The worst person is they that would exploit, make profit from, and wish praise for dealing with, the miseries you and I cannot conquer alone. No evil exists more than that which wishes your sickness to enable it’s remedy, and no person is so depraved that their validation is not gained without the existence of your troubles. This is why I am a socialist of the sort I happen to be, because of the simple economic structures I disagree with that allow the greatest benefits of the planet we inhabit, and all the resources we are surrounded by, to be captured and used for personal prominence by those people who I can only describe as the worst of us. I reserve my greatest criticism for those that exploit the kindness we are, most of us that is, capable of.

I often wonder if cruelty is a learned behaviour, or if it is just in some people as a fundamental of who they are. Maybe it is in all of us and Hobbes was correct, or maybe we are better than that as Rousseau speculated. I’d like to think that if I had the power to exploit people’s weaknesses I still wouldn’t, but in the absence of that power I cannot be certain. The question I’d like you to consider is simple…. Born bad, turned bad, or a mixture of both in varying degrees, what do you think?

A friend of mine, a man that suffers with his mind, said to me one day “there’s too many cunts about”. This statement encompasses his long experience of being in the world, but feeling not fully a part of it, that is what existential turmoil is. Somehow feeling detached from controlling your own existence, while knowing the truth that none of anything matters much in the grand scheme, and having to rely on something external that is granted to him by some means. Something that would be beyond his reach, or unavailable if it were contained within the control mechanism of profiteers. He is that hurt figure who cries out from his position of despair, hopeful for better, regardless of the odds of ‘better’ being long, never quite realising that contentment comes from giving up in the face of what Shakespeare’s character describes as “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.

Just like it is for everyone, the realisation of our own insignificant lives is a tough swallow for our guy, yet most people have somebody that they mean something to, a validation point to pivot round. People are at their worst, their lowest, when they feel isolated from meaning. I’m often harsh on people that seek validation in a false sense, I feel it is unhelpful to get likes on social media and attach to movements you don’t truly believe in. Raising awareness is not participation, jogging is not curing, thoughts and prayers do bugger all. Yet I may be wrong in my harshness, participation in a small way, even in an illusionary way, is self validating and internally purposeful, it allows the person to feel like a participant so it quells the helpless feeling. I personally just wish there was more action and less prayer. Where action is impossible awareness may be something I could at least credit, if I were more generous.

Those that can may do, those that cannot do may encourage or support, those that can do neither may hope, those that think their hopes have external impact are delusional, those that see this illusion for what it is realise true powerlessness. Your hope is your psyche helping itself, each person’s hope is their own psychological property, it has no affect on the physical world if it is not a shared perspective that leads to an action. We do not make the world with our wishes, we make the world with our power, but that does not mean these are not linked in some way. The individual that can remake their own circumstances so as to validate their need to be flawless, in their ego at the least, affects the perspective of those that they have dominion over. If Musk says that Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia (1984 reference), and holds the power to rewrite the history books, and it is not in the best interests of any citizen to question this postulate, then Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia, even if they haven’t. For Musk he has already rewrote his history so as to be in legal terms describable as a “founder” of the Tesla motor company, which he wasn’t in truth.

I think I, and you, have spotted where this has happened, the narrative has been rewritten on healthcare so that it looks like there is no alternative to the costly disaster it is now, and that is not accidental. It is necessary for us, the populous, to think this way if the current shambles is to continue, which it is because it serves a small group of profit makers to do so. Our historical perspective is a lens that can be made more concave, making gaps look wider than they are or were. As the generation that benefited most from national healthcare dies out, the memory of the reality is washed with the text of the replacement narrative and the repetitive statements of perspectives that are not truth, or lacking in motivation. To repeat statements from power is to repeat an ideology, and ideologies are littered with the needs of those that construct them. There will come a point where people will believe that the NHS was never free to all, and never publicly funded.

For example, Christianity is an ideology that echoes the will of slaves wishing for their power to be realised one day, and so it is promised that adherence today will be power one day, “our kingdom come”… (Nietzsche points this out in the Genealogy of Morals). It is no coincidence that this ideology was supported by those that had no freedom. That is not to say that it did not rewrite, and continues to do so, it’s own narrative so as to wash it’s own past doings on the way to the power it holds now. This is of course the ideology that burned women who wished to think, invaded countries, hid history books, supported wars, kept slaves and justified slavery, oppressed the poor, took foreign lands, and covered up the crimes against children carried out by hideous perverts in its own ranks. It’s written perspective has, and will, fade as it is re-described and reinterpreted to fit with the needs of a modern society, one that wishes to view it as the locus of moral wisdom, which it isn’t and never has been.

I’m not attacking Christianity just because I am not a member, as an example of a rewritten narrative it’s just about perfect to make my point that what is forgotten is deliberate and purposeful. What has been forgotten about healthcare in it’s former guise, state run, is that it worked well enough and was universal. This modern version works better for some than for others, and that is in contrast with it’s founding purpose and it’s mediated image. To say that it is free at the point of use is simply a fabrication, made possible only by accepting exclusionary principals that your eyes and your teeth and your muscles and your skin and your mind are not component parts of your health that require care. I paid for private therapy, I pay for dental work, I paid for my eyes test and my glasses, my neighbour paid for his mobility scooter, my partner paid to have her ears cleaned and pays for her foot care, women are funding their own menstruation cycle needs, every other advert on TV is for a charity that wants me to pay for a guide dog or a hot meal at xmas, some folks have to sell their property to meet the cost of grandma’s dementia care home residency. Where is the free at the point of use health provision in all this?

I told a co-worker of what health care looked like when I was young, they didn’t believe me, they didn’t believe it was possible, and that is the point I am making. We have to be forced to believe that something cannot work, we must forget what we once knew about that thing, so that someone can extract a large amount of value by making a version that barely works and then selling it ideologically to us as being the best it can be. I find cruelty in that, and where there is cruelty in structure there must be cruelty in the agency and on the agenda of some people. So we are back round to the question I asked earlier…. Born bad, turned bad, or a mixture of both? You decide.

Paul S Wilson