I am willing to bet that the majority of the people who are reading this, grew up in some kind of family environment. The family is probably the oldest and most basic of human collectives and is even more simple than a village or a tribe.
The reason why I am speaking about the family as the most basic human collective is that it serves as a model upon which all other human collectives are based. Indeed the town and city, the corporation and firm, councils and counties, states and nations, are in effect all collectives of a kind, which are far bigger in scope than the family.
Also presumably, you will have probably loved the people in your family. Obviously this is a less intimate love than between two lovers but, the love contained within the family group is still pretty strong. It is also usually disposed to wanting to see what is best for the other members of the family group.
If you move outwards, you start to see a more disperse kind of love which includes those larger collectives; including towns, cities, corporations, firms, states and nations. This has been pondered for centuries by philosophers, as they have tried to understand the nature of the things which build society which aren't necessarily of the physical world. Indeed, in my opinion, two of the four most important things to have contributed to physical human happiness and development are not physical things but mass literacy and the limited liability corporation¹.
I think that what has happened in the twenty first century especially, and which is manifesting itself in political antagonism and in physical calamity such as the current bushfire crisis, is a chronic breakdown of the more disperse kinds of love.
We spent the 18th and 19th century, trying to establish and invent a kind of language for talking about the rights of the individual. We then spent the latter half of the 19th century and following the deaths of a hundred million people across the fields of Europe, we began to look at how the workings of a collective kind of practical love might operate, through the development of the welfare state. Yet towards the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, having decided to undo a lot of those practical workings and privatising the machinery, we're now back on the road of trying to establish the rights of the individual and smash the remnants of whatever a collective kind of practical love produced.
As far back as Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics, he wrote about the disperse kind of love called philia. Philia expresses itself as a brotherly love, which might extend to family, friends and the community. He describes the proper outworking of philia as expressing loyalty and fealty to individuals and to the group, and the proper exercise of this practical love requires the work of virtue, equality, and familiarity. However, the expressions of this in the twenty first century appear to be cracking.
The big question that practical love with regards to the collective, that is the state and the nation, is: how does this benefit the collective as a whole? What we are very much beginning to witness, expressed through the elections of Trump, Brexit, and our own pathetic election which was won on the issue of franking credits is: how does this benefit me?
The success of Trump began in 2010 with the rise of the TEA Party within the Republicans. In fact, the TEA Party never really went away, they just quietly moved to the control centre. Trump is not a political genius but rather an egoist and an opportunist, who found a home. Indeed, the TEA in TEA Party stands for "Taxed Enough Already", and was set up in opposition to the aims of the Obama administration which was trying to lay the ground work for a practical outworking of that collective kind of practical love; through the establishment of a collective health care system.
Trump also found that he could mine a lot of political capital through the deliberate exclusion of people and othering his imagined enemies. This is an expression of a rolling back of philia and the active repeal of the extension of that love. In return for loyalty and fealty to him, corporations to a larger degree and individuals to a lesser degree, have been rewarded by being allowed to show less practical love for the nation and its people through the mechanism of paying less in taxation.
The issue of Brexit, is an overt expression of rolling back a collective kind of love. Admittedly, the idea that someone might not necessarily feel European is what is at the heart of the issue here but it demands a deliberate forgetting of why the European Union exists in the first place.
The forerunner to the European Union, the European Economic Community, had its origins in the European Coal and Steel Community; and it had within the words of the charter, the recognition that the previous four decades had caused tremendous mayhem and destruction and that it was only through community that somethinG larger would be built. Brexit is an explicit rejection of that community.
In Australia, issues which swung the 2019 Federal Election and the NSW State Election, both were rejections of community. The superannuation system which has been very much manipulated so that individuals do not pay tax, was perhaps the biggest benefactor with regards the issue of franking credits.
Meanwhile, the New South Wales State Government was returned and immediately cut the budgets for the National Parks, the Rural Fire Service, and NSW Fire and Rescue. Even if you reject the premise that climate change exists, the fact that basic maintenance wasn't done in forestry and land management is purely due to the fact that budgets simply didn't exist².
Australia's domestic response to the worst bushfires in the history of the nation, has been: The Prime Minister running away to Hawaii. The Governor General running away to France. The Environment Minister being silent. The Energy Minister openly lying to the United Nations. The NSW Emergency Services also running away to the UK and France.
From the standpoint of nations, which is getting pretty close to the biggest organised human collective, we are witnessing a deliberate rejection of philia and care about the citizens of those nations. The citizens of those nations are crying out for someone to listen to them but even though there are magic words said to those citizens (which vary from nation to nation), the leaders of those nations are showing demonstrations of a deliberate rejection of a collective kind of practical love. They are aided and abetted by various private organisations who through the manipulation of the media or simply through the manipulation of government itself, are seeking to defund, degrade, and destroy those institutions which facilitate the enactment of practical love.
In doing so, by rendering nations and states less powerful, power shifts to the next biggest human collectives which are corporations and firms, who love nobody but themselves.
¹The other two being proper sewerage and water management, and refrigeration.
²The suggestion that the Greens prevented fire management is simply untrue and if you want to run that as an excuse, then you are an idiot. Also, the fires have not been caused by arsonists; for if they had, then there would be thousands of people charged and imprisoned. The scope and length of fire fronts, renders that excuse also simply untrue. If you want to run that as an excuse, then you are an idiot.
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