William Essex
Shall I tell you a story?
  • Dear Diary
  • About Us
  • Back Stories
  • Read My Shorts?

We're all doomed again. But in a good way.

6/11/2017

0 Comments

 
Sometimes, it crosses my mind that civilisation as we thought we knew it is about to collapse. Our technology is telling us too much about the real world, and how it really works, for the necessary myths of "western civilisation" to endure. Which is a good thing. Scary, but good. I think.
     Once upon a time, "the establishment" had control of the means of communication, which mattered a lot more than the means of production. Institutions were remote, and the only voices we heard were establishment voices. We respected them, or behaved as though we did, because there was no apparent alternative. The establishment made the rules, made sure those rules were all we knew, and supported itself with every trick that appeals to human nature, including quasi-religious ritual. The judiciary dressed up in wigs and gowns, for example, and the judge would put on a black cap to pronounce a death sentence. The history of power is (okay, not quite) all about dressing to impress.
     Today, we face an old problem and a new problem. The old problem is that sooner or later, any establishment starts to believe its own mythology. Roman emperors came to believe that they were divine, for example (The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius, ages ago, or John Hurt as Caligula in the 1976 TV adaptation of Robert Graves' I, Claudius, 1934). Keeping it short; we could cite the fuhrerprinzip, which in its best-known application, stipulated that whatever Hitler said, went. Or, more recently, the UK's parliamentary expenses scandal.
     My understanding is: the view was widely shared among MPs that they weren't paid enough. The view was equally widely shared that giving themselves the pay rise that they "deserved" would be politically impossible. So a system evolved whereby expenses could be "nodded through" (my term), so that MPs could use their own judgement to reward themselves appropriately. It's not that any of them ever believed that [insert ridiculous claim here] was necessary to their parliamentary work, nor that they could get away with an inflated claim because the system was lax.
     It's not believing in the myth, exactly; it's believing in one's own myth-given authority. Effectively, believing that because you are an MP (or other authority figure) you have a right to interpret/apply/adjust the law in the given situation - and believing that this is compliant with the spirit of the law. So MPs believed that their expenses were a quiet but justifiable way of getting paid according to their worth.
     But they failed to take into account the new problem. In a system where we all get to see everything eventually, where control of the means of communication has distributed out of anybody's control, and we're all judgemental, that kind of "nodding through" - of being the authority figure who exercises rights over the law - is no longer sustainable. We all have a view, and often a harsh judgement, and we all have an equal right to be heard. Technology delivers that equal right to be heard far more effectively than any dogma. Technology is an unquestioned happy ending for its promoters, as though a householder having a conversation with a robot that he (yes, he) might have had with his servant a century or two back - delivers Utopia. Can it be that simple? Thought not.
     So my question to myself is: to what extent does the - what? The civilisation we want to believe we live in? Yes, that. To what extent does that depend on a myth that just can't be achieved if we're all sniping away at each other via our media and our smartphones? Whatever you think about the expenses scandal, we need to trust and to be trustworthy without being held to a standard by, say, CCTV. Civilisation has to allow for "I'll just park here for five minutes, nobody will mind", just as it has to allow for the kind of social, cultural, political compromise that would be exceeded by, for example, "If I claim for a hedgehog shelter, I'll cover the real cost of today's work."
     We need to find a way to blur the edges, loosen the constraints, be flexible with each other, despite the constant presence of a stranger's high-definition smartphone camera.
     Don't we?

Picture
Never mind the road not travelled; it's the way forward that matters right now. Don't tell me you didn't at least look at the dark opening on the left. Wonder what's down there.

Mind you, to be fair, that twenty-minute discussion on a radio-news programme that I mentioned last week - it did come ahead of a series of revelations that retrospectively justified the time spent, so maybe that was their way of hinting. I think my underlying point stands, but I take the rest of it back. Sorry, people.

Sometimes, I think that we get comfortable in our grievances. We go on grumbling, and by doing so, hold onto the grievance even as it evaporates. We're all complacent, but it's a negative complacency. Once, we might have told ourselves, say, that a Certain Person is in his Heaven and all's right with the world; nowadays, we're united by an identity politics that thrives on a mild form of victim-hood. 

Odd coincidence, don't you think, that every time an improvement is announced in state-provided health care, or welfare, it's also a cost saving? They never spend more money on us.
     I wonder if, in their private lives, government ministers call up their friends and say: "Let's not go to the fancy new restaurant that's just opened in the middle of town. Let's have our celebration at the cheap fast-food drive-through on the ring road." I don't really wonder that.
     Maybe the big secret is that we can't afford the way we like to live. We can't afford any of it. Nothing at all. It doesn't work. The state is bankrupt and collapsed and we need to start again as a small insignificant foggy country full of warring tribes out on the edge of Europe.
     And the guilt of not addressing that is beginning to eat through the fabric of society. Because at some level we all know it. But some of us are insisting on denying it.
      I feel better now, thank you.   
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

    Picture
    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

    RSS Feed

    What happens here

    This site is no longer updated weekly because I've taken to writing at Medium dot com instead. I may come back, but for now, I'm enjoying the simplicity at Medium.

    No data is kept on this site overnight. Medium posts might sometimes turn up here, and posts from here might sometimes turn up on Medium.
        Mind you, if you get a sense of deja vu when reading my work, that may be because you've lived this life before.

    Picture
    There's a page for this [edit: there isn't], but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

    Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.


    There's a picture, it's just loading...
    You found me!
    Welcome. Thank you for coming. But am I the right
    William Essex? Click here
    to meet some more.



    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

    Picture
    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

    All
    Abuse
    Consent
    Media


    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

    Picture
    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


    Picture
    Ceased to exist. Sorry.

    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

    Picture
    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

    Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!

    Archives

    May 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011

    Picture
    Out of print. Sorry.
No animals were harmed in the making of this website. Other websites are available online (and off). All the content here is copyright William Essex, this year, last year, the year before that and, you
guessed it, the year before that, although I don't have the time right now to hunt out that little symbol. This website uses organic ingredients and respects your privacy. Come back some time.