Fake Change: if You Never Change the Light Bulb, One Day Darkness Descends

The current British General Election is a farce based on asking people to choose between two failed ideologies. Both ideologies are trying to change reality rather than the lightbulb.

Ten months ago I wrote this about ideology, and how – in terms of both structure and belief – it chains us all inescapably to The Past:

‘All the ‘mainstream’ political Parties in the West represent the interests of big groups not individual citizens.

They are no longer fit for purpose, but the only way to get rid of them in favour of more electorate-connected movements is by dumping the dated ideologies that keep us all apart.

The priorities below are, I believe, four main changes that the majority of Western citizens could sign up to:

• A proportional representation voting system that most closely reflects the mass citizenry’s needs
• The removal of all donations to political Parties in favour of a regulated taxpayer support model, alongside a drastic curtailing of business, bank and military “for profit” lobbying
• Making fair tax contributions by globalist concerns a table stake
• A massive devolution of power away from national to city and local community politics

These are solid reforms based on a Citizen First philosophy. They are new approaches to giving people more power, not dead ideologies based on Adam Smith and Karl Marx. They can bring us together rather than pulling us apart. They are focused on human beings, not Big State systemics.’

Since that time, the two major Parties in the US have been marginalised by populist independents, as have those of France….while in the UK, the Left movement Momentum has shown how troops on the ground can rescue a seemingly hopeless cause.

But at the end of all that “change”, everything is in reality unchanged: a neoliberal egomaniac is in the White House, and rapidly being bum-rushed on message as regards neoconservative geopolitics; a self-styled Centrist (aka neoliberal banker) is in the Elysée Palace – and equally dependent on the Establishment for support; and in Britain, while the two big Parties are unrecognisable from their 1990s predecessors, new media tactics cannot disguise their continuing respective addictions to neoliberalism and socialism.

Momentum, or instance, has this to say about its endemically Leftist internal squabbles:

‘The nature of any future society will be shaped and determined by the ideological and everyday struggles of the present.’

And no, they won’t be changing the lightbulb.

In short, the dominant ideologies are barely bruised

Over that same period, meanwhile, the third dominant but equally archaic thinking model – Islam – has become more actively violent than even previously. And while we can all argue up hill and down dale about how many of its flags are false, the core religion remains intolerant and misogynist, while its fundamentalist offshoots institute violent, repressive and murderous régimes wherever they take power by military force.

But not only is Islamic ideology unaltered, so too is the Western Party Line about how to deal with it. Neoconservative outlooks under the ‘leadership’ of NATO still hold sway – as indeed does the UK’s adherence to the Special Relationship, the White House subordinacy to Pentagon and State Department strategies, and the EU’s growing commitment to “fight terror” with armed force abroad and higher levels of security at home.

One thing is abundantly clear: neither the domestic nor foreign policy strategies are working….and effective or not,  geopolitical expressions of it remain tainted by the diaphonous oil agenda.

In short, the dominant strategies are unchanged

Throughout the West, expressions of ideology themselves remain unchanged. The US President is still elected by Electoral College votes, and the UK continues to employ FPTP as a constituency electoral system. There is much talk of structural reform of the unelected European Commission, but no action: Juncker wasn’t slow to warn Macron about soft-pedalling on the Change pedal, and the EU side of Brexit “negotiation” has thus far consisted of threats from robber barons with a long record of form in the twinned areas of bungs and carpet-bagging.

In terms of raising finance for business, meanwhile, with every year the Bourse system becomes more dominant, more dangerously concentrated in a few hands, and its price-pump – the globalised banking system – more balloonatic in its product development. So anti-social are these over-packaged product lines now, not only do they deliver more wealth into fewer hands, they do nothing to drive broader economic activity –  and actually accelerate the snuffing out of competitive creativity.

Globalism beyond banking has achieved what I first opined forty years ago it would do: create mercantile wars which, in the context of systemic failure, could only lead to shooting wars.

Media around the world offer the same story via an ironically divergent development: an explosion of new avenues and apertures on the one hand alongside the familiar concentration of ownership. In the US before 1985, some 2,500 outlets were owned by 32 entities. Today, nearly 9,000 are owned by just 7. In the UK, the number is 5: if Murdoch’s BSkyB deal goes through, it will effectively be 3. The coalescence and cooperation of this élite with Sovereign security agencies has spawned uncontrolled monsters like GCHQ and the NSA.

Whatever emerges to prove their catechisms wrong – or even question the precepts – the ageing priests co-opt, corrupt, censor, bully or just shout down critics of the obvious flaws in globalist neoliberal capitalism, and its enforcer, neoconservative geopolitics.

The one surviving focus of resistance, sadly, is something even more arcane, archaic and bulldozer-systemic than the idea of a bedevilled hindmost – collectivist socialism. And it too remains in its favourite role of an antirevisionist literalism unable to respond to change. British Blairite socialism tried to do this after 1984, and succeeded only in becoming neoliberal.

Given its Utopian view of Man’s baser instincts, socialism – like its cousin multiculturalism – has produced the most astonishing history of dystopia in the century since it began coming to power. Failed States, brutally destroyed personal freedoms, crammed-full prisons, military bestiality and econo-fiscal failure have been the detritus found polluting its wake.

But none of this matters to the Clergy. No matter that wealth rushes up and hardly ever trickles down. That poorly paid mass consumers consume less and less in a system that demands growth through accelerated consumption. The good missionaries of Marx and all his works will not be discouraged by a 100% failure rate, and new bosses rising to replace the old ones.

Things go on, because in Room 101 Winston Smith must be taught that real is bad and goal is truth.

In short, material ideology prospers, Man stagnates, and Truth disappears

Predictably, a creative approach to anthropological futures and philosophies withers on the vine. The poorly educated human vine produces sour grapes who blame the other vines….not the soil or the viniculteurs.

I’m sorry to use such a cheesy analogy, but it does I think point up how the politics of blamestorming and resentment are truly, madly ineffectual.

It was not surprising to me when, towards the end of the 1990s, New Labour “thinkers” began talking about the end of philosophical politics in favour of “tactics” – aka, subterfuge and spin à la Alastair Campbell. Proclaiming ideas to be dead when you don’t have any is an excellent way of excusing a dullard nature.

Big, systemic failed process always tries to crush small creative glimmer. And small-minded process bureaucrats always look to put big new ideas into the darkest dungeon. We return full divigated circle to The Slog’s central aim as expressed here on the Home Page.

We don’t just need to change the lightbulb in the West; we need to develop a new type of lightbulb. A lightbulb based on the creative power of human communities, not on the censorious bullying of dogmatic systems.

Filed under: General Elections change Governments, not Lightulbs, Uncategorized Tagged: Failed EU, Failed Islamism, Failed neoconservative geopolitics, Failed neoliberalism, Failed socialism, Failed War on Terror, New lightbulb required, UK General Election 2017