Propaganda

I've avoided the various leader 'debates' on this election campaign, as indeed I have found myself listening to the radio less. I can't really deal with the amount of energy that is wasted making empty promises about a few marginal issues that will not affect the long term economic and existential viability of our country. However I can't avoid the news entirely and was pleased to hear that Ed Milliband finally tackled head-on the view (presented as fact for the last five years) that the last Labour government bankrupted the country through financial profligacy. He apologised for the lack of regulation that helped cause the global financial crisis (rightly) but refused to apologise for borrowing against an (apparently) strong economy. Of course the audience member who had asked the question was incredulous, blurting out his own variation on the received wisdom that he has to balance his household budget from week to week, so a government should do as well. Leaving aside the fact that a national economy is nothing like a household economy for the moment, what Ed and chums should really point out is that is exactly what they did. When a household is doing well and you're both earning a decent salary and you've paid off your student debts and you've got a bit of savings, what do most people do? Borrow four times their annual income to buy a house, based on the received wisdom that as we get older our salaries increase and we will not lose our jobs. Once we have factored in the repayments for this debt into our household budget (i.e. balanced it), we think about borrowing more, maybe to buy a car or a conservatory. None of these things unbalance our household budget, because the repayments are within our means, we can pay our mortgage, our car finance etc and still afford a pint at the end of the week (the measure I believe the audience member used). Of course if the company we worked for suddenly went bankrupt, what would we do then? How would we pay for the mortgage and car? Well, we could probably give the car back, but what about the mortgage? We still need a house to live in. If we were confident we might try and get some sort of bridging loan until we got another job or maybe borrow some money to start a business, so we were able to pay the mortgage. We could try to make some savings, maybe by not feeding or clothing our children; after all, what's the point in them having full bellies or clothes if they don't have a house to live in. I guess if we take no action, we'll be out on the street, where we would have to rely on state benefits (assuming this household is in a country that has state benefits). 

Anyone who is not a total idiot will be able to see the crude analogy I am attempting to draw above, but it is less crude than the analogy with household budgets that the current right wing orthodoxy wants us to understand. Of course a national economy is infinitely more complex than a household budget, but even a household budget is more complex than whether you have enough cash in your pocket for a pint at the end of the week. However, as far governments treating the economy like a household budget go, I would say the last labour government did a pretty good impression: borrow against your income whilst your income is good. Interestingly it was households borrowing not against their income, but against the possible future price of their house that caused the last financial crisis. Is that the kind of household budget we want? Given that the current 'recovery' is based almost entirely on a property bubble, the current government's household budget does feel rather subprime. But that's not the narrative; there is only one way to balance this household budget and that is sell the family silver and clothe the children in rags. 

These analogies are crass to the point of being useless, but then so is most of the rest of the 'debate' in this election. 

Port

Even at a time when politicians desperate for your vote will say pretty much any old shit, James Brokenshire's comments on migrants* risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea in leaky boats were pretty special. In case you missed it, he asserted that tighter UK immigration policy would put people off attempting this perilous crossing. I was instantly intrigued to know how many people scrutinise UK migration policy before fleeing war and poverty in their own country to attempt a journey of thousands of miles. I guess they probably go online and check the immigration or asylum policies of all the countries in which they may attempt to seek refuge before starting their journey, see the UK policy and think "that place looks really easy to get into, which is good because otherwise I don't know why I'd leave this war torn hellhole." 

A few days later a survivor of a sunken ship off the coast of Greece - a refugee from the conflict in Syria - offered her own way of stopping the flow of people attempting to get into Europe: "stop the war in Syria". This may come as a surprise to the James Brokenshires of this world, but what actually motivates most people to flee their country of birth and come to Europe is not the promise of endless free benefits (many of them probably have no concept of a welfare state) but the desire not to die. 

So when we ask ourselves what would stop people from other countries trying to come here, the clear answer is: making life bearable in their home country. So next time a politician claims they're going to reduce immigration in this country, you can check that they're talking about increasing the overseas aid budget. 

Of course they won't mean that, they'll mean wasting more of your taxes on the process of shipping people back to their ravaged countries, so they can try and make the journey all over again. For some reason the rhetoric of wasting massive amounts of resources not solving a problem at all plays well with a certain type of voter. Presumably the same sort of voter who likes their mechanic to fix their car's engine by repeatedly changing the tires. So you can look forward to much more tough sounding and utterly ineffectual rhetoric from the likes of James Brokenshire over the coming weeks, because it's apparently what you want. Enjoy. 

* I notice we've stopped even calling them 'asylum seekers', which was the term adopted when it was decided that 'refugee' made them sound too justified in attempting to come to our country. 'Migrant' sounds much better, as implies choice rather than compulsion based on survival. 

Preparation

Someone put a flyer through our door the other day for what was essentially a cramming centre. Their advertised achievement was a boy getting a 'C' in maths in year 5. I don't know what year that is in old money, but I'm guessing it's earlier than one normally gets a GCSE. My instant question is why do it? What do you hope to gain? I did my GCSE maths a year early, which simply allowed me to take three years to do my A-level maths. Obviously that wasn't what my teachers had in mind, but they clearly hadn't reckoned on my exceptional capacity for laziness. Ultimately though, the only reason one would ever do an exam early is to be able to say you did it early (see, even 20 years on, I can't resist), but at what cost? At the cost of actually enjoying the only childhood you'll ever have? I'm not saying that happened to me because it was just one exam one year early and I didn't do any extra classes. However if you're going to extra school after school all the time just to pass exams earlier, just to get through education faster, what then? You get to join the workforce earlier whilst you're younger and more malleable; whilst it's easier to indoctrinate you into the corporate mindset. Of course as an employer in such a situation, most of the heavy lifting has already been done for you. 

There seems to be a bit of a craze at the moment for emulating the success of Chinese education, which has generated hundreds of millions of citizens willing to be locked into the special version of capitalism that their masters have created for them. We may look east pityingly, sorry for all the freedoms that they don't enjoy, but the culture we think of as oppressing the Chinese is simply a vaguely reorganised version of the corporate structure that every modern multinational aspires to: one where the citizens/workers put the good of the country/company above their own personal wellbeing. Of course we all think we're too smart for that, we have a contract with our company, and we can walk away whenever we want, but how would we pay the mortgage if we just quit our jobs, how would we reach that perfect life that sits just beyond our grasp if we don't work for it? It's not just compulsion and coercion though, most companies work very hard at getting their employees to buy into their collective message, an idea that (they hope) goes beyond the basic premise that the company's continued profitability ensures continued employment. Companies want their employees to think of them as an organisation with a higher purpose, one for which it is worth going the extra mile. Ideally this sense of higher purpose should be coupled with a general sense of the generosity of the employer. 

At a recent company evening event, a colleague ponted out that 15 years ago, such an event would have started at lunchtime and taken up the afternoon, to which I responded that in those days he probably wasn't allowed to wear his own clothes every Friday. To my mild astonishment he accepted this as an entirely reasonable exchange, which is interesting given that it's not even true: he can't wear his own clothes on a Friday, not if they're shorts or a football top, or the sleeves are too short, etc, etc. Yet this colleague and so many others like him are seemingly happy to accept that a real terms wage cut is OK if they are allowed to wear a clearly defined set of slightly different clothes one day a week. My issues with 'dress down' days are well known and, I think, entirely justified. 'Dress down' days are the thin end of the corporate bullshit wedge; it is your employer playing make believe at meeting you halfway, whilst still actually dictating every aspect of your working life. They wheel out hundreds of similar ways to 'improve' your happiness at work in the hope that you will ignore the two most obvious ways of acheieving this goal: make you work less and pay you more. The make believe is that there is some higher purpose to your work; that in some way, by continually increasing the profits you make for your employer, the company will reach some never entirely defined corporate nirvana. Of course there can be no actual end point, just an unsustainable ever increasing margin. Regimes such as the one that controls China have an equally nebulous higher purpose. For better or for worse the government that we have ended up with in the western democracies exists largely to administer the state broadly in the interests of the population. In China the government administers the country in the interest of some increasingly I'll-defined ideal, disseminating power through the corporations that it owns. In the west governments have largely ceded power over people's lives to the large corporations, who lack merely their own entirely compliant justice system (and to be fair, when they need one, they just hire it off the nearest government) to fully emulate the politburo of the Chinese communist party. 

The mantra of modern politicians is that they don't want to do anything that could be bad for business, but what if what is good for business is bad for your citizens? What if educating children to be 'fit for the workplace' means grinding away at their souls until they'll accept any old corporate bullshit unquestioningly? 

Education is important, far too important to be left in the hands of those who think it is just a way of churning out compliant worker drones. When you push your children because you want them to have a better life, maybe take a moment to think about what would constitute a better life. Everyone wants the best for their children, but we really need to consider whether a system of education so favoured by corporate vested interests can be best for any individual. Next time you hear someone extolling the virtues of a Chinese-style education system, think about how having everything else Chinese-style has worked out for you. 

Paucity

In my first junior school, we had a succession of Swedish cooks. Each day they would come to our little village school (usually by motorbike) and prepare all of our meals from scratch, fresh each day. Naturally we all hated our school dinners. When, at the age of nine, I moved to North Tyneside, where the school meals were largely mass 'cooked' on an almost industrial scale across the whole county I quickly came to appreciate the culinary delights that I had left behind. It's an old cliché that you don't know what you've got till it's gone, but it might be helpful if we could find a way. A lack of appreciation of our current situation leads to a desire for another. As we are constantly sold the idea that the accumulation of wealth and possessions is the key to our happiness, we continue to accumulate and consume. It is like some sort of compulsion and no one is going persuade us to stop, as our whole economic model is built on the assumption that we will continue to accumulate and consume more and more. No alternative is offered or even considered; it is a one-way process that cannot be reversed or re-routed. We stick so religiously to this orthodoxy that even when the super rich run out of things to spend their obscene wealth on, they search relentlessly for more, still convinced that what they have is not enough or good enough. I recently heard that to fill up the Octopus - Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen's super yacht - with a month's worth of fuel costs $600,000.  And that is just fuel. A 'yacht' like that has no practical use, it's just a way of disposising with excess wealth. If you have enough money to spend $600,000 a month on boat fuel, you have too much money. That is not the politics of envy, it is the politics of basic rationality. 

That kind of example Is probably unhelpful in that it simply presents an extreme so ridiculous that we fail completely to associate with it. We can't see that we are locked into the same cycle of endless dissatisfaction as Paul Allen; we cannot equate our desire to buy the latest iPhone with his desire to posess a ridiculously large boat. Indeed that is part of the problem: we see that Paul Allen has so much more than us and subsequently feel justified in our dissatisfaction that we don't have a little (or a lot) more. So we push ourselves to greater consumption, because if they can have more, so can we. This is the only way that the wealth of the super-rich trickles down - the effect that the right wing is always so keen to accredit to their mates; this is the real politics of envy, it drives our economy on to greater and greater consumption, with the excuse against the consequences that we are not consuming as much as the next person. Constantly comforted that we are not the biggest contributors to the problems of relentless consumption and constantly dissatisfied that we are nowhere near the biggest contributors to the problem, we are happy to drive the the accumulation further and further, not by much, by just enough that we make it to the other side. Where the grass is greener surely. 

Persecution

The recent BBC documentary on the life and death of Aaron Swartz was as fascinating as it was moving. For me the key moment in the programme is the one of realisation that centres on a part of the interview with Quinn Norton where she describes her treatment at the hands of the U.S. District Attorney, in which she asserts that she is "still angry" that "we are OK with a system that tries to game people". My simple paraphrasing does little to emphasise the raw emotion and power of that video clip; I have watched it a number of times in order just to get the quote and I have been on the brink of tears every time. It might seem massively clichéd, but it feels like the moment the Internet grew up. The Aaron Swartzs of this world thought that they would be able to take on the injustices that they saw in the world with impunity because they were not doing anything anyone could really take seriously as wrong. The establishment media had been quietly demonising hacker culture for years, but that was largely on the back of a few silly childish pranks and even more media sensationalism, no one took that seriously did they, really? Turns out they did. Of course they did. Anything that threatens the status quo is automatically presented by the mainstream media and politicians as either ridiculous and disproportionate (feminism) or dangerous and subversive (direct democracy) or anti-business (socialism). These associations are made continuously at a low level so that they are pretty much second nature when it comes to dismissing the validity of the arguments of any of these groups. If this attitude had been engendered by a state or institution then it would be propaganda, but the people who espouse these views genuinely believe them because if any such movement was successful in achieving its goals, it would probably be to the detriment of these people. So they have genuine self interest in working against any such movement. Unfortunately, as they also have access to much of the world's wealth, power and influence they manage to make their opinion count much more than that of the average person. Indeed over much of human history (and certainly no less now than ever before), they have managed to convince everyone else that the service of their best interest is merely common sense. They have done an equally good job of convincing us that the contemplation of any alternative is dangerous or a sign of mental instability. It's easy for them to believe these things because from their point of view anything that threatens their position is dangerous madness, I'm just not sure why the rest of us go along with it so willingly. I guess partly because it requires not inconsiderable effort to think against an accepted wisdom that is reinforced daily through its public representation and the laws that subscribe it. 

Swartz came up against a problem that many very intelligent people encounter: the fundamental lack of logic in the systems, laws and interpretations of those laws that bound our world. He believed that if he pushed at the illogical points in the law or society, he would be able to bend them to a more logical position. Unfortunately it appears as if you are only allowed to bend the law once you own it. As many people on the documentary pointed out, whilst the U.S. State was attempting to prosecute Swartz - piling on as many charges as it could - the most heinous financial crimes in decades were going entirely unpunished. The view held by western governments of course being that the financial system is far too important to meddle with regardless of the detrimental impact it has on the lives of their citizens, whereas even potentially marginally disruptive political movements need to be snuffed out using the full weight of the law (or disproportionate amounts of legal action at least). If any stronger indication that the balance of power within our democracies is thoroughly unbalanced exists, I'm not entirely sure where. 

Swartz's 'mistake' was that he failed to make himself part of the 'indispensable' economic landscape before he started flouting the strictest interpretation of the law (and more importantly threatening the political and economic status quo). If he had taken any one of the companies that he was involved in founding on to be a Twitter or Facebook (maybe made a few party donations) and then used the corporation to steal information from another company, he'd have been fine. Sure the company would have been fined, but that would just have been an adjustment in its share price; as an indispensable captain of industry, it would have been unthinkable to prosecute the man himself. Unfortunately for Swartz, he wasn't really interested in the corporate world, indeed he could all too easily see the negative impact of so many of its failings and certainly of its dominance of modern politics. It would perhaps be a fitting legacy for him if more of us were more willing to do something about it. 

Porky Pies

From what I believe is a fairly common childhood viewpoint, as a child I was convinced of the idea of universal truth being something that adults had access to and full knowledge of. I think more than that, I believed on some unconscious level that adults had some sort of innate moral compass that allowed them to know the right decisions to make. In my childish mind these two things went hand in hand: knowing all the answers and deploying them in a morally responsible manner. I think there may be some way in which we all expect to wake up on our 21st (or 25th or 30th) birthday in full possession of all the facts; essentially grown up. I think the lack of this knowledge is one of the things most responsible for adults saying "I don't feel grown up". Of course part of becoming a grown up is coming to terms with the fact that you'll never have access to universal truth, with the accompanying comfort that no one else will either. In an ideal world we would all strive to reach as close to a universal truth as possible and negotiate our way through the world accordingly, so that to any observing child it would appear as if we were indeed in possession of universal truth and an unimpeachable moral code. Unfortunately the 'child' test is a long way from foolproof, given that it is not difficult to fool a child. It's not even that difficult to fool an adult; the Internet seems to have given us a desire to treat almost everything with credulity. It's as if we've taken the David St.Hubbins maxim to heart: "I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that makes me a more discerning individual than someone who doesn't believe anything." Perhaps even more problematic than our willingness to believe any old crap is the desire to feed any old crap to us that appears to drive so many of those we, in our childish state, believe ought to know better. 

The banner under the headline in the Metro on 14th January 2015 included the phrase "inflation hits an all-time low". I was surprised at this fact and so decided to do a little bit of research to find out if 0.5% really was the lowest rate of inflation ever. It didn't take me more than a couple of minutes to confirm that the rate of change in RPI had actually been negative for a time in 1959 and 1960, which is definitely lower than 0.5%. I'm sure if I were to present this fact to the Metro (assuming they didn't ignore me completely), they would point out that the index they were referring to as a measure of inflation was the CPI, not the RPI. The CPI didn't exist in the late 50s and early 60s, so in that sense, the Metro is entirely correct: a current measure of inflation is at an all time low, but only because 'all time' in this instance is less than 10 years. I don't think the Metro had anything more devious than a spot of sensationalism in mind when they came up with that banner, but it is indicative of the way people often use data selectively to make a point that the same data in its correct context would not illustrate quite so well (if at all). The fact that an entire radio series exists simply to look at the (mis)use of statistics in the news indicates the amount of liberty that is taken with data in politics and the media. Of course I don't think any of us is innocent of telling an incomplete story to make our point some time in our lives, but in certain quarters it appears to be almost an industry in itself. Certainly it seems almost impossible for a politician to quote any statistical data without poorly contextualising the crap out of it, even if the correctly contextualised data would have supported their point (albeit possibly less decisively or sensationally). It's almost as if being able to find data that corroborates your views is insufficient, and all data must eliminate the possibility of any other viewpoint. 

Given the amounts of data at our disposal these days, we are increasingly dependent on others to interpret it for us and it appears that an awareness of that fact has made many less, rather than more responsible in that respect. Climate change denial lobbyists seize on any inconsistency in a single piece of research to illustrate a point that flies in the face of almost all the other evidence. This is the sort blinkered logic that we call belief and associate with faith. We accept the application of such logic when it is associated with the supernatural beliefs of religion, but it seems altogether more difficult to accept when applied to more worldly topics. 

There has been much debate recently about the differences between fundamentalism and religion, with mainstream Muslims feeling compelled to distance themselves from the actions of a minority of fundamentalists who profess the same religion. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo killings, this was complicated by the fact that a number of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were clearly offensive to almost all Muslims. Now many western observers (and indeed pretty much everyone in France) would say 'tough luck, offence is the price you pay for free speech', and I would agree with this: witness the amount of not killing Nigel Farage I do. However, making a point about free speech simply by finding the thing that most offends someone and doing it to the greatest extreme again and again is also a fundamentalist position. Just as Muslims find themeves having to apologise for some of those who profess the same religion, I find myself wanting to apologise for some of those who profess the same secularism as me. Unfortunately it seems that the Charlie Hebdo approach to making a point is the only one we can understand these days: as if we must all be absolutist or we are not genuine. Again, I can't help thinking this comes back to the dearth of real debate in 21st century society. As we no longer understand how to talk to those who disagree with us, we select evidence to satisfy those we agree with and to deny any alternative completely. We have all become fundamentalist in our outlook even if we don't express that outlook through violence. The intransigence and extremity of our position doesn't persuade anyone of the validity of our argument and the mis-contextualisation of the data we use as our proof simply undermines our argument. In our desire to win the argument we lose the debate and sacrifice any moral highground to a kind of vanity of rectitude. Surely it is better to tell the whole truth and be accepted as fallible than only tell a half truth and be rejected as a liar.  

Prizes

I won the raffle. I never win raffles. Indeed, that is what I said when I won the raffle, which seems self-evidently incorrect with hindsight. It occurs to me that it is one of the most platitudinous inaccuracies in modern speech (and that's saying something), being statistically provable as incorrect. Of course, now that I have actually won a raffle, the statistics are much more provable, and I may be bound to say that I win raffles with a frequency that is roughly consistent with the aggregate probability of all the raffles I have taken part in. This is clearly nowhere near as neat as saying you never win raffles and is probably a cast iron conversation killer. So I guess next time I'm short of things to say in a raffle situation I'll just have to remain mute, or possibly relay the story of how I used to believe myself incapable of winning raffles until I won one. Yep, being stood next to me at a raffle is going to continue to be a conversational goldmine. 

I think I might have viewed the statement about never winning a raffle as a bit of a family heirloom, as it is a favourite of my mum's, deployed most inaccurately on the occasion she won a trip to New York in a free raffle. I think for me there was a sense of familial entitlement to the downtrodden enoblement of being an eternal loser. But this outlook itself is all about a sense of entitlement: the idea that the fact of our 'never' having won is somehow a universal injustice, that raffle upon raffle has been weighted against us, denying us our rightful prize. This is only an extension of the mindset that allows successful entrepreneurs to believe that their success is entirely due to their hard work and genius, whilst it allows everyone else to feel resentful that their hard work is not similarly rewarded. It is common knowledge that we have to hold an opinion of ourselves as in some way special so that we may avoid the crushing depression that will inevitably come from realising that we are just one of 7 billion idiots bumbling about the planet with no real idea what we're doing or why we're doing it. However, this opinion must also be one of humanity's greatest stumbling blocks: if we're so clever, why would we need to listen to others? Time after time we collectively suffer the consequences of this surfeit of hubris, "never again" we all say before getting straight back to thinking we can shit gold and giving ourselves chronic constipation. 

Would changing our attitudes to raffles, the lottery or any other games of chance change any of these things? There is a chapter of the excellent '10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10' that deals with our relationship to the random, looking briefly at its transition from a cause of fear throughout the majority of human history (largely because the unknown generally brought death and/or destruction) to a source of entertainment and stimulation in the modern era through games of chance. Whilst the chapter is not explicit on the point, it seems as if taking the danger out of the random has somehow convinced us we have control over it. We are probably no more superstitious than our ancestors but in all likelihood we have a stronger belief in our ability to influence random chance than them. We have more agency over our lives than ever before, although possibly not as much as we think we do. So much of what we think we know about the world we live in is based on assumptions about how much technology, government or corporations impact on our lives and we have little, if any, evidence to support these assumptions. Our understanding of the world seems as informed by James Bind as Edward Snowden, and it is through this agglomeration of fact and fiction that we arrive at our understanding of our control over our destiny. Given our propensity to overestimate our own abilities and agency, is it any surprise we believe that we can tame chance and, when we fail to, we feel cheated? I'm fairly certain that much of the frustration underlying the social media rages that wash across our age is due to this misconception of the limits of our possible agency in fate. 

In my defence, I'd like to think that my surprise at winning the raffle was a genuine surprise that random chance had resulted in my favour despite the logic of the odds telling me that it was unlikely. I genuinely don't think that my raffle winnings are reparations that the world should pay me for all the statistical wrongs it has influcted on me thus far in my life; I just think it was a nice surprise. I guess if we can view as many as possible of the good things in life like that, then we're probably doing OK. Certainly if we view less of the setbacks as personal sleights, we'll be less angry.