Political Cynic comments

Opinion Populism

Headline: The west is suffering from its own success

Sub-headline: Smartphone addiction, culture wars and low birth rates are byproducts of wealth

https://www.ft.com/content/74918df2-6911-4087-8add-c11df2811129

A sampler of this ‘Mulligan Stew’ that Ganesh prepares for his readers is helpful:

…

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, smartphone panic exists, smartphone panic exists,

so insulated from life-and-death issues that sad teenagers are what pass for news

it is a parable for the west, where life can be too good for our own good.

Where did the “woke” movement take hold?

the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic.

If woke is the howl of the dispossessed,

Problems of success are harder to fix because,

answer to the culture war is, after all, “induce an economic depression”.

the most effective answer to low birth rates is “undo modernity”.

Parents no longer need to have three children to ensure that one survives.

hey needn’t even have one as a source of income support in old age. State pensions have seen to that.

From something precious (the Enlightenment), something bleak (demographic decline).

the baby bust, No, that is populism,

the last time that electing a demagogue led to total societal ruin

the last crash starts to take risks with its balance sheet.

economist Hyman Minsky said of financial crises, that stability breeds instability,

The challenge is to persuade western intellectuals of this.

It is a hopeless account of the past decade.

The Brexit campaign won most of England’s affluent home counties.

it liberates people to be cavalier with their vote,

Faced with problems of failure — disease, illiteracy, mass unemployment — western elites are supremely capable.

(What if all the jobs disappear?)

(What will people do with all that leisure?)

Modernity — a world in which most people live in cities, have freedom from clerics and communicate across great distances at low cost — came along about five minutes ago in the history of civilisation.

The story isn’t phone-induced stress or even low birth rates. The story is that we haven’t experienced much worse.

Mr. Ganesh riffs on the themes of the Neo-Cons, who drown The Reader in chatter, that begats confusion and exploitable in-attention, or just utter despair: think of a novice attempting to read Hagel or Heidegger, without preliminary research!

Political Cynic