Quoting from 'Against Paranoid Nationalism'

I found a great passage from Ghassan Hage's book Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society..

Until recently, the capacity of the great majority of migrants to settle in Western societies was dependent on the availability of a Western 'surplus of hope'. This surplus is the precondition of all forms of hospitality. But it is clear today that while the West is producing a surplus of many things, hope is not among them. As Bordieu points out, while society is certainly defined through its capacity as distributer of 'meanings of life', any society's actual capacity cannot be taken for granted at any time, and hope and meaningfulness are not always offered. Capitalist societies are characterised by a deep inequality in their distribution of hope, and when such inequality reaches an extreme, certain groups are not offered any hope at all. 'One of the most unequal of all distributions, and probably, in any case, the most cruel, is the distribution of symbolic capital, that is, of social importance and of reasons for living,' he tells us. For him, 'there is no worse dispossession, no worse privation, perhaps, than that of the losers in the symbolic struggle for recognition, for access to a socially recognised social being, in a word, to humanity'.

...

What characterised neo-liberal economic policy in his eyes was not that it was shaped by a society marred by inequality, but that the very idea of society, of commitment to some form of distribution of hope, was disappearing. This has been perhaps the most fundamental change that global capitalism has introduced to Western and non-Western societies alike. In the era of global capitalism, the growth of the economy, the expansion of firms and rising profit margins no longer go hand in hand with the state's commitment to the distribution of hope within society. In fact, what we are witnessing is not just a decrease in the state's commitment to an ethical society, but a decrease in its commitment to a national society tout court. Many social analysts today debate the decline of national sovereignty and national identity as a result of 'globalisation'. Yet the greatest casualty, and the one that has most bearing on the quality of our lives, is the decline neither of sovereignty or identity as such, but the decline of society. This is hardly ever mentioned. When the society of the past saw the possibility of social death, the welfare state intervened to breathe in hope, for there was a perception that all society was at stake wherever and whenever this possibility arose. Today, not only does the state not breathe in hope, it is becoming an active producer of social death, with social bodies rotting in spaces of chronic underemployment, poverty and neglect. We seem to be reverting to the neo-feudal times analysed by Norbert Elias, where the boundaries of civilisation, dignity and hope no longer coincide with the boundaries of the nation, but the boundaries of upper-class society, the social spaces inhabited by an internationally delineated cosmopolitan class. Increasingly, each nation is developing its own 'third world', inhabited by the rejects of global capitalism.

From Hage, G. (2003) Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society. Pluto Press, Sydney, pp.17-18.