Barbelith Underground > Switchboard > A Very British Police State?

That seems so contradictory. On the one hand people are too something-or-other, preoccupied by daily struggles, to think up these alternatives themselves yet at the same time they embrace them when they somehow arise? We can discuss spontaneous idea synthesis and higher intelligence etc, but on this practical human level surely alternatives arise only from people themselves? On the other hand you say people are creative. It all sounds a little like we here are some parental elite looking down on the poor dumb masses discussing what's best for them and then imposing it by suggestion, exactly the perspective you say you disagree with.

My point is that ordinary, or less wealthy, people are indeed passive. They do ignore the problems around them or wait simply to pay lip service to the next alternative presented to them from above, which in reality is no more than the exact same thing with a 'new! improved!' packaging, or this season's colours. The same people in positions of power, ie. with money, pass on their jobs to their family or friends or even to those they consider to show merit, thereby paying homage in fact to their own vanity and continued conviction that they know what's best for others, but they continue to pay themselves vast and obscene amounts of money, thereby denying others. It's the 'other' economics of want, the real one.

The majority of people do not think outside of their immediate environment or realise the poverty they live in, in that that they are being cheated and working hard for very little return, with the profits going elsewhere to people who do less work. As you say, most people have a basic understanding of this, it is a kind of mythology and this is the fake popular dissent which I say underpins our culture, but no-one feels able to do anything. They are afraid of losing the status quo.

In a nutshell, I am suggesting that far from being a natural thing, that fear is a form of mental violence deliberately manufactured and encouraged by the people whom the status quo suits very nicely thank you. It matches their helicopter

Who are this left of whom you speak? I'm not being deliberately obtuse. I see left-right politics as just another part of the smokescreen, a divide and rule policy which keeps people arguing. The solutions are so simple. Pay people fairly for the work they do according to the profits that work generates. Stop creaming off the profits at the top.

I think one problem may be lesser-talked of (or maybe in hushed awed tones) British Dream. Secretly we want to support the status quo because we hope that one day we, or if not our children might be accepted into the ranks of the obscenely lazy and rich. If we subscribe to an ideology in which no-one is fantasy rich, there is no chance for us. It's our only escape.