by Jeffrey Tucker, Daily Reckoning:
This is not about whether there is such a thing as a literal social contract. The phrase has always been a metaphor, and an imprecise one since it was first invoked by Enlightenment-era thinkers trying to sort through a rationale for collective practice of some sort.
It’s easy enough to regard the social contact not as explicit but implied, evolved and organic to the public mind. At the most intuitive level, we can think of it as a widely shared understanding of mutual obligation, a tie that binds, and also the exchange relationship between society and state.
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The bare minimum idea of a social contract is to seek out widespread security and peace for as many members as possible.
No matter how narrow or broad you understand that phrase, it includes most fundamentally the shared expectations of what government should and shouldn’t do.
Above all else, it means protecting the public from violent attack and hence defending the rights and liberties of the people against imposition on person, public or private.
The reality today is that the social contract is broken in nations all over the world. This concerns the widespread failure of social welfare, health systems and sound money. It includes the medical conscription called vaccine mandates.
It impacts on mass migration as well as crime, and many other issues as well. Systems are failing the world over with ill health, low growth, inflation, rising debt and widespread insecurity and distrust.
Epic Fail
Let us consider the most shocking case in the news: the mind-boggling failure on the part of the Israeli government to protect its citizens against hostile elements just across its border. A revealing news article in The New York Times explains the aftermath. It includes:
a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on. Initial assessments point to an Israeli intelligence failure before the surprise attack, the failure of a sophisticated border barrier, the military’s slow initial response and a government that seems to have busied itself with the wrong things and now appears largely absent and dysfunctional.
Nahum Barnea, a prominent Israeli commentator, put it this way: “We are mourning for those who were murdered, but the loss does not end there: It is the state that we lost.”
True, there has been very little discussion of this terrible topic and understandably so. Israel at its base, as a project and history, is a promise of security for the Jewish people. That is the core of it all.
If it fails here, it fails everywhere.
After all, the attacks from Hamas were extremely well-planned over two or perhaps three years. Where was the famed Israeli intelligence? How is it possible that it could have failed in so many ways that end in unspeakable mayhem and murder, even to the point that Israel itself is hamstrung in its response by the existence of so many hostages?
It’s utterly heartbreaking, not only for the loss of life but also for the loss of shared trust that this nation depends on so foundationally.
Did It Start With COVID?
So what’s the answer? Part of the answer is that 3½ years ago, the Israeli government turned its attention to chasing down a virus as a national priority. It wasn’t only social distancing and business closures. It was contact tracing, mass testing and masking. The vaccine mandates in the country were some of the most coercive and universal in the world.
Almost immediately at the onset of the crisis, the Israeli government maxed out stringencies, going further than the U.S. Nearly a year later, they grew even tighter, only relaxing a full year later.
As Sunetra Gupta pointed out early on, this was already a near-universal violation of the social contract on how to handle infectious disease. In nearly every nation, we had rules of isolation to protect workers in some classes while workers in other classes were shoved in front of the virus.
This contradicted all modern public-health practice, which had long eschewed dividing classes this way. The theory of the past is that infectious disease is a burden shared socially with special efforts to protect the vulnerable — based not on class, race and access, but on traits of the human experience shared by everyone.
The warnings poured in from dissident scientists from the very onset – even dating back a decade and a half earlier — that anything like a lockdown would wreck trust in public health, respect for science and confidence in government institutions and those allied with them. That is precisely what has happened the world over.
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