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When government can't solve social and economic problems, what then?

By Vern Hughes - posted Wednesday, 20 September 2017


Gridlock is the new normal in politics. Neither side can command a working majority in parliament. Neither can deliver a knockout blow in the 'culture wars'. Neither bosses nor unions can win the industrial wars.

Stalemate is the order of the day – in politics, ideology, morality and culture.

For 150 years, politics in the English-speaking world has been a contest between rival methods of capturing and then using government as the main means of securing public and private well-being, and defining the relationship between them.

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That era has now ground to a halt. It has ended, not because the Left and the Right have given up their quest to control the state (their ground troops are still in battle positions) but because that contest cannot now be won by either side.

The scale and structure of government are simply too big, and society too diverse, to be captured by either party. Moreover, the political instruments of the last century established for this purpose (mass membership political parties) have dissolved.

All recent attempts to 'reinvent' government or make it more responsive to citizens have ended in conspicuous failure. Government is intrinsically centralized and impersonal. Around the world, governments work from an operating manual drawn straight from Henry Ford's car factories of the 1920s: they are routinised and require anonymity in interactions between officials and citizens.

Anyone who has tried talking with Centrelink knows what this is like.

Government is also intrinsically expansionary. The functions of government have widened over a century and a half, and the responsibilities of civil society have shrunk. Trust between citizens and government has spiralled downwards as the power of government has spiralled upwards.

The demand on governments to solve ever more of society's relational ills (crime, suicide, epidemics of addiction) has increased in inverse proportion to its capacity to meaningfully address these issues.

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Prevention of family violence and suicide, for instance, require networks of personal and social relationships which dissolve isolation and powerlessness. Governments, however, cannot forge these relationships. They can only conduct abstract campaigns about behavior or gender, and pick up the pieces afterwards.

Governments had more of a chance of maintaining the social fabric when a shared cultural consensus or sustaining moral tradition was in place. With the rapid secularization of the West and the onset of intense 'culture wars', that possibility has gone. We no longer have a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person and to live a good life in society.

The ideas that once used to be widely accepted about these questions have been discarded, but there is no agreement about what should take their place. Nor is there likely to be in the forseeable future.

We no longer have organic communal forums for exploring these questions, for learning the skills of relationship and interdependency, or for building personal 'character'. Schools are now asked to meet all of these needs, but that is not their purpose.

Discussion about how we treat each other, which might once have been called 'moral' discourse, is now largely subsumed in 'politics'.

But politics has become deeply adversarial in nature. Public debate on important mattersis increasingly vicious and polarised, with each side locked in its own echo chamber, separated by a deepening ideological and cultural chasm.

These trends now make it impossible for governments to act on moral or cultural issues. We have no societal consensus on marriage, indigenous recognition, pornography, climate change, the regulation of alcohol and illegal drugs, how the young should be inducted into adult life, or the value we attach to stable family relationships.

The problem for government in this increasingly fractured society is that it cannot govern. It is unable to rebuild a cultural consensus or political majority that will hold the fractured parts in place.

What then can be done? If government can no longer be the means by which competing visions of the public interest, or the common good, can be pursued, we need an alternative means.

Perhaps the way out of this impasse lies in the rediscovery and reinvention of an old organizational form: the mutual society.

As voluntary associations of self-help and mutual aid, the mutual societies of the 17th to the 19th centuries constituted a social infrastructure in the 'centre' of society, between the individual and the state, between households and nations. They assumed responsibility for the social well-being and good character of their participants, and entered into business arrangements in pursuit of these goals.

Because the mutual societies were opt-in and voluntary movements, they did not attempt to impose their values on the wider society. They served as a means for securing both public and private well-being – not for the whole of society – but for their members. And they developed an elaborate discourse, unique to each society, about the relationship between public and private well-being.

Government, by contrast, cannot avoid imposing its assumptions about public and private well-being on its citizens.

Recovery of the mutual society model would enable 21st century citizens to pursue their values-based goals with like-minded people, rebuilding community life, mutual care and socially accountable businesses, without imposing their values on the wider society.

Enabled by 21st century digital technology, this old organizational form can be used by 21st century citizens to aggregate their social and market power at scale to build new institutions and businesses to solve the social and economic problems that are now beyond the reach of government.

Governments will still have an important role to play in the 21st century. But by giving up the quest to solve social and economic problems and settling for a more limited and achieveable agenda of setting rules, they may, perhaps, even recover our trust.

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About the Author

Vern Hughes is Secretary of the National Federation of Parents Families and Carers and Director of the Centre for Civil Society and has been Australia's leading advocate for civil society over a 20-year period. He has been a writer, practitioner and networker in social enterprise, church, community, disability and co-operative movements. He is a former Executive Officer of South Kingsville Health Services Co-operative (Australia's only community-owned primary health care centre), a former Director of Hotham Mission in the Uniting Church, the founder of the Social Entrepreneurs Network, and a former Director of the Co-operative Federation of Victoria. He is also a writer and columnist on civil society, social policy and political reform issues.

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