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richard poplak

New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur skates off the ice during a team practice before Game 2 of the NHL Stanley Cup Final on June 1, 2012.MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS

Watching the 2012 hockey playoffs, you'd be fooled into thinking we're living in biblical times: the blood, the beards, the constant talk of sacrifice.

"The pain these men have faced, the price they keep on paying, the hearts they keep on lifting," Hockey Night in Canada's Ron MacLean said recently while comparing millionaire athletes to 9/11 first responders. Shot blocking – the fine art of lying down on the job – has become part of the zeitgeist and a presiding metaphor: We must give up something of ourselves, emerging bruised but better.

We may be living in biblical times, but instead of locusts and cattle plagues, we get European financial summits and bank runs – entire countries going bust. Meanwhile, Canada is preparing to pull out of an 11-year-long debacle in a region in which everyone wears a playoff beard.

This conflict demanded sacrifice only within our professional armed forces, an institution that has lost 158 members and counting. In the postmodern technocracy, war occurs in a sealed vacuum. There is no collective risk, self-denial or rationing.

And yet "austerity" and "sacrifice" have become political chestnuts. The words are smeared across the West's political spectrum, and one can spend days parsing the nuances of the French sense versus the Icelandic versus the American. Often, they are meant as antonyms for their dictionary definitions, but what's a little obfuscation between countries in default?

It's clear that we are being asked to adopt a mindset, if not entirely change our behaviour: We must think austerely, and engage in sacrificial musings.

We have, of course, been here before. "There is but one task for all – one life for each to give. What stands if Freedom fall?" asked Rudyard Kipling, who seems more and more en vogue these days as we obsess over royal wedding anniversaries and gush over the coming Queen's jubilee. Kipling's question is a good one, but most in the West might say it has been answered often enough – fascism, communism, Islamism, pick your poison.

But others have spoken in similar terms: In a certain influential prison tome, Adolf Hitler wrote of a "spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation" that would have his Teutonic automatons goose-stepping their way to utopia. Every "ism" demands sacrifice; every ideology requires its measure of joyful renunciation.

Still, we're pretty clear on what stands if Freedom should fall. But what stands if Freedom, well, stands? I'd say it merely teeters. In 21st-century social-democratic technocracy, there are many ways in which freedom is denuded. We are no longer led; we are administered. Bureaucracy, as cultural historian Ben Kafka puts it, is government by a piece of office furniture. And Staples is not known as a fount of evolutionary political philosophy.

That Western democracies, Canada included, have become more technocratic over the decades is not an ideological outcome, but a mechanical one – paperwork breeds more paperwork. In this, there are no real differences between the panicked Europeans and ourselves, unless you count differences in degree. We are monitored, tagged, bio-scanned, tracked. Like errant thoroughbred puppies, when lost, we are easily found.

Also, we are broke. I mean this in both senses of the term: The system of capital we invented seems on the verge of collapse. And as societies that were designed to progress via consumption, we no longer have a sense of our real appetites. Twelve years ago, we were asked to spend our way to freedom. Now, that seems like a bad idea.

We are told that self-denial will create a better future. But technocratic governments have no interest in the future: It is the past that they're after. They want the keys to the hurly-burly bedlam of history, the darkrooms and cabinets of curiosity in which photographs can be retouched and stories revised. The Greeks recall age-old Athenian glory; Barack Obama prods the spirit of American renewal and François Hollande echoes François Mitterrand echoing age-old French socialism.

Doctor the past, render it as a sepia-toned time of constant shot-blocking – an era of gentle, hard-earned bounty – and then you've shown us an ideal present.

Note the term "ideal." Which shouldn't be confused with a plan. No one ever got anywhere with unthinking sacrifice and po-faced austerity. The heroes get the zeroes to jump off cliffs.

That the West faces a desperate crisis of leadership, and that our technocracies can no longer generate ideas capable of saving them, is a tragic fact. As citizens, we need to think long and hard about our principles, and how our representatives in governments can help us realize them. We need to demand a reasoned assessment of the present if we are to expect much of a future.

Hockey players are clear on why it's worth taking a puck in the back: Blocking goals means more money. They'll do fine with a couple of shattered vertebrae. The rest of us? Not so much.

Richard Poplak is a Canadian writer currently based in South Africa.

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