Tag: All in the mind

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Question Time on Rise of UKIP

How would members of the panel deal with the rise in UKIP support among working class whites?

Dame Penelope Guardian Reader

This may surprise you, but on my mother's side I'm of White English working class extraction myself and have some friends and relatives who still live in white working class communities. A great aunt of mine stills reads the obnoxious Daily Mail and has indeed occasionally raised uninformed concerns about the scale and speed of inward migration to our wonderfully progressive and welcoming island. Like many people in her age group she's prone to mild forms of xenophobia, which can be a very debilitating condition if left untreated.

Recent research by the University of Northwest Tescotown, has shown the same kind of recalcitrant thinking that leads some people of Middle-Eastern descent to sympathise with ISIS may trigger reactionary anti-immigration thoughts in those of white Northwest European descent. In the Enlightened Guardian Readers' Party we believe xenophobia sufferers deserve all the help we can give them. That's why my party is committed to not only increasing spending on mental health, but allocating 20% of the mental health budget to combat the kind of unenlightened thinking that leads people to vote UKIP or join ISIS in the first place. I've heard of a range of therapeutic treatments, including a new generation of Selective Critical Thought Inhibitors and intensive Equality and Diversity Training sessions.

Terry Trendy of UK Uncut
We believe the spread of evil racist views among some sections of our wonderfully diverse community is a direct result of the government's shameful cuts in social welfare and mental health services. We clearly have a massive shortage of qualified and trained multicultural awareness therapists in this country and should relax our absurdly strict immigration controls so we can bring in the right professionals to tackle this endemic disease before it's too late.
Polly Pontificator of Spiked Online
I really don't think we have anything to worry about. The previous two speakers clearly overstate the problem. UKIP support is highest among older indigenous White Anglo-Saxon protestants and is not spreading to the new ethnically diverse and internationally minded younger generations. As long as this dying breed of old-timers is kept amused through repeats of 1970s comedy shows, plenty of booze, bingo and Mediterranean cruises, UKIP will remain a minority sport.
Aaron Aardvark of the Green Monster Raving Loony Party
UKIP supporters are just a bunch of primeval climate-change-denying Jeremy CLarkson fans. We would simply withdraw their driving licences until they pass a mandatory Diversity and Environmental Responsibility Awareness Training test.
Categories
All in the Mind Computing Power Dynamics

What the enlightened elites really think of you

Opinion leaders love to use inclusive first person plural forms, like we, us and our, when addressing unenlightened plebs who fail to share their enthusiasm for all things post-modern and mistakenly reminisce about the positive aspects of our recent past, like greater social cohesion, more respect for age and experience, simpler rules of social etiquette and above all a lot less social anxiety.

Yet despite their matey rhetoric, the opinion leading intelligentsia look down on the masses, treating divergent perspectives, not as important contributions to a vibrant democratic debate, but as symptoms of nostalgia, stubborn conservatism, uninformed conjecture, pathological prejudice or simply a lack of enlightenment, i.e. a refusal to embrace the kind of change they see as an inescapable next step in our evolution to a higher form of humanity. To oppose the winds of change, in the eyes of the neoliberal elite, is to uphold everything that is bad about our past.

Some may look at other good things that seemed better just a generation or two ago, like an extensive railway network that connected most small towns, more countryside, higher home ownership and local shops within easy walking distance that sold everything ordinary people needed and not just booze and snacks. Instead we have motor cars, more roads, smaller houses, more out-of-town retail parks, cheap foreign holidays and a wealth of electronic gadgets unthinkable to most of us just half a century ago. In short we are increasingly disconnected from our immediate surroundings. Few of us truly understand all the complex industrial processes that underly our globally interconnected high-tech lives.

Nobody voted to close down the last television set factory in the UK or outsource the production of electric kettles to South East Asia. It just happened due to circumstances beyond the control of humble citizens. Some may have protested against factory closures or job losses, but politicians were powerless in the face of the global steamroller, a force set in motion 4 centuries ago by the then expanding Dutch, French and British mercantile empires.

Yet our liberal opinion leaders would like us to believe that everything good about our times has been won through a long democratic struggle of progressive forces against reactionary conservatism. Progressivism has come to embody the notion that all change towards a more globally interdependent world is good, and while conservative naysayers may win temporary reprieves, they will in the end be proven wrong, i.e. we may debate the pace of change, but never the need for it.

As all amateur etymologists know, democracy is just an anglicized form of the Greek δημοκÃÂÂÂαÄία or people power. Most of us like to think of it as a good thing, but know deep down our politicians have their hands tied by various external forces such as the global economy, transnational organisations, banks and various other vested interests. However, true power does not come without responsibility and true responsibility is impossible without a clear, accurate and detailed understanding of the way the world works. The elites see democracy not so much as an ideal to which we should aspire, but an effective means of change management, i.e. by consent if we can, by force if we must (to paraphrase Madeleine Albright's summary of US foreign policy). As long as popular desires can be placated through bread and circuses, the spectacle of democratic debate and elections gives people a sense of participation in the decision-making process. Indeed the global elites are sometimes quite happy for people to vote for policies at odds with their long-term plans. If a country or region happens to possess key resources, their local democratic institutions may be allowed to provide better services and defend traditional ways of life or customs at variance with the new global superculture. One may think of oil-rich countries like Norway or Saudi Arabia that in very different ways adapt the concept of global governance to meet very local needs. In Norway this means protecting the fishing and whaling communities while ensuring everyone enjoys a high minimum standard of living, while the same principle of subsidiarity in Saudi Arabia means keeping alive the semblance of a theocracy. The global elite can tolerate such diversity as long as it is manageable and its relative success or divergence can be attrbuted to local factors. However, like all ruling classes, the new global elite cannot tolerate any organised group of people powerful enough to challenge their hegemony. Thus the lucky inhabitants of Norway, Singapore or Sydney are afforded higher material lifestyles in exchange for loyalty with the New World order. However, concentrations of highly skilled and well-educated workers present a particular challenge to ruling elites. Mission-critical professionals need to be culturally separated from the masses through international professional networks and a more refined variant of global consumer culture.

Modern society depends more than ever on technology that requires a complex sequence of industrial processes. No modern urban settlement could function without electricity, a sanitised water supply, transportation links, telecommunications and raw materials extracted from mines, forests or oil wells thousands of miles away. Yet few of us have more than rudimentary grasp of the underlying sciences. We have all come to rely on technocrats, yet complain whenever technical hitch, such as a power cut, burst water pipe or congested transport network, causes widespread disruption. Our modern lives would be unimaginable without electricity, clean water and rapid transportation. In their absence we would be disconnected from the mediasphere (cinema, radio, TV and now the Internet), unable to operate most household appliances, unable to cook or wash and only have limited range of local food available in shops. City states like Singapore would become ghost towns, if the rest of the world imposed an embargo. This hyper-dependence infantilises us by both raising our material expectations and denying us the freedom to fend ourselves. Why should the labour of a Vietnamese production line worker be worth just a fraction of a London advertising executive? The latter merely promotes sales of goods manufactured by the former with technology neither fully comprehend.

The managerial classes like to ridicule the naive opinions of the masses, usually accusing their amateur naysayers of fruitcakery (applicable to all opinions outwith the range of permissible dissent), religious myopia (if someone opposes three-parent babies), racism (if they oppose extreme labour mobility), homophobia (if they oppose gay marriage) or conspiracy theorism (if someone suggests the Iraq War was really about oil) or simply ludditism (if someone opposes nuclear power or hydraulic fracturing). This marginalising technique is most effective if issues can be isolated and analysed in the context of mainstream assumptions about almost everything else. Nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing seem so much more necessary if we plan to continue our high-consumption happy-motoring lifestyle. If you challenge the very foundation of modern economics, continuous material growth, then you risk biting the hands that feed you. If retail sales decline as people stop buying superfluous consumer goods, then not only do many retail workers lose their jobs, but the banking, marketing and advertising industries suffer too.

Consider the concocted debate on unbalanced mass immigration, where the establishment poses on the internationalist left, but sometimes pretends to share the concerns of indigenous workers. Some believe public concern about extreme labour mobility is fuelled by irrational prejudice against foreigners, rather than job security and social cohesion. By dismissing opposition to mass immigration as xenophobic and reactionary, the business elites can dodge real issues caused by a massive oversupply of unskilled and semi-skilled labour, i.e. de-skilling of indigenous working classes, disappearance of stable jobs with easy hiring and firing of human resources and dwindling class solidarity. If you have a stable long-term job and are fully integrated in your local community, you may join trade union and care more about the welfare of other workers in your neighbourhood. By contrast, if you only have temporary work contract in another country your main concerns are your pay cheques and staying out of trouble. However, rational debate on the subject is often difficult because mainstream opinion leaders are committed to economic growth at all costs, which relies on a dynamic labour market and bigger profits.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Why Labour will not bring about a fairer Britain

In less than 5 years, the Labour left seemed to have forgotten the sheer treachery of the last Labour administration. Rather than focus their attention on the real ruling classes sitting in corporate boardrooms or relaxing on Caribbean yachts, they prefer to demonise the bunch of overgrown public school boys and girls in the current governmental management team. You see national governments don't really have much power these days. Big decisions are made elsewhere. More important, to any rational and emotionally detached observer New Labour and the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition are just two brands of the same product marketed at different sections of the voting public. The Conservatives like to appeal to the common-sense middle classes, a demographic that has shrunk considerably since the 2008 banking crisis. While Labour hold on to some of their core traditional working class vote in Wales and parts of Northern England, they appeal increasingly to the Guardian-reading managerial classes as well as ethnic minorities and welfare dependents who feel uneasy about Conservative rhetoric on tougher immigration controls or welfare cuts. Ironically the LibDems share much of the same demographic, but are tarnished by their support for the ConDem Coalition government. This leaves much of the tradional working and lower middle classes without a voice. Their jobs have been outsourced and their wages compressed, while their taxes fund massive corporate largesse and social engineering. For now, UKIP is filling this vacuum, but are unlikely to challenge the hegemony of the same bankers who corrupted New Labour or address the fundamental economic imbalances that causes much unbalanced migration. The Greens appeal mainly to wishful-thinking Bohemian intellectuals disaffected with New Labour, but offer an unworkable mix of high-tax and high-spending neo-keynsiansian and environmental measures that could only work in a zero-growth steady-state economy unable to fund the welfare state in its current guise. Let's just look at the some of the policies the last Labour government forgot to detail in its 1997 manifesto.

  1. Tuition fees, within months of being elected Labour reversed its previous opposition to replacing university grants with loans. The old system worked when only 15 to 20% of school leavers went to university, but the employment market now requires most office workers to have a degree. Indeed as the further education sector grows, degrees are devalued, but without a degree many young people cannot even get on the career ladder, unless they turn their minds to practical manual jobs. It would have made much more sense to keep grants for STEM and medicine students and for top-performing students from poorer backgrounds in other academic subjects, while withdrawing subsidies from non-essential degrees and encouraging more to learn practical trades.
  2. Bombed Serbia (1998). Throughout the 1990s we witnessed ongoing civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. The Western Media had decided to blame it on the Serbian leadership, which served as a convenient test case for the new humanitarian interventionism, especially as many of the alleged victims of Serbian nationalism were Muslims, whose votes Labour would later rely on. Blair could then pose as the saviour of Kosovan Albanians. We now know the death toll between rival groups was much more evenly balanced than presented in the mainstream Western media and the purported Kosovan freedom fighters (KLA) were armed and funded by the CIA.
  3. Supported US destabilisation of Middle East with regular depleted uranium airstrikes on Iraq. The Blair government remained loyal to US foreign policy in the Middle East, joining regular airstrikes over Iraq to enforce the No-Fly Zone imposed in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.
  4. Let banks issue loans to low-paid and unemployed to boost consumer spending while manufacturing migrated abroad.
  5. Sold gold when at its historical low in 2001 to boost US dollar
  6. Allowed massive expansion of retail and entertainment sector.
  7. Failed to train millions of long-term unemployed people to do all those essential jobs that any country needs.
  8. Subsidised low-pay through working family tax credits.
  9. Hid real unemployment by broadening definition of disabilities and encouraging more young people to undertake useless degrees. Since since 1997 we have seen a proliferation of pointless non-productive managerial, marketing and surveillance jobs. Few jobs are directly associated with the things people really need. If you want to have your imported washing machine fixed, in our brave New World you'll probably call a service company who will dispatch a ready trained technician authorised to identify and possibly replace an inexpensive component. For every hand-on tradesperson or engineer, there appear to be many more pen-pushers and client relations managers. Official unemployment may be much higher in Spain, but at least Spain not only exports more food and cars, but has a booming tourist industry. However, if we look not at the official jobless count, but at the number of people with a real full-time job, then over 8 million UK adults of working age are not in employment, education or training or classified as stay-at-home parents. The UK also has the highest number of part-time employed workers who rely on tax credits to make end meet.
  10. Allowed a massive rise in unbalanced immigration leading to a huge oversupply of cheap labour and a population rise of 5 million in just 13 years. Since the end of WW2, the UK had accommodated many immigrants from its former empire. However, with many Britons migrating to Australia, Canada or the USA, net migration averaged under 30,000 a year and for a few years in the mid 1970s and early 80s was subzero. Since 1997 these numbers changed rapidly, as migratory pressures and cheap travel enabled millions to seek their fortunes in wealthier countries. At the same time, British workers lacked both key practical skills such as plumbing, bricklaying or catering and incentives to accept low-paid jobs, leaving a gap in the market for keen young labourers willing to work antisocial hours on little more than the minimum wage. This set the scene for Labour's 2003 decision to allow workers from Eastern European countries the same rights as any other EU countries. Since 2004 net migration has consistently topped 200,000 a year, dipping only briefly 2008 and 2011 and the country's population has risen from 58 million in 1997 to 64 million in 2014. Whole employment sectors, especially catering, construction and food processing, came to be dominated by new migrants. Yet New Labour pretended nothing had changed. Immigration had long been a side issue. While most politicians agreed balanced and gradual migration could benefit society, they now had to defend rapid and increasingly unbalanced migration, i.e. although many Britons migrated to the rest of Europe, they were mainly skilled professionals, English language teachers or retirees. As the New Labour decade progressed, more and more ordinary voters began to realise a disconnect between politician's rhetoric about building a new global future, and reality on the ground where whole neighbourhoods were transformed and job security became a distant memory. While the metropolitan elite discussed equality, diversity and anti-racism, the marginalised indigenous working classes were more concerned with job security and social cohesion.
  11. Allowed property prices to rise exponentially to over 10x average salaries. While official retail inflation remained low, housing accounted for a growing percentage of people's outgoings. Indeed Labour continued to sell off council housing stock to housing associations. As the number of low-paid and under-employed households continued to rise, the government's housing benefit rose to over £20 billion a year. In much of the South East of England, a married couple on average wages (approx. 25 to 30k) could no longer aspire to buy a house worthy of calling home.
  12. Obsession with growth led the UK to increase its carbon footprint largely through consumption of goods manufactured elsewhere. While British consumers continued to buy cars, washing machines, furniture, electronic entertainment gadgets and other household accessories, manufacturing jobs drifted abroad as UK workers proved unable to compete with East Asia. However, the service sector, especially retail, media and entertainment, kept expanding. Every week would bring news of factory closures and supermarket openings.
  13. Supported US occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. Within months of the tragic 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, New Labour joined forces with the US to attack Afghanistan, initially to hunt down the perpetrators of this dastardly act of terrorism, but latterly to promote women's rights and democracy. While they succeeded in killing tens of thousands and capturing eventually Osama Bin Laden in neighbouring Pakistan, the Afghan civil war continues to rage with much of the country still controlled by the Taliban.
  14. Deregulated booze and gambling. While Labour banned smoking, they made it much easier for people to get drunk and gamble away their devalued salaries. Indeed, not only did New Labour allow a massive expansion of casinos, they allowed the gaming industry to advertise on prime time TV.
  15. Enforced PFI contracts in the health service. Labour has long claimed to be the party of the NHS, yet under New Labour, the preferred way to fund new hospitals and facilities was through Private Finance Initiatives, which for short-term financial gain will burden future generations with £200 billion of debt.
  16. Expanded surveillance and tried to introduce identity card
  17. Supported US occupation of Iraq. Despite the largest demonstration in British history, with some 2 million travelling to Central London to protest the imminent US-led invasion of Iraq, the Labour government sent British armed forces to
  18. Oversaw massive rise in prison population. While nowhere near US levels of incarceration, England now has the highest imprisonment rate in Western and Central Europe.
  19. Passed 2007 Mental Health Act leading to massive rise in number of adults sectioned (detained) without consent. Note how mainstream politicians of all hues have championed mental health awareness, while in reality mental illness spending has continued to rise apace with the diagnostic rate for personality disorders. Yet few have linked this trend with other forms of invasive surveillance.
Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

How to Help the Needy

At this time of year, we are supposed to turn our minds to the wider community around us, so everyone can enjoy a Merry Christmas and restore their faith in humanity. People in the UK seem to have three competing personas.

  • The do-gooder: always thankful of one's relative financial privilege and eager to share some wealth with charities or maybe with less fortunate neighbours or relatives.
  • The reveller: focused on having a good time and spending as much of their cash as possible on lavish indulgence, expensive clothes, holidays, gadgets, new cars, booze and other recreational drugs.
  • The obsessive compulsive loner: ungrateful and cynical about overhyped festivities, worried that everyone else is having a better time.

Amazingly these traits often coexist in the same person. One may buy an expensive present to keep a relative happy, get drunk at the office party and spend Christmas day barely tolerating relatives concerned only with pop culture. Why are so many people so miserable when so many others exhibit so much joy and goodwill ?

Advertisers and peer pressure urge us to max out our credit cards or contemplate payday loans to ensure nobody in our immediate circle of friends and family feels deprived of the latest fashion accessories and gadgets. Once upon a time, a young boy would cherish a brand new Meccano set, a remote-controlled toy car or, if he was really lucky, a bicycle. Today, anything worth less than the latest and greatest game console or a top-of-the-range electronic smartphone is bound to disappoint.

Yet this Christmas thousands of tonnes of uneaten roast turkey and vegetables will end up in brown recycling bins. Hundreds of thousands of unwanted presents will be sold on ebay and the same Chinese container ships that carried many of our Christmas presents will return with plastic and cardboard packaging. Most presents will have a short life span. Some gifts will last just a few months or maybe just weeks or even just days before they join a pile of assorted junk destined for some hapless charity shop customer. Yet leading economists worry when retail sales fall and rejoice when people buy more junk.

The latest craze among the better educated click-happy middle classes is to order distant friends and relatives a Christmas hamper. Back in the day, local community groups would distribute donated grocery items to old and disabled people in the neighbourhood. Now, hampers have become a multi-million pound business and recipients are often those who least need these festive treats. Apparently everyone loves more chocolate, cheese, Christmas pudding and wine with their fridge and pantry overflowing with special treats. As Christmas loses touch with its Christian roots, it has become a huge collective shopping spree of atomised individuals wrapped up in their own tiny social networks, eager to demonstrate both their outward generosity and their feigned merriment. Post-modern society frowns on frugality and sobriety.

Marketing agencies have long been aware of our dual needs to exhibit altruism and indulge our material desires. As you shop, charity workers will encourage you to donate some of your earnings to some spurious cause whose true agenda you ill-understand, but whose worthiness you dare not question. So for every £100 you spend on fashion accessories, multimedia consumption devices, branded fragrances and so on, you may allocate £1 to the marketing campaign of what sounds like a good cause, but don't really know how much of your £1 will actually help the vulnerable individuals the charity claims to help.

Charities, or the third sector as some call it, are now a multibillion pound business. They have chief executive officers just like corporations and often receive billions from very profitable businesses. In many ways they supplement the welfare state, but because of their allegedly philanthropic nature they enjoy tax exemption. How could former prime minister Tony Blair pay just 3% tax on his earnings of £12 million in 2012? By setting up a set of charities and business consultancy, he could legally claim most of revenue either as business expenses or as part of a non-profit endeavour.

However, many charities have become household names in the do-gooder brand awareness market. Most of us have relatives or friends who have died of cancer, so any charity claiming to fund research into cures for cancer must surely merit our support. However, pharmaceutical multinationals and the growing biomedical business have vested interests not so much to find a cure, but to expand their markets.

A couple of years ago I had to work on the payments gateway of the new Web site of a major UK charity, Amnesty International, an organisation I once greatly sympathised with and regularly donated to. They had outsourced their Web site redevelopment to a Central London digital agency, housed in the same building as Saatchi & Saatchi. The digital agency shared open-plan offices with a much larger marketing agency whose clients included Shell Oil, Novartis, AstraZenaca, McDonalds and The British Heart Foundation. Being associated with Amnesty International must have been a massive a PR coup for company busy marketing fast food and diabetes drugs to growing East Asian market. Amnesty had become a brand with a message barely distinguishable from other commercial brands, a kind of horror story that invited you to donate to good causes. Why would Amnesty International hire an expensive marketing agency to do something many budding unemployed Web developers could have done for a fraction of the cost? In another corner of Central London under AKQA's plush offices is the UK headquarters of Save the Children. AKQA is one of the world's largest advertising outfits. They advertise everything from booze to video-games, cars to luxury holidays. The very same marketing geniuses that urge you through clever social media campaigns to buy your 10 year old son a Sony PlayStation 4 complete with 18-rated games, also want to save him from potential child abuse. Once upon a time, child abuse meant extreme deprivation and/or negligence often combined with serious physical assault. Whether these extreme cases have become more or less common is a separate debate, but these days most parents are very mindful that any attempt to enforce discipline by overly coercive means is very likely to land them in trouble with myriad agencies overseeing their children's progress. As a result of family breakdown and the information technology revolution, children are increasingly cocooned in their bedrooms in touch with a parallel universe of youth-oriented social networks, into which the likes of AKQA have invested big time. A parent's role has been reduced to that of a breadwinner and enabler. If you don't buy your kids XYZ gadgets, you are a bad parent, unless you are lucky enough to live in an isolated community where children still socialise by more traditional means.

If you really want to help tackle the causes of misery and hardship, why not just opt out of the consumer rat race, invite a lonely neighbour around and stop trying to keep up with the proverbial Joneses.

Categories
All in the Mind

Ten Trendy Actions which are very bad for the Environment

  1. Economic growth: Once people have clean water, a healthy diet, adequate housing with plumbing and electricity, meaningful employment, access to modern healthcare and a few other essential personal possessions, all additional consumption does very little to improve life expectancy or happiness. Yet our GDP growth drains many finite resources that could be better used by others suffering real poverty or be saved for future generations. Overconsumption, generating vast oceans of rubbish, is currently the biggest threat to our eco-system. We should focus on ensuring eveyone has the basics rather than artificially boosting the economy through superfluous retail therapy.
  2. Buying a more fuel-efficient car: If you really can't live without a car you may feel buying a newer and more fuel-efficient model may help save the planet. Unfortunately two thirds of the pollution that an average European vehicle creates takes place in the multistage resource-extraction and manufacturing process. By buying cars more regularly, you may well boost your country's GDP but for a marginal gain in fuel economy, you contribute to massive environmental destruction thousands of miles from home. Worse still, a more fuel-efficient vehicle will encourage you to drive more rather than consider other options like walking, cycling, public transport or simply avoiding unnecessary journeys.
  3. Having more than two children (per woman): Many countries may have undergone a demographic transition from traditional large families to one or two child families, yet the world's population is still rising. Most estimates predict a peak global population between 8 and 10 billion human beings sometime between 2050 and 2100. The rapid rise from just 1 billion in 1825 to 2 billion around 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 6 billion in 1998 and now over 7 billion has happened largely due to two parallel developments. First huge advances in sanitation and medicine have dramatically lowered infant mortality, so most children now survive even in the poorest African countries. Second the fossil fuel revolution has provided a plentiful source of cheap non-renewable energy helping us overcome previous constraints on the earth's human carrying capacity as envisaged by Thomas Malthus. We have witnessed two centuries of rapid technological progress, but until recently only 10–15% of the world's population participated in mass consumerism. While we may be able to survive with a low-consumption Tanzanian standard of living, hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians, South Americans and even Subsarahan Africans are transitioning towards more Western European consumption patterns. Car ownership is currently growing at a much faster rate than human population. Nigeria alone now has 180 million inhabitants, mainly in a few large conurbations. Yet its fertility rate is unlikely to drop to replacement level any time soon without Chinese-style coercive one-child famility policies. If its economy and population continue to grow at their current rate, then the vast oil reserves in the Niger Delta may just suffice for local needs. Some claim education and female emancipation can reduce the birth rate to sustainable levels. However, greater per-capita consumption usually accompanies such a transition. Some fear an ageing population, but with increasing automation and growing unemployment, this may well be an opportunity to build massive care sector that can almost guarantee employment for millions of jobless young adults. We should welcome a natural decrease in population, but fear only the disastrous human consquences of our failure to deal with two-edge sword of skyrocketing consumption and a record global population.
  4. Obessing with cleanliness and presentation: Yes, we all need to wash to keep our bodies fresh and prevent diseases from spreading, but our modern obsession with appearances often does more harm than good. Not only do washing machines and irons consume vast amounts of electricity (typically 2kWh each), mostly generated by gas, coal or nuclear power plants, but your washing detergent along with 50 litres of water per full load ends up in a local sewage plant, where it has to be treated before being dumped in a natural body of water.
  5. Holidaying abroad: We all love to enrich our lives with a taste of foreign cultures, stunning scenery, historic architecture, good food, sunny weather, beautiful beaches and exciting nightlife. However, cheap long-distance travel is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until recently, most working class Europeans just went to the nearest seaside resort or embarked on a brief excursion to the rural hinterland away from urban pollution. Air travel has made the world a smaller place and transformed thousands of kilometres of coastline and thousands of small fishing villages into monotonous open-air shopping malls, tanning lounges and nightclubs. As a result many areas of Spain, Portugal, France and Greek Islands have been colonised by bland global consumer culture and bear little semblance to their host countries' traditional cultures.
  6. Unbalanced mass migration: While many of us pay lip service to cultural diversity, the trend is clearly towards cultural homogenisation. The more people migrate from one cultural region to another, the more they lose contact with their cultural heritage and embrace global consumer culture. Most pro-migration arguments focus on short term economic growth rather than long-term socio-environmental stability. If people were migrating away from overburdened high-consumption regions to live a simpler life in a more environmentally sustainable way in a low-consumption country, we may be able to temporarily justify unbalanced migration. Likewise, positive immigration can be sustained for a limited period in spacious and resources-rich countries, like Australia, Argentina, Canada, Russia or the USA (before it became a net importer of energy and food), as long as the growing population does not unduly endanger delicate ecosystems. However, most recent migration has been away from relatively poor countries to spendthrift countries. Worse still much has been from warmer to colder countries that require greater indoor heating for much of the year. As long as migration is driven by artificial economic incentives, it will lead to greater per capita consumption, while promoting the wrong kind of development in countries of mass emigration, i.e. a brain drain and greater dependence on trade with wealthier countries. Yet current levels of immigration to richer countries cannot address the fundamental socio-economic imbalances that caused people to migrate in the first place. Ironically, growing consumer demand for imports from richer countries leads to greater environmental depredation in poorer countries with lower environmental standards. While many trendy lefties consider any opposition to mass immigration racist, many pro-migration arguments are incredibly prejudiced, e.g. assuming cheap third world workers should care for the elderly and disabled in wealthy countries because locals loathe such menial jobs. One wonders who should look after the old and sick in poorer countries. In an ideal world we would have a balanced cultural exchange between different communities. Indeed the technology exists for us to share life-enhancing ideas with other communities around the world without having to leave our home region. Ironically, tougher immigration controls are not the only way to redress this imbalance, shrinking overheating economies may be a better long-term solution. If we fix the underkying economic imbalances and remove the need for economic migration, we could let people move freely. Alas we are a long way from such an ideal world.
  7. Outsourcing industry: We all hate oil refineries, chemical processing plants, gargantuan assembly lines, pollution, inhumane working conditions and child labour, at least in our immediate backyard. Unless you retreat to a low-tech self-sufficient farmstead, which would require a lot of hard work, your lifestyle depends on a colossal industrial complex. The short-term economic gains of cheaper goods due to lower wages are offset by greater environmental cost of shipping goods half-away around the globe and the loss of key skillsets essential to our modern way of life. Worse still, as factories have closed in the UK, retail outlets have mushroomed everywhere from Lands' End to John O'Groats. Consequently our activities cause more pollution than they did in the grim 1960s, but it largely been transferred to the Asian Pacific Rim and Africa.
  8. Health and Safety Regulations: Common sense goes a long way, but many health and safety regulations actually obstruct simple maintenance tasks and waste finite public resources. I have been prevented from climbing on a desk to change lightbulb in a local council office where I worked temporarily, because their insurance policy for such tasks only covered trained electricians. As a result, a council technician had to drive 10 miles to change a lightbulb and the council paid me for two hours in which I could not work.
  9. Stupidity: Yes, I know stupidity is fun. Why walk to the shops, when you can show off your new car? Why watch a movie at home, when you can drive to a new cinema complex twenty miles away? Why cycle in wet and windy weather, when you can drive to your local gym? Why install a filter to purify tap water, when you can buy bottle water? Why wash nappies, when you can buy disposable nappies? Why drink coffee from a reusable flask, when you can advertise your favourite caffeinated milk brand in a disposable paper cup? Many people know their actions damage the environment, but other social pressures take precedence. Now try explaining to a 19 year old lad that he should not drive his new girlfriend to a restaurant, but rather they should both catch a bus or cycle.
  10. Ignorance: This has never been quite as trendy as stupidity, but is still surprisingly widespread. However, the worst form of ignorance is credulity, especially when it comes to the kind of eco-friendly advertising clearly geared to pseudo intellectuals. These trendy ignoramuses like to believe they can help African coffee growers by choosing a fairtrade brand at Starbucks or tackle clean water scarcity by buying Volvic-branded bottles of flavoured water. Their actions merely help the marketing of trendy brands and further subjugate the developing world to foreign multinationals.
Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Trouble with the NHS

How disease-mongering turns patients into customers

The closest thing modern Britain has to a unifying state religion is universal admiration of the beloved National Health Service or NHS for short, although its remit has expanded considerably since its early days when it aimed to provide essential healthcare to all irrespective of income. As a proportion of national wealth NHS spending has risen from 3.5% in 1960 to over 9% now, that's over 18% of government spending. The fastest rise occurred in the frenetic spending spree of the early years of the new millennium, indeed as recently as 2000 it accounted for just 5% of a smaller GDP, see UK Public Spending . And yet perversely many attribute the failings of the NHS to cutbacks rather than misplaced priorities, crippling bureaucracy and an obsession with targets. As a result of the pervasice tickbox culture millions of older and vulnerable patients are given immune-system-suppressing flu vaccines whether or not they want them or address any of the real medical issues a patient may have, while many real life-threatening diseases are either misdiagnosed or go undetected. It must seem ironic that elderly patients are left in death pathways, while younger NHS customers receive cosmetic surgery such as breast enhancements to combat the perceived curses of low self-esteem and depression. The growing number of clinically obese adults may be entitled to expensive gastric bands because their addiction to high-fat foods is allegedly beyond their self-control, while old people die in freezing homes because their neighbours could not be bothered to check. We have the technology to keep people technically alive in a semi-vegetative state until they are brain dead and to appease any perceived physiological inadequacy. Gender realignment treatment used to be a rather extreme measure, eligible for public funding only in rare cases of genuine hermaphroditism. Nonetheless, as surgical techniques improved many, clearly unhappy with their anatomical gender, opted for private sex change surgery. One Iraqi-born millionaire even underwent two gender reassignment operations, and many others have suffered from greater emotional turmoil because of dissatisfaction with the outcome of their life-changing surgery than they ever had when they felt trapped in the wrong body. Yet despite widespread public scepticism of its effectiveness, this invasive surgery is now available on the NHS and to suggest otherwise is now deemed transphobic, a term coined on the back of homophobic. Another growth sector is the murky domain of mental health. According a Nuffield Trust report, mental disorders cost the English NHS £12 billion in 2010, more than double the total spend on cancer. A longer term but welcome trend since mid 20th century has been longer life expectancy and a greater survival rate from diseases that would until recently have been irredeemably terminal, so one way or another health spending has risen in most wealthy countries.

The last European elections even saw the emergence of a new party, the National Health Action Party (NHA), which fielded candidates only in the London region. It has a very active campaigning team both online and among London-based NHS staff. They not only oppose privatisation, but also all cutbacks in NHS spending. This stance appeals to a large cross-section of left-leaning public opinion. However, their simplistic analysis has one small flaw. Government spending on healthcare has increased dramatically since 2001 and has continued to grow even under Conservative and Liberal Democrat alliance. The figures are publicly available. In real terms UK healthcare spending doubled from 2000 to 2010 and has continued to grow very modestly since, currently some £130 billion or 18% of public expenditure or 9.1% of GDP. To be honest this is largely in line with healthcare spending in countries with comparable living standards. But mileage or rather value for money varies. The USA has the highest level of healthcare spending in the world, but yet many much poorer countries have a higher life expectancy. Most notably Cuba and the US have the same mean life expectancy, but in US dollar terms US healthcare spending is astronomically higher. In the US an estimated 100,000 people die every year of inappropriate prescription medication, competing with Unintentional Injuries and Alzheimer's disease for the fifth most common cause of death.

Clearly if we expect our health service not only to cope with the challenges of an ageing population, but also to meet growing demand for lifestyle medicine (cosmetic or performance-enhancing treatment), we must be prepared to pay for it. The recent rise in lifestyle medicine, especially cosmetic surgery, has transformed beauty and wellbeing from gifts of nature into commodities. As a result fairly average imperfections, from misaligned noses and teeth, undersized breasts, balding hair, erectile dysfunction, once considered just unfortunate facts of life, are now treated as major causes of depression and prime targets for medical intervention.

That means we need to decide as a society which categories of healthcare we should socialise and which categories are best left to personal discretion (or in my humble opinion actively discouraged as they destroy social cohesion by emphasising the power of money to transform one's body beyond essential medical need). Certainly if someone endures a tragic accident or succumbs to a debilitating disease, it seems very unfair for their prognosis to depend on their bank balance or ability to pay into a generous health insurance scheme. Socialised healthcare means if you fall victim to injuries or illness beyond your reasonable control, then society as a whole will pick up the bill. However, by redefining physiological imperfections and emotional distress as illnesses, the multibillion pound medicalisation business has significantly boosted healthcare costs. As these costs spiral out of control, we risk throwing the proverbial baby away with the bath water. We all need essential medical care at times in our life. If we are generally healthy, this may mean just regular checkups with the odd vaccination (another controversial topic) and for women a short stay in hospital to give birth. Natural human diversity means we are not all blessed with perfect bodies or physical performance potential.

However, socialised medicine also requires social cohesion and solidarity among the different groups within society. While we delegate responsibility to medical professionals, at all times they must serve our needs, not those of disease-mongering pharmaceutical multinationals or invasive state apparatuses. We should not become mere customers or guinea pigs for medical experiments, but be empowered patients, who just want an honest diagnosis and impartial evaluation of medical options. If we expect others to subsidise our healthcare, then we have a responsibility to look after ourselves as best we can. If I decide to engage in a high risk activity for my own pleasure, it seems reasonable that I take out additional insurance. Why should others foot the bill for expensive restorative surgery, if some daredevil motorcyclist decides to jump over 10 double decker buses ? The point is as medical technology evolves, we must clearly define genuine medical needs, otherwise we will just sleepwalk into the collapse of the National Health Service as we knew it and healthcare will be just a profit-making business. Indeed this is already happening albeit underwritten by taxpayers and banks. As Professor Allyson Pollock reminds us "Virgin landed a £630 million contract for community mental healthcare, with no previous experience, while RBS, Serco and Carillion, to name but a few, are raking in billions in taxpayer funds for leasing out and part-operating PFI hospitals, community clinics and GP surgeries. A private company now runs an NHS hospital. US private medical companies are now involved in the privatisation process, such as HCA and United Health. HCA is in a joint venture with University College Hospital London, where it provides cancer treatment, but only for those who can pay. Both New Labour and the current Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition have turned the NHS into a front for a rapacious biomedical business.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing

Twitter Mob: Don’t Blame the Users

How lobbies have turned consumer groups into victims

Twitter does not exactly lend itself to critical analysis. I doubt many people have changed their minds on anything after reading a mere 140 character tweet. Such short messages tend to reinforce existing prejudices and opinions and often build on concerted advertising and awareness-raising campaigns. You can tweet a link to an article, but usually only those sympathetic to your cause will read it. Twitter also encourages conformity as nobody wants to be unpopular or offend their virtual friends. It's fine to support widely publicised causes, but not to voice views that others may easily misinterpret. When issues are simplified, many will readily interpret any divergence from the mainstream view as an act of tribal betrayal, like a crowd of Glasgow Rangers supporters spotting a loner wearing a Celtic scarf.

As I often take nonconformist stances, I've grown used to the devious tactics employed by seasoned opinion leaders, such as dismissing any embarrassing evidence against their case as mere conspiracy theories. However, another very effective tactic is to champion the rights of consumer groups to consume the very product or service that some dissident suggests may harm them.

By this logic, nobody could have ever exposed the harmful effects of cigarette smoking simply because millions of consumers enjoyed, or rather believed they enjoyed, this product. Smoking relieves stress and helps people befriend other smokers. It often serves as a great socialising tool and an act of defiance against an increasingly invasive nanny state. Indeed there is much evidence suggesting nicotine acts as an antidepressant, which might explain why so many smokers find it so hard to quit. This vice may be a little outmoded today, but fifty years ago non-smokers had to tolerate smokers at work, in their extended family, neighbourhood and in many public spaces like pubs, cafés and public transport. Some would complain, but generally had to keep quiet in many everyday social situations. Indeed some would have to claim to suffer from a special medical condition to persuade a friend to refrain from smoking in their presence. Yet as evidence mounted that smoking has all sorts of nasty side effects, smokers began to quit and non-smokers became much more proactive in reclaiming smoke-free areas. More recently smokers have been turned into outcasts, often having to escape outdoors on cold rainy days to indulge in their filthy habit.

Fast forward to the 21st century and antidepressants are not only a multi-billion pound industry, just as tobacco was, but they are actively endorsed by celebrities and state-sponsored healthcare institutions as the primary treatment for the growing number of people who feel stressed or depressed. Yet as smokers, alcoholics and recreational drug users know, mind-altering chemicals may offer you a temporary escape from your melancholy, but they come at a huge price in terms of long-term ill-health and some rather unpleasant neuro-psychological side effects. This change of public opinion, from the largely psycho-social model of emotional distress to the mainly biological model, is largely the result of a four decade long campaign to associate in the public mind a chemical imbalance with people's nonfunctional states of mind. Human feelings have been medicalised, although there remains scant proof of a link between natural serotonin levels and state of mind. Many substances we ingest can affect our natural mood-regulating compounds (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine). It should come as little surprise that many diagnosed with clinical depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD etc.., have a bad diet and have indulged in booze and other recreational drugs. Often bad lifestyle choices arise from a downward spiral of emotional insecurity and a tendency to seek solace in anything that turns your mind away from the immediate cause of distress. As our expectations for higher material goods and personal achievements grow, so does our sense of inadequacy and isolation, when we fail to reach these goals. We are not all blessed with perfect athletic bodies, excellent hand-eye coordination and extraordinary musical talent. We will not all be premier league footballers, Olympic medalists, world-famous pop singers, TV celebrities or fashion models. Most of us are fairly average with relative strengths and weaknesses, but our current obsession with status symbols turns minor personal deficits into medical conditions that require treatment. How personality traits develop has long eluded neurologists. Why are some people so gregarious with an upbeat and ebullient disposition, while others have a more reclusive, independent and sobre character and tend to reflect on events and observations in greater detail? If worrying about things were so bad, then why would such instincts evolve in the first place? In essence worrying is about caring about yourself and loved ones. If we didn't worry about anything, we would lack motivation to try harder. Most creative types need plenty of time for introspection. As we obsess more with image and social networking, detailed analysis can fall by the wayside. While some may be enhancing their social status through better presentation and socialisation, others prefer to build a better life through hard work and contemplation. However, in the age of industrial automation and outsourcing, many lack the motivation to make or even repair things themselves. In today's perverse world, a non-productive lawyer not only earns more than her cleaner, but also more her car mechanic and all the other manual workers who helped make her lifestyle possible. Yet many higher-earning professionals in the burgeoning hot-air sector succumb to work-related stress and even depression.
There may be a good argument for short-term medication to wean people off junk food and booze or simply to get the out of bed in the morning, but little evidence that the any pre-existing chemical imbalance caused them to make bad lifestyle choices. Millions now believe antidepressants are essential medication for anyone whose relative lack of cheerfulness or bad moods cause others so much distress. We have thus wished away the underlying causes of depression in our incessant drive to promote mandatory bubbliness, i.e. where we all feign happiness through fake smiles and frequent giggles ? Casual observations would suggest offices have been transformed from relatively sombre places of work into comedy workshops. 50 years of TV satire and now endless YouTube gags have had their effect on the collective psyche. Yet, we are not all born actors. If you fail to take part in mandatory amateur theatrics, your jovial teammates will soon write you off as a loner. Whereas 50 years ago a lack of practical skills could prove a handicap in all but the most privileged families, today it is a perceived lack of social skills that sets many at a distinct disadvantage. Social anxiety, here in its literal non-psychiatric sense, is a prime cause of social alienation, leading to a lack of self-worth, a sense of inferiority and inevitably melancholy.

Handing out free antidepressants to address social alienation is like distributing morphine tablets to combat tooth decay. They may temporarily alleviate unpleasant symptoms, but they fail to address the root causes of the problem and may have very nasty adverse effects with prolonged use. Suggesting that opposing state-subsidised mass-medication of unhappiness offends the unhappy is like accusing an opponent of hydraulic fracturing of condemning the elderly to freezing homes in winter (the elderly would be the first to suffer from polluted tap water). These quick fixes are simply not the solution.

For more on this theme may I recommend Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker .

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Dictatorship by Consent

Apparently, if we believe many opinion leaders, we fought most recent wars to spread freedom and democracy. Allegedly people across the world admire us because of our deep-rooted civic political culture. Never mind any inconvenient conflicts between personal freedom and true democracy, but what do the international ruling elites and their faithful cheerleaders actually mean by this Hellenic word for people power ?

Do they really want an open debate about issues that affect our daily lives? Are there really prepared to explain the inevitable dilemmas that arise from conflicting popular demands? Do they really understand the enormous sense of alienation and psychological inferiority that mass consumerism and an obsession with presentation and body image has created in so many of us? Given the choice, everyone would want higher wages, better working conditions, more leisure time, more green fields, cleaner water, better transport infrastructure, more affordable heating, larger houses, better healthcare, longer lives, more holidays, more fun, more friends and a higher social status. It hardly matters if we cannot have all these wonderful traits at once. However, if the mainstream media can set the agenda, stage-manage debates and isolate inconvenient critics, they can keep alive the illusion of democracy and free speech.

If we did as big business wants, we'd all halve our salaries, double our work load and triple our spending. If numbers don't add up, we can always ask banks or central government to create more money out of thin air, such is the logic of the debt-fuelled consumption-driven economy. Yet the more we are indebted and the more we rely on international trade, the more we transfer our theoretical sovereignty to unaccountable global entities. It often seems we can only debate how to boost the economy, how to attract more inward investment, how to accommodate more international commuters, how to deal with cross-border crime or how to combat terrorism. We do not debate whether any of these measures are necessary, i.e. do we really need to grow our economy?

As mainstream national political institutions become powerless in the face of tentacular transnational remote organisations, political debate is limited either to trivial parochial matters or is reduced to simple negative campaigning, blaming rivals for the collateral damage of policies that would have been implemented anyway. The recent Labour party political video, devised by the US media guru behind Barrack Obama's electoral victory (David Axelrod), may fool a few young angry voters, who'd like to blame a few convenient scapegoats for their misfortunes, but it is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. It perpetuates the myth that in the early 21st century any difference remains between the mainstream parties on any subject of importance. The video focuses on a few safe and simplistic issues, tuition fees, rising heating costs and bedroom tax. It then blames the old guard of British aristocracy. Just because modern CEOs wear jeans, listen to rock music and no longer have posh Etonian accents, does not make their huge financial superiority any less grotesque. Indeed the gap between rich and poor had been steadily rising for over 30 years. According to the top 10% earned just 7.1 times more than the bottom 10% in 1995, by 2008 this ratio had risen to 10.1 times.

It doesn't take long to disentangle any of these claims and see how Labour offers little alternative to the two other orthodox parties. Take, for example, the much-maligned bedroom tax. It is only an issue because housing has become unaffordable without huge government subsidies. Housing benefit effectively subsidises landlords, so why should hardworking low to middle income tax-payers in areas with lower property prices subsidise special categories of people entitled to housing benefit in wealthier areas? New Labour have become the biggest defender of spiralling housing benefits introduced by Thatcher after her government sold off council houses. Moreover, thanks to a rising population, largely driven by immigration, demand for social housing has never been higher, and thus needs to be rationed. Do New Labour plan to build millions more homes and where ? Will they admit the rather obvious environmental costs of more urban sprawl in Europe's most densely populated region? I doubt it. Indeed their stance against bedroom tax is just an exercise in political point scoring. In 13 years in government they abysmally failed to increase the tax burden on international oligarchs, multinational corporations and banks, as they relied on their presence in the UK to artificially boost the economy.

Not only did New Labour introduce tuition fees in 1997 and increased them to £3000 later in 2006, they promoted a huge expansion in higher education that turned universities into businesses competing not just for corporate sponsorship, but in the lucrative international student market. As a result degrees are not only devalued, but reflect the needs of big business rather than of wider society. With so many other spending obligations and financial constraints, no government can now afford to return to the old grant system, where most students from poorer backgrounds received fully subsidised education, but until the 1980s only 15 to 20% went to university. Yet today only a minority of the nearly 50% of 18 to 21 year olds who now attend university attain degrees of any practical worth with social sciences, law, business administration and creative arts among the most popular subjects. Biology is now dominated by the needs of the burgeoning pharmaceutical, biotech, assisted fertilisation and private healthcare (cosmetic surgery) sectors. Only a fraction of medicine-related degrees produce new doctors, most prepare students for life as a pharmaceutical representative, fertility clinic lab technician or psychiatric nurse. Such professions are in greater demand as a growing proportion of the population is on prescription medication, opts to bypass nature through fertility treatment or succumbs to emotional disturbances that we have relabelled as mental health issues.

Most of us shudder at the thought of opening our electricity or gas bills, largely because back in the 1990s they were, by European standards, incredibly low because most gas still came from the North Sea. Now most gas is imported and energy demand has grown. Logically we need to either increase energy production, with all its potential environmental consequences, import more or consume less. Token gestures like unplugging your TV set at night will make little difference. By offering short-term subsidies for heating, New Labour would promote inefficiency and fail to provide a long term solution, i.e. adapting to a low consumption economy, ensuring people can live healthy lives with less waste. If you naively believe they would just tax a few fat cat energy firm bosses, just consider the real reasons behind the 2003 occupation of Iraq.

In reality although some debate still takes place even on contentious issues such as mass immigration, the hands of local, regional and national governments are tied. All they can do is present a narrow set of options and hope big business will work magic to bridge the growing gap between social and environment sustainability and economic expedience. If people really exercised democratic control, you can bet the ruling elite would change strategy, as they often do. Instead every few years we are just given the opportunity to vote for another set of middle managers. Sometime we elect mavericks, who may rant and rave in parliamentary talking shops, but all along big decisions affecting people's jobs, community, housing, transport etc. are decided in remote boardrooms and think tanks.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Double Ungood: Brave New World Film

Things might not have panned out quite how George Orwell predicted in his infamous dystopian novel, 1984. In many ways rather than progress towards austere authoritarianism, modelled on Stalin's Soviet Union, penalising expressions of excessive joy, the latest phase of corporate globalisation has seen the spread of mass consumerism and commercialised hedonism as tools of social engineering. It is much easier to control an atomised populace mesmerised and distracted by mass entertainment, online games and trivial pursuits, than a disgruntled collective of workers frightened into submission. Overtly negative language instils fear and apprehension and can only influence people if counterbalanced by a deluge of positive messages about life and the organisations the establishment would like us to cherish. However, Orwell did foresee the gradual adaptation of language to change the way people think, or more accurately suppress certain thoughts altogether.

In Orwell's 1984 the government set about to phase out negative words. In a transitionary period, a simple negative prefix un could be used, hence ungood for bad. Thanks to positive psychology, so popular with corporate management, and neurolinguist programming (NLP), we can observe the ame trends today. A negative is now often the absence of a positive or replaced by deceptively neutral but prescriptive adjectives, e.g. a behaviour may be described not as wrong, bad, immoral, evil, indecent or selfish, but simply as inappropriate, i.e. possibly appropriate in an officially approved outlet for our frustrations, but not in the referenced context.

Indeed the worst abstract noun today is negativity itself. Any language or behaviour that meets this definition is simply deemed out of bounds, not acceptable, incompatible with our enlightened, tolerant and diverse brave new world. It provides the ultimate pretext for silencing dissent. Public organisations claiming to be open and democratic, often define all unpalatable opinions as "negative".

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ek5vse2_Aq0

Brave New World movie from 1980

In his 1931 novel, Aldous Huxley presciently anticipated many modern trends. Note how negative thoughts were reserved for outcasts known as savages, those who lived outside modern society and didn't take soma (chill pill, antidepressant) or participate in conditioning sessions. Critical thinkers were treated for deviance or banished to remote islands and any defiant behaviour was treated, as it is increasingly today, as a sign of psychiatric malfunction. View the film above and you will see what I mean.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing

All true conservatives are green

I sometimes enjoy Peter Hitchens‚ antidote to mainstream trendy Neo-Liberal thinking, but fear he is on some subjects in bad company and a tad ill-informed. No rational person could deny volumes of hard evidence showing the exponential rise in humanity's collective impact on our planet's delicate ecosystem, both in terms of our numbers (rising from just 750 million at the start of the industrial revolution to 7 billion now) and our per capita consumption. Our population will probably peak in the next 10 to 30 years, but at the expense of adopting modern high-consumption lifestyles. And now 2500 million Chinese and Indians are preparing to join the mass consumer frenzy, resources that previously seemed almost unlimited, are nearing depletion.

The fact that scientific forecasts have so often proven wrong should lead us to take a more rather than a less cautious, and thus conservative, approach to future development. Climatologists know full well our climate is subject to multiple natural and, dare I say, anthropogenic factors, but man's impact on our environment has reached unprecedented levels. But climate change is just one of many potential side effects of our rapid overdevelopment. James Lovelock has merely conceded that some of the more alarmist forecasts made 20 years ago have not been supported by subsequent observations. So what! They were just forecasts. Meanwhile, other forecasts, such as available oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, have also turned out to be gross exaggerations. That's why Brazilian geologists are busy surveying fossil fuel deposits 2 miles below the surface of Mid Atlantic Ocean, the Chinese are sealing deals with Nigerian businessmen and Western Oil companies see Libya as a mere gateway to oil in Chad and Darfur, despite the huge costs of building pipelines and other infrastructure.

Wishful thinking cornucopians would like to see the current era of cheap mass motoring for all continue without drastic consequences and place blind faith in scientists to find to magic techno-fixes. Climate change denial, so popular in Neo-Conservative circles, has little to do with any understanding of the actual climate (which may get warmer, colder, wetter or drier in different parts of the globe) and everything to do with the same culture of entitlement Mr Hitchens so rightly denounces in his columns. Claiming to have a god-given right to drive your car to a suburban shopping mall, funded by your non-productive marketing job, is just the same as claiming a right to welfare handouts to subsidise your hedonistic idleness. If we are to tackle our very real environmental challenges and avoid unprecedented loss of life resulting from a grotesque overconsumption, we need to power down.