Apologies for the delayed article. I’m afraid I’ll be a little brief this week due to contracting a lovely little pathogen from my children and spending 13 hours in bed with a fever dream today. I’m feeling better this evening, but it now seems it’s my wife’s turn to suffer.
Suffering, of course, being the undeniable element of reality, is something we are accustomed to. Nobody has a monopoly on that. It certainly seems to be on the rise in general, as we fret over the cost of living and nuclear war. Although finding a reason to suffer takes a little more poetry and sophistication.
My view of epistemology versus ontology is very much honed and characterised by my experiences at sea, and going out hiking when I was younger. I often figure out things about my life after having long voyages through vast landscapes and seascapes in my dreams. Visual poetry and metaphor leave an emotional residue that sits in your heart and stomach, far more substantially than any mental model.
The last two weeks of political affairs have been difficult to process. In fact, I think it is hard to tell if the mysterious powers that be are actually teasing and mocking us, or if what we are witnessing really is just the fact that the paradigm is broken, and our leaders are dishonest &/or delusional.
Let’s take Liz Truss for example. Her name is almost a pun for ‘Less Trust’.
Although lacking any charisma to speak of, I did think ‘finally, a conservative policy’, when she announced the top rate tax cut to a ‘mere’ 40%. Only to find that within 10 days, this policy was reversed. Was the whole thing just a manipulative tease, to fool people into a false sense that things might actually ever change?
The parallel with the energy/fuel price pantomime is too obvious not to see. Oil price goes up, so fuel price goes up astronomically. Oil price returns to a reasonable historic average, but the price at the pump never goes all the way back down. Same with our energy bills. Of course, it’s nothing to do with green policy, or monetary inflation. Just nasty Putin, with his tyrannical 13% flat tax rate.
The average working man observes this and absorbs it deeply. He doesn’t understand the ins and outs of price calculation in the commodities market. He just knows deep down that he will always get shafted, and the game is rigged. In some cases, this leads to ‘tear it all down’ socialist resentment. In other cases, it leads to a pretend world-weary cynicism. So that whenever he does earn a bit of money, he equates it purely to his own IQ and guile, and votes loyally for any party that promises to shore up the nominal value of his savings and rental properties. Regardless of the method.
Is it just another case of the cabal-cat, toying with the wounded middle-class mouse, to obfuscate the fraudulent feudalism of the Fed (&/or BOE)? Or is it an amoral government complicit with an amoral population?
I’m not sure if she has any ties to the nobility, even tangentially, but ‘Truss’ is a Norman word. At least, Old French, in its C12th origin. It means a ‘collection of things bound together’. Closely related to the Old French Fagot – from Latin Fascis – a bundle of sticks bound together.
A bundle of sticks bound together was actually a symbol of the fascists (the various National Socialists) in the early C20th when these political movements were rather less subtle. The idea was that a bundle of sticks was far harder to snap than a single stick, therefore collectivism provides strength.
The association of being ‘Trussed Up’, held in a thinly veiled captive bondage, should not be lost on Liz Truss this week. If she is indeed an honest actor, trying to implement a libertarian direction to her policies, then she has been thwarted by the immoral vested interests of Tory Tribalism. The media is really keen to push fatalist ideas on us. We are left with the impression that change will not be coming for the good, no matter what is done.
The banality of phrases like ‘Regulatory Capture’ can never capture the sheer unfairness represented by governments who rig the game in favour of their donors.
Let’s be honest. Britain hasn’t seen a whiff of ‘free market’ or classic economic theory since the battle of Waterloo. The way this has been reported in the press reveals an interesting part of the propaganda machine that allows the financial fraud of our time to continue. Describing slight reductions in the planned increases to welfare programs as ‘austerity’, or as ‘cutbacks in a time of need’, is seriously disingenuous.
We live at the end of an era of debt-induced narcissism. Even John Maynard Keynes – an evil childless fraudster of a man, and head of the British Eugenics Society 1933-1944 – advocated that government stop their spending when times were good. When have we ever seen that happen, in our supposedly Keynesian paradigm?
We live in a welfare-warfare state. The four horsemen, conquest, war, famine and death are idolised by our current ‘foundational fathers’, Darwin, Malthus, Marx and Keynes. The evil of a class system reflected in the ideas of an aristocratic few, that poison and colour our policy and thinking about intergenerational issues to this day can hardly be underestimated. These are the pastors of the tribes of British politics, and there is no party among them that doesn’t sacrifice some element of our society to appease these pagan gods. The right side of the aisle just tends to give a little bit more of a kickback to its corporate allies, than to people on the dole queue.
They criticised Christian society as a ‘death cult’, but through sacrificing the working poor and the welfare classes, they’ve created a ‘no-death-cult’ among the upper classes. Where they need never compete fairly, nor suffer indignity ever again, so long as the magic money tree is never revealed as the true agent of bondage and fraud that rules our world from the shadows.
I understand the stories and thinking behind the conspiracy realists online these days. But from my point of view, it is not worth committing to any speculation in these areas where I have no special knowledge. However, whether it is a deliberate evil conspiracy to destroy the sovereignty of free nations and individuals, or whether it is a pernicious ideological instinct and the result of animalistic power-play incentives, it doesn’t matter.
When I am driving a ship there are multiple unseen forces acting on it. If my ship is drifting quickly to the North, it doesn’t matter to me that 40% of the drift is caused by tide, 20% by the permanent current, 20% by the surface current, and 10% by recent surges due to rainfall. What matters is that I apply sufficient force in the opposing direction to escape danger and maintain headway.
Liz Truss is not a caretaker PM. She is not a leader, and perhaps not even a decent middle manager, from what we’ve seen so far. Her U-turn proves she is not pro-freedom, or pro-truth, and that she has not built support from her team.
A leader, by definition, must be more than a manager. A leader must do things differently from the way they have been done before. And a leader must have followers.
Liz Truss’s geeky ideas about economics mean nothing if she has no ability to communicate them as a story. Leadership requires persuasion. Narrative. Vision.
The Normans knew how to lead the English. When they colonised the Anglo-Saxons they were outnumbered 100 to 1. So why didn’t the English revolt?
The Normans allowed the Anglo-Saxon nobles to buy into their society. The highest ranks of society were permeable. One could enter the nobility by learning French, marrying a Noble, and owning land. Military distinction could also elevate one’s station. A permeability carried forth in the British Empire when the Sikhs and the Ghurkhas were brought into the military. (Also, some reckon the global warming of the medieval warm period meant their bellies were fuller than ever before, so who cares who they pay taxes to).
If Liz Truss wants a libertarian economic revolution, she’s going to have to rewrite the story. She’s going to have to turn on the special interests in her own party, who are deeply terrified that the poor might get their act together, and insist on fair market competition. She needs to point out the idiotic idea that corporate taxes do anything other than increase prices for consumers. She must destroy the myth that NHS stands for anything other than Nazi Healthcare Shortages. She needs to point out that the ‘welfare state’ you ‘paid into’ all your life, never had a little account with your name on it, and all your money went into an intergenerational black hole of debt. That inflation isn’t ‘price-gouging’ by the wealthy, but the result of every carefree indulgence with the printing press that Bernanke was applauded for, but that made everything worse for the little person.
The conservative part could be the party of the working and middle classes if they had a leader who could explain to the country, that everything they do via debt and deceit, makes things worse.
Leadership starts with answering the question Why. Liz Truss needs to focus on making people wealthy, not managing their poverty. Can she craft that vision, and communicate from the grassroots up through her party before the next election in 18 months?
I won’t hold my breath.
Instead, I’m encouraging everyone I know to set up as a limited company. And every business owner I know to employ contractors. And for the wealthy people I know to stop siding with those who gained their wealth by using the power of the state to inhibit competition. You are not the same.
The left/right paradigm of politics is as illusory as the colour magenta that the Blue and Red combine to make. We need to abandon the paradigm, manage our managers, and see the immorality on both sides of the aisle.
I have much more to say in the coming weeks about management, leadership and the necessity of ethical vision, but for now, I am spent. Apologies for my brevity, but my bed is calling!