The Time of Monsters

It's almost passe to say the world is in turmoil. And while to some degree it always has been, a glance at today's news shows just how much: mass street protests from Baghdad through Beirut to Barcelona and beyond to Chile. Governments in paralysis of one kind or another in Israel, the UK, Canada, the USA. Violent protests in Hong Kong, military conflict in Rojava,Yemen... and so on.

Underpinning all of it are two consistent factors. Extreme levels of economic inequality, often accompanied by increasingly visible poverty, and a collapse of faith in political classes seen as self-serving, corrupt and alienated from the Governed. Liberal democracy is teetering on the edge, its once universal nostrums of elected parliaments overseeing a modicum of public services in market economies with private property and supposedly "free enterprise" stripped bare and exposed for the lies that they have been.

Increasingly, we see the vast wealth accumulated by tiny, tiny portions of the population, acquired through a hypocritical combination of ripping off taxpayers through state-appointed contracts for tens if not hundreds of billions of pounds, euros or dollars and in turn corporate and personal tax avoidance. As the system slowly breaks down, no longer responding to the macroeconomic management of the past fifty or sixty years, the social contract is under ever growing pressure.

While as many as two million domestic properties are empty each night in the UK, 25,000 people sleep on the streets. While hedge fund managers speculate and earn millions betting on the future price of food, "gig" economy workers die at 53 years of age because they can't afford time off to visit their doctor - and in one recent Amazon case, they are sent back to work immediately the removal of the corpse of a colleague who collapsed and died on shift after being told to get on with his job by the company doctor.

Globally, resources once prized as being for the common good of all - such as the rainforests and natural sources of water - are seized and commodified by multinational companies with the backing of compliant governments and international agencies such as the World Trade Organisation. Trade treaties like the EU-Canada partnership allow companies to sue the taxpayer if, for example, a hospital contract is taken back into public hands, damaging the private firms profits. The whole system is stacked in favour of the wealthy becoming ever wealthier, even at the huge risk it creates to the future of life on Earth. As the Roman writer Tacitus once lamented of his own society's colonising of all it could grab hold of, "they make a desert, and call it peace."

Here there are dangers and opportunities, and both are already becoming nakedly apparent.

Unreformed, the system will stumble on, the super-rich gradually incorporating it even further to serve their own ends through funnelling public contracts and taxpayer cash into their ever deeper pockets. They will continue to extend surveillance over everyone else, initially in the name of consumer support, but already to control our thoughts, expectations and actions. In such a culture, they will continue to foster and sponsor division - between old and young, white and black, indigenous and migrant. They will fund wars and build walls. To divide is to conquer.

We can see the fruits of this just this week - a survey in the UK, divided between pro- and anti-Brexit supporters, found that a substantial majority on both sides support violence where people can be seriously injured as a valid means of achieving their respective objectives of remaining in or leaving the European Union. This includes those who claim to be anti-populist liberals, their anti-democratic prejudices showing a bit more nakedly than their leaders' spin doctors might ideally like. While actual political violence against individuals remains relatively rare in Britain, we only have to look at the 2016 murder of Jo Cox and the death threats routine received by her successor and other predominantly female MPs to sense that it doesn't lurk far beneath the surface.

Political violence in the USA has risen sharply in recent years - many of the mass shootings covered so luridly as the work of unstable loners in truth the work of politically motivated fascists and white supremacists, while a 2018 survey found that one in five Americans on both sides of the mainstream political divide felt that the country would be improved if a large number of  supporters of the other party could "just die". Similarly, 17% of Democrats and 24% of Republicans believe that is is acceptable to send threats to public officials. One in ten support violence if the candidate of their choice doesn't win the 2020 Presidential election.

In "The Common Good", the linguist Noam Chomsky wrote that “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”

Noam Chomsky

This could not be truer than now. The poisonous Brexit debate in the UK has pitched ordinary people against each other in ways that have destroyed any faith in ballot box democracy and in each other: different groups denounce each other as traitors and morons, both sides parade guillotines and scaffolds on marches and politics have growing into a new form of sectarianism. Facts do not matter on either side: it is sheer, naked, visceral hatred and distrust. All in the name of what type of trading relationship we have with a free trade block which in truth is neither the colonising behemoth claimed by its opponents, nor the guarantor of civilisation claimed by its supporters.

Happily skating above all this, moving with some ease between both camps, is a rich elite, untouched and unmoved by whether the UK is in the EU or not, but either way continuing to rip off society on an almost unparalleled scale and quite content for the paralysis and division to continue: for as long as it does, they are unchallenged and untroubled. The real issues are ignored.

We can take on the rich and make a better future. For we already live in a world of abundance. There is already more than enough food to feed almost 50% more souls than currently walk our Earth. And just this week a study showed that offshore wind power alone could provide more energy that the world is every likely to need - clean, cheap, and permanent. Artificial Intelligence is posited to "do" almost half of current paid human work by just 2030 - a decent society could use that to give every worker 4 day weekends. A capitalist society will put half of the workforce on the dole: it won't pay a company to keep humans on where robots can take over.

The choice seems obvious, but with all the vested interests and established Power in place, change will not come easily. It will take much more than a visit to the ballot box once every four or five years. The mass demonstrations we see around the planet now have to be the harbingers of wider, deeper change.

But first, we need to make peace with each other and turn together on the real issue, the real problem before the Monsters in charge of our world finally make a desert of it and continue to charge us admission to the "Peace Experience."