Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [82]
Not that most people choose this—they find out via bankruptcy or being laid off, or by watching their buddies and friends getting laid off (or killed/wounded) around them. Their belief in the goodness and reciprocity of the System—that if you work hard and keep your nose clean, we're gonna take good care of you—fades and then dies.
Immigrants are by self-selection believers, and the rise from poverty to relative wealth they see around them offers visible proof that sacrificing one's productive life for the System is rewarding.
But once you've reached the plateau of relative wealth, then the proposition becomes contingent on exactly what happens to you and your family. If your kids all get advanced degrees and they can't find a decent job in their chosen profession, then you start wondering. If you get laid off, despite your decades of selfless service, then you start wondering. If you get passed over in favor of some brown-noser, you start wondering.
And then you realize you don't have to work 60 hours a week, or live in a big house. An apartment works just fine, and 30 hours a week is enough. Let somebody else step up and take all the heat and the guff and the never-catch-up endlessness of the work.
At that point—a point I anticipate will come to pass in the next 5-10 years--then the Elites' machine grinds to a crawl. People don't have to throw their bodies on the gears of the machine—they just have to stop believing, stop taking that promotion, and stop wanting to trade their entire lives for a thin slice of more more more.
If that day comes, then the social contract will have to be rewritten, or an entirely new set of Elites will have to emerge with a new social contract which people are willing to believe and trust.
Another way of stating "when belief in the system fades" is this: when the Plutocracy over-reaches.
As noted above, societies collapse not just from foreign invasion or drought or environmental implosion but when the productive citizenry realize it's easier to let the increasingly burdensome structure collapse of its own weight than continue to support it.
Once the productive class removes its political and economic will to preserve the institutions via taxes, the institutions will fall. In our current situation, we can say that once the middle class opts out of the system, the burdens of Empire and entitlements will bring the Federal government to insolvency.
The social contract between the government/State and the middle class in advanced post-industrial democracies is fundamentally this: we pay substantial taxes, and you the State will handle the infrastructure of our society via various bureaucracies which don't require our input or oversight: Department of Defense, the judiciary, highway maintenance, etc.
But as the State over-reaches—and by that I mean the both the State over-extending its powers and its functionaries claiming ever-higher shares of the national income-- then the social contract breaks down. The middle class is dealt ever-higher taxes and fees, yet it receives less and less benefit as the less productive class and the Elites (including the "upper caste" of public employees) leverage their patronage of the status quo at the expense of the middle class.
The middle class sees their income as measured by purchasing power declining, even as the roads fall into juddering disrepair, the public education they counted on to educate their children falls under the sway of ideological fads and every State fiefdom indulges in grandiose self-serving spending.
The upper middle class which pays the majority of the taxes then finds itself in an unfamiliar and increasingly unsustainable bind. The unspoken social contract with the state not only guaranteed working roads and a responsive, efficient bureaucracy for the high taxes paid; the status quo was supposed to offer its citizenry free expression. The ideals of