Breakdown of society as economic crisis and Ukraine war continue

The cost of the social implosion triggered by the cooking gas crisis and the fuel crisis is devastating

The 16th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes had a negative view of human nature. Human beings are, by nature bad, the pessimistic thinker believed. Hobbes said people were basically selfish. Their selfishness is driven by the fear of death and the hope of personal gain. 
Those who subscribe to his views say human beings’ biggest enemies are human beings. That is why when we sleep or leave home we lock all the doors. But there are many people, whom we can trust. Hobbes, however, disagreed. He thought that at heart we are depraved and only the rule of law and the threat of punishment keep us in check.

Nigel Warburton in his book “A Little History of Philosophy,” says that Hobbes believed that if society breaks down and the law and order collapses, people have to live in what Hobbes called “a State of Nature.” To survive in the State of Nature, you, like everyone else would steal and murder when necessary. “At least, you’d have to do that, if you wanted to carry on living. In a world of scarce resources, particularly if you were struggling to find food and water to survive, it could actually be rational to kill other people before they killed you. In Hobbes’ memorable description, life outside society would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.”

With the economic crisis in Sri Lanka becoming worse with each passing day, people are fast losing hope while Hobbes’ State of nature appears to be more a reality than a fear. On social media these days, we warn each other to be extra cautious in protecting our belongings. The advice is: Do not open your house doors to strangers and do not lower your vehicle shutters.  The rising crime rate, income deprivation, and job losses point to early signs of society’s breakdown where poverty is at its worst and in its most ruthless manifestation. We read heart-rending stories about parents being driven to the extreme, unable to feed their infants and young children. Yesterday, residents prevented a 42-year-old Wattala mother from committing suicide, but they could not save her five-year-old child, whom she threw into the Kelani river. (Suicides prevention hotlines in Sri Lanka -- 1926 or 1333.) We hear stories about people, even some middle-income families, eating only twice a day and compromising the quality of their food intake.

Contributing to the possible breakdown of society is the government’s continuous failure in ensuring adequate supplies of food and availability of fuel, cooking gas, and medicinal drugs at affordable prices. A blatant failure is the government-run Litro gas company. It has not released cooking gas to the market for the past ten days. Yet disregarding the pain the people undergo in long queues for days and nights while waiting for a once-in-a-blue-cylinder apparition, Litro’s new chief has the outrageous temerity to say the company has not placed orders for fresh shipments of gas, for want of dollars. The sheer irresponsible and insensitive attitude apart, the company would not mind the criminal accumulation of demurrage due to its dereliction of duty. It keeps betraying the people by not being ready with the dollars to pay for the shipment. If the company says it could not find US$2.5 million for the shipment, then the government owes the people an answer as to how our export earnings are spent and what happens to the remittances Sri Lankan migrant workers send. 
The cost of the social implosion triggered by the cooking gas crisis and the fuel crisis is devastating, for they have led to deaths, health issues, starvation, job losses, loss of productive work hours, rising crimes, and many more social ills, besides affecting children’s education and pushing food prices upwards.  

Yet the measures the government leaders take do not appear to have brought the relief the people are literally dying to get. People do not even see any semblance of relief.
While in Sri Lanka, the responsibility for precipitating the unprecedented economic crisis squarely lies with an amateurish President and the incompetent team he picked to run the ailing economy, at the international level big powers are also equally responsible for aggravating the global economic crisis and the food crisis. 
A major war potent with the inevitability of energy and food prices reaching the levels many poor countries cannot simply afford is the last thing a responsible world leader would want to see, especially when the economy-killing COVID-19 pandemic is still not over.

Blaming Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine or prolonging the war is only one side of the story. The irresponsible behavior of the United States President Joe Biden and his European allies should also be denounced. They deliberately refused to address Russia’s security apprehensions over Ukraine’s temptation to obtain NATO membership. Instead, they kept on fuelling Ukraine’s bellicose jingoism. 

The US and European leaders’ hardline policy highlights their attempt to economically and militarily weaken Russia while making Ukraine a sacrifice on the altar of power politics. They knew that Ukraine and Russia were the world’s biggest exporters of wheat and fertilizer and therefore if war broke out, there would be a global food crisis. They knew energy prices would skyrocket and billions of poor people all over the world would suffer its effects if Russia was slapped with economic sanctions for starting the war. Yet they let the war happen.

If only these big powers had acted responsibly in view of warnings of a war-induced global economic recession and food crisis, many poor countries, including Sri Lanka, would have been in a somewhat better position to deal with the economic crisis. The Pakistani government, for instance, would not have urged people to cut down on their daily cups of tea. But disregarding the suffering the poor nations would undergo, the rich Western nations, which have the ability to survive a global food crisis, selfishly opted for war. This week, the US increased interest rates to control rising inflation which is partly due to the war in Ukraine. Britain, where inflation has jumped to a 40-year high due to the war in Ukraine, is also in a position to cushion the effects. So are the other European countries. But not a majority of low-income countries.

On Tuesday, Pope Francis, while condemning the brutality and ferocity of the Russian troops, told a group of European Jesuit news editors that the war in Ukraine was “perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented.” He said that months before the war, a head of state warned him that NATO was “barking at the gates of Russia,” and that Russia would not tolerate it, which could lead to war.

The pontiff cautioned that focusing solely on Russia’s violence could prevent people from understanding “the whole drama” unfolding behind this war, and then he referred to the interest of big powers in testing and selling weapons.
Sadly though, rich nations’ selfishness, greed, and hunger for power make Hobbes relevant even today, while poor countries continue to suffer.