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What Is a National Nervous Breakdown?
What Is a National Nervous Breakdown?
When the citizenry cease to believe the lies, the nation suffers a nervous breakdown.
Last week I used the phrase National Nervous Breakdown without clarifying its meaning. (The War on Our Intuition That Something Is Fundamentally Amiss)
By National Nervous Breakdown I do not mean the breakdown of civil order or the economy; I mean the breakdown of the officially sanctioned narratives that underpin the Status Quo. These Master Narratives legitimize the current arrangement; once they erode or break down, the legitimacy of the Status Quo is lost.
The shell remains in place, but nobody believes the system is a fair, just meritocracy.
Let’s consider the erosion or breakdown of these master narratives.
1. No accountability for abuse of power. The core narrative is no one is above the law, which means not only that everyone is supposedly treated equally before the law, but that abuses of power are punished or limited.
Now that police departments are essentially stealing from private citizens without due process via civil forfeiture, it’s clear there is no accountability for abuses of power.
This is simply one example of many in which blatant abuse of power is sanctioned by the Status Quo, and there is little recourse for citizens who have been abused unless they are wealthy enough to fund a high-powered legal team.
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From dismal science to language of beauty – Towards a new story of economics | Degrowth 2014
From dismal science to language of beauty – Towards a new story of economics | Degrowth 2014.
Humans are storytelling beings. In fact one could argue that it is impossible to make sense of the world without story. Storytelling is how we piece together facts, beliefs, feelings and history to form something of a coherent whole connecting us to our individual and collective past, present and future. The stories that help make meaning of our lives inform how we shape and re-shape our environment. This re-created world, through its felt presence in structures and systems as well as its cultural expressions, in turn tells us its story.
We live in a time of powerful globalised narratives. We no longer (or rarely) sit and listen to tales that were born of places we know intimately and told by people deeply connected to these places. Ours is a world saturated with information from every corner of the planet, voiced by ‘storytellers’ on television, radio, the internet, mobile phones, newspapers, billboards, books and magazines. It would appear that we now have access to a multitude of perspectives and, with that, more understanding of the different options open to human beings to live fulfilling lives. In reality however, the majority of us have to conform to a narrow set of rules not of our own making: the rules of economics.
The way in which our lives have become dominated by the pursuit of financial gain is full of contradictions. We may not be driven by the ‘love of money’ but we still have to ‘make a living’. The fluctuations in the economy have a profound effect on our everyday lives, but very few of us understand how it works, let alone feel we have the power to influence it. This lack of agency fills most of us with a degree of ‘background anxiety’ that drives many of our decisions, consciously or unconsciously. The economic story is possibly the most powerful story being told at this very moment.
So how is this story being told (and sold) to us? How is it being framed?
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