pinkfloydpsw's Blog

“Take a man out into the ocean many miles from land and drop him off the boat, then sail away. When you come back the next day he will almost certainly be dead. But take a man out into the same ocean and drop him off the boat, but this time tell him you’ll be back in a day before sailing off, and you may likely find him alive when you return” – Royce Gracie, a prominent BJJ Fighter describing the difference between having rounds in MMA and not having them.

His point is that when a person knows they have a safety net, then survival becomes much easier, now in MMA terms this means that if a person is most definitely caught in a choke or a hold that they are not likely to get out of they will know that they are finished, and tap out, but if they are 20 seconds from the end of the round they will not give in, because the reset of positions is coming, and they may yet have chances to win the fight. This highlights a phenomenon with human thinking, one that we will use in this piece.

I would contend, with my amateur psychology hat on, that most anxiety, whether arrived at in the present, or as a result of the past (in the person), is a manifestation of the condition where the future is not, or does not appear to be, stable, or predictable. What I mean is that when a person faces an uncertain future, one where they do not know they are going to be alright, then they worry about that future. What Royce Gracie points out (in MMA terms) is that if you know there exists the possibility that you will be okay, then you act with a certain hope and determination that this will be the case, you put in more effort, and accept greater levels of pain, because it can work out in the end.

Daniel Dennett points out that the brain is a future-generating-engine that keeps us, mostly, from making decisions or having experiences that are negative to us. How it does this is by way of a simulation process, before the potential event, utilising accumulated experiential data, animal instinct, learned information, and human reasoning (logic), seeing events in the future in the mind’s eye, playing them out and assessing them so as to predict the outcome of every decision we are considering and every choice before us, prior to the action that may follow. Now this is a very important and useful mechanism, without it we would make no progress because we could not envisage, and if we couldn’t then we wouldn’t be able to innovate and build and develop and adapt. We would be just like all other animals, unable to cope with a changing world. Animals, in general, do not adapt quickly, neither did humans for a great time, they cannot change their innate nature sufficiently as the conditions around them change, and they cannot affect nature and the environment so as to mitigate, they have no built-environment that is like ours. We could discuss the merits of our ability to make the world the way we want it to be with Greta Thunberg or John Zerzan, but that would be a different essay.

But what does this have to do with society you might ask? I feel that each person living in British society has, in recent years, had their safety net removed, and worse than that they have actually consented to this by voting in the sort of people who act against their best interests, because they (those that have power) have sold the populous grand preposterous ideas by way of constantly highlighting and magnifying miniscule problems. What I’m talking about is the sort of propaganda, spread by a motivated and money infected media, that has resulted in the masses concluding, without reasoning it out for themselves, that…

• They are being robbed by those who aren’t willing to, or are incapable of, providing for themselves. The poor, the unfortunate, the unwell are often suggested by the powerful to be parasitical in nature to the economic good. As if the economy is something that these people have no stake in, nor right to.
• The economy cannot handle having kindnesses and non-profitable objects within it. So the powerful support those organisations that shift the burden of social issues into the charity sector, as well as fermenting and supporting the idea that their personal intervention on a much less grand scale financially than directly paying taxes is a worthy endeavour, they even give themselves prizes and air time over it. I’m talking about cheating taxation then making yourself available for free so that you can raise other people’s money (A certain prominent pop star comes to mind on that one).
• You can disqualify yourself from having the right to use, or occupy, a socially provided (paid for by taxes) object such as a house, welfare, or medical care, by your own actions. You have to earn your poverty as Owen Jones might put it.
• The government is somehow a business, so it requires businesspeople to run it. The government is involved in business yes, but businesses operate within rules made by government, their existence is not dependant on governments. Before there were cities and states there was the exchange of goods between people. And if the government is a business why does it so often fail in everything it does so that all profits are made by subsidiaries and all losses are borne by the investors (the people)?
• Subsidising failing industries that cannot compete on the global stage is good for the economy, yet subsidising people is economically reckless. Farming is heavily subsidised, yet British farming is a very low employer of people overall, whereas Tata Steel had an entire regional infrastructure dependent on it, it was left to the slings and arrows of its fortune.
• Government can afford wars, but not peace. Never has a western nation stopped fighting a war because of the financial cost of it.
• Borrowing from a central bank, one that is in private hands, is a good and necessary thing. Instead of taxing the wealthy our government actually borrows from them so they can subsidise the businesses they (the wealthy) own that make them the money, so that they then can lend to government. So the exact opposite in reality and completely unsustainable, as any first year economics student could tell you that you can never mathematically reduce the deficit or pay the balance by borrowing more from the person you owe the balance and the interest to. This is the worst payback scheme the worst economist could ever imagine, yet so many economists that work for the government and speak on TV seem to support it, figure that one out.

Too often the propaganda start with this statement, a nod to a glorious past, but I’m going to use it here because in this case we all know that it was actually true of the mid-20^th century. There was a time, not so long ago in Britain (that’s it), where a person’s actions and opinions could not in any way disqualify them from the rights they enjoyed under the social contract. Let us remember that at for a time, between WW2 and Thatcher, no matter how many cigarettes you smoked, bottles of vodka you drank, what attitude you held towards government or society or black people or homosexuals, or what amount of double cheeseburgers you ate, you were still entitled to healthcare, eye care, old age care, education to tertiary level, and dentistry, and to pay for only one seat on an aeroplane, train, or bus as you were only one person. You were entitled to your vote even if you were incarcerated, you were entitled to a home regardless of whether you were actively seeking employment or willing to live by low means on a payment from the state that was not dependent on your level of effort in getting it. You were entitled to a pension from the state that would keep you at a level of basic human dignity. The point of all this was that you would be a bigger problem to society, and to the rich, if you were not part of a government provided scheme that enabled this dignity, the welfare state (a liberal idea based on seeing the uselessness of people due to ill education and ill health in the productive environments and wars of the 18^th to early 20^th centuries). In countries that have no welfare state the cost of the ills of society are greater than in those countries that have sufficient state provision, incarcerating people is much more expensive than giving them the means to get by without theft or violence. Remember the time before food banks, zero-hours contracts, qualifying criteria for healthcare, homelessness, debt consolidation schemes for people who had no credit but could borrow anyway, TV adverts promoting healthcare items?

If it was once possible to provide the basics for all persons, then why now, given that we are technologically better at getting all things done, can we no longer? The simple answer is that capitalism has broken out of the territory where it had purpose and “provided from nature the greatest wonder the world has known” – Karl Marx, and invaded the territory of moral action for society regarding the rights of a country’s citizens. The major problem with capitalism, in regard to society, is that it necessarily has built into it a principle of Exclusion. If we look at economics in simple terms it can be represented by two lines on a graph that intersect at a point of equilibrium where demand (which falls as price increases) meets Supply (which rises as price increases). Even though we refer to these as curves (and they are when it gets more complicated) they are in this simple example straight lines. The demand curve for Healthcare is not diagonal, it is straight up and down, the reason being that nobody desires healthcare in the same way that they demand an iPhone or a cocktail, where they may choose not to consume it when it becomes bad value, and they’ll be okay without it. Even when it becomes very bad value for money they will still require medicine, or an operation, or care. The powerful have noticed this, that healthcare is a captured market where they can inflate the price of the good being provided with little or no effect on the demand. We call this a monopoly market, and the same applies in many ways to housing, food and social care, but the curve has a lean because of alternative choices (smaller house, cheaper cheese, shitter care home etc). Other social commentators have often pointed out the elephant in the room on this one, that capitalism can never be used to provide sufficiently for social good by any means or by any graph or pie chart, it can only provide choice based market goods where a significant proportion of consumers must be marginalised. Yanis Varoufakis calls the sort of number chopping that TV and government economist do “torturing the data”, what he means is that they use statistics as a barrage to prove their point, leaving out a lot of relevant data, and choosing only the measures that seem to support their case.

So we must assume that there was a point in history, or a set of points, where the people we voted into power gave in to the people with real power (the owners of the markets and the money) and handed over control of those social objects that belonged in the public trust. But how is this possible when people had had it so good in the time before, and how did they get convinced that it would work out okay, or even be better, than it had been? Owen Jones wrote the book The Establishment (and how they get away with it), he’s not the first to point out how the powers that be have infiltrated and manipulated the social world so that nothing is left to chance, or indeed democracy, but his work is a great edition to any thinkers library. Propaganda by the newspapers supporting the doom and gloom rhetoric of politicians that made statements to the effect that healthcare, housing, transport, power, infrastructure, social care, in fact the provision of all social objects in their entirety, had become a burden too great to bear by means of taxation. This is all premised on an unproven (in fact disproven) idea that keeps resurfacing, that a country will retard its own progress if it taxes the wealthy fairly since they are the creators of jobs and wealth itself. This is an idea the wealthy love, for they truly loath the idea that they owe the state for educating their workforce, providing the means of transport that gets them to work, the healthcare that keeps them able to work, the forces that protect them at work, and the rules that keep them from rising up and murdering their oppressors (as they did in many revolutions all round the world). To win over a populous to an idea that is against their own interests requires the control of the means of information, the means of judicial process and the means of money, as well as the means of production that Marx is so famous for citing. So those that have the means of production, the capitalists, then go after the other mentioned, they invade government to change the laws and the taxes in their favour, they invade money itself by controlling the financial sector, they invade information by buying and running the major news outlets, they even use scandals to enact laws where there were already laws that sufficed – snooping on mobile phones was illegal, some journalists broke the law, there was no need for further laws as they were prosecuted using existing laws, so where was the incentive for a new law or charter that controlled journalism, and to whose benefit would it be?

This falsehood abounds, and is oft repeated by politicians and columnists and the sort of economics pundits that can get on TV. To realise that there is a demand that cannot be mitigated, diminished, nor marginalised by fluctuations in the supply chain these capitalists give away the secret that it is mostly demand that drives the market. I say mostly because I know as well as you do that new goods create new demand for those goods, but nothing creates demand by an increase in supply when concerning an existing market good unless the price comes down of that market good (causing the intersect point of demand to be further along the curve simply by shifting, not by actually crating a greater desire), or a new desirable feature is better than an old one, therefore perceived obsolescence. For example if the price of wood came down more people would buy log burners, but that wouldn’t mean they didn’t want log burners in the first place, they just had made the economic decision to drop out while the price was too high. This is exactly the marginalization that capitalism creates, where not everyone that desires a log burner can have one, yet not everybody needs a log burner, everyone needs a warm shelter though.

Now compare this to the situation where if your child required an asthma inhaler, or chemo, or long term care, how does the price matter in any way? Sure you may not be able to meet that price but then you may find ways, appeal to charities, raise money yourself, pay a premium insurance, ask family to contribute etc. But looked at in this way that surely means those persons who go on to invest in the capitalist, profit motivated, market provision of healthcare, and the persons who gave it over to the market, were/are deliberately using this known conclusion, and they did know it that’s why they did as they did and do as they do, as a means to extract wealth from those most in need or extremis, those who cannot refuse the good. My question is this, if you consider this long enough, can you find any way to justify it, or do you, like me, feel a little disgusted?

A wealthy elite doesn’t leave it there, with social provision just taken over by themselves, they will continue to find the means to promote the generation of the funds that will fuel their greed. One method is the promotion of activities by charitable persons to raise funds from other persons, fuelled by kindness or guilt, by way of free and pointless labours. Raising money for charity is a noble wish, but it is a stain on society, and an illness of society to need it in the first place, at all, or if not in the past but recently. It should be proof enough that it is always so very well supported by the same persons who do not wish to pay taxes, this is because charity is an extra form of taxation that is mostly imposed on working people, as it is mostly working people who do the pointless labour, and mostly them too who sponsor the events and make the donations. Looked at in this way, as a solution to their tax worries, is it any wonder that so many charities have the patronage of so many lords, and financiers, and politicians, and celebrities. By supporting charity you are lowering the pressure to tax them correctly, and they’ll love you for it, they may even give you their autographs or have the crown give you a pointless title or some letters.

A wealthy elite will go even further into social provision, leaving no opportunity uncaptured, further than any reasonable person could have imagined only a few years ago. They will force the issues that lead to austerity for the people as a way of protecting their profits, they will artificially inflate the values of their investments such as housing stock to keep the prices high by preventing the building of homes through ridiculous planning regulations that do not result in better made homes of higher quality (the homes built today are not green, not energy efficient, nor build of renewable materials, nor heated and cooled by natural methods, nor are they particularly built to last long). They will profit from industries that are government funded like social care or the stuff local councils used to do (refuse, roads, gritting, cleaning, repairs to infrastructure etc), yet they will still so often run to government with their begging bowl held out demanding ever greater funding even thought they may have just given their shareholders and their executives massive pay-outs. They will claim that they cannot do what they have agreed to do under contract even though they seem to be capturing a fortune of public money.

The argument is that they cannot possibly provide what is necessary for the money they are provided, that somehow the market has changed and it is not their fault, it is this tactic that has lead to the costs of private provision being now much greater than the costs would have been if the government employed its own councils as before. What the capitalist know is this, first you get an MP or two on side and have them make the economic argument for privatisation using a whole heap of facts and figures, secondly you control the narrative so as to make sure there will be no left wing socialist types speaking or writing on the subject in the mainstream media (keep them in the loony publications where they are easily dismissed), thirdly you make promises that you don’t intend to keep by signing up to a contract that is short term an will lose you money (in the short term), and this is the important bit, fourthly you now have the contract, the rights, the infrastructure and it will be very difficult and extremely expensive to get it back from you, so the government won’t even try, and the media won’t call for it (after all, you have already gained control of the measures that might expose you or your tactics yeah?).

What is true is that capitalists will happily dump sewage in your rivers, gleefully keep medicine from some of you and your children, stand idle watching the drains in your road clog up with leaves so that the rain is then a danger to your property, they’ll mercilessly ramp the prices up for medicine and use some of the profit to buy the car park the hospital owns (you own it) so they can charge you to see suffering relatives, they’ll strongly work against globalism of rights while promoting the free passage of capital between countries to avoid taxation or law, they’ll profit bare-faced directly and indirectly from charities, they’ll nefariously indicate a resemblance of morals by constantly giving each other prizes to the effect that they are good people or good institutions, they’ll carefully craft a perception of constant danger through media because they know that fear makes people spend more on mechanisms of insuring the future, they’ll paradoxically call for the subsidisation of low employment farming because they are land owners, they’ll happily retard the green agenda including windfarms and solar energy using the argument of the pretty countryside even though the landowners have wreaked havoc on ecology for the sake of profitability. Put briefly, if I ever could be brief, the greed of capitalists is always, and may always be, in absolute contradiction to the needs of the populous or the environment.

Everything that is not done that once was possible but now isn’t, and how can that be? It’s because the government, the main opposition party, the Liberal party, and most of the fringe parties are all people who believe that the marketplace can provide the best social conditions for the nation. This idea is attributed to Adam Smith, I’d say given the good long run it has had in testing, and the fact that it demonstrably isn’t true, it may be time for a return to the separation of the government and the markets. The right to have certain unwavering, unqualified, inherent social entitlements for all provides all persons with the knowledge that the boat will be back the next day. That in just knowing that, and knowing nothing more, it’s enough to keep that anxiety we are all currently feeling somewhat at bay. Working people can no longer feel assured of the future, only those that have accumulated the sort of wealth, power, or control over resources can feel confident that they will be okay, for them the boat never actually leaves.

Paul S Wilson