self-serving – Observations and Misunderstandings

The more I think about it the British General Election back in December was an even bigger loss than I thought at the time. Don’t get me wrong I was pretty desponded, as the annuls of this blog can attest, but this is a deeper realisation. At the time it was clearly a missed opportunity. The Labour manifesto was in places a sensation, an attempt to strip back years of neoliberal skullduggery and corruption. It was relatively radical by an measure of what depths British politics has sunk to, we were going to have drastic and crazy levels of social welfare in line with Germany and France. Perish the thought. Apparently that was going to be Communism in the heart of Europe, well the departing heart of Europe. This realisation that we were instead about to be dragged out of Europe and forced onto our proverbial knees by an aggressively self-serving United States. To sit by as those supposedly negotiating and supposedly on our behalf pretended they were going to act tough even though they had already admitted they had put all our eggs in the Yankee basket. The neoliberal con was about to have it’s one last job before going into retirement. Of course I was despondent.

And now as the world has descended into whatever we can call this shit show, it is beyond doubt that there will be lasting effects and change coming out of all of this. Nobody who says they know really has any idea because it genuinely is all open. All open in the way that power still holds all the cards even though they’re blank. Depending how long this goes on for will depend on how your average persons view of the world changes in an open compassionate way, and that means a lot of suffering I suspect. Right now after a month of this it’s far from long enough to have any lasting change and I must point out I’m not a believer in ends justifying means or innocent people suffering. I don’t want the world necessarily to change for the better if it means innocents dying. Anyone who believes this misses the point. But had power not been this corrupt bunch of self-serving scumbags then at least this rebuild may have been done with someone other than their own and the tax dodgers interests at the top of the pile.

What an opportunity. We thought it was going to be bad having five years of a majority government of some of the worst Tories in my lifetime calling the shots. Now these people will rebuild what comes out of this and I am not looking forward. Boris is no hero despite what the media are attempting to convince you, and I doubt he had an intensive care bed epiphany about the value of the NHS and freedom of movement despite his foreign NHS nurse holding his precious little hand throughout. Imagine the vitriol had Jeremy Corbyn been in charge, there is simply no way his government would be getting let off as easily as this current mob. They would most likely blame him for the state of the NHS despite only being in power for a few months after ten years of Tory austerity and ideological cuts. We could be about to move into a period of rebuilding society and the economy with people being put first, the whole populace, not the depending on bank account version. So it is a missed opportunity, but is it a lost opportunity? This is only something time can tell. We’ve certainly not made it easy on ourselves though.

One of the scourges of decent political debate in modern times is the cult of the personality. It goes without saying that this has always been a part of politics, players of the game have been getting embroiled in character assassinations probably since the days of feudalism. It seems however, or at least I’ve heard it said by many people and possibly partially been influenced by this myself, that this form of political delegitimising has been on the rise in recent years. This came to mind today when listening to a podcast of a talk with Brian Eno and Yiannis Varoufakis. While I’ve never heard of Brian Eno before, who incidentally has the best full name I’ve heard this week – Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno – Yiannis Varoufakis is for me certainly much more well known. He took on the EU while in his position as Greek Finance Minister, is a fervent critic of the EU although he believes in remaining in so as to tackle it from the inside and is easily and perhaps crudely described as a left wing rockstar economist. I don’t know everything he has to say but there are arguments he makes that appeal to me. My issue then is that people don’t like him not always for his politics but his character.

It is too easy to go into simply disliking someone. There have been many times I have heard people talking about an idea but found myself rejecting them because either I found them annoying or for some unconscious conditioned reaction to how they dress or their accent. It is ignorant and will make a good piece in itself at a later date, but that is for then. Varoufakis when in his position as minister took all his money out of Greece and put it in foreign bank accounts. I don’t think it was him, but the government, and I think it was after he quit his position, introduced laws to stop Greek people doing this. Some preempted this to varying levels of success but I remember chatting with a Greek at the time who disliked Varoufakis because he believed he had told people not to remove their money to safeguard what was left of the Greek economy but removed his own as he knew it was pretty much doomed anyway. Research would be required to confirm the validity of this.

The question though is whether you are capable of putting aside the supposed unpleasant act and therefore issue with his character and still listen to his ideas for what they are, or dismiss his ideas because either you can’t trust him or simply believe him to be sneakily self-preserving and hypocritical. This relates in a huge way to the current election. Boris Johnson is a lying racist scoundrel who cannot be trusted and Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-semitic marxist who wants to drag us back to the Stone Age. The point is not whether either are true or not but that people seem willing to still vote for them for their policies while others refuse to vote for them because of their perceived characters. That is of course oversimplifying an incredibly complicated and nuanced situation but fundamentally this is how the parties and media seem to be trying to play it.

It is really challenging to actually listen to someones words and put everything else aside despite your unconscious biases, especially to believe in what they say after they have proved themselves untrustworthy. An extreme would be Hitler and vegetarians but that isn’t worth going into. Both arguments can be rationalised with varying degrees of success, so must we look to the emotional side of the debate? Or it perhaps comes down to your belief in realpolitik. Whatever it is it seems an enormous challenge to actually see the words for what they really are. Certainly though if we all found a way to learn how to we may just manage to drag politics from the gutter it seems to have found itself in, and who knows in the process ourselves too.

Tag: self-serving

An Assassinated Character