If you listen to the debate on Britain's membership of the European Union you could be forgiven for believing that it's a clash between progressive philanthropists and selfish Little Englanders determined to restore Britain to Victorian values. To the likes of Caroline Lucas the EU represents green fields with solar panels and wind turbines interspersed with cycle lanes, eco-friendly houses and intelligent talented European citizens sharing ideas on how to make the world a better place. This idyllic vision of a new Europe might resemble a cross between a university campus and the Teletubbies, where EU bureaucrats act as benevolent teachers and playground assistants moulding a new generation to break with their forebears' old divisive ways. For all the talk of multiculturalism, pan-Europeanism has always been about suppressing national identities that emerged over centuries of gradual cultural evolution in favour of an artificial social construct.
Just as primary school teachers fear their children will revert to bullying and infighting without their progressive oversight, left-branded EU fanatics would have you believe Britain would revert to a pre-1973 squalor controlled by rightwing Tories intent on undoing all the good things the EU has purportedly done. In reality most environmentally friendly EU legislation just helps big business deal with the adverse affects of higher consumer demand. We may have more energy-efficient fridges and hair-dryers, but not only are these goods imported from afar, they are replaced more frequently offsetting any marginal gains in yield.
Yet it's when the debate turns to the UK's unbalanced net migration statistics that the faux left reveal their true colours. Free movement of labour has become a core value. It's doesn't seem to matter how unbalanced migratory flows are or how many social problems are caused by our inability to accommodate so many new residents, the infantile globalist left has only two answers:
Shout racism at native workers
Blame greedy capitalists for not building enough affordable houses, schools, hospitals and roads to accommodate newcomers.
By this logic 19th century Bengali textile workers should have welcomed cheap imports from Manchester in solidarity with their English counterparts toiling away in mechanised sweatshops. Surely any attempt to defend your community and way of life must be motivated by either insular nationalism or Luddism.
Yet the same arrogance that Victorian imperialists showed towards the native peoples of their colonies has now re-emerged as a the globalist revulsion against autochthonous working class opposition to their plans. Just as Victorian industrialists used child labour in English, Welsh and Scottish textile mills, factories and coal mines to displace local cottage industries in the colonies, they use migrant labour today to displace native working classes everywhere.
More disturbing is the pseudo left's emotional propaganda for perceived victims groups. They will have us believe that our health service would crumble without the hard work of immigrants from the rest of the EU. Besides the obvious point that a higher population boosts demand, a disproportionate percentage of NHS staff are indeed not UK-born. This is because the NHS has failed to invest sufficiently in training medical staff and relies increasingly on agency workers, who can be hired and fired at the drop of a hat. NHS managers seek to cut costs by importing ready-trained personnel, thereby reducing training costs and gaining more malleable staff.
No doubt, longer life spans, higher survival rates of disabled people and greater awareness of medical conditions and treatments have increased demand for healthcare in most technologically advanced countries. The NHS employs a staggering 1.7 million people, of whom around 140,000 are medical doctors. However, other European countries have similar needs and need staff too. Why should we pilfer the best and brightest from low-wage regions whether they happen to be in the EU or not? Why are young Britons not pursing medical careers in sufficient numbers or being given chances to train? These are naturally complex questions, but even those British nurses who try to do the right thing find themselves sidelined by agencies NHS spends huge sums on foreign nurses, yet two thirds of local applicants are rejected. The NHS is clearly run by people who do not have the beat interests of their local communities at heart. The locals are seen as customers or, as we used to call them, patients.
The faux left loves to complain about government cutbacks in welfare provision and mental healthcare. Yet has it occurred to them that alternative to both might be better training and job security. Why do so many native Britons need mental healthcare? Why do so many lack any sense of purpose in their lives? Traditionally one lived to provide one's family with comfortable standard of living and a future for the next generation. The kind of neoliberal policies we have seen since the Thatcher era have both destroyed communities and split families. Just as the information revolution enabled greater automation, Western elites decided mothers should organise their lives around wage slavery rather than seeking new ways to enable both women and men to work less and have more time to raise their children. So rather than reorganising our economy so people only have to work 20 hours a week, can retire early and take off a few years for sabbaticals, we opted to condemn millions to joblessness and welfare dependence while others were forced to hand over their young children to third-party carers so they could earn a living in boring office jobs. No wonder so many children lack any clear sense of identity or purpose life. Their parents either depend on welfare handouts or they're away most of the day serving someone else's needs. As men are no longer needed as breadwinners during a child's early years, many women have effectively married the state. However, these developments have not affected the chattering professional classes anywhere near as much. The highly skilled can usually negotiate much better work conditions. An affluent professional couple can easily team up to provide both themselves and their offspring with the right work/life balance. If you earn £100,000 a year each working 40 hours a week you can easily agree to halve your salaries while you take it turns to look after your children, though mothers naturally have a stronger biological bond with their babies in their tender first few months. By contrast if you're on the breadline struggling to pay exorbitant rents or mortgages, you have no such choice. A couple earning 30,000 a year each would both have to work full-time in most of the UK to maintain a vaguely normal standard of living without being a drain on the welfare system. Indeed as discussed elsewhere, anyone earning less than 32K per annum receives more in services than they pay in tax once we take into account childcare, schooling, healthcare, transport infrastructure, policing and other essential public services.
A new reality is dawning on the affluent world. Big business no longer needs most workers, except as marketing, surveillance and support staff whose job it is to control the behaviour of social deviants. The only mission-critical workers of the future will be those essential to the development of new technologies and new ways to manage the great unwashed masses, basically between 1 and 5% of the current workforce, a privileged intellectual elite able to grasp complex organisational concepts. Everyone else's job will be expendable.
The trendy left's simplistic rhetoric may reassure some that they care about the underprivileged, but increasingly it seems they have become extreme advocates of interdependence. Every faux-left cause célèbre seems to lead in the same direction, greater dependence on external agencies and greater reliance on high-tech solutions to cope with the demands of increasingly interconnected lives. If we grow our economies and fill skills gaps by allowing our population to rise, we'll have to import more resources, build more houses and find innovative ways to boost energy efficiency. If we expand mental healthcare, we are effectively policing people's minds rather than enabling them to fend for themselves. If we ban hydraulic fracturing, something I'd certainly welcome, we either cut consumption or need alternatives means of energy generation to cope with demand.
The last people the faux left trust to run their lives are ordinary workers, because sooner or later workers start to think for themselves and may not agree with the universalist vision of infantile globalists. Hence social media has to be proactively monitored for nationalist opinions. Social workers can pry into the lives of every parent or carer. Surveillance has moved way beyond the primitive CCTV of the 1990s. Labour-controlled Glasgow City Council partnered with an Israeli Intelligence firm to introduce a state-of-the-art surveillance system with advanced facial recognition (Big Brother is watching: Glasgow City Council partners with Israeli surveillance company to monitor ‘unusual behaviour' among citizens). If you think the Scottish National Party are any better, just consider their infamous Named Person bill that assigns an inspector to every child empowered to intervene in family matters.
The pro-EU left do not trust common folk to run their lives. They see us as mere voting fodder. If you think they care more about new immigrants or refugees, just consider the plight of Britons of Caribbean descent who arrived here in 1950s and 60s. Labour seemed quite happy to let agencies overlook hundreds of thousands of unemployed Londoners of Afro-Caribbean heritage, and hire directly from Eastern Europe. If the left really cared about immigrants, it would make sure we can assimilate the last wave of newcomers before we import another. If it really cared about sustainable development in Africa or India, it would also make sure they can keep their most talented sons and daughters rather than rely on aid and remittances.
In the forthcoming referendum on British sovereignty, you'd be forgiven for thinking it were some sort of X-factor style contest on the relative merits of continental Europe. The latest propaganda from the StrongerIn campaign press all the right psychological buttons:
Youth appeal
Young people want to stay in Europe. If you're young in fact or at heart, so should you. Although partly true, this is a purely emotional argument. If asked most young people would also favour democracy and self-determination. Here they are really just passing a judgement on the virtues of Europe as opposed to Africa, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent or any other cultural macroregion. However, as the pace of globalisation advances unabated, regional lifestyle differences are fading anyway. You can be an online gamer or Manchester United fan in any locale with Internet access these days.
Intellectual Superiority
Better educated people are more inclined to vote remain. This begs the question: in what way are university graduates, usually from more privileged backgrounds, wiser or brighter than those who left school at 16? So if you like to think of yourself as intelligent, you might want to vote remain. But shouldn't intelligent people think for themselves and always weigh up both sides of an argument critically?
Celebrity Endorsement
Englightened celebrities want to remain in Europe. This is just a variant of arguments 1 and 2. If you want to be like these smart cultural icons, don't think for yourself, but be positive about Europe and of course its cherished governing body. Why don't you recycle all the usual hype about reforming the EU and joining forces with progressives from other European countries to campaign for change. But what change? The EU is currently at loggerheads with many national governments over debt management and migrant quotas. For some inexplicable reasons many voters in national elections are not keen on either having neoliberal economic policies imposed on them or having to accept massive migratory flows. The truth is the Identitarian movement is growing across Europe, especially in France, Austria and Eastern Europe. Identitarians reject enforced globalisation and seek to reassert their national and regional identities and culture in the 21st century. While the EU used to pay lip service to European culture, its leaders are busy overseeing the dismemberment of viable nation states, economic and cultural convergence with the rest of the world and mass migration to wealthy regions. These trends are not merely coincidental, they are a consequence of an extreme concentation of power in a handful of corporations and their tentacular network of lobbies, NGOs, charities and spurious campaign groups. The EU really just plays a role in managing the transition from compact nation states to a form of global governance. Mistaking the EU for Europe is like confusing Russia with the old Soviet Union. Europe is a cultural entity built on civilisations that took 3000 years to mature and most Europeans still identify with their countries first. The EU remains a remote institution that few ordinary Europeans trust.
You might naively imagine the main focus of the Green Party is to promote environmental sustainability, while the Labour Party seeks to defend the rights of ordinary working people in their country. Yet increasingly both serve the interests of global corporations, just as much as their nominally centre-right counterparts in misnamed conservative, liberal or separatist parties.
Today no mainstream political force, and that includes the Greens, can implement the wishes of their activists. They may make a few eloquent speeches on subjects that can inspire strategic audiences and give us a semblance of democratic debate, but the only campaigns that ever succeed are those that win the backing of key corporate players via their myriad NGOs and lobby groups. The conservatives pretended to champion family values and curb unsustainable net migration. In reality they were unable to stem migratory flows, while failing to help stay-at-home mums (yes incredibly many intelligent women choose to take time off work to look after their children). Likewise New Labour had 13 years to tackle falling standards in state schools and a burgeoning housing crisis.
Radical environmentalism seeks to build an alternative model of development focused on a long-term sustainability rather than short-term profits or whimsical consumer desires. Likewise the Labour Movement was founded to empower workers, favouring long-term social wellbeing over short-term commercial gains. I sympathise with both green and red politics. I certainly do not want either a grotesquely unequal society or an environmental collapse.
Yet if history can teach us anything it is to be very careful what you wish for. As the green movement gained momentum in the 1980s, eco-sceptics claimed ecologists wanted a return to a pre-industrial era of horse-drawn carts, peat fires and peasants toiling 12 hours a day just to grow enough to feed their community. Some would argue that the Greens have never opposed technology, only bad technology. The trouble is without evil polluting technologies such as coal-fired steam engines or monstrous chemical processing plants our modern world could never have evolved. The industrial revolution initially saw a huge rise in infant mortality as young boys were sent down coal mines. It later produced the material wealth needed to invest in more efficient and human-friendly technology. By the mid 19th century child labour and slavery had become anachronisms in the eyes of capitalists, superseded by technological developments that capitalist competition had spawned. Capitalism was both a financial oppressor and a technological liberator, that the later Soviet Union could only mimic by enforcing an authoritarian form of state capitalism. Herein lies the first glaring dilemma for self-proclaimed anti-capitalists.
Back in the real world capitalism has long given way to corporatism, a marriage of major enterprises and state institutions. Left to its own devices laissez-faire capitalism would have died in the early 20th century. Indeed it would never have expanded as fast as it did without the help of state-funded armies, navies and airforces. Free trade, as we know it, has largely been won by gunboat diplomacy and later as its tentacles spread far and wide by financial coercion.
The greatest advances in workers' rights occurred in the first half of the 20th century, admittedly interrupted by world wars and national dictatorships. Capitalists had little choice because they needed highly skilled workers both to design, operate and manage their machinery and to buy their goods. In many ways the outcome of the second world war made the western world safe for a new era of mass consumerism. As mean living standards and productivity rose governments could offer more generous welfare and provide an illusion of democracy as conservative and social democratic managerial teams vied to win the favour of a docile public.
Endless Growth
However, corporate capitalism relies on continuous economic growth. The physical possibility of infinite growth on a finite planet depends on our definition of growth. It may simply mean greater circulation of capital, as happens during periods of high inflation, but most of us understand it to mean higher material living standards and thus higher aggregate consumption. We are currently on a trajectory to have a peak population of ten billion human beings. The problem is they will likely expect a Western European standard of living meaning the number of motor vehicles is set to grow from 1 to 5 billion over the next 50 years. They may well be electric cars, but they will still require billions of tons of steel, aluminium, potassium and plastics to manufacture as well as thousands of square of miles of asphalt and an exponential rise in energy demands. While many talk of a transition to public transport, walking and bicycling in urban areas, for the time being at least alternatives to cars only appeal in congested cities. When left to market forces, people will choose convenience and prestige over environmental friendliness or fitness. Our obsession with appearance and body image means many prefer to drive several miles to a gym than make a fool of themselves cycling or jogging along busy roads earning the ire of impatient motorists. Many wishful thinking Western eco-activist's are rather surprised when new immigrants to their country choose to drive short distances when they could easily walk, cycle or catch a bus. That's because they did not move to a richer country to promote environmental sustainability, but rather to enjoy a higher material living standard, or as we once said, live the American dream. Herein lies the second great dilemma of today's bien-pensant green left. Mass migration is driven, indeed actively encouraged, primarily by the same corporate system that ecologists claim to oppose or do they?
Impotence
In the UK Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, Nicola Sturgeon's Scottish National Party and Natalie Bennett's Green Party are powerless to challenge the hegemony of the multinational corporations that shape every aspect of our professional and consumer lives, for they all agree to transfer any scrutiny of our true masters to a supranational entity, the European Union. The SNP may well run the Scottish Parliament, but dare not limit the power of the corporations that run Scotland's consumer economy. In 2016 the likes of Tesco, Walmart, SkyTV, Raytheon, BP, Shell or GSK hold greater sway over public policy than the Westminster talking shop. Indeed the SNP are so keen on ensuring that big business pay their taxes that they promised lower corporation tax to boost inward investment. As a nominally autonomous country within the European Union, they would be powerless to pursue independent economic policies. They could merely liaise as a minor player with the European Union, itself beholden to the other organisations such as WTO, IMF and the upcoming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. How could any party that enjoys the editorial support of Murdoch-owned newspaper, the Scottish Sun, be anti-establishment anyway. The SNP only oppose the old guard of British aristocracy.
Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party seems to have greater anti-establishment credentials. Indeed the corporate media has been quick to denounce Labour's new leadership as dangerous extremists, naive pacifists or apologists for terrorists and Nazi-sympathising Israel bashers. The whole polemic about Ken Livingstone's Hitler comments is a case in point. You'd seriously think he had denied the Nazi holocaust or advocated the annihilation of Israel. In actual fact he had merely alluded to the 1933 Haavara Agreement between Zionists and the newly elected National Socialist regime, which incidentally still had important commercial ties the United State and Britain. We had the spectre of a Labour MP patronisingly shouting “Have you read Mein Kampf†at a former colleague.. This manufactured controversy over alleged antisemitism had two effects: to discredit the main opposition party and to restrict intellectual freedom. The other details were lost on a general public accustomed to a simplified Hollywoodesque portrayal of recent European history.
In 1981 before Argentinian General Gualtieri intervened to boost Margaret Thatcher's popularity, a much more radical Labour Party under Michael Foot won 41% of the vote in local elections compared to just 38% for the ruling Tories. In similar elections Jeremy Corbyn's party could barely muster 31% within England. Short of a miracle, Labour are extremely unlikely to win the next general election. If they oust Corbyn, then many Labour members would leave probably to join the Greens. With Corbyn, they can only hope to appeal to the core Labour vote in areas of high welfare dependency and/or Muslim populations as well as trendy professional elites. The party has lost much of its traditional working class vote. First in power it did little to protect British workers against unfair global competition and encouraged the migration of a new generation of immigrants from Eastern Europe to fill short-term vacancies in the country's volatile, but booming, labour market dominated by agency staff. Left-leaning opinion leaders and even government ministers would dismiss low-skill British workers as lazy and unmotivated, while failing abysmally to reform the welfare system to make work pay. Indeed Gordon Brown's flagship working family tax credits merely subsidised the kind of low-paid jobs to which new immigrants were attracted. Of course, nothing has changed under David Cameron's tenure either. Net migration has continued to hover around the 300,000 a year mark and more and more young people are employed under zero-hour contracts. While inflation-adjusted spending on the NHS has actually risen, a growing population is clearly putting it under enormous strain. Yet Labour and Conservative spokespeople always like to remind the descendants of the great British working class that we could not run the NHS without immigrants, a sly way of telling native Brits that they either too stupid or too well paid.
Ironically many in the Labour movement would agree with my critique of trendy champagne socialists, infantile eco-warriors and no-borders activists, the kind of people who think can they simultaneously cut industrial pollution, fight climate change, save endangered species, protect natural woodland and greenbelt, build more houses and allow million more economic migrants to enjoy a 1980s British standard of living. Many middle-of-the-road Labour activists from the 1970s and 80s just wanted Britain to be a peace-loving country that protected the interests of its own people without expropriating the resources of other countries or interfering in their affairs, except to deal with environmental catastrophes or to avert genocide. A humble country that would lead only by example. However, our economy has become so unbalanced and dependent on imports of goods and export of services as to make any government captive to the diktat of major multinationals.
In purely ecological terms the UK is a global parasite. It extracts much more from the rest of the world than it gives back. It has effectively become a large shopping mall complete with airports, a motorway network, millions of offices and matchbox houses. If you are worried about the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest, endangered species in Borneo, peace in the Middle East or carbon emissions globally, then buying imported goods at Tesco or taking a cheap Ryanair flight to sunny Spain will not help. Indeed our consumer habits outsource environmental destruction to the rest of the world.
Hands Tied
If Corbyn and Bennett really wanted to overthrow capitalism, they would not call for more economic growth or advocate corporate welfarism. They would oppose unaccountable and wasteful corporations and transfer their business operations to cooperatives respondent to the needs of local communities rather than short-term profits or longer-term commercial expansion. We would bring our consumption in line with our essential needs (e.g. we could eat a lot less and still live healthier lives), rather than short-term consumer fetishes. Most important a genuine workers' party would ensure all families have a stake in our real economy, i.e. at least one member who contributes through meaningful and rewarding work. If we outsource manual labour or let next generation automation displace workers in all but the most intellectually demanding roles altogether, we will have a nation of expendable consumer slaves.
The Greens may well oppose fracking and building on greenbelt, yet their leadership fully support the causes of fracking and habitat destruction. Capitalists do not lobby governments to allow hydraulic fracturing because they want to contaminate drinking water or destroy our countryside, but because they believe for the time being fracking is the most cost-effective way to produce the extra energy we need to power our growing economy and satisfy the consumer demands of the country's growing population.
Many Greens I've debated with live in a parallel universe, in which highly skilled and ecologically aware immigrants help us address an acute labour shortage and compensate for a shrinking and ageing population. This may be true in a few remote Devon villages, but the UK's population has grown from 58 million in 1997 to well over 65 million now. While youngsters born and bred in the UK struggle to find permanent jobs, agencies import ready-trained nurses and careworkers to look after the disabled and elderly.
What's Wrong With Old People?
If there is one demographic group the infantile left loathes more than any other it's the native British elderly, the kind of people who distrust the European Union, disapprove of gay marriage and may, heaven forbid, not be too happy about the displacement of indigenous communities with transient communities of international commuters. Yet an ageing population is hardly sign of failure, but a cause for celebration and an immense opportunity for a younger generation unable to compete with robots, but perfectly able to care for their elderly relatives and neighbours rather than twiddle their thumbs in marketing agencies or sell spurious legal services. If the UK had had zero-net migration since 1997, i.e. a sustainable balance of immigration and emigration, our population would only have declined only slightly today and we'd have smaller class sizes, much less congestion and a much smaller housing crisis. Indeed the fertility rate has risen from a low of 1.6 in the mid 1980s to 2.0 today (partly due to higher birth rates among some recent immigrants). By contrast countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Germany and Poland have fertility rates between 1.3 to 1.5. Singaporean women have on average just 1 child. People in these countries have merely adapted to the reality that our survival does not depend on having an excess of children. Raising a child to become a successful adult with good career prospects now requires massive investment in time and money. That why millions of European and Japanese couples simply opt out of parenthood.
Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will soon displace most most manual and many clerical jobs. Banks are busy closing branches, driverless vehicles are already a reality and manufacturing workers will be replaced by a handful of programmers and technicians. However, the elderly and disabled will still prefer human care-workers ideally with a similar cultural background. Would it really matter if over several generations the population halved through entirely peaceful and non-coercive means? Not at all, it would merely bring our numbers back to the population we had in the 1960s and it would certainly make it much easier to address the challenges of rising material expectations, resource depletion on a finite planet and the inevitability of greater automation. A true environmentalist would aspire to attain an equilibrium with a steady state economy and stable population, but we are not going to run out people any time soon.
Useful Idiots
If the Greens and Left Labour pose such a great threat to global corporations, why do they get so much airtime on TV and so great prominence in social media. People are not being arrested for expressing opposition to austerity cuts or staging refugees welcome demos, but rather for expressing socially conservative opinions critical of globalisation. This is because our real masters are not the old national aristocracies, but global corporations who positively loathe nation states. Both the European and North American elites are planing a new borderless playground for a new technocratic upper class. The main wheelers and dealers are not populist politicians eager to placate the concerns of a conservative electorate, but large banks, transnational enterprises and increasingly NGOs and charities. While the infantile left may rant and rave about our wonderful NHS and the evils of TTIP, trendy business consultancies are busy new ways to expand the market reach of their corporate healthcare clients and rebrand TTIP to placate European politicians. When professional services networks such as Price Waterhouse and Cooper, Ernst and Young, Deloitte or KPMG talk of global governance or localisation, what they really mean is the transfer of decision-making away from national institutions to large corporations. Increasingly national parliaments debate merely how and when to phase in policies decided elsewhere. Cultural convergence is seen as a historical inevitability that merely has to be managed. In this context the mass migration of people from the Middle East and North Africa may lead to a temporary culture clash. but the long term aim to displace all autochthonous cultures with a global superculture. Civil unrest, decreased social solidarity and the spectre of terrorism all provide excellent pretexts for more surveillance and greater centralisation of powers in supranational bodies. Not surprisingly, the Eurocrats always respond to economic, environmental and human crises with calls for more Europe, by which they mean greater powers for unaccountable institutions intent to undermining the will of ordinary Europeans.
Yet across the European continent the growing divide is no longer between the lifestyle left and the economic right, but between those of us who care about the identity and thus sustainability of our cultural heritage and those who wish to supplant all traditional cultures with a brave new world order, to which all but the enlightened elite have to conform. They are quite happy to use green activists and even trade unionists to push through policies that will both destroy our environment and undermine workers' rights. The real xenophobes are not those who defend their own cultural traditions, but those who cheerlead ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale.
The imbecile left will never thwart global corporatism, but will merely claim credit for policies emanating from corporate think tanks such as global taxation of corporations or their new favourite, the basic income, which will inevitably be a form a global social welfare subsidised by global corporations to the workless underclasses in exchange for their acquiescence.
It often helps to observe critically what is really happening rather than formulate a convenient worldview based on personal prejudices, peer pressure or official reports. Some will tell you the green lobby is harming ordinary working class motorists through their obsession with global warming and carbon emissions. Back in the real world green politicians support policies that increase carbon emissions by actively supporting the migration of people from poorer to richer countries and recycling propaganda about how a larger population boosts our wonderful retail economy. We thus witness a manufactured debate between small businesses, often keen on easier road transport and lower taxes, and globalist greens, usually keen on tigher regulation of private transport. Larger companies always find it easier to comply with new environmental regulations introduced to please green lobbies. All the while massive out-of-town superstores with huge carparks are sprouting up everywhere. They may have a few token cycle racks and sell fair-trade bananas, bu their bottom line depends on more eager consumers buying their imported merchandise. In power and in opposition, the greens have been disaster for our environment.
If you believe vocal lobbies, we can never devote enough resources to tackle our ongoing mental health crisis. Politicians of all hues like to champion the rights of mental health patients to better care. They try to score points on the perceived lack of funding for mental health services. The subtext is that we should treat mental health just like physical health and it is thus the business of healthcare providers not only to check your blood pressure and heart rate, but to analyse your state of mind.
Unlike physical health, mental health is highly subjective. What kinds of moods and behavioural patterns are so dysfunctional or antisocial that they merit the proactive intervention of third-party supervisors whether in the guise of counsellors, social workers, psychiatric nurses or psychologists. This paternalistic approach raises many questions about personal independence and freedom. Until recently we just assumed that happiness is a mere expression of satisfaction with life. Yet it is hard to detect any correlation between prosperity and happiness, except in a looser relative sense. Above all people need security, a sense of belonging and some love and affection. We often substitute ephemeral pleasures of temporary stupefaction or indulgence for true contentment gradually won through hard work. The abundance of consumer goods and a generous welfare state have jointly undermined the great art of delayed gratification and replaced it with a sense of entitlement that can often create an emotional void and an insatiable demand for more and better.
It seems only fair to care for vulnerable members of our community. If we were talking about paraplegics, everyone would understand why their disability, paralysis of the lower body, merits some help from the rest of us. Indeed with assistive technology most paraplegics can lead fruitful lives. However, few would choose to be cripples and most would welcome medical breakthroughs to help them walk again. If the incidence of paraplegia were to double every twenty years, we would seriously have to address the root causes for society relies on the able-bodied to assist the physically disabled. If we are unable to look after ourselves unassisted, we inevitably depend on the goodwill of others to act in our best interests. Our personal freedom is ultimately limited by our dependence on others for our basic needs. These days few of us could be truly self-sufficient, unless we adapted to a humble existence as subsistence farmers, so a paraplegic is only relatively more at the mercy of external agencies than your average able-bodied citizen. Arguably a talented cripple able to work remotely as a writer, designer or programmer may contribute more to society than an able-bodied drug-addict who cannot hold down a menial job. However, by promoting the concept of mental ill-health we greatly widen the range of people unable to fend for themselves without intrusive help.
Subjective criteria
Who exactly decides who is and who is not mentally fit? What criteria do we apply? If you can only run a hundred metres before running out of breath, are you physically disabled? Of course not, though you may be relatively unfit and should probably get some more exercise. Your doctor would probably advise you not to overdo it and set simple attainable goals and slowly adapt your lifestyle. However, if you fractured your spine in a horrific workplace accident, you may well lose control of your legs and suddenly countless everyday tasks like getting dressed or going to the bathroom become almost impossible to accomplish without some help. You are not simply unfit, but genuinely disabled. A disability, by its customary definition, prevents you from accomplishing essential life-sustaining tasks. It is not a relative handicap. If you're tone-deaf, but able to speak and understand a human language, you are not disabled, but just have a relative weakness in one facet of human creativity. Musical aptitude is certainly a nice to have and arguably gives you an advantage in natural selection, but many tone-deaf people have led fruitful lives without requiring any special help. Tone-deafness is also a rather relative concept as are relative intellectual deficits in mathematics, literacy or dexterity. While we may debate the causes of our relative strengths and weaknesses, modern society relies on functional and intellectual diversity. We cannot all be playwrights, musicians or comedians, but society would be dull without artistic creativity. However, it would cease to function without farmers, builders, engineers, plumbers, toilet cleaners or nurses. We can only relax and have fun once we have provided all infrastructure, food, clean water, shelter and other amenities essential to comfortable human existence. Technological progress and societal pressures have redefined our concept of comfort. Recent technological and economic trends have revealed two paradoxes. First automation and globalisation have displaced millions of manual workers, increasing competitiveness and lowering wages at the bottom end of the labour market. Second as material living standards have risen our emotional well-being has not. Greater labour mobility may have boosted the economy but it has led to greater job insecurity at a time when most women and men are expected to participate in the financial economy. Our personal worth is no longer measured by the roles we play in our family and community, but by our utility as a player in a dynamic consumption-driven market economy. Since the 1970s in much of Western Europe we've seen a gradual shift from practical trades to abstract tertiary sector roles involved in endless lifestyle and product promotion as well as the micromanagement of every aspect of human interaction. The UK now has more social workers than farmers, more accountants than carpenters and more IT recruiters than software developers. Yet we all need food, furniture and mobile communication. As we lose touch with the fruits of our endeavours, we begin to lose our sense of purpose in life other than the mere acquisition of money as a means of ersatz self-validation.
Not only is employment less secure, but human relationships are more volatile and communities more fluid and transient than ever before. By most measures material living standards have never been so high, but people are not only more indebted, but in the absence of paid employment or welfare payments only a few pay cheques away from financial ruin with little means to survive in the wild.
Extreme interdependence
Our current obsession with mental health is the result of extreme interdependence. A quick glance at the commonest professions in the UK reveals a rather disquieting picture. Fewer and fewer workers have any direct relationship to the production and maintenance of essential goods and services, excepts as managers, sales personnel or hauliers. In the UK over six million are employed in mainly administrative roles, some requiring some limited technical expertise or prior hands-on experience, over 3 million are employed in sales, marketing and business presentation, with only 300,000 employed in farming and fishing and around one million in manufacturing, but the biggest growth sectors are personal care and surveillance. The last-named sector encompasses not just policing, but social work and psychiatric services. An ageing population and technological innovation can partly explain this phenomenon, but not entirely, especially as older people are now fitter and many can live independently well into their 80s. A growing proportion of working age adults require assistance as a result of a learning disability, mood or personality disorder.
The Human Spectrum
Until the mid 1980s psychiatric disorders only referred to extreme cases of dysfunctional behaviour. Much of the literature on the relative merits of psychotherapy or pharmacological treatment relates to individuals who posed a direct threat to themselves and/or to wider society. They accounted for under 1% of the general population and as therapeutic care improved most could rejoin the community as normal citizens. Psychiatry had been tarnished by its association with authoritarian regimes, not least in Nazi Germany where schizophrenics were euthanised alongside the mentally handicapped, but also extensively in the Soviet Union where dissidents were routinely treated in psychiatric institutions. Freedom meant above all the freedom to be yourself, to be the master of your feelings and to act an autonomous player in a wider social reality. Of course personal behaviour is regulated by social mores and a fine balance between rights and responsibilities that we learn from our family and community. However, as we gained more free time, we could unleash our individuality and creativity in more expressive ways. Not surprisingly many of the mental ailments now falling under the broad umbrella of mental illness were first observed among the professional classes. The working classes were until recently too busy working to indulge in the kind of fantasies that would preoccupy early psychotherapists. Alcohol remained the main release valve for emotional insecurity and deviant behaviour was either managed within the community or treated as criminality.
To gain greater public acceptance, psychiatry needed a complete rebrand. As the age of self-centred narcissism deepened its roots in North American society, people became more preoccupied with their moods and feelings. New Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors such as fluoxetine, also known as Prozac, proved a huge marketing success. By the late 1990s taking mood-enhancing medication had not just become socially acceptable, they had helped blur the boundaries between a normal range of human emotions and psychopathy. Meanwhile concerned parents and teachers began to refer boisterous children unable to pay attention in class to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder with a seemingly tailor-made drug, methylphenidate better known as Ritalin. In the same period we saw a rapid rise in the diagnosis of hitherto rare neurological disorders on the autistic spectrum. This craze for psychiatric labelling spread to Europe, usually accompanied by awareness-raising campaigns. Psychiatry had now donned the clothes of the progressive left championing the cause of sufferers of these new labels and thus creating new victim groups demanding special treatment. More and more young people began to contextualise their problems in terms of a psychiatric diagnosis.
Marketing Personality Disorders
The more troublesome behavioural disorders that would have merited a psychiatric diagnosis did not lend themselves to marketing, but only to occasional awareness raising initiatives. Nobody could claim pride in psychopathic madness or subnormal idiocy. However, people can be persuaded to claim pride in geekishness, hyperactivity, obsession, sudden mood swings or certain learning challenges if celebrities share some of these traits. Indeed many high-profile media personalities have publicised their diagnosis with OCD, bipolar disorder, ADHD, Aspergers' Syndrome and even learning disabilities. These traits may have their challenges, but also their advantages especially in creative professions. Other past and present luminaries have been posthumously diagnosed. Albert Einstein is claimed to have suffered or benefited from Asperger's Syndrome. It's even been claimed that multibillionaire IT entrepreneur, Bill Gates, has this syndrome too. As the mental health industry widens the diagnostic criteria for personality disorders, we begin to uncover traits common in almost all of us. Excellence in any endeavour is impossible without focussing on the task at hand. It's thus absurd to claim that a special interest in a circumscribed subject is any way pathological. It may be relatively dysfunctional if it prevents us from doing more important things essential to our wellbeing, but we would have made little technological or social progress if some people had not dedicated their professional lives to specialist subjects that few others understand. Our complex high-tech society depends on hyper-specialisation, but as noted elsewhere, most specialists are involved in various aspects of communication, administration and supervision rather than in the hard science that makes our modern lives possible. By promoting the concept of neurological diversity, the authorities can now treat different groups of people in different ways.
Inevitably, some readers will feel a little confused. Most of us have friends or family members who face significant personal challenges. You may have had episodes of emotional distress yourself. Indeed one may argue if you have never experienced sorrow, rejection or isolation, you have led a very sheltered life and will probably struggle to understand the real-life experiences of most members of our society. Should we help an anorexic girl starving herself to death for fear of becoming morbidly obese, a severely depressed teenager confined to his bedroom or a troubled young man plotting to save humanity from a contagious virus by killing his next door neighbour because he works in a pharmaceutical testing laboratory? Of course, but we need to understand the true causes of such seemingly illogical behaviour, e.g. is the rise in eating disorders related to our obsession with perfect bodies, advertising, size-zero models and media obsession with obsesity?
Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons
In Aldous Huxley's prescient vision of a distant technocratic future, humanity had ceased to procreate naturally and was socially and biologically organised in 5 distinctive castes, ranging from high-IQ but potentially moody Alphas to low-IQ but happy Epsilons. However, everyone took pride in their own cast identity rather than fret about their relative social or intellectual status. In Huxley's Brave New World every aspect of life from conception to death was micromanaged and any psycho-social tensions were managed by the wonder potion, Soma (Sanskrit for he body as distinct from the soul, mind, or psyche) and recreational sex. Today's Soma takes various forms. Besides obvious analogies with anti-depressants and other psychoactive drugs, the mass entertainment business and recreational stimulants play an important role in managing the general population, turning us into compliant consumers and loyal team players rather than awkward free agents. Increasingly political opinions at variance with the neoliberal globalist orthodoxy are associated with maverick personal types, i.e. rather than tackle a philosophical viewpoint head-on, the new establishment will parody it and insinuate that proponents of such views suffer from some form of paranoid delusion. Democracy thus serves no longer to reflect the true will of citizens, but to manage different groups of people in order to manufacture consent with political agendas promoted by powerful lobbies.
Joining the Dots
We should view the neuological categorisation of human beings alongside other trends for cosmetic surgery, assisted fertilisation, gender reassigment and the potential for artificial intelligence to empower the technocratic elite. Now under the pretext of combatting childhood depression and/or bullying, the authorities feel empowered to subject all children to mandatory mental health screening, while simultaneously encouraging non-traditional family structures, facilitating fertility treatment, now available on the NHS irrespective of relationship status and heavily subsidising mothers going to work, even if their earnings are less than equivalent cost of childcare. All these phenomena remove children from traditional biological families and transfer responsibility for their socialisation away from parents to corporate institutions. Natural variations in human behaviour are analysed in detail to identify individuals that fail to respond to mainstream socialisation and psychological conditioning techniques and may thus become, in the authorities' eyes, troublemakers.
Concern about mental health, while often well-intentioned, provides the ultimate pretext to expand the surveillance state. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
As an idealist teenager I always wanted to side with the notional left on everything. The left represented progress towards a better tomorrow freed of human suffering, prejudice, inequality and exploitation, a panacea in which all human beings could enjoy life to the full in a giant communal garden of Eden. The right, on the other hand, represented the forces of reactionary conservatism emotionally tied to the establishment and traditions that prevented progress to a fairer world. I could summarise my naive adolescent appraisal of the left versus right dichotomy as a simple battle between altruistic good and selfish evil. If only life were so simple? However, this simplification of the left - right spectrum still holds true for many youthful political pundits. If you want to discredit a political stance, it often suffices to call it rightwing, end of debate.
The real distinction between left and right transcends broader political questions such as the balance between state control and private enterprise or the relative merits of equality and healthy competition. A left-winger, at heart, is just a wishful thinking idealist who believes social and technological progress will enable us all to enjoy a very high standard of living if only the greedy rich could share more of their wealth. Right-wingers on the other hand are simply pragmatists. They do not necessarily mean to harm anyone else, just they believe we can only really take care of ourselves and our family and should owe greater allegiance to our national community than our species as a whole. While left-wingers view humanity as an organic network that will converge on a new progressive agenda, right-wingers view people as a complex web of competing individuals and in-groups with different interests, strengths and weaknesses.
Fifty years ago in the midst of the Cold War, it may well have seemed that the notional left, at least in Western Europe and North America, challenged a notionally right-wing establishment. Conservative parties would tend to favour private enterprise, family values and civic pride, while the left called for greater state control, more social welfare and international solidarity. In reality most Western governments, whether nominally left or right of centre, pursued business-friendly social interventionism, often confusingly called social democracy, to engineer high living standards, a growing consumer economy and relative social cohesion. National debates would be framed in terms of progress versus traditionalism, personal freedom versus social intervention or democracy versus tyranny. However, both the left and right had plenty of skeletons in their proverbial cupboards. While the libertarian right could point to godless dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain, the radical left could expose national capitalism's complicity in supporting not only Mussolini and Hitler, but also dictatorships in Spain (1937-75), Portugal (1933 to 1974), Greece (1967 to 1974) or Chile (1973 to 1990). Whichever way, authoritarian regimes of the notional left and right, had the blood of tens of millions on their hands. Moreover, these regimes often enjoyed the full support and collaboration of governments in supposedly democratic countries. Meanwhile much of the European radical left sought either to distance themselves from the Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China or downplay their authoritarian excesses. Yet repressive regimes of all hues tended to favour collectivist rights and responsibilities over personal freedoms.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the notional left would champion the self-determination of subjugated peoples, whether in Ireland, India or the African colonies. Imperialism remained largely associated with the right, except when dealing with regions and peoples attempting to free themselves from a rival imperialist power. As the Spanish and Portuguese empires waned, the British, French and later American empires could spread their more technologically advanced liberal mercantilist culture, often supporting local forces of national liberation. As the Ottoman Empire declined, the French, British and Italians filled the vacuum as progressive purveyors of Western civilisation, a concept which would later morph into freedom and democracy. The left's view on self-determination began to change with the birth of the Soviet Union. While previously the left had always favoured the self-determination of all peoples in the age of expansionist empires, socialists became more interested in international solidarity and in defending what many saw as a workers' state, whether deformed or not. Yet many of the struggles, from which quasi-socialist regimes emerged, started as wars of national liberation from foreign oppressors.
Nothing epitomises the modern left more than its oxymoronic obsession with equality and diversity. Surely, the more diverse we are, the less equal we are too, except in the loose sense of equality of opportunities, rights and responsibilities. A hunter-gatherer community will never be equal to a globally integrated complex society reliant on advanced technology and an extreme division of labour. That doesn't mean hunter-gatherers are in any way intellectually inferior, just they use their intelligence in a different way. Hunter-gatherers conceive wealth in terms of their ability to enjoy the bounties of nature, not as their ability to use abstract finances to allocate strategic resources for their personal benefit. Yet traditional ways of life that evolved over thousands of years are rapidly giving way to a globally integrated high-tech mono-culture. The more we talk of diversity, the less we have. As fewer and fewer people survive as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers (the latter being an endangered way of life), most of humanity now depends on the financial economy. Globalisation has unmasked a massive, and indeed growing, disparity between the financially rich and poor, concealed only by generous welfare in wealthier countries and lower costs of living in some low-wage regions. Equality and diversity initiatives really have little to do with either equality or diversity, but merely managing global convergence as people from different social and cultural backgrounds come into contact with each other.
The heirs to the great European and American working classes, who in large part made today's world possible through skill and dedication, have either had to adapt to a volatile service economy or have been made redundant through automation and/or outsourcing. By keeping large swathes of the population dependent on welfare, the social democratic left has mainly succeeded in keeping the consumer economy alive while slowly but surely thwarting the willpower and self-motivation of millions in the growing underclass trapped on benefits. How could the heirs of the once-proud labour movement defend a system that not only demotivates the lower classes, but wrecks family life and requires a massive social surveillance apparatus to maintain some degree of social order. Fatherlessness alone costs taxpayers hundreds of millions through additional welfare support needs and lack of ambition in teenage boys. Yet the trendy left sees the demise of the traditional two-parent family as a sign of progress, because it allegedly empowers women and homosexuals to break free from heterosexual patriarchy. Yet in promoting this brave new world, the lifestyle left have broken with thousands of years of cultural evolution across many diverse societies. Rather than adapting the traditional roles of men and women in line with technological and social change, the doctrinaire left seeks to eradicate all functional differences. As a result in many Western countries, young men have become great demotivated underachievers, while women have an advantage in a plethora of non-productive people-oriented roles, such as social workers, project managers or recruiters. While female emancipation has been enabled by technology developed mainly by men, it has effectively turned most women into wage slaves and undervalued their traditional role as mothers.
All too often many of the forces that pose on the left advocate policies that suit the needs of power-hungry transnational corporations much more than those of ordinary women or men. Meanwhile the globalist left pretends to oppose the excesses of global capitalism, such as environmental depredation, grotesque overindulgence or mind-bending hyper-consumerism. Yet these are mere side effects of a system that creates insatiable demand for elusive opulence.
Do Corbyn and Cameron agree on Policing the human mind?
Did anyone notice that we now have a shadow minister for mental health? Until recently we just had ministers for health concerned with the provision of medical services and social welfare. Indeed Labour's new allegedly anti-establishment leader chose to use his limited time at Prime Minister's Questions to address the perceived shortage of mental health services in the NHS. If you substitute the word psychiatry for mental health, you will soon understand where I'm coming from. Let's be under no illusions, when awareness-raising lobbyists talk of mental health (theoretically a positive term as we all aspire to good health in all aspects of our lives), they mean psychiatry, the notion that any deviation from some arbitrary definition of sanity merits medical treatment, intrusive monitoring and potentially hospitalisation. Indeed Mr Corbyn specifically bemoaned the lack of hospital beds for mental health patients, when in reality NHS spending on so-called mental health services has continued to rise year on year, with direct state intervention supplemented by a growing third sector. The problem is increased spending fails to meet spiralling demand, so the real question is why do so many people fail to cope emotionally?
Jeremy Corbyn comes across as extremely sincere. I shared many of his views 30 years ago and still agree with his consistent opposition to neo-imperialist faux-humanitarian wars. I rejoiced as Labour activists voted against the careerist heirs to Tony Blair and endorsed a rebel MP. Should Jeremy Corbyn wear a neatly ironed tailored suit or sing a national anthem that hails from Great Britain's colonial past? Should he acquire a modish sense of humour or feign interest in popular spectator sports? Personally, I like his apparent authenticity and prefer people to be themselves rather than try to emulate media personalities, which leads me back to the creepy mental health agenda.
This subject seems to find its way into speeches and stage-managed debates in all mainstream political parties from the Liberal Democrats to the Tories, from New Labour to the SNP, now the governing party in Scotland. Concern about mental health services is always billed as progressive and caring, yet few question the underlying authoritarian roots of the latest attempt to rebrand psychiatry.
Define Irrationality!
Many human behaviours seem irrational and some are either evil or simply self-destructive. In antiquity, long before modern medicine and social welfare, dysfunctional behaviour would be rewarded only with social exclusion and procreational failure. By definition functional behaviour serves the best interests of oneself and one's immediate family and community, while dysfunctional behaviour may satisfy temporary desires, but destroys livelihoods. However, who may define insanity and gain the right to intervene in the lives of those who exhibit signs of madness? The answer to this question goes to the very heart of our concept of personal freedom and collective responsibility. If I want to run around naked in my back garden, do I not have the freedom to do so? Some would consider this an obscene act of madness and others a harmless and perfectly natural pastime on a sunny afternoon. The apparent insanity of such an act depends very much on its social acceptability. Not all actions are entirely logical. Many serve functions other than mere physical survival. We need to nurture not only our body, but also our soul and social bonds. We gain pleasure not just from essential life-sustaining deeds such as breathing, drinking, eating and keeping fit, but from our relentless quest for greater connectedness with the outside world and above all with other human beings. We live not just for the sake of life itself, but to play, learn, communicate, explore and experience. Over the millennia we have developed an almost endless variety of rituals and pursuits to fulfil our emotional or spiritual needs. Sometimes such adventurous creativity led us to discover new techniques and thus allow our species to colonise new habitats and dedicate more time to leisure and learning than mundane survival tasks. However, we have always grappled with two competing impulses. On the one hand we may seek greater social approval and integration, a tendency we call conformism. On the other, we have a natural drive to learn new tricks and engage in new experiences. We may call this latter inquisitive impulse, non-conformism, or when expressed as a rebellion against orthodoxy, as anti-conformism.
Is Society Insane?
As a rule illogical, non-productive and/or dysfunctional behaviours are fine as long they meet social approval. In modern Britain, all sorts of very antisocial destructive antics are justified as mere drunken larks. Many seemingly irrational deeds are not just socially acceptable, but are actively promoted by advertising and social media. Obsessive gambling, intensive video-gaming and all night drug-addled raves are now fairly mainstream, advertised in digital media and glorified by celebrities. Such activities carry mere warnings, yet have the power to blind us to reality or prevent us from leading productive lives. We have become obsessed with fame and publicity. If rock stars can lead lavish lifestyles high on heroin or crack cocaine, why should I not emulate them?
By contrast many harmless non-conformist acts are simply judged mad, or in modern parlance, mental health issues. If you have just re-mortgaged your house to bet on a horse who may not win, that may be slightly unwise, but just the kind of wild things people do these days. However, if you are fixated with media lies and refuse to believe hijacked jet planes could cause the collapse of New York's famous Twin Towers in 2001, many will consider you a conspiracy theorist. It doesn't matter that historically governments have repeatedly lied to their people. If you doubt your mainstream media today, you are probably afflicted by some sort of paranoid delusion.
Shifting Goalposts
Mental ill-health criteria depend not so much on illogical dysfunctional behaviour, but on people management and social integration. If someone deviates from societal norms and behaves in a challenging way that affects social order, it is much easier for myriad social workers and psychologists to view the problem as a neurological disorder rather than a wider societal problem. While we all like to pretend we care about each other, all too often we seize on some of other people's most superficial imperfections to justify exclusion and discriminatory treatment. More investment in the mental health sector inevitably leads more people to be diagnosed with spurious personality disorders. Once labelled, a person begins to view life's challenges mainly in terms of their new psychiatric identity rather than as a complex set of psychological reactions to a divisive social rat race. The more we diagnose people with one mental health condition or another, the more we need to invest in treatment for such conditions. Worse still such conditions are increasingly seen as natural genetic variations that have always existed.
The powerful pro-psychiatry lobby has meanwhile coopted the language of the radical left. People diagnosed with personality disorders are now seen as victims of stigma against their labels, rather than victims of psychiatry and of a wider society unwilling to understand why they behave as they do. They claim to defend the rights of the vulnerable, yet absolve the society that caused their emotional problems.
By equating physical health with mental health, we reduce complex human thoughts and feelings to mere physiological organs that respond to medical treatment. Some people do have genuine neurological deficits or brain damage. Our brains are amazingly versatile and adaptive. Some have coped incredibly well even after losing half their brain. These conditions are rightly the realm of neurologists, but most sufferers of depression, OCD, anorexia or psychosis do not have any discernible neurological defects that predate their first exposure to psychoactive drugs and a very large proportion of those who suffered psychosis had been regular users of recreational drugs, even of allegedly soft drugs like cannabis.
Awareness raisers will endlessly recycle the statistic that 1 in 4 adults will suffer a mental health issue. In Jeremy Corbyn's words this means everyone has a close friend or relative who has experienced a mental health crisis (which we used to call a nervous breakdown). The corollary is we need to invest in public healthcare and welfare to help such people. In other words we need more psychiatrists, social workers and welfare dependence rather than more tolerant and accommodating workplaces and less insane social competition. If someone finds it hard to meet and keep friends, is it necessarily their fault? Do we only act if social exclusion can be attributed to racism, sexism or homophobia? Why the hell do we all have to act cool and feign interest in shallow junk culture just to be popular among our peers? Why do we measure ourselves against movie stars, rather just look after our natural bodies? Can we not just be ourselves?
Lastly where do we draw the line between normality and mental ill-health, between sadness and depression or between audacity and insanity? These lines have been steadily blurring for over 20 years to encompass a widening cross-section of society. By normalising mental health labels, we're walking down a slippery slope to a Brave New World, in which everyone is classified by their neurological traits and all aspects of our lives are monitored for the greater social good.
The only irony is the media has already begun to explain away Corbyn's views on foreign affairs, wars and monarchy in condescending psychiatric terms. Yet expanding the surveillance state has been as much part of the elite agenda as waging destabilising wars in the Middle East. Corbyn will have little impact on any policies that are effectively devolved to NATO, the EU or global banks, but on mental health he is at one with Cameron.
A much publicised factoid, popularised by many left-leaning campaigners for greater equality, shows that the richest 85 people in the world are as wealthy as the poorest half or around 3.5 billion human beings. That would make each multibillionaire a staggering 41 million times richer than your typical Sub-Sarahan African, Indian or Indonesian. I've done the maths and it turns out the combined financial wealth of the top 85 billionnaires is around £1 trillion, at least according to research carried out by Oxfam as reported in the Guardian last year and retweeted endlessly ever since. 1 trillion is a mind-boggingly large number, ten to the power of 12, a million millions or £11 billion each. By contrast the same sum divided by the bottom 3.5 billion world citizens is just £286.
The upshot is to alleviate poverty we just need to redistribute wealth from the top 85 to the bottom 3500 million. However, this simplistic solution is based on the fundamentally flawed logic that financial wealth bears any direct relationship to real wealth and real living standards. Moreover, transferring abstract financial wealth to billions of the world's poor may simply fuel inflation and subjugate more people into a debt-driven monetary economy. £286 is peanuts in Europe, but then so is £572. Intriguingly, financial wealth does not necessarily buy more material resources, but merely exclusivity, privilege and power over others locked into a money economy. As I will explain, the real problem is the overconsumption of much larger minority of the world's citizens and the logic of infinite economic growth. That means if we are to transition to a more sustainable and equitable steady-state economy, we would need to drastically cut consumption and waste in places like Western Europe to let poorer regions enjoy much more of their own natural resources. We would fool ourselves if we believed we could bring about such a change by taxing the very same global corporations and investment bankers who created such grotesque inequalities in the first place.
In purely monetary terms what can £11 billion buy you? Possibly, more power via shares in leading corporations, an art collection, a few luxury villas, a private jet, a helicopter, a yacht, a team of tax consultants and lawyers, a personal security squad and privileged access to various wheelers and dealers in government and finance. At current prices, no normal human being could consume material goods worth £11 billion. A Ferrari 458 Spider may set you back £200,000, but it's not 10 times better or 10 faster than a more modest VW Golf hatchback. It also consumes a lot more, is harder to park and less versatile for practical purposes. Likewise having 2 cars for personal use does not help you travel twice as far or twice as fast. It merely gives you greater choice, a second option if one car breaks down and takes up twice as much space in your driveway if you're lucky enough to have one. Owning 200 cars would be sheer insanity as few people would have the time to drive and maintain such a large fleet of vehicles. However, owning a car rather than just a bicycle can change your life. There may be no limits to how much someone can waste or how much junk someone can accumulate, but there are limits to how much a human being can personally consume. When a billionaire, like Roman Abramovich, boards his £20 million Mediterranean yacht to entertain guests, he is not consuming the yacht for his exclusive gratification, but allocating some of his wealth to corporate hospitality. Some would also argue the Russian oligarch's maritime extravagance also employs boat builders, sailors, catering and security staff. Nonetheless, Mr Abramovich's wealth certainly leads to a misappropriation of resources.
If we take a wider look at the top 1% of the global population, around 70 million lucky individuals, we see a staggering concentration of both financial and material wealth, worth around £114 trillion in 2013, or just over £1.6 million each. In purely financial terms, that's astronomically more than the bottom 3.5 billion. If you spend much of your life in international airports, corporate get-togethers, scientific and academic conventions, luxury hotels and secluded holiday resorts, this wealthy cosmopolitan elite may well seem the norm, with the remaining 99% a mere backdrop. But does it mean your average global elitist is 6000 times happier, longer living, better nourished, better educated or smarter than your average bottom 50% guy? They do not own 6000 times more real estate or 6000 times more gadgets. Your average Tanzanian (in the bottom quarter on the global financial wealth scale) lives in a small bungalow or thatched house, owns second/third hand mobile phone or may have a bicycle or motorbike, but as long as someone can eat, has access to clean water and shelter and is integrated into a cohesive community, they do not feel the same kind of extreme poverty of many temporary city dwellers in makeshift housing or sleeping under bridges in cardboard boxes. Yet even the poorest city-dwellers have much more money than rural Tanzanians, simply because they have to buy everything. The global rich simply own properties in more exclusive or strategically located neighbourhoods and have access to the latest, usually much more expensive, cutting-edge technology. A small two bedroom flat in Tokyo or New York has a market value much greater than a 1 square kilometre farm in Tanzania capable of sustaining a small community of approximately 300 people, based on the average yield of the 16% of Tanzanian land that is actually arable.
For a few short years, my income rose way above the UK average (just £27 thousand a year), but because I had to rent a flat in London, pay off some debts and allocate around £1200 to maintain two teenage offspring, I saw pitifully little of this income. Indeed I had diminished and hectic lifestyle. Some people earning £100,000 a year in expensive cities are actually worse off than others on a tenth of that sum in much of the rest of the world. A better measure of wealth is purchasing power parity or PPP, but even that discounts all the extra goods and services that people in high-consumption countries feel they need or deem essential to maintain their way of life or compete in the labour market.
Green Billionaires
If you thought the anti-elitist left always backed green policies, while the billionaire-loving right wanted to despoil the planet, think again. A common argument against the extreme concentration of wealth is that the mega-rich do not spend most of their immense financial fortunes on manufactured products. If the same wealth were redistributed to the poor (and this usually means the relatively poor in high-consumption regions), they would spend it on manufactured goods and thus boost the economy. In reality such a release of financial assets would just trigger inflation as demand for consumer products would rise. If a billionaire owns a vast forest, some may naively conclude he is denying the rest of us of land for more farming, housing or parks. In reality he is just a custodian of natural resource that provides us all with oxygenated fresh air, absorbs carbon-dioxide and plays a vital role in our planet's ecosystem. A populist government may seize such land and allocate it to other purposes for short-term social and economic needs, but a wise administration would take a more holistic and farsighted approach. Naturally, as a counter-argument we would argue the billionaire forest owner probably made his fortune through profits from wasteful industrial processes, but only to meet consumer demand.
Who pollutes? Consumers or producers?
If you drive a car and shop at supermarkets, as most Western European adults do, why should you complain if the industrial processes required to maintain your lifestyle trash the planet. If a chemical processing plant contaminates groundwater destroying not just natural ecosystems, but food crops, we instinctively blame its evil capitalist owners rather than a system that creates massive demand for inexpensive petroleum-based products. Environmental regulations inevitably increase costs. These days the dirtiest industrial processes are outsourced to regions with lower levels of environmental protection, who we then blame for failing to adhere to our high standards. We often seem blissfully unaware of the massive levels of habitat destruction created by our addiction to more and cheaper gadgets with a very short operational lifespan.
Consider the humble example of a compact smartphone. In some ways it has the potential to act as a green device by avoiding unnecessary journeys, but in other ways it's very ungreen. All mobile phones require durable lithium batteries, silicon microchips and coltan capacitors as well as specialised plastics and aluminium. Nearly 13 tonnes of water and 18 square metres of land are required to make a smartphone, with two fifths of the water impact due to pollution at the component manufacturing and assembly phases.
What is Poverty?
It used to mean living on the breadline, on the verge of starvation or lacking the bare essentials of human existence. As our needs and relationship with nature have changed, so has the definition of poverty. A car-less citizen of North American suburbia is much more underprivileged than a Nepalese smallholder with just a horse, although the former may still have a greater carbon footprint as nearly everything she consumes has to be shipped from afar. An unemployed North American may feel alienated without the tools required to compete in her world, but her true poverty isn't the temporary lack of a motor vehicle, but her disconnection from the natural world.
Financial wealth is a mere temporary illusion. It can at best buy us only relative advantage in an endless arms race with diminishing returns. Rather than simply blaming the mega-rich, we should look at our own overconsumption. We cannot solve any fundamental social or environmental problems by misallocating concentrated financial wealth on short-term mass consumption which will only exacerbate existing environmental depredation. We should focus on quality of life and experiences rather than financial worth.
There has always been a thin dividing line between legal and illegal or between therapeutic and recreational drugs. We tend to call bad psychostimulants "drugs" and good officially sanctioned mind-altering pills "medication". While the former are distributed by underworld dealers, praying on our psychological weaknesses and the cool factor, and the latter are aggressively pushed by pharmaceutical multinationals.
Much has been made of the health benefits of recent anti-smoking measures introduced across Europe and North America. Back in the 1960s many smokers wouldn't think twice about lighting up on buses, in cinemas or in the office. A visit to Russia may give you glimpses of our recent past. But back then, pubs closed at 10:30 in much of the UK, teenage binge drinking involved just the occasional student escapade, only 5 to 10% of adults were on prescription medication and despite the buzz around the swinging 60s addiction to hard drugs remained a largely marginal phenomenon. Fast forward 40 years and over 30% of adults and 15% of children are on prescription medication in the UK, including 4 million SSRI addicts, binge drinking regularly blights our streets, offices and homes, over 1 million adults consume crack and millions of aspiring slimmers fill their trolleys with jumbo-packs of Diet Coke, a concoction of addictive caffeine and aspartame. And addiction is not just limited to chemicals. Millions of us are addicted to TV, the Internet, video games, shopping and, more disastrously from a financial view, to gambling. Rather than combat any of these prevalent addictions, except occasional lip service paid to the bogus war on drugs or rhetoric about taking the right medication or partaking only in responsible gambling, the government and its friends in big business urge us to indulge more. Mood-altering drugs are now subsidised by our beloved National Health Service and handed out like sweeties. And unless you've been secluded in a remote Hebridean crofthouse for the last 12 years, you cannot have failed to notice the burgeoning entertainment business with 24/7 pubs, dance halls and casinos appearing even in minor provincial towns and frequented by the nation's vibrant youth the length and breadth of the country. All made easier by laws introduced by our wonderfully progressive government. That's right, the same government that has banished smokers outdoors and spent millions urging us to get nicotine patches from our local GP, is quite happy for our youngsters to drink themselves insane and get high on ecstasy in one of the friendly dancing establishments run by pioneering entrepreneurs in cahoots with the government. The boom spanning from the mid 1990s to 2008 saw the expansion of four related sectors:
financial
retail
bio-medical and pharmaceutical
media and entertainment (often indistinguishable)
In the same period domestic manufacturing of essential items continued to migrate elsewhere. Even call centres, once a saviour for unemployment blackspots, were either outsourced or downscaled as technical support migrated to the Web. Where once school leavers would follow in their father's footsteps or learn a new trade they would pursue for much of their working lives, they now flock to colleges and universities with high aspirations of professional success in the tertiary sector, especially in media, entertainment and finance, only to find themselves changing careers every few years leading to immense insecurity. If you aspire to be a good plumber and work hard without unfair competition, you can succeed and become an essential pillar of your local community. By contrast if you aspire to fame and fortune, you will more likely than not be let down, possibly accepting a few low-paid roles in the advertising industry before discovering you lack certain physical attributes. Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary and all the bogus awareness-raising campaigns, those of not endowed with attractive bodies with a natural gift for smarm and well versed in the art of neurolinguistic programming are at a serious disadvantage. Suddenly being uncool has become a significant handicap warranting a mental health diagnosis. Unable to join in a culture of rampant hedonism? All-night ecstasy-fuelled parties not your scene? Not finely attuned to the latest celebrity gossip? Unable to bear piped techno sound? Then you probably suffer from chronic cultural discordance syndrome and need help. So basically if you're not a recreational addict, we'll help you cope with the stress of alienation from a society hell-bent on fun at all costs by getting you hooked on prescription medication. Ever wondered why people start taking tranquilisers to cope with anxiety, develop obsessive phobias or succumb to eating disorders? More often than not, it's because they feel estranged from an increasingly competitive society. We compete not just in terms of material possessions, physical prowess and performance in culturally valuable skills, but also socially. How many hearts and minds can we win to support our social career. Recently the media have highlighted a number of teenage suicides resulting from cybernetic and real-world bullying, exam stress and a sense of worthlessness. In each case school mates expressed their sorrow through diverse media and emphasised how popular the deceased was. “We don't understand why X took her life. She was such a popular girl. We didn't realise she suffered from depressionâ€. Indeed the next line is implied “Why didn't she seek the (pharmaceutical) help she neededâ€. Not once have I read “X freaked us out. She just didn't fit in. Only the cool deserve a place on this planet†or “We picked on this easy target because she such a loser. Don't blame us for driving her to suicide. We are only reacting to media pressureâ€.
Medicalising Uncoolness
A preoccupation with soft skills implies anyone with a relatively low popularity ranking somehow deserves all their misfortunes and the only way forward is to modify one's behaviour to please the popular cool dudes in one's peer group. Thus if one genuinely can't stand rap music and all the cool dudes in one's peer group like this genre, one has to morph one's tastes or rather desensitise one's aural discernment. We could call this cultural adaptation. One needs to mimic the behaviours and hone the skills that are valued within a given social group, often to the detriment of valuable skills and perfectly functional behaviours that other group members disfavour. Not surprisingly many of us either require some form of medical or therapeutic intervention to keep up with the cooler trendsetting dudes in our neighbourhood and circle of acquaintances. Uncoolness has now become a disease.
As an environmentally friendly, safety-aware, anti-racist, disability-positive, anti- homophobia, feminist, pro-growth, pro-children, pro-happiness party, we oppose all nasty policies that may harm other human beings.
Global minimum salary:
If elected the UK Nice Party will provide everyone in the world with access to an online bank account and transfer 1 bitcoin ( £150) a day to ensure a min. global living standard. Any work will be optional.
Pollution outsourced to Mars:
All industrial activities will move to the Moon and Mars. All resource extraction, manufacturing and shipping processes will be fully automated.
Imagine there were no countries:
We will abolish all border controls and provide free public transport for anyone wishing to move from one region to another.
Free Fertility Treatment:
We will encourage people to have as many children as they like and provide free fertility services for all those unable to conceive naturally.
A Luxury Villa for everyone:
Our automated builders will provide luxury eco-friendly villas for anyone with long or short-term accommodation needs.
Electric Cars for all:
All global citizens over the age of 18 months will be entitled to their own eco- friendly driverless electric car. These cars will automatically recharge to overcome rage anxiety.
Food for all:
We will build gigantic greenhouse satellites to grow practically unlimited supplies of sumptuously juicy health food to meet all tastes.
Sex for all:
We will provide all sexually repressed human beings with free humanoid sex dolls to suit all possible erotic preferences.
Free Gender Surgery and Body Transplants
Anyone dissatisfied with their current gender or body shape will be entitled to free gender realignment surgery or potentially a full body transplant.
No more accidents
We will repeal Isaac Newton's outdated and frankly misanthropic Law of Gravity and replace it a kinder Law of Floating Attraction. Everyone will thus be able to fly, float or walk as they please. Cliff-jumping, sky-diving and skateboarding will be safe leisure pursuits and pigs will be able to fly.
No more sadness
We will add Soma to the water supply to banish all residual forms of sadness or stray critical thoughts.
Caveat
A combined software and hardware upgrade is required to implement the above policies. We will migrate all physical human beings currently on planet earth to cloud servers interfacing with massively multiplayer virtual reality simulation software.
With so much media attention, you'd seriously think depression awareness raising charities would want to answer this very simple question. As the purported biological disease model of depression has now become almost an act of faith, debate now seems to revolve mainly around the relative merits of different forms of treatment. Whether it's medication or intensive psychotherapy, any talk of treatment implies a medical condition comparable with cancer, Alzheimers or broken limbs.
Affluenza
By now it should be clear that higher material living standards do not necessarily lead to healthier or more balanced emotions. We possess more powerful, versatile and efficient electronic gadgets, more cars and can afford more holidays abroad than ever before. Yet this material abundance does not translate into greater happiness. The infamous Germanwings copilot, Andreas Lubitz, had a wealthy family who could afford to pay for expensive flying lessons. By any accounts he enjoyed a privileged jetsetting lifestyle and, if reports are correct, was not averse to performance-boosting and mood-altering medication. Countless multimillionaire celebrities have publicised their depressive episodes. Indeed depression seems largely a concern in opulent consumer cultures and the very concept of melancholy is practically unknown to pre-agrarian societies such as the Amazonian Pirarã people.
Human Emotions
Human emotions are certainly complex, but why would we have evolved to have clearly distressing and dysfunctional mood swings that make it hard for us to address any of the more immediate problems in our life? If your house is on fire along with all your worldly possessions, what should you do? Contemplate the market value of your endangered possessions? Spend the next 60 minutes negotiating with your home insurance company? Laze around watching Youtube videos about how to rebuild your life after a catastrophe? Actually none of the above, the most rational course of action would be to quickly find the safest way out of the building and if possible help anyone else at home to join you. If you fail to act fast in such situations, you may very well die and be forever unable to help anyone else dear to you. Ironically the kind of emotions people experience in the face of death differ markedly from the self-centred feelings of inferiority and introspection that prevail in melancholy. When faced with a life-threatening crisis, all considerations about your relative social standing, your body image, your love life or lack thereof or your financial woes fade into insignificance. If you are penniless, homeless and starving, the relative merits of the latest and greatest gadgets or the number of social media friends you may have, are of little concern, but you will be probably be very glad to have a square meal and a roof over your head.
Most of all people strive for two things in life: A sense of purpose and affection, i.e. we need to have clear idea of what we aim to achieve in life and to feel wanted or rather emotionally rewarded for our efforts. In the simple pre-agrarian societies that prevailed in most of humanity's two hundred thousand year odd history, our sense of purpose was the survival of ourselves and our immediate community while our sense of love came from the close bonds we had with our community. As long as we did our bit to help in the collective struggle for survival, we would be rewarded with love and affection. As many died young from diseases and injuries that can now be easily treated, the mere fact of survival gave us cause for optimism and gratitude to mother nature and our community. Diverse cultures throughout the world value health more than material possessions.
The lottery of life has always been tough. It is clearly unfair that some of us are blessed with better, stronger or more appealing physiques than others and are thus better equipped to attract the best mating partners. However, humanity would never have evolved to its current level of technological excellence if we had not been able to harness different skill-sets. Carrying heavy building materials undoubtedly requires much muscle-power, but several thousand years ago someone took a break from the tiring task of lugging stones and logs around to devise a new more efficient technique for transporting heaving goods. At first heavy slabs of stones were rolled on logs and later logs were cut into wheels on rudimentary carts. We still needed muscle-power to load and unload carts, but mechanical engineers and craftsmen had enabled us to carry more with less effort. Even primitive societies began to value brains as well as brawn, wisdom and experience as well as youthful energy. That explains why many primitive societies cherish their elders, although they may no longer be able to help hands-on with hunting, building and food preparation, their experience and wisdom is invaluable especially in small close-knit communities.
As societies became more and more complex with greater levels of specialisation, trade and competition, more people failed to lead productive lives as their potential skills had been outsourced or devalued by techno-economic progress. Greater opportunities for some always mean fewer opportunities for others. Current socio-economic trends clearly favour flexible and highly mobile labour markets with a rapid turnaround in human resources and skill-sets. These far-reaching changes affect every aspect of our lives from job security to intimate relationships. In our brave new world, the only certainty is perpetual uncertainty, which in turn makes more and more of us dependent on remote organisations just to stay afloat.
Drugs and Psychiatry
While I do not rule out that some genuine neurological conditions may make some of us more susceptible to melancholic thoughts, the primary cause of depression in modern society is a sense of helplessness, i.e. an inability to help oneself overcome a temporary setback, exacerbated by the breakdown of traditional extended family and community networks. Any purported treatment plan that fails to identify the root causes of so much emotional distress is doomed to failure as in any other cases of misdiagnosis. If you have a broken leg, pain killers may help you temporarily cope with unpleasant sensations, but may have long-term side-effects if taken for prolonged periods of time without addressing the root causes of your suffering. Likewise, no rational dentist would treat tooth decay with ibuprofen alone. In an ideal world we would avoid breaking limbs or exposing our teeth to decay, both of which depend on external or environmental factors. However, at least caries and bone fractures are easily identifiable medical conditions. Depression, on the other hand, is a state of mind induced in an incredibly complex organ with an estimated 100 billion neurons.
The over-prescription of anti-depressants is merely a symptom of a more fundamental problem, a shift away from the psycho-social model of emotional distress to a strictly biological model of mental health patients. The former model recognises biological differences that may make some of us more susceptible to mood swings (not least of which is gender), but rather than concentrating on natural phenomena we cannot easily change, it focuses on how the rest of society can help these people become more productive citizens able to help themselves and feel wanted by helping others. The latter approach, currently in vogue, treats individuals as psychiatric subjects and psycho-social stimuli as mere external triggers of underlying conditions. This turns the depressed into victim groups who require more treatment, and thus greater dependence on others, both of which are very likely to exacerbate their sense of helplessness and under-achievement. If a condition is considered a life-long illness caused by an underlying neurological syndrome, then there is much stronger case for lifelong medication.
Many claim that anti-depressants helped them out of the depths of misery or that they would be unable to function without them. Both claims dodge the more important issues of causation. First if you are on psychoactive medication, you cannot easily just go cold turkey without suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, because your brain has already adjusted to your regular chemical stimuli. Second, there is much stronger case for mild anti-depressants for short-term use if the underlying psycho-social causes are addressed, but in these cases we cannot easily identify whether Selective Serotonin Uptake Inhibitors such as Prozac are more effective than placebos or natural remedies such as St John's Wort. The evidence would suggest outcomes are much better for those with better emotional support from friends and family and more rewarding careers who only need temporary treatment. Unfortunately that leaves millions of marginalised individuals who struggle to realise their self-worth through meaningful work (sense of purpose) or relationships (sense of belonging).
