I may be able to keep my New Year's resolution not to waste so much time trying to engage with other-minded people on Twitter. Following a short reply to a minor account on medical malpractice, my account has been suspended.
My appeal to Twitter's support team will probably fall on deaf ears. The woke enforcers of progressive technofascism do not do debate. They are only concerned with discussing how to roll out their vision of our Brave New World and how to deal with dissidents.
Censorship is real.
I would like to thank you for clarifying your opposition to democracy, which as you know cannot function without free speech and open debate on all key ethical and scientific issues of the day. Nobody has a monopoly on truth.
You claimed that I spread "misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19." In Mid 2021 I had a one-week suspension with the same justification for a reply to a user with a small following alluding to tried and tested therapeutics for viral infections currently known loosely as covid-19. The keywords that attract the attention of your censors are ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. We have over 60 years of data on the latter and around 30 years for the former. As I have stated in many other comments, these drugs should only be used at moderate doses in combination with other treatments. I have personally taken HCQ in Africa and am very familiar with its mild side effects (drowsiness). It may alleviate symptoms and reduce the likelihood of hospitalisation. As stated in the offending tweet, Ivermectin has been widely deployed in India, Japan and Iran to treat sars-cov-2 symptoms. There are numerous abstracts on PubMed discussing its efficacy:
As in most medical controversies, other studies have reached different conclusions, but I invite you to find evidence that early treatment with ivermectin at moderate doses can cause significant harm compared to "no treatment" followed by dangerous antiviral drugs such as remsdisivir accompanied by ventilation.
I suggest you censored my minor account for ideological reasons. The ball is in your court. If you persist in suspending accounts that counter the narrow covid narrative preferred by your partners in the biotech industry, then we can only conclude your organisation is opposed to liberal democracy and UNESCO’s Universal Declaration Code on Bioethetics and Human Rights.
If your platform cannot accommodate vigorous debate on such matters, its relevance will wane. It will be little more than a virtue-signalling echo chamber tolerating only controversies that do not challenge your biotech partners. One may debate whether the Earth is flat or whether Elvis Presley lives on the far side of the Moon, but one may not question the alleged "science" that regimes around the world exploit to justify growing authoritarianism.
You have recently purged many other accounts such as that of Dr Robert D Malone, the inventor of mRNA injections that you seem so keen not just to promote but to mandate as a condition for participation in society.
Prove me wrong and unsuspend my account. I welcome anyone to challenge my assertions. I have always been respectful and enjoy interacting with others who hold different views. Without open debate in the public sphere, our society will descend into authoritarianism.
Future historians will not treat tech giants like Twitter kindly if you persist with this attitude.
The liberal consensus over the last seventy-odd years had, until recently, favoured equality of opportunity. As long we all have access to good and inspiring education with a supportive family and wider local community, we can all thrive in our chosen vocations. We may have allowed for a few unlucky exceptions with severe mental retardation, but by and large, we liked to think most people had opportunities galore to be masters of their destiny. There is no easy measure of excellence or success. It all depends on your priorities and expectations. Some people may succeed financially but fail academically. Others may succeed in raising the next generation, but only enjoy modest personal wealth or career progression. Likewise, some may be content with moderate success, while others may feel demoralised if they fail to compete at the top of their league. It hardly mattered if you were a mere sole-trading plumber, factory worker or housewife, you were just as worthy as a surgeon, property speculator or the CEO of a large company, or at least so we were led to believe.
The illusion of equality before the law lasted little more than half a century. In most of Western Europe, it emerged from the ashes of the Second World War. Other countries had to wait for the end of colonial rule or racial segregation. While the managerial classes have long distanced themselves from open support for eugenics, the corona crisis has unmasked their thinly concealed contempt for the uncooperative underclasses.
The new eugenics, as we may call it, builds on the core precepts of modern psychiatry, namely that free will is an illusion and thus all aberrant behaviour can be tamed through psychological conditioning and/or pharmaceutical intervention. Over the last three decades the pendulum has swung from an emphasis on the psychosocial causes of mental disorders to the genetic determinism of all behaviours ranging from sexuality and violence to depression and hyperactivity. Such behavioural patterns may now be considered as immutable as skin colour or biological sex. Indeed feelings, with mysterious genetic origins, may trump more obvious physiological traits. In the absence of free will, a person lacks agency. We can always ascribe presumed misconduct to genes, bad education or a lack of early medical intervention rather than conscious decisions by responsible human beings with minds of their own.
Once people attribute behaviour mainly to genes, it only takes a small leap of faith to link intelligence with genetic inheritance and thus to justify a master race of experts empowered to regulate everyone else‘s lives. Wrongthink, as George Orwell called it in his dystopian novel 1984, means any idea at variance with the orthodoxy of official experts. In just a few years the Overton window of permissible opinions has shrunk from open debate on a range of scientific and ethical issues to complete deference to the cult of scientism. The mainstream media no longer debates whether genetic code injections marketed as covid vaccines are safe and effective but how we can persuade the vaccine-shy to roll up their sleeves. As I have explained amply in earlier posts, the nature versus nurture debate presents a false dichotomy. Our genes do not compete with our environment to determine our personality or intelligence. They form the blueprint for the biological hardware on which our emotional and intellectual software runs. Surprisingly little may distinguish the DNA of a successful brain surgeon from that of a semi-literate unemployable welfare claimant but their phenotypes may differ in some important respects. This may soon change with advent of human genetic engineering and augmented intelligence implants, bypassing limits imposed by natural biology or ecology. We could soon see a rapid shift away from the expansion of human activity that has characterised progress since the industrial revolution to transhuman excellence. Until recently, technological progress relied in large part on intense competition among natural human beings. Only a few of us would ever develop ground-breaking inventions, but advanced societies needed millions of conscientious workers with a diverse range of skills. Not everyone may have had the intellect to invent a new form of locomotion, but we still needed millions of specialised assembly workers and mechanics, many of whom could earn good salaries. Alas with smart automation, industry needs fewer and fewer engineers to drive innovation. The economics of growth is now morphing into the economics of supremacy.
Here we see a paradox. The same global corporations that welcomed expanding consumer markets that thrived on a multitude of human resources have now shifted gear to techno-feudalism with strictly regulated consumption and behaviour. The same advertising agencies that for decades sold us the dream of carefree mass motoring and debt-fuelled retail therapy in a sprawling urban landscape of highways and shopping malls are now selling us both the misnamed Green New Deal and the new concept of bio-security. We even get hybrid neologisms such as a green pass that grants additional rights to people with up-to-date genetic code injections. Green is the new grey, the antithesis of the natural harmony that many pre-industrial civilisations and many in the late 20th century ecology movement championed. Rather than learning to live alongside nature and adapting technology to help humanity as it has naturally evolved over the millennia, the technocratic elite now seems hellbent on radically modifying human nature itself.
The Green-Grey Alliance
The convergence of all mainstream parties and big businesses behind the biosecurity state and the Green New Deal should not have surprised the more astute political analysts among us. The controversial progressive policies of the last decade such as open-door mass migration, gay marriage, gender theory lessons in primary schools and proactive mental health screening did not grow organically from grassroots campaigns against social injustice. All these initiatives came from powerful lobbies deeply embedded in NGOs, academia, mainstream media outlets, private and public sector agencies. They may well have co-opted a few activists from communities with genuine grievances. On the surface, Black Lives Matter is about racial equality. In practice, this well-funded organisation promotes anything that destabilises close-knit ethnocentric communities that value strong families. This is almost the polar opposite of what most Black Africans want. BLM leaders do not just support the LGBTQ+ agenda, paving the way for transhumanism, they’re fully on board with the covid narrative, wear submissive face-masks at staged protests and have yet to utter a word of criticism against the multi-trillion dollar mRNA-vaccine roll-out. Rest assured that BLM did not voice any concerns over the suspicious deaths of five black presidents who failed to cooperate with the WHO’s mass mRNA-inoculation plans. Within little more than a year Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza, Tanzania’s John Magafuli, the Ivory Coast’s Hamed Bakayoko and Eswatini’s Ambrose Dlamini died prematurely and Haiti’s Jovenel Moïse was murdered. All presided over countries with very low covid-related death rates and growing populations but had expressed scepticism about mass inoculation. Their successors have all fallen into line with the WHO’s plans. Black lives only matter if someone’s high-profile death can sow the seeds of racial disharmony by blaming the white working classes for the crimes of their ancestral rulers. Not surprisingly, this organisation has enjoyed massive corporate support especially among cybertech, entertainment and sports giants.
More disturbing has been the authoritarian drift within a broad spectrum of the liberal green left. Tony Blair’s support for vaccine passports, around 15 years after trying to introduce mandatory ID cards, should surprise nobody. However, many who once opposed military adventurism, the abuse of corporate power, profit-driven environmental destruction and the over-regulation of people’s private lives, have now embraced zero covid, something that could only be achieved with total biological surveillance putting an end to the last vestiges of personal freedom. Admittedly long before covid entered our daily lexicon, idealists had to reconcile the conflicting demands of wildlife preservation, ecological stability, universal prosperity, human rights, peace, personal freedom and democracy. We had been led to believe we could have our proverbial cake and eat it, but you need not be a genius to see how these virtuous goals conflict with each other. We cannot clear forests and savannahs in the world’s most hospitable regions to make way for more farms, mines, roads and urban settlements without depriving other species not only of their habitats but also of their functional independence. Likewise, once our life support systems depend on advanced technology and supply chains controlled by a handful of interconnected corporations, we too descend to the status of zoo animals. Our freedom is now at the mercy of our technocratic zookeepers and conditional on our compliant behaviour.
Around 2018 Extinction Rebellion appeared on the scene. It recycled the extreme techno-pessimism of earlier radical ecologists. They believe if we don’t cut aggregate human consumption forthwith, we may soon face a man-made cataclysm that may wipe out our species. However, rather than advocate greater self-sufficiency and seek common cause with grassroots opponents of crony capitalism, Extinction Rebellion (XR) targets the consumer habits of the Western working classes. Most of the recent rise in demand for non-renewable resources has come from what we once called the developing world. Most Western countries have fertility rates below replacement level and, since the 2008 banking meltdown, have seen falling per-capita consumption, as young people’s priorities have shifted from car culture to electronic gadgets. Whether you believe our overconsumption of fossil fuels may destabilise our climate or not, growth in India and China would offset radical reductions in Western Europe. XR’s activities would hasten the demise of the Western working classes and, as is already happening, empower the very tech giants they claim to oppose. XR has attracted mainly wishful thinkers and dropouts from the affluent professional classes, whose antics facilitate the transition from the old model of hyper-consumerism to the new model of hyper-surveillance.
The same activists who once campaigned to keep the state and church out of people’s private lives when it comes to consensual sex or recreational drugs now oppose personal freedom when it comes to natural unmasked faces or informed consent on medical procedures. A few years ago, trendy metropolitan professionals may have liked to express their support for progressive causes such as saving refugees, tackling climate change by adopting greener technology or standing up for their rainbow coalition of worthy victim groups. At least their concerns, however impracticable or counterproductive, related to the plight of natural human beings. Now they virtue-signal their compliance with a puritanical narrative that transforms organic human beings into potential biohazards. All of a sudden, the chattering classes have co-opted a compulsive obsession with hygiene and a blind faith in the biotech industrial complex. The common denominator here is the triad of the mass media, academia and NGOs posing as independent charities, trade unions and think tanks. These have come out almost unanimously in favour of stronger corona containment measures and accuse all sceptics of murderous irresponsibility. Their tactic is to frighten us into submission unless we succumb to groupthink and relinquish our personal independence outside carefully monitored environments. Intelligence is no longer a measure of one’s analytical powers or problem-solving skills, but an expression of one’s internalisation of the presumed scientific consensus. This only works if you assume the experts employed by the organs of global governance have your best interests at heart. The growing rift in society no longer runs along left vs right or libertarian vs authoritarian lines but pits conformists against free thinkers. Behavioural psychologists have persuaded a critical mass of ordinary citizens that so-called covid deniers and antivaxxers threaten their freedom and health. Corporate technocrats and environmentalists have perversely joined forces to reset the world’s economy. Now the fake greens and elitist left sing from the same hymn sheet as the WEF (World Economic Forum), the WHO (World Health Organisation), the tech giants, the big banks and retail empires. They have buried their differences over the profit motive and industrial waste and concluded that humanity is the problem.
The New Master Race
Over the last 18 months, many leading scientists and medical professionals have been unpersoned and confined to the dark web of the alternative media. Meanwhile, other approved experts, such as Dr Anthony Fauci in the USA or Prof. Christian Drosten in Germany, have acquired an almost godlike status in the eyes of social conformists. Postmodern deference to scientism differs little from medieval deference to religious leaders. The architects of public opinion have thus simplified complex scientific questions to soundbites about our collective responsibility to each other. Politicians can now get away with sweeping generalisations based on a selective interpretation of available data unchallenged as they talk down to their subjects and dismiss any divergent opinions as mere conspiracy theories. Behind the thin veneer of public relations officers posing as elected representatives or acclaimed academics, a global governance network pulls the strings of the disposable talking heads we may want to hold accountable. Unsurprisingly, we see variants of the same policies rolled out in diverse jurisdictions around the globe.
The technocratic classes probably make up less than one percent of the general population, but they now consider themselves superior both to the plebs and their underlings in middle management. They have now cleverly exempted themselves from most coronavirus regulations that affect the plebs with exclusive travel corridors and resorts. Some may have posed before cameras to publicise their covid vaccinations, but we have no proof they received the same genetic code injections as the underclasses.
On a more serious note, current events across the prosperous world from Canada to Australia via Western Europe, clearly show the global governance classes are acting in lockstep to wage a war of attrition against non-compliant free-thinking citizens and guide the acquiescent majority to a new reality of socially engineered submission.
The well-to-do managerial classes suffer from an extreme form of cognitive dissonance. In public, they love to express their sympathy with the plight of the underclasses, especially those who belong to perceived victim groups. In private, they dream of a society where everyone shares their narrow worldview and the uncooperative great unwashed masses have either embraced new more malleable childlike identities or have disappeared into oblivion. They can only tolerate the underclasses if they know their place and do not question official experts. In a new virtual reality, the guardians of truth may hide unspeakable crimes against humanity while treating whistle-blowers and dissidents as terrorists or psychiatric patients. If you think this sounds far-fetched, just consider the plight of former school chaplain, Dr Bernard Randall, who was reported to the UK’s counter-terrorism body, Prevent, for delivering a sermon on respectful free speech. It is now clear our technocratic masters want to ensure the next generation is unaware of alternative perspectives. They can only trust the upper echelons of the managerial classes to resolve controversies. Everyone else should internalise and recycle the authorised scientific consensus, even if it conflicts with our first-hand experience, common sense intuition and earlier scientific orthodoxies.
We could see the warning signs of our current drift towards progressive totalitarianism long before the covid scare. While politicians posing on the liberal left may be well-intentioned, their advisors have consistently promoted policies that disempower the working classes. Comprehensive education in large high schools stifles excellence and creativity. Teachers spend more time on dealing with inevitable conflicts in oversized classes than imparting a passion for learning. Such an approach rewards conformity and penalises critical thinking. Schools no longer teach children how to think but rather what to think. The same well-paid consultants support welfare incentives for smaller and more malleable non-traditional family units, while also favouring the influx of new communities with a stronger work ethic. Ironically new immigrant communities often prefer traditional families and retain more socially conservative attitudes. As a result, millions of working-class youngsters have been deprived of meaningful job opportunities. First they had to endure dumbed-down schooling that failed to inspire them, then they encountered intense competition at the lower end of the labour market unable to compete with better disciplined newcomers and finally, they succumbed to the allure of welfare dependence and became the clients of mental health outreach workers.
For much of the 20th century the upwardly mobile middle classes continued to grow, while the numbers of traditional blue-collar workers gradually shrank. Big business first outsourced and then automated manufacturing. By the turn of the millennium, the burgeoning service sector employed the lowest paid workers such as temporary burger flippers, toilet cleaners or fast-food delivery drivers, with gruelling farm labour and food processing assigned mainly to transient migrant labourers. A dwindling minority of the working people now make essential goods or provide mission-critical services. Since the advent of medical martial law in early 2020, we’ve learned to call such people key workers. Policymakers now consider everyone else expendable or in modern parlance non-essential. Seriously, our authorities seem more concerned about covid compliance and vaccine acceptance than helping young people gain fruitful employment and start natural families. In the UK a nominally Conservative government has overseen the largest expansion of welfare dependence ever and the decimation of independent small businesses. The other main parties all support the rapid transition to a new economy that will exclude most adults of working age from any meaningful participation, except as cheerleaders, rule enforcers and carers. Via the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, the global high-tech industrial complex has swept aside the old debates over public ownership, EU membership and Scottish independence. The National Health Service has now effectively become a subsidiary of big pharma with central government merely dishing out digital cash underwritten by banking cartels.
The Equality Myth
In classic NewSpeak we are “the same but different”. Learning disability charities love the slogan and shamelessly recycle it for very different categories of people with additional support needs. Expressions such as differently-abled may make us feel good about our assigned disability but really mean that some people are more equal than others, i.e. not equal at all. Since the early 2000s I’ve chronicled a growing trend to broaden the definition of learning disabilities to cover anyone who has challenges in any intellectually demanding task. Dyslexia is both hard to define and may affect as many as 10% of the population. A much larger percentage could be mathematically challenged and the vast majority of mobile phone users would struggle with rudimentary programming concepts. Eventually, learning disabilities may apply to anyone below the top 10% of the IQ range (approximately 120+). As smart automation gathers pace, more and more workers within the medium intelligence range (80 to 120) will lose their jobs to AI. With moves afoot to roll out universal basic income, people will soon be rewarded not for their labour but for their compliance and good behaviour with social credits. Many may earn a little extra as part-time as carers, customer relations managers or narrative enforcers. However, these roles are non-essential and serve only to manage the moods and behaviour of other members of the underclasses. We can see that now with store staff employed not to serve customers - something machines can easily do these days - but to ensure visitors comply with new covid measures. It should come as little surprise that over the last 15 months governments around the globe have targeted independent small businesses that are not subservient to larger corporations. This follows in the wake of a three-decade-long worldwide onslaught against small-scale farmers. It hardly comes as a surprise that Neil Ferguson’s wild projections of mass death also served to bankrupt family-run livestock farms in the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, leading to the incineration of over 6 million animals.
Traditional skillsets, of the kind farmers and craftsmen once had in abundance, rely on multiple facets of intelligence, experience and conscientiousness. Devoted generalists could succeed in life with a can-do attitude. This is no longer the case. A broad range of mediocre skills no longer suffice for anything but personal care and hobbies in a world where big business with its vast economies of scale and smart automation can undercut any talented artisan. There remain niche markets for millionaires prepared to spend £13,000 on a handcrafted record player, but the rest of us may enjoy superior sound from a digital download at a fraction of the cost. Craftspeople work today more as artists who sell their creative spirit more than their actual products. An overpriced custom turntable is a work of art whose market value depends on its uniqueness and authentic embodiment of a bygone technological era. However, only a tiny minority of the millions of skilled workers who once formed the bedrock of modern industrial societies will transition to new roles as celebrity artisans. Alas most young adults have chosen to pursue tertiary-sector professions that are neither mission-critical nor immune from smart automation. We live in a world with more recruiters than engineers and more social workers than fishermen.
The once culturally homogenous working classes have now morphed into a motley collection of atomised individuals that social scientists may categorise by employability and mental health. A new social structure is rapidly emerging:
Non-academic people, i.e. within the low to medium intelligence range:
The caring classes: Well-socialised and compliant members may earn extra within the social care and awareness-raising sector. Their jobs may be non-essential but serve to give people a sense of purpose and participation.
The idle classes: Well-socialised but lethargic members may rely on UBI (universal basic income), but occasionally earn social credits for compliant behaviour. In practice, most people will flow between these groups at different stage in their lives.
The victim classes: This growing subsection of emotionally unstable and often uncooperative individuals, prone to drug abuse and risky behaviours, will be subject to intensive surveillance and act as guinea pigs in social and medical experiments. As long as their noncompliance is expressed through recreational drugs, junk culture and sports, social workers can prevent the brighter elements within this subgroup from succumbing to the lures of personal independence and associating with subversive intellectuals.
Academically gifted, i.e. within the upper 10 to 20% of the intelligence range.
The Managerial classes comprise the better-socialised and more cooperative among the new upper classes, they will vary from low-ranking social engineers to high-status policy analysts but will rely increasingly on artificial intelligence.
The Engineering classes: This more creative but cliquey group will be rewarded for their technical expertise and afforded greater personal freedoms within their exclusive clubs.
The critically thinking classes will form a subversive subset of the first two subgroups. They may be tolerated to a limited extent to allow some innovation but must be carefully monitored at all times. When dissident academics overstep the mark, they will be treated as psychiatric patients but kept well away from other potential troublemakers.
I have just outlined a likely outcome of the Great Reset within the next 10 to 20 years, assuming it all goes to plan, which I hope it will not. The policy planners at the World Economic Forum seek to phase out the middle and skilled working classes as they roll out UBI and social credits while restricting private ownership of real estate and motor vehicles. Our challenge is to build an alternative and avert this drift towards a Huxleyan dystopia. Meanwhile, the progressive chattering classes, from media pundits and leftwing politicians to trade union leaders, have betrayed us by denying us any meaningful bargaining power. Among the biggest cheerleaders for the so-called zero-covid strategy favoured by many progressive think tanks such as the misnamed Independent SAGE in the UK, are the trade unions. They perpetuate the founding myths of the corona scam, through their dogmatic embracement of face masks in workplaces and schools and their abject failure to oppose experimental gene therapy injections in school children, despite ample scientific evidence of their potential for long-term neurological adverse effects. Many wishful thinking lower-ranking middle managers may mean well, but they serve the interests of their technocratic masters.
It beggars belief how anyone with half a brain could let an obsession with infection rates destroy the freedom of future generations.
I've long been critical of superstates and any extreme concentration of power, but only really from around 2014 did anti-EU feeling in the UK gain enough momentum to call into question Britain's integration with the European project and to force a referendum, which the establishment hoped would endorse the status quo's trajectory of ever-closer union. The real underlying cause of widespread public distrust in remote political elites remains the rapid pace of corporate globalisation with its extreme labour mobility, job insecurity, transient communities and fast cultural change. The biggest issue of all is the perceived disenfranchisement of the traditional working classes. I say perceived because some may argue that democratic accountability has always been an illusion, but at least until the late 1970s, British workers had a sense that some politicians in power actually cared about their plight and would negotiate with big business to secure better working conditions, higher pay and above all job security with subsidised training and apprenticeship schemes.
If you think the prospect of Brexit is bad, then you may wonder whom to blame for this calamity. The Guardian's favourite culprits are Tory aristocrats, Rupert Murdoch, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and naturally the ominous Russian connection. Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian has taken Putin-themed conspiracy theories to the next level, even claiming Russian involvement in the recent drone incident at Gatwick Airport. Yet they fail to identify the real cause of people's distrust in remote elites, lying politicians, and most notably the former New Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who not only evangelised European integration and opened up the UK Labour market to agency workers from poorer Eastern European countries, but fully supported military interventionism in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Iraq. New Labour had 13 years to help train British youngsters to meet the technological challenges of the new millennium, yet succeeded mainly in producing more project managers and recruitment consultants to organise ready-trained human resources, while more and more British youngsters failed to gain any practical work experience except in dispiriting part-time promotional gigs.
However, the whole Brexit Saga does reveal divisions within the ruling elites, which reflect shifting global alliances as the relative strength of the USA wanes and European governments embrace a more interventionist form of corporatism with the transfer of power away from national governments to supranational organisations. While big business may once have backed continued US Hegemony by supporting resources wars in the Middle East, they now openly despise President Donald Trump's advocacy of America First. When Macron and Trump spoke at the centennial commemoration of the Armistice ending the First World War, news outlets favourable to more global governance (BBC, CNN, the Guardian, New York Times, France 24, ZDF, Le Monde etc.) supported Macron's denunciation of nationalism and his redefinition of patriotism to the mean the exact opposite, while they ridiculed Trump's defence of nationhood. The USA may have a gigantic military industrial complex, but its endless escapades do little to defend US citizens back home, but rather serve mainly to project the power of a global network of banks and corporations on the whole world. Until recently North Americans have been more willing to support their nation's military endeavours than their European counterparts. As the wider American public begin to realise that their country's huge military outlay does not help them and may promote the kind of corporate globalism that will strip them of any economic advantages they may once have had, we can expect peacekeeping activities to be managed more at a supranational level with missions outsourced not only to multinational armed forces but to mercenary outfits posing as NGOs not associated with a specific country. Just consider the example James Le Mesurier's outfit, Academi (formerly known as Blackwater). Judging from their website and many promotional videos available online, you'd seriously think their main mission were to provide humanitarian relief to conflict zones, rather than arm and train insurgents and rescue workers specialised in the art of atrocity simulation. Such organisations are happy to work for the highest bidder, especially with the implicit support of global corporations. As rapid cultural and ethno-demographic transformation destabilises many urban areas, we can expect to see heavily armed transnational security forces deployed in Western Europe in the same way as NATO peacekeeping intervened in the former Yugoslavia.
The Free Market Myth
Western Europe and North America converged in the post-war period on a mixed economy compromise where local small businesses could thrive alongside larger corporations while the government intervened to provide essential services and infrastructure as well as regulate markets in the best interests of social cohesion and general prosperity. Until the 1990s Europe remained a very heterogenous continent. Global brands and culture may well have permeated home-grown traditions, but if you scratched beneath the surface of ubiquitous Anglo-American movies and pop music, young Europeans could still identify with their cultural roots, which they interpreted mainly along regional and national lines. Moreover, each country chose to manage its economy, social welfare and security in different ways. Italy and Greece would offer very limited benefits for the workshy and single parents, as they just assumed extended families should take care of relatives who had fallen on bad times or made unwise lifestyle choices, but offered comparatively generous pensions and early retirement for many categories of workers and state employees. The bedrock of Southern European economies remained family-run businesses, which naturally favoured local or culturally attuned workers. The last twenty years of rapid demographic change has seen hundreds of thousands of longstanding small businesses close as young adults seek better temporary career opportunities in remote cities, often abroad, in the emerging gig economy, dominated by transient design, development and marketing companies whose fortunes are intimately tied to a handful of tech giants, global corps and NGOs. Rather than help their family business adapt to modern technology or a changing clientele, many of the smartest young Europeans are creating marketing media for consumer lifestyle options or awareness-raising initiatives at a design agenc in London, Frankfurt, Paris or Barcelona, while struggling to pay sky-high rents for modest mini-apartments and only being a few pay cheques away from bankruptcy, eviction and a future of welfare dependence and emotional insecurity. Today's knowledge workers are paid not just for their expertise, but for their positive attitude to recent social changes and their compliance with the evolving progressive orthodoxy. Money talks. If you can get €300 a day as a graphic designer in one of Europe's major cities for an advertising agency producing a transgender awareness campaign, why would you refuse? Yet this is precisely what happens. There's a lot more money in transformative social engineering than in good wholesome conservative values. Big business does not want young women to marry and start families in their home region staying at home to give their children the best chance in life. It wants them working for advertising agencies in remote metropolises paying sky-high rents and partaking in commercialised hedonism while the state brings up their offspring in a foreign land instilling postmodern cultural uniformity in their young minds.
For some time now large corporations, third sector agencies and governments have been working in unison to facilitate the kind of rapid cultural change that empowers technocrats and undermines traditional support structures. Nominally Tesco may appear to compete with Sainsbury's and Asda (currently planning to merge awaiting approval), but in practice most shoppers gravitate towards the nearest and most convenient supermarket. The real competition is with independent retailers and farmers. Likewise Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and IBM may appear to compete. For a while I would religiously boycott Microsoft products, probably due to a virus that wiped two hard drives in 2001 (and which had not been fully backed up), preferring Linux instead and then falling into the clutches of Google and the even more restrictive Apple[1] instead. Yet away from the public gaze these tech giants cooperate a good deal. For instance Microsoft has just announced that is abandoning its own Edge Browser (the successor to IE) in favour of Chromium, making the default Web client on Windows 10 just a Microsoft-themed version of Chrome. Meanwhile Google has adopted Microsoft's open source Javascript successor, Typescript, for their Angular framework and have long desisted from seriously challenging Microsoft's main cash cow, its desktop Office suite, which works just as well on Mac OS as on Windows and has fully functional mobile version running on Android and IoS, and distancing itself from underfunded open-source projects like LibreOffice. I suspect behind the scenes their collaboration may be much deeper as Google invests heavily in the development of the Fuschia operating system, optimised for embedded systems, and Microsoft ports its flagship database system to Linux and promotes its cloud Azure services much more aggressively than its ageing desktop OS and has all but abandoned Windows Phone in favour, temporarily at least, of Android. Alphabet Inc. dominates search, video streaming and smartphones, while Microsoft prevails in core productivity software, keeps its grip on desktop computing and diversifies into Web services and artificial intelligence. Meanwhile the other main players, Apple, Samsung, Facebook, Huwei and Amazon use variants of each other's technology stacks. Samsung makes screens not just for their ubiquitous gadgets, but for Apple's iPhones too, which are mainly assembled in China using variants of the same components that Huwei installs in its more competitively priced products. Most of the world's estimated 3 billion micro-computers are made in a handful of large manufacturing facilities employing only a few hundred thousand workers at most. Smart automation will reduce these numbers further in years to come.
Our lives are increasingly run by a tangled web of tech companies and parastatal[2] agencies, over whom we have no meaningful control except by asking our governments to negotiate with our technocratic overlords, who in practice do not so much compete as agree to divvy up different market segments. Neoliberalism assumes vibrant competition both between companies and among workers. Yet modern technology requires massive investment only available to the biggest players and most workers compete for crumbs as their monotonous occupations give way to smart automation. This explains the shift in terminology from personnel and staff (the usual terms until sometime in the 1980s) to human resources, emphasising the need to employ real flesh and blood human beings rather than assign a task to machines. While people may compete socially and usually respond positively to financial rewards or other privileges, machines have highly predictable physical needs and do not compete with each other unless programmed to do so. Neoliberalism works when market forces and technological innovation demand healthy competition. It doesn't work when new scientific advances require both substantial investment only available to transnational organisations and multidisciplinary cooperation, while most consumers rely more on welfare than paid employment. This is already the case in the UK where the median annual salary is still just £29,000, which entitles most employees to working family tax credits meaning its often makes little practical difference if you work full, part-time or just claim incapacity benefits. The furore about the UK government's controversial roll-out of universal credit with thousands of severely disabled people deemed to fit to work masks the objective reality an increasingly dynamic labour market marginalises a growing section of the population unable to compete. The privatisation frenzy of the 1980s and 90s simply let large corporations wrest control of key public services from local governmental bodies. Private healthcare and education only empower the wealthy, giving them more specialised medical treatment and greater choice over how their children are educated. I've discussed in earlier blog posts how corporations behave more like states, with massive bureaucracies, legal teams and security services, than agile businesses focused on commercial success. A business may respond to customer demand, while a corporation seeks not just to manipulate customer demand, but to regulate customers. If someone provides you a service almost free of charge, chances are that you are their product. If you use Google's ubiquitous services, the search giant probably knows more about you than your spouse or close friends. In theory the main search providers track your search history to suggest products and services that meet your very personal and idiosyncratic needs. If you enquire about the causes of sciatica, you may well see ads for recliner chairs pop up on your screen on favourite news site, but smart recommendation engines can analyse the demographics of users who seek information about sciatica and guess you may be approaching retirement or be open to considering life insurance. And it gets more sinister if you investigate any contentious issues that challenge vested interests.
The problem is not Europe, but its Rulers
The great European ideal, as many of us understood it in the more upbeat 1990s, stood in contrast to the North American melting pot or the autocratic Soviet model with its extensive ethnic cleansing. If Europe means anything, other than being the Western section of the Eurasian landmass stretching from the Urals to the Atlantic, it is defined by a rich mosaic of interweaving cultures that have evolved gradually over many centuries rather than a new nation of recent settlers who have embraced a shared identity. Europe is simply not European without its constituent nations, and most important of all, cultural continuity linking us with past generations. When communities have deep regional roots, state planners struggle to mould new universalist identities. Britain and France took centuries to suppress regionalism, while Germany and Italy only formed unified states in the mid 19th century. Historically attempts to accelerate the gradual process of cultural convergence have involved some degree of coercion. That was naturally before the emergence of sophisticated modern advertising, global youth culture, radio, television and more recently the Internet. While the European Union may once have championed the continent's distinctive national traditions to placate popular opinion and appear more inclusive, its socio-economic policies have promoted mass migration, both within the bloc itself and more recently from further afield, undermining regional identity and social cohesion. While the towns and villages of poorer outlying regions have been deprived of their best and brightest young adults, the continent's main conurbations have been transformed by transient migrant communities often outnumbering the autochthonous inhabitants. While previous waves of migrants to Europe's richer cities usually assimilated with the dominant local culture (if we exclude ethnic cleansing in the wake of wars of conquest), today's migrants only find localised variants of global consumer culture with which to integrate. What does it mean to be French, German, Dutch, Italian or Polish anyway? Is it just about watching the same American movies, listening to the same pop music, buying variants of the same consumer products, adopting dialects of the same lingua franca or redefining human relationships and family structures at the same rate? Some may dream of a new pan-European community of hipster professionals joining forces to create a more egalitarian and socially just version of the United States of America. Alas the latter dream is eclipsing too as the once affluent middle classes struggle to make ends meet.
The French yellow vest protests took European observers by surprise. Just 18 months after Emanuel had defeated the leader of the country's main nationalist party, Marine Le Pen, in the presidential election, reaffirming France's commitment to European project, its squeezed provincial working classes have revolted taking to streets in their gilets jaunes. While their ruling elites extol the virtues of more globalism and accuse their indigenous peoples of xenophobia, the working classes expect their governments to protect their livelihoods and let their families thrive in their home regions. The emerging conflict is not between rival national identities, who are quite happy to coexist peacefully, but between the arrogant elites eager to socially engineer a more compliant populace and the demos, who just want to get on with their lives.
[1] Mac OS X is based on BSD Unix and thus behaves under the hood more like Linux, which provides some advantages for developers like me who target Linux servers, but may need desktop applications that have not been ported to desktop Linux. The alternative is often running Linux as virtual machine on Windows.
[2] Run directly by government or indirectly with corporate funding. Parastatal organisations may thus include local councils, service companies like Capita or Serco, charities, lobbies and research institutes.
How warmongers and open-borders activists collude to disrupt viable societies
If you have a romantically humanitarian worldview, you may well welcome all policies that seem to help other people in need and oppose all actions that may either harm or hinder others. An idealist would resist all wars, abhor all violence and accommodate all victims of military repression and socio-economic upheaval, receiving refugees and economic migrants with open arms.
Such extreme altruism rests on a Rousseauian interpretation of human nature, i.e. that we are all good at heart and only corrupted by an oppressive system that concentrates power in a few hands and pits one group of people against another. Its antithesis is the Hobbesian view that we are mainly self-interested and can, if left to our own devices, resort to savagery to further our selfish ends. I believe the truth lies somewhere in between, but one thing remains certain: civilisation affects human behaviour and some civilisations are much more violent or coercive than others.
Alas we are a socially competitive species. We don't just strive to better ourselves, but to win a competitive advantage over others. We see this behaviour at play in mate selection, in creative pursuits that require strong motivation and in our desire to gain influence over others. However, we can only live together peacefully if we fully respect each other's personhood and agree to a set of a ground rules to resolve conflicts. This begs the question: to what extent do we need the supervision of coercive authorities to maintain social order?
While opinion leaders may appeal to our idealism and emotions, in the real world ordinary people appear powerless to change the course of events. We may yearn for a harmonious world free of the deep-seated rivalry that once divided us, but such a paradise remains little more than a pipe dream. On the burning issues of military adventurism and mass migration we have four camps:
Pacifists oppose all wars and all borders, i.e. infantile leftists or anarcho-communists.
Jingoists always support wars against rogue regimes, but expect their governments to keep them safe by enforcing strict border controls, i.e. many rightwing nationalists or Trumpian neoconservatives.
Extreme interventionists support military interventions against the perceived enemies of progress, but also welcome the erosion of national borders and transfer of power to superstates, i.e. globalists such as American neoliberals, European federalists or the likes of Hillary Clinton, Tony, Blair, Angela Merkel and Emanuel Macron.
Non-interventionists oppose most wars, but still want borders to protect their way of life and cultural traditions, i.e. most ordinary working people.
Proponents of the first position clearly live in cloud cuckoo land. National borders are just one of many barriers between different groups of people. The biggest divider between us remains the power of wealth to control our access to private property. While an unemployed Portuguese woman can hop on a bus and travel within the Schengen zone to the wealthier regions of Northern Europe without ever having her passport checked, the intervening landscape is replete with countless other manmade barriers denying us access to buildings and land. I can't just turn up at a five star hotel and demand access to a vacant room because I have nowhere else to stay. I need to prove my ability to pay the going rate. Sure, in an ideal environmentally sustainable world without extremes of poverty and opulence, we may not need border checks at all, just as people in safe neighbourhoods do not feel the need to lock their premises at night. Do I lock my front and back doors because I distrust my neighbours or assume all passers-by are ill-intentioned? Of course not, I do so because in an imperfect society burglars may take advantage of my vulnerability.
The other three options have many nuances, but the real contrast lies between conservatives and interventionists. Pragmatically most governments of affluent countries need to maintain social order at home and may acquiesce to the demands of their more conservative citizens to keep their towns and cities safe from the worst excesses of gangland violence that plagues bustling metropolises across the developing world. Likewise many European governments seek to distance themselves from unpopular US-led wars to maintain trust with the general public. This gives us the illusion of a diversity of opinions among political leaders and national governments. It may seem that some politicians talk about the dangers posed by terrorists and foreign dictators, while others are concerned with helping those displaced by wars. It's a truism that if you don't want refugees in your country, you should oppose the arms sales and wars that caused so many to flee these war-torn regions.
I now think it's too facile to lay the blame for the endless wars and social dislocation in much of the developing world on Western military interventions alone. Most migrants who have fled to Europe with the help of people smugglers and aid agencies do not come from regions directly affected by recent US-led wars. Moreover, many civil wars rage in regions where the main Western powers have been more noticeable by their indifference, allowing some analysts like neocolonialist historian Andrew Roberts to suggest that we need more not less proactive intervention to stabilise Africa and the Middle East. It's hardly a coincidence most new low-skilled migrants (i.e. not those who could easily obtain a work visa) come from regions with a high fertility rate and a fast rate of urbanisation. People tend not to flee stable communities unless they are no longer able to fend for themselves or are enticed by promises of untold riches in faraway cities. Rural Africans experience their biggest culture shock when they move to a big city where they are likely to meet many other itinerants, not when they later decide to move another city in a more affluent country with a more advanced welfare system.
War is not the only cause of death and destruction. Environmental mismanagement is a much bigger killer. Moreover, many technological solutions, such as better sanitation, modern medicine and higher agricultural yields through irrigation and fertilisers, may lead to other problems further down the line like rapid population growth and an exodus of young adults to large cities. If the economy fails to provide most men of working age with gainful employment without a social safety net, many will turn either to crime or fanaticism, hoping for salvation through submission to a political or religious cult. Just as the professional classes in the affluent West embrace green solutions to meet the challenges of the coming century, Africa's upwardly mobile middle classes embrace mass consumption with a verve reminiscent of the swinging 60s.
Many of us have theorised that Western powers intervened in the Middle East mainly to gain control of the oil supply, but demand for this oil is growing faster in China, India and Africa as their car ownership approaches European levels and within the next ten to twenty years most vehicles will be electric anyway, reliant more on the availability of lithium and abundant cheap electricity than on the price of crude oil. However, we will need massive infrastructure to power billions of vehicles, robotised manufacturing facilities, domestic appliances, air conditioners, hospital equipment and other machines essential to our high tech way of life. Whether we bedeck deserts with giant solar panels or invest in next generation nuclear fusion reactors, only large corporations will have the resources to build and maintain such phenomenal infrastructure further reducing regional independence. Billions of urbanites are already at the mercy of remote organisations responsible for their energy, water and food supply. People may protest, but are powerless to challenge the hegemony of tech giants. If even oil-rich Venezuela, which used to be self-sufficient in food, cannot develop the technology to gain functional autonomy from big business, there is little hope for countries like Nigeria or South Africa whose restless populations are demanding a bigger slice of the global cake.
If neoliberal lobbyists really cared about people in the third world, they'd promote greater self-reliance to minimise the kind of sudden cultural and demographic change that can destabilise societies and trigger internecine conflict. They see the destabilisation of previously viable societies not as a threat to world peace, but as an opportunity for yet more intervention. So it should come as no surprise that many of the same global actors lobbying for more humanitarian wars, which tend to empower local militias and create more refugees, also welcome mass migration, not as a temporary side effect of environmental mismanagement, but as a desirable end in and of itself. The same players also seem quite happy to witness social dislocation across many European and North American cities. The spectres of Islamic fundamentalism, gang violence and rightwing extremism serve to justify more surveillance and a clampdown on free speech, while divided communities only empower social workers to engineer new identities detached from our cultural heritage.
Flag-waving nineteenth century imperialism has now morphed into progressive globalism coopting trendy social justice activists as its missionaries, but supported by the same banking cartels and industrial behemoths that once bankrolled Western colonialism. Once the middle classes of the home countries of the great empires may have enjoyed some economic privileges and cultivated a sense of moral superiority over the apparently less civilised peoples of their colonies. By contrast today, outside a few safe havens of general opulence and social stability, the whole urban world has become an occupied territory that nobody can truly call home.
How greed, distrust, decadence and unsustainability engender conflicts
Most of us agree wars are best avoided, but we have long debated whether and when they can ever be justified. In theory at least, we can assert the right of all communities to self-defence against incursions and conquest, but in practice life is seldom that simple, as outside forces may easily manipulate disaffected insurgents with well-founded grievances for their own ends. Today most nation states rarely fight wars for territorial gain in the way European and Asian powers regularly did until the mid 20th century. In an increasingly interdependent world national governments play second fiddle to corporate lobbies, supranational bodies and borderless banks. As migratory flows have grown rapidly in an age of job insecurity and international commuting, regional identity has waned especially in our more cosmopolitan cities. Why spend billions of pounds to defend the right to self-determination of around 2000 Anglophile Falkland Islanders, when the ethnic composition of towns and cities across the British Isles and the rest of Western Europe is changing at a rate not seen since the mass people movements of the Second World War? Why invade a country if you can just move there, buy up properties and take over entire neighbourhoods? While global superculture with its familiar brands and transient communities often imposes itself on a backdrop of distinctive historical landmarks and geographic surroundings, we may ask if the blurring of national borders will end military conflicts, set in motion a new era of intensified internecine conflicts policed by transnational militias or trigger heightened superpower rivalry? After two decades of decline following the fall of the Soviet Union, military budgets in the world's main jurisdictions show a marked upward trend. However, the world"™s most active military powers do not seem very concerned with the defence of their own people, but rather with global peace-keeping and counter-insurgency operations.
The progressive narrative holds that enlightened superpowers may intervene to restore peaceful coexistence and protect human rights in more backward regions. Recent boundary changes in the Balkans occurred only after the Yugoslav federation went bankrupt and the wealthier republics of Slovenia and Croatia seceded. Most fighting took place in the contested regions of Slavonia, with a large Serb minority, Bosnia-Hercegovina and most notoriously in Kosovo. While the civil war rekindled old wounds dating back to the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire and the shifting alliances of Croat, Serbian and Bosnian militias during the First and Second World Wars, its main victim was national sovereignty as NATO assumed a peacekeeping role in the Bosnia and Kosovo while Slovenia and Croatia integrated with the European Union widening the economic gap with their southern neighbours. Other border disputes since the collapse of the former Soviet Union relate more to superpower rivalry than to aspirations of national aggrandisement, e.g. the Russian annexation of Crimea merely reflected the will of most Crimeans, who had only been part of Ukraine since 1954 and only divorced from Russia since Ukraine gained independence in 1992. With over 17 million square kilometres of land, the Russian federation hardly needed more living space and the region's key port of Sevastopol was only of limited strategic value to counter a massive US military presence in the Black Sea region. The backdrop to this dispute was the westward expansion of the EU and NATO through an association agreement with the Ukraine, a borderland whose eastern half had been part of the Russian Empire since the 17th century and before that was split between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossacks (Zaporozhian Sich) and Crimean Khanate under Ottoman rule. Ironically today ordinary people value nationhood more in Eastern Europe and Russia than in Western Europe, where it has fallen out of favour among the chattering classes, except when secessionist movements as in Scotland or Catalonia can help undermine larger nation states whose integrity stands in the way of global convergence.
Social Stability and Peace
Idealists may well oppose all wars, no matter how evil the enemy may be, while simultaneously expressing their love of all peoples and all cultures, no matter how oppressive or depraved they may be. However, our desires for greater prosperity, social justice and tranquility have often motivated us to support the military endeavours of our ruling classes or to unite behind freedom fighters. Like it or not, today"™s world would look very different without the legacy of Western imperialism, the industrial revolution and the liberal enlightenment. While the industrial revolution led to the growth of entrepreneurial capitalism and the abolition of slavery, it is also helped create the sophisticated infrastructure that have enabled such widespread prosperity.
To most of us peace does not just mean an absence of state-sponsored military conflicts, but freedom from the scourges of state repression and violent crime. We can think of peace as a state of social harmony where we resolve disputes without resorting to acts of coercion against individual liberty. We can only approach this ideal when we moderate our desires to goals we can attain without depriving others of their livelihood or personal space. Violence may ensue when we perceive that another group of people have denied us of our material and spiritual wellbeing and we have no other means to better ourselves through education and hard work.
Without innovation, we would still be fighting over finite resources with a much lower human carrying capacity. In some ways we still fight over access to life"™s necessities. For millions in the world"™s most densely populated arid regions of the Middle East, North Africa, Australia and the Southwestern United States, potable water has become a scarce resource, often only available as a packaged product. With widespread unemployment and limited welfare provision, price rises of staple foods and fuel can trigger social unrest that fanatical insurgents can easily exploit for their own ends or to empower rival superpowers. In previous ages if a region"™s population grew beyond a level that the local environment could reasonably sustain with contemporary technology, most people would simply die through malnutrition, disease or warfare. Today"™s youngsters have two other options. They can either emigrate to wealthier regions or demand more foreign aid or corporate taxes to subsidise technofixes, shifting social problems to the opulent countries most economic migrants choose and transferring responsibility for their environmental adversity away from local leaders and personal responsibility (i.e. only having as many children as you can feed unaided) to external powers, whose influence we could best describe as neocolonial. If you can only feed, house and clothe your people with the aid of large multinationals, foreign banks and NGOs, you are not independent at all. China is now by far the largest investor in African infrastructure projects. While local leaders gain their share of the proceeds, they train pitifully few local technicians preferring to rely on their own engineers.
A low-level civil war has been raging in the mainly Muslim regions of Northern Nigeria against infidels (non-Muslims) since around 2011. It only reached the Western public's attention when Boko Haram abducted 276 school girls in the town of Chibok, Borno State. While many observers have focused on the spread of Islamic extremism, another factor is the country's high fertility rate alongside widespread unemployment and a mass exodus of the fittest young adults to the country's sprawling conurbations and abroad. Many philanthropists hoped that better education and sustainable local business development could guide Nigeria towards the kind of social democracy that emerged in Western Europe in the latter half of the 20th century. Alas desires for larger families and consumer products, especially cars, have thus far trumped the impetus for greater engineering excellence and more sustainable technological solutions, i.e. more solar panels, greater use of bicycles, better public transport and smaller families. This begs two questions: Who is responsible for solving Nigeria's developmental woes or how can we both meet the people''s expectations for a more prosperous future and ensure social stability? It all depends what we mean by we? Do we mean external powers such as UN agencies, charities, tech giants and foreign governments seeking to gain influence over Africa? Or do we mean the Nigerian people taking responsibility for their own future and living with the consequences of their decisions? Some would still blame the legacy of colonialism and the dominance of foreign multinationals in the country's lucrative petroleum sector. Yet one startling and easily verifiable fact stands out. At Independence in 1960, the country had just 40 million inhabitants. Yet despite the Biafran civil wars of the late 60s and occasional famines in the arid north, the population has grown to around 200 million not because women are having more babies but because more babies are surviving into adulthood and beyond.
Instability breeds conflict
While I still believe greed, envy and vindictiveness are the ultimate drivers of violence, in complex societies unsustainable development leads to greater coercion, whether in the form of state repression, heightened surveillance, militarism, violent crime or gang fights. When society can no longer foster prosperity and social stability through responsible management of a shared environment and high levels of communal trust, it will inevitably resort to more overt means of social control. When advanced people management techniques fail, social unrest ensues and the administrative classes have little choice but to suppress the personal liberties of the great unwashed masses. These days only the affluent professional classes can afford to buy more private space.
However, high tech societies with largely unarmed and welfare-dependent citizens need not resort to the kind of overbearing brute force that the great dictatorships of the 20th century had to deploy against insurrections long before most young adults were immersed in social media and online entertainment. The biggest threats to today"™s ruling classes are not drug addicts, low-life gangsters or even remorseless terrorists, whose actions conveniently serve to justify more intrusive surveillance, but the politically aware skilled working classes, whose expertise our rulers still need, but whose conservative beliefs may stand in the way of the kind of progress that our elites envisage. What the managerial classes fear most are not troublesome malcontents, but intelligent, conscientious and independently minded workers with families and strong roots in their local community. That may explain partly why many employers prefer a smaller number of well-remunerated technicians working over 40 hours a week, than investing in training more specialised staff so they can spread the burden. They want to limit the number of well-connected mission-critical operators who could challenge their hegemony. As we rely more and more on smart automation and lucrative jobs require forever higher levels of analytical intelligence, expect the captive disempowered welfare classes to grow. This transition to a subsidised consumer economy, where people are paid for their acquiescence rather than any real work, will affect military strategy too. A hyper-dependent populace, engrossed by social media and online entertainment, is much easer to control through non-violent means, e.g. psychotropic drugs, operant conditioning and financial incentives.
The future of warfare depends on the success of the global convergence project, which would eventually lead to the disappearance of practical cultural and economic diversity, with lifestyle homogenisation in locales as diverse as Beijing, Istanbul, Lagos, Berlin or New York City. In such a scenario, the workless classes would have little to fight over except access to the bounties of tech giants. Cities may still have different climates and landscapes, but each would have similar mixes of submissive consumer classes, social supervisors and technically literate professionals.
Sadly I don"™t share the optimism of many leading proponents of a borderless utopia with universal basic income for all. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the relative economic decline of the United States, the inability of Western military alliances to tame the Middle East, the failure of the European multicultural experiment with parallel communities and Africa's delayed demographic transition could all destabilise a fragile peace in the prosperous world. While Western elites focus on the perceived Russian threat, they are playing with fire in the Muslim world.
If you want social tranquility in a relatively free and fair society as much as I do, then you should not just campaign against military adventurism, but identify the causes of future conflicts. Bad environmental management and unsustainable rates of cultural and demographic change pose by far the greatest threats to world peace.
#Fakenews may soon kill millions as the liberal enlightenment gives way to corporate mind control
Barely a month after Donald Trump replaced Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and appointed John Bolton as senior national security advisor, we stand yet again on the brink of a major military showdown between NATO and an emboldened Russia. Except this time the Eastern Bear has forged strategic alliances with Iran and China and enjoys greater popularity on the ground in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East than the US and its regional proxies, chiefly Saudi Arabia and Israel. Just five years ago such a confrontation would have been unthinkable. Russia may have expressed dissent with US-led military adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, but it was powerless to act unilaterally. When two million Britons marched against the upcoming invasion of Iraq in late February 2003, Russia Today did not even exist. Indeed the West believed Vladimir Putin would follow in Boris Yeltsin's footsteps to give global big business and Russian oligarchs free reign to exploit the country's copious natural resources. We got our news from alternative media, mainly based in North America or Europe. John Pilger remains one of the few mainstream anti-militarist journalists with decades of war-zone experience to appear occasionally in the Guardian or on the BBC. Many of us agreed with former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, that the war basically about oil. We may have disagreed about the scale of crimes attributable to deposed dictator, Saddam Hussein (though few would absolve him of the kind of state-sanctioned brutality common to most Middle East countries), but observers concur that the US-led occupation has contributed significantly to the region's destabilisation with the proliferation of Islamic fundamentalist militias under the guise of Al Qaeda, ISIS or Al Nusra. While the US State Department blamed Al Qaeda for the infamous 9/11 attacks, they seemed happy to arm their close allies in Libya to topple Gaddafi only 10 years later. Since 2011 the US and UK have not only directly funded Syria opposition militias, they have trained their very own agitprop outfit the White Helmets, set up by former British Army officer and mercenary James Le Mesurier. They masquerade as first responders, but work almost exclusively in rebel-held zones. Their focus is not so much on saving lives as on atrocity re-enactments and photo-opportunities with face-painted children such as the infamous boy in the back of an ambulance, Omran Daqneesh, who came to symbolise the victims of Syrian air force attacks. However, only a few months later after the Syrian government had recaptured Aleppo he appeared alongside his family on Syrian TV decrying the rebel militias.
Ever since the start of the conflict the main Western media outlets have consistently portrayed forces loyal to the Syrian government as the bad guys and ill-defined maze of rebel militias known initially as the Free Syrian Army as the good guys. Bellicose politicians have repeatedly reminded us how Assad is responsible for far more deaths than the opposition, but only if we include the total death toll of a previous Muslim Brotherhood uprising that the Syrian government successfully suppressed in the late 1970s and early 80s. It's almost impossible to keep an accurate tally of deaths attributable to rebels as they can just attribute all deaths to real and alleged air strikes. However, Syria's two and half million Christians have been the worst affected by Islamist Jihadis intent on eradicating all infidels.
Just as the British public began to doubt the BBC's narrative on the Skripal poisoning case (both alleged victims of a lethal nerve agent are amazingly alive), we are being fed more disinformation about purported chlorine or sarin gas attacks in Eastern Ghouta. Why would Assad authorise the use of chemical weapons when his forces were the on verge of defeating their enemies, the head-chopping militias armed by Saudi Arabia? What strategic advantage would Assad have in the age of instant communication? None. It would be a massive own goal. He would have committed the very act that the Western media has long associated with him and would serve to justify immediate reprisals from the US Air Force? Whatever crimes Bashar Al Assad may have committed, he is undoubtedly a smooth operator and gifted strategist. Yet as Donald J Trump resorts to threatening Russian forces in Syria with brand new shiny missiles via Twitter, Assad focuses on rebuilding Syria from the rubbles of the last 7 years of intensive warfare. Astoundingly Boris Johnson's new hawkish persona wins the approval of the guitar-strumming Butcher of Baghdad. Despite his early flag-waving phoney patriotism, arch globalist Tony Blair will probably go down in history not as the man who defeated Saddam Hussein, but as the architect of the breakup of the United Kingdom. If the British regime follows Trump's neocon cabal into a conflagration with Russia, Iran and China which is very likely to lead to a humiliating military defeat as any US-led ground troops would face overwhelming opposition from ordinary Syrians, it may well trigger the breakup of the United Kingdom, destroy Britain's status as a soft power and stop Brexit in its tracks. If World War Three starts, expect alliances to change fast as an ethnically modified Germany realigns with Turkey and Emanuel Macron's France lends his support to John Bolton's vision of regime change, emboldening Islamic fundamentalists both in the Middle East and Europe. If you want endless bloodshed and ethnic cleansing, you may welcome more airstrikes. If you want peace and stability, boycott the organs of war propaganda!
Did you naively think the whole EU membership debate had something to do with Europe and its smörgåsbord of cultures, cuisines and intellectual enlightenment? No doubt some of those who voted to leave the EU reminisced simpler times and older ways where at least we had a sense of social cohesion based on shared values, but most simply wanted to regain control over the country's administration so it works in the interests of its current citizens rather than serve as a social engineering playground.
Nostalgia is not unique to Britain, but it is easy to understand why those who endured the repressive dictatorships of the mid 20th century may be keener on belonging to a community of peaceful free-trading European nations. For many the expansion of the European Economic Community and its later transformation into the European Union coincided with a period of unprecedented economic and technological growth. Yet these apparent advances have failed to improve the perceived quality of life of most Western Europeans. The relative socio-economic security of the 1950s, 60s and 70s has given way to a new era of permanent volatility in our jobs, family structures, local communities, housing and dependence on external organisations.
So come April 2019 the UK will no longer be half in the EU, it will be half out of it. Some imagined the UK could regain its national sovereignty, stabilise migratory flows to more sustainable levels, forge new more advantageous trade deals and give our young people a chance to learn new skills through greater labour market protection. Alas all that is happening is the UK will technically be able to open its markets even more to the rest of the world. I suspect the end game will be like being an associate member of the EU, NAFTA and ASEAN with special deals with India and Australia. None of these trade deals are likely to restore power to our Parliament. Quite the opposite, such trade deals will merely transfer yet more power to unaccountable multinationals, headquartered not only in places like Chicago or Frankfurt, but in locales as exotic as Hyderabad, Mumbai, Shanghai or Seoul.
If you still harbour illusions in the European Dream, Martin Schulz, former President of the European Parliament and current leader of the German SPD (social democrats), let the cat out of the proverbial bag by openly advocating a United States of Europe and urging countries that do not share this vision to leave. What's also clear is that the international elite no longer follow the lead of the United States administration. The USA's share of the global economy has been steadily declining for over 50 years. China's economy is set to overtake the USA's by 2025, while many leading trading countries are moving away from the US Dollar. Worse still US-led intervention in the Middle East has lost the all-important battle of hearts and minds as its collusion with Saudi Arabia and Israel becomes all too clear. The Syrian Civil War, fuelled by foreign mercenaries, marked a watershed as Russia, rather than the USA, helped defeat ISIS and enable millions of displaced Syrians to return to their homes. Both the BBC and CNN have lost enormous credibility as the facts on the ground fail to match the fairytale accounts of evil Assad-led forces targeting heroic freedom fighters.
While most Europeans want both peace and stability through international cooperation on environmental and security matters, few outside the metropolitan elites and idealistic students, want a United States of Europe with open-door mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East. Yet this is precisely what Europe's politcial elites offer. Only coercive means, usually threats of economic meltdown, can persuade national electorates to support tighter integration. Oddly the strongest resistance to European Federalisation comes not from France, Italy, Spain or Portugal, whose economies have struggled to adapt to the Euro, but from Eastern Europe, whose people do not want to accommodate rapid change in the ethnic composition of their countries. Eastern Europe has seen its fair share of ethnic cleansing over the last century and the spectre of Islamic hordes at the gates of Budapest and Vienna loom large in the collective psyche.
However, Europe faces another little-mentioned crisis. The continent's primary strengths have long been its educational excellence and strong skills base. Yet most technological innovation now comes from the United States and East Asia. Hundreds of millions of Indians, Iranians, Chinese, South Americans and Russians can now compete with Europe's younger generation. As standards continue to rise in much of East Asia, they're falling in much of Europe as schools have to accommodate children from new migrant communities, who seldom speak the local language at home. At the same time many traditional low and medium-skill jobs are undergoing smart automation leading to the growth of workless underclasses and the proliferation of part-time non-jobs such as charity awareness raisers. With millions of Eastern Europe's best and brightest now in the UK, Germany or Scandinavia, local youngsters are less motivated to pursue many high-stress professions such as nurses or plumbers. More striking is the dramatic fall in the scientific excellence of major Western European countries, of which only France remains in the top ten countries with the most engineering graduates. And guess which major country has the highest number of engineering graduates relative to its population? Not Germany, France, Italy or the UK, but Russia. In computing we see similar trends, Russia, Ukraine and the Far East produce proportionally more talented programmers, especially in the more demanding domains of machine learning and artificial intelligence, than North America and Western Europe. Whereas once the top developers would be attracted by higher salaries in California, in our interconnected world more and more startup companies run their operations east of the old Iron Curtain. JetBrains, the company behind Android's new Kotlin programming language (named after island near St Petersburg) comes to mind. Not only does Google rely on many engineers trained in East Asia and Russia, but both Russia and China have their own home-bred alternatives, Yandex and Baidu.
So what was really going through the minds of our politicians as they negotiated the UK's new relationship with the EU? I suspect their two main concerns were how to continue the process of globalisation on all fronts while the UK nominally leaves the EU and second how to placate public opinion back home and keep alive the illusion of democracy safe in the knowledge that the only likely alternative government, a Corbynite Labour administration who may well end up in coalition with the more business-friendly Liberal Democrats, will seek an even deeper relationship with the European Union and do nothing at all to address the issues that concerned voters most, unbalanced mass migration and job security. In just two years since Jeremy Corbyn's surprise election and Momentum's takeover of the party, Labour have fully embraced a future of extreme interdependence. If you dream of a borderless utopia with universal basic income guaranteed by taxing global corporations, the EU may well seem a side issue or a mere means to an end. As things stand, I can only think the future of our country's younger generation may be slightly better if we emulated the high-skill economies Japan, South Korea and Russia than follow Sweden and Germany's recent conversion to welfare consumerism (a common argument among Swedish politicians is that while many of their low-skill immigrants do not work at least they contribute to the economy through their consumption).
The sad truth is we're a small archipelago that imports around half of its food and is a net importer of most manufactured goods and raw materials. A larger population will only increase our dependence on imports. Our geography and historical ties push towards two dwindling blocs, either with Donald Trump's USA or with the EU. Both are discredited on the world stage. The EU tries to cast aside the imperial legacies of its constituent nations, while collaborating with the USA in the destabilisation of the Middle East and its attempted economic colonisation of the Balkans and Ukraine. The world is changing before our eyes. The whole Brexit debate may be swept aside as smart automation and the growing power of East Asian multinationals consign both the EU and US to the status of regional bureaucracies overseeing divided communities that could easily descend into civil war.
Under communism you buy everything from a single state outlet, whereas under fully mature capitalism you buy everything from Amazon. Karl Sharro
I once dreamed of a socialist utopia devoid of hate, fear, anxiety, poverty and interpersonal rivalry with common ownership of the means of production. This fantasy comes in two main flavours, idealistic anarcho-communism based on small cooperatives with no central states or organised means of coercion in a tangled maze of hippie communes converging miraculously on a carefree lifestyle of fluid relationships. The other kind of socialism assumes a strong state responsible for regulating every aspect of our communal lives and overseeing our private behaviour, lest we act in an unduly selfish or hateful manner. While anarcho-communism takes a fundamentally Rousseauian view of human nature, assuming that without the oversight of higher authorities, we will revert to our natural state of peace-loving and inherently altruistic creatures, state socialism relies on a complex web of organisations to enforce social conformity and solidarity. Marx foresaw that a workers' state would gradually transform human nature over several generations until the institutions of surveillance and coercion could eventually disappear.
It is easy to dismiss the great socialist experiments of the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea and Cuba either as deformed workers' states or state-capitalist. The latest catastrophe is Venezuela that failed to diversify its economy to free itself from the grip of multinationals. These regimes relied on technology developed in advanced capitalist economies and could not deliver their people with the kind of living standards millions of ordinary working class people enjoyed in Western Europe and North America, because state coercion and engineered solidarity failed to motivate creativity and innovation. However, now capitalism is failing too. It cannot survive without subsidised mass consumerism and debt-driven economic growth. Until recently advanced mixed economies relied on the salaries of skilled workers to keep the consumer economy afloat. Now most manufacturing jobs have been either outsourced to low wage regions and/or undergone substantial automation, workers can only aspire to service sector careers that either require a high level of analytical intelligence or exceptional people skills. As the artificial intelligence and robotics revolution progresses, businesses will need to hire fewer and fewer ordinary people with mediocre skillsets. Today large corporations need consumers more than workers. As AI and robots displace monotonous manual and clerical jobs, big business will rely on governments to subsidise their customers. Arguably this has been going on for years in the UK. Most jobs are now involved in people management, social surveillance, retail, entertainment, education, infrastructure inspection or banking.
If big business needed creative, resourceful and independent-minded workers, you can bet they would lobby government to improve academic standards in schools and invest billions in STEM. Alas big business only needs the best and brightest. They may complain that they can't hire enough seasoned programmers or bioscientists and have to import specialists from abroad, but they know only a small minority of graduates have a high enough IQ to be worthwhile employing and rewarding with handsome salaries. Many have criticised modern schooling for focussing too much on socialisation and attitudes than on the practical skills young adults might need in the workplace. Customer relations has suddenly become more important than fixing someone's car or washing machine. While a good mechanic may lose business by insulting his customers, an incompetent mechanic may be blessed with a wonderful sense of humour, but cannot compensate for shoddy workmanship through soft skills, at least not for long. If smart robots supplant human beings in practical jobs like mechanics, plumbers, drivers, bricklayers and farm labourers, people within the median IQ range can only aspire to tasks that require a degree of human authenticity, mainly in the persuasion and care sectors. Persuasion encompasses a very wide range of modern professions, anything from marketing to social work, teaching and charities. I've long argued that schools should refocus on practical skills, but I've not been a lone voice. Every consultation about secondary education in the UK yields similar results. Small businesses and parents alike want smaller class sizes and greater emphasis on vocational skills. There is virtually no grassroots movement calling for more lessons on gender theory or more mental health screening. Such calls inevitably come from well-funded lobbies and spurious charities that pop up from nowhere and suddenly have articulate spokespersons on TV shouting down traditional naysayers.
The left has correctly in my view accused both New Labour from 1997 to 2010 and then three Tory-led governments ever since of colluding with big business. Yet if big business is in the driving seat, why would they support an education system that has clearly failed to train a new generation of conscientious workers able to accomplish all the practical jobs we have traditionally needed? Is it because the government is totally incompetent or driven by ideological concerns at odds with the needs of big business? I'm sorry to admit, but we really have to consider another more disturbing explanation: Large corporations do not need workers. They need consumers.
Outsourcing and smart automation have boosted productivity to such an extent that a few hundred highly skilled technicians can manage a manufacturing facility capable of supplying sophisticated products to tens of millions of consumers. Most of the auxiliary jobs around manufacturing such as shipping, quality assurance and accounting can also be automated too. Much of the marketing and sales operation has already moved online, requiring human input only for client-facing roles, but if you've interacted with automated help lines or online sales chat bots, you can see how artificial intelligence is set to transform our lives. Not only do we now have more car sales representatives than automotive production line operatives, we probably have more high street charity awareness raisers than solar panel and wind turbine technicians. More people are employed to persuade others to adapt their lifestyles and embrace new ways in our dynamic interdependent society than to provide the goods and services we really need.
Whether your electricity supply works or you can afford transportation to your places of work, study or socialisation are no longer viewed as mainly technical challenges, but have become human rights issues. However, capitalism can no longer guarantee the minimum living standard to which we have become accustomed without significant state intervention. The political debate has moved on from how to generate wealth to how to persuade big business to share more of its wealth with the advanced welfare states of affluent countries. However, the state will only subsidise your lifestyle if you play by its rules and big business will only be prepared to bankroll the public sector if it grants them special privileges. Let us just consider your typical provincial town in early 21st century UK. The biggest employers are the local council, the National Health Service , the large supermarket chains and increasingly the distribution warehouses of major online retailers, which in practice means mainly Amazon. Other big employers include charities, banks and insurance brokers, whose role is either to manage your indebtedness or raise awareness for various social transformation initiatives. Hard work, as we traditionally understood the concept, seldom reaps substantial rewards. Instead we rely more and more on social networking and delegation of responsibilities to other human or technical resources.
This is perhaps the biggest paradox of the early 21st century. Just as capitalism seems invincible, its most powerful exponents seek to phase it out and replace it with a command economy, managed by global corporations with the illusion of brand choice for the masses and healthy competition only for the professional elites. The ensuing socio-economic model may resemble an amalgamation of Swedish welfarism and Chinese authoritarianism much more than late 20th century North America. The captains of high tech industry have finally realised they do not need many workers, only compliant consumers.
As a species we combine social solidarity and shared culture with a strong competitive spirit. In a way these variant behaviours represent the true yin and yang of the human psyche, collectivism versus individualism or social cohesion versus self-betterment. One could argue that our social and technological reality would never have progressed without these instincts. Idealists have long envisaged a collectivist society devoid of competition at all levels in which our only motivation in life is to further the greater good of society as a whole and all rewards, both material and spiritual, are shared equally. Yet no modern society has achieved these egalitarian aims. As much as many of us may preach equality, at a personal level we remain highly competitive in our social interactions and choice of partners. All too often we preach social compassion in public, but practice social exclusivity in private.
Our technology inevitably relies on prior art or the acquired body of human knowledge accumulated over successive generations, while our social fabric and mores have evolved through centuries of experimentation and gradual adaptation. Social solidarity starts in the family where mothers and fathers sacrifice their body and soul to ensure the survival of the next generation and care for their living forebears. As societies evolved from small hunter-gatherer communities to larger fiefdoms and eventually nation states after the agrarian revolution, we had to share resources and infrastructure with a wider group of people with a common set of cultural traits and values. Yet societies remained profoundly unequal and riven by strong class chasms that prevented social mobility. If you were born a peasant and had to till the land from an early age with a rudimentary diet that stunted physical growth, you stood little chance of progressing to the professional classes or nobility, except potentially through marriage or adoption. The industrial revolution disrupted the feudal class system and later led to the expansion of state education and growing demand for a new class of literate and technically qualified workers. Much of the political debate since has revolved around two contrasting ideals:
Equality of opportunity: Here we allow healthy but peaceful competition in social interactions and in the labour market, but the state intervenes mainly to ensure a level playing field for all children by funding universal education and providing a social safety net to prevent extreme poverty. However, this principle cannot guarantee equal success, which may depend on inherent aptitudes and biological differences, e.g. success in athletics may depend on training and diet, but also genetically determined physique.
Equality of outcome: Here the state intervenes proactively to ensure everyone can attain the same socio-economic status through positive discrimination and massive investment to help underperformers. This principle identifies the least successful as victims of purported oppression, exclusion or prejudice. Here we should distinguish between giving everyone a fair chance to prove their worth and rewarding incompetence or demotivating excellence.
In truth neither approach has worked. As long as we have vast differences in wealth and culture, it will remain practically impossible to ensure a level playing field. The rich can always buy homes in the most exclusive neighbourhoods, shield their offspring from the worst aspects of today's anti-intellectual hedonism and hire childminders and private tutors. On the other hand the last 50 years of social engineering and positive discrimination in Western Europe, especially in Scandinavia, have failed to yield the results many envisaged in the 1960s. Men and women are not the same, at least according to most recent neurobiological research. Women continue to prefer people-oriented and caring professions rather than more technical or object-oriented professions, as revealed in one of the world's most gender-egalitarian countries, Norway. Likewise not everyone is academically gifted. Many of us are much more hands-on and prefer learning through a mix of practical experience and social osmosis. We can't all swat away for hours on end to pursue a career in engineering or scientific research, because the acquired knowledge would remain too abstract for many. Indeed that's problem with much of academia. They can develop mathematically correct theories and extrapolate internally logical conclusions based on selective facts or epidemiological data. The theoretical approach that drives so much of modern corporate and government policy making has one major flaw. It fails to take into account all factors that are either unknown or considered irrelevant. Back on planet earth simple practical people take such unknown and unforeseen factors for granted. Our daily experiences often defy academic theories, but are still dismissed as mere anecdotal evidence until they appear in an official report. So who's right? Theoreticians or practical laypersons? The answer is both in different ways. An academic may envisage a nanochip with a processing capacity greater than a human brain. A layperson may suggest that analogue human brains do not work in the same way as digital computers and they'd be right, but of our knowledge is fuzzy, i.e. based on a collection of associated concepts. However, cybernetic luddites have repeatedly been proven wrong. Advanced speech recognition, natural language processing, satellite navigation and even self-driving cars have long passed the proof-of-concept stage and promise to transform our lives. Cumbersome desktop computers gave way to more compact laptops, soon superseded by forever more sophisticated and versatile mobile devices in the form of smartphones, tablets, e-readers and watches. Academics may better understand the potential of cybernetic technology, but they fail to get to grips with the disruptive technology's impact on the lives of millions of ordinary people, who may soon be rendered either redundant or completely subservient to corporate control.
Procreative Competition
Few aspects of human nature are as socially competitive as our mating or sexual bonding strategies. Sex is both a social taboo and something we all intimately crave, when we're in the mood and with the right partner. Recreational eroticism has deep biological roots that ultimately seek to maximise our chances of passing on our genes and thus our cultural influence onto the next generation. We can transfer our cultural influence through adoption or through our life's endeavours, but until recently the biological family remained the primary means of preserving one's legacy for posterity. Naturally sexual desire is psychologically complex. Our erotic urges are much more powerful than our need to conceive more offspring than we can reasonably bring up. Such urges, especially among young men, merely satisfy hormonal impulses and boost our sense of self-esteem.
We thus have both sexual selection, a process that affects all sexually reproducing species, and erotic selection, in which we choose to win the affection and favours of the most affable mates to enhance our status or our gratification. Players in this game may vaunt their physical desirability or their socio-economic status. A young woman may delude herself that she has just fallen in love with her affluent married boss, with whom she first slept while attending a business conference together. A sociologist would ask why some women fall for guys 20 or 30 years their senior, who are way beyond their physical prime and have other family commitments, rather than men in their age group. Numerous studies have shown that women actively pursue the most successful men, who are inevitably both a small subset of all adult males and are likely to be older than most attractive women, typically aged between 18 and 30. Believe it or not there is no shortage of heterosexually inclined young men who would like to mate with attractive females in their age group, but not enough females who aspire to mate with low-grade males who have yet to prove their worth. This explains two key differences between male and female mating strategies even in cultures where both promiscuity and contraceptives are socially acceptable. A young man can boost his self-esteem and thus gain a higher status merely by virtue of scoring with a physically attractive female. By contrast young women target high status males, or at least those perceived to have a high status. In other words young men would be happy to score with most younger women, provided they are not grotesquely overweight or suffer from some other hideous bodily imperfection. Indeed some low-status young males are so desperate for sexual encounters they can easily reassess their physical desirability criteria and make do with almost any potential partner available. Young women tend to be much pickier and effectively disregard most men in their age group. As a result a minority of alpha-like males get a disproportionate amount of female attention. Luckily nature does provide some checks and balances. Not all women pursue the high risk strategy of targeting alpha males. If a woman seeks commitment, affection and economic security from a relationship, a mildly successful beta male is more likely to reciprocate, and more important, stay loyal. However, given women and men differing erotic needs, an open sexual market tends to empower females more than males. Men create most of the impulsive demand, while women control the supply. To make matters worse a strong cultural preference for males in much of the Middle East, India and China has led to a growing imbalance of males and females at birth. Worldwide we have 1.06 males under 15 per female of the same age group. In China that ratio rises to 1.2. Indeed male homosexuality may be a reaction to both biological and economic imbalances. Sex may well be more fun when both partners understand each other's erotic needs, do not seek to gain other favours in exchange and need not worry about unwanted pregnancies or potential parental responsibilities.
Attractive women can thus play two games: reproductive selectivity and erotic selectivity. The former is fairly easily to understand in purely sociobiological terms. More successful men are not only better able to provide for their offspring's economic needs, they are also more likely to pass on better genes. By contrast erotic selectivity rewards men who best meet women's other emotional and economic desires. Put another way, we could describe wealth and power as the ultimate aphrodisiacs.
Undoubtedly environmental factors play a significant role in determining available opportunities, cultural outlook and socio-economic success in life, but we'd be foolish to deny natural physiological and indeed neurological differences among human beings. When it comes to partner selection, nature can be very cruel. Culture may affect which attributes are most valued by members of the opposite sex, but some players will always be at a relative advantage in the mating game.
Networking
The old saying goes it's not what you know, but who you know , but at the end of the day some of us do require some hard skills that extend beyond social networking and communication. Many modern professions ranging from marketing, sales, project management, recruitment to psychotherapy, policing, social monitoring, public relations, media presentation and entertainment depend primarily on advanced social skills. These mean our ability not only to interact with people from different walks of life and cultural backgrounds, but identify their weaknesses and predilections in order to modify their behaviour. People managers need enough technical expertise to win the trust of their more practical team members and see their projects to a successful completion, but their main task is to ensure workers not only comply with business requirements, but do not hold the business to ransom. That's why many technical tasks are assigned to teams with multiple layers of management rather than to one to two competent engineers, who may get the job done faster and more efficiently. If business managers can keep engineers focussed on circumscribed fields of endeavour, they can hide the full implications of their projects from well-paid technicians, e.g. technology developed for medical purposes could be adapted for military use.
Ironically as we depend more and more on technology whose inner workings few of us truly understand, the world's major tech companies are busy investing more in psychoanalysis and social engineering than they are in hard science.
