some observations on governments and the people they represent
fighting the conservative wave in Canada
Bonobos don’t have nations, but humans invented this concept, and tried to make something of it, a few centuries ago. Modern nations all have governments, some of which are elected by the soi-disant citizens of those nations. Elected governments belong to a ‘party’ or an alliance of parties that has gained more votes than another competing party or coalition of parties. For a period of time, until the next set election – in three, four or five years – this government gets to deal with the finances of the nation, including how much finance, garnered through taxation, that government gets to play with. Some parties believe in minimal government, and tend to reduce taxation, while others feel that the government should have a larger role in such public benefits as healthcare, education, welfare, infrastructure, and legal and policing systems, requiring a larger tax burden on the populace, based roughly on that much maligned dictum, ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’.
So the burden on citizens would be indexed according to income. Children who have no income, wouldn’t pay tax, and the elderly, no longer able to work, would, depending on their savings and assets, be supported by government pensions. As to the rest, the amount paid, and the manner in which that amount is spent, is subject to endless debate and scrutiny.
So this post will focus solely on democratic nations. It’s interesting that the concept of ‘nation’ has become so reified and so positive that Aboriginal or ‘First Nations’ people, in Australia and the Americas, have happily adopted it. We likely now think of the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians, or Genghis Khan’s Mongols, as belonging to a nation, so it’s worth noting that, only a few centuries ago, we could have travelled from the region of Lisbon to that of Vladivostok – nearly 14,000 kilometres – without crossing a border or being asked to produce a passport or a visa. Not that we wouldn’t have been treated with suspicion or hostility along the way!
I remember years ago hearing of people who, rather heroically in my opinion, refused to belong to a nation. They rejected passports, citizenship and all such paraphernalia and designations. They fully accepted, however, that they were human beings. Interestingly, when I look this up on the internet, all I get is stuff about people who are refused citizenship – the Rohingyas of Burma and other discriminated minorities, and of course refugees around the world. These people, of course, greatly outnumber the few who take what they consider a heroic stand against national identity.
So, from the preceding, you’d be right in assuming that I take a somewhat skeptical view of nations and nationalism, possibly because I was born in one nation and transported to another as a child – no free will after all. But given that the human world is divided into nations for the foreseeable, and that nations must be governed, it seems obvious to me that democratic systems, in which the people have some input into how they’re governed, are the best systems available, though the oscillations between limited governments and over-arching ones can be quite frustrating.
It’s also worth noting that, regardless of whether right or left wing governments are in power, some nations have more of a tendency towards collectivism, and others towards individualism. We can see this in national data regarding the role of government in education, welfare and healthcare, amongst other things. For example, most national democratic governments stipulate a minimum wage, though obviously comparisons between nations would be difficult. For example, Austria has no clear minimum wage, and wages appear to be set via collective bargaining by ‘job classification for each industry’, and India has over a thousand minimum wage rates over many different industries and roles. Federalist nations such as the USA and Canada may have many state rates that are higher than the federal rate, and so on. And of course many countries, even democracies, have unregulated ‘under the counter’ labour of all kinds. The USA, with its large contingent of libertarian, anti-government types, would be a prime example.
Given that I’m fully convinced that free will is a myth, I’m no libertarian. In fact it seems obvious to me that we dominate the biosphere, and have developed our complex neural structures and our scientific know-how, due to our hyper-social nature rather than individual liberty. It’s also interesting to note that libertarianism is a predominantly male ideology. Interesting but hardly surprising.
And then there’s communism and socialism. As someone who’s long taught English to Chinese students, young and old, I’ve noted how defensive and proud many of them are about their government, and it seems to me obvious that those who choose to remain in China (though of course many would have no choice) would be even more defensive of the so-called communism that their government claims to provide. What I’ve noticed, typically, is that their government, known as the Politburo – that’s to say the full 24-member body, not its Standing Committee, which currently consists of 7 individuals – is entirely male. There have been only 6 female members in the history of the Politburo, formed by Mao in the 1950s. They’ve mostly been wives of other members, and there has never been a woman on the Standing Committee. Funny that, considering that women tend to be more community-minded, which is what communism is supposed to be all about. But then, if China is a communist country, then it must surely be the case that my arse is another planet.
Other countries, such as Russia and North Korea, no longer pretend to be communist, if they ever did. The official title of one, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is about the sickest joke I’ve ever heard, whereas the other’s former title, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was about nothing if not Empire, and wee Vlady wants it all back, and then some.
Of course, virtually all dictatorships are governed by males, but then, so are virtually all democracies. But it’s beginning to change – obviously too gradually for old codgers like me, but certain outliers – we may call them the ‘quiet countries’, such as New Zealand, the Scandinavian nations, and even Australia and Canada – these are the places where women are tending to come to the fore politically. I compare it to the bonobo world surrounded by a rather more dysfunctional chimpanzeeism. What are the countries that make all the headlines? The dysfunctional ones and the brutal ones. And I’m still shocked to find that people have no knowledge of or interest in bonobos.
Australia is heading for a federal election soon, and the buzz in the air is we’re going to succumb to the current wave of conservatism, along with New Zealand and the USA – as if current ‘liberal’ governments are anywhere near heading in the direction of a bonobo humanity.
I suppose we have to play the long game and keep plugging away….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_wage
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