From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Fri Jan 16 1998 - 10:22:56 MST
On Fri, Jan 16, 1998 at 05:10:11AM -0800, mark@unicorn.com wrote:
>
> Personally I'm having an amusing time watching my socialist acquaintances
> who voted for Tony Blair have fits because he's taking the British welfare
> state apart;
Don't look at me -- I voted against both sets of bastards. (Nice little
anagram: TONY BLAIR MP == I'M TORY PLAN B. There's more than a germ of
truth in it.)
> ... Frankly, anyone who still
> believes that socialism stands a whelk's chance in hell should be looking
> very closely at what the 'socialists' are doing in the UK.
Not exactly true. The Labour party in the UK has basically succumbed to
the same historic compromise that the Democrat party in the USA made
a couple of decades ago, realigning themselves on the right.
> >What I want to know is WHY
> >governments at the end of the twentieth century have become bloated,
> >inefficient, and counterproductive monsters that are resented by many
> >of their citizens.
>
> My personal opinion is that with the rise of industrialisation and the
> concentration of power in large industrial corporations, big government
> became a good way for them to maintain power.
Big corporations as the engine of government?
> As people have got fed up with socialism and new technologies spread
> power around, government is increasingly getting in the way and
> proving unable to do anything worthwhile.
That doesn't seem to explain the widespread _support_ for government
institutions I see around me, at least here in the UK.
My pet hypothesis is future shock; the whole of western civilization is
suffering from a subliminal but chronic case of the ailment, with most
people unable to examine any new development without slight feelings of
panic and anxiety. This makes it really easy for moral panics and knee-
jerk rejection to take over. (It's an easy target for politicians, too;
in an increasingly globalized market, they _need_ some way of demonstrating
to their constituents that they care deeply and can do something about
their concerns. They can't jigger the interest rate or raise money through
taxation very easily, but they can strike postures over trivial irrelevencies
and promise legislation to control the perceived threat -- things like the
current idiotic ban on human cloning, or the mass hysteria over satanic
ritual child abuse a few years ago, or porn on the internet.)
Select a random push-button issue and watch your neighbour jump to
attention when you mention it; odds are, they haven't ever really
_thought_ about it, because they're running as hard as they can just
trying to get their heads around the necessary complexities of day to
day life. The standard stock response to an unfamiliar challenge is
"the government ought to pass a law about it". It's a lot easier to
shrug it off onto Big Brother's shoulders than to have to think about
uncomfortable and unfamiliar and possibly threatening new things --
especially with so many other demands on their attention to worry about.
-- Charlie
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