I wonder where we will draw the line with the economic precariousness of life?
Have you tried to look for a job right now, it’s fucking abysmal.
The educated are over-qualified (or under qualified with particular skills), and the under-qualified are, well, under-qualified.
Especially now, you’re hearing that hundreds, even thousands, are applying for the same poorly paid shit jobs.
So what are we supposed to do? Could it conceivable of people refusing to work and finding new ways of existence? What if the upper/middle-middle classes, frustrated by the things which have plagued their inferiors for decades, simply gave up on participating in society?
What if, instead of waiting for a retirement date, they chose early to buy land and farm their own goods? What if their children forgo university and use their trust fund to buy this land. Land again, proving to be the most valuable resource. Not education, that never was.
Maybe we could see a space open up for the lower-classes. The middle class is becoming fatigued and maybe this is necessary. Maybe they need to become the transcendent class, which using it’s privilege, can choose to move out of society. Maybe this will precipitate a greater advancement for us at the bottom?
I don’t know, and this is not to push praise onto the middle class and the government for potentially opening up this new space. This wasn’t a success of the economy or the system, it’s one of their great failures that the middle class, the only demographic they need to worry about, could be pushed to its limits (which are much narrower than how far the lower classes have been pushed), and this could lead to a newer society with more opportunity for those at the bottom.
It would be their catastrophic error; sacrificing those who have already been lost unnecessarily through state and neoliberal economic cruelty, and accidentally leading to the rise of a new middle class. They wouldn’t want it, but they would take the credit, naturally. They just need them to forget of the troubles of the past, and convince this new group that it was worth it – that they are worthy of their damned votes.
These are a lot of hypotheticals, but it’s interesting to consider. What if the state was so inept and unable to deal with the economic crisis, the superstructure which we served was pushed all the way around and it actually led to growth. It had to capitalise on something, so it finally started to capitalise on failure; making one pathogen attack another nasty intruder because the former needs to survive at any cost. That would almost be the perfect metaphor for how this cosmic melodrama could perpetuate.
It feels a little bit like dabbling in accelerationism, which I hesitate to do. No less because I don’t understand it, as well as not really wanting to align myself with it. I think there is a moral duty to not let society to decay to the point that good may come from it, as it would almost feel like the point of building a society would be lost along the way. If it can only improve, why bother in the first place? Why not degenerate right now or just fuel the fire and make it breakdown quicker?
Sorry for the rant. It doesn’t feel comfortable to write. All I can say is that I’m thinking a lot about the economic situation in the UK, and it feels like we’re at a cross roads. Something has to change to make this situation more sustainable. To me, however, it just feels like incompetence and lack of desire to help those who need it will hold us back.
Precisely it. I can see the government giving up and refusing to help, as they may see a clearance through the trees. They may see that society is organic and will right itself, without their interference, or they might just not bother anyway (again, incompetence). When things are bad, we’re always told that “they can only get better”. Things have been bad for a long time but that doesn’t mean that we watch the system re-calibrate and redefine what “better” is, for us. It’s already too far along for that.
The Disinterested Philosopher Gets By 