There is something about being a certain age - in this case 57. You've been around long enough to live through social and cultural change, with the perspective that can give; yet still (hopefully) have enough fitfully functioning braincells to be able to reflect adequately on everything that's gone before....
History can be read in different ways. But, for me, one inescapable reading of the forty years of my sort-of adult life is the progressive suppression and removal by other means of any opposition to the status quo in the western world. This I suspect to be the main subtext to most of what has happened since I was a nice little boy running round the playground in shorts. While the communists tried to achieve this goal through salt mines and incarceration, the ubermensch of western societies has adopted a far more subtle and successful method: give the masses consumer goods to keep them quiet. Colour television; texting; microwaved tv suppers; holidays in Thailand; ring tones. Always something new and fascinating. The deliberate cultivation of mass mutton mentality (apologies to sheep), the final opium of the masses. Shop, shop, shop, turn on playstation and shut the f**k up! It's the strategy of the modern dominators, and it works superbly.
Just how successful the reality channel that the control system has us tuned into is, was driven home to me last christmas time. In the shop where I work, customers were busily beavering away until closing time, 4pm on the 24th. By the time I returned to the scene, 11am on Boxing Day, December 26th, the shop was already being mobbed again! After their uncomfortably-negotiated enforced day of rest on the 25th, the west's ideal families were back in force to do what comes naturally, as dictated by the dominators: spend, spend, spend. It was the controllers' dream come true.
This control system paradise is characterised by an absence of perspective and, paradoxically, any real choice (one of the system's buzzwords, which we are taught means 'good'). One unfortunate consequence of the falling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in the late 1980s was that all effective visible opposition to the western capitalist dream vanished in one fell swoop. With communist Russia around, at least people were aware that other ways of going about life existed, even if they weren't up to much. Younger people now grow up with no sense that it is possible to live in any way other than the western consumerist nightmare. All other possibilites have been eradicated; we are confronted with a single world philosophy, a true monoculture. Totalitarianism by default. And it's mainly crap.
It's not necessary to subscribe to full-blown conspiracy theories to realise that recent western history is characterised by the increasing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small clique, while equality and personal empowerment disappear, flushed away in the sewage system of falsely-free markets and a one-eyed misreading of Darwin's ideas of survival of the fittest. There is no doubt in my mind as to the unspoken, possibly sometimes unconscious, agreement on the way that things are and how they should continue; an agreement among a nexus of people of politics, business, the law, the media, church, and money. Once we spoke of 'the Establishment'; now I might talk of 'dominator complex' or 'control system'. It amounts to pretty much the same thing.
One consequence of this levelling out of perspective and disappearance of real choice is a certain bland 'sameness'. We all participate in the same culture, have the same interests, so nothing is really any better than anything else. Gordon Brown gives his opinions on 'X-Factor' contestants, and David Cameron listens to Lily Allen. Yes, we're all the same now, and we all agree that's a jolly good thing. Amazing.
A recent report - commissioned by the UK government! - confirmed that divisions between the haves and have-nots in Britain have widened since the 1970s. The most interesting thing is that, while forty years ago such a situation provoked miners' strikes, general political and economic unrest, and the eventual ushering in of S.M. Dominatrix Thatcher to sort it all out, today nobody bats an eyelid. Nobody cares. Life continues as normal. Anyone tried that new Vodafone mobile yet?
So the dominators can feel well-satisfied in their efforts over recent times. Even when their financial institutions lose billions of pounds, no worries: the taxpayers will pick up the tab. Yes, it's been a job well done.
History can be read in different ways. But, for me, one inescapable reading of the forty years of my sort-of adult life is the progressive suppression and removal by other means of any opposition to the status quo in the western world. This I suspect to be the main subtext to most of what has happened since I was a nice little boy running round the playground in shorts. While the communists tried to achieve this goal through salt mines and incarceration, the ubermensch of western societies has adopted a far more subtle and successful method: give the masses consumer goods to keep them quiet. Colour television; texting; microwaved tv suppers; holidays in Thailand; ring tones. Always something new and fascinating. The deliberate cultivation of mass mutton mentality (apologies to sheep), the final opium of the masses. Shop, shop, shop, turn on playstation and shut the f**k up! It's the strategy of the modern dominators, and it works superbly.
Just how successful the reality channel that the control system has us tuned into is, was driven home to me last christmas time. In the shop where I work, customers were busily beavering away until closing time, 4pm on the 24th. By the time I returned to the scene, 11am on Boxing Day, December 26th, the shop was already being mobbed again! After their uncomfortably-negotiated enforced day of rest on the 25th, the west's ideal families were back in force to do what comes naturally, as dictated by the dominators: spend, spend, spend. It was the controllers' dream come true.
This control system paradise is characterised by an absence of perspective and, paradoxically, any real choice (one of the system's buzzwords, which we are taught means 'good'). One unfortunate consequence of the falling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in the late 1980s was that all effective visible opposition to the western capitalist dream vanished in one fell swoop. With communist Russia around, at least people were aware that other ways of going about life existed, even if they weren't up to much. Younger people now grow up with no sense that it is possible to live in any way other than the western consumerist nightmare. All other possibilites have been eradicated; we are confronted with a single world philosophy, a true monoculture. Totalitarianism by default. And it's mainly crap.
It's not necessary to subscribe to full-blown conspiracy theories to realise that recent western history is characterised by the increasing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small clique, while equality and personal empowerment disappear, flushed away in the sewage system of falsely-free markets and a one-eyed misreading of Darwin's ideas of survival of the fittest. There is no doubt in my mind as to the unspoken, possibly sometimes unconscious, agreement on the way that things are and how they should continue; an agreement among a nexus of people of politics, business, the law, the media, church, and money. Once we spoke of 'the Establishment'; now I might talk of 'dominator complex' or 'control system'. It amounts to pretty much the same thing.
One consequence of this levelling out of perspective and disappearance of real choice is a certain bland 'sameness'. We all participate in the same culture, have the same interests, so nothing is really any better than anything else. Gordon Brown gives his opinions on 'X-Factor' contestants, and David Cameron listens to Lily Allen. Yes, we're all the same now, and we all agree that's a jolly good thing. Amazing.
A recent report - commissioned by the UK government! - confirmed that divisions between the haves and have-nots in Britain have widened since the 1970s. The most interesting thing is that, while forty years ago such a situation provoked miners' strikes, general political and economic unrest, and the eventual ushering in of S.M. Dominatrix Thatcher to sort it all out, today nobody bats an eyelid. Nobody cares. Life continues as normal. Anyone tried that new Vodafone mobile yet?
So the dominators can feel well-satisfied in their efforts over recent times. Even when their financial institutions lose billions of pounds, no worries: the taxpayers will pick up the tab. Yes, it's been a job well done.
