Our society is failing to work and it is time we started to accept this as a fact. When you take a good look around you will see failure of our society on every single level, affecting every single class, in fact all forms of social stratification are being let down by “the system”. At the lower ends of society humans are being let down by being forced into slavery under the guise of “honest hard work” whereas the top ends of society are being let down by living in a system that encourages them to abuse the position of power that they are in. Our society is exploitative by design, not by human failure. The greedy select few at the top are only that way because we live within a social system that encourages competitiveness. Often this competition is promoted as good, encouraging free trade and control of market prices when in fact all it does is promote greed, corruption and exploitation. This is achieved through scarcity and the control of resources to ensure the lack of abundance and perpetuation of profit based market systems.
Our society is one governed by money, and a monetary based society is one founded on the need for profit and gain. In this kind of environment, coupled with intentionally created competitiveness we end up with greed and those seeking “more”. This is one of the root causes of crime, as those worse off consistently seek to compete with those via criminal methods as our society cannot support everyone competing through a work/slave market. A lot of these topics are going to be published in a future blog but for now they serve to highlight some of the basic issues of our society which support my current topic – politics and law.
The issue I wish to bring up at this time is our approach to a solution. We need to begin to rethink how we tackle social issues and the failures of the current system, and more importantly how we no longer need those people who currently uphold the system as it is. Politics has long been held as a system that provides a voice for the people, allowing the wishes of the masses to be made manifest through political discussion and the creation of law. This system has critically failed. You only need to ask yourself this simple question – what is currently improving my life? Are the decisions made by politicians actually improving your life? No. Many say that to not vote is to support the status-quo when in all honesty voting supports the status-quo as no matter who you vote for nothing integrally changes. Thatcher was not responsible for poll tax, the system was responsible for it. If she hadn’t of done it someone else would have in some other form, be them conservative, labour or anyone else.
Please bear with me as I try to explain this as I will attempt to not go off and a thousand tangents!
It is very easy to establish that we live in a monetary based society that can only function off the basis of profit and the use of money as a form of wage and payment. How does a company make profit? By ensuring that it’s product trumps any other on the market and that they control supply so as not to saturate availability and therefore water down costs subsequently reducing profits. Many south African diamond mines for example destroy a large portion of the diamond stock so as not to reduce the value of the unit. This process leads to scarcity – the primary cause of high prices and high profits. This failure is not caused by groups of people or individuals, they are merely the symptom – the problem is the social system that practically encourages it to happen. This is system is perpetuated by the political and legal process as we often try to control social systems through law and the governing politics of a law yet this has consistently failed to deliver.
Example
When we consistently see something wrong happening such as cars crashing into each other and killing people because they are going to fast what does our social system do?
It creates a law…
What can this possibly do? Some abide by said law, others don’t. Some people still die and some are locked up in prison for their trouble. This is not a solution, it is a patchwork, a social plaster that doesn’t amount to much.
Do we have the same problem with planes? No – and why is that? We have applied that which humans do best, problem solving and technology. Ever since we designed tools to help remove the skin of an animal or to help build something we have applied our ability to create and design.
Why is this not being done today?..
PROFIT
The monetary system and subsequently the political system that supports it is socially paralysing our development both socially and technologically. New technology is only being encouraged on the basis it will increase productivity and profit. No profit = no funding = no design. Our profit based social mentality cannot allow cars to be designed that require almost no service maintenance and that don’t crash or collide. This would hammer the profits of both the service industry and insurance industry too much – and the people who are at the head of such industries across all of society are people with a lot of money and a lot of political persuasion. This inevitably causes us to look at those who claim to govern our society, this society which has failed to deliver…politicians.
A politician is someone who claims to get things done. Have a problem? Write to your local MP. Want to see change – vote for the party who stands for what you believe.
This is a social fallacy.
What does your local MP have the power to do? Absolutely nothing. Any and all social change cannot be governed any one single individual, and even a single political party can only cause nominal change to occur. Why is that? It is simple really…politicians do not create anything other than legislation and law, and attempt to cause change to occur through the maintenance of the national monetary system – and this is where we are let down. A political party is no different than a corporation – it lives within a monetary system and therefore must work and create within a monetary system following the same route as everyone else – competitiveness and greed cause by intentional scarcity and the drive for market share, or in the case of political parties – power and the drive for voting share.
There is another way. Outside the control of a monetary system our technological and additionally social advancement would not be stifled and paralysed by the governance of profit. We have the technology and the ability to design new technologies that can significantly improve our society and improve the global society as a whole. It may seem far fetched to think of a world devoid of the monetary system but it isn’t. We have not always lived within this system and I believe there is a future for us beyond the system we are in now. We all need to change the way we think – we all need to make a difference to ourselves and in turn make a difference to our society. This archaic and useless system of politics and law cannot last forever and a change in these will take us one step further towards freeing humans from the grip of profit, greed and the corruption it creates.
People need to stop seeing these qualities as something inherently human. You are not born greedy, corrupt or bigoted. These are conditions caused by social functions, socialisation and cultural conditioning. They go to show the failure of our society and the failure of humans create a social environment that works in cohesion with our natural environment allowing us to live more healthy fulfilling lives. The time is now to start changing your life and working towards changing our society for the better.
What are you waiting for?
Tags: politics, scarcity, society
There’s something bloody weird going on here, Daniel. I agree with nearly every word (well, apart from the way to make a protest vote, but we’ve been through that already!).
MP’s can make a difference in terms of a specific problem for a specific individual – like getting an old lady’s house redecorated. In terms of overall significant social change, they’re no better than you or me.
You’re coming up with the same stuff as RAW and Bucky Fuller before him , and several before them too.
One question: In practical terms, how?
Love,
Seán
It is impossible to state how within the current climate – we have to accept that there is no way that we can envisage an end result and then come up with a full strategy to get there. We have to do what our ancient ancestors did when walking out of Africa – take that step and see where it leads. This has been the common recurring factor of human development throughout the ages – the taking of a risk for the betterment of our society yet this has now stopped. The monetary system has forced a climate of maintenance and a fear of change. We need to become the explorers, the inventors, the artists we once where. Einstein didn’t come up with what he did because he was paid to do it – he did it because he wanted to do it. Ye gods even Bill Gates created windows originally because he thought he could make things better – he did it as a side project and wasn’t paid for it although of course he is now – there was no way he could have envisaged the way things went, but it was of course inevitable in this profit system we are tied to.
I guess we need to look at our own lives. Me, pix and Jess already have a plan to literally sit down and brainstorm what it is that makes our lives better and how we can improve that and also how we can make changes ourselves within the house and our surrounding environment OUTSIDE the current system to make life better.
You may have noticed things like my styatus on myspace, facebook etc changing from time to time to things like “working on the reality bomb” etc – this is with intent and purpose.
The rules of warfare need to change – we need to wage war on our own system and to do this we essentially have to fight ourselves – and our weapon? The reality bomb. We need to force ourselves to open our fucking eyes if we are ever to free ourselves from this shitty situation we have got ourselves into. The people of the future are going to look back on this point in history and think “what the hell where they thinking?” – the benefits of hindsight are a kicker aren’t they.
It can seem hopeless – just how do we free ourselves from the grip?…
Think on this – the technology we create is supposed to free us from work to allow us to live. When a man works in a factory and a technology is created that can replace that man – he shouldn’t be placed back into the slave pen waiting for more work, he should be free – this was the driving force of industry in the early days of the industrial age TO FREE THE PEOPLE. This didnt happen because of our profit based monetary system and now new technology is only developed if it serves to reduce costs and increase profit – this is where the change needs to lead to.
In case you haven’t found it already, you may find this stuff interesting:
http://www.anxietyculture.com/
I did!
Love,
Me
Oh yeah, there are these as well:
http://www.workersoftheworldrelax.org/
and:
http://worklessparty.org/
and this, which is interesting:
http://www.alternet.org/story/84960/
Damn right Daniel!
I agree completely – society is broken becuae the systems don’t work. It’s time for a radical change.
I’m with you all the way on this one.
Go Big D!
x
An excellent post, Astral One! Interestingly, one thing I would point out is that politicians certainly cannot do ANYTHING if the state doesn’t OWN anything. This is why deregulation and ‘light touch’ interventionism has lead to the catastrophe we are in now. A completely free market economy with no nationalised industry basically takes all power OUT of the hands of any Parliament or ruler. Unless there is some kind of nationalisation or regulation in our economies we can’t be surprised when things spiral out of control of governments. This is why Governments all over the world are jumping in and renationalising things, led, it seems, by Gordon Brown (the New Messiah) who is actually using good, old-fashioned Socialist Keynesian economics to shore things up.
What has happened is that all the world’s politicians have gradually ceded all their power to markets, business and things like the WTO through deregulation, privatisation and treaties such as TRIPS and GATS which signed away Governmental rights to policy if they were against business interests. Amazingly, none of these politicians seem to have realised that in doing so they made themselves redundant. Its probably the root cause of why our political class is so feeble now. If you REALLY want power, you don’t run for Office, you become a businessman.
The original model for all this was Pinochet, from whom free market ideas spread to the Evil Thatch. Pinochet bought into the ideas of Milton Friedman, deregulated and privatised. It went for a while and then, shock horror, it collapsed. To get Chile out of trouble, Pinochet renationalised whole chunks of its industries. In a nutshell, if politicians sell everything off they end up ceding control of everything. Thus the corporations run the show and, as we know, corporations are unscrupulous, immoral and sociopathic. What can we expect if we set Money up as our new God? That is what we have done. We call ourselves atheists but in fact we are Mammon Worshippers now, lapping it up at the altar of our own massive Golden Calf (which turned to be the Shitty Calf in actual fact)…
So politicians CAN make a difference, but only if they displace utter materialism from the centre of their credos. I am not suggesting a return to Communism or Socialism, only that a balance has to be struck between non-monetarist values and a healthy, thriving economy. All the great cultures of the world believed that some things were beyond price. We don’t. If you can’t pay for it, you can’t have it, it has no right to exist. And yet money is the greatest fiction the human race has ever invented – much more pernicious than God. Having created money to facilitate trade, it has become a God of its own. We are hypnotised by it. We worship it. We allow ourselves to view it as indispensable while human beings, their value (and even existence!) becoming subordinate to it!
The only way to sort this out is to wean ourselves off materialism. And THAT is bloody hard! But its the only way! Only when we learn that human values, indeed the continued existence of humanity itself is more important than the ammassing of wealth, will we begin to set ourselves free of this tyranny. Nothing less than a complete alteration of our values and Consciousness. How do we do that? I don’t know either but we have to start with ourselves, I guess and see if it spreads. And as you say, unless we take the step, we are never going to know…
In the meantime, here is something interesting from Buddhism on the subject:
“A Buddhist creation myth found in the Agganna Sutta tells a quite different story from the book of Genesis. The myth describes how the inhabitants of a world-system which has been destroyed are gradually reborn into one that is evolving. At first their bodies are translucent and there is no distinction between the sexes. As the fabric of the new world-system becomes denser, these spirit-like beings become attracted to it and begin to consume it like food. Slowly, their bodies become less ethereal until they resemble the gross physical bodies we have now. Competition for food leads to quarrels and disputes, and the people elect a king to keep the peace, an event which marks the origins of social life.”
- BUDDHISM: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION by Damien Keown (ISBN: 019285386
Also, here’s an interesting little quote I found from a selection of Islamic wisdom stories about Isa (Jesus):
“The students said to Jesus, ‘How is it that you can walk on water and we cannot?’
He said to them, ‘What do you think of the dinar and the dirham?’
They answered, ‘They are precious.’
He said, ‘But to me they are the same as mud.’”
Interesting!