¡No Pasarán!: Your Fungible Freedoms

Your Fungible Freedoms

posted by Joe @ 11:59

Another way of saying "share the goods, comrade" is all they're capable of coming up with.

It is time to think about how to prepare democratic society for the significant stress that adjusting to climate change will cause, and how to guarantee political participation in a difficult period. In Germany, citizens are already beginning to doubt that they live in the best of all political worlds. According to a study conducted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, almost one in three people hold the view that democracy is functioning badly; astoundingly, 60 per cent of eastern Germans were of this opinion. There is a growing impression that the political system is not equipped to deal with the "big issues" such as climate change, global justice, and demographic development. In other words, democracy is no longer "delivering" and is lacking an essential pillar of its credibility: output legitimacy.

The fear of vague ecological something-or-other is in the view of the great European minds, just another necessary wedge issue/crobar to carve away at democracy by banal rulemaking and use dirigism and subsidies to place the role of work and industry under state control.

Unremarkable to see that these unremarkable minds also believe that measure to control the runaway march to an absolute welfare state, and any number of class-warfare based complaints are some sort of justification for the dismantling of individual freedoms too.

The lack of importance the individual has to the people who spout these theories, and the casualness with which they discuss investing in central governments something closer to absolute power might seem to make a cliche out of these folks, but it's largely true when you read what they write. It's not wooly-headed to plainly say just how much people like this seem to resign themselves to concepts of governance consistence with dictatorship, and sad to see that they show no scepticism of absolutism and to the end of political pluralism at all. I suppose that like the East German regime they will willing to accept the nominal existence of more than one political party for a few years, so longs as they're all the same.

From communication management to democratic skill

It is not hard to understand that those affected by such situations feel themselves abandoned by the state, and often from democracy as well. One of the main reasons is precisely that the state has not ceased to profess willingness to provide care that in reality it can no longer afford. Thus, for example, the increasingly loud demands that low and middle income groups receive compensation for dramatically rising energy costs are likely to be disappointed. No democracy in the world that can vouch for this if resources become scarcer and therefore more expensive; moreover, if democracies wish to retain trust, paradoxically they must admit that they cannot do so. It is possible to imagine what will happen if rising energy costs result in a decline in living standards even for middle income groups, with low earners no longer able to heat their homes

But to find the true ignorance evident in their view, they cant help but forsee disorder in the public communication of relief measures to salve the people where strict controls are trying to do what free-markets can accomplish without manipulation. In wondering just how it is that central governments will be able to tell those "classes" who will demand relief from the rising cost of energy which will be for their own good, they see a "communication management problem". To translate that into plain language: they see the need to propagandize.

In the search for actors that possess or could acquire democratic skills, the gaze falls less and less upon professional politics. Some see the chance for the revival of social participation in active consumer responsibility; consumer rights lends itself well to learning democratic skills through apparently trivial questions such as: "What can I do so that our school is supplied by the local organic dairy?" According to this approach, analogous issues of climate and environmental protection open up new opportunities for political engagement that connect local and regional agendas with global ones.

That's interesting: they don't sem to want democracy, a social form that permits multiple views, debate, and an environment that permits independant study and opinion. They want people with "visible democratic skills" to all make the same kind of decisions and push for the same kinds of initiatives.

The seeming smallness of their motives is as stunningly ignorant as the unthinking ease with which they will concider such a huge and sweeping disposal of the idea that overbearing and invasive state regulation of society is somehow harmless and inherently good.

You simply could not get any more naive about history or myopic in identifying the scale of the problem that they're telling people that they want to solve. Rampling around for yet more, the credit crisis (naturally "caused by greed",) is mined for yet more proof that what the world needs is a veneer of participatory government, so that the real business of an elite within NGOs making themselves a meal-ticket out of the emotional anxiety of the polulation and a few flawed threds of science can trump all else - private of public.

We've already seen the regurgitation of the notion of "making the new socialist man" by way of the use of guilt over social, political, and environmental matters - benignly in the promotion of "new attitudes and lifestyle" which combine a trained non-resistence to anything that looks like a public stunt for "social-justice", or "saving the earth". I only wonder what other revisions of the discredited authoritarian manifestos have been left out.

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Saturday, November 29, 2008

Your Fungible Freedoms