by John Ward
Some of what follows is going to read, in parts, like a ‘Scenes from a Life’ stream of consciousness. I beg you to use perseverence – it all makes sense in the end. And anyway, Percy Verence needs the money
Let’s open with what happened 15 seconds ago when the Worpress autosave didn’t work: they put up a panel saying “Saving failed – you’re probably offline”. Or put another way, “It’s highly unlikely to be our fault”. This is the default mindset for all ISPs, and it is profoundly unhealthy – for that ignorant arrogance set the standard of unaccountability on the Web, and the attitude infected everyone in commercial, legal, political and public life faster than you could say Get the Jab.
I’m now on my third attempt to actually fill in the unspeakably nosey formule granting me the huge privilege of continuing to be a French resident. The number of documents I need to photograph to prove the who, where and why of myself are dictated by the same prats who have spectacularly failed to process my driving licence from UK to Gallic equivalent….the dictation “must” consisting of their unwillingness to accept any other form of residency application beyond online. Most Brits here are retired, and a good 40% of these are barely computer literate.
As for photographing the documents, my digital camera chose to put the shots into a file that doesn’t exist, and therefore I needed an app to find them in ‘photos’…which no longer speaks to ‘images’. What was ten years ago an instantaneous import process taking less than a second (with a clearly delineated import file) now involves animal cunning, seven steps and enormous patience.
(I just got a further “confirmation” that I am offline, by the way. When I plug in my headphones, the AI tells me I’ve plugged in some headphones. At some point today, it will tell me that ‘an unknown error has occurred’ or ‘something is not right’)
The comms and social media organisation Telegram insists that I first of all install it on a smartphone, which I neither have nor want. Mobile internet may well be the future, but forcing me to embrace it now (and lay myself open to 24/7 State surveillance) is fascism, pure and simple. I want to use Telegram because since Microsoft bought it, Skype has turned to frequently frozen, blurred and pixcelated frustration, plus constant requests for us to tell them how good they are. I was happy with Whatsapp, but now it has a near-universal software glitch that requires constant reloading. When all this crap is a distant memory, we must all pray that ever-reliable landlines aren’t abolished by the idiots in charge….although such is already under way.
I switched on my ‘smart’ television last night to watch the Johnson-Whitty-Vallance yes-and-no-freedom probably perhaps fantasy. My channel-changer died last month (at the age of two – Chinese circuit board) and the new “much better” version cost €30 with all the best features of the old version absent. Thanks to the UK/EU driving licence exchange disaster, I had to cajole a mate into driving me to the electronics outlet.
BoJo’s announcement that he was setting us free from a tyranny invented by his merry chums was an anger-inducing affair: two more plugs for Build Back Better; a notable switch from “following the science” to “following the data” just to be on the safe side; three mentions of “this deadly virus”; two patronising references to just how jolly well we’ve all behaved; and the last infantile ‘hands face space fresh air’ slogan nonsense that begs the question, how can a mask help you breathe fresh air? As ever, the confection was topped off with a dollop of inane “questions” from a media set competing to crawl as far as possible up his capacious back passage.
Declaring time-out to analyse the everyday experience of colliding with hitech, media and the State is, however, useful in that it does (once one has overcome the desire to thrust the laptop up Fauci’s nose and then throw them both of them into a vat of boiling Ivermectin) highlight very clearly all the features of 21st century life that make it so obnoxious. Further, it reminds a person of just how deep and all-encompassing socio-constitutional reform is going to have to be.
The following realities leap out:
- When fault and blame are in order, it’s far to easy for perpetrators to hide
- The State is far too invasive, demanding and, ironically, inefficient to the point of being totally ill-tuned to the needs of its employers
- The desire to alienate and “leave out” the older generation is everywhere apparent
- Hitech – being the creation of geeks with very serious personality issues – is over-complicated, driven by sales-via-new, and counter-intuitive in almost every way
- The tech sector has overtaken the arms industry in its power, and willingness to supply anyone with the means to crush all opponents, in that it has become a complex of thought control and infratstructural weaponry
- Not-very-durable crap built by robots doesn’t last, and makes life hopelessly expensive for the ordinary consumer. Better product quality and more emotionally intelligent after sales service would create millions of jobs, and a better quality of life for almost everyone. The greatest destroyers of gainful and fulfilling employment have been cost accountants and the short term “profit growth” demands of bourse traders and investment banks
- The political class no longer works for us, and its bureacratic resources work for neither us nor them. They answer solely to the siren call of those with commercial power, money to lend, and weapons of surveillance and war. The corporatisation of government is now complete – and as a direct result of that, the Government and the State have become as one. In 2021, we work for them through a combination of tax and undue obedience based on gullible belief; they do not work for us, nor do they wish for our fufilment. Their main weapons are false science and the broadscale use of obfuscation when challenged.
So much for the diagnosis. A problem in its own right today is the willingness of ideologues to whinge about the symptoms of capitalism, but then present a set of strangulated syntaxical rules unchanged since 1840. What none of them grasp is that greedy globalist monopolism is the enemy – in alliance with Utopian extremism.
(I just got told for the third time that I’m offline)
Oversimplification is always a danger; but cutting through the IABATO* does at least help to stop complexity being a turn-off – as in, “I don’t know where to start, so I won’t”. What I want to do in the final part of this brief essay is – having established my analysis of effect – propose cause, and then cure. This kind of ties up the loose ends of what I first called Radical Realism towards the end of 2009.
*IABATO – It’s all bollocks and that’s official
CAUSES – WHY ARE WE HERE?
- The unit of human community is far too big. This is straightforward social anthropology. It leaves community members distanced from power, and too often schooled in the forelock-touching necessity. It creates alienation, bureaucratisation through complexity, and untrammeled power on a frightening scale. Nationalism causes media expansion and propaganda in favour of unwise ventures. Blocism leads to hegemenous ambition. Both are fuelled by the megalomania and narcissim of the Powertariat. Opposition to these developments tends too often to be either ideologically or egotistically splintered.
- Large community units create fear-inducing power. It’s a tough uphill struggle to get rid of Robert Mugabe, it takes a World War to get rid of Adolf Hitler, and unimaginable measures to rid us of the unelected gargoyles running the PRC, the USA and the EU. All are possible (to my mind, even likely) but most citizens don’t see themselves as David in the face of Goliath.
- Massive blocs inevitably lead to technocratic systemics. The “only” way to organise a mob numbered in billions, in the bureacratic mindset, is to forget about the individual person and issue each one with a long number, identify them as a typology, and treat them as clones who are (in their very ant-like nature) an inferior species. It is a very short step indeed from ‘one size fits all’ as a mentality to one ideology: a volk, a race, an amorphous mass…. a resource to be expended in the search for Utopian Lebensraum.
- Mass markets lead to huge output sectors and giant multinational companies. Every corporate manager with an ounce of ethics in their DNA will testify to just how impossible it is to maintain a functional and socially responsible culture above a certain size. Public stock offerings exacerbate this problem, in that the eternal demands for ‘25% on the gross’ each and every fiscal year from bourse analysts and banking firms produce a fanatical management desire to hit targets at all costs…..up to and including Annual Report lies, work in progress fraud and the deliberate harrassment of clients for gain. (Google ‘Lloyds victims’)
- Mindless megatechnology leads to institutional and incurable mass unemployment.
- Huge national tax-funded State units overspend and accrue debt. It is this established fact above any other that inevitably gives unassailable power to those engaged in Sovereign lending and – at Central Bank level – the manipulation of currency values. The bigger the unit, the easier it is for State criminals to hide, and accountability to be diluted.
There are 7.8 billion members of our species on the planet, and most of them aren’t paying attention to The Big Stuff. The six points made above go a long way towards explaining why: they’re befuddled by the complexity, overdependent on lowest common denominator media, focused on their careers and families, insecure in their employment, and – in some cases – lacking in the intellect and courage to recognise their serfdom. I don’t condemn or judge any of that: it’s largely driven by species wiring.
Equally, the Bread and Circuses principle of dictatorship is alive and well: what was once the amphitheatre and subsidised carbohydrate of Roman times moved on later to bear-baiting, cock-fighting, the bullfight, fox-hunting, proletarian football, rock concerts and then the media-based entertainment supplied by game shows, talent shows, celebrity lifestyles, home makeovers and cuisine. Even the bread part is still intact: in my region of Aquitaine, the staple farming model is soft fruit and viniculture. But in recent weeks, it’s become blindingly obvious that every last square metre of available ground has been put over to wheat. Such things come from the énarcs and the Préfectures: nothing in French agriculture happens by accident. Come fiscal Hell or high inflation, the State here intends to ensure a fixed price for the pain and the baguette.
THE SOLUTION – WHAT CAN WE DO?
I’m going to try very hard here to be brief.
The best way to dilute potentially dictatorial power is to scale it down – by a division of, at the top end, a billion – all the way down to a million at the bottom end.
That would produce self-supporting communities of an absolute maximum of 1,500 souls.
It would also reduce the power of any governing body to an almost homoaeopathic level.
The best way to focus the minds of those in governance is to take all monied influence out of politics and have their exploits funded by every community taxpayer.
Such a move would ensure a single focus on the wellbeing of that taxpayer. Failure to have that focus would result in ejection from Office.
The best way to harness the full potential of each community would be to do trade deals online on the basis of mutually efficient shortage and excess, and have community intranet providing full disclosure.
The best way to produce markets based on true valuation would be the abolition of the bourse-driven central banking system and – where necessary – the introduction of free-ranging barter to remove the potential for currency perversion.
We’re never going to get to a perfection of this strategy, because that would turn it into yet another Utopian ideology busy creating Dystopia.
But ultimately, my central argument for proposing it as a majority economic model in the future is that it offers an infinitely better solution to the survival of human freedom than the thinly-veiled genocidal-to-transhuman obscenities being proposed by the mad folks from Beijing to Davos via Virginia and Gatesland.
I believe in trying to get the greatest possible socially-functional fulfilment of every human being on the planet. It’s a vision, but not a catechism: it’s what our legislators should be aiming for. Right now, they are aiming low….and missing badly.
Thanks for reading.