Reason cannot be met on the field of intellectual battle with effort alone, your effort will not make your case. How strongly you feel something is practically unimportant to the point you make, in a reasonable society.
What I mean by that opening statement is that when people use reason to form their view and affect their subsequent actions, rather than passions, then the forcefulness of their argument is in its truth and not the passion by which they may deliver it. It is perfectly plausible to become passionate about a lie, or a misconception, the passion only indicates your associated emotional experience as it manifests. A wife-beater feels emotional passion during the act while enjoying the pleasure principle of harming someone they ought not to, they feel strong and superior and they get to vent their passion, a football fan enjoys passion while cheering on their team, feeling like they are a participant when they are not, a man having sex with a prostitute has a heightened state of passion also, jealousy incites passions and yet is likely built of false assumption. In none of these circumstances does the passion, the felt emotion, speak to the moral validity or correctness of the actions that are in the associated event or the reasoning of why they came to believe that it was the right thing to do. For the football fan the emotion is morally and maybe practically indifferent, for the violent spouse I hope we can all agree that the passion cannot make the act in any way acceptable.
I have an idiot in my vicinity, I’ll not name him, he is to me the epitome of what is wrong with democracy at its core. Plato pointed out the problem 23 centuries ago, democracy creates the conditions whereby the well-informed few remain always at the mercy of the ignorant masses and their ill-conceived understandings of the choices before them. I call this guy my pal because he does no real harm to me and he is pleasant enough, but I ask myself can he be my pal if he uses his voting token to contribute to outcomes I know he does not understand the potentially dire implications of? The reason I say this is I know that he does not know why he casts his ballot in the direction he does other than that he has been won over by a single policy that has sparked his interest.
That policy I know is a simplification of the issue it attempts to solve in soundbite only. Immigration talk is mostly a falsehood, everyone that bothered to look into the facts and realities of this apparent problem, if you see it that way, has discovered that the phrase “illegal immigrant” does not in fact apply to anyone that is seeking asylum in any part of Europe. So the party that thinks it can make that statement of what we can only name as a social truth, is of course misleading the very people they wish will vote for them. The important point to stress is that they are aware that they are attempting to deceive people, it is not wise to consider them simply stupid, and they are smart enough to know that a deception that gets them votes is better than telling things as they are. So my ‘pal’ has voted for people who set out to deliberately mislead him, and he is refusing to see the con, happy is he in his ignorance. I find that troubling.
The party he wishes to be in power have clearly stated that their goal is to remove entitlements to state objects and base these on an ability to self-fund, I know of this guy that he has been the beneficiary of a state object that he would not have liked to have been given a bill for, yet his choice would, if realised, take that very benefit away from others. It is my opinion that if he realised this he would choose differently, so the problem is in what he thinks he knows.
Politics and political parties seem now to only run on one marque policy, that’s all they feel they need. With the Tory’s it has always been law and order, with labour it was always to do with workers though not so much now (a party without an identity these days). Reform UK are a party that harnesses dissatisfaction, like vultures they feed off the corpse that the previous governments made. The informed person sees that the ills of society are born primarily of inequality, because most of society is made up of the have-nots, not of race relations or law and order. In truth law and order policies become unnecessary as inequality shrinks (the GINI index proves this) because of a phenomenon that all educated people are aware of, namely that Poverty itself is the parent of criminality, reduce the former and the latter follows naturally. Poverty and lack of means is the prime impetus of social upheaval. It is only if you consciously intend to do absolutely nothing about inequality that you need to do much concerning law and order, and that is where we see the real fur of the Tory/RUK animal.
In any falling empire or society, the phenomenon of division arises where people blame the fall on those that are not kindred to themselves, i.e. people they see as not in it with them, not in their tribe. This means people of difference, people from other places, people of other tongues and beliefs become the target for ire, and of course those people push back, and the struggle becomes the news. Reform UK will not tackle inequality, they merely harness this natural phenomenon, remember again that it is my contention that these folks know exactly what they are doing, it is not a fault it is a feature, and that makes it even worse. When a person votes for a party that foments their hate and anger and focusses it on a single issue, they must be being naive if they think that that party would not continue to do so, because what else would remain for them to continue if they actually had success? There will always be a problem that is the fault of the target/s they nominate because this is their MO. The architect of this method is unknown, but the exponents of using it are in history books.
Hitler pointed blame at jews and it worked, he gained enough popularity to take over Germany and enact his vision of how that state ought to be. He reached for a mythical past that could be returned to, he utilised propaganda and fired up a tired and jaded people with patriotism and a sense of national identity. His was a spectacular success until the allied forces stepped in to stop him. We are mostly all thankful that he did not succeed, but we as a people, even though we all learned about this part of history, seem to have learned nothing apart from the movie portrayals of what happened mechanically rather than what happened vis a vie the social conditions that can make the rise of such a lunatic possible. At what point in your history class were you shown the economic circumstances of Germany in the 1930s and how they might make a populous vulnerable to a charismatic speaker with a promise of something better if the people were just brave enough to grab at it?
This very tactic is embodied in people like Trump and Farage, they are not new, and neither is their patter, it just looks new because we have forgotten or failed to learn from history. Unfortunately, in this time they are effective, and that has to be because we are an idiocracy. How did we become an idiocracy? We let the rich tell us who we are, what we are, and what we should care about. They are not the architects of this either, merely the front end of a movement that has many nefarious tentacles that reach into media – it is no coincidence that the wealthy will run media outlets at a financial loss for the externality that is shaping public opinion, social media – it is no coincidence that the richest people of all clamour to control everyone’s algorithm, governance – complicit governments consistently enact laws under a banner of safety that control the content and prohibit or minimalise certain subjects, education – bends the intellectual knee to put people’s feelings of offence above demonstrable data, and has helped to turn intellectual scrutiny, critical analysis, and natural human scepticism into controversial and potentially dangerous traits.
Orwell wrote of how the control of language itself is a form of anti-revolutionary thought or community conversation, one is prohibition, the other is self policing. Once certain subjects are tightly controlled then the conversations that would be possible otherwise are of course kerbed, because people cannot test what they think by speaking it to others without fear of being labelled as contrary to the rules of the tribe. To control the medium is to control the message. We can no longer criticise certain actions without being accused of wrongdoing by making the criticism or wishing at the least to examine the nature of the subject. That is an indication of what Orwell was getting at, and a man called Akala echoed this same sentiment in a speech at Oxford when he stated, and I’m paraphrasing here, that for certain beliefs to be useful a populous must first become functionally miseducated. It is this functional miseducation that creates the social conditions for a manipulated vote, where people become captured within single policy ideas that are unfeasible and will prove not to be realisable. Akala also stated something I believe to be true, that people who do not know cannot be blamed for their ignorance, but those that can know and choose not to can.
I’ve gone into the rabbit hole a bit, so I’ll back off now and get back to my idiot…
What I’d like to say, we could call this an imagined response generated by an internal monologue…. Though I did not offer this simply because I know it would not resonate. It would be pointless because it would not sink into the weak mind of the person I am speaking of, and I don’t mean to be nasty by saying that, it is just a fact. Often the argument is wasted, maybe it should only be offered to those that can handle it? Simply put, my current position is that some people should not be allowed to vote because they cannot be trusted to think, and I no longer feel that is an unreasonable position to take. What my interlocutor offered was mistaken and crude, but felt strongly. What follows is my proposed response, one that I did not waste my time to give….
I care not that your belligerent persistence is the only tool or tactic you possess, its use is still moot. Trolling me by saturating my day with the same argument, one I have already presented a reasonable resistance to, constantly and repeatedly, will not convince me that you are correct simply because your efforts do not wain. I am convinced by reason because I am reasonable. You are not, you are merely being repetitive, as if that were a tactic that could ever work. Do you wish me to wear down and concede? It is not likely. Clearly we have reached an impasse where we identify that yours and mine positions are opposed, I have arrived at mine through thought, you at yours through a sort of football-supporter mechanism. It is not my fault that you have no understanding of why you support a party that you don’t understand the policies of, and I have tried to fix this for you by presenting the reality of your choices. You chose not to grasp reality and fact because it doesn’t suit what you have narrated and created in your head as your worldview. I believe you have been fooled and seduced by people who are a lot smarter than you are, leading to your bad choices, yet I must accept that you are allowed to cast a ballot because you are a citizen, even though you render yourself incapable of realising what it is you are doing by your ignorance. You are the turkey that voted for Christmas. What I object to most is that your vote counts as the same value as mine even though it is unreasoned. We are not equals if I make an informed choice and you are the victim of a con job.
Today as I finish this, London is preparing for a Unite the Kingdom rally, this will be mostly attended by the sort of people who have felt something, because they have been led to believe many somethings, that are simply not true. Theirs will be a perceived inequality, yet I contend it is based on multiple falsehoods. If we look at who is funding and organising these folks we find that it is the right-wing wealthy influencers, those that both benefit from inequality, foster it, and now steer the social conscience regarding its impact. The trick on their part is to take ordinary folks and point the very anger they, the creators of inequality and the manipulators of society, are the root cause of, at those persons who have the least wealth and the least impact. So the phenomenon is that the problem, is in control of the resistance to it. This is a brilliant bit of propaganda work, one that Goebbels, Moseley et al would have thoroughly enjoyed. And we would be fools to think that it isn’t working, it is a spectacular success. The people who are impacted the most are following the people who have impacted them, to call for action to be taken toward making the most disenfranchised people worse off. My idiot would likely be a willing participant if we lived closer to London, many like him will be, definitely he will be in support from afar.
Until we solve this one malady, idiocy, we can solve almost nothing further. Until we start to blame and to put upon those that are the real criminals in this social and political drama we will continue to allow racism and bigotry and tribalism to dominate our collective social landscape. My proposal is that we find a way to take away political capital from those that are too unwise to use it. I have no idea what form that takes, or how many arguments there would be against it, but I do believe we would be better off if the idiots didn’t get to vote.
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