There is an underlying psychological risk in starting a family under shit societies. Those who follow through with it will forever undergo the hard challenge of being pulled further and further into a survivalist headspace.
Forever compelled to rationalize their pursuit of naked self-interest as something they are doing for the sake of supporting their family. Forever compelled to rationalize their tolerance of appalling working conditions and labor alienation as something they are being pragmatic about for the sake of supporting their family. Forever compelled to leave their passion projects on hold for longer and longer, for the sake of their goddamn family.
This would only become exacerbated with weak and corrupt institutions, low opportunities, and entrenched poverty. Those workers of the corrupt institution will take bribes for their family. Those aspirants with low opportunities will emigrate for their family. Those paupers of deep destitution will pursue crime for their family. And with every young familyman that grows into an elder who has learned to tolerate such a shithole, the shithole becomes the only thing he knows, the only maze he can navigate in. There is no limit to the height of moral gymnastics one can pull if he convinces himself that he is doing it for the sake of his family.
A society of self-interest that has surrendered to alienation and abandoned its passions, all painted over with the honorable glaze of protecting one’s family is not run for the mutual benefit of its inhabitants, it is merely a sprawl of isolating homes where every house is a fiefdom. You can’t trust anyone who isn’t a family or friend, and everything is fucked.
“Politics are all corrupt, anyway. All politicians are all unredeemable fraudsters. We can’t change it. All of this could have been a lot worse. Just be thankful it’s not. Just focus on your own life. Focus on your own family.”
Some post-Soviet states call this as “nihilistic conservatism”.
Nihilistic conservatives are eternally nihilistic about the future, and eternally conservative about what they have now. These are not the people who vote MAN. These are the people who do not vote, because they do not believe it will change anything. One might feel anger towards the 823,326 people who voted for Khurelsukh and got him elected as President. But that anger is unjustified. Your anger should be directed at the 834,316 people who did not bother to vote at all. Their resignation to the present, and their paranoia of reforms and their aversion to politics are always the biggest obstacles to real change.
But the group that never bothers to vote and the group that votes to keep things the same have one thing in common: They are especially protective over the potential loss of social resources they have built. What do I mean by “social resource”? It is an informal and unwritten advantage or privilege that one had to develop and possess in order to survive and prosper. (I made up the term on the spot, don’t @ me) The biggest example being nepotism.
Let’s ask ourselves this. How did we get stuck with nepotism in the first place? Is this some weird old characteristic of traditional Mongolian society that we haven’t shaken off? Or were there periods of history in our country where things such as public services or career opportunities were in such short supply that entire generations of people have used mutual assistance between members of the extended family as its substitute? My money is on the latter.
When you’re too poor to gain decent medical care, call up your aunt and ask her to give you some free medical checks. When you’re new to the city and can’t find a place to stay, hit up your uncle and crash at his place for a few months. Keeping in touch with your family network and receiving assistance is not inherently a bad thing, it is borne out of either unavailability, desperation or convenience. But the accelerated conclusion of its proliferation is simply:
When your young son cannot find a decent job for himself, call up your cousin in the state for some favors.
Funnily enough, it’s a phenomenon directly resulting from those who rationalized self-interest under the name of their “family”.
Along with this stagnation, what we get are the stories of elders who have gotten adept at navigating it. Their justifications for their personal sins will always be filtered through the flowery language of “life wisdom”. But the truth is that it is merely a life wisdom of the shithole, endlessly reuttered by the people who survived it. The people who couldn’t survive this society would surely speak a different story.
Never forget the 117,000 Mongolians who have left Outer and Inner Mongolia for a better life. Their stories and their “wisdom of life” would be fundamentally different, for it wouldn’t be a Shithole Survival Guide. But alas, we do not share a country with them anymore. We share a country with the former.
While we can be thankful of the effort of previous generations in keeping the country an oasis of stability in a sea of authoritarians, it is tragic to witness them still trying to preach about the old rules and old realities of old society, and dare to parade it as something universal.
It’s like an immigrant who escaped the asphyxiating social ossification of their home country, only to still preserve in their new family the norms and inhibitions that led to such ossification in the first place.
It is already so hard and so difficult to raise a child here. For any young family, it would be almost impossible to reject the advantage brought forth by nepotism. You need to get ahead, you need to survive and you need to prosper. All for the sake of your family. It was different when you were single, and when you had no commitments. But things have changed now.
“You are now no longer responsible for only yourself anymore. Be rational.”
So you participate in it. You develop your own series of “social resources”, your own “connections”, your own “favors”. Your elders were expecting you to meet them here eventually. And then you find yourself becoming a card-carrying member of the very corruption you used to hate. How can you pretend to vote against it if everyone knows it’s something you’ve benefited from? Society remains sick because we are all forced to participate in the sickness. But it was for your family’s sake, of course. It always was.
And when you’re 55 years old, watching reruns of UB Comedy like how your parents used to watch X-Tuts, you will realize that the new generation hates you just as much as you hated your previous generation.
You have become the corruption, you have become the selfishness, you have become the problem.
A sick society does not deserve to vindicate itself with a high population growth. And the greatest method of passive resistance is the refusal to populate it.
Free yourselves from the swamp that is the inevitability of assimilation into corruption and nepotism. Take hostage of society’s population growth. That is the only thing states worry about anyhow. And they will inevitably notice.
That’s it. That’s my hot take for today.
