic.
The people's job was to decide the issues once they had been properly framed.
If we think of the upper class in the U.S. as a sort of informal aristocracy, we find that looting is now their primary goal, regardless of how much wealth and power they have already amassed. We also find that the quality of leadership emerging from this class has declined; the political and social "leadership" has been reduced to self-serving buffoons, the deeply ignorant, the fearful (fearful of losing their slice of the loot and power), those lacking any moral compass, bought-and-paid-for toadies, seedy oligarchs and the superficial.
The intelligensia has also failed to contextualize our deepest problems, instead choosing the obscurity of academic arcana or repeating the same old tired cargo-cult myths of past eras (such as "aggregate demand" or the usual left-right circus acts).
The people have chosen poorly, selecting those who rattle sabers and over-promise everything to everybody, all by shunting the costs onto future generations who are not yet old enough to vote the scoundrels out of office.
In other words, every segment of American society has failed to perform their minimal duties adequately. They all act solely out of self-service.
This is how the "center" fails to hold, and how society fractures into warring camps demanding their share of the spoils remain sacrosanct. This is dissolution, and we have ringside seats to the sacred process.
From Left Field
"A general guideline these days is that people are rewarded when they can do things that take trained judgment and skill — things, in other words, that can’t be done by computers or lower-wage workers in other countries.
"Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill — charm, by the way, counts — that employers value. But there’s also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.
"The new rules have effectively removed both the floor and the ceiling. It’s easier for some to make a lot more money and for others to fall much further behind. That has meant a huge increase in inequality. The top 1 percent of families now makes 26 times the average of the other 99 percent (the ratio was 11 to 1 in 1979)."
Serious problem here in the US--too much stuff.
"To be successful, keep looking tanned, live in an elegant building (even if you're in the cellar), be seen in smart restaurants (even if you nurse one drink) and if you borrow, borrow big." Aristotle Onassis
Thanks for reading--
charles
