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.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I do not think the young have been lied to more than the rest of us – everyone has been deceived.
I also question “ideological abstractions they see the world through the lens of concepts”. I see the issue as politicians, with little or no interest or understanding of the drivers of society, economics or technical issues, have decided the sort of place they want to create. I avoided referring to their country or yours or mine because one of their objectives appears to be to eliminate nation states.
Their other objectives are to create a depoliticised people ruled over by the chosen ones whom we could call the nomenklatura because the word already exists. They have already begun to behave as if they had reached their state of karma and we our state of degradation by mandating all sorts of costly damaging policies which they would like to work. They have persuaded themselves these policies could work if only the oiks were to do as they were told.
These are not ideological abstractions they are aiming for but practical new states of affairs: no hydrocarbons, no private rented homes, no significant accretions of wealth, no voices against their story… Read more »
I am desperate for the IMF to come in, having been a child of the 70’s I lived through the Labour wrecking of the Uk the first time. What did that look like as a child coming home from school. Well there was the scrabble for candles as the lights went out, at circa 7.30pm, we were lucky in that we had a coal fired rayburn to heat the water and the kitchen. No TV, and early bed. Then there was the daily site of the army on the streets clearing the bodies, the rubbish.
What seems never to be recalled is that because of the numerous strikes, there was queueing for bread, and you could not buy yeast for love or money.
My family some who worked at British Leyland were regularly forced out on strike by the unions.
Cold, miserable, third world streets, queues, strikes. That was the reality of Labour in the 70’s.
Now as we no longer have sufficent farm produce to feed ourselves, we rely on foreign imports of food, and diesel to transport that food, but we are not allowed to use our own oil, that has to be imported, and there is now… Read more »
I was working in the 1970s – it was grim.
I just cannot understand how Andy Capp can believe it’s was some pre-Thatcher golden age to which we should return. He says the 1980s saw the industrialisation of the UK, but…
ONS Index of Production (IoP) – covering mining, manufacturing, electricity/gas and water – industrial output:-
1970 = 55.9, 1979 = 66.3, 1985 = 66.9 and 1992 = 75.0
That’s 10% up when Thatcher left Office, than how Labour left it. Of course much of that was due to denationalisation.
So where does he get the notion industrial output was destroyed? I think it concerns the number of his union cronies working in industry which certainly dropped = increased labour productivity – because of union reforms which allowed improved operating methods requiring less “jobs for the union boys”.
I assume the shortage of “oil” you mention is locally in the UK and out of the ground. There is no national shortage if we chose to extract it and none internationally – the world is awash with it.
All the other difficulties you mention are real but they did not begin to come true in mid 2024.
“Perhaps the most unlikely solution is that we manifest compassion for the progressives chasing their unattainable paradise.”
They are not progressives. They are fascists who want to control me, want the state to control me (and them). I am out of compassion. It’s binary. I want to be left alone as long as I leave other people alone. Most people disagree with me, sadly for me. This is not a position I think can be persuaded out of. It’s not about right and wrong even, it’s about completely different ways of seeing life.
I completely agree with you.
I agree. The worst part of the latter-day Bolsheviks who rule us is that they not only think our property is theirs to control and dispose of, but that they own us as individuals. These vermin actually think they own you and me!
“But the state is a system staffed by people. How do those people continue to behave in such a destructive way?”
On the State payroll, entirely reliant on it, unemployable in the private sector?
The same people who stood by and ate cake and partied during Covid whilst forcing our elderly to die alone, and then be buried with only a couple of people from their family, the same people who then allowed cancer to run riot in order to protect their colleagues in the sainted NHS so they could make dance films on tik tok, the same people who sacked people who worked becasue they refused to take the injections they presumably raked off back handers from in Big Pharma.
These people are the same sort who would have been at home in Germany int he 30’s and 40’s the same people who would have happily worked in the Soviet Union under Stalin and his followers.
Inhumane, immoral, full of hubris self satisfied parasites.