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Riots,
Inc. "Overhead a rainbow appeared, in black and white..." Like many in London, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in
riot-postmortem mode. What happened in our city, and subsequently in several
English cities and towns, has come in for some of the most bizarre and
ill-conceived media and political scrutiny that I think most of us can ever
remember. Those traditional guardians of the nation’s morals, namely the
Church, the state, and the media, have been scrambling over the bones of recent
events in order to lay blame and say “I told you so”. But we don’t need anyone
to tell us so. It’s perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain what caused
the riots: this is what happens if you fill people’s heads with materialism
and then deny them the means to attain it. The only questions that need
answering are how did this situation come about and what do we do to
solve it? It’s time for a reality check. So, let’s get weaving. The Church
They tell us that the nation’s spiritual health is in crisis. I
completely agree with them. But let’s define “spirituality”: Spirituality, in
its simplest terms, is the opposite of materialism, “spirit” being a catch-all
name for the indefinable parts of ourselves that respond emotionally and
intellectually to life. Love, passion, creativity, humour, inspiration,
tolerance, all those things that depend only on our connections with others,
the things that fulfill us emotionally and therefore actually make life worth
living. Without meeting these needs we cannot be spiritually satisfied. Historically, religion attempts to step-in and plug the gaps in our
spiritual welfare with promises of pan-dimensional activity and supernatural
well-being. It boasts that satisfaction is guaranteed after death in return for
doctrinal obedience now. It offers us a service: we abdicate all responsibility
for our spiritual welfare to it, by following a few simple rules, and in return
we receive an eternal reward in the form of everlasting life, either in a place
called heaven, or by means of reincarnation, and so forth. And we are required
to take it entirely on faith that this will happen. Now, let’s define “materialism”: Materialism is the pole opposite of
spirituality, as we earlier defined it. It is the bastion greed, rather than
need. Ego, self-gratification, vanity, megalomania, control, self-righteousness,
insecurity, dishonesty, and violence. It hungers for glory and rewards, it is
propelled by objectification, jealously and entitlement. Think about it. Which one of the two templates, spirituality or
materialism, better fits religion? Well, on the whole, it’s quite obvious that
it’s materialism. In fact, the promise of any reward, let alone the eternal
jackpot of everlasting life, is utterly materialistic and about as far away
from spirituality as it is possible to get. As I’m applying this to the current state of affairs in England, let’s
take Christianity as our example. If you know your history of Christianity, you
will know that originally, indeed for three hundred years or so, Christianity
was a philosophically based school of thought, influenced in part by Hinduism,
which was dissipated across Europe and North Africa from the Middle East in
secret as it initially attempted to escape Roman persecution. It drew many
parallels with existing European pagan beliefs (which themselves had previously
influenced Hinduism), and the common enemy of all these tribal belief-systems
was Rome, whose imperial empire had fallen across many of the lands wherein
these systems were practiced. By AD 300, a great many of them had united under
the banner of Christianity, whose scriptures taught that the kingdom of heaven
was within each human; it was not some strange land one went to after death,
but a metaphor for the human spirit, those things defined above, those needs
which all people seek to meet. It was about liberation of the mind and the
heart from the pursuit of materialism, of worldly goods that failed to satiate
the desires of the spirit. As such, it was tolerant and inclusive, and it
became big, too big for the Romans. In the end, Emperor Constantine realised that
Rome’s only hope was to join Christianity, and then attempt to co-opt it into a
tool of imperialism. Constantine’s plan succeeded, and the Roman Empire was
rebranded as the Catholic Church. The Council of Nicea invited all the various
tribes of fledgling Christianity to join the new church, and those which did
not were hunted, persecuted, and murdered exactly as they had been by the old
Roman Empire, only now under a flag of Catholicism. The scriptures that were
“on message” were collected together as the Bible, and those that weren’t, such
as the Gospel of Mary Magdalene (Jesus’ wife and the mother of his daughter St.
Sarah), were discarded, and only later compiled as the Apocrypha, a book which
the Catholic Church has always been at great pains to discredit, for obvious
reasons. (By the way, these are all historical facts that are only
disputed by the Catholic Church itself, which also disputes the fact that
condoms can help protect people from HIV infection. Historically, if the
Catholic Church disputes something, that thing is probably correct.) The Protestant Church was a distinct rebellion against Catholicism,
largely because of what it saw as the Catholic Church’s penchant for
materialism and control. Yet it’s initial success was soon tempered by it’s own
control issues, and whilst it freed people of the dogma of the Catholic Church,
most notably it’s unnatural and dangerous sexual pathology, it did itself fall
prey to the hierarchy of the haves over the have-nots. Elizabeth I’s religious
tolerance laws, the English Civil War and the Enlightenment eventually wrestled
much of the Church’s power into the hands of the state, since which the Church
has remained socially inert, tolerated as an increasingly quaint artifact that
has little if anything to say about the reality of life in our time. But in
truth, it never had anything whatsoever to say about the reality of life, in
any time. It was always just a big old power play, with its roots firmly
planted in the vulgar and proto-fascistic lusts of Roman imperialism. Ergo, the
Church, and the organised religion that it represents, came about through the
persecution and cooption of true Christianity for imperialist ends, and is
therefore, by definition, the exact opposite of spirituality. The State
One of the most exasperating things about living under a Conservative
government in the United Kingdom is having to listen to their endless stream of
socially inept gobshite. This was the case throughout the 1980s and early
1990s, and is the case again now. I’m not suggesting that Labour has any
answers. I will deal with them momentarily. I’ll start with the Tories simply
because they’re the incumbent political status quo. Firstly, David Cameron himself. I’m not going to plumb for any mileage
out of the Bullingdon nonsense. I will allow him his follies of youth, we must
all make allowances for our past. I’ve no desire to character assassinate him
for his alleged wealth, or for his privileged background and his opportunities.
None of it matters if he can rise to the challenge of being a compassionate,
thoughtful, inclusive, understanding and tolerant human being, which is the
minimum requirement of anyone who takes the job of Prime Minister in this
country. Unfortunately, he has yet to display any of these character traits,
and indeed is speedily creating a profile of himself that projects anything but
a compassionate, thoughtful, inclusive, understanding and tolerant human being.
Indeed, he has talked a great deal of the aforementioned socially inept
gobshite since coming to power. More worringly, he has actually acted on it
like he believes it to be true. The socio-political damage heaped upon the poor
and needy of this country in the last 18 months is without precedent in modern
times. The justification for this has been spending cuts and economic
instability, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. Adam Smith, the father of
Capitalism, made it quite clear that in order for the system to work you have
to keep an equilibrium of happiness among the populace; the way to achieve this
is help them meet their needs, as nothing creates stress and worry like an
unmet need. Cameron has completely ignored this, and the inevitable effect has
been the destabalising of our society from the bottom up. But what of the gobshite? The other day he laid the blame for the riots
squarely at the feet of “absent fathers”. This is, frankly, one of the
stupidest things any British Prime Minister has ever said in public, and ranks
right up there with Neville Chamberlain’s piece of paper. Where to begin
explaining what’s wrong with this? Firstly, not all absent fathers are absent
through choice. Secondly, not all single mothers do a bad job of raising their
kids, and to suggest that they could have done it better with paternal help is
pretty darned insulting, actually. Thirdly, the vast majority of single mothers
and absentee fathers are caused by relationship breakup, and the vast majority
of relationship breakups happen for very good reasons. To suggest that an
unhappy relationship is somehow a more stable and less dysfunctional
environment for child welfare is absolutely crass ignorance. As for the call
for a return to 1950’s style nuclear families, this is just as bonkers as John
Major’s back to basics Victorian values gobshite was before it. The Sixties
have happened. Punk has happened. The pill exists. Feminism and post-modernism
exists. The Cold War is over. Equality is a war worth fighting for all of us.
You can’t turn back the clock sixty years, and only a fucking maniac would want
to. What happened to “compassionate conservatism”? Well, simply, it never
existed, because conservatism and compassion have no social overlap. And whilst
socialism’s compassion is utterly fake and forced, at least it exists, if only
in a forced, fake way. Is that better. Marginally, perhaps. The problem is benign autocracy. This is what we actually have in the UK
instead of proper democracy. A partisan system with no written constitution.
Partisan politics doesn’t work. It failed in France, when everyone had to vote
for the hated Chirac just to keep the even more hated Le Pen out of office. It
failed in America in 2000, when a tied election due to an apparently faulty
voting apparatus resulted in a hugely questionable recount, and the subsequent
election of a regime of mismanagement that in eight years turned the biggest
budget surplus in US history into the biggest budget deficit the world has ever
seen, one which almost bankrupted the whole fucking planet. And it failed
big-ass style in the UK last year, with the Liberal Democrats holding the
balance of power and then handing it to bigger of the two evils, even though no
one who voted LibDem thought in a million years they were helping sweep the
Tories back into power, and most of them would probably have voted Labour if
they had known. True democracy has no partisan affiliation. You simply try to elect the
best person for the job, based on their skills, experience and ideas. If they
screw it up, you get someone else, you don’t wait to see if they screw it up
more or not. Democracy is a committee based service structure that works on a
variable mandate, it has nothing to do with partisan politics, sloganeering, or
manifesto. It’s a self-regulating system of governance as express through
conscience and consensus. It is very open, very fair, very easy to implement
and very hard to manipulate, which is why it’s the best system. Modern
technology would make it fast, cheap, efficient and highly interactive too. It
actually involves people in its process, and makes living with tough decisions
somewhat easier, as grievances could be aired, and could even influence policy.
Likewise, the inevitable mistakes would be forgiven and the lessons duly
learned, adding to the sum of wisdom. This is not objectivism. This is not
materialism. This is Plato’s Republic, this is Adam Smith’s Wealth of the
Nations. This is true democracy, and I believe we will have it within our
lifetime. The partisan choice between Pepsi and Coke, the system of
first-past-the-post followed by four years of benign autocracy is in it’s death
throes, and we will soon dance and piss on it’s grave. The Media
Aside from the current scandal (in which we discovered that the last
great, self-styled guardian of British morality was, in fact, tapping people’s
phones, betraying personal trusts, and deleting the voicemails of murder
victims in order to manipulate a story) there is a more pending, obvious reason
not to place any stock whatsoever in the media. Peter Hitchens. I rest my
fucking case. Since my attention was drawn to this utter peon of opinionated
pondlife, I have been both exasperated and illuminated. This man knows nothing.
Absolutely nothing. His brother is the great Christopher Hitchens, one of our
most inspired and valuable polemicists. Christopher has gone on record as
saying his brother is an idiot. And he is, too. An absolute moron, who, for
some reason, is employed by a British newspaper in order to express
ill-informed viewpoints on subjects about which he has no personal frame of
reference whatsoever. And he, Peter Hitchens, is symptomatic of a great many
media voices in this country. Let him serve as an example and a warning, like
Hitler before him. I don’t read newspapers, so this is all news to me. Hence my simple view is that no more should we listen to the materialist status quo, with it’s paedophile priests, expenses-grabbing self-serving politicians, and arrogant, shallow, facile media. Nor should we react to them. We should, instead, start treating each other as we would want to be treated ourselves, with dignity and respect. We should express understanding and empathy, and look for new ways to communicate positively with each other. They’re not going to save us, we have to save ourselves now. We’ve spent our lives reacting to this system over which we had no jurisdiction, or so we thought. The time to react is over. The time to listen to our hearts and make choices based on our personal truths and needs has begun, to live within our spiritual means, which is not limited by any doctrine or law or system or opinion, and isn’t enslaved or threatened by class or race or past mistakes or bad decisions, but which always has an impulse for good, and a momentum of truth and self-forgiveness. Who knows, we might even put Half Man Half Biscuit in charge for a while, they always seemed to know how things really were.
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WEDNESDAY 17th AUGUST 2011 Wishing a very happy birthday to two of my most very favourite people, Dot Allison and Maria McKee... Jude xxx BLOG ARCHIVES Like many, over the years I've experimented with platforms such as Blogger and MySpace, and in doing so I've learned that, in blog terms, if you want something done properly, do it yourself. So from now of stuff's just going to get posted here. But in case you can really be bothered to trawl through the cobwebs of my past bloggings, here are the links for to do so: |
