Column: State of Indulgence by Patrick van der Hijden, opening debate Burger King & Citizenship

In the debate Burger King & Citizenship give Patrick van der Hijden, David van Reybrouck, Chris Keulemans and Samuel Vriezen Their views on the state of the citizen. Public may, but need not, participate. Below is the column State of Indulgence, recited by Patrick van der Hijden - as a kick-off to the debate.

"Our life was invented in the 18th century.

Members of the upper classes - the elite - had their own homes, often with gardens. They sent their children to school, which then started further education. They had free time and generally arrived at their appointments on time, due to the watches they wore and the train barges that left on time (they complained when delayed). Citizens who lived outside the city commuted - by carriage, that is. They drank coffee to stay awake. They visited restaurants with menus. They were vaccinated against smallpox and had pets. A great source on that life is the diary of Otto van Eck, who started it at the age of 10 under pressure from his Enlightenment-obsessed parents, in 1791. I borrow the above examples from that.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this life is not lived by a small minority, but by a large part of the Dutch population. These do have to do without staff. That, in fact, has been replaced by technology. Today's Dutch are healthier and are also getting a lot older. Otto van Eck lived in abundance - but he died at 17, of tuberculosis.

The lifestyle of the absolute upper class has become just about everyone's. That is a leap that has not happened often in history. Perhaps the leap is even unique. Which is at least one reason why the Dutch do not know how to handle the abundance in which they live. That leap came from obscurity, that much is certain. In the first years after the end of World War II, Europe was completely in ruins. And certainly until the end of 1947, the start of Marshall Aid, Europe's fate could have been very different. So the leap is also of fairly recent date. That is why many Dutch people can trace it in their own family history.

If the jump can be compared to anything, it is to the first half of the seventeenth century. Simon Schama wrote the masterful The Embarrassment of Riches, published in the Dutch translation under the timeless title Abundance and Discontent.

Schama paints a young nation, inventing its own identity over a period of a few decades, while becoming the richest country in the world. Culture and abundance of the United Provinces cannot therefore be understood without each other. The immense popularity of stories and illustrations of shipwrecks in the seventeenth century is, of course, because the nation's wealth was earned at sea. But those stories gradually gained additional weight: a ship became a metaphor for the land itself. And the image of a shipwreck became a reminder that sudden wealth could also be gone in an instant. After all, the passions associated with abundance - envy, lust, laziness - threatened that abundance itself. Horror and heroic stories about sinking ships helped regulate those passions. A beached whale, besides being a great gift of tears and flesh, is also a warning: the sea is unpredictable, as is fate. And so in the seventeenth century, anecdotes and pictures of stranded marine mammals teemed with anecdotes.

Today's Dutch could do with such a lesson in fate swearing.

After all, we are in crisis.

But in what crisis actually?

In the Netherlands these days, when we talk about the crisis, we mean the economic hardship that befell much of the western world after the US housing market collapsed in 2008. What the Dutch feel about that crisis was initially hard to pinpoint. By now, we know all too well. It is harder to borrow money, layoffs are happening everywhere and uncertainty is splashing off the newspaper pages.

You would almost forget that another crisis had been declared just a year earlier. With a film under the menacingly - modestly titled An Inconvenient Truth (2007), Al Gore seemingly single-handedly put the ecological crisis of our time at the centre of attention: climate change. That was a crisis before Gore even started talking about it. And it has remained a crisis. Also for the Netherlands.

Both crises are linked to our abundance. One could say that each seems to mark the limits of our wealth growth in its own way. The economic crisis seems to be putting an end to the 'normal' growth rates shown by Western countries. The effect is to call into question the certainties of our material prosperity: the value of our homes and pensions. The ecological crisis reveals that growth always comes at the expense of something. If it is not the workers, it is our environment. And if it is not ours, it is one on the other side of the world.

The economic and ecological crises have something else in common. Democratic politics in Western Europe is struggling to formulate answers to them. Politicians seem preoccupied with very different things. Religion. Migration. National culture. Ourselves. In any case, they are caught between extremely complex tasks that they themselves do not fully understand and voters who demand unrealistically simple solutions to in themselves real problems. The crises of the economy and of ecology thus reveal another crisis, a political one.

The solutions to the crises mostly have to do with what we will do with our wealth. How much do we sacrifice to cope with the ecological crisis? To what extent do we link the fate of our welfare state to that of countries elsewhere in Europe? Is growth more important than poverty reduction? What does a politics that does not promise 'more' but prescribes 'enough' look like? These questions are not exclusively Dutch, they apply across Europe and partly to the US. The answers given to them in the Netherlands have an explicitly Dutch character.

So a triple crisis is about what we do with our wealth.

We are just not sure what prosperity does to us.

Cultural and personal self-analysis is a popular style figure in the media and a widely shared Dutch pastime. The paradox is that the prosperity that gives the Dutch the time and space to get to know themselves is hardly the subject of all such analysis.

Thinking and talking about welfare often happens against a backdrop of popular public attitudes. You have to 'go through' that if you are looking for the deeper layers in the Dutch collective unconscious. And at the same time, those views show you the way to exactly those layers.

Popular beliefs are rooted in the past. Friction with the practice of contemporary life is not crazy, in fact it is natural. Those always slightly outdated-feeling beliefs do guide policies and decisions in business and politics. And that is where rubbing turns into wringing.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith introduced in The Affluent Society (1958) the notion of conventional wisdom. That is the entirety of accepted ideas about the economy and society - ideas, in short, that match our popular beliefs, and that are not necessarily based on observations and facts. The Affluent Society is one big rebuke to the conventional wisdom Galbraith observed in the US in the second half of the 1950s. It remains a bestseller to this day. That argues for Galbraith's indeed amazing intellect. But it also illustrates that conventional wisdom is tough.

A persistent and current example of conventional wisdom is the myth of autonomous consumers and subservient, following producers. In our economy, creating demand is as important as creating supply and both are among the core tasks of companies. 'You ask, we turn' is a fairy tale, masking a mechanism that has brought us tremendous wealth growth. However, the fairy tale gets in the way of understanding and makes our perception selective. We confuse carefully directed consumer demand with autonomous need, for instance. Or we fully accept that the production of consumer goods is paid for with money borrowed by private individuals, convinced as they have become that they actually have those goods needed have. While poverty in the Netherlands (and elsewhere in the West) is inextricably linked to unrepaid consumer loans.

Moreover, the fairy tale of the autonomous consumer appoints market demand as the main gauge of what animates and needs society. No wonder, then, that politicians are constantly in the dark about what their voters want. Which in turn does not stop them from simultaneously eagerly using the marketing know-how of big business. Politics as a product and the citizen as its consumer - no doubt there are politicians walking around here in The Hague who think like that.

In any case, politicians are masters at creating abuses - the market demand of political life. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find abuses.

In 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked economists Amartya Sen, and Joseph Stiglitz to figure out what are the best measures of our prosperity now. 'Figuring out' in this context is more like 'listing'. But because Sarkozy asked, and then also to two world-class scholars, the report by the Commission sur la Mesure de la Performance Économique et du Progrès Social still some weight.

The committee lists eight factors that contribute to a good life for people in a country. Health. Education. Personal activities. Politics & governance. Social relations. Environment. Personal safety. Economic security.

Imagine a country that scores adequately on all these points, say a seven-and-a-half on a scale of 10.

In that country, many people enjoy a long life in good health. Every child goes to school and spends the vast majority of his or her childhood there. The people of that country have many opportunities to organise their own time, time, no more than a quarter of which has to be spent on work. Politics is accessible, both passively and actively. There is little corruption. Trust plays a major role in social and business relationships. The quality of the living environment is under pressure, but regulations and new technology are gradually improving the environment. The likelihood of becoming a victim of crime is decreasing. Victims receive support. Perpetrators and suspects enjoy legal protection and judges are independent. Finally, residents' incomes rise decade after decade. It enables many of them to buy houses or affordably rent and furnish them at will, drive cars, keep up with fashion trends and give gifts on many occasions. The chances of dying from malnutrition are zero. The uncertainties of life are limited. Residents have space and they have time.

This country is quite similar to the Netherlands.

The committee's ideas on what constitutes the good life certainly go back to the time of diarist Otto van Eck. In the second half of the 18th century, Europe was buzzing with ideas to improve people's existence. While Otto went to school, met up with friends and filled his diary with healthy reluctance, a fanatical vanguard (including his father) made plans to make the country better. Inspired by the Scottish and French philosophers of the Enlightenment and spurred on by the United States' Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, the Dutch patriots developed a programme that looks wonderfully contemporary. The country's citizens contributed their bit to the state (both, incidentally, brand-new concepts; the Netherlands, for instance, was a decentralised body of regions) and that state had to contribute to the prosperity of its citizens. There were three sides to that welfare: poverty reduction, health care and education. All three had to be rational and were seen as a common responsibility of all citizens. The interpretation of the three elements was also sometimes astonishingly modern. Hoorn's poverty problems were tackled with a company, the ´Vaderlandsche Maatschappij van Reederij en Koophandel ter liefde van 't Algemeen´, which created employment and made a profit - a social enterprise avant-la-lettre. And education for society reformers was not just about the demands of church and market. Education was inseparable from development as a human being.

Incidentally, slavery was not yet outlawed - citizenship may have been a fancy new invention, but it was by no means universal, let alone something like world citizenship.

But what it shows unequivocally is that our prosperity is as linked to our citizenship as it is to our consumerism. This is also reflected in the percentage of our income we put into collective arrangements, such as taxes, insurance and pensions: 60-70%. Welfare is not a product we buy, but a pot into which we collectively put income and individually cover fate.

Otto van Eck's upbringing was suffused with belief in progress. It is not for nothing that books appeared in Otto's time with projections to 1994 and 2440. Naive and sometimes laughable was that belief. But often astonishingly accurate in its predictions. Coupled with the good intentions of the Batavian Republic, one is tempted to think: 'It worked'.

And immediately afterwards, 'Now what?' "