What Is a National
Nervous Breakdown?
Posted on January 15,
2015 by Charles Hugh Smith
When the citizenry cease to believe the lies, the nation suffers a
nervous breakdown. Last week I used the phrase National Nervous Breakdown without
clarifying its meaning. (The War on Our Intuition That Something Is
Fundamentally Amiss) By
National Nervous Breakdown I do
not mean the breakdown of civil order or the economy; I mean the breakdown of the officially sanctioned
narratives that underpin the Status Quo. These Master Narratives
legitimize the current arrangement; once they erode or break down, the
legitimacy of the Status Quo is lost. The shell remains in place, but nobody
believes the system is a fair, just meritocracy.
LetÕs
consider the erosion or breakdown of these master narratives.
1. No accountability for abuse of power. The core narrative is no one
is above the law, which means not only that everyone is supposedly
treated equally before the law, but that abuses of
power are punished or limited. Now
that police departments are essentially stealing from private citizens without
due process via civil forfeiture,
itÕs clear there is no accountability for abuses of power.This is simply one example of many in which
blatant abuse of power is sanctioned by the Status Quo, and there is little
recourse for citizens who have been abused unless they are wealthy enough to
fund a high-powered legal team. In
effect, our legal system is broken. This mirrors the erosion and breakdown
of accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when abuse of power was
rampant and there was little recourse for the citizenry.
2. Though
U.S. foreign policy is guided by realpolitik, it is fundamentally based on the high moral
ground of defending liberty, democracy and civil liberties. Wars of choice that squandered American lives,
treasure and credibility and the use of torture for dubious gains have
demolished the credibility and legitimacy of U.S. foreign policy–once
again, mirroring the delegitimizing result of the Vietnam War and all the
official lies that were issued to mask that warÕs true costs and failures.
3. The
manipulation of official data to mask the reality that the U.S. economy now
operates to benefit the few at the expense of the many–crony capitalism writ large. Vested
interests control the political and financial machinery to expand their share
of the national income and power. Meanwhile, the income and wealth of the vast
majority of citizens stagnates.
4. The
middle-class roadmap to financial security–earning a college degree and
working hard for a corporate employer–is broken. A college degree leads to debt-serfdom in the
form of crushing student loans, but the education gained has little value in
the emerging economy. In the
corporate world, loyalty has been reduced to a facade of rah-rah PR that masks
a culture of insecurity.
5. The government
at all levels–local, state and federal–responds to any questioning
of its authority or abuse of power with increasing over-reach and violence. There are so many examples of this, itÕs
difficult to know where to start: the federal governmentÕs war on truthtellers regarding domestic spying abuses, and the
state of CaliforniaÕs blatantly unconstitutional confiscation of taxpayer bank
accounts with zero due process–the mere suspicion that income hasnÕt been
fully reported in california is sufficient grounds
for the theft of citizensÕ money by the state. Welcome to the United States of Orwell, Part 2:
Law-Abiding Taxpayers Are Treated as Criminals While the Real Criminals Go Free
(March 27, 2012)
When the master narratives have broken down, legitimacy
is lost. WhatÕs left is authority without accountability or recourse and
abuse of power without limits. When the citizenry cease to believe the lies,
the nation suffers a nervous breakdown.
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IÕm
a Physician involved in work injury rehab. Along with most other health care
people, IÕm seeing insurance companies behaving as unethically and as
aggressively as IÕve even seen in 35 years of practice. They are denying
critical medications (e.g. the last patient I saw today who also sees a
pulmonologist, had her lung meds denied which WILL, eventually, result in her
death), many are denying all imaging for old injuries that can progress and
cause deterioration in the future (forget about all that high tech medicine,
the insurance criminals wonÕt allow it to be used on you or me; only on the
super rich, Dick Cheney types); and they are taking more than 120 days on
average to pay (the average used to be 60 days). Also iÕm
seeing more insurance companies pay with a credit card (very weird). All
of this tells me that the crash is very near and the fat cats who own and run
insurance companies are in the know and are preparing by cutting costs to the
bone and witholding services, even critical services.
Regarding real estate, I live in an upper middle class neighborhood that in the
15 years weÕve lived there before 08, houses were only on the market for a few
days, always less than a week before they were sold. Now its months, and they
appear not to be sold; rather it appears that the seller
gives up and take the sign down. (this doesnÕt
keep the criminals running the city from raising the real estate taxes each
year). Again an indication that not only are the poor and working class getting
hit but so are the rest of us who are below the 1% billionnaires
(which the vast majority of doctors are NOT, contrary to some ignorant peopleÕs
opinions).
.
My diagnosis: collapse
coming soon.