Some of you may have heard me going iggle-ubble-sloggle on election night. I was actually making some pretty accurate result forecasts and radical social points, but the soothsaying sound quality was dulled, flattened and slurred thanks to the less than perfect Nordnet Satellite technology at my end. I hasten to add that such was not down to interviewer Roger Lewis’s skills, nor to my wine consumption – even though you can observe me quaffing happily as the interview develops.

Roger’s pointyheaded genius has since been applied to capturing and then digitally restoring my side of the conversation, to the extent that you can now hear what TF I’m boffing on about, and thus decide if you like my ideas or not. If you don’t, I suggest you do the decent thing and amble off somewhere to shoot yourself, as you are clearly an oxygen-abusing burden on the rest of us.*

*ATTENTION ALL ARTICLE 50 REVOKERS, HUMOURLESS CORBYMENTUM FASCISTS & VARIETAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES: that was a joke. Do not try such things at home…or indeed anywhere else distant from access to emergency services.

The link for the new improved Youtube broadcast is this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkPf6ONx7OQ

My advice is to fast-forward to 5 mins 25 seconds, at which point the Q&A starts.

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I’m not entirely sure why, but since the utter drubbing of the 1917 Kommissariat during the recent British election proceedings, my email inbox has been swollen by Cro-magnon Leninists explaining to me why my lack of faith in Homo sapiens explains The Slog’s retrograde, anti-progressive determination to condemn Man to slavery beneath the whip of the Boss Class capitalist enemies of the proletariat….cue singing of The Red Flag.

So I thought perhaps I might offer an observation in turn designed to show how aiming for human perfection in a socialist Utopia is doomed to produce a tragi-comic dystopia in which the gargoyles always triumph.

The term Homo sapiens is rather like self-regulated cops: everything that is very obviously imperfect comes out looking and sounding like Nirvana.

Ever since man formed packs in a bid to alleviate the boredom of existence, depressives in the tribe have inadvertantly collected, matured, distilled, heated and then consumed mind-altering substances.

It mattered not whether these concoctions were drunk, smoked, sniffed or – as we  ascended further towards Godliness – injected: the existence of reality alteration predates agriculture, currency, domestic servitude, manufacturing, services provision, weapons of mass destruction, spin, the Premier League, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.

Probably the only thing that existed before dope was religion…an instrument of control designed to fool our megalomanic species into signing up to fear of priests as the key most likely to unlock the ethereal door to eternal life.

If you don’t already have doubts about the logical frailty of our species on those bases, keep reading.

All of the mind-changing Look-I-Can-Flyeeee stuff eventually produced major industries in their own right. So clearly – how can I put this? – a fucking enormous proportion of us prefer being fuzzy round the edges to stone-cold sobriety.

But the trouble is, inhaling smoke makes you feel sick at first, gives you a cough, and then kills you. And oddly enough, drinking this stuff burns out your liver, gives you brewers’ droop, makes you vomit the next morning, and then kills you.

Still not convinced? Nihil desprandum, there’s more to come.

Disgusting smoke and toxic liquids not only result in you feeling like shit later (prior to addiction) they also smell like burning plastic and taste like bleach.

Some substances like crack cocaine, heroin and Channel Four are pleasurably (albeit destructively) addictive in their own right. But most aren’t.

Hence the development of other industries to mask the quintessentially repulsive primary sense experience of setting out to die before your time.

Menthol was added to cigarettes. Tequila and salt were added to beer. Fortificating sugars were added to wine. Peat and oranges were added to whisky. Chocolate was added to coffee.

And more huooouuuge than almost everything else, sweet things were marketed in their own right, turning over time into the enormous ‘mixers’ sector designed to help make corrosive acids more palateable.

So to sum up, many human beings are so disturbed by their existence in our three-dimensional life on Planet Earth, they will not only eagerly imbibe stuff they know to be life-shortening (and feel like swallowing weedkiller or sniffing burning rubber) they will also develop, market, sell and then themselves add obesity-producing things to said stuff, the better to increase the rate at which they can partake while driving somewhat carelessly in the outside lane towards death.

Now socialists would have you believe that the misery of capitalism is to blame for this; but anthropological history is there to give the lie to Marxist dialectics. Equally, neoliberal globalists simply tell you the markets shall decide…primarily, alas, on how to exploit the species weakness.

Call me an old-fashioned optimist, but I think we can do better than this. That is to say, I think we can improve on south American drug cartels, Milwaukee brewers, Skunk cowboys and near-Asian hypocrites bribing entire governments in a bid to fuck up the citizenry. And I’m absolutely sure that practical and pragmatic social programmes devoid of crippling ideology can offer every variety of addict a hope of personal fulfilment that offers more contentment in the long term than a short term High.

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But never mind all of that….focus on the main point: the human race contains very few saints. We are, all of us, curate’s eggs. The idea of perfecting the beings described above is dangerous nonsense, and doomed to not just failure, but also to a loss of responsible liberties that lie at the heart of what most of us want.

Dump Utopian and Hobbesian ideology. Adopt instead the tough love of pragmatism, compassion, and an acceptance of human imperfection. Let’s use civic education to maximise every individual’s fulfilment in the cause of creating better communities.