Friday 12 November 2010

The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left's New Theory of Everything by Christopher Snowdon

 

After reading Wilkinson’s and Pickets ‘The Spirit Level’ I picked up a copy of this rebuttal by Christopher Snowdon, in the interests of fairness.

‘The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone’ was published in 2009 to wide acclaim on all sides of the political spectrum and argued through evidence garnered from reliable sources [notably the UN and EU] that greater inequalities in society hampered the overall effectiveness of a nation’s economy and health,  with The UK and US emerging as two of the most unequal societies in the developed world.

This book is one of the first to challenge those findings.  However, the problem Snowdon has are first perceptions; what is he trying to say? That Wilkinson and Pickett are wrong and the UK is actually a more equal place than they describe, or that its societal inequalities are actually acceptable, that in fact a small minority of people should be allowed to be ‘super-rich,’ for the ‘benefit of all’, and an increasingly marginalised underclass is a fair price to pay for this, particularly as they usually deserve to be there through their own failings, anyway?

The first stumbling block this book has to get over [and fails] is that any ordinary person [i.e. 95% of the population] can see day in day out that Britain is a very unequal society and we are, frankly, in a social and economic mess where any sense of community is barely a memory now for much of its population. The vast majority of people can sense there is something very wrong with this, even if they cannot fully articulate it.

So again the question begs to be answered: what is Snowdon trying to prove? His association with a right wing libertarian think tank probably explains a lot, and the speed of this rebuttal to the publication of ‘The Spirit Level’ clearly shows Wilkinson and Pickett’s book must have disturbed the libertarian right considerably, but having said that Snowdon’s book is well written and, as a couple of reviewers have said, is a good ‘tube read’ which is no bad thing, but probably sums up its ‘academic’ weight. The fact is unfortunately, apart from spending a lot of time trying to shoot down Wilkinson and Pickett’s figures and methodology, Snowdon comes up with very little counter-analysis of his own.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s ‘The Spirit Level’ is far from perfect, but its overall findings are solid and its argument is convincing, striking a cord I would imagine with the underlying feelings of very many people. Snowdon’s rebuttal is interesting but at the end of the day, a paper tiger. Certain points made in the ‘Spirit Level’ are obsessed over as incorrectly/disingenuously presented, yet they are nonetheless fully explained by Wilkinson and Pickett in their book. For example much is made of the sample group of rich countries, yet the criteria for their selection is fully explained by W & P, and going on for example about places like Hong Kong not being included is simply erroneous from the outset, as it is not even a nation state.

The fact remains, despite its occasional airbrushing over of a few details, ‘The Spirit Level’ is a highly successful, peer reviewed work that will have a positive impact for years to come. Snowdon’s critique though, cannot escape the feeling of being an exasperated bleat of indignation from the neoliberal right, who are trying to maintain their well-worn strategy of the past 30 years of muddying reality with disinformation and spin. It has worked for a couple of decades, but this book shows that these techniques may well now have run its course, and neoliberalism is on the run. And it is the majority of the UK/US population who will benefit from this, which is no bad thing.

Monday 25 October 2010

City Boy…Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile from Geraint Anderson

 

There's a whole clutch of books about the financial crisis and the fall from grace of drug-fuelled, city boy jpegmisunderstood city boys and girls and this is probably the daddy of them of all, so if you are going to read any in this new genre, it might as well be this one.

Based on Anderson's The London Paper's column- although narrated by a fictional character clearly for legal reasons- it is essentially an autobiographical tale that takes you on a journey from his [we are assured] 'left-wing hippy days' of University, through the uber-capitalism experience of life as an analyst in Canary Wharf, and back again.

It has to be said there is something compelling about the story- a bit like rubber necking a motorway car crash- and it is written in an almost hypnotic, blokey style that despite your higher nagging sense of taste, keeps you reading until the end.

However that blokey style too often strays into the juvenile, which although no doubt an accurate voice of the type of people making millions in the City, relentlessly applied throughout a book is wearing, as are his quips, jokes and 'amusing' closing time sexist and racist observations which again, as he says, are clearly based on a reality he has stored up from years of a banal existence with the idiots who come out with this rubbish, but they come with such frequency [and often repetition] in the book, that they left this reader exasperated and close to just tossing the book away.

This is a shame because many people probably do just that and miss the overall message of the book, and the really good parts. When Anderson is describing 'sensibly' the machinations of The City and the origins of the recent crash, he is very, very good; lucid and rational in his explanations. Unfortunately though this is too often swamped by a rollercoaster of prose style that too often sinks into banality and a crudeness that isn't clever enough to be funny.

Having said that, if you key into the voice and shrug off the lows, it is more often than not an entertaining- and occasionally gripping- read and although it is difficult to feel sorry for the author at the end of it, I suspect that was not his aim.

There are more stylish and perhaps more emotionally affecting accounts of the self-destructive City lifestyle- Alex Preston's novel 'This Bleeding City' springs to mind- but for an account from the raw, blokeish coalface of The City, this may well be the only book you need to read in a growing library on the subject.

Thursday 7 October 2010

Imperial Bedrooms

 

imperial bedroomsI must admit I have grown into a firm appreciation of Brett Easton Ellis rather than being a rabid fan from the outset. I enjoyed the first couple of books in the 80s [Clay, the narrator in Imperial Bedrooms, is a character from Less Than Zero] although well written, were almost disposable in a yuppies 80s sort of way. It was American Psycho that finally got me hooked and that book remains one of the best [and most shocking] I’ve ever read.

Whatever, Imperial Bedrooms. This is a lot slimmer slice of ‘stream of consciousness’ story telling than those before in which there is in fact hardly any ‘story’ as such, but more of a snapshot of lifestyle anxiety in the neoliberal materialistic morass of the early 21st century. Clay has returned to LA during a ‘break’ in his standard issue media career, although it’s not exactly clear how successful he’s been at it, although one suspects not very. Wealth has nonetheless still clung to him which is perhaps another salient indicator of the nature of our times. He is obviously close to a breakdown, filling a life he secretly acknowledges as being shallow with delusions of love and friendship fuelled by the usual drugs and drink. It culminates in the trademark BEE scene of sexual and narcotic debauchery which is probably less shocking now than it once was, but still efficiently does the job.

Imperial Bedrooms is little more than a novella and the criticism that it seems to have been rattled off quickly are understandable but I think this misses the mark; the prose is in fact deftly managed, experimental but not numbing and clearly has been carefully designed. It may seem like easy stream of consciousness stuff, but BEE’s talent is that he makes it look easy, when it is not at all.

In that way this book is perhaps closest to ‘The Informers’ in its atmosphere of materialist ennui and aimlessness, than any of its other predecessors.

This is a great book to lose yourself in for a few hours, to just let wash over you, and then allow its subtle messages to creep up on you. Although it is based on the monied ‘elite’ of a corporate America, BEE still has a strong message for our wider society in his analysis of that increasingly inept, corrupt, unimaginative but paradoxically continually enriched elite.

Finally, BEE is often described as the archetypal ‘post-modernist’ writer with his arch-irony and cynicism, but again this is a moniker that misses the mark to my mind. There is something stridently modernist in his work as he exposes the fundamental flaws in our consumerist, individual-obsessed western culture. He perhaps doesn’t meticulously pick it apart, or suggest any mechanisms for its amelioration as some modernist analysts do [of whom there are precious few of today anyway] but. as a novelist, he does do what a good novelist should do: he makes you think and then devise your own conclusions on what has been presented to you.

Wednesday 1 September 2010

The Island [2005]: A Unexpected Political Critique

the island-jpeg Michael Bay's 2005 film The Island has an interesting popular culture take on the shape of our society today and what the new future holds. Essentially a magpie combination of Huxley's Brave New World and Logan's Run and, although in terms of direction and plotline it rarely strays from its central template of a 'boy and girl against the world' action adventure, it does nonetheless beneath the veneer hold a salient for the present day which is worth discussing in detail.

Set in 2019, the central character [Ewan Macgregor] lives in what is apparently a perfect, gentle if sterile environment where his diet is carefully controlled and social interaction is controlled by a benign 'security' force. Employment is provided by simple production lines and individual, personal focus is maintained on the weekly lottery where a fortunate individual is chosen to go to 'The Island,' an idyllic place which the inhabitants of the environment are told is the last place on earth not contaminated by some unspecified catastrophe in the outside world.

The central protagonist [Macgregor] however discovers that there is an outside world and decides to escape, spurred on by the fact that the girl he has befriended, has just won that week's lottery.

Of course all is not as it seems in this ordered society; the habitat is a corporate construction deep in a former US military ICBM silo and ran by the Merrick Corporation as a centre for growing clones of wealthy patrons, who take out an insurance policy to have a clone 'grown' and maintained for spare body parts in case of accident. The lottery winning is in fact, the calling up of that particular clone to be harvested for an injured and/or dying 'sponsor.'

The Merrick Corporation's secret is however, that according to Eugenics Laws, such clones had to kept in a vegetative state and not allowed to be conscious- that is- actively human. Despite this, the corporation had found that the organs from vegetative clones failed after a few days of harvesting; but the organs of a viable, conscious clone were healthy and remained operative. As such they had decided to secretly maintain a colony of fully grown clones as exact copies of their sponsors, albeit developmentally arrested at 15 years old and brainwashed from birth with false memories and social mores and, critically, not allowed to sexually mature.

Needless to say, the story focuses on the escape of the two clones and the pursuit of the Merrick Corporation of them out in the real world, but it is the details of the whole corporate process that is fascinating. The colony is for example almost all white; one of the few black clones is that of a famous football player, which the escapees eventually see on a giant billboard as they flee through LA. The corporation is serving a definite elite- it costs many millions to sponsor an individual clone- and this neatly shows the core aim of an elite to self-perpetuate not just its structure, but it's individuals as well, who are effectively being promised the potential to 'live for ever'. They can truly be the New Gods- so long of course, they have enough money to buy the privilege.

This posits the reality of how a corporation, supposedly free of political control and regulations [although the president has a clone in the colony too] will do whatever it wants to achieve a profit and of course under the guise of advancing society, such as finding a cure for leukaemia [but as with all neo-liberal myths, this is in reality only for the benefit of the elite alone of course]. The clones are consistently referred to as 'product;' they are seen as flesh and blood automatons- walking organ banks awaiting transplant- nothing more.

The film sketches out ideas of spirituality- the director of the corporation is adamant that the clones are soulless- although it becomes apparent with the escape of the two protagonists, that sentience and 'human' traits such as curiosity and a sense of justice and personal freedom are inherent in them as organisms. Whether this is a genetic trait passed on through the DNA of the original host-sponsor, or a matter of spiritual 'birthing' is of course unresolved- as would be expected, as whole libraries are full of books discussing the nature of that issue, the selfish gene, or the God Spark?- but the reaction of the corporation director upon discover of the characteristic in what is identified as a particular model of clone, is immediately branded as a defect and in the time honoured corporate technique of re-adjustment at times of product failure, the director announces a recall, meaning of course, the destruction of all completed and in production clone models deemed to have the human defects.
Now of course one has to be careful not to over-analysis and attach too many intellectual symbols onto a film like this; it's director is known more for his action movies than the cerebral and it's debateable how many of the anti-corporate symbols and comments on the nature of human existence appear by accident rather than design, but it nonetheless is a striking contemporary comment on our current society and it's near future.

This is exemplified by the controversy at the time the film was released over the level of product placement in it. The makers were adamant it was necessary to supplement the huge budget required for the making of the movie- the chase scenes in particular are genuinely spectacular- and it has to be said that the logos of some of its sponsors, such as MSN at time literally jump out and hold centre screen as if in some quick flash advertisement. But that makes the film all the more complete as a microcosmic example [and at times unwitting] commentator on our times. The juxtaposition of a story line exploring the evil, over-reaching powers of capitalism, ignoring even what little regulation has been applied to it, is openly- almost lovingly- funded and actively promoted by some of the largest global corporations of today.

Then within the film's structure itself, there is the dichotomy of the illusion of freedom and 'individuality' within the [discreetly] policed colony- a stasis that neo-liberal capitalism sees as it's nirvana- being shattered by the discovery by some of its inhabitants of a true individuality that can extend out of the holographic projected confines of the colony's boundaries. In fact the film ends with the holographic projectors turned off, and its freed inhabitants wandering out into the desert, blinkering at their new surroundings. This has overtones of slave emancipation, but it does beg the question...what now? The released clones need to find the wider society, assimilate themselves into it and what then? Do they revert to the capitalist 'slave model' all the rest of us are in? Does this mean there is no escape? In this way, the neo-liberal, corporate capitalist fog of supposed non-ideology and anarchic self-determination, the sense that there is no centre, no identifiable force, that we are all agents swept along in one chaotic but cogent system largely of our own making and with a lack of any definable alternative- we truly are at the end of our history- seems all the more reinforced. There can be no Marxist analysis of this movie's premise of a released proletariat, establishing a communist paradise as a reaction to the horrors they realise they were subject to in the colony. The reality is that a cell of humanity has been released from one control system, into a similar, wider outside world one. As such this film is a genuine post-modern comment on the western corporate world. The clones will in all likelihood assimilate into that wider society quietly and either disappear, or use their new found awareness and sense of purpose to find their original human sponsors, whereupon either a battle of the egos will ensure where one or the other will kill each other, or the clone becomes a willing surrogate for its original master, literally bowing down to what it perceives as its genetic superior, essentially seeing him or her as its parent.

Whatever the eventual scenario, there would appear to be one consequence in the projected aftermath of this film's particular storyline- no matter what, we can expect business as usual.

Saturday 28 August 2010

New Town Anthology

One of my poems is in 'Tales from a New Town' recently published by Beacon Press. 


Based around experiences and perceptions of Skelmersdale, one of the UK's post-war New Towns, my contribution is an epic ode to The Concourse, the town centre's covered-mall shopping centre.  The poem, called Concourse, can be read on a separate page of this blog.

Friday 27 August 2010

Update from Planet Skem

The strange and wonderful world of dofollow has been entered...my little vessel of self-discovery has cast off from the a safe shore of cardboard trees, plastic rocks and artificial pebbles into the unknown...oh tempestuous opinions of worldwide rancour, be gentle with thine heart!...or something like that :)))

A new page has been added as well, the chalkboard,which will be an ever moving feast of new work, a veritable testbed indeed of draft scribblings.  Enjoy.

Thursday 19 August 2010

Dogville: A Political Analysis of Failed Republicanism

Orientation
I don't know how I missed the film Dogville when it was first released in 2003. Whatever, through the wonders of Sky Plus and Film 4, I caught up with it a couple of weeks ago.

Directed by Lars von Trier and with an impressive array of actors with Nicole Kidman in the lead role, supported up by the likes of Lauren Bacall, James Caan, Ben Gazzara and Paul Bettany amongst many others, it is a philosophical parable that is immediately striking- if not at first un-nerving- in its use of a minimalist, one stage set. Of course, what at first appears a bold, innovative art-experiment had more prosaic origins; the Swedish director won't fly, but wanted to make a film about and set in America and so came up with the ingenious idea of shooting it on a soundstage with minimal scenery. Buildings are shown as chalk lines on the floor and all locations, including the gooseberry bushes, are labelled to help orientate the viewer at any given point in the narrative.

What at first appears a surreal piece of theatre is in fact a clever calling card of intention and message; the small, isolated mountain town that 'clings to the edge of a cliff' has its few buildings charted out in plan form only. The characters literally move across an annotated largely one dimensional map, with wall-less buildings only occasionally alleviated by sparse examples of internal furniture, a bell tower over the mission hall, and a redundant mine entrance on the edge of the village. There are symbolically no solid doors although their opening and closing is mimed by the actors. All is apparently laid bare…although of course as in all communities, it slowly emerges that there are plenty of secrets, anxieties and prejudices woven through the fabric of the township. And slowly is the operative word here; although one can sense the director's aim is to gradually immerse the viewer into this enclosed world, it doesn't entirely work, particularly as the viewer has to contend with [for some time in my case] the play-like setting being so at odds with accepted cinematic models. This is not an entirely bad thing…the innovation at work here is to be applauded, but the lack of urgency for the first 120 minutes at least of the film [it clocks in at 2 minutes shy of a whopping, bottom aching 3 hours], filled largely with at times thought provoking but often needlessly wordy observations of individual characters delivered to us by a nonetheless impeccable narration by John Hurt, does become at times tedious.

This unfortunately runs the risk of only the very artistically committed staying the length- you can picture the most earnest movie buffs sat in deep thought on the edge of their seats in small metropolitan art house movie theatres- and this sadly I fear may well of been the case upon its limited release, as I myself in all modesty am not one with a particularly short attention span, still found myself taking use of the advantage of watching a recording of the film, so could do so in a number of bite sized chunks.

The fact that a larger audience will probably have been lost through the over lengthy [some less kind would say the over-indulgence] of Von Trier's direction is however a great shame, as the atmosphere generated, the issues explored and the extraordinary, explosively shocking ending, deserve to be seen, absorbed and discussed.


Analysis
It is the 1930s depression in small town America, and Grace Mulligan [Kidman] is a woman hiding from mobsters who arrives on foot in Dogville, desperate for a bolt-hole. She is allowed refuge there, in exchange for physical labour; a town meeting decides that she must win and maintain the acceptance of every single inhabitant of the township, and because of this, any attempt to do things her way, or any mistakes she makes, puts her at risk of being handed over to the criminals. The gangsters make an appearance early in the film, handing over a card to Tom Edison Jnr [Paul Bettany] asking him to contact them if he or anyone else in Dogville sees the girl. Tom is an aspiring writer and 'communitarian,' who tries to get his fellow citizens together for regular meetings to improve their intellect and 'moral awareness,' which he describes as a programme of moral rearmament. The story is seen very much from Tom's point of view, and it is clearly his prime aim is to succeed his aging father, a doctor, as the moral leader of the small town.

At a pedestrian pace, the film enfolds as it looks into the darkness inherent in people's souls, particularly those of a small community, which on the surface appears ordered, efficiently structured, democratic and consensually fair and moderate but, is in reality- as it is in every corner of the world- far from this ideal. It is the issues inherent in this hypocritical mask of normality and conformity that Von Trier deftly picks apart.
And the issues are huge, fascinating and highly political. Essentially, they cover the three basic tenets of Enlightenment republicanism: Equality, Fraternity and Liberty, which are of course principles enshrined in the French Revolution, but also are heavily woven into the US constitution from the immediately preceding, closely related republican revolution across the Atlantic.
Tom and Grace
All major decisions in the township are made through regular meetings in the Mission Hall, attended by all the adult population of Dogville. In this canton-like democracy, it is implied that the most important of the decisions that affect the structure/integrity of the town, must be agreed upon by everyone present. It is through such a meeting that Grace is, after at first much suspicion and doubt, allowed to stay in Dogville, with of course the labour conditions attached, for which she is deemed to receive a minimal wage.

What at first appears an enlightened, inclusive act- the towns people initially state that it is not their place to make demands on a newcomer; it is more so their duty to provide shelter to someone in need- is soon corrupted by all of the residents in some way or another. Although at first appreciated for her efficiency and friendliness, excuses are found to reduce her pay. The women become dependent on Grace for carrying out all the chores they most dislike; she is at first raped by one man, then the other men begin to take sexual advantage of her to the point of turning her into a 'whore-for-free.' In a bizarre scene, a pre-pubescent boy who she teaches, demands that he punish him by giving him a good spanking. She refuses, but he says if she doesn't, he'll tell his mother she did it anyway. She acquiesces, only to find herself reported by him to his mother anyway, a mother that also finds out she has had sex with her husband, but doesn't know it was through his action as a rapist [she eventually does find out but it does not change her attitude toward Grace].

In short she becomes enslaved. This is however further compounded and complicated by Grace's belief- which probably drove her to escape the world of Gangsters from which she was on the run in the first place- that people are inherently good and will not naturally do bad things unless they have been conditioned/brutalised into it by an outside agency; that understanding and forgiveness should be offered first and foremost to people who do bad things to you and others, because they either at best don't know any better, and at worst have discovered it is the only way to survive life.

This highly 'liberalised' [some would of course say naïve] world view of Grace's, is in itself an important political aspect of the film's societal comment; she embodies the individualist stance of 'enlightened' libertarianism, that people should be allowed to do as they wish, even if those actions affect you, directly, in a negative way, because individual rights should stand at the core of our society and any wrong doing should be ameliorated through sanction and/or understanding, rather than community penalty. This is an interesting psycho-moral paradox in it owns right; such a belief is quasi-religious in nature, yet in the modern context is grounded in individualist, free market capitalist ideology. This is a belief that however, ironically entraps her.

In this way she puts up with her enslavement until she decides enough is enough and she decides- tellingly in her mind as much for the benefit of the town as for herself- to secretly leave, bribing a bootlegging truck driver to take her to the next town in the back of his truck hidden beneath some produce, only to find herself eventually returned by him to Dogville after having had to have sex with him, to ensure her passage and as his rightful 'bonus' in the economic transaction. The town's people had decided she was not to leave; they had become dependent on her thraldom; there was to be no way out for her. The new socio-economic status quo demanded that she be an inescapable part of the town's self-regulated, libertarian capitalist structure.

In an American context, the similarities with that nation's slavery experience is clear and the juxta-positioning of enslavement and the emancipatory process- which amounts to a direct call of action for Equality not just economically but 'humanistically'- is being directly addressed in this scenario.

Also the process [and subsequent short-comings] of democracy is faced head-on; the township runs on the principle of consensus which, on paper, looks like a wonderful mechanism to enjoy and apply for the equitable running of a community. But does it work in a fair way? The validity and 'fairness' of this concept of consensus as opposed to the vitality of constructive ''dissent' is one that is receiving much philosophical attention at the moment- notably from Jacques Rancière amongst others- and it's failings are laid bare in this film. Putting aside the peer pressure complexities inherent in the democratic process of achieving a viable 'consensus,' it is clear that fair and just decisions are not always reached by this political process. In this case, it is a process that produces a result that is anti-freedom and equality; Grace's liberty is not just at first restricted, but eventually eroded at an ever quickening pace until she is nothing more than an economic and sexual chattel [and in the case of Tom Edison Jnr, her 'protector' and would-be lover, an emotional filter and intellectual self-determinator].

In this way, the ethics of Fraternity, based in the practise of consensual democracy, can seem to a flawed façade to the truer, baser nature of the participating citizens. The idea of community takes on a distinctive American tone here, directly related to the philosophies of John Locke, whose basic premise was that communities were only viable if property owning men came together to protect their individual interests as a self-serving group. As such the purpose of society was solely to enhance [and of course protect] the enjoyment of property; the only legitimate political power was one that served this end. This is core to the frontier spirit of the 'American Ideal,' and tellingly Dogville is clearly a former frontier town, with its now spent mine and sense of being by-passed, quite possibly for good.

Liberty- and by default individual freedom- is as such ironically compromised in this republican democracy of cantonic consensus. What on the surface appears to be the workings of a successful regime of anarcho-communism, is nothing less than the machinations of a society which celebrates the actions and rights of the individual, but only of course, if that individual citizen is in a place of power. In Dogville's situation, this is bestowed on those inhabitants who were born and raised there; everyone else is an outsider and therefore powerless. The similar process can be seen in contemporary western societies where immigration is concerned. Migrant workers are welcomed and tolerated if they keep their head downs and do the work the indigenous population don't want to do; but step out of those strictures….

Working through this, the film is a neat critique of the lopsided view of America's take on liberty. The European tradition is much more aware of the fact that individual liberty is only one facet of the political spectrum that's makes a 'good society.' The pursuit of personal liberty cannot be an absolute one, because at some time or another, the prosecution of one person's liberty [aka as 'rights'] relies on a constraint on the liberty of some other individual[s]. Personal liberty comes with a social responsibility for the benefit of all; as Richard Tawney, the leading inter-war socialist neatly put it, 'every man should have his liberty and no more, to do unto others as he would that they should do unto him.'

In this way, the citizenry of Dogville's application of liberty, as applied through their democratic Mission Hall institution, is not just very one sided, but a sham.


Summary Justice
The climax of the film is a brave, shocking, thrilling and- for me-an immensely satisfying conclusion. It unfolds in the last twenty minutes and if you make it that far into the film [in much the same way you may have made it to the end of this review/analysis :)], it is well worth the wait.

It turns out that Grace is the daughter of a leading local mobster in the city [James Caan]. Tom Edison Jnr, finally realising that Grace's presence in the town had the potential to disrupt and perhaps taint his own life plans of being a writer and- of course perhaps more importantly, his position as 'moral' leader of Dogville- decides to contact the mobster and tell him where she is hiding. He dutifully turns up to try and persuade his daughter to return with him [she is clearly being groomed to be his successor]. At first Grace refuses; she initially refuses to see no wrong with what the towns people have done to her, their actions were of course, 'beyond their control.'

Her father tells her she has an arrogant, hypocritical take on human society, precisely because of her liberal 'façade,' and that true justice is handed out by the likes of him; that rapists, murderers and thieves are sanctioned by him cleanly and effectively without resort to rancour or the smokescreen of consensus.

She at that point appears to experience an epiphany; she begins to realise just what she has been through and how debilitating the lifestyle and morality of the towns people has become, for them, as citizens and human beings. They have not just degraded her but, more importantly, they have degraded themselves.

As she gets out of her father's limousine, she realises what has to be done. She tells the gangsters to kill everyone, including the children, and burn the place to the ground. She takes a handgun, and without fuss, executes John Edison Jnr herself.

The issues dealt with here are many and complex, and warrant many hours of discussion. Is the summary judgement handed out by the gangster and his daughter barbaric, or is it another aspect of the American Way, the application of natural law by the powerful? This is after all the way American foreign policy has shaped up so far in the twenty-first century in Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps soon in Iran. This absolutism of justice, seen through the prism of individual liberty assessed and applied through consensus democracy, perhaps really does come back to bite the citizens of Dogville on the bottom , and arguably rightly so.

The actions of Grace and her father are therefore clearly of a revolutionary nature; they are, through the exercise of dissenting judgement operating through an interest beyond their insular, personal needs; they do this by, quite literally, entirely erasing Dogville from its already tenuous place on the world map.

Could such a film have been made by an American? I think not. It is a brave and challenging- if shocking- finale and one that should be soundly applauded for its lack of neoliberal-pleasing restraint. In fact the film was criticised at the Cannes festival for its 'lack of humanism' and it certainly ruffled some libertarian feathers- particularly those across the Atlantic who saw it as anti-American- although it went on to win a number of awards, was voted the eighth best film of the noughties by The Guardian, and was in slant magazines top 100 films of the decade.

The film- despite its length which may well be its greatest weakness- is a wonderfully well written, remarkable critique of the republican values of equality, freedom and community, and a timeless comment on the fragile state of the American concept of liberty, for it is as truly relevant now- if not more so- to the current socio-political shape of the US, as it was in the depression times portrayed in Dogville.

Thursday 5 August 2010

Modern Science Is Now A Pseudo Religion

It has become increasingly the case over the past 30-40 years that many branches of science have come to demand, as a bare necessity, complex [and thereby expensive] machines and systems to further their research. Notable examples are CERN's accelerator, JET and Hubble. In fact these immense projects are so big they require multi-government finance and collaboration to support them. Gone are the days of a individualist genius like Einstein, working in an academic lab to further our collective knowledge.

As such, science has become inextricably linked to Big Business. It is fully incorporated into the free market, fundamentalist capitalist complex. It is no longer a disciple looking to further human knowledge; it has shareholders [and individual reputations/media profiles/book sales]to think about.

Money matters to science now. Not debate, open-mindedness and the pursuit of truth. As such, any scientists and researchers that wish to challenge existing scientific beliefs that are in effect, written in tablets of stone by the scientific establishment- such as the Big Bang and Evolution, two 'scientific' theories that are actually barking mad when looked at rationally- get short shift from said establishment. The prevailing staus quo must not be questioned; funding cannot be affected by any signs of challenges to existing theories that are reliant on megabucks for their perpetuation as establishment givens, and which have been sold to the public as immutable truths.

Huge [egoistic] personal and corporate reputations [aka share value] rely on it. And so instead of debating openly and with a mature approach- one in line in fact, with their own vaunted scientific method- to ascertain whether there is any merit in these alternative theories and views, the scientific establishment take a leaf out of the neoliberal book to which they have become so politically aligned, and actively obstruct the publication and promotion of unacceptable counter-ideas, pillory and debunk said alternative ideas in their own journals that dominate the market [much as Murdoch does in popular media], whilst denying the targets of their discrimination a right to reply.

This is of course identical to the approach of the religious authorities before the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The contemporary scientific establishment is no different from them; they have become just as much a part of the wider economic and socio-political establishment as the Church did in medieval times- the church of course they so despise [yet secretly admire and copycat the techniques of] and waste no opportunity to attack as the basis of un-scientific mumbo-jumbo; again, with true neoliberal hypocrisy.

The techniques are also identical to those used by neoliberalism over the past thirty years; establish a position of power- use propaganda and falsified information, to create self-sustaining myths in society that support said power bases position as the only game in town: There Is No Alternative- actively suppress by whatever means possible any sign of dissent to this model and above all, protect the income/funding stream.

This ideology is ingrained in scientists from school/university onwards. It is an ingrained position; the scientific establishment is right; it always is; who are you to question it? To do so means you must be an idiot. Go away and realign yourself with the sheep.

Myth of course, pure myth. the science of the Enlightenment is as blinkered as any it has kidded itself it would replace. The Great irony. But a dangerous one for the advancement of human knowledge. How so much less advanced, how much original thought and humanity improving discoveries have been lost, by a forced conformity to the Old Theories held in such awe by the scientific establishment and their unthinking lackies, with such religious fervour?

There are signs things are changing; the 21st century is shaping up to move on and the ridiculous, comfort blanket theories of Old are being increasingly dismantled...but it's still going to be a struggle. Take your blinkers off, and join it.

Wednesday 28 July 2010

When the Sun came Down and Danced in Our street

A chapbook of a dozen new poems by yours truly has now been released by Parachute Poetry.

A free pdf download of the booklet is available here:

When the Sun Came Down to Dance in Our street by Mark Reed

Whitehaven and the Consumable Environment

It's a bitter-sweet experience walking around a lot of British towns these days, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.

The fall-out of thirty years of de-industrialisation, and ten to fifteen years of urban regeneration projects, is now clear. Most of them have come to fruition in the past five years or so, kick-started in many cases by the marketing double whammy gem of a new century and millennium with all the associated investment fever hung onto those wonderful advertising bye-lines.


What that urban regeneration process has meant in most cases, is an interlinked double levelled strategy on one hand has seen the transformation of town centres into a tourist 'destination;' based on whatever socio-economic assets a locality once had- whether it be a harbour, or a particular mining or engineering industry- which is then sanitised, interpreted and transformed into a shiny new environment to be consumed by locals but more specifically, by visitors, who are supposed to bring in the much needed external capital that the former industries used to. Industries that of course are now long dead are not so much buried, but carefully 'preserved' in their more interesting, sanitised aspects and museum-ified with an almost militant aesthetic.


Tourism Pounds in the shape of hotel, restaurant and attraction ticket prices alone cannot of course substitute wholly for the income of say, a once thriving coal mining industry exporting its wares through a large busy harbour, so it has to be supplemented by an injection of service industry infrastructural support. Of course the new tourism and heritage facilities in themselves provide jobs for some people, but other sources are needed and so the science and business parks spring up on the fringes of the town. They are often home to global corporations [even if they may parade 'local' names], and so most of the profits they generate are syphoned off abroad, but they offer enough local sustenance in the shape of business taxes and wages [just] adequate enough to enable two-income families to buy local property and shop in Tesco's. Despite these initiatives, n most urban areas of Britain's de-industrialised landscape they are still not enough to provide jobs in adequate numbers across the board, and so medium-to-largest single industry employers are maintained. It may be a biscuit manufacturer; it may be a submarine or oil rig construction plant; it may be an engineering plant making springs; it may be a nuclear power station. Whatever it is, the urban area is more often than not as heavily dependent on it for employment and local income as the local heavy industries of old, that fell to the neoliberal axe of organised labour organisation destruction and globalised market creation of the 1980s. The only difference being, the former old industries were nearly all locally developed and owned. The new industries of course, are not.


As such our towns- particularly those outside of the South East and the ones reliant on heavier industries of the past, and which are now clinging on to the margins of the world economy- have become transformed by neoliberal free-market capitalism, into consumable items in their own right. They are products to be visited and consumed; the new street furniture, the new harbour architecture, the new statues, the refurbished pit wheels and foundry wagons set in flower beds and explained by neat interpretation boards, that strive not to over complicate things- three paragraph sound bites are deemed enough- are there to serve a basic, economic function. The whole area is placed within the wider market; quite literally The Market Place, the literal geographic place where once people went to as a neutral ground to carry out economic activity, has itself merely become another element to be consumed within the wider societal market.


Whitehaven in West Cumbria is a prime example of this process. A medium sized town clinging to the North West coast of England and sandwiched between the Irish Sea and the Lake District, it has a rich industrial heritage, as well as a history that goes back to Neolithic times through into the Roman period, and was a key port from Norman times to well into the 2oth century.


With a large harbour and a small but rich coal field beneath it, the town and its surrounding area enjoyed a fair bit of prosperity throughout much of the last millennium, its pre-industrial success evident in its many fine Georgian buildings and extensive harbouring facilities. What happened in the latter quarter of the 20th century however need not be explained in any further detail here.


Over the past ten years, the town centre- focused primarily on the harbour area- has undergone that most miraculous of late 20th/early 21st century phenomenon- an 'urban renaissance.' The harbour now has a large, well-stocked marina [who owns all these yachts you see up and down the country in such places, and why do our coastlines outside of the harbours appear so empty of them nearly all of the time?] and plenty of interpretation signage, renovated industrial artifacts, nice street furniture, white steel tubing canopies, new road and pavement surfaces and museum to enjoy.


Now I am not being a killjoy here; the environment is very pleasant and clearly well used and enjoyed, but one cannot help but have a nagging sense of unease at the sanitised presentation- the expensive dressing up- of a once proud and working, albeit dirty and course, self-developed economic powerhouse for the local area. In what has now effectively become an open air museum and harbour play-park, to be visited for an afternoon by wanderers through the lakes or local walking their dogs [nothing wrong with that; would do it myself if I lived there, but it doesn't bring in any readies for the town council], there once was a thriving industrial base that provided for nearly all of the local economic needs. It may have been [arguably] a more polluting local industrial process, but wasn't it still ultimately so much more sustainable in its economic containment than today's structure? A world now built on the tenuous but commercial-sound bite attractive 'idea' of global connectivity. I say of course idea, because the reality is not one of two way connectivity, but of one way drainage for places like Whitehaven…and that is as in outward.


And so Whitehaven maintains its lovely if sanitised harbour area for day-visitors and yachting enthusiastic who probably take their boats out- purchased in times when they had nothing else left to buy- two or three times at most a year- whilst the vast bulk of the population relies on employment at Sellafield, the world's no. 1 nuclear waste recycling plant of choice just down the coast, and which itself lurches from closure threat to closure threat every few years.


What happens to Whitehaven if or more likely when it does close? Will there be enough jobs on the small West Lakes Science Park to soak up the 80% or so of the working population that are reliant for employment directly [or indirectly in associated businesses] at Sellafield? You of course know the answer to that…and for a government who has ran out of money for the foreseeable future, and has now played all of its neoliberal leisure-consumer led urban regeneration cards not just in Whitehaven, but 99% of all the rest of similar places in the country, what then? What happens to Whitehaven? I hope for the best, but can't dispel this cloud of pessimism, and it hurts.

Monday 26 July 2010

Skemster: The Launch

Welcome to the overhauled, shiny and new Mark Reed blogspot. It moves on, in a second generational way, from the proto-blog that was markreedwritings.blogspot.com for the past year or so.

As such Skemster is my new blog tag. I intend the output to be eclectic but will in particular be focused upon literature, the visual arts, science/religion and politics. it will include trial runs of my own work, both written and graphic, and I hope to incorporate a 'local' flavour wherever possible.

So without further ado.....Viva La Skemster!

Sunday 25 July 2010

This is the new blog page for Mark Reed, which is also directly linked to his website which can be accessed here:

http://markreed-online.com/Home_Page.php

The original Mark Reed blogsopt still exists, although all new entries and information updates will henceforth appear here.

Saturday 24 July 2010

Confusion, Deception and Denial in the UK: Will a sense of reality ever return?


These are confusing times, as we stumble around in the aftermath of the financial crisis of a couple of years ago. Many people appear to be dazed from the shellshock to their lives amidst the recession; in one way, they have an inkling that something awful happened, because of something terribly wrong with the system they have spent years making a living/life in. Maybe it is because of that, despite all the obvious inequalities and structural weakness inherent in unregulated capitalist economies, they still harbour a deep seated desire to forget this, forget the trauma, and have things back to the cosy world they enjoyed before, as quickly as possible. We live, in short, in a nation of the Numbed.

Free market fundamentalist capitalism failed spectacularly; it clearly wrote the script to its own demise based on recurrent threads of greed, incompetence, elitist arrogance, selfish over-indulgence in over-complicated spheres of economic activity, that not even its own architects fully understood and, of course, an utterly misguided conceit that its players were being successful in the good times because of their skill, NOT because of the reality of the situation- they were just being incredibly lucky- and wholeheartedly acted it out to the gallery's until the Autumn of 2008.

The crash was spectacular but two years later, clearly not as debilitating as the vast majority of the world's ordinary citizen's expected. Neoliberalism, the ideology driving the over-fuelled engines of unregulated global capitalism, has in its own time honoured way with urban mythology and socio-economic mind engineering, recently shown signs of an expected resilience.

It is already re-inventing itself. At first, the western neoliberal capitalist machine was shuddering and reeling; the fault clearly lay with them, there were no cantankerous labour movements to blame this time, or socialist governments with bothersome high tax regimes to finger as spanners in the works of unfettered capitalism at this historic juncture. Oh no, just the structure, workings and players in the most extensive and unregulated system of capitalist exchange the globe has ever seen, were obviously to blame; for some time, this was so blatantly clear, not even the most strident of capitalists even tried to provide excuses for their actions and the resultant, chaotic fallout from the economic collapse. There even appeared to be some proto-deathbed conversions to Reality Perception, as Alan Greenspan, one of neoliberalism's foremost and most powerful ideologues and practitioners, publically recognised the flaws in his beliefs.

It is now clearly the financial shock of 2007-08 was only the first act in an ultimately more tumultuous series of global economic disasters that are going to unfold during this decade. This realisation is enforced by how quickly neoliberal ideology and its practical application in the way of unfettered global capitalism, is bouncing back. The propagandised message is now consolidating: it's back to business as usual, the crash was just a blip, we will get back to the old days again, just you watch…we will all once again have unlimited personal credit, constantly reducing tax burdens, [the illusion of] increasing salaries way beyond a miniscule inflation rate, accelerating property prices… the neoliberal dreams [based on ideological myth] are being peddled again. There are even examples of right-wing think tanks beginning to excuse the crash/credit crunch/recession/financial crisis call it what you will [in true neoliberal publicity technique, giving phenomenon a multitude of names neuters its overall societal effect], as a case of the world at the time of 2007-08, being not unregulated enough. A recent paper produced by the Adam Smith Institute, claimed with barefaced, on the face of it comical aplomb but all the more frightening because it was clearly serious, that tax havens were actually vital mechanisms to help the poor, and as such should not just be maintained but celebrated.

These claims are [currently] being laughed at by even he most hardened of neoliberal capitalists, but the fact that they are beginning to be said, shows the resilience of neoliberal ideology, how embedded it is within our political, economic and cultural psyche, what a hold it elitist practitioners still have over our society, and how it's socio-political mechanisms have a truly remarkable, shame-free self-promotional drive that flies in the face of all intellectual reason and general public perceptions. And it is relentless in its bare-faced self-promotion of concepts that are at the first rightly derided as rubbish, and then gradually listened to and remarkably, eventually, accepted as perceived wisdom.
More, even deeper financial disasters lie ahead. Not even getting a few hours away from an almost total western collapse of its banking system has stopped free market, fundamentalist capitalism in its tracks, take stock, and address it's most fundamental of flaws. Even worse must happen [and it will] before it is broken. But it's going to be a long haul. The new Conservative government in the UK for example, shows no real understanding of those fundamental flaws in neoliberalism as it pushes the crippled economy into a position where recovery can only be revived by the private sector. A private sector without any money and any wish to borrow/lend any money, a private sector reliant on internal markets that are being wound up [the public sector] and external markets [the EU] which is falling back into recession, and a private sector which is now almost entirely globalised when it comes to financial structure, and as such keeps the bulk of its assets off-shore in low or non-existent tax environments.

The future for the UK doesn't look bright, and it certainly doesn't look a shiny successful Tory blue.

Tuesday 13 July 2010

Modern Science Is Rubbish


Modern science is entirely a capitalistic venture now. It has an establishment that is wedded to neoliberal ideology at the expense of varied democratic discussion, adaptability and social conscious.

Ironically, the ultimate casualty of this process is its own much vaunted Scientific Method.

Modern science is full of contradictions. Gravity- which modern science does not at all understand- it cannot, otherwise we would be whizzing round in anti-gravity machines [or at least the blueprints would exist by now]- for example, is to all intents and purpose observable as an instantaneous phenomenon. Yet modern science states categorically that the speed of light cannot be exceeded. You cannot, by modern science's own strictures, have the possibility of both states occurring at the same time.
At the core of modern science- a central tenant since the Enlightenment- is that all things must be quantifiable and a measurable force attributed to the actions of matter. Gravity of course escapes the [artificial] rigours of this self-imposed constraint to the pursuit of knowledge. Gravity exerts a force, without expending any energy whatsoever. It is a constant, perpetual force, if it were not so, the planets would fly from the orbit of the sun as soon as that energy was burnt up or even, if there was a disruption to that energy source. This obviously does not happen, even when a star dies. There are clearly fundamental forces at large in the Universe that modern science cannot begin to understand, yet it believes that the Big Bang is the only viable solution to explaining the beginnings of the universe. Hmmm.

One thing is clear. Modern, establishment science has shown it is so limited in scope [and dare one say intellect] that it has allowed itself to be straight-jacketed by systems and dogma; it can only provide models for the universe around us through equations, abstract constructions and computers. To explain phenomena it cannot explain, it invents unproven, quasi-scientific concepts such as Dark Matter and Neutrinos which are in fact, when rationally considered, as super-natural in essence as the concept of a Higher Power.

The actual understanding of even the most fundamental phenomenon such as gravity is beyond modern science. It just cannot get its head around it within the cerebral constraints it imposes upon itself. As such modern science, its adherent scientists and the Scientific Method are not in a position to- nor have the authority to- state categorically that spiritual and metaphysical forces are not an integral part of the universe. The 'Age of Reason' is in fact the most laughable of misnomers; at best it may of put our understanding of the natural world around us back hundreds of years. At worst, it may very well destroy us.

Monday 12 July 2010

Modern Science has become a Pseudo-Religion Trapped in Neoliberal Capitalism


It has become increasingly the case over the past 30-40 years that many branches of science have come to demand, as a bare necessity, complex [and thereby expensive] machines and systems to further their research. Notable examples are CERN's accelerator, JET and Hubble. In fact these immense projects are so big they require multi-government finance and collaboration to support them. Gone are the days of a individualist genius like Einstein, working in an academic lab to further our collective knowledge.


As such, science has become inextricably linked to Big Business. It is fully incorporated into the free market, fundamentalist capitalist complex. It is no longer a disciple looking to further human knowledge; it has shareholders [and individual reputations/media profiles/book sales]to think about.


Money matters to science now. Not debate, open-mindedness and the pursuit of truth. As such, any scientists and researchers that wish to challenge existing scientific beliefs that are in effect, written in tablets of stone by the scientific establishment- such as the Big Bang and Evolution, two 'scientific' theories that are actually barking mad when looked at rationally- get short shift from said establishment. The prevailing staus quo must not be questioned; funding cannot be affected by any signs of challenges to existing theories that are reliant on megabucks for their perpetuation as establishment givens, and which have been sold to the public as immutable truths.


Huge [egoistic] personal and corporate reputations [aka share value] rely on it. And so instead of debating openly and with a mature approach- one in line in fact, with their own vaunted scientific method- to ascertain whether there is any merit in these alternative theories and views, the scientific establishment take a leaf out of the neoliberal book to which they have become so politically aligned, and actively obstruct the publication and promotion of unacceptable counter-ideas, pillory and debunk said alternative ideas in their own journals that dominate the market [much as Murdoch does in popular media], whilst denying the targets of their discrimination a right to reply.


This is of course identical to the approach of the religious authorities before the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The contemporary scientific establishment is no different from them; they have become just as much a part of the wider economic and socio-political establishment as the Church did in medieval times- the church of course they so despise [yet secretly admire and copycat the techniques of] and waste no opportunity to attack as the basis of un-scientific mumbo-jumbo; again, with true neoliberal hypocrisy.


The techniques are also identical to those used by neoliberalism over the past thirty years; establish a position of power- use propaganda and falsified information, to create self-sustaining myths in society that support said power bases position as the only game in town: There Is No Alternative- actively suppress by whatever means possible any sign of dissent to this model and above all, protect the income/funding stream.


This ideology is ingrained in scientists from school/university onwards. It is an ingrained position; the scientific establishment is right; it always is; who are you to question it? To do so means you must be an idiot. Go away and realign yourself with the sheep.


Myth of course, pure myth. the science of the Enlightenment is as blinkered as any it has kidded itself it would replace. The Great irony. But a dangerous one for the advancement of human knowledge. How so much less advanced, how much original thought and humanity improving discoveries have been lost, by a forced conformity to the Old Theories held in such awe by the scientific establishment and their unthinking lackies, with such religious fervour?


There are signs things are changing; the 21st century is shaping up to move on and the ridiculous, comfort blanket theories of Old are being increasingly dismantled...but it's still going to be a struggle. Take your blinkers off, and join it.

Thursday 8 July 2010

Humanism and Political Denial


Humanism seems to be continually in denial as to its role in world politics in the past two hundred odd years, instead hiding behind a cosy veneer of scientific reason, controlled, experimental deduction and a continual propaganda stream that states all believers[and even investigators] in any metaphysical possibilities in the make-up of the universe, are simple idiots.


It's interesting, for all the statements that religious groups in the past would have carried out mass destruction on the scale of the 20th century if only they had had the weapons technology of that century and now at hand, there's been no example in contemporary times of religious powers being inclined to do just that, when arguably there's been plenty of opportunity; Hitler could have made his crusade a religious one; the Germans were a broken but nonetheless devout Christian people in the aftermath of the Great War, but he of course chose not to, more enamoured as he was by social Darwinism and the principles of the Enlightenment.
Now then, it can be said that the Enlightenment had a large part to play in this, by eroding the political powers of religion, notably the Christian Church in the West [although this was a process already underway before the advent of the Age of Reason]. Fair enough. But the proponents of the virtues of the Enlightenment- one of reason, the over-riding power of the human intellect and the supremacy of the scientific method as an assessment of current and future cultural framework- cannot escape responsibility for what followed. Where religious political power fell back, 'humanist' politics based in modern philosophy and atheistic political ideology [of both the right and left] inexorably filled the vacuum. It resulted in the first, worldwide war of ideology between 1939 and 1945; the following Cold War was based in its principles and it reached it's logical, horrific logical conclusion with the Khmer Rouge's atheistic/nihilistic Year Zero.
Humanism and atheism cannot escape the legacy of its ethos, once it had the opportunity to exercise real power, such as it did in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. These two examples alone, should be enough to make us stop and take stock of our cultural over-reliance in the West, on the supposed advantages of the Enlightenment. For too long the Age of Reason has been taken as a given, as a vital intellectual core to the mechanics of our economy and society. Its early proponents such as Voltaire may have shouted 'God Is Dead! but perhaps we swallowed the by-line too easily, without bothering to understand the true nature ethos that has so pervasively replaced Him.


And so the to the 21st century where the over-riding claim of the humanist/atheist/Social Darwinist Reasonists rings out: 'There is No Alternative!' Now where have we heard that before….

Wednesday 7 July 2010

Darwin, Racism and Fascistic Humanism


Much is made about the evils of religion and the purity of thought and purpose inherent in humanism and atheism, springing of course from the glories of the 'Enlightenment,' and there is no greater revered priest to this New Theology than good old Darwin.


As with all extremist belief's, this is intellectually ill-founded and theorists like Darwin are not only misunderstood, but selectively represented, in exactly the same tried and tested ways of the religious fundamentalists they purport to abhor.


It is a rarely reported fact that the sub-title Darwin chose for Origin of the Species was 'the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life' [it was removed from later editions of the book]. Darwin was a racist, and by association, all of his current day advocates are also. Darwinism [and the humanist movement in general] has a lot to answer for when you look at the turmoil of the 20th century. Hitler [a militant atheist that Dawkins no doubt secretly reveres] was a huge fan of Darwin; he wrote the fundamentals of eugenics into the heart of the Nazi charter. In fact the 'Age of Reason' [if ever there was such a laughable misnomer] has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths from the Napoleonic Wars through Nazi/Stalinism to the Khmer Rouge and 21st century Iraq.


Evolutionist theory led directly to the holocaust. 'Survival of the fittest' as an ethos has led to a free market fundamentalist capitalist system [where all metaphysical considerations are at best blanked at worst ridiculed], in which the accumulation of money and the perpetuation of a small, global, economic elite is promoted as the only valid purpose of human life.


This system is not only destroying our humanity, but our planet.