Everyone has at least one role they fill in their family. One of the roles I fill is that of entertainment bitch. In this role, I’ve now got my mother watching Sons of Anarchy which is a series whose main characters are all in some way involved with an outlaw biker club of the same name.
The club, and its members, are violent, mercenary, and largely on the wrong side of the law. Despite this, the characters as written also live by a vaguely chivalric code in which loyalty, duty, and family weigh heavily. My mother allowed as how such a code might be a tad unrealistic given that the point of being in an outlaw biker gang is to do whatever the hell you want most of the time. She doubted that the members of most real MCs had gotten more civilized since Hunter S. Thompson spent almost two years living with the Hell’s Angels in the mid-1960s given that society as a whole hasn’t gotten more civilized since then. She also advanced the opinion that maybe our behavior was just evening out and that eventually we’d all get to the “let them all go to hell except cave 7” point.
It seems to me if we reach that point of self-interest in behavior that our only two choices for the future of humanity are anarchy or fascism.
Society, cities, towns, organized human settlements of any size over about 100 people depend on the social contract in order to survive. Living grouped together just doesn’t work unless there is a base agreement that certain rules apply to everyone. Without adherence to such an agreement, what you end up with is anarchy; everyone does exactly what they feel like all the time. The strongest take from the weakest and only those with the most access to resources of the most basic type – food, water, and defensive power (or the ability to barter for defense) – survive.
Some of the seeds of society’s current move toward anarchy are immediately obvious: the gap between rich and poor; how access to certain services, like healthcare, is predicated solely on your ability to pay; and the smaller, more subtle indicators, like what I call “alone on the planet syndrome,” that the social contract dissolving.
Our other choice besides anarchy is fascism. Since the wing-nuts of the world have decided to use fascism interchangeably to describe other political and economic philosophies with which is has very little in common, it would be helpful to actually define fascism.
- often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
- : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
— fas·cist \-shist also -sist\ noun or adjective often capitalized
— fas·cis·tic \fa-?shis-tik also -?sis-\ adjective often capitalized
— fas·cis·ti·cal·ly \-ti-k(?-)le-\ adverb often capitalized
The exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control through social regimentation. That means the actual enforcement of existing laws and the enacting of new laws designed specifically to keep society, and the economic machine, running smoothly.
If the social contract dissolves to a point where people are no longer even vaguely following the law such strict enforcement would be the only option for keeping society as it exists now functioning. You can’t very well provide services and keep people paying taxes in an environment in which you can’t provide them security. How long society would survive after you take away people’s freedom of movement and freedom to choose is anyone’s guess but it’s probably a lot longer that we want to admit given the longevity of societies in places where even today people are horribly repressed.
Some of the current slide toward fascism in society can be seen now: “three strikes and you’re out” enforcement of laws; enforcement of the letter of the law rather than smart policing; the lack of understanding that it is possible to be patriotic and still criticize your government (though this last one is more of a citizen attitude than it is an attitude of organized government). In a very similar way that anarchy is a dissolution of the social contract, so too is fascism assuming that we understand the social contract as “balancing the needs of the whole against the needs of the individual for the benefit of most.”
A good society, a stable society, can absorb a certain amount of flouting of the social contract. Where, though, is the line? When does the breaking of laws or the existence of laws that unduly restrict someone’s ability to live her life as she sees fit push that society in one direction or the other? Is it the number of laws broken or enacted? Is it what those laws that are being ignored or enforced are designed to do that matters?
Someone more well known than me, though I can’t remember who just now, once said that all human beings want three things: food, security, and the ability to live their lives as they see fit. So what happens when society as we know it ceases to be the best way to achieve those three things?
Again, no answers, just a lot of questions, and a mother who is totally blowing up my Netflix queue.
“all human beings want three things: food, security, and the ability to live their lives as they see fit”: sounds like Abraham Maslow and the hierarchy of needs.