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Friday, March 29, 2024

A Society on the Verge of a Meltdown

By Jakob Augstein

"We know nothing about the form of future tragedy," German playwright Botho Strauss once wrote. But that isn’t true any longer. Now we can picture the form of our tragedy — all we have to do is watch it on YouTube. The images of the London riots are a preview of our future. Malaysian student Asyraf Haziq sits bleeding on the ground as a man approaches to help him up, only to then help three others plunder the contents of the defenseless man’s rucksack, leaving him alone on the street.

This is rock bottom for humanity.

British Prime Minister David Cameron needed a few days to find the right words. "Social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face," he said just this week, referring to a "broken society." For a Tory this was a step forward. "Society" is not a word that easily passes through the lips of a conservative.

"There is no such thing as society," former conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said. "There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

But when society is broken, people break too. Thatcher and all the other neoliberal ideologues after her didn’t want to believe this. But the market has no moral qualities, and without morals we all become animals.

Continue here: Opinion: A Society on the Verge of a Meltdown – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

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