So who's fault is it anyway?

The usual solution to a problem involves finding out who it was put the spanner in the works. Who left the lid down, the gate open, or cleaned out the biscuit tin on the sly? Once there is another at the end of the crooked finger were on the road.

Only thing is, what if the pathology is attached to the other end of the finger?  In such an instance, there is no point even turnin the key as the auld yoke is not even goin to start. If, as is often the case, we-ourselves are the cause of the effect we are wont to bellyache about; what then? In a more formal sense we might ask, what or where is the mechanism whereby democracy might protect itself from the ravages of democracy; from it’s own excess, it’s myopic focus upon fulfilling the material fantasies of the masses? Well that’s another kettle of herrings entirely.

The Genie is out of the bottle, our revolutions have given us our democracy and it‘s one track mind. The initial priority of democracy was to fulfil the wishes and the needs of the people; our need for bread, for a share of the riches of the dictator, the king or our former oppressor. Democracy is programmed to do little else, other than provide for the wants of the masses. It is confined to this thought-horizon and as such our politicians promise economic growth,  lower taxes, more money cheaper hamburgers, etc, and they are duly elected.

Yet the wants of the masses are no longer consistent with our needs. We have enough bread (almost half of it ends up in the garbage and half of what is consumed, clogs arteries and bursts buttons).  Our poverty is one of relativity, or a consequence of some individual pathology, rather than the old model of the lion’s share going to our masters. The left, the unions and the socialists remain  trapped within this thought-horizon.  

In many respects our Democracy has permitted us to become the new masters, to re-inhabit the old palaces, to add a few more en-suites, and squeeze into the tights and ruffs of our former Lords. We have lacked the courage or the intellect to see the folly of their wealth, ‘the idiocy of the millions’, and so we have retianed the ideals of slave-master.  Their former oppression has validated the ideology of greed, it has confirmed the castle and the title as the universal aspiration, the dream of the multitude, imitation being the highest (or the lowest) form of flattery. And yet, the Emperor, as our children remind us has no clothes, possession is an illusion, wealth is superfluous and consumption is our greatest pathology.

Anyone who has lived and worked in Africa as I have, would baulk at the notion of our Western ‘poverties’. Is it more of an immorality that Mary in Dublin cannot afford her cigarettes or petrol for her car, than the plight of Mary in Somalia who must abandon her dead child by the roadside? When a journalist or politician speaks of the recession in Ireland, of how people are 'suffering', and are finding it ‘hard to get by’, the words should set their mouths on fire.

In the west we die of cardiovascular disease, we die from fat, not from famine, our only depravity is one of intellect and reason. Whoever should point the finger in this case is sure to bring the house down on top of him or herself. In a democracy the first and most sacred right of the masses is the freedom to blame someone else for our mistakes and our ills. Not only that, but whomever should be foolhardy enough to spot the Emperors nakedness, will be instantly reminded of their unavoidable hypocrisy, given that our Ignatius is part of the very problem her or she is alluding to. The job is banjaxed from the beginning.

In order to generate a bit of momentum for change the purveyor of that illusive and illustrious substance must first unearth a scapegoat, once there is a pariah in the room, the rest as they say is child's play. The momentum for Irish independence was out in the open in all her crimson glory; red post boxes, red coats, the Union Jack, these were symbols of the oppressor, the cause of the slums, the depravity and the loss of the language and the poor old woman at the gate. In Ireland prior to our independence one did not have to look far to find the enemy.

Hitler turned this universal hunger for goats meat into a potent force that culminated in the grotesque obscenity of human beings putting other human beings into ovens and gas chambers. Somebody once wrote that ‘there is no inhumanity like man’s inhumanity to man.’ I'm not sure that I agree, and given the rate of a species or two per day that are eternally extinguished as a consequence of our consumption, it is unreasonable to assert that we humans enjoy a monopoly on our inhumanity. Ultimately our obese consumption of the ecological web that sustains us will translate into human suffering; when the ice caps melt, the oil runs out and richer nations must openly steal the goodies from poorer ones. Perhaps our destruction of global ecology will manifest as the greatest inhumanity towards ourselves.

And still we see only shadows on the wall, we remain chained within a cave, locked into a thought-horizon of yesteryear, one where our problems are described in terms of the medieval need for bread, for more wealth and the all consuming cancer of economic growth. The approaching end-points of; ecological destruction, peak oil or the free markets and globalisation are becoming something of a cliché; one that points to melting ice caps, to heart rending images of lonely polar bears floating on ice cubes, to the belching smoke stacks of power station or factory, or the pile of rubble and the bodies beneath that was once the sweat shop of our too many clothes.  All of it is becoming facile, dreary and predictable, as effective as the warnings printed upon cigarette packets, impotent, tired and more likely to make one want to have another smoke rather than contemplate giving up.

The pursuit of change is as wilfully ineffectual as the delusion of charity.  It lacks a scape-goat and suggests that the cause of the problem is at the other end of the finger; if we smoke we will give ourselves cancer, a pointless and cancerous reiteration of the obvious. Throw a goat into the mix however, uncover that  'The Man' is putting something into the cigs to make people smoke more, before you know it an army of instant ex-smokers will be standing around tobacco bonfires and an auto-da-fe for the Marleborough Man.

This reluctance for introspective analysis in the context of the self, encourages us to see our problems as being external to the self. The crisis of ecological degradation is not one of individual consumption, rather it becomes a crisis of 're-cycling' of 'green energy' . The environmental movement has neither the courage nor the social space to analyse the real cause of our private and ultimately our environmental  malaise. The sacred cow of consumption cannot be violated at the risk of social and political isolation. 

We remain confined to our intellectual horizon, chained as it were to a number of sacred cows, material idols that a more enlightened age will undoubtedly scorn.  I live in a house that is two hundred years old. I have no idea who were the original owners, who were the loving (or not so loving) couple who turned the key in the front door of their 'forever' home, and were thereafter  waked-out in an oak coffin in the same spot where sits my leather sofa today. 

The original owners are gone and forgotten and I am the owner now. Of course ownership is entirely transitory, it is a human delusion, one that we will ultimately evolve beyond. In reality there is no such thing as ownership, and all that we own (or think we own) is simply borrowed, much of it will be passed onto another, or returned to the earth in a degradable or non-degradable form.

In his lesser known but very pertinent essay The Soul Of Man Under Socialism, Wilde states that 'it is immoral to treat the ills that are caused by private property, with private property.'  In essence, we are trying to cure the disease with the same process that has produced the disease.  Wilde rightly concludes that Charity is immoral, that it degrades and demoralises.  Charity is in itself an entirely ineffectual institution, one that works on an immediate level by relieving in a limited but obvious way, the sufferings we impose upon the world in a massive globalised and yet invisible way.

Our allegiance to and dependence upon the idols of today, those of; private property, economic growth, fashion, and material wealth, are of the same variety and potency as the Pharaohs or the Golden Calf, or that of the Jews being genetically inferior. We cannot evaluate our 'problems' until we first understand the nature of our sacred delusions and move beyond them, to a different intellectual horizon. The question remains whether there is sufficient time for the human animal to undergo this intellectual evolution of sorts, or whether present consumption, the markets and private wealth, have already pushed our ecology beyond the point of no return.

Personally I suspect the latter but hope for the former, and yet the vitriol and vehemence by which many of my peers and compatriots cling to these defining delusions of our age might relegate that hope to the realm of a purely romantic optimism, one that awaits the laughter and perhaps the scorn of generations to come.