Most ideas start out with the best of intentions. None of Jeremy Hunt’s do, but that’s not my point: I’m talking about human beings here.
Banking was, from the 14th century onwards, a way to collect idle money and invest it in active people. Bourses appeared rapidly to allow a higher level of risk for the likes of Christopher Columbus. Multiculturalism aimed to promote harmony, Health & Safety to protect workers in the same way as Plimsoll had 150 years earlier. Religious seers tried to get people to behave better, and not keep swinging ass jawbones around in an intemperate manner. Trade Unions kicked off with the audible aim of getting capitalist bosses to pay something above subsistence wages. Newspapers appeared to help traders sell at better value prices, while helping their customers to understand WTF the Corn Laws were all about. And Civil Servants developed in order to put what politicians say into words.
But all too soon, the original idea gets lost in the swirling mists of three considerations: making money, creating jobs, and achieving power.
Being egalitarian and taking the last one first there, throughout history we have had chiefs, kings, priests, landowners, millowners, media barons, politicians, trade unions, bankers and the EU….vaguely in that order. Let’s face it, there are always some pricks who think they can run stuff better than the people already doing it. The law is supposed to come in at this point and say, “Oi – you – no.” But it very rarely does. Because power dispenses power, and people are rather too prone to having the power thing.
At various times during the rise, fall and then generally f**king about of Man, we have had religions, mill bosses, trade union bosses, men of small stature, newspaper owners and finally bankers who think they should be the Sovereign Body. This is not a one-off progression from one approach to another, by the way: over time, religions have tried several piss-takes to grab all the power, as have media owners (Hearst, the Barclays, Berlusconi and Murdoch), bosses (Ford, Joe Kennedy, and Lord Ashcroft), and small blokes (Napoleon, Hitler).
Forty years ago, we were going through a period of Union bosses having the upper hand. Now, in much of the Anglo-Saxon world, we have a loosely arranged axis of bankers, multinationals and media barons having a crack at it. The difference this time around is that these three have bought the politicians and the civil servants. They also control, through Goldman Sachs, most of the technocrat positions in the EU, and the manipulation jobs in the US.
The power of labour has been transferred to the power of capital. Both have an equal potential for socially destructive behaviour.
The problem is, if one hangs all the lawyers, bankers, Mandarins and globalists, within a relatively short period of time the socialist control freaks and mindless job-creators will be back. This is exemplified for me by the way in which – quite obviously – Jeremy Hunt is one the one hand trying to get his relatives and mates profiting from a privatised health service; whereas on the other hand, Ed Miliband and the neutered Union demonstrators have no clear plan beyond what was clearly dysfunctional (and unaffordable) before.
This has seemed to me for some time like a series of tedious repeats on telly, whereas what we need is a brand new show that’s like nothing hitherto: the West’s cultural approach to its socio-commercial model needs to have a Saturday Night Live/Monty Python moment. As John Cleese used to announce, “And now for something completely different”.
Way beyond any consideration in terms of importance is the need to accept one simple reality: the problem lies with Homo sapiens and its ability to pervert perfectly good ideas to a selfish or sectarian need. We need to accept once and for all that the idea of an unregulated human species would have been as abhorrent to Jeremy Bentham at one end of the spectrum as it was to Thomas Hobbes at the other. It is even more deranged today, given the rapid descent of our culture over the last thirty years.
I believe that if ordinary men and women are allowed more say and more responsibility – and if they are educated with more emphasis on both civics and thinking for themselves – we can build future societies where there is both more freedom, and less need for regulation.
But here in the UK – and in both the Eurozone and America – a clique is now in power which will explain away every last excess, rationalise every inhuman action, support every idiocy of globalist mercantilism, pass every illiberal law, suck up to the most obscene sources of money, and censor every website in its bid to achieve the goal of absolute power.
My problem is, I have no idea what they intend to do with it once they’ve got it. Even worse, I doubt if they do either. All I do know is that, unless we find a way to show our citizens a better way of living mutually communal lives, the lunatics on high will impose that power anyway.
Communities do not exist to make money, create jobs, or exert power. They exist to give their members the most fulfilling life available….and help them realise their full potential. As soon as jobs, money and power cloud that aim, all is lost.
The Slog 