The War of All Against All

Get ready for it. We’re about to enter that phase political philosopher Thomas Hobbes termed the “war of all against all.” It represents one of the most difficult phases any democracy can go through, and it’s not guaranteed that how we enter such a challenging time will be how we emerge through the other end of it.Hobbes wrote his observations a long time ago (17th century) and is often credited with developing some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought. He championed the rights of the individual; the natural equality of all; the distinction between civil society and the state; and the view that all legitimate political power must be representative and based on the free consent of the people. All this leaves us with a question: How could someone who sought accommodations within society write forcefully concerning citizens and groups warring with each other?In a prophetic way, Hobbes pictured what countries would endure once civil society was no longer reflected in the political order. He concluded that governments, in an effort to hold political power, would seek to create a society of winners and losers and would accomplish this by successfully maneuvering factions within a population against one another.There has been enough written about the present Conservative political agenda to conclude that Hobbes’s predictions now fit the Canadian context. Often such outlooks emerge in times of great economic change, where various groups struggle with one another to maintain their standard of living. But what happens when a government already possesses and peddles that point of view prior to a time of economic volatility? We’re about to find out.Some things are clear. The hugely expensive economic stimulus plan fell far short of creating the jobs of tomorrow. A quick look at the employment statistics bears it out. While Canada lost hundreds of thousands of full-time jobs, the roughly 400,000 new jobs that have been created are mostly part-time and temporary. That’s not building for a future. The purported “green dividend” growth in economic activity around environmental technologies never got off the ground because so little of the stimulus funds were invested in such long-term infrastructure. With the Prime Minister vowing to get rid of some $54 billion of deficit costs in just five years, and with economic growth at a snail’s pace, it will be inevitable that the federal government will slash public service jobs and services themselves. What remains will be passed down to provinces and municipalities and regions. This has always been the way with successive federal governments, but the sheer privatization ideology of the present government will sink this to new levels.This is what Hobbes worried about. It’s when democracy becomes an empty promise, where a few advance at the expense of the many. It is in such moments that privatization ideology attaches itself to politics as like no other time, and when the very public structure of advanced democracies come under attack. If it lasts a long time it could very well undo the very social and economic fabric of any nation. It becomes a pervasive and updated version of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, where social cohesion breaks down, the strong seek to dominate the weak, and the new society that is created can no longer take care of its own. We regress to what feudal society was like prior to our escape from kings, lords and authoritarianism.Soon enough the loss of meaningful jobs will swell, food banks will struggle to handle the load, university will become out of reach, union rights will be attacked, caregivers will collapse under the load with little assistance, seniors won't be able to afford their drugs, and it all will become a struggle against one another for scarcer resources. Where capitalism was once allied with values that, to a certain extent at least, contributed to democracy and responsible citizenship, it now links itself inextricably with the naked bottom line that can undo communities and reverse decades of social progress.Tough times lie ahead. The temptation to get angry and turn on each other will be palpable. One can only hope the good graces of tolerance and civil responsibility that empowered us in the past can keep us together, fighting for a public space we ourselves once championed.