Everybody is Losing

The UK appears to be winning the race to disaster, albeit vigorously pursued by Germany, approximately half the USA, Spain and France.

If you are short of misery here are some links to the UK’s 360 degree catastrophe: the economy and where it is heading, the NHS, Climate paranoia, its dubious funding and its cost, energy denialism, education and unemployment. Young people have been betrayed in every way possible with massive debt for hollow, useless degrees; by the minimum wage destroying entry level jobs; and by a future lacking affordable housing whether to rent or buy.

It has become impossible to hide the consequences of mass immigration, grotesque welfarism and governmental incompetence. Even the mainstream media acknowledge, too late as ever, that there is a problem.

The state is now a parasite on the nation.

But the state is a system staffed by people. How do those people continue to behave in such a destructive way?

The tragedy is superficially political, at bottom it is cognitive. Our perception relies on understanding. If someone’s fundamental understanding is constructed with ideological abstractions they see the world through the lens of concepts. Even though all of us understand the world imperfectly, they see it through a further reductionism. Where we see weather, they see climate change. Where we see a disagreement, they see racism. I have written about this profound existential problem here, here and here. Ideology simplifies and polarises into good and bad, hence the passion of the ideologically deluded. They know they are right and they feel existentially threatened by disagreement.

As Burnham and his civil service shepherds have lived entirely in this delusional world of abstractions, policies and protocols they have no idea how little they know. They have no meaningful commercial experience. None of them has ever started or run a business, come up with a functional, costed solution to a real problem or taken responsibility for their own mistakes.

They continue their destructive behaviour because they don’t know what else to do.

But there’s more.

Right wingers, sceptics, self-declared patriots and the old school working class feel that they are losing.   All around us are changes we didn’t vote for and we don’t like.

But Lefty progressives also feel they are losing. Their view is that they have just started to create Nirvana and evil capitalists and heartless Right-wingers are obstructing them and stopping real change.

Whatever they have achieved to date is ‘just a start’. True progressive liberation remains far, far away. Ideologues fight for a perfect goal, a goal so unreal that whatever they achieve cannot be enough. Their simple, naïve goal can never be reached in our complex, human, shadow-laden world.

There is endless room for disagreement about which specific, concrete circumstances correspond to their lofty, ideal. And even if by some marvellous chance their ideal were to be realised for a moment, humans would human and soon would arrive the era of purges, of re-education and renewing the purity of party cadres. Progressive paradise is an ever-receding mirage.

So strangely Left and Right, progressives and traditionalists, have something very important in common.   We all feel we are losing.

Where on earth can we look for solutions?

The rich and the future rich are emigrating. Much of the rest of the world is not in great shape, but almost all of it has better prospects than the UK. For those left behind – what to do?

Much has already happened. Britain has de facto Balkanisation. Certain cities are not what they were. Certain parts of London have greatly changed. But British citizens are trapped. The ordinary UK citizen has his income taxed at source and has no Second Amendment.

There is a very, very slim chance that massive action will force the Government to respond to the wishes of its citizens.

If that doesn’t happen, there has to be a big enough collapse to force the state to curtail the salaries and grotesque pensions of public sector bureaucrats, to cap and to limit duration of welfare payments and remove fiscal and regulatory impediments to ordinary people making a decent living. It is unlikely that any UK politician will do that, so we must stand by, watch the economic and social breakdown and, at best, await the intervention of the IMF.

Perhaps the most unlikely solution is that we manifest compassion for the progressives chasing their unattainable paradise. Joanna Gray has just written a helpful guide to sustaining a conversation with the deluded. Perhaps softly softly, one by one, step by step, we could coax them to see that an earthly, imperfect paradise could be re-built if together we loosen the grip of, and on, ideology, stop trying to control everything, and tackle the real, immediate problems that surround us.

Dr Hugh Willbourn is the author of The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it, available here (use the code INSIGHT to get a £3 discount until the end of November) and on Amazon.