Last weekend a piece of my molar broke off. The game is over, I immediately thought. I should have flossed, brushed better, checked out more often. Now the rest of the molar has to be pulled, and who knows what else they’ll do, maybe I’d better get dentures right away.
It turned out to be okay. I was just in time to avoid a root canal treatment, the dentist said, and before I knew it I was outside again, with a tooth filled with which I could easily eat a sandwich on a pleasant terrace. I wanted to believe in God so I could thank Him, I was so relieved. Also because it felt like the universe had beaten me undeservedly.
I recognized the feeling from earlier moments. When the pandemic started, I expected the worst: Italian conditions in ICUs, years of loneliness for homeworkers, a death blow to nightlife. Even then it was not that bad, the vaccine came faster than expected. The nightmare dissolved in the light of everyday life.
It is a fixed pattern: disaster is imminent, I panic, but something or someone softens the blow. There’s an airbag between me and fate. A ‘bad luck damper’, as political scientist Pieter Hilhorst called it in 2011. He came up with the word in response to Rutte’s statement that the government is not a ‘lucky machine’. People don’t expect the government to make them happy at all, only to take care of them if they are hit by bad luck, says Hilhorst.
In the western world there are many breakdown dampers. In addition to the welfare state, which should ensure that people do not starve to death or receive unaffordable dental bills, there is science, which is constantly inventing new ways to postpone death and disease, such as the corona vaccines. And there is international cooperation, such as in the EU, which is now trying to curb gas prices.
Sometimes the breakdown dampers don’t work. Benefits parents, for example, will not say that the government protects them from fate. But most of us are relaxed about the ship, assuming that there is a lifeboat waiting for us.
Or actually I should say ‘stepped’, because the ship is restless. People are beginning to realize that there is a little too much bad luck in the air to get away unscathed: the threat of war, inflation, rising gas prices and, of course, climate change, which manifested itself unsubtly this summer. This time it doesn’t seem to go well.
That threat creates uncertainty, also because bad luck now ends up everywhere. The new monthly energy bill rates are handed out like a raffle, and middle-income people are also short of money. In Bloemendaal, more and more residents are participating in the crossword puzzle of the neighborhood newspaper in the hope that they have a chance to win a free filled shopping bag, I read at the dentist. Bloemendaal: not a poor municipality after all.
Of course there are politicians who shout: if I had it in charge, you would never be unlucky! Then the climate problem would not exist, gas would be affordable and inflation would be non-existent.
The question is how many people fall for such a story. That also depends on the cabinet. I think that should do two things: ensure that the bad luck is distributed as fairly as possible, and explain why not all bad luck can be cushioned. The first seems to be finally happening. The minimum wage is going up and the payroll tax is going down, and this Friday Ministers Schouten and Jetten discussed with the energy companies how they can prevent people from being cut off from energy.
But I don’t see the second, the breakdown preparation, yet. Sigrid Kaag made an attempt this week in her speech at the Brussels think tank Bruegel. “A sustainable transition requires sacrifices, adaptations and a different way of living from all of us,” she said. But those are distant, abstract words. It takes someone to say: It’s really annoying that we’re going to have such a shitty winter, but most of us are relatively well off. And besides, that ‘bad luck’ is partly our own fault (think of our Russian gas addiction) and therefore, strictly speaking, not even really bad luck.
You may expect the government to do its best for you, but as a human being you are not entitled to a life without trouble. Any politician who would have you believe otherwise is a charlatan.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 10, 2022