How a Society Becomes Unraveled

When you have one set of rules for the top dogs and a different one for everybody else, then somebody notices that the top dogs use the rules to flaunt everybody else, then you have the unraveling of your society. Or, as translated by Robert Shiller, you have a wave of mortgage defaults:

Strategic default on mortgages will grow substantially over the next year, among prime borrowers, and become identified as a serious problem. The sense that ‘everyone is doing it’ is already growing, and will continue to grow, to the detriment of mortgage holders. It will grow because of a building backlash against the financial sector, growing populist rhetoric and a declining sense of community with the business world. Some people will take another look at their mortgage contract, and note that nowhere did they swear on the bible that they would repay.

Currently I'm reading Robert Conquest's book Reflections on a Ravaged Century, and a point he makes about the disintegration of the Soviet Union was that the self-serving duplicity of those on the top led to the destruction of a very cozy set-up for that selfsame elite in Russia. I'm guessing the same may be happening in the US. You dissolve social trust, the solidarity which is best seen in times of catastrophe when "everybody is in this together" is being eaten away by the greed and indifference of the bailout billionaires on the top. They write and re-write rules to their advantage. They buy and sell politicians and wonder why a respect for "rule of law" is eroding.

You would think that the top dogs would do everything in their power to keep things running tickety-boo. After all, they are the ones that slurp up the goodies and loll about in the luxuries. But Wall Street weasels are blind to their own hypocrisies and are willing to throw it all away in order to squeeze the last little bit of extorted wealth out of the poor working stiff. Greedy to the point of grief. Willing to throw it all away just to have the last gluttonous goodie.