Tag: Chinese

Good Versus Evil

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Yesterdays piece is apparently the one hundredth on this blog which understandably I’m reasonable pleased with. There’s a good chance you’ll struggle to find many things I’ve stuck to for three months, especially as, or maybe it’s because, it has been a daily exercise. It seems only fitting then to go with the suggestion I made yesterday and discuss the concept of good and bad with this being piece 101, fitting indeed if you ask Winston in 1984. I’ll not be discussing rats in cages fixed to your face but more so the fact that although I clearly described something as good and bad yesterday I am generally loathed to do so.

It is an easy thing to do to describe something as either good or bad. It immediately gives the recipient of this information a general understanding of what we mean. If you call someone a bad man it is pretty clear that you are suggesting in someway they are responsible for something or have a character that could be described as negative. We have been conditioned by society through our education, our parents, movies, television, religion to have a general understanding of this notion. Typically in all these examples, in particular movies, although arguable they’re just the outcome of centuries of religious influence, we see the battle of good versus evil, with good usually overcoming some odds stacked against them to be victorious. In films it can be portrayed as the action hero overcoming a larger force of bad guys, usually represented by whoever is the political enemy of the time, think communists to Islamists to probably Chinese very soon. I haven’t read the Bible but have been brought up in a Christian country and therefore am aware of the general attempt to portray this good versus evil battle throughout the whole text. The absolutist necessity to portray Jesus as a righteous saviour over all the evil in the world, but he can only save you if you join him. It all comes back to power and contemporary politics too is riddled with this. Join us, we are the good guys who are fighting those other guys. They’re bad, it’s okay to kill them…and so on.

While all that seems pretty obvious it is still remarkable how successful it can be at manipulating people. We are so triggered by this concept of good versus evil that we fall for it in such an easy way. It is why despite the fact I dislike it I still used it in yesterdays piece as it was an easy way to get my point across. The issue though lies more with what is good and what is evil. People will always use the concept to manipulate people but we seem oblivious in these moments to step back and actually question what is bad and why that is a bad thing. Not only that but clearly one person’s good can be different to another’s, who are we really to say what is right and wrong about someone when it is clearly such a subjective thing. I am aware it would be better to discuss this after spending a few hours reading some essays on morality and ethics but like each piece I just start writing, wing it and see what happens. There may be a lack of depth to my point but ultimately with the knowledge that one thing can be credibly both good and bad to different people, as well as everything in between, how can we legitimately label something so without giving it real thought. It is such a simplified take on the world and that makes it easy to manipulate of course, but for this reason we must be so careful about throwing these two words around. Really who am I to say somethings bad; I’m no god, I barely even understand ethics and like everyone am prone to bouts of hypocrisy. To know ones fallible yet proceed with authority anyway, oh to be human, oh to misunderstand balance.

Take Down Thy Fence

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Goodbye my lover…sung an annoying whiny man once. Today marks the end of a relationship nobody knew they cared about until after the Brexit referendum two years ago, or was it three, it might have been three. It all feels like a complete blur politics wise these last few years. Actually as I say that it might have been 2016, which would be four years ago because Trump was 2016 and certainly there were parallels of fear over the two. Social commentators the world over spent hours refusing to admit they had zero understanding of how society thought outside of their own narrow little universes.

We have spent the last three and a half years, let’s settle on that; arguing, hating, blowing up bridges, digging deeper trenches, building barriers and getting nowhere, and we’re in a much worse position than had we just stopped hating each other for five minutes and worked together. Tomorrow our relationship with the EU will be exactly the same as it is today, it’s just we won’t be able to influence decisions. Despite officially leaving it won’t be until the end of the year that we either sign a rushed and half-cooked trade deal or we just crash out with no deal at all. Boris was going to Get Brexit Done but it’s become clearer that nobody except the puppet master Dominic Cummings really has any clue what that actually means.

We leave one trading block to gain the liberty the Americans and Chinese are very quickly going to take away before turning us into the meat within their squabbling sandwich. The only power on the world stage we have is The City of London, the financial centre which will very soon become the epicentre of British efforts at becoming a cold, wet and windy version of the Cayman Islands. There is already talk that the fishing rights to our waters will be sacrificed to allow the financial sector access to European markets. It may have been one of the major issues that was used to sell this power play but it looks delusional in hindsight that unelected bureaucrats like Cummings would stand up for a few fishermen when his mates in the City demanded a return on their investment.

The EU is not perfect and they have feasted on the carcass of countries which were never going to be able to match up to the requirements of membership. It was a great model; get them in and when they can’t keep up, call in the debts and sell them off. The Greeks for example may have brought it upon themselves but they were sold an illusion that would benefit only the minority at the top. Are those in power in the UK taking us out because they want to protect us from that? Or are they in fact the minority at the top who have simply seen an opportunity of even more personal riches in dollars and yuan than the euro can offer?

It doesn’t matter anymore though because tonight at eleven o’clock, or midnight Brussels time ironically, we will be leaving the EU. We have five more years at least of Boris and when the Labour Party lurches back to the centre; an opposition in name only. What comes next is anyone’s guess but before anything happens we all need to accept that the fight to stay is over for now. It is only in this acceptance that people will be able to make any genuine productive moves in the future. We also need to accept that this is not a black and white argument, that there are actual genuine benefits from leaving the EU. There may not be many but until we can see that they do exist we’ll never manage to reconnect with the leave voters. Too many barriers to cooperation have developed over these last few years. You may disagree with your neighbour but while that fence gets bigger the only person to benefit is the one selling you new planks of wood, incidentally he’s also the one leaving you both notes about the indiscretions of the other.