As Secretary-General of the Presidential Office Chiu Yi-ren (
The damage is more than it appears. Apart from mistrust in the authorities, relations between groups in society have also been dramatically twisted and undermined. All kinds of pathological behavior and conflicts of value and interest emerged at the end of the election campaign, such as the breakdown of family relationships or covert threats to colleagues, doctors, patients and employees. All these have turned the trust relationships in our daily lives into a matter of psychological terrorism.
All of a sudden, our workplace and community are transformed into a battleground where the hesitation of undecided voters has been eliminated. Every day, hyped-up propaganda bombards our consciousness and besieges our normal lives. The nationwide action to take sides has removed reality to a simulacrum, where people fight a war of us against them, north (blue) against south (green) in a tribalized world.
Not only has this taking of sides failed to build the most fundamental consensus required by democracy, but it also leaves little space for the freedom to speak one's mind and little time for a public discussion of deliberative democracy. The price we paid for the "democratic miracle" turns out to be a split society.
Repeatedly, abstract collective identification and narcissism is used to incite mass rituals of collective worship. This thought-numbing strategy of common hatred of an enemy ultimately suppresses basic individual freedoms and rights. Years after martial law was lifted, the culture-political project to eliminate authoritarianism has suddenly collapsed overnight as if shaken by another 921 earthquake.
Some people insist that this price is necessary, if not reasonable. In order to achieve Taiwan's self-awareness, they claim to have no choice but to go to such extremes. These destructive means, however, supplant our objective of social integration (democracy) and individual rights (freedom). Once the means override the end, the means will become an uncontrollable monster and an addictive stimulant for frustrated politicians.
For instance, all social, educational, cultural, economic and welfare constructions are deliberately branded with an eye-catching ethnicity logo. But how can a country lacking a basic consensus and mutual respect and trust talk about a diversified country and society in anything but vague terms of respect and materialistic integration?
Let us look back on the reformative politics of the New Middle Way and the citizen-oriented politics focusing on economic welfare and how it came to die in its infancy.
First, social welfare, labor insurance and environmental protection were given up one by one in order to maintain capital-absorbing economic growth. It then became unavoidable to adopt the deeply sick economic strategy of building a partnership with capitalists, directing all efforts toward the demarcation of ethnic identification, which led to the suffocation of reformative and citizen-oriented politics.
At the same time, a sense of insecurity spread throughout society and unemployment and poverty soared. Frustration then led to suicides and violent money-related crime became rampant. The authorities' impotence and loss of credibility forced the government to tear society apart and adopt risky measures.
The task we face now is how to rebuild public confidence and heal the wounds. Among many urgent issues, a social security network protecting citizen's basic livelihoods is the most fundamental. It cannot be denied that National Health Insurance (NHI), despite conflicts over resource distribution, has guaranteed equal health security for a majority of the people. The insurance program has now become a new cornerstone of our society. Compared to the NHI, the pension system, delayed and debated for a decade, appears more pressing. Nonetheless, if we expect the pension system to produce and accumulate public confidence, we should exclude two disturbing factors -- capitalist logic and ethnic identification. After all, economic growth and ethnic outlook cannot replace the relevance of social trust, improvement of individual wealth and the protection of a free and democratic political system.
Chang Shr-syung is the dean and professor at the department of social welfare in National Chung Cheng University.
Translated by Wang Hsiao-wen
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