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Moral Decay Leads to Collapse
By Charles Hugh Smith
November 29, 2020 "Information
Clearing House"
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A very strong case can be made that America
is now a moral cesspool. Consider just three
cases: Jeffrey Epstein, the CEO of Pfizer
and JPMorgan Chase.
Sadly, Epstein is the epitome of America's
elite: getting away with abusing children
for years, if not decades; when finally caught a
few years ago, escaping with a legal wrist-slap;
acquiring a fortune of $200 million without
creating any jobs, innovations or value; buying
his way into the good graces of Harvard, MIT and
a seemingly endless parade of celebrities,
politicians, scientists, etc.
And very par for the course in America's
elite: Epstein's crimes were known by
America's intelligence and law enforcement
agencies, but rather than indict him, they made
him an "intelligence asset" that had to
protected from exposure to the consequences of
the rule of law.
When some tiny sliver of light was shed on his
decades of blatant corruption and exploitation,
a sliver that implicated the wealthy and
powerful, then Epstein was dispatched in classic
Deep State fashion, in a manner that speaks
volumes about the banana "republic" nature of
America.
Pfizer's CEO arranged a massive sale of Pfizer
stock and then timed the release of overhyped
vaccine data to maximize his private gains.
Nothing illegal here, just another example of
what I call legalized looting.
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JPMorgan Chase
manipulated markets to maximize its gains, and
its $1 billion fine is just the cost of doing
business in a pervasively corrupt society and
economy. Nobody ever goes to prison for
these billion-dollar skims, scams, frauds amd
embezzlements; financial criminals get a get
out of jail free card with every crime.
These three examples are just a few of
thousands of examples of insider skimming
and gaming the system, abuse of power, fraud,
pay-to-play, embezzlement, racketeering and
other forms of corruption that enrich the few at
the expense of the many.
Whenever I mention America's moral decay,
somebody is always quick to discount the decay
with cliches such as "there's always been
corruption" or "it's human nature, you'll never
get rid of it."
These pathetically flimsy excuses mask the
reality that America's moral decay has reached
extremes that eventually trigger collapse in
the financial, social and political realms.
The decay of civic virtue and the social
contract is so gradual that only the few who
recall specific set-points from previous
generations even notice the advancing rot.
A third of the Roman Senate was killed in
combat during the disastrous defeat at Cannae;
can we imagine a third of the U.S. Senate
putting their own lives at risk? No, we cannot;
that level of sacrifice is unthinkable in
America today. The protected elites have no real
skin in the game. The consequences of their
mismanagement fall on the unprotected many.
Can we imagine the two eldest sons of a
present-day political scion volunteering for
combat overseas, with one killed in combat and
the other severely wounded? (Joe Kennedy, Jr.
and John F. Kennedy in World War II.) Such
elite sacrifice is unimaginable in today's
America.
As for the social contract: to saddle
young people with highly uncertain prospects
with $1.7 trillion in student loan debt would
have been unimaginable, If not criminal, two
generations ago. Now this ruthless exploitation
of students--in essence, punitive debt-serfdom
that enriches the wealthiest few who own the
student loans--is now the norm. Parasitic
elites sucking the powerless dry is now the
status quo in America.
This academic paper (via A.P.) sheds light on
the severe consequences of moral decay:
Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From
the Past.
In summary, the authors examined premodern
states / empires with an eye on socio-economic
systems that generated a social environment
which provided real benefits to citizens via a
moral code and good government practices.
(I would include the early Tang and Song
dynasties in China of examples of such systems
that were not democratic but which offered a
judiciary of recourse, investment in
infrastructure and other forms of public good,
rule of law and social mobility.)
Yes, elite corruption is ever-present, but
good governance requires limiting elite
corruption as part of the social contract in
which citizens support the state (paying taxes,
etc.) because the state provides for the common
good.
The authors point out that citizens expect
relatively little of autocracies in the way of
public good because the citizenry know the
autocracy is a self-serving, corrupt elite. But
governments that earned the consent of the
governed by providing for the common good are
held to a higher standard.
When the moral code that requires service to
the public good decays, the legitimacy of the
state collapses. Here is a quote from the
paper:
"Moral failure of the leadership in this
social setting brings calamity because the
state's lifeblood--its citizen-produced
resource-base--is threatened when there is loss
of confidence in the state, which brings in its
wake social division, strife, flight, and a
reduced motivation to comply with tax
obligations.
In the resulting weakened fiscal economy,
services that citizens have come to depend on
fail, including public goods and administrative
control of corruption.
To realize and sustain good government is
especially difficult owing in large part to the
importance of shared moral obligations between
citizens and the state."
In other words, a strict moral code that
requires elites to devote resources and
leadership for the public good is the critical
foundation of the entire social, economic and
political order. When this moral code
decays, the state and its elites both lose
legitimacy and the consent of the governed.
Put another way: once the elites have decayed to
exploitive, self-serving, profiteering
parasites, the public has no interest in
supporting the state or its elites. Rather, they
will cheer the collapse and ruin of the
parasitic elites.
The explosive rise of elites' wealth and power
in the past few decades has been documented and
charted, and I've repeatedly posted charts
showing that virtually all the real income gains
of the past 20 years have flowed to the top
0.1%. This RAND study found that America's
elites siphoned $50 trillion into their own
pockets in the past two generations:
Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.
This is the chilling summation of America's
terminal moral decay from
Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From
the Past:
"Many citizens perceive that they have little
stake in what should be a democratic society.
Decline in citizen confidence is compounded by a
great economic transition in the US, a U-turn
over the last five decades in wealth and income
inequalities.
These economic shifts are undergirded by a new
ethos and practices that enshrine shareholder
value, personal freedom, nepotism, cronyism, the
comingling of state and personal resources, and
narcissistic aggrandizement in ways rarely seen
in the early history of our Republic."
Our national claim of moral superiority is no
longer plausible: America is a moral
cesspool that cannot be drained.
Charles Hugh Smith is the proprietor of the
popular blog
OfTwoMinds.com.
His new book is
available!
A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our
Shrinking Planet
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Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).
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The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.