No Such Thing as Society said she Elected to Lead it

Margaret Thatcher

"I think we've been through a period where too many       people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm  homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are   individual men and women, and there are families. And      no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."

To what are the wealthy entitled? What is the extent and measure of their obligation to those outside their immediate family? Their immediate, often gated, community? Do we have a political, civic, or moral obligation to our fellow citizens? Answer from The Right, No. From Jesus, Yes. How then is a Christian Right possible? What cause in nature makes these hearts so hard? And will they when broken, shamed and discarded, bear their own misery in diffident silence? Some, Evangelicals, certainly set a higher and more Christian standard. May their voices be heeded.  The market is no substitute for civic virtue.

My friends in the Right Wing Think Tanks! To say there is no society as you, and those you lackey, live on the fat of the land, at the tip of every pyramid, is a sin against the Holy Ghost. Were there no Society you would torn apart by ravening mobs. (See Hobbes.) 

Comments

[Ajax E. Bucky]

Some of that Thatcher-effluent is a narrowing of vision, as well as the obvious deconstructing of the social architecture. She refuses to see the banding together part as an assumption of responsibility. Like the slave guys. So hey ho slavery's no good. So hey ho no more slaves. Problem solved. Slaves! Listen up! You're free. Go away. Get a job. Don't bother me.
A lot of the residue that's cloggin the goodlife portals for the current elect are yeomen and cannon fodder from the old days and the old ways. Useful once, essential to the rising scum pageant that created Thatcher's sense of deserved privilege. Now the peasants are free to sink or swim while the already-proven-fit enjoy a cool drink at the pool's edge.
It's just that they proved it in a Jacuzzi, after the peons delivered their helplessnesses from the real lagoon, where sink or swim meant we're all in this together. We were once, or they were, you were. I'm not so sure about me on that.
The sanctity of contract law means, unequivocally, no contract - no obligation. Go away don't bother us.
So now the recently endowed non-slaves must take personal responsibility for their newly non-slave selves in their non-slave lives and that's that. I mean it. Go away. We're busy creating a new world of human perfections. With us at the very heart of it of course of course. We are the great true denominator and we say - "Too much Volken!"
Thatcher and Bush and Cheney and Reagan and Mr. Austrian Universe all share this superiority thing. And have been blinded to the chicanery that removed the real human aristocracy, leaving their sorry grubbing scum-sack ancestor/selves to dominate the race, now, after.
After the aftermath it's all about the imitation of natural process in a purely artificial human environment - that we! We! WE! Control!
No responsibilities, now that we've extracted hundreds of years worth of labor from the misfortunate. They are deadwood. Shells, misshapen refuse, waste.
She deconstructs the larger bond, atomizes the tenuously coherent social mass, and at the bottom it's all people just people, and Mags - your ass is all atoms you know, just atoms - so my foot will now pass right through it without demonstrable harm.
The main tropes and conceits are:
Human core essence is a changeless thing. and:
The rules are all that matters.
These two lies have rearranged the human form, and the thing that now inhabits its/our center wants to be the hive-queen, the royal blood, the reason why. And the beaten down are finding it harder and harder to do anything but submit. It's all biology. Cloaked in a moral garment made from the hand-spun fabric of our once-shared past. But who needs that shit? We've got GM pop-tarts! And body-skin armor! And .. and ..well we are kind of short on reasons to be...but hey, we'll get some, soon as we get all this human trash picked up and deposited in the protein vats.
Human core essence is a changeless thing. and:
The rules are all that matters.
This allows the currently privileged to ooze in from the margins they were once forced to inhabit, by virtue of the "we're all in this together" evolving ethos of sharing and caring that was Western public morality for the last two millenia give or take - and having oozed into position, they can now throw off the constraints of sharing and caring, because - we have a surfeit, a surplus, a plethora, a stuck toilet full of human waste all feeding at the public trough. So it's time for tough love and cleaning up the gene pool.
The deception's in that that last sentence is actually true, but they want to do the cleaning, not Mother Nature, who does a much better job - they want to run it, fixed to their own grotesque neo-human template; or more humbly - create a God out of their own arrogant desires for immortality, and follow its triumphalist dictates into the kingdom.
What they're banking on is nobody will figure out a way to tell the soon-to-be-excised that they've been scammed. All Socially Darwinical Puritanical and everything.
It won't work. Not in a million years.
Scum on the throne means the kingdom stinks, even one one-tenth as packed.

[Harry]

Social Darwinism is an anti-inflationary measure taken in response to an anticipated market correction. It's not social engineering, just good negotiating with obstreperous unions who would kill the golden goose.

A loud and vocal minority of the economic chickenhawk class publicly doubts the effects of exploitive, unrenewable economic practices on the planet. The rest think environmental degradation is primarily the result of overpopulation, and not the result of the way they do business.

I doubt many of them would deliberately plan a cull. But if invisible market forces sort of push people into it, few would shed many sincere tears. Hand wringing from the Democrats and smug, out of context Bible recitations from the Republicans is the normal state of affairs.

[Phil]

"The sanctity of contract law means, unequivocally, no contract - no obligation." Comes down to the social contract and Christ's reply to the question, "Who is my neighbor." The state of nature is always plan B. What is amazing is that marketing has induced those slated for permanent poverty to applaud the system by which they are cast off as trash. "Reality TV" is they call it, yet it is as mythical as Robinson Crusoe. Reality is when the suckers on the reality show, who are given, say, pig hearts to eat, rise as a group and say to the host, "Bon appetite." Reality is that the many have the real power, though they are atomized, and somnolent, sleepwalkers. Giving in the sense of getting active in conversation with one another, and in common efforts for the public good are a way back to a truly civil society. Of course, the way things are going many will be so poor, and social programs so few, that giving may be no more than triage. We shall we which way it tips, towards ameliation or social organizing, towards charity or change.