BerryBoy1969

Long but interesting article about how things may play out for the peasants ruled by the professional idiots of our rules based international order.

A small portion for your reading enjoyment:

It’s perhaps hard to realise just how far government has become performative and virtual in recent decades. It’s not simply that governments have lost capability, it’s also that they don’t care. For modern political parties, the imperative is that of the Party in 1984: to be in power. Actually doing things is dangerous: you might fail, and even if you succeed you could annoy potentially powerful groups. Talking about doing things, on the other hand, is fine. Blaming others (especially outside forces), condemning your opponent’s or your rival’s plans on ideological or financial grounds, successfully burying a problem or even denying that it exists, are the standard tools of government today. The Covid crisis illustrates this very well. A decision had to be taken in various countries about whether to close schools. It was argued that doing so would harm children’s intellectual and social development, which was true. It was argued that not doing so would only make the epidemic worse, which was also true. Like Buridan’s ass stranded between two bales of hay, governments were torn in both directions, faced with the terrible requirement to actually make a real decision. The result was confusion, order and counter-order, until finally the magic bullet of vaccines came along, and governments could avoid having to take any more such decisions. We’ve seen the same with Ukraine: western policy, for all its bombast and aggression, is largely about pretending to deal with the crisis, not least by adopting panic measures of sanctions and arms deliveries, and then continuing with them when it was obvious they were ineffective and counter-productive. But it looks good and gives the appearance of action, which is what counts.

So I think we are at a point where action and influence (if not necessarily formal power) will increasingly devolve upon those who can Do Things, as it always does in difficult times, especially at a local level. Otherwise, we will perish. On the other hand, there is no point in capable people just sitting around waiting to be asked: we shall all have to do what it is within our power and expertise to do, as it becomes necessary. But unlike the past, we also have the problem of performative speech to contend with. By that, I mean that something over 90% of the public commentary on today’s crises is not analysis or advice, but insults, allegations, expressions of anger, personal attacks, attacks on the integrity of others, attempts to get noticed, attempts to stop others being noticed … and so on. Now there has always been controversy, but in the past the barriers to entry were much higher, and the time to print and distribute even ephemeral pamphlets was relatively long. This meant that the signal to noise ratio was reasonably high, whereas these days it’s hard to find any real signals at all among the noise, except the signalling of virtue. Money and clicks come from anger and engagement: thus, the proliferation of sites and tweets and comments that amount to: “I saw this stuff on the Internet and it made me angry so this is what I think, even if I don’t know anything about the subject.”

Genuinely important arguments are simply lost among the noise, the chaos and the anger, and that’s fine with our political leaders, because useful ideas, valid criticisms and pertinent comments all disappear and are overlooked in the fog. The world has no need of my views on, say, the US political system, the potential for the end of the Dollar as a reserve currency, or the internal politics of Venezuela, since I have no special insight into any of these, and no desire to needlessly make myself angry, or to infect others with my anger. There’s too much of that already.

So how do we preserve a decent society in difficult times, since I increasingly think that’s what the argument comes down to? Well, we might first remember that there have been difficult times before. The western world has been at peace within itself since 1945, and we have forgotten what a crisis is like, and what humans are capable of, for good and ill. If you don’t do so already, it’s worth looking at records of the experiences of ordinary people in the nineteen thirties and up to the end of the War: not front-line combat or the death camps, but their ordinary fear, insecurity and mundane sufferings. At one extreme, check out, for example, the autobiography of Aaron Appelfeld, born in Rumania of German-speaking parents, interned in a ghetto at the age of seven, sent to a camp, escaped and lived in the woods for years before being picked up by the Red Army, finding his way to a transit camp in Italy and entering Israel clandestinely … Or at another extreme, one of my favourite authors, Jorge Semprun, who wrote mostly in French: the son of a diplomat loyal to the Republic, fled to France joined the Resistance and the Communist Party, arrested and sent to Buchenwald, where his life was saved because the clandestine Communist Party apparatus in the camp falsified the records to make him look like a skilled labourer … What comes out of these experiences, as with tens of millions who never recorded theirs, is less sudden drama than mundane everyday heroics in the face of hunger, despair, deportation, racketing and exploitation, violence and the complete destruction of all social bonds. Of course, a large part of the world lives like this now anyway: who is to say that we will escape all these things, and how would we deal with them if they happened to us?

It’s not for me to give advice. But it seems clear that if we abandon performative gestures and impossible demands, if we recognise that our enfeebled states are likely to be overwhelmed by the challenges of the near future, then we are of necessity thrown back on the collective resources of ordinary people. In times of stress, these have often turned out to be considerable, and our energies might be better devoted to doing things ourselves and with others, than striking poses to demand action from institutions that increasingly lack the capability to act. You can certainly demand your “rights” but, as Spinoza was probably not the first to notice, rights do not enforce themselves in the absence of power.

Of course, this implies a massive change in mentality: figures who are now conspicuous may simply disappear because they have nothing useful to contribute, and others may come to the fore. But heroics are not essential: what keeps society turning, after all, is the activities of ordinary people, not governments, doing their jobs and living their lives honestly. Here, I’m going to lean on my Protestant heritage and invoke the idea of “Calling,” ironically probably more familiar in its Latin form “Vocation.” We are used to the idea of vocation in certain careers: religious people, of course, but also doctors, teachers and others who work for the public good. But Calvinists, in particular believed that God had “called” each of us to do something, and that any task, trade or profession, no matter how humble, was of value and pleasing to God if it was done conscientiously. Now in our Liberal and secular age this is laughed at: a mathematician who goes into teaching when they could become a bond trader is an object of pity. But when you think about it, our society needs maths teachers more than it needs bond traders, and the honest shopkeeper, the competent and reliable tradesman, the dedicated home helper, the conscientious cleaner, for that matter, the caring parent, are all part of the glue that keeps society together. So perhaps it would be useful if we were to consider how we spend our lives, and try to do what we are doing to the best of our ability.

And we may be called to do other, more challenging, things, if the situation deteriorates. Like many people, Jorge Semprun joined the Resistance because it was the right thing to do: he doesn’t seem to have thought twice about it. One of my personal heroes Jean Moulin, the only Prefect to refuse to serve Vichy, made a dangerous escape to London, only to be sent back to France to organise the Resistance there into a single movement. He accepted what he realised was a probable death sentence because, with his political and administrative skills, he was the only man available who could do it. He was duly captured by the Gestapo and died under torture without giving even his own name, but he had united the Resistance and helped to avoid a civil war in France in 1944-45. And finally, I’ve had the privilege of knowing some white South Africans who fought, militarily and otherwise, against the apartheid regime, giving up a comfortable lifestyle for obscurity, exile, danger, poverty and often imprisonment and torture. But then as one friend said to me about his decision to go into exile at a low point in the fortunes of the anti-apartheid struggle, “I couldn’t do anything else.”

Perhaps we will be called on to make a personal contribution when the time comes, or perhaps we just cultivate our personal gardens as best we can, which is not a small thing in itself. But given the series of crises that are drumming their fingers in anticipation of an interesting future, we will not be helped by performative actions or performative words, but only real actions, no matter how humble, of ordinary people.

Let’s leave it at that for this week.

Maybe It's Up To US! was more a warning to prepare for the inevitible, than it was a campaign slogan for a candidate who would never be allowed near the levers of power in our owners government.