Week 26: The Age of Resentment
Discussing the concentric circles of violence
This week I was asked by the Italian Consul General in Melbourne, Hanna Pappalardo, to have a conversation with a young woman she is mentoring in the Italian foreign service. The idea was to have a casual chat about the role of women in the current challenging international relations environment.
Our discussion started with the mega-trends of our era – the way young women are accelerating past men in educational attainment, and the extraordinary male backlash that has come in response to this. This resentment has become one of the dominant forces of individual, social, national and international instability.
I think we’re starting to see a greater understanding of the connections between individual and state-level violence. There’s an emerging understanding of the concentric circles of violence, how state-level violence is not divorced from domestic and individual violence, but driven by similar resentments and psychological impulses.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers a compelling example of this. The most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she tries to leave, with men’s violence often escalating to murder. Ukraine’s attempt to leave Russia’s “sphere of influence,” to reorientate itself towards the European Union has elicited the same violent response from Moscow. This is driven by a belief that Russia has a natural right to control Ukraine, just as many men see a natural right in controlling women.
If we are serious about addressing instability in all its forms, we need find ways to negate these innate tendencies and turbulent male emotions. We need men to understand that the world isn’t a zero-sum contest between men and women, and women’s advancements shouldn’t need to be curtailed to protect men’s feelings.
I think it is the incessantly low expectations we have of men that contributes to their inability to adjust themselves to the modern world. Men need duties and purpose, and lowering expectations strips these from them. Maturity is not beyond men’s capabilities, there are plenty of men who are mature and responsible. But this should be considered an expectation, not an exception.
However, we also need to see the whole chess board and think about the issues that feed into these resentments. The cost of housing and insecure work being two major forms of insecurity that can compound resentments and exacerbate violence. All policy, from council-level up to foreign ministries have harmonies to find to protect individual, social and state-level security.
This Week’s Reading:
Australia Works to Combat Modern Slavery
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“In terms of modern slavery within Australia itself the most common forms are sexual exploitation and forced marriage. These can be abuses that hide in plain sight, and are protected by social norms and power relations that can be difficult for governments to address.
Sexual exploitation involves someone having to perform sex work due to being coerced, threatened or deceived. However, the lines around what constitutes consent can be incredibly murky and even a concept like informed consent has many shades of grey. This means that sexual exploitation is probably a far greater problem than is acknowledged.
These instances of negative power relations between individuals or groups can often be compounded by other external forces. As [Penny] Wong highlighted in her speech: “Conditions including political instability, conflict, pandemics and famine – all worsened by climate change – help modern slavery thrive. These conditions exacerbate existing inequalities and condemn people, including children, to inhumane conditions. The creep of authoritarianism is also a factor. We know that some countries use forced labor as a tool of oppression.”
From Myanmar and Bangladesh to Ukraine, Australia Announces New Assistance Packages
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“Bangladesh is currently carrying a great burden for the world, with close to 1 million Rohingya refugees having been forced into the country. Countries with the ability to resettle refugees, like Australia, have been reluctant to do so with the Rohingya. Since 2008, Australia has granted refugee visas to less than 500 Rohingya. The permanency of the world’s largest refugee camp is not viable and has the potential to create further destabilisation in the region.
Greater humanitarian assistance – including a more substantial resettlement of refugees – presents an opportunity to not only invest in the stability of the region, but to build goodwill and habits of cooperation with a country that Australia may be overlooking.
When viewed outside of comparison to its gigantic neighbour in India, Bangladesh has significant weight that should warrant greater attention in Canberra. It’s a country of 170 million people whose development trajectory in recent decades has been incredibly positive, with a major reduction in poverty and a per capita income that has moved past both India and Pakistan. There is an opportunity to transform cooperative humanitarian links into a strong economic relationship in the way Canberra has successfully done with Vietnam.”
The Voice And Our Inauthentic Heart
Richard Flanagan – The Monthly
“The Yolngu fourth tense implies something profoundly different: that we exist in a relationship with the larger world that is outside time yet also the guarantee that time continues; that by building the fish traps today we ensure they continue being built both in the past and in the future. It places us in a position of humility towards the land and sea, and towards those who come before and after us. The act is eternal and so are we for as long as we continue to build the fish traps, for as long as we continue to sing the land and sea in to being, for as long as we honour the material world that gives us our life.
We need to understand what Yunupingu was trying to tell us. We need to bring the Yolngu fourth tense into our thinking – into our literature, into our dreams, into our national affairs – honouring those who have lived before us and those who will live here after us, making of many countries one nation. The fourth tense is one that is sung and we need singers whose tongues are not torn out to create the new songlines we so urgently need, connecting this world to the spirit world of our many countries, black to white, past to present to future, honouring all that we are, so that we might finally go forward as the nation of which we dream.
The voice to parliament is the question mark that now appears over our country and, by implication, our literature. For us to be secure, for us to prosper, the answer lies not in relentless exploitation, nor more inequality, nor yet in reckless acts of external aggression to please larger countries. The answer lies in us and our land, and the way we answer this great question later this year. I hope, I pray, that our reply will be yes.”
Michael Schuman - The Atlantic
“How the Chinese people truly feel about Xi and his agenda is almost impossible to determine in the absence of a free press or freedom of speech. Yet some statistics offer clues. Take, for instance, interest in entrepreneurship. The greater confidence a person has in the future, the more likely he or she will probably be to embark on the risky venture of starting a business. Only a few years ago, young Chinese were eager to try their luck in this regard. Incubators popped up across the country to accommodate a wave of start-ups. Now that enthusiasm has waned. According to reports from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which tracks trends in start-ups worldwide, the proportion of adults engaged in starting new companies has fallen dramatically in China recently, from 15.5 percent in 2014 to only 6 percent last year.
The Chinese aren’t starting families either. By the government’s own tally, the number of babies born in China dropped by almost half from 2016 to 2022, to a mere 9.6 million among a populace of more than 1.4 billion. Interestingly, the dramatic decline began immediately after the government finally lifted its draconian population-control policy, which had permitted most urban couples only one child. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographics specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that the nosedive in childbearing “signals deep disaffection with the bleak future the regime is engineering for its subjects” and “can be read as a landslide vote of no confidence in President Xi Jinping’s rule.”
Timothy Synder - Thinking About…
“When backed into a corner, Putin saves himself. In the West, we worry about Putin's feelings. What might he do if he feels threatened? Might he do something terrible to us? Putin encourages this line of thinking with constant bluster about "escalation" and the like. On Saturday Putin gave another speech full of threats, this time directed against Prigozhin and Wagner. Then he got into a plane and flew away to another city. And then he made a deal with Prigozhin. And then all legal charges against Prigozhin were dropped. And then Putin's propagandists explained that all of this was perfectly normal.
So long as Putin is in power, this is what he will do. He will threaten and hope that those threats will change the behaviour of his enemies. When that fails, he will change the story. His regime rests on propaganda, and in the end the spectacle generated by the military is there to serve the propaganda. Even when that spectacle is as humiliating as can be possibly be imagined, as it was on Saturday when Russian rebels marched on Moscow and Putin fled, his response will be to try to change the subject.”
There’s No Such Thing as a Great Power
Phillips P. O’Brien – Foreign Affairs
“More useful than the concept of a great power is that of a full-spectrum power, which takes into account the diverse factors that create military might, not just its outward manifestation in weapons. Few countries have ever achieved all the fundamentals on which superior military power is built and sustained; most that have been described as great powers were in fact mid-ranking Potemkin states whose militaries served as façades for otherwise weak power bases. This was true of Benito Mussolini’s Italy, and it is true of Putin’s Russia.
In the last 150 years, there have been only a handful full-spectrum powers. One is obviously the United States, which became the largest economy in the world sometime in the 1890s and had few security concerns compared with most countries. The United Kingdom was certainly a full-spectrum power from the late nineteenth century until 1943, when it had to subordinate its preferred grand strategy to accommodate U.S. interests. Before then, the United Kingdom was capable of creating and deploying advanced and well-prepared forces almost anywhere in the world and maintaining a war economy that hardly any other state could match. Other countries that probably fit the full-spectrum bill were Germany from around 1900 to 1942, the Soviet Union from 1949 to the 1970s, and China from approximately 2010 to today. All three could compete in every strategic domain and produce high-quality military equipment. They did not always have true global reach, but they exercised great influence in a large part of the world.
What made them full-spectrum powers, however, was not only their military might but also the economic and technological prowess that enabled their armed forces. Military power is to a large degree based on the ability to make the best, most advanced military equipment, from small arms to highly complex aircraft and naval vessels. This ability cannot be faked, and it must have the capacity to scale up quickly when the need arises. A military is only powerful if it can be equipped—and then re-equipped. That is why the Soviet Union was in some ways the weakest member of this club and why it ceased to be a full-spectrum power sometime in the late 1970s.”
Akhilesh Pillalamarri - The Diplomat
“Beyond politics, there are hundreds of social, economic, and cultural trends and occurrences across India that are almost never discussed in the mainstream U.S. media. Indians are traveling like never before, experimenting with new forms of literature and movies, building high speed rail, and changing their marriage patterns, while companies like Apple are building factories in India. None of this is to deny the pervasive social discrimination present in India; rather, it is to demonstrate that Western coverage of India tends to be narrow.
To put this in context, it is instructive for Americans to compare India to a similar era in U.S. history: the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when the United States was industrialising and beginning to assert itself as a major world power. This was the era of robber barons, but also of manufacturing growth that provided opportunities for millions. Political machines such as Tammany Hall influenced elections in cities like New York, but groups organised and won elections on the basis of labor, suffrage, temperance, and anti-immigration. Groups existed that promoted social changes, while others advocated a return to tradition and religion. New technologies, foods and fashions came to the fore. The United States increasingly became jingoistic, what today people would call nationalistic, seizing Cuba and the Philippines from Spain in 1898, despite significant domestic opposition. President Woodrow Wilson presided over a country that enforced the segregationist Jim Crow laws in the South while also promoting democracy abroad in Europe.
Could the complex social, cultural, and political changes in the United States at this time be reduced to only one or two themes? This is something for U.S. analysts to reflect on when considering contemporary India: a country that is in a state of change.”
This Is Why Trump Lies Like There’s No Tomorrow
Thomas B. Edsall – New York Times
“The authors described a phenomenon in which Trump and his most ardent followers engage:
Identity leadership refers to leaders’ capacity to influence and mobilise others by virtue of leaders’ abilities to represent, advance, create and embed a sense of social identity that is shared with potential followers.
In the process Trump’s supporters lose their connection to real-world rules and morality:
Regardless of how others see them, followers themselves will rarely understand their actions in destructive terms. Instead, they typically perceive both the guidance of their leader and the objectives they are pursuing as virtuous and are willing to undertake extreme actions.
This willingness to take extreme action grows out of a duality in the way people experience their identities:
Humans have the capacity to define themselves not simply as individuals (i.e., in terms of personal identity as “me” and “I,” with unique traits, tastes and qualities) but also as members of social groups (i.e., in terms of social identity as “we” and “us,” e.g., “us conservatives,” “us Trump supporters,” “we Americans”).
Social identities, they wrote, “are every bit as real and important to people as personal identities,” but
the psychological understandings of self that result from internalising social identity are qualitatively distinct from those which flow from personal identities. This is primarily because social identities restructure social relations in ways that give rise to, and allow for the possibility of, collective behaviour.
Social identities become increasingly salient, and potentially more destructive, in times of intense partisan hostility and affective polarisation, accentuating a climate of “us against them” and the demonisation of the opposition.”
Jonathan Levy – Boston Review
“In similar fashion, The Wealth of Nations is full of piercing insights, most famously about the relationship between the “division of labor” and the “extent of markets.” But it offers neither a comprehensive theory of the market nor a categorical imperative that self-interest should or must always rule in economic life or in analysis of it. When he wrote about the merits of economic self-interest, Smith was not advocating laissez faire. Rather, his version of the Enlightenment faith in reason told him that merchants and peasants alike understand local economic conditions better than government officials. Smith also held that governing should not be left to businesspeople, given their partial interests, and should rather be left to the hands of government officials whose job it was to look out for the public interest.
Smith’s particularism means his writings are not always consistent with one another, but there is only Das Adam Smith Problem if one demands that a single thinker’s thoughts must comprise a single systematic whole free of contradictions. Some thinkers metaphysically yearn to create a perfect complete intellectual system; their successes may be judged according to the standards they set for themselves. Smith was not among them. He had no such ambition.
There is worth in comprehensive systems. At times, politics demands ideological stridency. Smith offers something valuable of a different kind. Being a localist, Smith was not much of an ideologue at all—a fact which makes Liu’s reception history, in which ideologues like Friedman, Thatcher, and Reagan celebrated him, so fascinating and ironic. The greatest mistake that Stigler and Friedman made was not so much to position Smith on the rightward end of the ideological spectrum but to read him as a discoverer of scientific, universal truths that easily translate into ideological slogans.”
John Hendrickson - The Atlantic
“[Robert F. Kennedy Jr] is tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche. Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them. Falling down conspiratorial internet rabbit holes has become an entirely normal pastime. Study after study confirms a very real “epidemic of loneliness.” Scores of people are bored and depressed and searching for narratives to help explain their anxiety and isolation. Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.
The United States has grown only more conspiratorial in the half century since the publication of Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” There are those who refuse to get the COVID vaccine because of the slim potential of adverse side effects, and then there are those who earnestly fear that these innoculations are a way for the federal government to implant microchips in the bodies of citizens. The line between fact and fantasy has blurred, and fewer and fewer Americans are tethered to something larger or more meaningful than themselves.”
Are South Korea’s New Policies Silencing Rape Survivors?
Hawon Jung - Foreign Policy
“Not long ago, a feminist wave was sweeping across the economically advanced but culturally conservative country, launching Asia’s most powerful #MeToo movement and taking down powerful abusers, including a presidential contender. But these women are now facing a major political backlash. A men’s rights movement that rejects the notion of male privilege has rallied around the belief that false accusations of rape and sexual assault are widespread, and it helped fuel Yoon’s rise to the presidency. Though official statistics on the number of sexual assault cases reported in 2022 have not yet been released, The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy spoke to several women’s rights advocates who say they’ve already noticed a “chilling effect” on rape survivors thinking about filing a case.
“When victims call us for help these days, one of the most common questions they ask is, ‘Would I be charged with false accusation if I report my case?’” said Yun Gyeong-jin, an official at the nonprofit Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center (KSVRC). “Now, many victims seem to think not once, but twice, three times before making a decision on whether to report or not. It’s a worrying situation.”
At the heart of the controversy is a 1953 law that defines rape on the basis of physical violence, not lack of consent. The switch from coercion-based to consent-based rape law has been adopted in recent decades by several countries, mostly in Europe, reflecting United Nations guidelines that favour the latter. Feminists in South Korea have been trying to reform the law for years, but their efforts have created a sense of panic among some men who believe it would result in a flood of “false allegations” of rape.”
What’s Gone Wrong For Men – And The Thing That Can Fix Them
Caitlin Moran – The Guardian
“Feminism. What men and boys need is feminism. And what women need is boys and men who use feminism. Feminism is still the only thing we’ve invented that exists solely to look at the problems of gender, and bring about equality between the sexes.
Until now, feminism has worked on making women equal to men in power, safety, status, politics, relationships and the economy. But it now urgently needs to embark on the second phase – which was absolutely predicted by the word “equality”.
For men are not equal to women in numerous things: 1) Their ability to talk about their problems – instead, men have “banter”, which slaps LOL Artex over crumbling emotional walls. 2) Women have “The Sisterhood” – which knows it should, even though sometimes it doesn’t, spring into collective action whenever an issue is raised. 3) Women have think-tanks and charities and hashtags – they organise the fuck out of International Women’s Day, while International Men’s Day still gets less attention than International Steak and a Blowjob Day. 4) According to need, men are not equal in services for mental health, as that terrible suicide rate still shows. 5) I have never seen a single discussion about how to prevent boys being excluded from schools, kept out of gangs, kept out of jail, prevented from becoming addicted to pornography, or becoming homeless, that has received even half the traction that women and girls can get for doing “No Makeup Monday”.