A
society is a mixture of interests related to people and property. Both equate
to a series of rights. They are co-dependent. Current law attempts to uphold
those rights. Principles of government are based on those rights. The sole
rhetorically unarguable point in any society is that “People are entitled to
their rights”.
So how have we arrived at a global society where
people’s rights are routinely abused, and their ability to hold property is
largely nominal? Most societies at the time of writing are in a state of
considerable flux. Property is expensive, difficult to acquire, and costly to
maintain. Services cost a fortune, education and health care are ridiculously
priced relative to normal median incomes, and
“social benefits” equate to a miserly few handouts and some rather
shoddy services.
There’s a pretty clear trail of documentation regarding the onset of this mess. Fortunately for historians, if nobody else, the noble ideas of social equity arose in a comparatively literate time. Much sincere and genuinely altruistic thought went into providing a higher standard of living, covering every aspect of human life.
It’s easy enough to portray humanity and its ideals
as a tapestry of ineptitude woven by morons for no identifiable reason. God
knows, I do it often enough. But the really dangerous error is to consider
these concepts “naďve” or inherently impractical. The underlying instinct for a
working society is a healthy one. Societies are survival mechanisms for the
species. Much as I loathe and truly despise this facile, selfish, society, I
can’t honestly say “Don’t have a society, it’s not good for you.”
I can sincerely say, “Don’t have this sort of
society, it just doesn’t work, and you can’t trust it.” There’s precious bloody
little about this society which could be called admirable, or vaguely
resembling a manifestation of high principles. Between an “ethos” of greed and
corporate idiocy, fanaticism and incompetence, set against a background of
global disasters, what’s to admire?
The fact is that the methodologies of the altruistic
ideals have failed. The mechanisms which used to be functional tools for social
maintenance were never of a particularly high quality. They were introduced
grudgingly, or thoughtlessly, or both, and were tacked on to bureaucratic and
legislative millstones which tinkered incessantly with details to the point of
losing the objectivity needed to make them work properly.
Rather sadly, the altruism, genuine though it was,
obscured the real social needs. Leave an ideal lying around long enough, and a
supply of political plodders will come along and use it as slogans, to the
point it becomes meaningless, and much more dangerously, divisive.
The original idea of socialism wound up as a half
baked economic class war. In effect it enshrined a split in the perceived
interests of people within a society. “Support socialism, and you’ll be living
better.” “Don’t support socialism, because they’ll take your property away from
you.” Then followed the inevitable split on both sides, “They want to prevent
you having your rights.”
A recipe for total failure. In effect the economic classes within the
society were set against each other from the outset. Much worse, it prevented the practical considerations of the original
ideas being properly developed, and the many bugs and flaws being addressed.
Marx added to the problem, and a sort of institutional pseudo-egalitarianism,
actually based on power groups who weren’t subject to any restraint, finished
the job of completely destroying the whole idea.
Socialism, when put into practice, was much more
notable for its sheer turgidity than any practical application of itself above
the most modest aspirations, and misrepresented them in the process. The
grinding demand for public education was held up as an example of improved
quality of life, a vindication of everybody’s ideals. In countries where
capitalism ruled, it was a natural vindication of capitalism. To describe the
rhetoric as “dire” would be to flatter it.
In practice, a collection of industrial serfs would
have had no possibility of functioning at all under the demands of the late 19th
and 20th centuries. The societies would have collapsed,
uncompetitive, mal-administered, and technically backward. Economically, a
workforce full of downtrodden illiterates couldn’t survive at all, and many
countries have histories which prove this rather obvious (and extremely
expensive) point.
Then there was the brand new idea of health, duly
exploited by all ideologies. Perhaps the only sector of public interest in
which every single politician, political scientist, and lobbyist could claim to
have invented the idea of the healthy human being. Sorry, Hippocrates, get a
better press agent next time. Whole systems of insurance, benefits, laws,
budgets, ethical tantrums… 50 years, at least, of self-righteous bile… and it’s
a global disaster on a scale which even the Plague in full rampage never
achieved. We really do have a planet
full of very sick people. There are a range of huge epidemics, against which
medical science has been fighting for decades just to keep up with them. If
there are less than a billion chronically ill people on Earth at the moment, I
would be very surprised.
I used health and education as examples of the idea
of social interests. To work at all, a society needs educated people. It also
needs people healthy enough to do their own jobs, let alone manage the affairs
of others. In this case the social interest is purely in making sure its
components work properly. If you consider health and education as capital
investments by a society, how would you say the portfolio is doing? Answer, a
severe, crippling loss on investment. A loss, running at a loss. The resources
used failing to address the costs are moreover not being used for anything but
propping up failed, chronically inefficient,
fossilized systems. Adding a touch of perhaps appropriate irony is the
fact that the demand for education is far outstripping supply, and the main
reason for that is that societies are too cheap to provide an education that
trains the people that produce their profits and taxes. Another massive ongoing
loss, this time in real potential for creating capital that the societies
desperately need.
That’s “social capital” as meant in this book.
The ideals of the past weren’t so naďve. A society
must be able to maintain, support, and develop itself, to remain viable. Most
of the old civilizations were destroyed by weaknesses they created within
themselves. The very idea of a global society means that the elements which
shape it are that much more powerful. There is a very real danger that this
fetal global society, due to its erratic and unsystematic inertia in
maintaining itself and meeting its own needs, and the vast weight of money
driving it in so many contradictory directions, will simply fail, and take most
of humanity with it.
The least of the results would be a real
global Depression. A global Depression, today, would be the equivalent of ten
of the original Depressions, minimally, just in terms of equity, never
mind assets and cash. Savings and capital holdings could be obliterated. That’s
becoming stunningly obvious as world trade becomes a series of surges in the
bathtub. If you don’t keep adding liquidity, the liquid medium becomes toxic
and stagnant. If you don’t add heat, it becomes tepid and stagnant. If you
don’t sometimes drain off the wastes, and keep the liquid clean enough to at
least pretend it’s hygienic, you’re probably bathing in a very dangerous soup.
Now- do you need a plumber? Preferably one legally
obliged to make sure you survive your bath?
The worst of the results would be an
irrecoverable loss of a generation or so trying to survive the results. Even
the 1929 Depression left horrible scars on the next two generations. A modern
Depression would destroy trade on an unthinkable scale. Food would be the first
thing hit by price demands. Services, infrastructure, and anything based on
revenue wouldn’t be able to stand the strain, if there’s nothing to pay costs.
Meaning you either buy something to eat, or pay for the machinery to keep your
society going. Interesting choice, isn’t it? You don’t need a Third World War
to do this. All you need is a society that can’t maintain itself. Just to cheer
everyone up, to get out of a mess like that you’ll have to invent the economic
methodologies, because they don’t exist, yet.
Those with a similar sense of humor might note that
there’s something irresistibly apt about this hideous bit of mindless
shop-keeping we call a society pricing itself out of existence. I’ll buy the
popcorn, when it happens. Oh… all right, I’ll give you a discount…
A slightly more humanistic viewpoint may go one step
further after it stops laughing, and come up with a better schematic for a society
in which the human being has some reason to exist. Given that the human being
has been almost totally devalued to near worthlessness by the present society,
and is little more than an obstacle in a queue to other humans, that isn’t too
hard:
1.
Social
ritual has produced something marginally less inspiring than a battery chicken,
and called it a human being. Arguably a battery chicken has a structured
existence, better health care, better diet, and a career path, and dies without
experiencing a lifetime of deprivation, neglect, and insults…
2.
“Intellectual
excellence”, that pretentious, unspeakably irritating and utterly useless
thing, has failed unanimously to come up with even a vague idea of the
aspirations of the human race. Sic transit academia. What do you
bastards think you’re there for? Applause? Did you get all that education just
to have no opinions and no forward vision? How about the mildly relevant
concept of making some of the new ideas for making this world habitable again
workable and cost-effective? Think you could condescend to have a shot at that?
3.
Many
years of dedicated, if un-shut-up-able, effort have produced global mechanisms
completely and demonstrably unable to deal with anything to the extent of
actually solving any of the problems. Perhaps this highly remunerated supply of
officious offal would care to address the metaphysics of actually achieving
something, for once.
4.
A
global culture barely removed from bird mating rituals, and much less often in
key, has reduced the modes of human relationship to a pretty dismal condition.
There’s some logic in that, because time spent exposed to the culture is in
effect time spent not being yourself. Bit hard to have a relationship with
someone who’s not there, particularly if it’s you. In some cases that may work
out, but generally someone is supposed to be participating in a
relationship between people… if they have the time. (Future generations note:
things really are as vague as that.)
5.
A
veritable museum of daily practices infest almost every aspect of the advanced
form of frustration human beings refer to as “life”. The fact is that most
forms of human activity can now be done better and much more cheaply, and the
social environment hasn’t even begun to catch up. From anachronism to antiquity
scampers the happy human, in absolute certainty that something will stuff up
somewhere. Hence it spends hours traveling to a place to do a job which it
could just as easily have done at home, and saved the entire society the
expense and risk of people on the roads.
6.
A
mythology of crime is maintained to keep everyone interested. Crime is about
nothing but money, and the solutions are really pretty obvious. Make
crime expensive, and everyone will go and do something else. Instead, we have
an ongoing industry promoting crime as a way of life. Prohibitionist
ideologies, even those based on reasonable health concerns, ensure that anything
illegal can be valuable. Does anyone really believe that organized crime would
sit around all day trying to offload worthless things? Instead, it’s
subsidized, by law. A brilliant non-solution to a problem that never needed to
exist.
7.
For
thrill seekers, there’s always poverty. The one truly traditional social
heirloom, upheld selflessly by possibly the most genuinely lazy society in
history. The absolute certainty of billions of people being not only ignored,
but their ability to participate and contribute completely negated, by policy and by precedent. Meaning that all
the very necessary work required on this orbiting sewer, which isn’t being
done, won’t be done, because nobody has the brains or initiative to pick up a
phone, get them trained, and getting the jobs done, and making sure the
problems don’t come back. The physical problems of this world can be solved,
but it won’t be by doing nothing.
This was intended to be a book. It may well turn out
to be an encyclopedia. As usual with my stuff, I don’t expect, and won’t
tolerate, mindless agreement. There are going to be ten billion people on this
mudball by mid 21st Century, and they deserve more than the record
of some previous generation of halfwits agreeing with itself as a monument to
whatever misery we’ve inflicted them with through our own stupidity.
It’s hard to imagine anything more unlikely than
some author coming up with all the answers in one book. It’s also unbearable to
think that I would write a mere dogma. Particularly when most of the problems
I’m trying to address are created by social dogmas.
All I can really say is I think I’m doing the right
thing by writing the book.
I do hope that it will get someone thinking.