Enough With the Recession! | Clarissa's Blog
I think sometimes people buy the austerity line because they want to suffer. In Australia, we have had an economic boom -- the only country not to succumb to the global recession, but we had to get rid of a female prime minister, who made us feel badly about ourselves, so we voted in a guy who will impose austerity measures so that we can all feel real again.
The need to suffer so as to feel real is probably as hold as humanity itself. It's why rituals were invented. Their sadomasochism is not incidental. There's a certain benefit in feeling the limits of one's being, which can serve to reorient slightly more healthy people toward the world at large. But then there are the really sick, who just want to suffer, and don't care about it so long as they get the chance to drag others down. Australia is filled with these sorts of people -- Irish Catholics -- as well.
So I think austerity often happens because we wilfully choose it, rather than as an externally imposed necessity. It also speaks to a failure of the imagination -- one could choose to suffer, for instance, by trying to pass one's next martial arts grading, or by writing a very difficult academic paper or by flying to the moon. Instead, one demands that one's suffering be simple and imposed from the outside. This is the scourge required by people who are truly mediocre -- and they require it for the rest of us as well.
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