The Assisted Suicide of the Nation

Thoughts from the Shire

Yes I know I am prone to exaggeration, that’s the fisherman in me. Yet the more I look around, not at one scandal, one policy, one migration wave, one economic betrayal, or one grotesque little episode of bureaucratic lunacy, but at the whole direction of travel that the UK/Ireland/Europe are on, the phrase begins to look less like exaggeration.

The Assisted Suicide of the Nation

Nations can die in many ways. They can be invaded, bankrupted, starved, conquered, corrupted, or simply exhausted by luxury, decadence and father time. But there is another kind of national death, stranger, and even more humiliating than all of the above: the death of a nation persuaded to cooperate in its own disappearance. Not beaten in a heroic last stand, not crushed beneath the boot of some foreign invader, but coaxed, shamed, bribed, distracted, indebted, censored, managed, and re-educated into believing that its own survival itself is vulgar.

That is the assisted suicide of the nation.

It is not simply decline. Decline can happen through weakness, stupidity, corruption, bad luck, or the ordinary wear and tare of history. This is more obscene. This is decline with a PR strategy. This is civilisational self-harm administered by people with lanyards, safe salaries, public pensions, expensive credentials, and most importantly the conviction that they are morally superior to the civilisation that feeds them.

Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

The nation is not being destroyed by one act. That would almost be too simple. No, it is being unmade by accumulation, by the steady drip of small betrayals, each one presented as reasonable, necessary, compassionate, temporary, modern, inevitable, or economically prudent. A little more bureaucracy here, a little more tax there, a little bit more compliance, a little more form-filling, a little more “safeguarding”. A little more suspicion, a little more surveillance, a little more managed speech, a little more imported pressure on housing, schools, hospitals, wages and public order. A little more contempt for the native working class. A little more outsourcing. A little more deindustrialisation. A little more “choice” for consumers, and less actual power for citizens. A little more debt for the young, a little more loneliness for the old. A little more propaganda for the children, and a little more therapeutic nonsense for everyone.

And then the experts look upon the ruins and announce that the real problem isn’t the top down imposition of all of the above, no the real problem is populism, or more succinctly, the real problem are those who have noticed all of the above.

Orwell understood this game better than most. “Political speech and writing,” he wrote, “are largely the defence of the indefensible.” That one sentence should be carved above the entrance to every government department in the country, preferably in letters large enough for even those with the heaviest lanyards to read. The modern state has perfected precisely this art. The ugly thing is never named, the brutal thing is never described plainly, and the betrayal is always wrapped in language so soft it feels like anaesthetic.

Factories are not closed, the economy is “transitioning”. Communities are not displaced, they are being “enriched”. Families are not destroyed, relationships are being “reimagined”. Men and women are not reduced to economic units, they are “participants in the labour market”. The country is not being stripped for parts, rather it is being made “globally competitive”. What we are watching is not merely bad government. Bad government is almost charming by comparison, being at least recognisably human in its stupidity. This is something colder. This is the long conversion of a people into units: taxable units, consuming units, voting units, data units, labour units, diversity units, carbon units, patients, clients, service users, stakeholders, anything except fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, neighbours, craftsmen, citizens, parishioners, countrymen or kin.

The machine cannot understand a people, it can only process a population of units.

The Family as a Big Main Target

No nation can survive the destruction of the family, because the family is the small republic in which loyalty, duty, memory, sacrifice, sex, birth, death, forgiveness, discipline and love are first made real. Before the citizen, there is the son. Before the state, there is the household, before the economy, there is the dinner table. This is why the family had to be weakened. Not always by open attack, although there has been plenty of that, but by a more subtle combination of commercial pressure, ideological vandalism, economic impossibility, and of course large doses of cultural mockery. The old household economy was broken. Mothers and fathers were pulled apart by work patterns, debt, inflated housing, childcare costs, consumer temptation, state dependency, and a culture that now treats permanence as suspicious, and self-expression as sacred.

Everything that once supported family life has been made harder. Marriage is delayed, avoided, mocked or treated as a lifestyle choice among many, rather than the ordinary foundation of social life. Children are treated as accessories, financial burdens, ecological offences, or little emotional support animals for adults still trapped in adolescence. Homes have become investment vehicles. Grandparents are warehoused, women are told (or at least led to believe) that motherhood is a limitation unless it can be packaged as a branded performance. Men are alternately demonised, infantilised, medicated or rendered economically useless. The child is no longer received into a stable moral world, but delivered into a marketplace of identities, screens, slogans, disorders, diagnoses, fears and appetites. Christopher Lasch saw this direction of travel with painful clarity. We were, he said, “fast losing the sense of historical continuity”, that awareness of belonging to generations stretching backwards, and forwards. That loss is fatal, because once people cease to think generationally, they become easy prey for the market, and the state. The market says, “Live for yourself.” The state says, “Depend on us.” Between them, the family is slowly squeezed until only sentiment remains.

But sentiment is not enough. A nation cannot be built on Mother’s Day cards, corporate Christmas adverts, and carefully staged photographs of politicians pretending to value family while supporting every policy that makes family life more difficult for ordinary people.

The GDP Cult and the Destruction of Real Work

Perhaps nothing reveals the sickness more clearly than the way everything these days is boiled down to GDP, productivity, growth, efficiency and monetary worth. The language of economics has colonised the moral imagination so thoroughly that we now speak of human beings as if they were entries on a spreadsheet. A mother raising children contributes nothing unless she pays someone else to do it. A man repairing his own home contributes less than if he hires a company. A village that grows, mends, shares, swaps and looks after its own may be poorer on paper than a miserable commuter belt drowning in debt, takeaway receipts, antidepressants, and childcare invoices.

The machine loves dependency because dependency can be measured, taxed and monetised. Independence is bad for business. A people who can cook, mend, build, grow, repair, worship, sing, organise, educate, defend and govern themselves are a nightmare to those who profit from helplessness. Ivan Illich put the alternative beautifully when he spoke of choosing “a life of action over a life of consumption.” That is exactly what has been stolen from us. We were once makers, growers, repairers, neighbours, parents, worshippers and workers. Now we are consumers, service users, subscribers, patients, claimants, viewers, scroll addicts, and human resources.

The destruction of the industrial (though imperfect in itself) base was not merely an economic shift. It was a civilisational wound. It broke towns, trades, male dignity, local pride, inherited skill and the connection between labour and place. In their place came call centres, warehouses, service jobs, betting shops, vape shops, charity shops, phone shops, coffee chains, and the strange dead-eyed economy of post-industrial Britain, where a man can work all week and still feel he has produced nothing, built nothing, owned nothing, inherited nothing and passed nothing on. Mumford’s warning about “authoritarian technics” belongs here. He understood that the danger was not merely machines, but systems too vast, too centralised, too remote, and too powerful for ordinary human life. His contrast between democratic technics and authoritarian technics was not nostalgia. It was a warning. When tools remain small enough to be mastered by men, they serve life. When systems become too large to resist, they begin to master men.

That is modern Britain/Ireland/The West in miniature. Bureaucracy is not simply paperwork, it has become a way of seeing. It turns judgement into procedure, wisdom into policy, responsibility into compliance, and men into case numbers. It is death by form, death by portal, death by risk assessment, death by consultation, death by the smiling woman behind the desk who agrees with you privately but cannot help because “the system won’t allow it”.

The perfect idol for an age without courage.

Divide, Confuse, Rule

Then, to keep the public from seeing the whole thing clearly, politics is reduced to false binaries, left versus right or compassion versus cruelty. Openness versus hatred, growth versus decline. Diversity versus bigotry, safety versus freedom, progress versus reaction. These binaries are not designed to clarify, they are designed to herd. They turn thought into team sport, and citizenship into pantomime. One side sells market idolatry with rainbow flags, the other sells corporate servitude with patriotic bunting, both bought from the same corporate overlord. One gives you the HR department, the other gives you the shareholders. One dissolves the nation in the name of compassion. The other sells what remains of it in the name of growth. Every few years the public is invited to choose which hand will hold the syringe in the assisted dying home.

This is how the cycle renews itself. Every few years, the public is permitted to believe that the next political messiah will fix things. A new leader appears, usually with the same dead eyes, but slightly better branding, promising renewal, recovery, common sense, change, hope, stability, growth, or whatever other word has been focus-grouped to death that season. And people, understandably exhausted, want to believe it. They want to believe that one more election, one more party, one more manifesto, one more reshuffle, one more hard-talking minister, one more “new direction” will finally reverse the damage. But very little is reversed, the can is kicked yet further down the road, the machine has an oil change, the slogans are repainted, the same policies are continued under slightly different packaging, and the public is told to be patient because real change takes time.

Then time passes.

Nothing fundamental changes.

The debt grows, the bureaucracy thickens, the family weakens. The young remain priced out, the borders remain porous, the industrial base remains hollowed out. The speech codes tighten, the schools get stranger. The streets grow less familiar, the administrative state expands. The ordinary citizen becomes more tired, more suspicious, more cynical, and more politically homeless.

Then comes the next election, the next saviour, the next promise, the next “historic opportunity”, and the whole predictable theatrics begins again.

That is not democracy in any meaningful sense, it is managed disappointment. As some of you know, I have become more and more convinced, that what we call democracy is little more than a pressure-valve system. It allows the public to vent just enough anger to prevent revolt while ensuring that the basic direction of travel never seriously changes. The faces rotate, the machine remains, and the nation continues its assisted suicide under new management.

John Gray saw through the religion of progress. Modern man no longer believes in God, but he still wants salvation, so he relocates paradise into politics, technology, economics or history. “Humans cannot live without illusions,” Gray wrote, and for modern people “an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism.” That is why the managers cling so fiercely to the language of progress. Without it, they would have to face what they have actually built: a lonely, indebted, deracinated, over-managed, under-loved, spiritually starved society full of people who are told they have never been freer while being unable to afford a house, raise a family, speak plainly, trust institutions, or recognise the street they grew up on.

The assisted suicide of the nation is not one policy. It is the convergence of many systems of unmaking. It is the destruction of the family, the worship of GDP, the selling off of industry, the importation of social fracture, the suffocation of ordinary life by bureaucracy, the replacement of citizenship with consumption, the use of politics to divide rather than represent, and the steady training of a people to despise their own inheritance.

And the worst part is the patronising smile.

The smile of the expert, the smile of the activist, the smile of the politician. The smile of the consultant, the smile of the broadcaster. The smile of the bureaucrat holding the pillow over the face of the nation while explaining, in calm and caring tones, that this is all being done for our own good.

The phrase may sound harsh or exaggerated, the assisted suicide of the nation.

But the more I think on it, perhaps its not stark enough, many believe suicide is a form of self murder, so perhaps the “Murder of the nation” would be a better title, but hey its Thursday, and tomorrow I head to Dublin for the weekend (pray for me) to see Metallica (last time I saw them, it was actually last century) not once but twice, so I haven’t time to be changing titles :-) I must go and get my haircut so I can still pass as Catherine’s hubby, and not her dad.

God bless folks, I know the above is depressing, but seeing behind the curtain is a gift not everyone receives, so at least we can be thankful that we have been given a glimpse.

Source: Thoughts from the Shire