Liberal policy: The social deficit and death

Social dysfunction amongst the West’s underclass and middle class can be traced back to all three facets of the problem.  Under liberalism’s reign five conditions have been imposed on western culture and the effect has been perversely transformational.  Those conditions are:

·      The promotion and defence of liberalism’s world view creed, using the oppressive brown-shirted politics of political correctness and abuses of democratic process.[1]

·      The implementation of social policies and educational strategies consistent with those doctrines – creating dependency and state monopoly controls through direct governance and regulation.

·      An escalation of commitment to those policies in the face of mounting evidence of the harm they are causing.

·      The ideological commitment to big government and big business, despite all the evidence against their instrumental value.

·      A relentless campaign, capitalising on internal Church weaknesses, to discredit its ability to provide balancing perspectives on liberal-corporate actions.

The thin-world, empty-self conditions, evolved from liberalism’s doctrines and policy, has exacted a high social cost, as the true meaninglessness of a self-centred, live for now, consumerist world, takes hold.  The empty-self characteristics now endemic under the liberal inspired Toynbee Effect are excessively individualistic, adolescent, narcissistic, passive and sensate. Adolescence is now carrying on into what used to be regarded as the fully adult years. Critical and rational thinking, in the absence of any higher meaning to life, is replaced with busy lives lived to meet self-centred existential expectations. Serious issues are reduced to cliché-level examination, or arguments. Those in the Church have largely succumbed to this empty way of filling in the years as well.  Our liberal and corporatist elite have the blood and ruined lives of millions on their hands. Their legacy is on a scale that rivals Stalin, Hitler and Mao, all of whom, like most liberals, believed they were doing good – with the attendant ‘sacrifices’ that had to be made – by others, not them.  There is also a more pagan element. Just as ancient cultures used to sacrifice babies for instrumental ends, liberals have inaugurated the same practice. In this and other ways they have embraced the politics of death, adding new meaning to Rummel’s democide.  The next table catalogues the more obvious examples of liberalism’s social cost and its corresponding toll in lives.

 The social cost – Liberalism’s social deficit

·      The general collapse of the family.

·      The demise of the stabilising and economic benefits of fatherhood.

·      The heavy burden of social welfare taxation, with massive transfers of wealth from productive to unproductive sectors.

·      A leap in wealth and class inequality.

·      Committing future generations to national indebtedness for short-term wasteful programmes.

·      Narcissistic sexual promiscuity, violence and sex crimes.

·      Drug and alcohol abuse.

·      A huge expansion in the prison population.

·      Social welfare dependency and the rise of various underclasses.

·      The stalled and backward momentum of democracy and human freedoms.

·      The popularity of pornography

·      Opened gates to a lower age of consent, incest and pederasty.

·      Lowered educational standards and respect for education.

·      The over-emphasis on rights over responsibility, leading to unnecessarily high levels of crime, promiscuity, prostitution, substance abuse and anti-social behaviours.

·      Functional illiteracy and discipline issues as a by-product of statist education with all its downstream effects on society.

·      The loss of individual rights in free speech and autonomous life choices before political correctness and government over-regulation.

·      Democracies that allow people to vote, but robs them of any real ability to collectively determine their nation’s policies.

·      The rise of narcissistic generations intent on self-fulfilment before long term social responsibility.

·      The increasing need to work at the expense of quality time with family.

·      Lost property rights enabled by heavy-handed town and country planning regulations.

  Liberalism’s policies – death, disease and dysfunction

·      The killing of millions of unborn children, robbing them of their right to life and creating huge downstream economic problems associated with labour markets, skill shortages and immigration.

·      Upward trends in mental health conditions, particularly depression, anxiety and bi-polar disorders.

·      High levels of family related crime including murder and physical / sexual abuse.

·      High instances of rape, violent crime and murder generally.

·      The creation of mores and systems that make life as a child unsafe both emotionally and physically.

·      A massive increase in divorce with identified links to poverty, poor health, crime, suicide & educational failure.

·      Drug and alcohol related death, crime and anti-social behaviour.

·      The emergence of HIV/AIDS and the consequential reduction in the life expectancy of ‘gays’.

·      A soaring increase in sexually transmitted diseases (110 million people in the U.S. alone).

·      High rates of suicide and self-harm, particularly amongst youth.

·      Multiple murders performed by serial ‘Columbine style’ killers.

·      An epidemic of school yard violence, bullying and disrespect for teachers, parents and police.

·      The moral degradation of the pornography industry & the use of graphic violence as entertainment.

·      Increases in endemic killer diseases that have their origins in materialistic lifestyles & government policy failures.

·      Serious multicultural weaknesses in responding to Islam, leaving the West exposed to cultural collapse and terrorism.

The statistics in areas that point to social dysfunction have been trending upward from a low base 50-plus years ago.  There can be no doubt that the reasons for  increasing dysfunction in areas like crime, poverty, mental health, education, welfare dependency and the decline in the family can be sheeted back to liberalism’s rejection of traditional values and classical liberalism.[1]  The salve on the wounds created by the liberal love affair with ideological social engineering has been material progress, new technologies and the ready availability of credit.  The banking and corporate world have collaborated with liberal politicians to mask the real effects of liberalism’s failed religion by providing cheap goods, mass entertainment and almost unlimited product choice – as if they were a substitute for human nobility and freedom.  But economic shocks, made inevitable by neo-liberalism and the mounting cost of maintaining liberalism’s failed social policies, prove materialism and the false security found in plenty, come at a high price.  If a western world wants to survive under liberal hegemony it will have to give up its freedoms and accept producer/consumer and political serfdom, or return to pre liberal-era values. 

Corporatism and the social deficit

Corporatists’ reliance on usury (interest on loans) and incessant appeals to buy and consume have added immeasurably to the social problems caused by liberalism.  Between 1950 and 1986 alone the amount spent on advertising increased by more than 500%![2]  The gap between purchasing power and total production has progressively degraded the average person’s ability to make ends meet and overcome indebtedness, while unnecessarily stressing national infrastructures.  The automobile and oil industry hands on the costs of air pollution.  The financial and banking sector’s practices pauper people with all the attendant health and social costs caused by this kind of stress, but the financial sector is not held responsible.  As Moxton explains in The End of Progress, our unregulated market system rewards those who can produce the cheapest product by transferring as much of the cost of the product as possible to society.  These costs are what economists call negative externalities.

The 2008 global financial crisis highlighted the way the financial sector exploits vulnerable people.  The concentration of wealth and power abetted by the corporate world’s close alignment with governments and with the international money lending infrastructure takes moral hazard and provider capture to unprecedented levels.  Despite corporate globalisation and incessant growth over decades the catalogue of social dysfunction caused by indebtedness and the constant pressure to produce more, buy more and work harder all but eclipses the benefits:

• Whole sectors of constructive and productive work in the West have been lost to low wage economies and mass producing technologies, without any thought given to the effect on peoples and communities.  Since the start of the industrial revolution human communities have been sacrificed on the altar of profit, for the benefit of a few.

• Education has been turned into a labour market training ground, rather than a system for human development.  Cultivating the whole person with a fully rounded education has been subsumed in a production line education system that teaches people to fit into a feudal style hierarchy of workers under corporate and bureaucratic control.

• The health sector, despite all its magnificent achievements, has been made a handmaiden of corporate success.[3]  Thanks to advances in hygiene, knowledge and medical skills our hospitals should be small, or under-utilised.  Instead they bulge at the seams.  Diseases almost unheard of 100 years ago now ravage our populations; heart disease, stroke, various types of cancer, asthma in children, child cancers, dementia, chronic depression and diabetes are the most well-known.  Medical prescriptions and days off work for illness are now higher than they were in the 1950s.  Study after study point the finger of blame at higher life stress, lower quality foods, chemicals in processed food and other environmental hazards.  Paradoxically, the health costs of the grow-or-die economic dogma are borne, not by its corporate and neo-liberal champions, but by the tax-paying victims of its perversity.

• Civil society itself is under intense pressure.  Oskar Gruenwald describes the situation thus: “…the bitter fruits of postmodern culture (see definition in Pt.1/8) devoid of normative standards – emotional imbalance, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, infidelity, lack of trust, broken marriages and broken selves that can lead to violence or suicide – now afflict all classes and races in America, undermining families and communities and deconstructing civil society.”[4]

No fault divorce laws, sexual permissiveness, abortion on demand and materialism encouraged behaviours like adultery, delayed or forgone family formation and indebtedness on a scale that attacks the natural foundation of an advanced and ordered civilisation.  Destructive behaviours follow as a natural consequence.  Crime, self-harm, suicide, debt-slavery, gender tensions and a careless disregard for others have all followed as a natural consequence.  

[1] After an exponential growth in crime since the 1960’s the official statistics now indicate significant decline, but not in violent crime types and not to pre-liberal levels.  Unfortunately, there are early signs that this decline may not last and doubts surround the ‘dark figure’ – the amount of crime that goes unreported.

[2] Douthwaite, p.153.

[3] Life expectancy in the UK and some small Caribbean states grew by similar amounts despite the fact that the island’s GDP ranged between 25% and 50% of the UK’s (Douthwaite, p.106).

[4] Oskar Gruenwald 2014 paper, The Promise of Interdisciplinary studies: Re-Imaging the University.  Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies XXVI 2014:1-28.

[1] In New Zealand many of the major policy changes made over the last 40 years were forced through against public opinion.  I dare say other Western societies have experienced much the same.  Long-term conditioning processes have led western societies to accept the changes (like no fault divorce) and even regard them as necessary.