At the End of the Day

A chastised Camerlot and a defeated Newscorp are the results of coordinated pressure and obsessive group endeavour, not individual bloggers.

Nobody can keep this up forever. The answer is radical, long-term change – not an endless series of revelations.

In the new spirit of United Against Murdoch, I got 81 hits from the Guardian this afternoon. Somebody on a comment thread had been nice about The Slog, and for that – thank you ma’am. But of course, underneath my comments box there, it still says ‘Commenting privileges on this account have been disabled’. (Also the piece I ran this morning about the possible political use of hacking against Gordon Brown suits the agenda of the Guardianista tendency).

Moving from the rigidity of the Left to the rigor mortis of the Right, some of you may have witnessed my little epi in today’s earlier post about the dictatorship of the cave mentality in Britain: ‘my cave right or wrong’ and so forth. I’ve had the afternoon to think further about it, and so tonight’s piece is simply designed to ask whether anything has substantively changed after today….and if so, how can it change on a broader basis with greater permanence.

I think the situations in Camerlot, Scotland Yard and Wapping will change for a while. But not for long. As I keep saying, don’t try and teach pigs to sing: you don’t get a choir, and it annoys the pigs. Much better to sell the pigs, and keep more intelligent animals next time.

BSkyB withdrew the bid. This is the huge victory not for politics and scoiety’s institutions, but of a few newspapers, a few MPs, a few campaigners, and about 50-60 blogs against a global empire. And as such, it proves my long-held view: we are more powerful than they are. The trouble is that, after a while, we lose interest again (because we’re normal) whereas the mad minority just keep at it, 24/7. Most of us will have noted the thinly-disguised sting in Newscorp’s tale of affronted woe this afternoon: ‘too difficult to progress in this climate’. They will try to be back. This time, though, we must ensure they can’t be. The only way to do that is to change the climate permanently.

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Perhaps you see already where I’m going with this. It is no life at all (believe me) to be chained for much of the day to a pc, constantly pointing out how disgraceful the behaviour of so many people is. When it’s fresh and you’re ahead of the wave then yes – it is terrific: there’s no feeling like it. But most of the time it’s a chore involving endless visits to unhelpful data points, ringing up folks who quite rightly don’t want to talk to you, and then working out the agenda of every last source of news.  It can be tedious beyond belief, and above all, it is absolutely knackering.

After the fact, is the occasional vindication worth it personally? For me, no – it isn’t. We all like to bask in praise, but rather like winning new business in advertising, the chase is more stimulating than the denouement. My main reaction after something like DSK or Hackgate is to fall asleep for about ten hours. My main emotion after waking up is that there’ll be another one along in a minute.

We will never get a perfect society: indeed, Utopianism has been the serial rapist of liberty for the last 250 years. But if we don’t per adua ad astra, we’ll remain in the ditch of sub-civilisation forever. The empty cynicism of post-Victorian British society has led where it was always going to: ethics are for wimps, do whatever it takes, don’t get caught, and if it feels good, do it. You can run Bedlam on that basis, but you can’t run a civilised society like that. Being a cynical Hobbesian is no more useful to cultural thinkers than being a pc New Labour fantasist.

The answer in the end is to breed better citizens. I seem to spend my life these days apologising for a choice of words, but I can no longer be bothered to even see the bait, let alone take it: if people don’t want to understand, they won’t – and so, in the words of the inimitable Frankie Howard, sod ’em.

Strong, mutually caring and creative communities of independently responsible citizens don’t happen by accident. They happen because of planning aforethought. For that reason, I can’t get along with the more anarchic end of contemporary libertarianism, I loathe selfish Thatcherism, reject Friedmanite Globalism, fear Harmanite Stateism – and above all, want to get rid of muddlingalongism. The ideal-free, tactic by tactic empty technocracy perfected by the ghastly likes of Blair and then perverted by the degenerate Mandelson is now being smoothed down and repackaged by Camerlot. It is a pointless confection, and must go.

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I think Camerlot will go, but we need far more than that. A better society with a stronger mutual element in government administration, the economy, and the community starts with education. Education that aspires to high personal standards of behaviour, rather than setting targets and passing anti-libertarian laws. Not a system of propaganda, but one of setting an example.

If such a system is not to seem hollow to those going through it, then in the adult world that surrounds them, young citizens must see the recommended ethics and morals reflected in political, business and governmental affairs.

‘Radical Realism’ as I call it therefore cannot get off the ground until dedicated professionals agree that this is the game plan. It most certainly cannot be achieved by harrumphing wrinklies using second-rate free software fulminating day in day out about bigotry and greed. It can be advanced (as Hackgate has shown) by intelligent use of the internet to create what David Cameron this afternoon called ‘firestorms’ around those whose behaviour goes beyond what is generally recognised to be ‘the pail’. (Contrary to philosophical myth, this latest scandal has shown once again that there clearly is a widespread agreement on the community pail).

By ‘realism’ I do not mean unaspirational empiricism, but rather putting to death once and for all the idea that that one polemic (or ism) and one alone can produce a Utopian result. Dystopia is always the result of that idea. And ‘mutual trashing’ politics are a big part of it. A real, new healthy politics can only emerge when people retain an open mind about the best option in every circumstance: to return again to my hero Jeremy Bentham, that which aims to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Communism, Socialism, Conservatism, Islamism, contemporary liberalism, European Unionism and Globalism are not merely far from The Answer: they are proven failures, stuck in the distant past and of no relevance to either where we are or what lies ahead. The Answer doesn’t exist. Everything is a trade-off, and the trade-off is nearly always between the liberties of the citizen and the goals of the State. The logical answer to this is to increase the independence of the citizen and reduce the power of the State. But to ensure that the result is not a devil-take-the-hindmost jungle, individuals need a stronger civic sense, and the mutual element in society has to increase its share within the total range of activities. This is what I mean by Radical Realism: it is, in effect, a modernisation of Utilitarianism.

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Over the next ten years, one of two things will happen as life changes for all of us around the globe. Either the Newscorps, Microsofts, Politburos, Googles, Oranges, globalists and Brussels will win. Or their power will wane – and in some cases disappear – to be replaced by devolved State structures working towards self-sufficiency rather than global market share. I want the latter to win, and I think that they will in the end – as a natural organic reaction to an accelerating rate of socio-economic collapse, life essentials rationing, and energy change. But the process will happen more quickly and more peacefully if we reform both the superstructures and the civic educational methods of our Western societies.

As I wrote earlier, the end of Camerlot is only the end of the beginning in the UK. The beginning of the end will be dismantling the current political Party oligarchies. The end will truly begin to become something else when fresh, brave thinkers with genuine public service values form themselves into looser tendencies in a coordinated but less centralised manner.

In a material sense, I cannot see any outcome in the West other than all of us having less. My experience (and that of my parents’ generation) is that when people have shared limits rather than selfish ambition, the cooperation gene kicks in. A community that needs the help of others for survival will always be a nicer place to live. One in which a degree of sharing becomes fun rather than a chore will always produce a better life balance. And one in which minds are more open to new ideas (not closed by old allegiances) will always renew itself – as all healthy packs must.

There is scarcely a scintilla of understanding about these factors and inevitabilities anywhere inside our existing cultural Establishments and pressure groups. Ergo sum, without their entire removal, nothing will change except by the force of internal unrest and irresistible external forces.

Movements and online mutual societies and free-thinking journalistic cells with a grown-up business model can act as catalysts in this process. Individual blogsites will never make an iota of difference on their own. I’ve known this for a long time, and now readers of The Slog must accept that truth too.