James Piereson, author of Shattered Consensus (2015) writes in The New Criterion an interesting column containing this paragraph.
What happens when a majority of the population loses confidence in the legitimacy of the political order? Will they still send their sons and daughters into the military? Will they still make sacrifices to fight wars in foreign countries, or to support wars like those taking place in Ukraine and Israel? Will they still accept the judgments of courts of law? At some point they may stop paying their taxes. The United States is beginning to look like an “administered” polity that does not have the support of its population.
Reading this reminded me of a concept somewhat in the recent news: quiet quitting. The Harvard Business Review has a definition I like.
Quiet quitting refers to opting out of tasks beyond one’s assigned duties and/or becoming less psychologically invested in work. Quiet quitters continue to fulfill their primary responsibilities, but they’re less willing to engage in activities known as citizenship behaviors: no more staying late, showing up early, or attending non-mandatory meetings.
Maybe these are different facets of the same behavior? Losing one’s commitment to an organization without quitting is like losing one’s commitment to a nation, without emigrating.
People stop voting, stop volunteering, stop caring what happens, focus on their own immediate lives. I’d argue a non-trivial percentage of our public is already there, maybe always has been.
The Benedict Option is one version of this, taken to extremes you get the Amish, the Hutterites and locally the fundamentalist (polygamous) ‘Mormons.’
The scary part is that the “opted out” fraction is growing.
