Saying "No" to the World: The Sclerosis of the Modern State

Doctors during the 1918 Influenza pandemic.

To paraphrase Alice Caldwell-Kelly from the Trashfuture podcast: The frustrating thing about history is that there’s this vulgar read where it repeats, and when you see that this read is wrong you go off and you learn things about historical forces – long term cycles in monetary theory, medieval conceptions of imagination and envisioning the world, labor struggles in ancient Rome, the cultures of indigenous peoples who were colonized – and then you go back and look at it, and the damn thing does something that looks an awful lot like a repeat.

What gets really frustrating for me is that it feels like we’re on a really short repeat these days. In March of 2020, I was excited to get back to teaching, Edgar and I had contained a pesky infestation into the back room of the apartment, I was feeling conflicted about my second job, and there was a worrying new virus going around that we didn’t know what to think about. Now, in August of 2021, all of that is true again. Oh, there are different specifics – we’re not having to drive out to Lawrence, KS to deal with a storage unit, everyone who’s responsible is masking up and making an effort, and there’s a different very old white man in the presidency who is committed to making no positive change – but it fundamentally feels like the past year was a treadmill that took us absolutely nowhere, a red queen’s race that deposited us back to where we were at the start.

The biggest difference, now, is that nothing is closing down.

There was a moment back in 2020, when it felt like there was a crack through which some light could pour. The establishment was on the back foot, and the fringe elements who actually wanted to do things and help people could push a bit. That’s not the case now. In Washington, the doctrine of “nothing will fundamentally change” is firmly rooted, and in Missouri, we’re going for the bronze medal in whatever event Texas and Florida are jockeying for the gold in.

Let me be clear: while I might acknowledge that some aspects of closing down were good (a slower pace of life for a bit was nice,) I don’t actually like shutdowns. I don’t actually like wearing a mask all that much. I hate them being made necessary more, so I continue to mask and I am remaining careful.

Instead of a sensible response to the current situation, we got this photo of a UPS truck making a delivery to hell.

The real frustrating part about all of this is that we could have gone hard on the masking and shutdowns for six weeks or so and had all of this sorted out: freeze mortgages, freeze rent, freeze loan payments and interest, helicopter money equivalent to 60-80% of normal pay (if not full pay,) offer everyone categorized as an essential worker double pay, and everyone free healthcare for the duration. That’s how the people invested in the status quo could have maintained it humanely: a brief hiccup that could be excused as extreme measures that can’t be repeated.

But the Politics of Can’t are a funny thing. The powers that be are much more willing to do something expensive that maintains an appearance of normalcy than something that would maintain normalcy long-term. Our economic system doesn’t really plan more than three months in advance, and we’ve decided – for some stupid reason – that government should work like a business. If it doesn’t make things normal immediately, why bother?

This is why schools are reopening. As the Delta variant surges, and rates among children are ticking upward, I fear it’s only a short period of time before we see some further variant that is profoundly deadly to children. We have, in fact, created a petri dish for this to happen by forcing schools to stay open, and for allowing the culture war over basic preventative measures to influence how we do that.

I am an adjunct instructor (I normally just tell people I’m a “teacher”, it’s simpler than explaining what an adjunct is,) and the semester started on the sixteenth. As of this writing, I’ve had the same number of students need to quarantine as I’ve had days of class. In my life, I’ve been in a number of car accidents – some of them very bad, my family isn’t terribly good at avoiding them – and I am emotionally in about the same place you normally are between seeing the car ahead swerve towards you and your already-kind-of-shit car and the impact that will inevitably be followed by the other guy informing you he doesn’t actually have insurance.

Hold on. I took a break between the last paragraph and this one, and I see that my university has informed us that Delta will be “moving out of the area” in mid-to-late September, as if the miasma theory of disease were accurate and the changing wind patterns of Fall will carry the bad vapors away.

This is patently false. Changing weather, if anything, will make the disease worse as people move indoors. Since the countermeasures against the disease have become a culture war issue, it is likely that – even with vaccine mandates now possible due to FDA approval – further adoption of the vaccine will not happen swiftly.

What we have here is another example of social murder. With schools open, a certain number of students, faculty, and staff will catch the virus, and a certain number of them will die. This is considered acceptable, because education cannot be stopped – at the elementary, middle, and high school level, this is necessary because school serves the purpose of a day care. Children and adolescents go there so that their parents may go to work. As a byproduct, these children will be educated (if the property values in their area are high or their parents pay a tuition), deprived of an education (if the property values are low), or potentially abused (the school-to-prison pipeline starts somewhere, after all).

The situation is somewhat different at the level I teach at. Students are not simply removed from their parents’ care, they are groomed to enter either the middle class (if STEM or business majors,) or the precariat (liberal arts majors). Largely, this builds upon the foundation laid as a byproduct of the aforementioned daycare setup, but there are always robust programs to bring students up to speed.

It may sound as if I’m shitting on my field, but I’ll be honest. I like my job. Students aren’t necessarily blank slates, but I’ll be honest, many are unprepared, and so need to be brought up to speed, a process that isn’t always easy.

It’s harder, still, when they might randomly have to self-isolate because their roommate attended a sporting event and was exposed to a deadly virus. Nothing about the current situation is fair, and I’m not sure it can be made fair.

I’m already eleven hundred words in and this has been a bit of a ramble, and a bit more personal than I usually go. I should get to the point.

There’s a lot of reason to feel gloomy about the world. It feels like we’re back where we started. This summer has been unprecedentedly hot and unpleasant in some parts of the world (the heat wave in the pacific northwest has been terrible, obviously – but some parts of Russia above the arctic circle recorded temperatures as high as 48 Celsius. That’s 118 degrees Fahrenheit.) What we see is that, throughout the world, but especially in North America and Western Europe, there is a dwindling of state capacity. We can see this in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, we have seen this in regard to climate change.

This is related to what the folks over at Cool Zone Media have been calling “the crumbles” – the tendency for society to not so much collapse as for there to be cascades of smaller failures that make everything else worse, and compound and simply grow shittier as time goes on. I trace the foundations back to what I – above, and previously – have referred to as the “Politics of Can’t”: the unwillingness to do beneficial things because, in some way, we are essentially unable to do it. Doing good and useful things is counter to the essential nature of the state. This is never explained, publicly, but Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine and Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilisk might both point to Neoliberalism as the cause: the idea that the state shouldn’t provide services, but serve as a clearinghouse for contracts that private corporations will then fill in an efficient way.

What a load of bullshit, honestly.

This is part of why Afghanistan collapsed the way it did. I am not qualified to comment upon the ins and outs of Afghan culture, or upon particular battles, campaigns, and policies, but if it functions anything like how Klein described Iraq in Shock Doctrine, the United States has become something like a zombie state: a shambolic mess, devoid of the things that make life possible, that is driven by nothing so much as a desire to pass on its infection to others.

In some places, this takes the form of invasion and replacement: Iraq, Klein describes, is a state born hollowed out (the money delivered to it to help pay for things quickly burned away in graft and corruption, largely on the part of contractors brought in,) and it’s entirely possible that Afghanistan was born the same way (the description of their American-style combined arms military sounds like would be: those are expensive to maintain.) In other places, it’s exporting the for-profit American style healthcare and social services to other countries, with attendant price increases and service cuts (see this article from the “Corporate Europe Observatory”, and remember that “for-profit” is often referred to as “American-style” healthcare.)

I highly recommend reading the pamphlet. It’s fast, and it condenses all of the paranoia of the McCarthy years down into eleven pages, while being extremely nonspecific about the crisis or war.

There’s a peculiar madness that comes with it, infecting whole societies with a death-urge that’s difficult to explain. As Sweden slides out of the social democratic and into a more neoliberal space, for example, it produced a brochure called “If Crisis or War Comes” and sent out versions in twenty different languages to every household in the country.

While Neoliberalism is thought to have emerged out of the Pinochet regime, it’s largely a product of anti-communist sentiment produced by the economics department of the University of Chicago. It’s a product of American and Western European paranoia following the emergence of the Soviet Union. The hallmarks of this shift in thinking are that the state is reduced to an agency that just makes gestural changes.

And that’s how we’ve ended up where we are, honestly: if the government is basically just a nominally powerful entity that simply gestures one way or the other, while other people simply live their lives, then you end up with a world much like the one we live in.

Of course, there is one important mandate that the government still possesses, which is to spread the logic of the Neoliberal order, to say no to every move to make the lives of the average person easier.

As an aside, Klein’s book suggests, reading in the early 2020s, that our current predicament is purely the result of the triad at the heart of the second Bush Administration: Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush. Cheney and Bush destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq (thus, ultimately, being responsible for the retreat from Kabul that was found so shameful and to the emergence of Da’esh and setting the stage for the Syrian Civil War and the current aggressive moves by Turkey), while Rumsfeld ran a sideline privatizing pandemic response.

This is the fucker that ruined the 21st Century.

What’s needed is both hard to get and simple to articulate: what we need is for someone – anyone – to actually believe that they can and feel the need to take steps for the benefit of other people. Not to “be a hero” or similar, but to make a choice that makes another person’s life better in some way or another.

Ideally, once one person does it, more people do it. Eventually, maybe we can reach a point where we escape the trap that we’ve all decided we are stuck in.

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