Under communism you buy everything from a single state outlet, whereas under fully mature capitalism you buy everything from Amazon. Karl Sharro
I once dreamed of a socialist utopia devoid of hate, fear, anxiety, poverty and interpersonal rivalry with common ownership of the means of production. This fantasy comes in two main flavours, idealistic anarcho-communism based on small cooperatives with no central states or organised means of coercion in a tangled maze of hippie communes converging miraculously on a carefree lifestyle of fluid relationships. The other kind of socialism assumes a strong state responsible for regulating every aspect of our communal lives and overseeing our private behaviour, lest we act in an unduly selfish or hateful manner. While anarcho-communism takes a fundamentally Rousseauian view of human nature, assuming that without the oversight of higher authorities, we will revert to our natural state of peace-loving and inherently altruistic creatures, state socialism relies on a complex web of organisations to enforce social conformity and solidarity. Marx foresaw that a workers' state would gradually transform human nature over several generations until the institutions of surveillance and coercion could eventually disappear.
It is easy to dismiss the great socialist experiments of the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea and Cuba either as deformed workers' states or state-capitalist. The latest catastrophe is Venezuela that failed to diversify its economy to free itself from the grip of multinationals. These regimes relied on technology developed in advanced capitalist economies and could not deliver their people with the kind of living standards millions of ordinary working class people enjoyed in Western Europe and North America, because state coercion and engineered solidarity failed to motivate creativity and innovation. However, now capitalism is failing too. It cannot survive without subsidised mass consumerism and debt-driven economic growth. Until recently advanced mixed economies relied on the salaries of skilled workers to keep the consumer economy afloat. Now most manufacturing jobs have been either outsourced to low wage regions and/or undergone substantial automation, workers can only aspire to service sector careers that either require a high level of analytical intelligence or exceptional people skills. As the artificial intelligence and robotics revolution progresses, businesses will need to hire fewer and fewer ordinary people with mediocre skillsets. Today large corporations need consumers more than workers. As AI and robots displace monotonous manual and clerical jobs, big business will rely on governments to subsidise their customers. Arguably this has been going on for years in the UK. Most jobs are now involved in people management, social surveillance, retail, entertainment, education, infrastructure inspection or banking.
If big business needed creative, resourceful and independent-minded workers, you can bet they would lobby government to improve academic standards in schools and invest billions in STEM. Alas big business only needs the best and brightest. They may complain that they can't hire enough seasoned programmers or bioscientists and have to import specialists from abroad, but they know only a small minority of graduates have a high enough IQ to be worthwhile employing and rewarding with handsome salaries. Many have criticised modern schooling for focussing too much on socialisation and attitudes than on the practical skills young adults might need in the workplace. Customer relations has suddenly become more important than fixing someone's car or washing machine. While a good mechanic may lose business by insulting his customers, an incompetent mechanic may be blessed with a wonderful sense of humour, but cannot compensate for shoddy workmanship through soft skills, at least not for long. If smart robots supplant human beings in practical jobs like mechanics, plumbers, drivers, bricklayers and farm labourers, people within the median IQ range can only aspire to tasks that require a degree of human authenticity, mainly in the persuasion and care sectors. Persuasion encompasses a very wide range of modern professions, anything from marketing to social work, teaching and charities. I've long argued that schools should refocus on practical skills, but I've not been a lone voice. Every consultation about secondary education in the UK yields similar results. Small businesses and parents alike want smaller class sizes and greater emphasis on vocational skills. There is virtually no grassroots movement calling for more lessons on gender theory or more mental health screening. Such calls inevitably come from well-funded lobbies and spurious charities that pop up from nowhere and suddenly have articulate spokespersons on TV shouting down traditional naysayers.
The left has correctly in my view accused both New Labour from 1997 to 2010 and then three Tory-led governments ever since of colluding with big business. Yet if big business is in the driving seat, why would they support an education system that has clearly failed to train a new generation of conscientious workers able to accomplish all the practical jobs we have traditionally needed? Is it because the government is totally incompetent or driven by ideological concerns at odds with the needs of big business? I'm sorry to admit, but we really have to consider another more disturbing explanation: Large corporations do not need workers. They need consumers.
Outsourcing and smart automation have boosted productivity to such an extent that a few hundred highly skilled technicians can manage a manufacturing facility capable of supplying sophisticated products to tens of millions of consumers. Most of the auxiliary jobs around manufacturing such as shipping, quality assurance and accounting can also be automated too. Much of the marketing and sales operation has already moved online, requiring human input only for client-facing roles, but if you've interacted with automated help lines or online sales chat bots, you can see how artificial intelligence is set to transform our lives. Not only do we now have more car sales representatives than automotive production line operatives, we probably have more high street charity awareness raisers than solar panel and wind turbine technicians. More people are employed to persuade others to adapt their lifestyles and embrace new ways in our dynamic interdependent society than to provide the goods and services we really need.
Whether your electricity supply works or you can afford transportation to your places of work, study or socialisation are no longer viewed as mainly technical challenges, but have become human rights issues. However, capitalism can no longer guarantee the minimum living standard to which we have become accustomed without significant state intervention. The political debate has moved on from how to generate wealth to how to persuade big business to share more of its wealth with the advanced welfare states of affluent countries. However, the state will only subsidise your lifestyle if you play by its rules and big business will only be prepared to bankroll the public sector if it grants them special privileges. Let us just consider your typical provincial town in early 21st century UK. The biggest employers are the local council, the National Health Service , the large supermarket chains and increasingly the distribution warehouses of major online retailers, which in practice means mainly Amazon. Other big employers include charities, banks and insurance brokers, whose role is either to manage your indebtedness or raise awareness for various social transformation initiatives. Hard work, as we traditionally understood the concept, seldom reaps substantial rewards. Instead we rely more and more on social networking and delegation of responsibilities to other human or technical resources.
This is perhaps the biggest paradox of the early 21st century. Just as capitalism seems invincible, its most powerful exponents seek to phase it out and replace it with a command economy, managed by global corporations with the illusion of brand choice for the masses and healthy competition only for the professional elites. The ensuing socio-economic model may resemble an amalgamation of Swedish welfarism and Chinese authoritarianism much more than late 20th century North America. The captains of high tech industry have finally realised they do not need many workers, only compliant consumers.
Humanity has always had a wide range of cultures, vocations and two biologically defined sexes. For most of our history we identified with our family, our tribe, our gender and our vocation. We had no choice over family and gender, seldom switched tribes and had a limited window of opportunity to find a vocation within the cultural paradigm of our era. To the above list we may naturally add status, something we traditionally acquired from a mix of our family's social standing and any natural talents we can exploit in a socially advantageous or entrepreneurial manner. One assumed, rightly or wrongly, that your family bore the primary responsibility for your success either by endowing you with a better-adapted brain and body or by instilling in you their acquired customs, knowledge and wisdom.
Long before biologists discovered DNA and sociologists undertook detailed studies on the influences of culture, class, ethnicity and gender on intellectual and professional performance, we knew both nature and nurture affect outcomes. In the real world nature and nurture do not so much compete with each other to affect our personality, intelligence or economic success, as they interact in a continuous feedback loop, e.g. culture and behavioural patterns play key roles in determining who gets to mate with whom.
However, these days not only are our three core identities (gender, vocation and ethnicity) considered infinitely variable, but our behaviour, personality, desires and learning patterns also form key components of our personhood subject to endless categorisation and psychoanalysis. So nowadays people do not just identify as a woman, man, girl or boy, as an Irishman or a Thai or as a mother, a father, a farmer, a nurse or a blacksmith. All of a sudden, within just a few decades, we have come to identify with our erotic proclivities, our favourite pastimes, our brand loyalty, our personality profile, our medical conditions, our fatness, our relative handicaps and increasingly by our assigned mental health label. Someone may well identify as a mathematically challenged, obese, bipolar, gay and diabetic Xbox gamer. Rather than pinpoint and try to overcome someone's relative weaknesses, we celebrate a diversity of equally valid traits. The afore-mentioned identifiers are naturally a mixed bag. Mood disorders interact with narcotics, diet and medication. For instance, an emotionally insecure person with an imperfect body unable to find their ideal partner might succumb to recreational drugs, which in turn trigger sudden mood swings with psychotic episodes, which lead to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and the prescription of antipsychotics, which cause weight gain through binge eating, leading to a type-II diabetes and a sedentary lifestyle of online gaming. Without a strong focus on work or family as breadwinners or housewives, people can easily descend into a puerile state of monitored play and endless victimhood.
Traditional personal identities make practical sense. Your anatomical sex identifies your potential role in procreation and raising the next generation. Your vocation identifies your primary purpose in life. Your ethno-religious identity determines the essential ethical rules and customs by which you abide. Yet today we're blurring the boundaries of all three core identities. Rather than emphasise different aspects of our main occupation, we assume many different roles and identities at home, with our friends, with our neighbours, with our colleagues and as consumers. Someone may identify as a Manchester United fan, as an iPhone aficionado, as a diabetic, as a vegetarian, as a hiphop fan, as a disco dancer, as bisexual, as gender-fluid, as a keen online gamer or as a sufferer of mild obsessive compulsive disorder. All but the first of these identities would have bewildered past generations. The question is to what extent do these modish labels determine who you really are and to what extent are they malleable? Supporting a sports team is usually a way to bond with other members of your wider community and express your tribal loyalty in a controlled environment. Your choice of team would reflect your background. If you grew up in Merseyside you may support either Everton or Liverpool. Today spectator sports are run as sleek commercial operations whose only connection to their home city is their stadium's geographic location.
As the consumer age took hold in the 1950s, social marketers realised that if peer pressure can influence the sports clubs people support, then media promotion can affect our association with emerging musical genres and cultural scenes. By the early 1960s we had street fights between Mods and Rockers, identifying with rival commercialised countercultures. By the late 60s we had more middle class hippies experimenting in drugs and challenging traditional views on sexuality. In the 70s youthful rebellion found an outlet through the medium of Punk Rock, Reggae and Ska music. In the 1980s youth culture moved more to the narcotised Techno and House music scenes. Pop culture had come not just to dominate our lives way into our 30s and beyond, but to normalise a set of irrational behaviours in a regulated social context.
In the affluent West these new cultural identities mingled with the ethnic identities of new migrant communities. This set the stage for a new era of identity politics based on diverse characteristics, only some of which were inherited and thus immutable under normal circumstances. All of a sudden activists would equate prejudice against lifestyle choices and behavioural traits with racial or sexual discrimination. We don't choose our parents or, until recently, our biological sex. We do not really choose our personality either. It just evolves gradually through symbiosis of our neurological hardware and environmental software. Not everyone will be equally gregarious or equally conscientious, but social stimuli can certainly guide us towards more successful outcomes.
Most societies reward functional behaviour and penalise dysfunctional behaviour. They merely differ in their interpretation of which behaviours may be acceptable in which circumstances. Madness is simply unmanageable misbehaviour that is seen to pose a threat to social stability and may lead to heightened conflicts and cultural decadence. However, in the early 21st century the game has changed. As only a small minority of workers are responsible for providing essential goods, infrastructure and services, the powers that be are more interested in micro-managing people's moods and behaviours as subservient guinea pigs of a giant social experiment than promoting traditional values of diligence and self-reliance. Indeed many now view extreme interdependence as a virtue. The trouble with interdependence is some players contribute much more than others, thus empowering technocrats and bureaucrats at the expense of the underclasses unable to exert any real control over their techno-social ecosystem. In the emerging world of consumer slaves who depend either on insecure temporary jobs or welfare handouts, an interlocking diversity of identities is now seen a virtue that justifies more invasive surveillance and social intervention over an atomised populace.
Transgenderism serves mainly to blur traditional boundaries between well-defined types of people and create new subjective and infinitely variable categories. It conspires to normalise non-traditional families and to disassociate in the public mind the biological link between procreation and motherhood. Lastly, it may also helps redefine many complex psychological problems in terms of non-binary gender identities. Many youngsters may not identify as either males or females because they fail to meet the exacting standards of stereotypical alpha masculinity or femininity. However, divergent gender assignments may be only one of myriad alternative identities that may explain someone's inability to fulfil their personal ambitions.
Welcome to the World of Neurodiversity
Traditionally we viewed any kind of mental disability as unfortunate and reserved psychiatric diagnoses for extreme cases of dysfunctional behaviour. Today, we champion neurological diversity with celebrity endorsements of new-fangled mental health labels. Any human emotional or intellectual challenge can now be reassessed as a medical condition that requires some form of treatment and supervision. Any psychological traits that stray from an arbitrary range of normality now warrant attention, creating an almost infinite variety of problematic personality types in an age of self-obsession. The much trumpeted claim that one in four adults suffer from a mental illness at some stage in their life has served to normalise the concept in the public mind.
While nonconformist behavioural patterns and thought processes have now been pathologised, the NHS has ceased to classify gender dysphoria as a mental illness. So let us get this straight, if a young woman falls into a despondent state following a series of personal setbacks, spending more time alone in bed and failing to socialise with friends, an NHS psychologist may assess her as clinically depressed and thus suffering from a mental illness. If, however, the same woman believes her relative lack of femininity means she should assume the identity of a man and be allowed to take life-changing hormones or undergo genital mutilation, public funds should assist her in pursuing her delusion that her anatomically female body is at odds with her self-perception as a man rather than help her come to terms with her biological reality and deal with the real psychological causes of her identity crisis. We are literally normalising insanity, while redefining perfectly normal thought processes as somehow insane. However, identity crises do not only concern gender. A German woman, with a stage name of Martina Big (and since re-baptised as Malaika Kubwa), has invested tens of thousands of Euros in cosmetic surgery and tanning injections to transform her complexion and facial features to resemble a black African lady. While Ms Big's appearance may fool some, Rachel Dolezal from Philadelphia has only undergone a modest transformation, but nonetheless identifies as African American. Of course, many will remember Michael Jackson's expensive skin whitening treatment to give him more Caucasian features. More disturbingly, a growing number of able-bodied people now identify as disabled, a condition known as Body Dysmorphic Disorder. In 1997 Scottish Surgeon Robert Smith amputated the perfectly healthy lower left leg of an Essex man, which naturally impeded his mobility and personal independence for the sole purpose of emotional relief. The patient reported feeling complete and at ease with himself after the procedure. More commonly this disorder causes people to have a distorted self-image as too fat, too thin or with exaggerated imperfections and may lead people to undertake dysfunctional cosmetic surgery. How does body dysmorphic disorder differ from gender dysphoria? There are naturally rare cases of hermaphroditism or ambiguous genitalia, in which case any psychological problems reflect a biological reality that may require corrective surgery. Likewise many people have defective or diseased body parts, which may often affect their body image.
What's wrong with a society where more and more people cannot come to terms with their natural selves and wish to assume identities that are either at odds with their biological reality or upbringing? Rather than create more cohesive and tolerant communities of people with a diverse range of practical experiences and skillsets, current trends have produced an atomised collection of victim groups at the mercy of external agencies. Unlike traditional categories, identities based on behaviour or self-perception require some sort of social or medical intervention to ensure a person's viability, something only possible complex collectivist societies. To some these assertions may seem oxymoronic. How can we be both atomised and reliant on collective organisation? A troubled young man suffering from social anxiety unable to hold down a well-paid job may well be both isolated from his wider community and yet concomitantly dependent on remote organisations for his livelihood. More and more individuals in our increasingly interdependent world fail to get along with their neighbours, extended families or colleagues. Rather than find a practical niche within a small close-knit community, many now prefer the safety of virtual communities in which many dysfunctional lifestyle choices become the norm.
In our emerging brave new world of constant transmogrification of human identity, I suspect the boundaries between sexual orientation, transgenderism, transableism, neurodiversity and eventually transhumanism will blur until only a upper caste of intellectually superior technocrats and social engineers retain true freedom of action.
Hardly a week passes without a brand new high profile campaign against the Orwellian concept of hate speech, perceived public ignorance or the spectre of unofficial fake news. Naturally ignorance no longer denotes an absence of knowledge, but a failure to internalise a specific worldview or cultural attitude. By the same logic we need not worry about officially certified fake news, because no doubt experts wiser than we have sanitised the truth for the greater good of humanity, while evil dissidents probably have ulterior motives.
Presumably all enlightened progressives should welcome the arbitration of third party organisations over all contentious social, scientific, historical, economic or moral issues. It's a truism that none of us, no matter how wise or intellectually gifted we may be, could conceivably fully comprehend all controversies that affect our lives. At some stage we have to place our trust in someone who has had the time, intellect and resources to gather hard evidence and present it in a succinct and readable format. Who is qualified to decide on issues as complex as nuclear energy, arms sales to foreign regimes, support for rebel militias in entangled ethno-religious conflicts, genetic engineering of human embryos or sex education in primary schools? Can we trust the general public to reach rational conclusions on these matters based on incomplete data and swayed by emotions?
How do we make sense of the daily deluge of confusing and conflicting information about our rapidly changing world? Surely we need some sort of independent verification service to help us sort the wheat from the chaff. This begs the question, whose interests do these non-governmental fact checking outfits serve? Do they just want to give us raw data and let us make our own minds up or do they want to discredit any evidence that runs counter to their preferred narrative and may lead a larger cross section of public opinion to rebel against the policies that major corporate and state organisations are seeking to implement through deceptive means ?
Indeed as soon as someone accuses the government or big business of deceiving the public, they may attract the epithet of conspiracy theorist or tinfoil hat wearer. We've gone a long way from the days when these slurs were mainly aimed at quirky nostalgics uncomfortable with the implications of modern science and technology. Some Americans genuinely believe the Lunar Landing was a hoax staged in Iceland or possibly in film studios. Others believe extraterrestrial creatures have landed on our planet. Without evidence, this remains nothing but wild conjecture and given the sheer size of our galactic neighbourhood exceedingly unlikely. Most UFO sightings may be exactly what the term suggests, unidentified flying objects, in all likelihood meteorites or military aircraft. However, now it's often those of us who doggedly insist on scientific truth who fall foul of the new postmodern orthodoxy on subjects as diverse as gender identity to the sustainability of rapid mass migration.
On Wednesday, Labour MP, Sarah Champion, resigned her position on the front bench for having told the truth about mainly Muslim rape gangs targeting mainly white (or at least non-Muslim) teenage girls in a popular tabloid newspaper, the Sun, which the left, myself included, has long despised. I could think of few cases that could better exemplify the problem with politically correct censorship of both open debate and objective investigation as this. Her Labour colleagues have accused her sensationalism bordering on racism and collobarating with the hated Murdoch press, yet at the end of the day what matters is not what the liberal intelligentsia believe today, but what diligent historians will conclude tomorrow. Who's right, obedient Guardian columnists who pretend there are no irreconciable cultural differences between sizable sections of the growing Muslim community and the indigenous population or tenacious journalists such as Douglas Murray and Raheem Kassam, author of No Go Zones, who challenge the new orthodoxy? Should we await an official report to reassure us that our benevolent authorities are looking after our best interests or should we challenge media bias and demand both truth and common sense solutions? Now imagine a near future where the truth about rape gangs is no longer contested by rival sections of our media, but is flagged as hate speech and all Internet searches on such issues point to fact-checking services that essentially obfuscuate reality through selective statistics and emotional arguments.
So let us for the sake of argument agree that both racism and sexual abuse are morally reprehensible, but we have a logistical problem here. If the main concern of the police and social services were the welfare of vulnerable teenage girls, it would be an open and shut case once they had sufficient evidence to prosecute the perpetrators. Don't get me wrong in all such cases we need to corroborate evidence on the ground to prevent the police from arresting innocent participants in consensual sexual encounters. However, the recent trial of a Newcastle-based grooming gang follows a familiar pattern seen up and down the country. Young playboys, mainly of South Asian Muslim descent, lure working class non-Muslim teenagers to sex parties plying them drugs such as cannabis and mephedrone. As detailed in Peter McLoughlin's book Easy Meat: Inside Britain's Grooming Gang Scandal, these organised gang bangs have been going on for some time, but the establishment colluding with the regressive left have done their best to hush up and downplay the scale of this phenomenon. When the Rotherham case first hit the news, many viewers of mainstream news programmes could be forgiven for thinking it was isolated to one town. Ever since the authorities have been in damage limitation mode. Yet Channel 4 journalists have known about it since the suppressed 2004 documentary Edge of the City.
An online campaign has been launched to try and stop Channel 4 from airing a documentary that features claims Asian men are grooming white girls for sex. Edge of the City, set in Bradford, had been shelved in May after police warned it could incite racial violence ahead of local and European elections. The Black Information Link website asks readers to lobby Channel 4, police and the Culture Secretary to stop the film.
Some wishful thinkers may prefer to believe that Britain's growing Muslim communities are integrating just fine with the settled population and share our wonderfully enlightened liberal values on women's rights, sexuality and tolerance of diverse lifestyle choices. They may prefer to disregard the higher fertility rate of Muslim families or their higher dependence on social welfare (a consequence of larger families and widespread inbreeding). Indeed any problems that cannot be easily swept under the carpet are often explained away as by-products of past Western imperialism or of despotic regimes, which our enlightened governments opposed.
However, if objective analysis of hard facts revealed that not only have hundreds of thousands of British non-Muslim girls been systematically targeted by gangs of mainly Muslim young men, but such behaviour is deeply engrained in their culture, some may conclude that in the interests of community cohesion and indeed the safety of vulnerable teenagers (some boys have also been targeted), we should restrict further immigration from mainly Islamic regions without extensive background checks. You see in our private lives we'd behave in more rational ways. We may welcome our new neighbours and be pleased for them to play with our children, as long as we can agree on a core set of shared cultural values. Until recently we did not need social workers or pervasive surveillance to manage community affairs. Neighbours would look out for each other and any transgressors would soon be identified and dealt with. Within a culturally homogeneous community people know the bounds of acceptable behaviour. Tolerance is a wonderful word when applied to diverse cuisines, music or literary traditions, but not when when our naive tolerance blinds us to hateful intolerance and we become an ethnic minority in what used to be our parents' homeland. Indeed the whole concept of homeland is anathema to globalists, who imagine the world as some sort of playground or university campus interspersed with national parks and connected by airports and high speed rail.
The trouble is the truth is seldom convenient and often ugly. Human beings can be violent, selfish, vindictive and morally corrupt, but we can also be loving, resourceful, creative and conscientious. In different circumstances the same human beings can behave in very different ways with radically different outcomes, but we are not all the same. Some of us cope very well with stress and take heightened competition in our stride. Others thrive best as loyal members of a team learning mainly through social osmosis. Indeed creative or critical thinkers often make very bad team players, but our modern world would be very different without the innovations of a non-conformist and often reclusive minority. Successful societies need to harness the best of both mindsets. If we rely exclusively on experts endorsed by our dominant institutions, we risk closing our minds to institutional bias that serves our true rulers' agenda.
Shaming Dissenters
Speaking out against organised rape gangs may seem a no-brainer in a society that almost universally condemns such acts, but not when it conflicts with other priorities, such as facilitating cultural change to undermine the self-determination of all viable national communities. When the progressive media starts talking in terms of Islamophobia, transphobia (a term that only entered the Oxford Dictionary in 2013 after a petition) and hate speech, alarm bells should ring. As soon as one dissents on issues as diverse as the environmental sustainability of mass transfers of people from poorer countries or state-funded fertility treatment for lesbian couples, one is labelled a hater. People are named and shamed for defending hard science on building viable communities and respecting natural biological differences.
Can state planners really want to simultaneously promote tolerance of an ideology, Islam, that abhors sexual deviance and treats women as sex slaves, while teaching young children that gender is a social construct rather than a biological reality? Today in Canada one may be arrested for protesting against Islamisation of one's neighbourhood, but also for failing to use the correct gender pronouns for a tiny minority of transsexuals who fail to identify as either male or female. While Islam and transgenderism (or the LGBTQ+ agenda) would seem to lead in opposite directions on sexual ethics, both dogmas push us towards more social interventionism and greater surveillance. I suspect what we lazily call the globalist elite for want of a better word, will only tolerate the rapid Islamisation of many European and North American neighbourhoods until they devise means to subvert this culture too. Indeed most Muslims today would feel utterly ashamed of the grooming gangs that blight towns and cities across Britain, the Netherlands and other Western countries with large concentrations of randy Muslim males. Maybe these young men have been corrupted by exposure to Western decadence. Maybe the guardians of their female victims failed to protect their daughters against dangerous sexual predators. Whichever way, the multicultural experiment is failing the underclasses, namely those least responsible for Britain's imperial past.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/d5IZ16UpE7U
I wonder if John Lennon would welcome the new idealism embraced by the bankers and warmongers he once decried.
How former Blairites morphed into radical advocates of a borderless utopia
Politics is really the art of winning influence over other power brokers to further one's true agenda, which may be self-aggrandisement, commercial interests or the pursuit of long-term ideological change. Personally I think most politicians fall into the first category of wishful thinking opportunists, eager to make a few gestures to please their electoral base, but more concerned with their career. Over the last century or more it seems it hardly matters who wins parliamentary elections, big business will always get its way anyway. The old dichotomy of a state-interventionist redistributionist Labour Party and a more laissez-faire pro-business Conservative Party was always a mere façade. In reality big business supported most of Labour's radical social transformation policies. The age of mass consumerism required a compliant but contented populace, something that naked capitalism could never provide left to its own devices. Indeed welfare dependency rose fastest not in the 1960s or 70s under Labour, but in the 80s under Margaret Thatcher as manufacturing moved overseas.
In the last two years British politics has undergone some quite unexpected realignments. The reemergence of Left Labour as a major force in British politics under veteran backbench rebel Jeremy Corbyn has taken many by surprise. Labour now has over 600,000 members, mainly critical of Tony Blair's legacy as a poodle of US foreign policy and big business. Back in 2003 many Momentum supporters would have marched against the US-led invasion of Iraq. I remember powerful speeches from the late Tony Benn, a younger Jeremy Corbyn and a grandiloquent George Galloway. The protest attracted broad support from disparate groups. The two most visible contingents were the far left, in their neo-Trotskyite and neo-Stalinist incarnations, and the Muslim Council of Britain. We also had a lower-key ensemble of mainly middle class Greens and left Labour activists embarrassed with their leadership. However, most participants were just well-intentioned teachers, social workers, charity workers, learning support assistants and even a few with normal jobs who were like me just generally disgusted with the idea that our government was about to authorise a military intervention that would likely trigger a wider conflict. Two years later the British electorate gave Tony Blair's government a reduced majority, but with just 35% of popular vote (and only 21.5% of potential voters). Many left-of-centre opponents of the war such as myself voted either Liberal Democrat or SNP in protest. When the Labour lost to a Conservative-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this rainbow coalition regrouped to oppose cuts in social services, welfare and the perceived privatisation of healthcare. Nonetheless the general public had little appetite for a traditional left platform that might include the re-nationalisation of privatised services and industries, much higher taxes for the rich and massive cuts in defence spending. On this latter point many fail to realise that while conservative public opinion tends to oppose military adventurism in far-flung places, it's all in favour of defending the realm. In power New Labour seemed to take the opposite approach overstretching limited military resources in numerous conflicts around the globe, while failing to defend national borders, literally instructing border officers to wave through new migrants with minimal checks. Amazingly working class voters were much more concerned with social cohesion in Birmingham, Bradford or Luton than media reports of atrocities in Baghdad, Kabul or Pristina.
We may speculate that social media has played a major role in building support for the various causes that tend to inspire virtue-signalling trendy lefties. However, this apparent shift may reflect the changing strategies of corporate wheelers and dealers eager to undermine the residual power of national governments and replace traditional cultures with a global superculture.
Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, Marxism has kept a low profile, despite the fact many Western far-leftists had long distanced themselves from Stalinism. In Britain the Socialist Workers Party used the slogan Neither Washington Nor Moscow but International Socialism. As early as the 1930s Antonio Gramsci realised the workers would not rise up to overthrow their capitalist overlords, without a cultural revolution. Ironically Mussolini's government pioneered a close collaboration between the state and large companies, known as corporativismo, although in Italian a corporazione was not a limited liability company, but a state entity that coordinated smaller industrial concerns. Nonethless mid 20th century fascist regimes believed strongly in close liaison between the state and private enterprise. They viewed democracy as an illusion and tended to prefer plebiscites as a form of patriotic consultation. Gramsci feared that a workers' uprising in the more advanced capitalist countries would result in the kind of national statism we saw both in the German Third Reich and Stalin's Russian Empire. Many of us misunderstood what Marxism really meant. Marx did not argue for an all-powerful national state to protect the interests of local workers against predatory global corporations. Instead he argued that modern capitalism would inevitably yield to socialism, which in turn would eventually evolve into stateless communism, in the same way as primitive communism (based on an idealised Rousseauian view of early humanity) gave way to slave societies, feudalism and later, following the industrial revolution, capitalism. Early Marxists concerned themselves as much with culture as with economics. In 1884 Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State advocating the eventual dissolution not only of private property, but of nation states and families. Engels genuinely envisioned a world free of economic, ethnic or sexual hierarchies where we would be motivated not by personal betterment, familial or tribal advantage, but by the progress of humanity as a whole. Over the last 120 years Marxists have mainly debated how to achieve these ends.
As the student-led protest movements of the 1960s failed to inspire the working classes of Western Europe, who despite their daily struggles were by and large glad they did not live on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Marxist Left, still strong in Italy and France, devised a new strategy, Eurocommunism, which advocated a mixed economy and gradual social reform. Indeed on practical policies little distinguished the Italian and French Communist Parties from their social democratic cousins in Britain or West Germany, where local communist parties struggled to win popular support. On the great divide between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, the mainstream Labour Party remained staunchly Atlanticist in outlook. The Eurocommunists simply recognised that the Soviet Union could not serve as a model that would unite the working classes of the West with their comrades in the developing world. Their aims had not changed, only their strategy. Yet among a small clique of intellectuals in the Labour Party and the tiny CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain), the New Left exerted much influence via organs such as the Socialist Register and later Red Pepper. One such intellectual was the late Ralph Miliband, born in Belgium to Polish Jewish parents who later migrated to England 1940 to escape Nazi persecution. He remained a committed Marxist until his death in 1994, having published numerous articles and books on Marxist theory. He was a close confidant of historian Eric Hobsbawm, who notably sympathised with the former USSR, and the radical Fabian, Tony Benn. In recent years the Miliband brand has been more associated with Ralph's sons, David and Ed. As Labour leader from 2010 to 2015, Ed Miliband tried to distance himself from Tony Blair's military adventurism. However, his brother not only supported the Iraq War, but willingly served as Foreign Secretary working alongside Hillary Clinton to promote commercial and military globalisation. After narrowly losing to his brother in the Labour leadership contest, David Miliband accepted a well-remunerated role in New York as CEO of the International Rescue Committee, which seeks to aid refugees worldwide. Earlier David had worked as Tony Blair's head of policy from 1994 to 2001, when he became an MP.
To most Momentum activists, Tony Blair is nothing but a traitor to the causes of social justice and international peace. However, the young Aaaron Bastini, one of the masterminds behind Momentum, opted in 2010 to support David rather than Ed Miliband. I mean at least the latter decried the Iraq War. Did Mr Bastani suddenly have an epiphany before he embraced Jeremy Corbyn's idealism only five years later? This would seem a rather odd move as most of us tend more to idealism in our youth. Not surprisingly two of the other leading lights in the People's Momentum, Adam Klug and James Schneider hail from the same upmarket districts of North London as the Milibands. Small world, isn't it?
One may wonder how both Tony Blair and Tony Benn could belong to the Fabian Society or how the son of Marxist scholar could embrace early 21st century US imperialism, while one of his close associates backed a longstanding opponent of US imperialism as Labour leader. Here it is important to understand that most Marxist strategists are not pacifists. They are quite prepared to support military might if the outcome is more likely to pave the way to international socialism. Indeed over the decades self-professed Marxists have adopted some startling positions on global conflicts. The British Communist Party failed to support the Second World War until Hitler's invasion of the Ukraine and Western Russia. Meanwhile some former Trotskyists, while opposing US imperialism before the fall of Soviet Union, became cheerleaders of US-led global policing operations ever since, most notably the late Christopher Hitchens who supported the 2003 Iraq War to defeat the looming danger of Islamism. However, the globalist left remained bitterly divided over military interventionism in the Middle East. They had to support both global cultural convergence through mass migration and the projection of Western values on the rest of the world on the one hand and appease the growing Muslim lobby at home on the other.
Every problem in the world today seems to demand one solution, more globalisation. It doesn't matter whether it's climate change, unemployment, unsustainable debt, regional wars, organised crime or terrorism, our main media outlets, national governments and global institutions just propose tighter international integration and the undermining of traditional nation states and support structures. The growing concentration of power in a handful of high tech multinationals naturally demands greater coordination of governments to regulate them and prevent tax evasion. It should really not surprise us that the New Left does not advocate the nationalisation of Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Tesco. It needs these profitable organisations to bankroll its social engineering plans. And it appears it's succeeding. Big business has for some time not just embraced rapid cultural change, but openly promoted it.
Ahead of the Curve
Momentum has cultivated an anti-establishment reputation, often accusing the BBC of bias and openly campaigning against what it sees as reactionary newspapers or political organisations. I've lost count of the number of online petitions against the Daily Mail or Nigel Farage. Yet one only needs to watch a BBC soap opera to understand the convergence of the BBC's social agenda and Momentum's objectives. Both support open door immigration. Both welcome the ethnic transformation of British cities. Both support greater state intervention in people's private lives. Both support the concept of multiculturalism, while also promoting the dissolution of traditional family structures at odds with practically all traditional cultures. However, the BBC still has to offer the pretence of impartiality and patriotism. It only seems yesterday when each evening of televisual broadcasts would end with the national anthem. Now we have 24/7 news, non-stop sports, endless repeats of soap operas and pop concerts.
Rebranding Globalism
Behind the scenes the leading proponents of Blair's third way do not really disagree with Labour's radical rebranding. They may complain about Corbyn's irresponsible spending plans or his opposition to Britain's expensive token nuclear deterrent, but actually such disagreements may not matter as much as we might like to think. The current debate about Britain's exit from the European Union has only exposed just how little independence once powerful nation states really have. It seems without the oversight of one supranational organisation or another, the country will grind to a halt. Vegetables will rot in the fields and sick patients will be left untreated because of a lack of migrant farm labourers and nurses willing to serve us tirelessly. You see both Blairites and Momentum activists love mass migration, because they hope the ensuing social dislocation will let them turbo-charge their vision of a socialist utopia, bankrolled by the same corporate behemoths they claim to loathe.
Of course, some people will always be more equal than others.
Could globalisation trigger regressive ethnocentrism and religious hatred?
In a paradigm shift over the last 30 to 40 years, the establishment media in most Western countries now openly embraces not just globalisation and the gradual dissolution of traditional national boundaries, but also rapid cultural change via social engineering. However, until recently most national leaderships pretended to care about their countries, their citizens and their traditions to retain their people's trust and preserve social stability.
Back in the day rebels would oppose the imperialism or military adventurism of their rulers. We rightly associated wars, exploitation and oppression of subjugated peoples with expansionist nationalism. Some of us felt so disgusted with our rulers' crimes that we would support their enemies or wish for the dissolution of our nation state into smaller regions of a larger continental superstate. Much of the European Union's philosophical appeal among the continent's trendy professional classes rested on its apparent disassociation with previous colonial empires. Yet in the early 21st century it's not so much the working classes who want to abolish their countries, as national elites who are now so enamoured with globalisation that they see their country as a mere anachronism and only pay lip service to its cultural heritage to placate conservative opinion.
Today school students learn about the horrors of, wait for it, nationalism. often seen alongside religion as the root cause of all evil. As discussed in previous posts we should contrast negative nationalism, which seeks to impose itself on rival ethnic identities, from positive nationalism or patriotism, which implies pride in the cultural heritage and collective achievements of one's wider community. In this sense, negative nationalism is a precursor to imperialism, which has now morphed into globalism. We find many of the descendants of the same business classes who championed British imperialism in the 19th century and embraced Americanism in the mid 20th century are now the keenest advocates of globalism, often at odds with more conservative or protectionist movements at home. The worst examples of 20th-century mass murder came not from small to medium-sized countries minding their own business, but from expansionist regimes that believed either in their civilisational supremacy or sought revenge for perceived past injustices. Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's People's Republic China, both responsible for millions of avoidable deaths, were not compact nation-states, but regional powers with a globalist outlook that openly suppressed traditional expressions of ethnic nationalism. Even isolationist regimes such as Pol Pot's short-lived Democratic Kampuchea came about as a reaction to competing expansionist imperialist and ideological forces in the region. Pol Pot received funding both from China and later from the US State Department. His regime could only seize control due to the power vacuum created by US bombing of the Vietcong (Vietnamese National Liberation Front) camps in Eastern Combodia. Admittedly a cocktail of supremacist ethno-nationalism and military might can engender murderous regimes, as we saw in Nazi Germany and Japan. However, one may also argue that they only resorted to genocidal barbarity because other means of commercial and political expansionism had failed. The problems here were military adventurism and ethnic supremacism, not national pride. The British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian and Dutch empires were also responsible for their fair share of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, mostly of defenceless peoples who failed to write their own history books to counter the dominant narrative of civilising the world.
The workers' movement has long championed internationalism, i.e. solidarity and cooperation among independent nations with different cultural traditions and mores. One of the most famous gestures of true internationalism was when British and German soldiers ceased hostilities over Christmas 1914, exchanged gifts and reportedly played football. The truce highlighted the reality that it was not their war. Ordinary working people had little or no say in their country's foreign policy or military planning and had to rely on biased newspapers for information about unfolding events in other parts of Europe and the Middle East. Most supported the war due to their instinctive loyalty to their fatherland, a concept alien to many young Europeans who prefer vaguer appeals to abstract social justice and non-judgmental universalism. A hundred years ago our rulers urged us to fight for our country, now the descendants of the same power elites want us to welcome the transformation of our countries into mere regions of a fluid global superstate. Some still imagine the ruling classes as a reactionary cabal of nationalist aristocrats and religious leaders eager to prevent the fraternisation of a global working class yearning for a new tomorrow free of oppression or petty ethnocentric divisions. This is little more than 19th-century fiction. In reality, the upper classes have always been more universalist in outlook. The Great War of 1914 to 1918 saw intimately related European Royals on different sides of a dispute over the carving up of the former Ottoman Empire and the remapping of Eastern Europe. Ever since power has shifted to the bankers, oligarchs and state bureaucrats, who strut the world stage and often pose as progressive and environmentally conscientious liberals. Forget the waning influence of British Royalty, the real movers and shakers of the next century will be today's mightiest business leaders and multibillionaire technocrats in the guise of familiar jeans-clad rockstar tycoons such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Tim Cook or Mark Zuckerberg or even Britain's very own small-time billionaire aviator Richard Branson. These guys are all globalists, not old school nationalists by any stretch of the imagination.
Rebels against Post-modernism
Today's intellectual dissidents are seldom those calling for faster global cultural convergence. That prize belongs to what we may call the loony fringe of overzealous cheerleaders and idealists whose vitriolic loathing of their countries and traditions can be easily manipulated by global bankers who view national democracies with disdain. Instead, the rebels of the early third millennium seek to warn us of the creeping authoritarianism of our ruling elites and of the cultural decay of our liberal societies. Naturally, their main points of reference are the historically successful and prosperous nation-states of the 19th and 20th century with their focus on civic culture and a mix of familial and social responsibility built on traditional values that evolved gradually through trial and error over many generations. While negative nationalism may have led to the revanchist neo-imperialism of the Japanese Empire and Germany's short-lived Third Reich, positive nationalism produced the social democratic mixed economies of Western Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea and Australasia. Most of the relative freedoms and rights we now take for granted evolved in nation states. Each country had a national debate about contentious issues as diverse as abortion, the legalisation or criminalisation of dangerous narcotics, nuclear power or euthanasia. People may reach different conclusions on these issues and live with the consequences. If a Muslim country wishes to force all women to wear a veil in public, that's their business. A globalist may seek to change such practices through military interventionism rather than by setting an example of more enlightened dress codes. If a cultural habit is bad for its practitioners, they will soon learn by comparison with neighbouring countries who take different approaches. Superior cultures, especially those that have stood the test of time, tend to expand more through emulation rather than conquest or imposition. We may reasonably debate whether the British needed to colonise India and much of Africa to spread our technical expertise, language or customs. Would the Indians and Africans not have found other ways to learn from our scientific discoveries and innovations without being colonised? Indeed many would consider the Christian culture that Britain spread in the 19th century to much of the non-European world both backward and supremacist. One only needs to read the annals of George Bernard Shaw's Fabian Society to learn how many envisaged the British Empire would morph into a Federation of the World.
Rebels vs Conformists
Today's critical thinkers can easily attract derogatory labels such as misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamophobes (which my spell checker has just underlined), transphobes, right-wingers, conspiracy theorists, fascists or, if all else fails, Nazis. At the recent #welcomeToHell protests against the Hamburg G20 summit, Antifa black block activists asked reporters if they were, wait for it, Nazis before proceeding to beat them up. Such epithets are mere insults devoid of any connection to real historical events as if modern dissidents are as obsessed with a short chapter in central European history as the authoritarian left seems to be. Unless you submit to borderless universalism and systematic social engineering, you are purportedly on a spectrum of reactionary perspectives that include sympathy for a defunct dictatorship.
By and large, dissenters react to overwhelming bias from the mainstream media, academia and corporate lobbyists. Anxiety grows when empirical first-hand experiences diverge from the sanitised versions of reality that our mainstream media feeds us. When the media and other vehicles of indoctrination suppress key aspects of objective reality, some of us begin to ask questions. That doesn't mean we always come up with the right answers. It's easy to get sidetracked by focussing only on circumscribed issues or viewing the whole world through a narrow prism. This is precisely the tactic that clever social policy marketers deploy. They emphasise a perceived problem, e.g. depression in pre-school children, and present a solution, e.g. early psychiatric screening. If we focus on that problem alone without reference to wider society, the solution may sound reasonable especially if marketed as a mental health checkup. Likewise, dissidents may view today's social problems entirely through the prism of Islamic fundamentalism or Israeli involvement in recent Middle East wars. These phenomena are based on mere observations of a tangled web of events that cannot be fully understood in isolation.
Islamocentrism
Twenty years ago Islamic fundamentalism seemed a side issue, confined to a few regions of Central Asia and the Middle East with a few followers among the Muslim diaspora in Europe. The US and UK had long funded some radical Islamic sects, most notably Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Afghanistan's Mujahideen to counter Soviet influence before 1991 and secular pan-Arabist regimes later. As an opponent of Western interventionism in the Middle East, I soon became acquainted with the prickly Israeli / Palestinian issue and the role of the Zionist lobby in shaping US Foreign Policy. On demonstrations against military intervention, I naively viewed Muslims as allies in the great battle against US imperialism and Western cultural decadence. Islam does have a few merits, such as its condemnation of gambling and interests on loans. Some interpretations of the Quran reveal an appeal to universal love and social solidarity akin to Christianity, but in practice, modern Islamic societies exhibit extreme materialism, internecine violence, misogyny, child marriage, polygamy and castigation of homosexuality. For many years I wilfully turned a blind eye to these oppressive aspects not only of austere Wahhabism but a wider unreformed Sunni and Shia Islam.
Before the 1980s many Muslim societies had experienced a rather swift cultural enlightenment. One can still view films of Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon from the 1960s with women wearing revealing dresses, jeans or short skirts just like their contemporaries in the West. Cultural attitudes seemed to differ little from those in Christian countries with a comparable level of economic development. An Afghani acquaintance of mine recounted her experiences as a student in 1980s Kabul before the Mujahideen took over. Educated women could aspire to careers in medicine and scientific research. A decade later the Taliban had forced all Afghan women to wear burkas in public and prevented girls from attending school. Yet these austere practices masked the sexual slavery of young women and little boys behind closed doors. Meanwhile, I revisited the nondescript municipality of Luton where I spent my teenage years, only to notice the small Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities once concentrated in Bury Park have become the most visible ethnic group. Women now wear burkas in the town's large Arndale shopping centre. Many long-established pubs have closed to match the town's changing demographics and most of the people I knew from the late 70s have relocated either to nearby market towns or further afield. In little more than 30 years the Muslim community has gone from fewer than 5% of the population to over 50% of under 25s. Nobody really cared that much about Luton, but if you read the liberal press you may be under the false impression that the widely vilified Tommy Robinson exaggerated the scale of the problem facing Luton's parallel communities. While once Lutonians would boast of their Irish, Londoner, Regional English, Scottish, Caribbean, Italian, Greek Cypriot or Indian heritage, today the real divide is between Muslims and everyone else. In the late 70s, I eagerly attended Anti Nazi League demos and Rock Against Racism gigs to protest against the antics of few white racists and the short-lived popularity of the National Front (an ex-school mate actually joined this organisation). I would read reports of white skinheads deliberately targeting defenceless black and Asian kids. In real life, a mixed gang of English and West Indian lads beat me up once, but I didn't let this isolated incident counter the narrative of pervasive white racism that essentially transferred the guilt of British colonialists onto working-class youngsters in post-imperial Britain. None of this rapid demographic transformation would matter if everyone shared similar values and a comparable level of cultural integration. Today Luton's most tightly integrated community adhere to Islam. Everyone else is an outsider or infidel.
Media hysteria means little unless it tallies with lived experience. On my return to Greater London in 2006 I became aware that phenomena I had previously dismissed as mere teething problems of a multicultural Britain had begun to sow deep seeds of division. The rose-tinted view of Cool Britannia that I would read in the Guardian and Independent or see in BBC or Channel 4 documentaries seemed at odds with the harsh reality of ethnically cleansed neighbourhoods interspersed with unaffordable gentrified estates. Alarm bells started to ring when Guardian columnists expressed greater outrage over Daily Mail sensationalism than verified accounts of Pakistani rape gangs. That Daily Mail readers would tarnish all Muslims with the same brush seemed to concern Guardian columnists more than the fate of thousands of mainly white teenage girls treated as sex slaves. Some of us actually care about the truth. The mainstream liberal media now used the same techniques of diversion and subterfuge that served to justify Western intervention in the Middle East to suppress the unfolding reality of the kind of social disintegration that could lead to civil war. Some of us recall the Guardian's anti-Serbian bias in the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s. In the final analysis, the death count was fairly even split among the belligerent sides. The Serbs were the bad guys, while the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians were mere victims of Serb aggression. The Guardian devoted thousands of column inches not to objective reporting of a complex conflict, but to slandering dissenters who failed to toe their line that the Serbs initiated most violence, going so far as to describe playwright Harold Pinter as an atrocity denier for opposing the 1999 NATO airstrikes over rump Yugoslavia. We now see the same vitriol against those who protest against some of the less salutary side effects of Britain's multicultural experiment. The English white working class have in effect become the Serbs of the current decade. The liberal media either ignores the likes of Shazia Hobbs and Anne Marie Waters, or it associates them with alleged far-right activists. That the former is a mixed-race Glaswegian and the latter an Irish lesbian and former Labour activist is of little interest to the regressive left, their critique must be ridiculed.
State-sanctioned ethnic cleansing
The concept of multiculturalism appeals to me on many levels, not least because I've long loathed the creeping homogenisation that is rapidly displacing traditional cultures that evolved gradually over countless generations. I would liken real cultural diversity with an insurance policy. If one culture succumbs to dysfunctional decadence, others can correct its ways by seeking inspiration from more successful societies. If a universal culture results in unsustainable degeneracy or extreme totalitarianism, the repercussions are by definition global in nature. However, the peaceful coexistence of diverse cultures is not the same as a deliberate policy of mass movements of divergent peoples or as Douglas Murray would put it the transformation of a country into an airport terminal. Indeed airport-grade security is steadily infiltrating shopping centres, office blocks, colleges and other public venues, just in case some deranged loners or radicalised extremists unleash their hatred on innocent bystanders.
Cognitive Dissonance
The cognitive dissonance of the liberal media is so strong that they fail to acknowledge that the spread of Islamic fundamentalism into the West could destroy the very progressive liberalism they claim to cherish. It could do this in two ways. If Douglas Murray, author of the Death of Europe, or Boualem Sansal , author of 2084: The End of the World, are right, then radical Islam will eventually replace modern Western society except perhaps in a few isolated havens of tranquillity populated by affluent liberal elitists. However, technological developments will likely preclude such an extreme outcome. Some Islamic leaders may be shrewd businessmen and ruthless political strategists, but they will rely on technology developed by mainly European, North American and East Asian engineers, bioscientists and programmers to placate their growing army of adherents. Countries like Sweden or Germany can only provide generous welfare to economic migrants if they can leverage their collective brainpower to generate excess wealth. The Islamist strategy is solely predicated on conquest by migration and a higher fertility rate and will ultimately fail if their offspring cannot contribute in any meaningful way to wealth generation. A much more likely scenario in my view is that the spread of dysfunctional subcultures and parallel communities will only empower the technocratic elite eager for pretexts to expand surveillance and limit free speech.
What Is Social Engineering
A Web search for this term may define it only in its more recent application in the context of information security where it may refer to psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. This is obviously not what I mean. I refer instead to a combination of social policies, spending priorities, media conditioning, educational bias and commercial incentives that affect human behaviour, social interaction, our identity and sense of self. Architecture, town planning, wealth distribution, transportation, advertising, information technology and schooling are all factors that governments and big businesses can engineer to modify human behaviour. It's not necessarily a bad thing if such policies and their likely implications are openly debated. However, influential pressure groups can easily manufacture consent for radical policy initiatives by focussing on a narrow set of perceived social ills. Other forms of social engineering appear to respond to market forces or popular demand, e.g. pervasive fast beat piped music in shopping malls, leisure centres, offices and now even in some schools and libraries.
The key question is whether policy planners and corporate executives were aware of the psychosocial consequences of their initiatives, e.g. did the expansion of welfare state, especially the provision of generous child benefits to single parents, lead to the demise of the two-parent family as the cultural norm? Some would question the morality of those who even dare to ask such questions? Others would either seek alternative explanations or would welcome the decline of traditional family structures.
The Grenfell Tower blaze shocked the world. How could a fire spread so quickly and kill so many in one of the wealthiest cities in the world? I won't waste time investigating the details of flammable cladding or the absence of a sprinkler system. However, to the untrained eye these apartments seemed fine and could be rented privately for £2000 a month, which is below current rates for comparable flats in this upmarket area of inner London.
Let's face it, accidents happen, especially when we rely on high tech infrastructure such as high density tower blocks in inner cities, aeroplanes, trains, motorways, nuclear power stations and sewage treatment plants. All these systems can kill large numbers of human beings if they malfunction. By the same token if we fail to provide such services as affordable modern housing, inexpensive electricity, rapid transportation and clean water, millions will die. It stands to reason such systems should adhere to very strict safety standards to avoid the kind of human tragedy we saw in Grenfell Tower.
We don't yet know the exact death toll, anywhere from a low of 60 to as many as 400 (based on the estimated number of missing people who have not survived), a human tragedy by any stretch of the imagination. As I write, protests continue across London not just against the negligence which let such a disaster happen, but against a weakened government as it attempts to negotiate Britain's exit from the European Union. Some forces would dearly love to seize any opportunity to derail Brexit and bring Britain back into line with their vision of a one world government. To even suggest such a calamity was made more likely by rapid population growth in the English capital only invites instant derision by vocal social justice warriors eager to blame a dwindling bunch of aristocrats within the Tory Party.
However, as a rule it's much easier to plan and build affordable housing and provide all essential services people need if we have a stable population and ensure most people can earn their upkeep. This means taking a more holistic long-term view, rather than short-term view based on economic expediency or radical social engineering. Herein lies the crux of the matter. Most ordinary people, away from the hustle and bustle of our metropolises, take the gradualist view, while our political elite increasingly take the radical view. If such a revolution empowered commoners, I might support it. But given the extreme concentration of power in a handful of transnational tech giants and banking cartels, this is not going to happen. We will just see the transfer of power from one bunch of elitists to another bunch, using the poor as mere pawns in their game.
The Reincarnation of the Socialist Dream
I think elements of socialism are desirable at a local community level. It's called solidarity or helping your neighbours. Extremes of wealth and power do not bode well for social cohesion, but they're inevitable in any system that relies on a technocratic elite. That said I think the steady advance of artificial intelligence and robotics alongside globalisation will destroy neoliberalism. We should start writing its obituaries soon. Neoliberalism advocates the deregulation of large corporations so they can compete in an open worldwide market. The neoliberal era from the late 70s to the present day has seen an unprecedented rate of technological innovation and improvements in material living standards worldwide. Indeed many prophecies from the 1970s have not transpired yet. While we have had some localised famines, fewer people than ever, at least proportional terms, suffer from undernourishment. The big story of the last two to three decades has been the rapid movement of people in the developing world away from traditional rural lifestyles to large towns and cities and thus in touch with modern technology and subject to the rules of modern economics. Millions of Africans have gone from growing their own food to selling products and services in exchange for money they can use to buy food and other essentials of our modern way of life. While once we understood whence our daily bread came, now we just expect to have enough money in our bank account to purchase everything we need or desire in our local supermarket. Most of us fail to understand how our work translates into the physical goods or practical services we can afford. We may now see the rebranding socialism to mean universal basic income.
Competition only works among the Highly Motivated
Neoliberal theory is that competition drives innovation. In practice this only works among highly motivated and talented individuals. A higher salary might motivate a street cleaner to turn up for work on time and pursue his job diligently, but his productivity can be infinitely boosted through smart automation. Increasingly middle managers try to keep semi-skilled workers away from any mission-critical operations or decisions. We've thus seen a huge rise in temporary non-jobs, more concerned with people management than actually providing the goods and services we need. As such non-jobs are expendable, they seldom command high wages or inspire workers to innovate. We thus have the dilemma that by raising the minimum wage, we merely incentivise more automation and greater welfare dependency. Not surprisingly governments have been subsidising low pay and high rents for some time now.
Most residents of the infamous Grenfell Tower block would not have been able to pay the £2000 monthly rent and no property developers would fund high quality accommodation unless they had a guaranteed return on their investment. It only took a couple of days for Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to suggest seizing empty dwellings owned by wealthy property speculators. I understand the superficial attraction of this policy. Such properties remain empty because their owners cannot rent them out at market rates and would prefer to keep their real estate assets in pristine conditions until they find wealthy tenants or buyers. If such properties were made available for social housing, their market value would decline. Wealthy city dwellers pay more to stay away from the riffraff and all the potential dangers of social unrest and technical faults resulting from substandard equipment, i.e. an exploding fridge triggered the fire which then spread due to flammable cladding, both extremely unfortunate coincidences. Like or not, London's wealth is built on banking, advertising, media and property speculation. Labour and Tory governments alike have tolerated an extreme widening of the gap between rich and poor in the metropolis to boost the economy and thus their tax intake. If market forces cannot pay bus drivers more than £30,000 a year (a very low wage by London standards without housing benefit), then either the state has to subsidise these jobs or they will be automated. Big business now needs strong centralised state organisations to transition to a new economy where ordinary people are paid to consume and participate in non-essential social management initiatives. It's been obvious to me for some time that powerful corporate forces are bankrolling rapid socio-cultural change. I think we need to investigate not only George Soros's network of Open Society foundations and universities but hundreds of other well-funded organisations that have seemingly sprung out of nowhere to advocate international socialism. One such organisation is Novara Media, which presents a more radical spin on the globalist narrative we read in the likes of the Huffington Post and the TheCanary.co , but also endorses the cult-like Momentum movement behind Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party.
Only a few years ago, socialism in any form seemed rather outmoded. Sure, a few old-timers and naive young recruits kept the flag flying. You'd think the recent experience of Venezuela, which the usual coalition of global banks and US-sponsored opposition groups have almost certainly helped destabilise, would have deterred any resurgence of socialism among ordinary working people and you'd be right. The radical left have long given up on the traditional working classes, whom they openly view as reactionary. And it's not just the British working class whom they distrust, but any native working class community who still expect their local governments to protect them against rapid globalisation and automation. It seems everywhere in Europe the trendy left loathes its own native working class. France is a possible exception as Jean-Luc Mélenchon tried to build a 1970s-style opposition, known as La France insoumise, to multinationals and to reactionary nationalists. Indeed such rearguard adversaries of current global trends may have to join forces with Europe's growing but sidelined Identitarian movement and anti-establishment protest groups such as Italy's 5 Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle) to offer any alternative to the polarisation over the nationalism versus globalism debate.
So we now have an odd alliance of global bankers, corporate CEOs, multi-billion dollar transnational consultancies and media-savvy social justice campaigning organisations joining forces to undermine the power of local institutions and small businesses to empower transnational organisations and big business. To manufacture popular consent, our global revolutionaries need some catalysts to sway public opinion away from the old guard and to accept what they loosely call change.
The Revolution That Never Happened
In the 1970s some radical left-wingers genuinely believed a socialist revolution was just around the corner as capitalism would inevitably enter a terminal crisis that only a command economy with direct workers' democracy could solve. Alas after the 1978/79 winter of discontent with striking ambulance drivers, nurses and refuse collectors, many workers opted to support a Thatcherite Conservative Party over a moderate Labour government. The next few years saw a steep rise in unemployment as old unprofitable industries closed or moved abroad and a few desperate attempts to save the integrity of the once proud British working class. The Socialist Workers' Party, to which I briefly belonged, fully supported the 1984–85 Miners' strike. Yet it failed miserably as power stations began to import coal from Poland, still firmly in the Warsaw Pact and allied with the Soviet Union. I recall attending various events where leftwing student groups would attempt to fraternise with heroic miners. I think the latter tolerated us very well, but had little interest in our social justice idealism, only in defending their way of life. Even then I witnessed stirrings of a cultural clash that play out over the next 30 years as a fringe student group known as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) met hostility from Welsh miners on a demo in Cardiff. Coal miners took enormous pride not just in their close-knit communities, but in their families and cultural traditions. They were not impressed by a bunch of upper middle-class punks with dyed hair lecturing them on the oppression of sexual minorities.
Workless Cultural Marxism
Today no serious Marxist could contemplate mobilising an atomised global workforce to defeat capitalism. Far from empowering the working classes, the current phase of globalisation has rendered any tentative industrial action obsolete. If you strike, you will be replaced either by imported cheap labour or by a robot. Free market capitalism is in all but name dead. Instead, their strategy is to infiltrate global corporations and especially NGOs to bring about cultural change to mirror an emerging socio-economic reality of complete dependence on a handful of tech giants and banking cartels liaising closely with a network of local governments and charities. Consider Novara Media. They seem very keen on defending the rights of immigrants, advancing the economic case for mass migration and combatting Islamophobia. They're equally eager to promote LGBTQ+ rights and environmentalism. Yet organised high birthrate Islam opposes both gay rights and any attempt to limit consumption through lower birth rates and lower migration to high-consumption regions. Their aim to champion miscellaneous disgruntled groups and offer universal welfare as a solution. The name of the game is to destabilise stable societies in the hope that the desperate underclasses support radical social change. Who is going to provide this global welfare? None other than big business. I'm not sure if Jeremy Corbyn really understands how big business is bankrolling many of these protest groups. Will Facebook, SpaceX, Google and Amazon support a younger version of Bernie Sanders for the next presidential election? Let's see, but they won't back anyone who does not reflect their selfish interests to expand their stranglehold on planetary power.
I had wanted to expand on my Brave New World thesis in relation to mounting calls from the trendy left and business leaders for a universal basic income. We now see an alliance stretching from social justice warriors, environmentalists and no-borders activists to corporate CEOs all advocating what is in practice a global welfare state. Since Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, joined SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to support UBI (universal basic income), it's become clear to me that tech multinationals are planning for a future where most of their customers will not be workers, who earn money by providing services that big business needs, but citizens whose main responsibility in life will be social conformity and deference to the techno-elite. Just as we thought capitalism had won the great idealogical battle of the 20th century, it has now outlived its purpose as the primary engine of social and technological innovation. Capitalists rely not only on the exploitation of workers, but also on profits from the sales of their goods or services. As workers demand higher pay, shorter working hours and better working conditions, capitalists naturally resort to outsourcing and greater automation. The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution will redefine the relationship between businesses and customers. Previously the market worked by selling goods to workers who in turn earned a living through their productive endeavours. Now big business has dispensed with the need to have so many semi-skilled workers and as AI progresses, so will the minimum IQ required for remunerative work. Most of us could end up either being carers, reliant of state handouts, or being labelled subnormal and thus also dependent on welfare largesse. In the not too distant future the main responsibility of governments may be to redistribute wealth created by tech giants and to supervise their local population to prevent social breakdown. If most people depend on corporate welfare, albeit rebranded as universal basic income, it doesn't really matter where they live. That's why so much of the debate on mass migration misses the point. Naturally if the citizens of a given country wanted greater autonomy, they would need a sustainable population and cohesive community with shared values. In a traditional economy immigration can boost demand and fill skills gaps, but can also lead to unbalanced labour markets and social upheaval. By contrast in a world reliant on corporate welfare only a small minority of working age adults can fill a dwindling number of remunerative high skill jobs. Even most tasks performed by carers can be automated. Human carers can only outperform robots in advanced emotional intelligence and authenticity, both of which require cultural compatibility. If you just need some help dressing and bathing, you may well prefer a smart robot to an underpaid migrant carer with a poor command of your language. If tech multinationals are willing to bankroll universal basic income in Europe or North America, why should they not extend the same privileges to the rest of the world? If your sole role in life is to act as a good global citizen looking after your family and neighbours, then surely you could fulfil that role anywhere, but that would also subordinate all governments to the same worldwide technocratic elite. Nonetheless, my thesis remains incomplete as we see rifts in our ruling elites, some still favouring the illusion of laissez-faire capitalism.
Could Corbyn really win ?
However, events in the UK have kind of overtaken me. Just a couple of weeks ago most political pundits believed a sizeable Tory majority in the coming UK general election was a foregone conclusion. May's local council election results would seem to back this up. Labour did fairly well in trendy cosmopolitan urban areas, while amazingly the Tories gained support among traditional working class voters with LibDems doing best in affluent leafy suburbs. Even in Scotland, which often bucks the English and Welsh trend, we saw the Conservatives pick up votes in some unexpected places as the main opposition to the dominant SNP (Scottish National Party). Then the mainstream broadcasters and social media campaigners began to present Labour's policies in a much more positive light. Corbyn's Labour now promises to renationalise the railways (something New Labour failed to do) and scrap tuition fees while naturally boosting social welfare in many other areas, all presumably funded by raising corporation tax and income tax for the top 5% who earn more than £100,000 a year. Labour has pledged to respect the outcome of EU referendum and prioritise training of British-born youngsters to address perceived skills shortages. More important, Labour has been much more active on the ground than the Tories. While Corbyn may not have the confidence of bellicose Blairite MPs, his leadership has energised an army of young activists, who true to their convictions have attempted to reach out to the working classes, whose confidence Labour have lost.
Islamic Terror rocks the Election Campaign
Last week's bomb attack at Manchester's Ariana Grande concert shocked the nation. What kind of ideology could justify deliberately detonating a nail bomb in a crowded music venue killing 22 innocent revellers including many young girls? Even the IRA tended to target politicians, soldiers and adult protestants. This attack targeted carefree youngsters having a good time. Many have commented on the mainstream media's reluctance to blame radical Islam head on. Britain's growing Muslim community has many difficulties integrating with the country's settled non-Muslim population with radically different cultural attitudes on sexuality, marriage, women's rights, alcohol and gambling. More disturbingly the establishment media has suppressed the scale of mainly Muslim grooming gangs. Yet most people are smart enough not to blame a whole religion for the actions of a tiny minority of its adherents. Islamic terrorism seemed confined to a handful of trouble spots in the Middle East and Central Asia, until our enlightened liberal elite decided to intervene there to overthrow local regimes responsible for abuses of human rights. Rather than stabilise the region, Western intervention has unleashed a hornets nest of Islamic extremism that has spread its tentacles far and wide among the growing Muslim diasporas in the West. So rather than blame their Muslim neighbours, many voters have laid the blame for the murder of 22 innocent youngsters with the government and it doesn't take a genius to work out that on foreign policy and arms sales Theresa May is much closer to Tony Blair than Jeremy Corbyn. Saudi Arabia has long been one of the major funders of Mosques, Islamic schools and madrasas in the West and the cradle of Wahhabism, the most virulent strain of Islam fundamentalism. Yet British governments have been happy to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, which currently spends more on military hardware than Russia, despite the former having a much smaller territory and fewer citizens to defend. Of course, one could also blame rapid mass migration and ethnic cleansing of some inner city districts, but that's not something we can change overnight without triggering even worse social unrest. So when Jeremy Corbyn attributed part of the blame to UK involvement in recent conflicts in Libya and Syria, he had a point. Indeed Mark Curtis, author of Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam, has detailed the Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, and his father were members of a Libyan dissident group, covertly supported by the UK to assassinate Qadafi in 1996 . Of course that does not fully explain why similar attacks have occurred in Sweden, Germany and most notoriously in France, except Islamic terrorists do not really distinguish Western countries they way we do. Theresa May's response was to deploy army reserves onto the streets to supplement armed police, only revealing her earlier cutbacks in policing as home secretary.
The long and short of this whole sorry saga, is that in just two weeks the Tory lead over Labour has shrunk from 15% or higher (some polls showing staggering leads of 46% to the Tories with Labour on just 25%) to as low as 3% (The YouGov poll released on 01/06/2017 for the Times had topline figures of Con 42% and Lab 39). Corbyn's Labour is now polling higher than the party did under Ed Miliband or Gordon Brown. Indeed even Tony Blair, despite enjoying the support the Murdoch press, only gained 35.2% of the popular vote in 2005 and just 43.2% in alleged 1997 landslide. Although I'm no seasoned psephologist, I suspect a marked movement away from the Liberal Democrats and Greens to Labour and only a much smaller trickle away from the Conservatives and UKIP to Labour. Most intriguingly, Labour seem to be doing best among affluent cosmopolitan professional classes, the youth vote (18-24 years) and of course among its special interest groups, the rainbow coalition of ethnic minorities, Muslims, gays, transsexuals and welfare dependents).
As discussed earlier, this heterogenous demographic is only set to grow in coming decades. Corbyn's politics may seem like an anachronistic throwback to the 1970s, but his naive inclusive universalism may serve other long-term agendas brilliantly. The latte-sipping Guardian reading classes now loathe USA's climate change denying President and Vladimir Putin much more Europe's authoritarian politicians or a Labour leader in bed with a bunch of unreconstructed Marxists. Only ten years ago the bien-pensant metropolitan elite still supported Blair's third way. Now they are throwing their electoral weight behind a more radical strand of globalism.
Derailing Brexit
Only a year ago, the outcome of Britain's EU referendum signalled public discontent with enforced rapid globalisation. Ever since the Conservative Government have attempted to use this somewhat unexpected result to drive their own vision of a more globally connected Britain, while placating public concerns about unbalanced mass migration. Brexit, like most neologisms, means all things to all people. As said I have nothing against a community of European nations cooperating on many strategic environmental and economic issues. Indeed I'd prefer a European Community that stood up for the rights and rich cultural heritage of Europeans as a counterbalance to the growing power of China and India and as a bastion of liberal values threatened by authoritarian tendencies within Islam.
Amazingly Theresa May, who wanted to remain in the EU, has capitalised on public distrust of the European superstate, while advocating policies that seem perfectly aligned with those of Angela Merkel and Emanuel Macron. How could she possibly renege on her commitment to take Britain out of the EU with a slender Tory majority reliant on the support of fervent Brexiters such as David Davis, a curious politician with refreshingly honest views on personal freedom and military adventurism (he opposed many recent military interventions and many laws restricting personal privacy). However, with substantial majority, as Peter Hitchens suggested in his Mail On Sunday blog, PM May could safely ignore her nostalgic Little England colleagues and push through a compromise that would in practice differ little from our current arrangement, leaving large corporations as the main mediators between British and EU interests. But that scenario may not happen. Many reluctant Tory supporters (i.e. patriotic working class voters who used to vote Labour) could well stay at home, making the unthinkable, a hung parliament, a real possibility, except unlike in 2010 the LibDems may only muster a handful of MPs.
We may speculate on the growing role of social media. Both Twitter, which I use, and Facebook, which I don't, have become intensely monitored outlets for virtue-signalling social justice campaigns, usually of the kind that the Corbynite Momentum group would wholeheartedly support. While I realise these days we only need a small group of graphic designers, video editors and Web developers to produce a polished media campaign, I sense the omnipresent hand of international big business behind the myriad campaign groups and NGOs that endlessly promote these awareness-raising spectacles. How else can migrant rights groups afford plush offices in expensive cities ? I really started to question the authenticity of today's corporate left when Greenpeace (an organisation I used to support) supported the White Helmets, which as Vanessa Beeley has amply documented are little more than war propagandists bought and paid for by the US and UK governments.
They are clearly working in cahoots with a tangled web of trendy tech entrepreneurs, globalist bankers such as George Soros whose through his Open Society Foundation, countless NGOs bankrolled by big business and a motley crew of old school Marxists who have long dreamed of a borderless utopia.
I still predict Theresa May will win her snap election albeit with a smaller majority than initially hoped, largely because most older voters would rather side with the devil they know than risk an unpredictable Labour-led coalition, who could hasten the rate of cultural change.
Universal Basic Income for all (Terms and conditions apply)
On behalf of trendsetting businesses around the world, we'd like to thank all semi-skilled workers for your tireless devotion to the complex industrial system on which we all depend. We are truly grateful to all our past and present colleagues and business partners including production line operatives, meat packers, welders, textile workers, millers, steelworkers, coal miners, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, builders, carpenters, farm labourers, fruit pickers, truckers, bus drivers, cleaners, shop assistants, cooks, waiters, typists, accountants and the thousands of other specialised roles that have served us well over the last 250 years.
Over the decades we have endeavoured to improve working conditions, raise salaries and address emotional issues such as stress, anxiety and interpersonal relations that may arise in the modern workplace. However, we have always had to strike a fine balance between the wellbeing of our staff and our commercial viability.
To this end, our team of robotics engineers and artificial intelligence programmers have now successfully developed a range of smart automatons who will relieve you of your daily drudgery and let you spend more time with your friends and family, unleashing a new world of playful creativity and exploration. As a sign of our lasting appreciation we have lobbied your governments to provide a global basic income, which you may spend online or at any of our authorised retail outlets or leisure centres. In keeping with our commitment to universal human rights and inter-community tolerance, we will extend our universal basic income to all world citizens, irrespective of gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, religious affiliation, ethnic origin or mental health challenges, provided you agree to our terms and conditions* and cooperate fully with our friendly social harmony supervisors.
George Soros, primary supporter of the Open Society Foundation
The above announcement is of course fictitious, but based on current social trends. A populace fully controlled by a technocratic elite and totally subservient to an army of humanoid robots, social workers and psychiatric nurses is no longer science fiction, it's an emerging reality. The main questions relate to its implications for personal freedom and our sense of purpose in life as well as the likelihood of societal breakdown if things do not work out as planned.
We all yearn for freedom. Instinctively nobody wants to submit to the will of others whom we cannot trust to act in our best interests. However, in today's complex high-tech society we've become so interdependent that we relinquish our personal freedoms and submit to higher authorities in all our daily interactions with the rest of humanity and man-made infrastructure. Failure to conform to societal norms can often result in isolation and impaired emotional wellbeing. So freedom is a very relative concept and can only be truly understood in the context of other desirable goals we may have in our lives and in wider society such as good health, safe neighbourhoods, social cohesion, prosperity or democracy. We often confuse freedom with rights or entitlements. Access to clean water is strictly speaking not a freedom in and of itself. It's a human necessity that keeps us alive and kicking. We may thus have a right to potable water and breathable air, but their availability depends on our ability to exploit nature either by choosing hospitable habitats or by taming erratic natural forces to meet our needs. Primitive human beings did not expect clean potable water to flow freely from taps. Our ancestors had to learn where to find sources of vital elements. We may have been free to move to inhospitable regions, but would have had to pay the ultimate price for our adventurism if we failed to gather life's necessities. Naturally, we cannot enjoy any other freedoms until we have attained the means of survival. Absolute freedom would let us do whatever we want, whether or not it's good for us or harms others. Both biology and culture determine what we want. Our more basic instincts are not just to survive, but to procreate, which in the case of human beings means partaking in a complex game to enhance our social status and mate with the most desirable partner. Absolute tyranny would grant us no freedom of action, speech or thought at all. We might exist, but higher authorities would monitor and control every aspect of our lives, purportedly for our own good. As a social animal, we have seldom enjoyed absolute freedom, and neither have we yet succumbed to absolute tyranny, although some societies have come fairly close. A lone hunter-gatherer in a fertile wilderness may temporarily enjoy absolute personal freedom for no other human being could tell him what to do. Visions of primordial freedom have long featured in our literature, often portrayed as the aftermath of a misadventure as in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The need to survive would constrain all his actions. He would not enjoy the freedom to lie in bed or play video games all day. Indeed they'd be no modern infrastructure at all. The only man-made artefacts would be the creations of our intrepid extreme survivalist. If one day our hero were to meet and fall in love with a woman, his personal freedom would end for cohabitation inevitably constrains your actions. Even the most primitive societies had the concept of social responsibility and rules which governed the behaviour of its members. If you broke these rules and lacked the authority of a lawmaker, you may well be banished and risk becoming yet another biogenetic dead-end. Most of us can thus only conceive of freedom once we have met all our other vital needs and satisfy a set of innate emotional and biological urges that evolved to ensure the procreation of the fittest. More important as a social animal whose young need extended nurturing all our freedoms are subordinate to community needs.
Communities may allow some activities, such as sexual liaison, only in private or in segregated settings to avoid unwanted resentment and disgust. One person's freedom ends where someone else's fundamental human rights begin. As soon as our actions affect other people, we are no longer free to do as we please and have to modify our behaviour to suit our social environment. In a complex society privilege thus means greater exclusivity via private ownership or temporary hire of private spaces, where one can exert greater personal freedoms without constant social surveillance. Naturally in your private space you could do good or bad things. You may partake in leisure pursuits of which many do not approve or at least do not wish to witness. Often we probably just want to work or relax without fearing social opprobrium. As soon as we leave our private space and enter a social space shared with the wider community, we adapt our behaviour and outward appearance. The range of permissible behaviours depends very much on the social milieu and level of trust. In private we may also discuss personal or business matters that may give us an unfair advantage over others. However, in rare cases where things go nastily wrong, some of us might commit heinous crimes that are obviously easier to conceal in more secluded surroundings. If you happen to own, and have exclusive usage of, a castle in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands, you might be able to get away with murder much more easily than a typical resident of a high rise flat surrounded by neighbours and CCTV cameras. Many of us like to express our freedom through greater contact with nature, inevitably making us more vulnerable to natural predators and other humans who may take advantage of our nonchalance. Yet we can only confidently exercise such freedoms when we feel safe among others we trust.
One of the most fundamental principles of law is the presumption of innocence, i.e. the assumption that one does not seek privacy in order to commit heinous acts and most people have essentially good intentions unless proven otherwise. The principle of innocent until proven guilty may well have been the bedrock of both Roman and many modern legal systems in what we once considered the enlightened liberal world, but it relies on a strong foundation of shared moral and cultural values and high degree of mutual trust among members of our wider society. Once this reciprocal trust breaks down in an interdependent world, the authorities have to resort to growing levels of surveillance and subtle inculcation to maintain social order.
Complex versus Primitive Societies
Anthropologists often contrast complex with primitive societies. In essence the greater the size, specialisation and interdependency of a society, the more complex it is. More complex societies tend to produce more advanced technology that both expand and restrict personal freedoms. More primitive societies may afford its members greater theoretical freedom of action, but are inevitably constrained by rudimentary technology.
Technocratic Paradox
Undoubtedly most of us in modern European and North American cities enjoy easy access to better technology than our ancestors or the hapless denizens of cultural backwaters still clinging to outmoded ways of life. Our forebears had to survive without the benefits of modern telecommunications and comparatively inexpensive travel. Our day-to-day lives would be a never-ending tale of hard work and thankfulness for our anecdotal daily bread. Freedom never meant entitlement to a life of workless leisure and endless self-obsessed exploration. It meant first and foremost familial independence, i.e. the right of each viable family to manage affairs in their best interests and raise the next generation as they see fit. Under feudalism such freedoms were always constrained by land rights and punitive fees. Early capitalism transformed the nature of exploitation, so workers gained the freedom to compete with each other for breadcrumbs. Only later as technology improved could better educated and more specialised workers demand higher wages and better working conditions that also granted them greater individual freedom. Yet we tend to conceptualise our freedom of action only in relation to the dominant cultural paradigm of our era. Car owners may appreciate greater freedom to drive where they want, but such freedoms ultimately rely on massive infrastructure, advanced technology and regulations that prevent accidents and ease traffic flows. One may well enjoy the illusion of free movement on a desolate highway surrounded by wide open spaces, but when stuck in a traffic jam on a multilane motorway with no easy escape route, one may wish for alternatives. Indeed in many congested metropolises the mega-rich bypass overcrowded trains and gridlocked roads by helicopter. Hyper-consumerism has morphed into an arms race, where the same machines that once seemed to liberate us trap us into a high-tech rat race. Before the era of mass motoring urban children would happily play in the streets. Now their parents dare not let their offspring out not only for well-founded fears of road traffic accidents, but also because of a breakdown in communitarian trust and media reports of rampant child abusers and grooming gangs. Young children may be free to hop in their parents' car to the nearest shopping mall, sports centre or school, but are often no longer free to explore their neighbourhoods unsupervised. My point here is a higher material living standard does not necessarily beget more freedom. Better and more accessible technology may enable us to do things that our forebears could only dream of, but also impose other constraints. We may have the freedom to fly to Tenerife on holiday, but once there our actions are constrained by the thousands of other tourists who have taken advantage of cheap air travel and the facilities needed to support their lifestyle. To gain greater personal freedom you either have to venture off the beaten track and forgo many of the luxuries we now take for granted or buy access to exclusive resorts. Today's mega rich may profit from an increasingly globally integrated economy, but use their immense financial wealth to escape the excesses of mass consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance. We have thus commoditised freedom. If you like the commercialised hubbub of shopping and leisure centres with their incessant promotion of ephemeral products and synthetic experiences, then you have probably relinquished any true sense of self. Had I never visited a shopping mall, I may find the experience of temporary interest. Likewise I don't regret visiting the Great Mosque of Al Quayrawan (Kairouan) in the interests of anthropology, but I would not convert to Islam or agree with many of its practices. All activities organised by higher authorities restrict our freedom of thought, expression and action.
Free Will
In theory at least we are all mere carbon life-forms. Human emotions and culture would be inconceivable without our evolved intelligence that helps us learn new skills and concepts. To an animal behaviourist, a herd of cattle act in highly predictable ways responding largely biological impulses and environmental variables that may affect the availability of edible grass and potable water. They can easily explain aberrant behaviour in terms of disease or bad ecology. Most zoologists do not expect one cow to seclude itself in the corner of a field to write a philosophical treatise, compose a symphony or invent a new kind of manger. Neither do they expect groups of cows to gather to discuss how to free themselves from their human overlords. Yet our bovine cousins still have independent brains and some limited sense of self, albeit as part of a larger collective. We know this because most animals, except under extreme stress, act in the best interests of self-preservation. Without a sense of self, life and breeding serve little purpose other than to propagate one's species to the detriment of other life forms. Here we note two competing procreative strategies, known to ecologists as r/K selection theory. Lower animals with less evolved brains tend to maximise their procreative potential through r-selection and are limited only by their habitat's natural restraints. Such animals tend to rely more on collective intelligence than individual insights. Higher or more intelligent animals tend more towards K-selection with much higher investment in raising their young and much more selective mating strategies. However, a given species may adapt its procreation strategy to match environmental or cultural changes. Although human beings tend to more to K-selection, when compared to more prolific species, our rapid cultural and technological evolution has changed our procreation strategies and consequently the relative importance of individuals versus the collective. Our modern high-tech society would not be possible without hyper-specialisation and the creativity of a relatively small number of pioneering scientists, engineers, mathematicians, philosophers, entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Without a highly evolved sense of self our ancestors could never have innovated or challenged the old status quo. Critical thinking means understanding that the real world has many inconvenient dilemmas and paradoxes, e.g. should I satisfy my temporary desires by eating more ice cream or keep to a strict diet to maintain a healthy body shape and avoid unpleasant illnesses? Such a choice is an act of free will, a battle between biological instincts that evolved in Palaeolithic times and rational evidence-based behaviour. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers may well have feasted on nuts and berries to give themselves a much-needed sugar and fibre boost while stocks lasted. We evolved to crave things that were good for us or our longer-terms survival in most circumstances. But as we modified our environment through the invention of tools, farming and machines and we colonised habitats to which naked humans would be ill-suited, our instincts gave way to reason and culture, ways of life that evolved through trial and error. Ultimately everything we do or say can be reduced to biological instincts, but describing as human beings as mere carbon life-forms makes about as much sense as defining books as wood pulp products. Paper is a mere medium for advanced concepts expressed in complex human language. Free will is thus the intersection between physical reality and our intelligence. It is the act of conscious thinking when we consider conflicting options. We can exercise our free will to help ourselves, our loved ones or wider society. We are also free to make mistakes or follow the wrong advice. Without free will, independence is a mere figment of our imagination.
Identity Politics and Personal Freedom
A free person does not need a label to define or justify his or her behaviour. As long as our behaviour does not unduly limit someone else's freedom, without their express consent, then our predilections are a matter for us alone or other people with whom we choose to share such experiences. We have devised two dominant ways to deal with the complexity of an increasingly interconnected and transient society. The free market, in theory, allows competing cultural paradigms to coexist and find their own niche in a rapidly evolving world. By contrast a socialist utopia would replace competing cultures with a universal super-culture that would seek to eradicate practical inequalities between individuals. Equality and diversity may sound virtuous, but in practice cannot coexist, unless we redefine diversity in terms of ethnic background, gender identity, sexual orientation or non-conformist personality traits. Indeed we would never have progressed beyond the Stone Age if we had all conformed to societal norms. Some of us needed to think out of the box to devise new ways of overcoming natural constraints, while others had to nurture our prehistoric inventors. Natural diversity, especially of the intellectual and vocational kinds, spearheaded human development. Sadly such natural differences are also grotesquely unfair. A maladapted person without an opportunity to flourish is an evolutionary dead-end. Hence we descend mainly from the survivors of past civilisations with high infant mortality rates. Anyone with extremely dysfunctional behaviour would either not have survived to adulthood or would have been shunned by the wider community. As a result only more advanced, mainly post-agrarian, societies could afford a degree of specialisation that would take full advantage of the rare intellectual skills that saw the development of writing, mathematics and applied sciences, without which our modern world would be unthinkable. We have seen neither the triumph of Smithsonian laissez-faire economics nor a transition to a command economy with full public ownership. Instead we have the growing dominance of large transnational corporations closely tied to global banking cartels who work symbiotically with millions of smaller service providers and suppliers. These conglomerates not only bankroll the world's most influential media outlets, they fund myriad third sector organisations to lobby governments and promote the kind of lifestyles that suit their long-term business interests best. Many of today's leading businesses invest more in marketing, advertising, lobbying and law than they do in research and development. Any large hierarchical organisation, however classified, is much more concerned with bending the will of its subjects, whether citizens or consumers, than empowering others. That's much easier task if you can split your subjects into a plethora of interdependent identity groups. Your freedom to consume has to be balanced by other freedoms, such as financial independence or privacy.
Traditional ethnic, religious, professional and biological identities have recently given way to new identities based on lifestyle choices, personality profiles, erotic preferences or ancestral traits such as skin colour. It may matter little whether you are Portuguese or Polish, but it seems to matter more whether you chose to stay in your home region or migrate to a wealthier country, identify as an avid gamer, suffer from OCD, are allergic to nuts or enjoy erotic exchanges with members of the same sex. An almost endless array of circumstantial and behavioural traits can divide people into thousands of subcategories that justify special treatment and new regulations that affect the rights and freedoms of others. Corporate globalisation is commodifying thousands of years of gradual cultural evolution into a set of marketable flavours and identities that mainly serve to subjugate us to their domination. In this bizarre brave new world we are no longer free to criticise a religion that considers homosexuality evil or to challenge the fashionable view that sexual orientation is an immutable inherited trait. We are no longer free to challenge the theory that human activity has caused climate change or to challenge the logic of mass migration. Now I don't dispute that mass consumption has environmental consequences or sustainable migration can be of mutual benefit. I just want the freedom to investigate and discuss the evidence for these propositions.
Freedom to Breathe Fresh Air
I value the freedom to walk in the countryside undisturbed by vehicular traffic, noisy machinery or rowdy behaviour. Yet such freedoms can only be guaranteed by limiting the freedoms of others. You may believe the freedom to cross national boundaries untrammelled trumps all other freedoms such as the freedom to walk your dog in the park without getting mugged or raped. In a complex and unequal world we cannot grant everyone universal freedoms that do not inevitably counteract each other.
How the Virtue-Signalling Left Cares More About Affluent Jet-Setters Than Defenceless Goat Herders
The faux outrage about Donald Trump's controversial travel ban on citizens of 7 mainly Muslim countries reveals more about the priorities of the affluent infantile left than it does about any shift in US foreign policy. Most people in the world outside of North America, Europe, Japan and a few other wealthy countries cannot afford to fly to the United States. The freedom to travel where you want and to enjoy the benefits of advanced civilisations that took hundreds of years to evolve is a relatively new concept. By contrast food, water and shelter are the most fundamental human necessities. US foreign policy under Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama has denied millions these basic human rights by bombing neighbourhoods, destroying vital infrastructure for clean water, food distribution and electricity, littering the landscape with depleted uranium, imposing sanctions, arming despotic regimes and covertly supporting Islamic fundamentalist militias in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere. While many protested against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, opposition to subsequent military escapades and arms sales has been muted. The mainstream Western media, most notably the BBC and CNN, have consistently peddled US State Department propaganda by blaming local leaders, Russia or Iran for the region's growing instability. Indeed many left-leaning politicians and opinion leaders supported US intervention in the Middle East. Gordon Brown and the late Jo Cox MP published a report calling for more proactive intervention in Syria to counter aggression from Russia and President Assad. Their narrative leads in only one direction, a borderless one world government controlled by global corporations and policed by a transcontinental expansion of NATO. It's a vision shared not only by Hillary Clinton's campaign team, Tony Blair and George Soros, but also by the EU and China.
Yet the wishful thinking fake Left in all their collective indignation against President Trump seem much more concerned with the rights of affluent Middle Eastern globetrotters than those of Yemeni goat herders whose homes have just been bombed by the Saudi Air Force with the full cooperation of the US and UK or the rights of Christian Syrians murdered by rebel militias that the UK or US armed. They can only relate to people like themselves who value the freedom to travel abroad more than the right to safety, social stability and cultural continuity in your own homeland because they just imagine the world as one large university campus and project impractical idealist student politics onto the rest of humanity.
The latte-sipping soi-disant Left tend to confuse actions with categories of people. Migrate is a verb. Anyone who moves to another region or country is by definition a migrant just as anyone who travels by aeroplane is an air passenger. Migration may be good, bad or indifferent depending on objective environment and social conditions. Likewise anyone who drives a car is a driver. Logically driving may also be good, bad or neutral in different situations. The same human being may be a driver in one situation and a train passenger, cyclist or walker in other circumstances. We should not debate whether migrants or drivers are good or bad people, but whether mass migration or mass motoring make environmental or social sense. Oddly the two phenomena are closely related as people tend to move to more affluent countries with higher car ownership. In today's complex world immigration controls are like traffic regulations. Ideally we would not need any restrictions on movement and if we all lived comfortably in sparsely populated and resource-rich regions we could minimise both traffic and migration controls, but we don't. More freedom in one domain inevitably limits freedoms in other areas. People might value ease of travel, but we also need safe and peaceful neighbourhoods.
Until recently only a tiny fraction of humanity could afford long-distance travel. European emigrants to the Americas would save up many years only to endure a long and arduous journey in the lower decks of a ship. It's something people might do once or twice in a lifetime. On arrival they had little choice but to work for a living as there was no welfare to speak of. Not everyone succeeded. Some died through exhaustion while a few returned to their homelands penniless, but the American dream was open only to those who either arrived rich or worked hard and seized every opportunity. Not surprisingly the USA attracted the most highly motivated immigrants. If you were not prepared to adapt to the competitive reality of the new world, you were better off staying in your homeland where at least you knew the score. However, since the mid 1990s we've seen an unprecedented rise in global migratory flows as millions seek a higher standard of living in wealthier countries. People move not so much because they must, but because they can or rather because they are aware of better opportunities elsewhere.
Celebrity Rednecks vs Hollywood Divas
Two media-savvy celebrities vie for the hearts and minds of the American people. One is a pop star and actress whose semi-pornographic exhibitionism has helped promote the kind of consumer fetishism that big business loves and ecologists loathe. The other is a loudmouthed urban redneck from Houston, Texas, who has built his multimedia career on the conspiracy theory that the Feds want to deny law-abiding citizens of their god-given right to drive oversized SUVs and bear arms. At least Alex has ranted and railed against the establishment and stood up for free speech, but Madonna Louise Ciccone has only ever lent her support to Hollywood fundraisers to improve her public image. I can't recall her voicing her opposition to US arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Curiously Alex Jones and Madonna personify only marginally different versions of American exuberance and extreme indulgence. Both drive SUVs and lead jetsetting lifestyles that could sustain 100s, if not 1000s, of African or Indian lives.
Since the inauguration of the accidental president of the United States, property developer and reality TV Star, Donald Trump, the world's most influential economic, military and cultural power has been split into two rival camps, both funded by big business. For decades the White House could rely on the main American and European media outlets to toe their lines on strategic foreign, economic and social policies. The Republicans and Democrats differed mainly in rhetoric, one appealing more to the conservative hinterland and the other more to the trendier metropolitan conurbations. In practice they both vigorously pursued policies that benefited mainly large corporations while attempting to manage the expectations and social conflicts of their diversified citizenry. Behind the scenes the two main dynasties of the last 40 years, the Bush and Clinton families, whose members played key roles in the Reagan and Obama administrations too, got along just fine. Bill Clinton famously vacationed with George HW Bush in Kennebunkport.
Donald J Trump is a loose cannon who dreams of a powerful, self-reliant and prosperous America trading peacefully with the rest of the world. Most notably he has publicly advocated strong nation states, secure borders and bilateral trade deals that protect the interests of local workers, all concepts alien to universalists. However, his presidency is now captive to a splinter group of the infamous neoconservatives who architected the USA's disastrous foreign and military policies over the last 30 years or more. While once united, the business elites in the US and to a lesser extent in the UK are now split into two camps. One remains fully committed to the globalist project and view conservative patriotism as an anachronism that must give way to a new global mindset. Globalists may pay lip service to local or national identity, especially for temporary electoral gain, but their long-term goal is a one-world government. A few years ago many would have dismissed such prophecies as far-fetched, but Western academics have long argued against nation states.
The other group recognises the world is a complex and dangerous place and prefers to build on the relative strengths of advanced countries such as the USA, Japan, Australia or France as a model that the rest of the world might emulate rather than attempt to re-engineer the world in their own image. While globalists always favour policies that undermine national privilege and favour cultural harmonisation, modern patriots favour stable societies that benefit their own people and here I use George Orwell's distinction between patriotism (positive nationalism) and negative nationalism. This marks a paradigm shift that may itself be an adaptation to the USA's relative demise as a superpower. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the USA utterly dominated the world's economic, cultural and military domains. No other country could challenge its hegemony. China may have had a much larger population, but lacked the economic and military means to be more than a regional power. Very much aware of the Anglosphere's soft power advantage, China has focussed on building up its economic leverage with Europe and North America as well as expanding its mercantile empire to Africa, South America and the Middle East. The East Asian superpower's economy is set to overtake the USA's in the next 10 to 15 years. A close alliance between China and Russia could challenge the USA's former dominance and prove a much better trading partner for Central European countries who already import much more from China than from the US and rely increasingly on Russian gas. Over the last decade US Foreign policy has attempted to thwart the re-emergence of Russia as a major player in a multipolar world, by preventing a trade alliance with Ukraine under Poroshenko and funding the Maidan movement to bring Ukraine within the EU and NATO umbrella. This strategy has failed. Russia can survive without the US or EU as it has a captive market for its raw materials in China, Iran and India. Russia has little need for territorial expansion and has only acted to defend the rights of Russians in neighbouring countries formerly in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Yet Saudi Arabia with a fraction of Russia's size and population now spends more on military hardware than Russia.
For the first time in recent history the CEOs of major American corporations and much of the so-called liberal media are openly hostile to the US Presidency. Sergey Brin, the multibillionaire co-founder of Google, led 2000 employees to protest Trump's travel ban. He has already alluded to a future President Pence, possibly after the successful impeachment of the sitting President. Their main concern is the ease of travel of affluent Silicon Valley workers, not the safety of Yemeni goat herders or Chicago residents.
