One of the great benefits of working abroad is that one drops out of the tedious background noise of our news and current affairs. Like an unwanted rock, it’s still there when you get back. For me, the returns have often been from places where politics is a matter of terror. Increasingly, I find it difficult to to feel our own system works the same way, with the terror keeping itself better concealed.
David Malone (link right) puts it in a rather traditional, if dissident manner.
‘What we have in place now is a system of permanent and institutionalized acceptance that the largest accumulations of wealth and those who own, manage and serve them can never be imperiled or threatened either by democratic rule of law nor even the workings of the markets themselves. Both perils have been removed for the super rich and their banks because it is now established that the purpose of government is to make sure the system and the hierarchy of wealth and power at its peak, remains untouchable and unchangeable.’
Orwell may have wanted to call 1984 1948. The very notion of Big Brother is always portrayed in Frankenstein mode, making us look for chimera like Gadaffi, Hitler or Stalin. Frankly, we don’t have much of a track record of stopping even their ilk. Malone is right, but we think we have heard this all before, and this is just what left-leaning Pinkos think, not realizing they are playing John the Baptist to ‘Soviet enthrallment’. The dumbfuck hasn’t realized we know all this and choose it. It’s the best we can hope for. Capitalism is the only game in town. We see ourselves as individuals with free choice in this.
I think David is right, even Max Keiser. The whole story isn’t there, and, of course, capitalism makes space to contain such views and even market them. It’s cheaper than jail time and doesn’t create martyrs. Indeed, in creating a whole industry of ‘dissent’, from Chomsky to the Slut March, capitalism parades self-interested alternatives in order to marginalise and ridicule. The leaders are just promoting a different kind of circus and taking the profits in their own way, perhaps as sinecured academic marxists (it’s non-U to use the capital these days) driving their Volvos to second homes in Wales that Welsh families cannot afford. Max is not short of a few bob, if three-pence short of a shilling. It’s capitalism that sustains them, if only they could see it. The very regulation and politics they suppose bring the armies of self-serving bureaucrats that fuck things Soviet-style. We want less government, not more.
This isn’t reasoning, it’s noise from the trance, the buzzing of incumbency. We live in an argumentative sleep, long after what is now labeled left and right both thought monopoly was a very bad state to get into. This is an animal state, little to do with the potentials of human being. The explanations of it we need are not economic in the first place, even if you believe like me, that our economic situation is hapless. We need wide scientific understanding of our animal heritage first. Many people can’t bear to think of themselves as animal, perhaps imagining that the animal in use would have us fucking on street-corners like stray dogs. Is this what they get from Freud? Human achievement surely isn’t swallowing years of political-bureaucratic shit and becoming leader of the IMF in order to force oneself onto a chamber-maid in a Sofitel. The Italians may elect animals like that, but surely the French have come on a bit?
Economics and non-politics is the stuff that ‘makes us free’ to burn the planet, to achieve war by other means and so on. It’s a great means to be responsible and accountable for sweet FA, until the gods come back to us to pay for their mistakes, to pay for their existence. It’s all like paying bags of gold and virgin daughters to see off the Jabberwock.
That high finance and politics are a Jabberwock is without doubt. Malone, Keiser and others are actually right. It’s to no avail and not just because of our poodle press, owned by Jabberwock Offshore to a pouting floosie feigning sincerity. What we are doing (apart from making livings like satirists) is chucking ‘facts’ at mind-sets, forgetting Quine’s problems with empiricism. World-views are in the way, assimilating energy to the network.
Science more or less requires that one chuck away tradition and soaked-up, mundane learning. We have the opposite of this in modern false-consciousness and I suspect it is still taboo to think of human being scientifically. Science has long pretended it is value-free. It had to to elide tradition, especially religious tradition. It is mystified in teaching, only monks allowed its secrets. I don’t believe teaching 2T-4d physics is the answer. Most of us know we can’t even teach our economics’ classes sums.
The Jabberwork parasite is too cunning, feeding on and feeding our animal nature. Science will need fairy tales to defeat it. Ones better than the Star Trek it produces. I’ll give the first lines:
There was once a planetary society so inane that it was fighting over resources even though only 5% of its work was needed to provide its basic sustenance and shelter …
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