The way I see it, since the turn of the millennium, the biggest impact to the world and the way the majority of people live is caused by greed, maybe it has always been that way.
In 2007-2008 we the world was rocked by a financial crisis. Many people lost their homes and their lives were changed abruptly and significantly. What happened to the bankers that caused that crisis due to risky financial practices? How many of those bankers went to prison or were punished? Many bankers get paid even more now than they did then, and the public has had to bear the cost in bailing out the failed financial practices of banks. Not very many bankers were punished for their risky practices.
Who is bailing out the public in our time of austerity? Did we (the public) cause the financial difficulties that we find ourselves in as a nation? Unfortunately there is no one to bail us out, and we didn’t cause this mess, except maybe by proxy – by letting bankers invest money to boost our economy, give us better returns on investments and boost our pension funds. All these things can be done sustainably if managed carefully, often gaining modest returns as opposed to staggering gains.
The problem is, greed – we want more, we want it now, we want it to continue forever. We have a warped view of what is possible and sustainable, and our greed blinds us to the downside of the actions we take, sanction or even turn a blind eye to as a nation. Not only that, but we push under the carper our nationalistic and societal greed, and assign the blame to the situation we are into people who aren’t even guilty. Thus refugees and immigrants get the blame and as the 2016 Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump (not to mention the rise fo the far right in Europe) show, we seem to have, as a society broadly agreed that becoming more nationalistic and less tolerant of foreign people, the other, those who don’t belong will improve our situation.
The problem is, not only is that a false premise, but our system that exploits weaker countries, extracting their wealth through conquest or corporation, disrupting the lives of many people abroad through war, meddling in regional affairs, raping the land for resource and marginalizing the native inhabitants of the people who live there, is the very system that causes people to want to leave their countries and seek refuge of some kind where we are. It’s a double whammy, of “we can take what you own, but you will never get the crumbs at our table” or “what’s mine is mine and what’s your’s is mine” .
Give two families all they need to live, and they can co-exist without any relationship characterised by dependency. If one family were to exploit its neighbour and own its neighbours resources somehow, it wouldn’t be long before a relationship based on dependency is established.
In my eyes the rise of nationalism reflects not only the fact that we are blinded by our own greed, but we are falling away from the principles of the equality of all races and people. It also reflects the fact that our democracy is failing, because our democracy is essentially toothless and unjust. We have the power to vote, but as soon as a government gets into power, they make all the decisions on our behalf, even if it seems that the majority of people in the country do not agree with their decisions.
We’ve seen this in the Iraq War, and I wonder what would have happened if instead of the government almost unilaterally bailing out the banks which arguably led to this period of austerity, if they had put to the people what should happen in a vote. Maybe we would have seen market volatility for years and the wealth of financial institutions disrupted while the state remained treasonably untouched. Maybe we could have avoided austerity, Brexit and the knee jerk reaction that foreigners are to blame for everything.
It could be the case that the real problem with the world is not that more countries aren’t democratic, but that the countries that are democratic do not practice a deep enough form of democracy to make that democracy truly effective. Greed corrupts democracy, and in a sense the two are at war, and what we are seeing is that the checks and balances that should exist in society to ensure justice and fairness are being eroded and silenced. We have reached 2017, and now 8 people on the planet own as much wealth as 3.6 billion of the worlds inhabitants. Well, that is going to be the natural state for that hybrid leviathan of democracy and capitalism fueled by greed, a selfish union that devours under the pretence of equality, justice and freedom.
