For many years the political parties in Malta worked hard for votes from the electorate as means to an end. To create a society based on a Christian democratic way of life, or to advance the plight of the working classes.
They fought hard until they saw Malta attain independence in 1964, declared a Republic in 1974 and accepted as a member of the European Union in 2004.
Affluence seems to have changed all this. Acquisition of votes is now the main end of the political parties. Means have become ends. They seem not to stand for anything, anymore, as they used to.
Voters, once protagonists in the political process, have been turned, and they have let themselves be turned, into commodities. They serve mainly to put small groups of people in power for their own ends, in return for a perceived better way of material life. Politics, once a noble mission for the attainment of the common good, has been transformed into a series of business transactions.
It seems like the beginning of the end of democracy, and the ushering in of an era of oligarchies, as was the case in ancient Greece, the Middle Ages and beyond, until the advent of the French Revolution. The poverty of our democracy has been exposed.
In his book The Affluent Society, John Galbraith, an economist, sought to outline the manner in which the post-World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector.
Building off Galbraith’s book, Paul L. Wachtel, a psychologist, wrote another book: Poverty of Affluence: A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life.
The book is an insightful analysis of the psychological poverty of modern materialism. He claims that: “We have developed a culture that is good at extracting natural resources and building material wealth, but psychological wealth has not kept pace.”
Politics, once a noble mission for the attainment of the common good, has been transformed into a series of business transactions
Wachtel’s work is a good profile of middle-class psychology in the US, its habits, expectations and frustrations.
One key theme in his book predominates: “Bigger isn’t necessarily better. On the contrary, our national obsession with growth has, despite the sloganeering, produced a deeply unhappy society of atomised individuals.”
Most of the points here are fairly familiar ones concentrating on the spiritual limitations of material accumulation made more severe by the use of competition as the driving force behind obsessive growth and accumulation. The author has experienced a number of dysfunctional patients whose difficulties are traceable to these societal phenomena.
Wachtel presents a number of insights into modern social behaviour. A significant element of his own orientation lies in connecting the psychological with the social, and the health of the individual with that of the group.
Accordingly, an important part of the book lies in a critique of individualism in its many guises. Behind this critique appears to lie a deep regard for the humanistic impulse which he views as inherently social in nature. To the detriment of that impulse, however, a society of unhappy, alienated people is being produced by a national ethos of mindless self-absorption, obsessive growth, and an ethic of competition.
Hence remedies for personal ills must tackle the societal thereby taking on a scope far exceeding that of the single individual. Accordingly, Wachtel mounts a critique of capitalism as an ordering process and its need to reproduce these alienating forms of social behaviour. In the process, he seeks to shatter myths surrounding the marketplace as producing the best of all possible worlds.
Suicide statistics for Malta show that between 2005 and 2015 the number of suicides doubled, from 17 to 36 a year, with people aged between 40 and 59, the most likely to have “accumulated material wealth” to commit suicide more than other age groups.
Before the last general election, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat came out strongly saying that what counts for the Maltese at present is “il-but” (their pocket). Former prime minister Lawrence Gonzi, from the other end of the political spectrum, rather cynically, agreed with him that it is “the pocket”, implying the “accumulation of material wealth”, that really matters for many Maltese at present.
How long will it take for politicians, voters, or some other social agents to discover what’s beneath the rot, bring it out in the open, take a leaf out of Wachtel’s book, and begin turning things all over again?
Here’s something for the political parties to stand for and support. Politics is about the attainment of the common good, to make people flourish, and not be delivered to new kinds of bondage to individualism and materialism. Man is a social being who many times in his life is bound to stop and reflect and ask: Who am I? Why am I here? Who led me in this mess?
A reflective, selfless and committed politician would probably have made the discovery much earlier and decided to do what it takes to find a remedy for it.
Nationalist MP Clyde Puli, in his article ‘What does the PN stand for ?’ (July 17) came close to a possible solution. He suggested the promotion of “communitarian [Wachtel uses the word societal] values” as “the essence of the nation”. With this prosposed solution one does not necessarily win elections soon but can, progressively, rebuild an alienated nation.
Tony Mifsud studied politics and social affairs in Oxford.