As a species, we humans are a stain on existence. We are a cancer on this planet. Our closest similarity is with a virus, and yet in its simple, single-minded efficiency, a virus is surely the better of us. As far as I can see, America and Britain are at the vanguard of our global decay, eating our way faster than most and with more careless a disregard for our hosts than Ebola. Every conceivable economic, social, political and environmental catastrophe has been witnessed and every single one has been our own fault.
Now, I can't stand a banker. I'd rather spit in the face of a Tory or a Republican than look at them. If I had my way the CEO of BP would boil in a heated vat of his own crude product. But I don't blame them. We made them who they are. We are weak. We are pathetic. We need politicians, hedge fund managers, oligarchs. As a society they are our collective crutch. We made the News of the World. We gave them permission to invade people's lives. We rationalised it because we also made the celebrities. We sanctioned it, whether we read it with glee or dismissed it with equal and opposite glee. But why? Why did we make a kiddy-fiddling Catholic Church? What's in it for us? Does it make us who we are? Possibly.
Ok, so let's do a thought experiment. Take one of the pillars of our society and consider what the world might be like if we did it right. Take banks. What if we hadn't dismantled the regulations that were placed on the financial sector following the Great Depression? What if they weren't allowed to trade in dept, creating a parallel economy of credit and insured credit and underwritten insured credit and on, and on. What if...? Well clearly there's a problem. Take away the unregulated financial free-for-all and pretty quickly you find that there's little need for a complex stock market as we have it today. No need for different currency either. And for that matter, currency as we know it. Once you remove the unending competition, the driving force of our economic system, then the cycle of boom and bust, bubbles and burst bubbles, soaring highs and crashing lows, you get economic stability. Harmony. But it will never happen.
I always liked Macbeth. We can all empathise with Macbeth. He was promised a better life. He already had a fine life, but he was told, albeit by an unreliable source with hidden self-interests, that he could do better. And he tells his wife. She then enables him to take that first tentative steps towards his ultimate downfall. He kills the king, assumes the thrown, is wracked with guilt, murders his best friend, is wracked with more guilt and then eventually dies in accordance with the ambiguous prophecy of the very people who led him down this road in the first place. His wife, meanwhile, is driven insane and kills herself. The End. Sorry if you have never read or seen Macbeth. Spoiler alert etc.
We are Macbeth. Advertising promises us fantastic things. Material wealth beyond our imaginations. Lady Macbeth whispers in our ears, telling us that we can have it, that we should have it...she's the institution, the banks, filling us with conviction for the deed, and we do it. We sign on the dotted line and become beholden to the fates. The banks, they're mad. They go bust. They take themselves out of the equation leaving us, neck deep in blood/debt, grasping at straws, trying hopelessly to find a way out while at the same time knowing that the only way is forward into ruin and death. And who is the king? The king is harmony and order. The king is nature. We kill nature to further our own ambition.
As a society we are far past the point of no return. We are seeing what surely must be the harbingers of the coming collapse. Cycles of boom and bust are getting faster. Environmental disasters are becoming less frequent but more severe as we push our capabilities ever harder to satisfy our insane demands. We've bought into the lie wholesale and we're riding it out because really...what the fuck else are we going to do?
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