The descent of Britain into an atomised and deracinated society dominated by a neoliberal ideology that is accepted and preached as Gospel by both the fake Conservatives and New Labour seems to reach ever more surreal proportions. As Peter Wilby comments in the New Statesman,On the same day as David Cameron made his "big society" speech in Liverpool, the Times reported that an American company, Rent A Friend, is launching here. For an hourly fee, it will arrange for somebody to go to the cinema with you, act as best man at your wedding, or simply converse in a coffee shop. This should remind us that capitalists, far more than public authorities, have robbed us of the capacity to do things for ourselves.Neil Clark has backed Wilby on his opposition to this horrid ideology and the baleful effects in creating a fundamentally diseased and eerily denatured society. All in the spurious cause of promoting "choice" and individual "self-determination", as if people can be reduced to consumer items.
We look to manufacturers of instant meals and high street takeaways to provide food we once cooked for ourselves. Once, if we needed exercise, we joined a few (unrented) friends to play football or went for a brisk walk. Now we buy membership of a gym club. To sympathise with the bereaved, we once wrote a letter. Now we buy commercially produced cards with standardised sentiments.
Just as the "personalities" and "parties" are now just branches of PR and advertising. The fake Conservatives are no different from New Labour in holding to a vulgar and reductionist utilitarian neoliberal ideology in which sovereign consumers have rights that non-consumers or lesser consumers do not.
Forget the idea of citizenship. In 2010 the concept of the morally educated citizen is seen as outdated and people are now mere consumers and some consumers are more equal than others. It is considered the only way to motivate people by brand status and differentiation. This is pathetic. Wilby looks at how education itself could be privatised,
Cameron's speech refers to the "big society" ensuring we "don't always turn to officials, local authorities or central government". He doesn't want to stop us turning to business. On the contrary, Cameron wants to connect "private capital to investment in social projects". That, I suspect, is what the "big society" is really all about.
Parents may decide to start a school, but they will soon find it's best to bring in private money and hire private management if it is to get off the ground and survive as a going concern.
Several private companies, most earning millions from outsourced public projects, are already offering their services. Some openly admit that they aim to create branded chains of schools which they will largely control even if they do not legally own them.
It never seems to cross what passes for their minds that such a degraded worldview is both vulgar and unbecoming of honourable that treats people like commodities, as though 'human resources', a term first coined by the Nazis. Where people are assessed only according to their use value, then depersonalisation and dehumanisation will follow.
Remember what happened to those classic 19th-century self-help institutions, the building societies. Thanks to Tory legislation in the 1980s, their owners - the customers - were bribed to "demutualise" and sell out to commercial banks. For "big society", read big bonanza for big business.
Well done Karl.
ReplyDeleteI would say that Britain has a combination of 3 dystopian worldviews, Orwellianism, Neoliberalism and Huxleyan/nihilism (they are similar) and I have been writing a bit on my blog about this.
I have been doing a lot of thinking and research into this. I also think another thing is the growth of higher education, much of it is merely to fulfil a purpose, that of being a right of passage and transtionary period for young people. This however creates a market where there are 'graduate jobs' reserved only for universtiy graduates, even if they are relatively simple for non graduates. It is just a way of being selective, and also to stop people working their way up- now their is a glass ceiling for ordinary workers.
we sure are in a dystopia.
Charles/NapoleonKaramazov
This is a fascinating topic.
ReplyDeleteThe Orwellian dystopia applies in many ways to the use of language, the soundbites, and authoritarianism of New Labour, as well as to the way NATO has become one huge military power block competing for hegemony in Central Asia in a war in Afghanistan that few understand.
Yet, unlike Orwell's vision, the muting of critical thought in the public domain has not been achieved by the jackboot, rubber truncheons or a secret police. Sticks are there but the carrot of mass consumerism has offered a more effective way of dampening dissent.
That was what Huxley was getting at in Brave New World. In Britain, Huxley got it right that people could be made to love their servitude. Huge new shopping temples, transient crazes and fads are there to divert the messes from thinking too hard about how the wealth of the economy they share in is maintained.
Huxley saw that material privation would not lead to the traditional forms of subjection updated by new forms of technological domination. Instead, there would be silence on where the wealth was coming from and the fact that violence and instability is still lurking in the back of BNW too.
In BNW there are still those "savage reservations", the equivalent of present day Afghanistan, where wars are continuing. But no dystopian writer working today seems to have been able to create a new convincing dystopia where events in Iraq and Afghanistan are linked to our consumer economy and freedom as they are about grabbing natural resources and pipeline routes.
Within Britain, J G Ballard had started to grasp the way that consumerism could lead to a soft Fascism in Kingdom Come, as well as psychopathological resistance movements against consumerism. Yet he never linked what might happen in the near future with its underlying insecurity.
After all, consumerism is a palliative, an anodyne that takes people's minds of having to think too hard about the uneasy world outside the charmed circles of Western consumerism. One day a deranged loner will try to blow up a shopping centre in order to get "consumerbots" to fundamentally reflect of their existence.
I have heard people refer to consumers as "consumerbots" in scarcely veiled hatred as a form of alien life form. Presumably because those who have no thoughts or considerations for anything beyond brands cannot be fully human. This, of course, not true. Consumers appear gormless but are all too human.
As are those who believe that, if people have chosen to live such a shallow existence whilst consuming and using up so much of the earth's resources, then they cannot be totally human. The real fear to be assuaged is the sense of helplessness at events elsewhere.
For nothing ever happens in a cathedral of consumerism...Not yet...