So-called ‘modern’ life is riddled with unnecessary demands and infuriating frustration. It is that way because such suits at most 1 in 7 of Western citizens: it is not a viable or even stable recipe for the future. Top down globalist ideological process is reaching the end of its days, and it is up to more mutualist opinion-leaders to start planning from the bottom up for a better balanced world. A world offering maximum personal fulfilment alongside creatively independent thinking. A world freed from potentially totalitarian catechisms.

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A dating site wastes an hour of my time subjecting me to a cod-scientific personality assessment, and then presents me with an invitation to ‘continue’ to a page that says ‘Error 500 – Not supported’. So I click on ‘Help’, which proves about as helpful as an armed Islamist let loose with a Kalashnikov at a Kosher Food convention.

My default Plan B these days is to go to the brand’s Twitter site and make a public pronouncement on the unhelpful nature of their Help. This I do. 36 hours later, a tweet arrives giving me a link. The link doesn’t work. I tell them this. An email arrives telling me I need to download Google Chrome, which I downloaded three years ago. I tell them this. Another automated email arrives asking if my Great Aunt’s cat was a Communist. I give up.

A letter from the French tax office arrives replete with dire threats because a standing order with my bank has bounced. The letter was posted ordinary mail, and has taken 9 days to travel some 55 kilometres. It warns me that I need to do something by a date that is already three days ago. I ask the bank why it bounced the order, given I wrote to them saying a deposit is on its way to more than cover it. There is a great deal of umming, aahing and unconvincing explaining, none of which helps.

I now go online to my personal tax space and try to pay the instalment manually. The Trésor’s software is completely baffled by this request. I type ‘payer taxe foncière facture’ into the Help panel, and ten results pop up. They explain many things of great and hitherto unknown complexity to me, but not how to pay my land tax bill. However, a flashlight keeps beeping at me saying I haven’t paid it. The contrast was, shall we say, poignant bordering on seriously irritating.

I ring the Trésor and am offered three levels of (a) to (f) options, eventually pressing (d) for desperation, and a female voice – a real one – answers. This bubbly, friendly woman listens carefully to what I’m trying to do, opens her laptop and makes a second request of the bank, which passes immediately. I am left wondering whyTF the original bone-idle fonctionnaire couldn’t have done that anyway.

Another letter arrives by post, sending my Anglo-French tax agreement form back to me stamped and signed. The French authorities are supposed to send it back directly to my UK Tax district themselves, but this practice has now been stopped “to save money”. I have to schlep to the post office ten miles away and post it.

The satellite phone I use here as a backup to SFR’s fixed-line service rings nonstop all day. The communicants are of a varietal – nay, cosmopolitan – nature, in that they are ringing from Estonia, India, Ethiopia, Macedonia and many countries not necessarily ending in ia. They’re trying to sell me garden sheds, penis extensions and other construction projects, none of which I either want or need. Further, as none of the organisations involved are peddling a drug to help me write the definitive 21st century novel, I have pigeon-holed them all as Nuisance Callers.

I ring the ISP, and they recommend I change the number. For which there will be a charge. I ask how about you just stop the nuisance calls, and the bloke at the other end asks what do you suggest and I say oh, right, I’m the phone company now. We have a long and fruitless discussion, at the end of which I think we have agreed that they will monitor the nuisance calls and get back to me.

The same afternoon, a text message arrives “confirming” that I wish to cancel my subscription to the phone service.

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Now all of the above may sound like the random groans of an ageing Grumpy, but in fact there is a connected, macro pattern here that reflects the unfortunate reality of Western life today.

The overarching observation is this: we pay our tax monies purely on the basis that this will protect us from nasty tax demands, deliver us a level of service (given that allegedly they work for us) and protect us from invasive annoyance, scam artists and unaccountable institutions. But on investigation, it is very obvious that the basis of our tax obedience is without foundation.

Taking each of the case histories outlined above:

• The State has no interest in regulating or controlling the diabolical service and serial lies offered by internet marketers trying to sell you something; its sole concern is to stop free speech on the Web trying to tell you something.
• Increasingly, the taxation organs of the State automatically (a) put the citizen in the wrong (b) question citizen motives rather than banking incompetence (c) save money as a means of exerting pressure on the taxpayer and (d) launch software to cover arses rather than meet customer needs.
• Government charges us more and more for doing less and less. This is because it is there to serve globalist banks and bourse profits, defend currency valuations, maximise its own pension arrangements and help Big Business deliver the maximum profit to its shareholders. It is most emphatically not there to help realise the potential of its greatest asset, the citizenry.
• The private sector is heading helter-skelter towards a world in which cheap Artificial Intelligence (AI) acts as the means by which service-receivers can tear their hair out in frustration, while the Gigarich get richer still at the expense of an honest living for the less fortunate. Time after time after time, human emotional intelligence can solve within seconds the kind of problem that leads to sleepless nights for the innocent, the ill, the deprived, the betrayed and the old. This is a policy which has, in terms of stable social anthropology, absolutely no saving grace whatsoever.
• The selfish and stupid idea that everyone educated to O-level, GCSE and/or over the age of 75 is ready to start doing tax declarations online and paying for everything with zero-contact plastic only goes to show how completely off with the fairies bureaucrats and bankers are. More pernicious, however, are the apps and tones adopted by contemporary banking and tax demands that seek to address the bamboozled as if they are common criminals.

The totality of this madness is at times hard to express, but on this occasion I will take a shot at it. Here we are – regardless of Western nationality – and this is our situation: we are being ordered (not asked) to pay more and more of our meagre incomes – and take less and less interest on our capital – in order to underwrite in one way or another the reputations of deluded political ideologues, the privileged pensions of bureaucrats, the obscene wealth of the financialised 3%, the death toll among our armed forces, the share prices of globalist tax evaders, the influence of a tiny number of on and offline media moguls, the depravity of the energy industries, the goals of religious zealots, and subterfuges of assorted security service paranoiacs.

Something approaching all of us want nothing more than happy families, cohesive communities and the privacy of liberty. Something approaching all of them don’t have any of that on their radar; they desire only more and more – power, money, weapons and surveillence technology on the fantasy road to global hegemony.

Yet we, the 97%, are keeping them, the 3%, in limos, conferences, red carpets, wars, illusions, grandeur, fame and control.

Why in God’s name are we doing this?

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The reasons are myriad, and I’ve covered them endlessly elsewhere: tiredness, laziness, low IQ, a desire to conform, a need to write off empiricism as conspiracy theory, an internet full of loopy conspiranoids, distraction, disinterest, cynicism, boredom, kids, media manipulation, chores, and the endless struggle to make ends meet. Beyond the 3% and its 12% task-force of lackeys, some at least of these motives and causes impinge on all of us. But hardly any of us stop to think, for example, why none of our ends meet any more….why there are chores, distractions, long hours, stress, tiredness, money problems, credit debt mountains, cynicism and conformity.

The reasons are those outined in my earlier account of the last 36 hours: arrogant bureaucrats, self-seeking politicians, business without ethics, selling without service, banks without accountability, mainstream media without investigation, police with too few investigators or too many pc careerists, and citizens with no time.

But above all for me, two reasons stand out….and they are totally interrelated. First, ideologues who flatly refuse to depart from the script, and thus evoke the inevitable response – viz, to metaphorically change channels. And second, a citzenry whose education and media consumption has led them to believe that life will be just fine if they just keep on changing channels and watching crap. Their goal is no longer to get the most out of life, their goal now is to get through it with an acceptable level of sanity.

When it comes to the Ideological Script (and the brass-necked mendacity that goes with it) there is no difference at all between Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Jeremy Corbyn, Vince Cable and Nigel Farage. They will parrot Special Relationship, NATO, City contribution, trickle down wealth, more jobs than ever before, for the Many not the Few, neoliberal globalism, collectivist Socialism, privatisation, bourse economics, nationalisation, austerity, Keynesian expansionism, Modern Monetary Theory, Marxism, Mercantile Free Trade, Human Rights, more regulation, less regulation, European Union is everything good, European Union is rich man’s club, Brexit means disaster, Brexit means freedom, feminism is right, racism is rife, Tommy Robinson is a hero, Tommy Robinson is Hitler and all the rest of the simplistic drivel that passes for analysis in 2019.

As for the electorate that lacks either time or interest, let’s look at time first. “I haven’t the time for that nonsense” they often tell me; but they do have time to read magazines about mediocre celebs, follow soaps, and rave on about what’s going to happen next on Game of Thrones or whether Liverpool can beat Man City to the Premiership title next year. As for the interest, the puerile target-set nature of education has ensured for nearly thirty years now that socio-political conformity scores A*, and debate about received truth gets a Fail. The truly dangerous thing about the 21st century West is that vast swathes of the population have little or no understanding of political consequences and constitutional watersheds, but both the police and the media are highly politicised.

Some examples might be helpful here. Britain is currently engaged in a Mediterranean face-off with Iran. I doubt if more than 7% of the electorate either knows why, or what they think about it either way. The depraved role of Jeffrey Epstein has suddenly surfaced again in the US. I’d be surprised if awareness there of Epstein’s likely past role as an intelligence agent (or his ability to flout the law at every turn) is the hot topic of conversation in any family – not least because Anglo-Saxon families don’t eat together any more. The EU is about to pass laws making air travel more expensive. Ostensibly the reasons for this are ecological, although in my view they don’t stack up. How many voters in Germany have a working knowledge of what the Gilets Jaunes are about, and why they exist? In France, the private monies promised for the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris stand at €800 million. The amount received is €38 million. Although an Inquiry was “launched” on April 16th, it has yet to make its maiden voyage. A badly stubbed-out cigarette or an electrical fault could have started the devastating fire that ripped through Notre-Dame cathedral in April, Paris prosecutors said three weeks ago. Vague on the detail there….but surprisingly clear on the conclusion: ‘any criminal intent has been ruled out’. Where is the public outcry or press analysis of that surreal interplay of cluelessness and certainty?

Plato famously remarked that an uninformed electorate would always lead to dictatorship. 2,450 years later, the percentage of the western democratic populations aware of who said this, why, and how such a certainty might be supported has, without question, shrunk over the last half century. Ask them, however, what causes global warming, and a chorus of the Mob will shout “CO²!!” as if they were extras in a scene from Life of Brian.

Think of it like this: a media, political, banking, bureaucratic, globalist, intelligence or military opinion-leader can assert anything today, and stand an excellent chance of being believed. An ordinary citizen can quite legally put up an argument disputing that assertion, and wind up in jail.

Or better still, think of it this way: nobody is thinking about stuff any more.

Nobody at the ‘ordinary’ level is thinking about how both monetarist financialised capitalism and collectivism have failed almost everyone almost everywhere. But in “democratic” societies, these are the only realistic options on offer….and 60% will go into the voting booths apparently happy with that. The 40% who aren’t happy with it (or indifferent) are cut out of the discussion, because they don’t vote.

What can we do about this?

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Most Sloggers already know my views on devolved mutuality as a far better alternative to the above sclerotic chaos. Those who don’t are welcome to read what I’ve previously written here.

The answer isn’t yet another political Party with more of the same Top-Down ideas. The answer is something that starts as community ‘bridging’ and then grows to assert pressure on the need for radical constitutional reform.

The immediate need is to dump ideology, replace it with pragmatic testing, oppose any futher AI and robotics development, and get the real emotional intelligence of people back to work.

This is not a Luddite blast from the past, but simply a better future direction based on fairness, fulfilment and niche exports that go beyond services and finance. More of the same is not the answer.

Community bridging could do worse than start with education, and applying pressure locally to get rigid educationalist attitudes both revised and more attuned to questioning rather than placid acceptance.

If necessary, this may require the creation of a new educational sector – away from either private or State – that is funded on the basis of mutuality and affinity selection. The aim would be the greatest fulfilment of every child, in the context of a strong civic element stressing the need to respect others.

Such would be an expansion of ground-level PDC (Personal Destiny Control) as discussed elsewhere on this site.

At some stage, however, I would also avocate the application of pressure on Westminster to introduce obligatory social service (discipline but no arms or uniforms) between the ages of 13-15.

In the meantime, ignoring Westminster, Whitehall and political dogma, and demonstrating superior alternatives from the bottom up, is the only way left for Western citizens who want to make the rest of this century considerably better for considerably more people than the first 20% has been.

Thank you for persevering with this essay.