What we have now in the Western world is not families, it is millions of single independent autonomous actors. They have close friends, but loose families. They have teenage crisis where they try to gain independence from their family. They have work relationships. When they fall, they can’t come back home, they have no place called home. They may say « I’m from Minnesota » but their grandfather was from Belgium. Even in France or Germany, people are unrooted, and a good 15% of them are total migrants, as in, people who fled/left their home country, often in a state of war. Some would raise the flag of a Muslim country and fly there every year. And yet, they are more French than foreign.
This may be a difference with India. We’ve thrown tradition to the bin while inventing modernity, but what we’ve really done is cut through all the ties between people, made them move cities and countries, made them leave their home land with carrots that had grown from the ground for centuries into worker factories where all they owned was a bed (on rental) and a place in the factory, we told them family was a contractual relationship, and shred their sense of belonging to a place. « So why would you help your next of kin? He doesn’t come from here. »
Similarly the results of diversity can be positive or negative. The people who slip through the cracks are those who don’t have enough glue on them to stick to any group that will embrace them as their own out of empathy.
I have been woolgathering and I also think the main reason is the young age of America. It simply leapfrogged into prosperous existence after minor dramas in its relatively short timeline. The only collectively experienced trauma is the civil war and that’s just a memory now. And it doesn’t even apply to everyone in the small population dataset. Weak small magnets.
America is also a nation of immigrants. We have never had any kings or queens. We have never deferred to authority ever and have no notion of social contracts. We believe in our ‘vote’.
There is always a reverse reciprocality to responsibility. If you borrow money from me, you will feel obligated to pay me back. Because my face will keep floating in front of your eyes or I will knock on your door loudly. It is easier to deny this with a govt. Perhaps that will lead to life changes.
During the tougher times of my life, I didn’t have time to lose myself with drugs or alcohol. I fretted about failing my parents, grandparents, teachers, ancestors, community...if I hadn’t been a wannabe atheist dickhead during my ill spent youth, I guess the thought of failing my faith would have been a weight upon me too.
Recently, I have been exploring ways to re enter my universe of religious/spiritual faith. In my wool gathering, I wondered if communism, socialism, capitalism are all religions too.
it’s the same with relationships between a person and institutions. You have faith in the institution of marriage, the institution of law, the institutions of education, the institutions of trade and commerce etc. No relationship is consummated without a voluntary vesting of power.
Another big one is military and armed forces. I am anti-war and I don’t want to say anything that will even indirectly glorify war connected concepts. But conformity and shared social responsibility is a big thing with people from countries with mandatory draft. We don’t have that either. Most positive behaviours come from negative inputs. I am just pinning it here. It is not something I like to delve into...but to be fair, that we have never had any major wars or mandatory conscription also contributes to the weak social glue.
Faith in government is a form of religion too. The people who pray to the elected god of politics are disappointed when they are not rescued.
The suffering faithful cry out to their gods... why won’t you rescue me? The others wonder how the unblessed have sinned. Some others are smug in their own worship of the gods. Some create new gods. Cults emerge.
When you start thinking of faith in govt as no different from faith in a god/higher power, it won’t be too long before you realize that it is US who have vested power in that institition.
And then there is the issue of contracts. Every relationship is based on an understood contract. Be it a mother/child or a bank/customer.
In most countries..let’s take Scandinavian countries because they are the America’s favourite...the contract is between govt and tax payers. These countries were monarchies initially. The notion of economic social net is a very old one. As is social contracts. They go hand in hand. That America had never had a functioning monarchy and has a diverse expanding population with weak glue could also be a reason.
I agree with you. I phrase it this way: In the 1500 in Europe, people believed the origin of universal public good came from God, now people believe the state represents public good. It is very dangerous, as in both cases it is reified by humans who clearly don’t only have positive intentions.
I've no doubt that, for every person who ends up rough sleeping in the US there are 1000 who move back in with their parents. Or sleep on a friend's couch. Or get gifted a few hundred bucks from a loved one to tide them over. Or move in with a partner when otherwise they wouldn't have.
But there will always be some people who don't have any social connections left to spend - if your parents have died, or were abusive, or you're a first generation immigrant, moving back in with them might not be an option. Maybe you've had $300 from grandpa several times before, and lost it to your gambling addiction. Maybe you've stayed with your sister before and scared them with your untreated mental illness.
None of which is common - but if a million people are struggling to make rent it's a simple numbers game: some of them won't have any social connections to fall back on.
Perhaps the problem is that there IS a govt welfare program. The complaint currently is that what’s being done is not enough. The truth is that it will never be enough. The govt and tax payers can shovel mountains of dollars into the maw of the problem and it will never be enough.
The way American welfare programs are designed is like sticking a band aid for cancer and hoping rosy health will return.
If we stop relying on govt, perhaps our tribal instincts to care for each other will return ...perhaps it will finally dawn on us that we rely on our kith and kin...that we come from other people like us and it was not the govt that birthed us.
I don't think that's true. Welfare as commonly understood doesn't really exist any more in the US. The closest is TANF (temporary assistance for needy families) but that requires you to have children and is time limited. SNAP gives you food benefits but that is limited to 3 months unless you have a job or are in workforce training. For the most part, your random homeless person on the street isn't eligible for these and doesn't get benefits. The loophole is disability but that's a pretty tough process to go through. Not likely that many homeless can muster it.
If you get Section 8 housing assistance in the US, it is illegal to house that relative who needs a hand without an extensive paperwork and approval, which you probably won't get. It is especially difficult if that relative has a drug charge in their past, including "smoking a joint at age 16". (If that relative has a felony drug charge in their past, they also can't get federal student loans ever.)
Many of the things people do to help their families have been made to have bad consequences for poor people in the US. To me, it feels as if there has been a systematic effort to break poor families, take away their ability to help each other, and ensure that they continue to be embroiled in "the system" in the US.
Isn’t section 8 itself a welfare program?
‘Help’ here should flow down from the haves to have nots. For the have nots to help each other is counter intuitive and counter productive. No solid results. And can be detrimental to the original goal of social welfare.
It dilutes the notion of section 8. If the goal is feeding someone with a bowl of soup so he can be strong enough to start working, then splitting the bowl of soup between three people defeats the purpose. Everyone is still hungry, everyone is too weak to work and nobody achieved their goal. It is a waste of resources.
If one needs to get out of debt, do they go to someone who is debt free or to someone who also needs to get out of debt?
> Many of the things people do to help their families have been made to have bad consequences for poor people in the US. To me, it feels as if there has been a systematic effort to break poor families, take away their ability to help each other, and ensure that they continue to be embroiled in "the system" in the US.[..]
Can you give an example?
Maybe it’s different in India now. But my generation remembers ‘family’(and I use the term loosely) walking in and leaving through a revolving door for a break from the condition what most people in America call ‘unhoused’.
You feed the guests, house them, pull connections..find a job, heal them, fight for them..whatever until they can leave. If someone can’t manage it, they’d at least duct tape them and drop them off with the next relative with more resources. Keep in mind..’resources’ doesn’t necessarily mean money..it could be pulling a favour or even just giving sane advice.
It boggles my mind that anyone could go hungry in the USA..one of the richest countries in the world. Having said that, a bag of rice, lentils and throwing in some vegetables is cheap. And it is easy to keep people well fed and housed so they can function, recover and revive. The social contract also insists upon reciprocal favors when the time is right. The entire society works on ‘you scratch my back, I will scratch yours’. Together..everyone survives.
Anytime someone has to leave their home town to travel for work or study or vacation or a break from the rat race, the social net will be activated and word will go from one end of the country to another. Also multi generational families were the norm and that’s how wealth..even middle class wealth..accrued.
I knew a girl whose family was from mainland China or Hk ..or maybe Taiwan whose extended family had a restaurant. Everyone worked at the restaurant and she was also working at HSBC. We found out from her that she handed over every paycheck to the family’s head. And he gave her back a monthly stipend. She worked weekends at the restaurant without pay. When she finally decided to marry her boyfriend, the family gifted her a house. Fully paid off. And now she had a family unit of her own and an asset that was hers and hers alone.
Now...everyone who wasn’t a first generation immigrant was shocked by this system. I could grok it. That’s what I think of as a social net. It could be known as ‘co dependent’ in the west, but most people from Asia get it. Because there is no govt ‘welfare social net’ or Medicare or whatever. It took me a while to understand what ‘social safety net’ meant in the United states.
In America, everything is translated in the language of money and what someone else owes to every individual. It’s different. Entirely different world. Clearly.