Rot in your rights
Prior to the 1970s, if the local authorities thought that they were sick enough, hundreds of thousands of mental patients in North America and many other parts of the world used to be confined to what were then called lunatic asylums. In some of those institutions, most patients were treated reasonably well, according to the standards of the day, but in many other places thousands of people were treated very poorly indeed. The trend then became to move almost all those patients out of the asylums, the intention being that more appropriate treatment would take place instead in hundreds of newly created community centers and outpatient clinics.
During the 1980s, however, the world was overtaken by the individualist ideology known as neoliberalism, according to which all governments were supposed to cut back on ever expanding public expenditures and free everyone from “creeping socialism”. Overall government spending never really declined at any point, but was instead gradually shifted toward other more worthy objectives, such as conducting hugely expensive foreign wars and giving incredibly generous tax breaks to large investors. As a result, a large number of social programs were adversely affected, among which were most of the community based alternatives to asylums.
At the same time, the individually based neoliberal disease also deeply infected the justice system, making it very difficult to confine anyone, even very sick people, to any kind of compulsory treatment. And thus it came to be that the downtown areas of most major cities and towns were overrun by thousands of homeless people, many of whom were former inmates of asylums, or newer patients who would have been sent to asylums in days gone by. It soon became obvious to the rare numbers of horribly overworked health professionals, and to the police officers forced to take up the slack, that many thousands of mental patients were being allowed to “rot in their rights” by not receiving any serious treatment at all.
But the rot in your rights strategy has not by any means been confined to the under treatment of homeless people. It has also been extensively used in many other, seemingly unrelated, aspects of public policy. The multicultural lobby, for example, is currently using a rot in your rights approach as a neat way of protecting religious extremists from the separation of church and state. Charters such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights were initially designed to protect individual rights from the enormous excesses of totalitarian and theocratic governments. Recently, however, in many different countries such charters are being deliberately misinterpreted by the politically correct as a weapon to help the world’s fundamentalists succeed in reviving religious control of the state.
For example, in Quebec the multicultural lobby raised an enormous outcry against the provincial government’s attempt to enact a secularist statement of principles that would include a ban on civil servants wearing ostentatious religious symbols. If the government’s charter ever gets passed into law, the multicultural individualists threaten to invoke the Canadian or the Quebec charter of rights to get the courts to block the alleged attack on religion. Similar conflicts have also popped up in many other countries, notably in France, Britain and Germany.
The kind of extremist behavior that seems to draw the most attention in these debates is the tendency on the part of a growing number of Muslim women to wear some kind of religious garb in public. All over the world, female cover-up garments such as the hijab, the niqab, the chador and the burqa have been identified with an extremist, male chauvinist, nominally Muslim insistence on controlling female attire as a way of returning to an antediluvian, almost tribal level of social control. On the opposite side of this debate, secular attempts at thwarting extremism put the emphasis instead on upholding the equality of rights between men and women.
Curiously, no one on the multicultural side seems to have recognized the incredible irony of trying to use a charter of rights in order to uphold the flaunting of “voluntary slavery”. In Germany, a similar sort of symbol promotion would be a neofascist argument in favor of wearing the swastika based on an individual’s right to support the ideology of his choice. An even closer equivalent would be letting collaborationist Jews in today’s Germany wear the Nazi-imposed, yellow Star of David on their clothes as a form of perverse identification with their former aggressors. For some odd reason, people in the politically correct, multicultural lobby think that proclaiming female submission in public is an inalienable religious right, whereas promoting racial submission in public is much more disgusting.
In fact, condoning female submission in public is just another way of getting people to rot in their rights, by refusing to do anything that might be seen by fundamentalists as anti religious. Somehow or other, the refusal on the part of millions of more moderate Muslim women to wear such garments in public is not seen by the political correctness lobby as being even more anti religious than government attempts to control such behavior. But if each religious extremist is supposed to be allowed to follow his or her own conscience, regardless of symbolism, why does the same right not apply to extremist political symbols? Why allow some people to rot in their rights, but not others?
Another argument that has to be dismissed in the same debate is the contention that it is unfair for either side to focus on religious attire. To be sure, any government attempt at controlling something as personal as one’s fetish was bound to elicit enormous resistance from people who simply oppose government intervention of any kind, for any reason whatsoever. But those supposedly more reasonable secularists who do not want to focus the debate on symbols have instead suggested that governments would be better advised to focus on more important things, such as rejecting government funding of religious schools, or taxing religious property. In many parts of the world, including Quebec, most “private” schools are in fact not all that private, since they receive 50 or 60% of their overall funding in order to compete against 100% public schools, while most religious property remains 100% tax exempt.
However, that argument also turns out to be bogus, but only in this particular context, because the people making those suggestions do not seem to have realized how colossally bigger a stink the politically correct, multicultural lobby would raise if ever anyone tried to get serious about controlling public spending on religion. The amount of hatred directed against any secular government making such an attempt would be a thousand times more virulent, even violent, than what we have so far heard in the current debates over symbols. Religious people certainly enjoy “rotting” in those particular rights, since non religious people are also forced to help them pay for exclusively religious privilege.
But once again, this by no means the only other recent application of the “rot in your rights” approach to public policy. Even though it is not immediately obvious, the increasing number of train derailments in North America is also indirectly affected by the same social trend. Big corporations continue to fight against the “creeping socialism” that I mentioned earlier by refusing to allow governments to regulate their activities sufficiently. And they get a lot of support from millions of ordinary people, who continue to use their democratic right to vote in order to elect pro-business governments like the Conservative government of Canada, or to support pro-business lobbies in the USA like the Tea Party movement. In this case, through the democratic process, massive manipulation of popular opinion by rich lobbyists is being successfully used to overcome government regulations against all sorts of dangerous activity. The transport of oil products by rail, which was relatively rare until very recently, is just one of the environmental issues being affected by powerful lobbies successful control of millions of alienated minds.
As a result, millions of ordinary people have come to hate government regulation of anything at all because they have been convinced that it makes the things they want to buy that much more expensive. According to them, letting people in poorer countries get higher wages is bad because it increases the prices at large discount stores in Europe, North America and Japan. Many short-sighted working-class and middle-class people have come to support deregulation because it is too humiliating for them to accept the fact that real incomes for most people in the so-called “rich” countries have not increased at all since 1972, whereas the incomes of the genuinely rich have multiplied hundreds of times over.
They have also been convinced to support the contention that fighting against the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas is bad because it means relying on higher-priced oil from the OPEC countries. Using public transit more often is bad because it takes away from spending more on the upkeep of roads and highways. Refusing to allow large pipelines to be built, even though they are constantly rupturing all over the place, is bad because it is the only viable alternative to shipping large quantities of oil by much more dangerous methods.
The rail companies who transport all that oil, as well as the petroleum companies and the neoliberal governments who egg them on, therefore get to do whatever they feel like doing. The July 2013 Lac Megantic derailment in Quebec, that killed 47 people, was caused by a perfect storm of “rot in your rights” collusion between several different perpetrators. The railway companies in between North Dakota and Quebec were allowed to use defective cars and operate with insufficient staff, the oil companies were allowed to label the shipment with an inferior classification of the dangerous goods being transported, and the pro-business governments refused to do anything to protect the millions of people living right beside the rail lines in order to promote a rather obvious form of unsustainable economic development.
Since that time, many more derailments have taken place at an ever increasing rate, thereby causing all the companies and the governments involved to bombard the media with ads and mission statements about how they certainly intend to do something about all this in the very near future. But given the intensity of those very powerful people’s long-term commitments to neoliberalism and letting the masses rot in their rights, the chances are quite good that many more ordinary people will die before any kind of real control is put into place, if ever.
The best recent justification for adopting such a skeptical attitude toward official bleating about oil transport has been the way that the 2008 world-wide financial meltdown was handled by many of the same class of people. It was also another excellent example of how millions of less well-off people were allowed to rot in their rights in order to buy homes that most of them could not afford. In that case as well, the most important financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by the collusion of several deregulating governments, most of the world’s most important banks, thousands of traders in derivative financial products, hundreds of private and semi-public real-estate firms, car company executives and many other VIPs, spread out over dozens of different countries.
After “investing” thirty or forty trillion dollars in helping all those too big to fail, and letting ordinary homeowners rot in their rights once again, the world’s leading governments and financial regulators kept right on helping big business survive its ongoing crisis of confidence, by pumping hundreds of billions more borrowed dollars into the system, month after month, year after year, right up to the present day. They also tried to placate public opinion over vastly expanded public debt by fining some of the larger banks involved in the crisis, those “huge, unprecedented” fines collectively amounting to about three or four months worth of overall bank profits. Then they started a massive propaganda campaign to convince ordinary taxpayers that all the rules were going to change so that such a crisis could never happen again. Which is what they had already said the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that, all the way back to the royal bankruptcies that preceded the Black Death of the fourteenth century.
None of those otherwise unconnected events, however, seem to have any effect on the millions of ordinary conservatives, all over the world, who continue supporting deregulating governments, using their hard-won right to vote to make sure that those who wish them the most harm can keep on doing whatever they want, whenever they want. “The beat goes on.”
