The modern world's first failed state

[mdlbear]

Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
The Great Lesson of the 20th Century — and How America Never Learned It
--Umair Haque

... is a very disturbing article. Hat-tip to thnidu.

When I say “the modern world”, what do you think of? Probably a great city somewhere, with broad avenues, spacious parks, art and culture, old museums, people buzzing about, public transport thrumming.

Now think of America. People dying for a lack of insulin. Young people who can’t afford to start families of their own. The average person living perched right at the edge of ruin, one missed paycheck, one illness, one emergency away from disaster. Kids massacring one another at schools. Infants on trial. Politicians who proclaim “God is a white supremacist!” An endless and gruesome list of stuff that’s beginning to put the dark ages to shame.

Here’s what I think. American never joined the modern world. It’s the modern world’s first failed state. It became something like a weird, bizarre dystopia, replete with falling life expectancy, hand-to-mouth living, relentless and legendary cruelty, instead of a truly modern society. But why?

...

Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.

But the question we still haven’t answered is why. Why did America never join the modern world? The answer goes something like this. Americans never learned the greatest lesson history taught. That poverty causes ruin.

You see, in America, poverty was seen — and still is — as a kind of just dessert. A form of deserved punishment, for being lazy, for being foolish, for being slow. For being, above all, weak — because only the strong should survive.

...

So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial. History is teaching us the same lesson, all over again. Americans might not even learn it the second time around. But the world, laughing in horror, in astonishment, in bewilderment, should.

What was that about those who fail to learn from history? Welcome to the 19th Century.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

That's the impression people can get from reading the headlines. When I look around at real people, I see them doing reasonably well, building successful lives, often being quite happy. There are problems, and some are getting worse, but we're hardly in a state of collapse.

[stardreamer]

When you look around at the real people that you see. You're living in a bubble, and if you'd ever both to look outside it you'd see much more poverty, desperation, and despair.

Hell, just on my friendslists here and on FB, I see people who are barely hanging on by the skin of their teeth -- usually because they're disabled, can't work, with limited access to health care. That group happens to include a fair number of filkers, which suggests to me that you're not seeing them even though they're real people too.

As to the state of collapse... when it hits, it's going to come down like a hammer with no good way to stop it, just as our current slide into 1930s fascism is doing.

[mdlbear]

>>people who are barely hanging on by the skin of their teeth<<

Which includes me and Colleen. Our cash flow is negative, and by roughly the sum of what Medicare doesn't cover of Colleen's insanely expensive medication (which costs over five times as much here as in South Africa -- I looked it up), and what we pay her (very part-time) caregiver (which Medicare doesn't cover at all because someone who can actually get out of bed and walk ten feet to the bathroom with a walker isn't sick enough to require help). Which is why I'm looking for a job at an age where people in first-world countries are long since retired.

It's true we made some decisions that turned out in hindsight to be disastrously wrong. That's kind of the point -- in a country with an adequate social safety net, we'd still be okay.

And we're doing way better than most people in this country.

[gingicat]

Usually I try to avoid interacting you, but... you live in an area with a dearth of social services, and surely you go out to the supermarket and other stores. Just the clerks you interact with are living paycheck to paycheck, let alone people in your extended social circle. I haven’t had a hotel room at a science fiction convention or been able to fly anywhere in well over a decade.

Often people who say this simply don’t see those outside their bubble, subconsciously considering them nonpeople. I certainly hope you are not so betraying the people around you, who are swiftly losing the supports that could keep them from starving or freezing while hunting for the next job.

[madfilkentist]

It isn't just a bubble. Facts and numbers show that people are doing reasonably well.

I've noticed how people fall lockstep into one fantasy after another, but this "failed state" one really boggles me. A failed state is one where governing institutions become non-functional, where normal civic institutions don't work. The claim that the United States is "the modern world's first failed state" implies that it has disintegrated more thoroughly than the USSR around 1990, Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Iraq in 2003-5.

What I've seen for responses here doesn't attempt to back up that extreme claim, but instead attempts shaming. You should have figured out that that technique doesn't work with me. It's not that I consider you a non-person. It's that you're giving me non-arguments.

The "failed state" fantasy isn't a harmless one. It implies that the normal channels of persuasion and legal processes don't suffice. What courses of action will this delusion lead to? I don't know. I'm hoping it's a current fad of rhetoric that will succumb to a more harmless one next week, but it could be a sign of reckless actions to come.

Even if it's just noise, it leads more people to think (with reason) that the lunatic left is detached from reality and that the only alternative available to them is populist authoritarianism.

[stardreamer]

It's the lunatic right which is detached from reality and falling down the rabbit hole of fascism. You may be content to see America become the bad guys of WWIII, but we're not.

And yes, you live in a bubble, and you've been doing so for at least 20 years, and you bloody well SHOULD be ashamed. You're consigning real people to poverty and death because rfeality doesn't match your ideology, and that's definitely a shameful thing.

I don't know why I bother -- you don't think I'm a real person either.

[mdlbear]

The US is not a "failed state" according to the list of failing states (which you can find in Wikipedia -- I'll post the link in a follow-up). However, in a very real sense, it is failing its people and has totally failed to become a "modern", first-world country.

[mama_kestrel]

The other consideration is that for the most part, even for those who are struggling, it doesn't show. It's not like it's something dropped in casual conversation with an acquaintance. You don't see the "which bill do we pay" discussions - or fights, more often. You don't see the tears of pure embarrassment as someone goes to the township trustee because they can't pay the heat is about to be turned off in the dead of winter in a nice house in a normal suburban neighborhood. All those things happen behind closed doors. So while it appears that everything is normal, and people are doing well enough, it's frequently a sham.