Obviously, it would be better to live where the vast majority did not think things were broken, if they were correct. But it’s hard to think of a place where they would be correct. Given flawed human nature, government and society have always been in bad condition everywhere. Indeed, most people through most of history have rightly believed they lived somewhere that everything was broken and, worse, could not be fixed.
I’ve twice referred on this topic to Austria-Hungary, which crumbled in 1918 and only lasted four years, as with the Ottoman Empire that bit the dust four years later, because its neighbours were terrified of the mess it would create when it crumbled. (I don’t normally quote Hitler except to warn about how evil people think, but his “Mein Kampf” ridiculing of Germany’s pre-Great War ally as “this mummy of a state” is memorably bang on.)
Nor, I might add in this context, is The Woman King’s glossy portrait of life in 19th-century Dahomey credible. But it is instructive to think about the late Roman Republic, in which people like Cicero were delivering Philippics and moaning “O Tempora O Mores.”
Nowadays I do not think our very broken schools are teaching kids who Cicero was or what was bothering him. But he was very popular in the 18th century, more than during his first-century B.C. lifetime, because many people saw signs of serious trouble around them and were determined to do something about it.
Which is why this poll result is good news. Again, it would be better if Canadians were rightly pleased with the state of affairs. But as things stand they’d have to be insane, and the most alarming possibility would be to live somewhere like Camazotz where propaganda plus mental decay produced a demented conviction that everything was fine. Instead, when politicians brush aside complaints that things are broken, we apparently brush them aside. Phew.
To inhabit a regime where things were so bad you weren’t allowed to complain would also be terrible. And many do. Remember the old joke about a pollster saying, “Excuse me, I’m surveying public opinion on meat shortages,” and an American responds with “What’s ‘shortage’?” a Soviet with “What’s ‘meat’?” and a Chinese with “What’s ‘public opinion’?” (And you can, or once could, add an Israeli, Bostonian, or some such going, “What’s ‘Excuse me’?”)
Obviously, Canadians know what all these things are, and it’s good. Moreover, we’re angry that things are broken, which is also good… up to a point. It’s very dangerous to sink into rage and paranoia over such conditions. But almost anything beats sinking into resignation, which is what happened in most places over most of history.
General José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori, for instance, was President of Mexico for seven terms between 1876 and 1911, basically the real-world “Autumn of the Patriarch,” a period of hallucinatory stagnation in which time itself seemed have stopped. And then it restarted with a hideously violent revolution, underlining the terrible human cost of situations so bad the populace succumbs to fury, despair, or a toxic mix of the two.
In Canada we haven’t. Not even with a major public sector union deciding now’s a good time to demand a 47 percent raise over three years. Such a thing needs to be hooted off the stage, especially given that the public sector is the most conspicuously busted part of our society nowadays. But it almost certainly will be, because Canadians haven’t given up or broken down. We want better and, crucially, still believe in it.
It won’t be easy, and we can’t go blaming others. Not even for electing these politicians; we did it to ourselves. And social disorder, increasing rudeness, lack of self-restraint, these mores didn’t fall from the sky or the Peace Tower. We embraced radical personal liberation, from social institutions, individual character, and ultimately reality itself and, just as Cicero warned, collapsing political self-government is driven by the collapsing personal kind.
Which is very bad. No question. We’re in a mess we made. But we’re upset, indignant, and, I think, determined, rather than bitter, resigned, and malevolent. Which is very good.
