A better life? Is there only one way?

[hamzen]

I ask this because I've been involved in two seperate discussions about this topic area this week.

If you want to have a good life, and not be one of the unemployed arabs that gets sucked into rioting say, is the only way the individuualistic way whereby it's purely up to each indivual to pull there finger out, work hard, get themself a good education, and with good health it will happen, or ate there other factors involved that need to be addressed.
Also when a lot of the rioters are under age does that mean it's just an excuse for them to be typical idjut adolescent males with a gang mentality?

To use the French situation as an example, if the national average of unemployment is 10% then if 25% of French under 25's are unemployed it's purely because of what? That french under 25's are just plain lazy, or thick, or what?

And if 42% of Arab/North African descent under 25's are unemployed, I guess that means they must be REALLY lazy.

Yeah of course you've gotta work for your dreams to come true, but there's also otherr factors that reflect other issues here., such as institutional racism., and that's a political issue if ever there was one.

But that political issue affects individuals, who over an extended period of time start losing hope, and either get angry or self destructive. And yeah the rioters are gonna be younger than that, it has always been so, but riots reflect the underlying tensions in a society, and the reckless kids, the ones without responsibilities, are gonna release the tensions they are experiencing through the eyes of their family members., has always been so, and they are also the ones who are likely to overreact when directly confronted with things like 'acceptable' levels of racism..

So yeah of course you can't have a society in anarchy, but to my eyes, neither can you marginalize and ignore blatant injustices. either. To ignore is to inflame.

I suspect this is the same problem that is happening in Iraq. where hearts and minds, the social psychological angle, seem to have been rather too easily forgotten .
When even now the Iraquis are glad the Allies came in, they also want them to leave fairly soon, and to an agreed agenda time.

All of this seems absolutely basic psychology to me, and if that statement makes me an arrogant brit, well so be it.

I just don't understand why the concept is so difficult to get?

Maybe someone can enlighten me.

[hamzen]

I've just gone to Scott Talkington;s blog to find an almost identical response, if a little more coherent.

www.demosophia.com/

[jcf]

Ham:

I've been in survival mode the last month or so, so didn't notice your post on my site. I guess my primary comment is that "identity" can form around anything, including religion, ethnicity, ideology, or hair color. The advantage of having it form around liberal values is that those tend to cross-cut other forms of identity by appealing to the primal needs of humans for freedom and material success. But others have noted that totalitarianism has the advantage of being ruthless rather than accomodating. Jury is still out, I guess.

Europe's problem is that its ethnically-derived identities are being cross-cut by other ethnic identities which ultimately have little tolerance. And these other identities have the advantage in terms of demographics. Their numbers are growing. The only way that can really save themselves is by adopting and identity based on Liberalism 3.x, which replaces the laboristic economy with a capitalistic one. That is, as more and more work is done by capital those dependent for income on their labor are at an angry disadvantage. They will therefore clamor for welfare solutions, which will undermine productivity (because paying people not to work tends to create non-workers). Capital ownership becomes more concentrated, and the recursive loop continues. The only way out of the loop is to turn laborers into capital owners so that they have some independence from their labor and from the State.

This is LIberalism 3.x. At the moment Liberalism 2.x is busy committing suicide. It's not clear that anyone has the right idea yet, least of all the elites who have been running things (especially in Europe).

Well, that's my two cents.