Why New Orleans went south...

Let's start with this irritating cliche "going South" for "going bad" which we in Australia have picked up from American media. What is wrong with the South anyway? Since most of the rubbish is coming from the north it seems we should consider it the underside of the world. We proudly call ourselves "Down Under" when we are the top of the world. and not just us but the south in general. There is nothing in nature that decides north or south is up or down. in fact if the stars are up then we face the centre of the galaxy and have more stars in our skies so we could be said to be looking up.

Now for what happened in New Orleans. There are some fundamental questions that come up about the role of government and the nature of politics we have to ask if we are to even think about this question. The conservative side of politic in any country is by definition the supporter of the status quo. It seems that this is not actually the case in the USA or Australia. They are misnamed they should be more aptly called the side of business as opposed to wealth. This is where the fundamental question comes in. Business is an expression of wealth not the source of it. Business focusses and communicates wealth and so in a sense it does help create it but the deep source of wealth is Trust. Business can't operate if there isn't trust.

A wealthy corporation, person, or nation is someone who is trusted by the people they do business with. This means a network of trust - banks, landlords, suppliers, shareholders, customers, and employees. They need reliable communication systems - roads, phones, mail internet, rail, &etc. They need reliable education systems to provide people who can talk the same languages and share the same stories, even with similar fears and desires (since these help drive their ambitions and allow reliable manipulation for management). You need to be able to trust the police, water and the traffic lights. Technology at all levels needs to be trustworthy.

The manager of this system of trust, until we are mature enough for anarchy, is government. Most government regardless of stripe seem not to understand this is their central role. If they are conservative then they focus on helping those who are already apparently wealthy without realising that the great threat to wealth in the long term is the break dwon of trust that the poor and disenfranchised represent. Here in Australia the poor are used to relying on the government and therefore the nation to look after them when things go wrong. Most conservatives here and I'm sure many in other parts of the world would find this irritating, confronting and upsetting. The thing that it says to everyone in our society is that when things go wrong we can depend on not just the government but the community to help us. This trust means we have a greater tolerance for slow responses for whatever reason (mismanagement or just the natural difficulties that organisation has) . We know they will come through in the end. The number of people whose rage, envy and distrust of the system, of the power elite is minimised to the most radical and criminal while the simply poor and disadvantaged are used to waiting for the help they know will come.

In the States the government appears not just to outsiders overseas, but to those who are in that category within their nation, cannot be relied on for help with their normal life crises so why would anyone think they are going to be there for them in a big crisis like Hurricane Katrina. Law and society can't be trusted everyday so why would that change in an emergency. Very quickly we see a pre-law state appear where the only trustworthy emotion is fear and those that infict it become the leaders. As happens in Africa and other places where intimidation and its instrument, violence, are the primary organising emotional force acting in culture and on society and nation.

Business can't operate in these situations. No one trusts anyone and left unchecked it is a downward spiral to war and famine, and the death of the nation. Western Europe and those inspired by it (like the USA and Australia) and parts of Asia like China, Japan, Korea, India and South East Asian all have complex systems of trust all with different texts and textures, shapes and structures that allow people to comunicate effectively and for them to build themselves up in a way that sees their people fed and housed. They all have large organisations that can only arise in atmospheres of trust. And that allow them to recover from tragedies like hurricanes and colonisation in relatively short times.

This trust is an outgrowth of culture meaning it comes out of the everyday attitudes and ways we live - can women feel safe catching a taxi by herself at any time of the day for instance. This is what makes it a hard problem because it is not the result of actions of any group in a society including the government. But it can be damaged by the way those given power by the social structures people live in as we saw at the end of world war one in Germany but it was more like a disease. if we look at New Orleans we can see it as a flu campared to Germany having pnuemonia during the 1920s. But if you were a hard working person being well paid who was getting flus and colds a lot you'd wonder about your immunity and how you were coping with working too many hours and the stress it was inflicting on you. The USA is like this kind of person it is working flat out to get wealthy when it actually has it already. Itis like a highly talented person who has worked very hard to achieve great position but can't believe in it and so is a work-a-holic exhausting it whole system in the process. When a celebration for a Sporting victory can become a riot there is something wrong. In fact it seems at a distance that when ever the disenfranchised and poor get together for any reason it results in violence. They don't feel part of that society, they can't trust in the American Dream even though they spend an enormous amount of energy chasing it.

Conservatives, or rather warriors of politics what ever the tagline, have a tendency not to see their role in creating a battle. They are always innocents who are being attacked by the evil empire or the axis of evil and don't get how complex the interplay really is and how to act on the big picture instead of the smaller self interests of theose who pay their bills. Politics is the art of disappointment- as someone once said. The politician is always trying to balance the disapointment their humanity is going to infict. If they have their eye on the prize of trust in society for the most number of people business can and will take care of itself.