In this extended essay, The Slog tries to get real about what lasting construct of cultural reform will be required to destroy the greedy micro-elites…..and the philosophical sacrifices that will be necessary along the way
Apartheid
There’s an African Unity conference going on here in Gambia at the moment. It’s taking place inside an obscenely huge conference hall designed and built by Beijing….a building that very nearly halved the reserve Park available to Red and Fervert monkeys. Very few of the attendees have anything to do with Gambia (a tiny country) but the most important thing for the authorities is that these bureaucrats should be spared the sight of breadline poverty wherever their CD-plate limos may take them.
Every last one of these decision makers is dressed in expensive clothing and overweight. They do not look to left or right, for fear they might have to engage with the socio-economic results of their policy fantasies. But they all have the conference ID cards that mark them out as a species apart….almost as if they might be evacuee kids during 1940.
Out front of my apartment block, 4-wheel drive gas-guzzlers sit with their engines running, thus wasting valuable energy that becomes yet more invaluable with every month…just in case its privileged passenger might need rapid access to anything from a press conference to a prostitute.
I’ve been meaning to write about this reality for some time now, but there is the ever-present possibility that one can be seen as bourgeois Western white boy sticking his nose into stuff he doesn’t understand.
In this instance, I refute that charge. I’ve travelled in Africa over many years…..and beyond Africa, I’ve seen all forms of weakly rationalised privilege under various headings – Change, Progressiveness, Neoliberalism, Political Correctness, Black Lives Matter and so forth. They all have one thing in common: they all wind up wanting Zil Lanes because their goals are more important than ours….and their fellow dingbats seem incapable or unwilling to look us in the eye.
On the three intersecting roads leading up to what locals call The Turntable, there are now 24/7 traffic jams making journeys that used to take twenty-five minutes anything up to an ordeal of ninety minutes. The sole purpose of this new ‘highway improvement’ project is to ensure that December delegates at the World Islamic Council do not encounter any of the worst examples of begging, desolation and waste pollution the rest of us deal with every day.
It is almost as if they somehow feel they have mutated into the new normal Homo Imperator – the supreme unelected Morlock power quietly eating We the Eloi.
The multi-Nation nation
177 years ago, a young novelist called Benjamin Disraeli wrote a book called Sybil, or The Two Nations. He (as a Jew) wrote persuasively about oppression of the working classes, female and child labour, low wages, abominable conditions of housing and work, and the squalor and misery of industrial towns. The eye of the minority foreigner creates prose that are often worth reading, on account of the trees v wood blindness thing.*
*I’ve been a Dizzy fan ever since I read how a young historian asked him, ‘What is your advice to any young person on the election stump?’ to which he replied, ‘Never forego an opportunity to visit the lavatory’.
His blinding glimpse of obvious insight about social injustice for once correctly suggested a glittering political career for this young man, who went on to be repetitively Prime Minister for long periods in the days before the lease on 10 Downing St was renewed more times than most people change their underwear.
Today – not that far short of two centuries later – we’ve gone full circle (albeit a concentric – some would eccentric – one) to separate my Britain that is not so much twofold as manifold
Many years ago one November 5th, the late and much-lamented Anna Raccoon and myself pitched up with a group of Guido libertarians to sit in the public gallery of the House of Commons. We had to leave all suspicious items in the cloakroom, and when we arrived there in order to do so, one of the snooty staff on duty said in loud voice, ‘Who in God’s name let you lot in?’ Anna walked up to him and replied, ‘This is our Parliament….you just work here’.
So far so not so good: we’ve paid a brief visit to the tribal tendency of our species to assume that the right to wield power must, in and of itself, suggest superiority.
But what I’m really getting at here is the resultant separations we’re creating that go way beyond rulers v ruled….that is, separateness created further upstream that renders all concerted opposition to the State dysfunctional. Add the reality of an advance in habitual online/smartphone citizen surveillance, and you’re looking at a future in which any mass movement against the tiniest minority in power will fail as a result of early detection, lack of unity and fear of cruel repression.
From Heracles to Hitler, Divide and Rule has often been a winning strategy on the way to power….but capable of creating administrative confusion that becomes fatal in the long run. In our epoch, these multivariate divisions have made it almost painfully easy for the totalitarian tendency to render opposition ineffectual – and ironically, make the goose-stepping they propose seem like the best policy.
For many years – when having my own qualified individualism vilified – I was fond of making my point by observing, “There is only one thing that unites humanity, and that’s the fact that we are all unique”. But as so often with our species, the very ideological nature of ‘unity’ – exactly the same etymological route as ‘unique’ – demands the subjugation of individual inquisition. If you will, asking the question “why?” by definition becomes strengstens verboten.
In 2022, every last one of us is philosophically – in many cases, ideologically – separated from our fellow citizens. In the small-minded world of today (the one we’re told is a global village) the existence of the lonely brave family dissenter is a broadly shared experience.
One can argue that a great deal of this is explained by the enduring liberal v conservative split in First World politics. But this doesn’t survive even the most cursory examination. We have always, for example, had the Democrat v Republican thing as well as the Tory v Labour, SPD v CDU in Germany and Gaullist/Nationalist v Socialist/Communist in France. But it is only relatively recently that we’ve had the ideological mendacity of Greens, the politically correct illiberal warrior hegemonists and dubious globalist financialisers to factor into the mix.
My overarching observation is that – for the first time in my life – peacetime national and geopolitical conflict is on a non-stop war footing.
That’s to say, pretty much all of the “news” output associated with it is black-lie/false flag bollocks. And there’s a very good reason for this: what’s at stake is ownership of the world – and all its riches – to be shared among a tiny minority (no more than 800,000) of psychopathic megalo-narcissists.
What we’re going through is a technocratic information-rich version of the dictatorial claims upon the civil rights of every human individual made by Nazis and Communists during the period 1925-45. It’s the ‘techno’ combining form element that makes all the difference in the third decade of the 21st Century.
Genuine debate v Top-down division
The main separators of our epoch are listed below in order of “age” – that’s to say, their degree of maturity as divisive issues. Thus, climate change and race have been ‘around’ as belief debates forever, whereas total awareness of the potable water problem is only just coming to the fore.
Climate Change manmade v modeled nonsense
Ethnic repression v Cultural difference
Sexuality obsession v civil rights issue
Unelected State takeover v Political incompetence
Brexit Leave sabotage v Brexit is a disaster
Bat virus v Biolab escape
Vaccine v Bioweapon
EUNATO/Ukraine meddling v Putin as megalomaniac
Unipolar NATO hegemony v Polypolar coexistence
Financialised global trade v national self-sufficiency
Depopulation mania v water conservation
The most obvious element of the debates is the constant need for insults in the way the “other side” is nominated. In the case of climate, the Change side are warmists and model freaks, whereas anyone with doubts is a delusional denialist; as regards sexuality, LGBTQs are mincing narcissists and straight people are phobic; Brexit leavers are bigots and low IQ Little Englanders, Remainers are naïve luvvies who hate losing, thus Remoaners –and so on. Overall across the piece, cynics who doubt most government pronouncements are conspiranoid, while those who tend to comply are face-nappy wearers or scum.
But perhaps more importantly, those with auto-compliance as their default behaviour are far more likely to be convinced that they are “following the science”, when in reality, under questioning they tend to display data ignorance. So what I conclude is this:
IDEOLOGICAL separations are just another example of falsehood as the fuel for the engine driving us away from genuine reality: and when it comes to that form of locomotion, there is no shortage of it among the peddlers of tartan paint. By contrast, PHYSICAL separation is an illusion, such a conclusion being based on the scientific physics of connection.
In a nutshell, ideological separation is artificial, whereas the illusion of physical separation is real.
The difference is what it is because, first, hidden professional opinion formers, paid social media manipulators and image consultants are becoming more and more effective in presenting falsehoods to smear an opposing view. And the whole has been conflated by global stockholder giants using their supposed voting power to muzzle the mainstream media.
But second – and for me, this is the overriding factor too many people miss – the invented false emergencies are all top down, descending from the many parts of a multivariate soi-disant elite.
Climate change, for example, is far from just ‘Green’: in pretty much equal parts, it’s also the Left in search of an issue (its historical collectivism being a busted flush) and the financial community inventing another illusory “goody-gumdrops” thing to invest in – covering everything from carbon footprints to the insanity of electric cars via wind propellers that fall over a lot and cost a fortune in upkeep.
LGBT also falls into the New Left category – as does BLM.
The biggest sore thumb of all is probably an unwillingness to see the Unelected State either at work in ‘fixing’ elections, crowning the unelected or interfering directly in the policies of the elected. The US judicial system has still not bothered to investigate the 72 cases of suspicious 2020 voting behaviour in the Trump v Biden Presidential contest. In UK politics since 2016, five potential or actual Prime Ministers have been unceremoniously pushed aside – Cameron, Leadsom, Johnson, Truss and Johnson again to make way for May, Hunt and Sunak – all these last three blatantly connected to the, in turn, Home Office MI6/CIA and neoliberal financialisers behind much of the New Normal Orwellisms. As for the Truss fiasco, hardly had her bum hit the Cabinet Room hot seat before the Bank of England snake Andrew Bailey conspired to make a nonsense of her tax cut proposals.
Everyone tut-tuts, but nobody wants to know how Jeremy Hunt became Chancellor…because it sure as hell wasn’t Truss’s idea. But whose was it?
Fauci of the NIH’s eclectically contradictory Wuhan evidence, lockdowns ordered by hard Left wing sypathisers, the demonization of Putin, offshore jobs as part of neoliberal globalism, and the depopulation drivel of Gates and Schwab: all of it is top-down mendacity.
Even I – as a believer that the planet’s supply of potable water needs to be increased as population growth continues (or even flatlines) – am acutely aware of how this could be used to frighten voters in the West….or be a weapon of war like gas supply today – in Eastern Europe.
Is there an answer?
Yes there is ….but it’s something far easier to acclaim than to achieve. It’s the same awkward Truth I’ve been pushing since 2010, and it remains the logical philosophy (not ideology) of Radical Realism: fundamentally, an update of the Jeremy Bentham belief in the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number….which I rebore as ‘Realising the Greatest Potential of every Citizen’.
At the present moment, the US mid term elections look likely to give the Democrats a caning on the overriding issue of rampant inflation. I see this as healthy.
However, changing Party fortunes are one thing; root and branch constitutional reform is another thing entirely. There is no point in launching a new movement in the West if it isn’t (a) bigger than politics (b) committed to open-minded practical philosophy rather than the closed ranks of ideology (c) radical in its approach to power relationships in general and decentralised government in particular (d) opposed to indirect ‘sham’ democracy (e) bankrolled solely by a public purse regulated well out of Whitehall’s reach (f) desirous of an education system with far greater emphasis on depoliticisation of the teaching staff, and the personal health, civics, national service* and employable métiers of students (g) serious about a search for stable every-vote-counts electoral systems (h) a belief in social mobility based on relevant talent, not gender, race and sexuality quotas
*Just to be absolutely clear here, I am talking about two years of compulsory service (for those aged 15-17 prior to them starting work or attending University) among the poor, needy, old, mentally ill and otherwise disabled/disadvantaged members of the citizenry. Weapons would not be involved.
Dare I say this? We in the Resistance are too individualistic, divided, hidebound and negative. The (a) to (h) Top Ten needs outlined above quite deliberately puts the size of the reform task into awesome perspective.
The physical separation we perceive in the Universe is a trick of the mind. Our devotion to individualist separation is an open invitation to elite prositutes to turn a trick at our expense.
The Slog 