The universe is monstrous

I read recently in the newspapers that according to Stephen Hawking, the Higg’s boson, that is responsible for the existence of all matter, is an unstable particle. Apparently, it could quite easily break down and cease to function altogether, at some point, in a rapidly expanding universe like this one. If that happens, human beings, everything around us and everything that human beings know about, would just disappear, like that, without warning. This seems to me to be without a doubt the ultimate natural disaster scenario: goodbye, game over, problem solved.

So far as I can tell, this is just the latest in a long series of possible, end of the world disasters that the world’s leading scientists have been communicating to the rest of us over the past few years. Some of them are at the level of the entire universe, but most of them are concerned with smaller entities such as our own solar system, our own biosphere, or our own species. The one that seems to have been around the longest is the idea that our solar system is full of assorted space junk, such as asteroids, and that any one of several thousand pieces of rock, much larger than the ones that burn up in the atmosphere most of the time, some of them known and others unknown, could come crashing into the Earth at some point. Any reasonably large piece, such as the one that presumably wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, could easily eliminate all the larger animals on this planet, including all humans.

Another well-known scenario involves the Sun, which is inevitably going to explode several million years from now. In the meantime, a much larger sun storm, or giant flare, than the ones so far observed, could presumably happen at any time. A very large incident could wipe out our biosphere, but a more medium sized event could eliminate modern communications systems, plunging us humans back into a pre-industrial kind of world, not at all conducive to supporting the lives of seven billion people, and counting.

On the Earth itself, one of the most frequently mentioned disaster scenarios is the eruption of a super volcano, like the one lying underneath Yellowstone Park. That particular volcano apparently explodes every 300 000 years or so, and is now long overdue. The enormous pollution caused by that giant explosion would presumably bring about another kind of biosphere disaster, possibly by setting off a new ice age, or some other, equally unpleasant, event.

There are also quite a few more such scenarios of natural origin, even before the conversation turns to disasters of human origin. What makes all such natural events so monstrous is not that the whole universe, or the local solar system, or just this particular planet, somehow feel like doing something bad to human beings. The natural world has no feelings, nor does it think. Anthropomorphic theories have never impressed the world’s scientists, who are at least theoretically immune to any kind of religious nonsense, or belief in magic.

It is only the existence of sentient beings, all the ones known to us currently living right here on Earth, that make any of these scenarios potentially monstrous. This is the case not only for most other animals, who are definitely sentient, but particularly for humans, who are presumably the only animals capable of envisioning the universe beyond any particular natural habitat. Only in a monstrous universe, or at least a section of it, could thinking animals like ourselves possibly be threatened by such incredibly disgusting disasters. The natural universe is monstrous precisely because sentient, thinking animals like us could all be wiped out at any time, with no regard whatsoever for our feelings or our thoughts. Not just one person at a time, which is everyone’s future, but all humans, or at least quite a few of them, at once.

Why have people gradually evolved to the point that they are capable of realizing the situation they are in, when that situation could be, and some day probably will be, so incredibly horrible? This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why so many different civilizations invented all those comforting, infantile, anthropomorphic, religious fantasies in the first place. Those human beings who think a bit more deeply, and rationally, than their religious cousins do, still have to put up with the fact that there is no way out of this fundamental, ontological dilemma. Rational humans are forced to realize that everyone lives in a truly monstrous universe, even though many people are not capable of dealing with such a thought.

But the horror of that grown-up acceptance of reality is certainly compounded by the equally mortifying realization that a large percentage of the human population does not utilize its theoretical capacity for free will. Inventing religious traditions is just one of the ways in which millions of people behave like the objects in space mentioned earlier, pushed into current trajectories by enormous forces, and unable to change direction without some other equally enormous counter-force, intervening from outside their own limited attention spans. Their incredibly strong devotion to tradition and to ultra-conservative ways of thinking, indicates that they are really much too terrified of reality to accept the capacity of exercising free will in any genuine sense.

Much of the time, this overpowering inertia is even disguised as its opposite. People will say that they are in fact exercising their free will when they refuse to conform to any evolutionary restrictions on their traditional activities. Millions of people all over the world continue to practice ancient religious habits that are in total contradiction with current living conditions, the sacred cows of the Hindu culture having become a metaphor for all  those completely outdated traditions. In search of some particular version of parochial identity, millions of religious or ideological fundamentalists in every country or denomination insist on trying to recreate ideas that reflect the social conditions prevailing dozens, hundreds or even thousands of years ago, thereby preventing them from adapting to the kind of globalized world that exists nowadays.

Some people try to argue that human beings are capable of controlling their passions sufficiently to avoid causing at least man-made disasters by pointing out that weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, did not lead to a catastrophic third world war during the Cold War (1945-1991). Leaders back then were able to use their free will to prevent their imperialist passions from overpowering their sanity and leading into what was then dubbed “spasm or insensate warfare”. But the fact that those people back then were capable of pulling back from the brink on several different occasions by no means guarantees that today’s leaders would be just as capable. The continued existence of huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons nowadays, not to mention (in spite of official denials) chemical and bacteriological stockpiles, and the proliferation of such weapons to a much larger group of political entities than before, make that kind of global disaster a very real possibility still. Even a limited exchange between relatively minor nuclear powers would probably not remain limited for very long.

But such completely inappropriate geopolitical passions, given the very existence of weapons of mass destruction, are not the only kind of antediluvian behavior that could wipe out many millions of human beings through more or less man-made causes. Another major contender is the world-wide epidemic, which at first glance seems to be a natural phenomenon, before numerous, contributing, human causes are factored in. In the past, some of the world’s worst epidemics apparently killed more people than such disasters normally do for other than natural reasons.

Even the toll from the Black Death of the fourteenth century seems to have been much greater than usual because many of the affected regions suffered major famines just prior to the arrival of the epidemic. Apparently, those famines were themselves caused by crop failures brought about by the cultivation of vast, marginal forested areas not suitable for agriculture. Most European historians also believe that it was Genoese plunderers arriving back home from what is now the Ukraine who brought the plague with them, after being bombarded by catapulted corpses from plague victims deliberately thrown at them by Muslim defenders of besieged cities. Other historians have also postulated a causal connection between the First World War and the unusually high number of deaths in the 1919 Spanish flu.

In a somewhat more obvious way, it seems that the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa was originally caused by a local tradition of touching the corpses of dead relatives before they were buried. The number of people who have so far died in that region from that particular epidemic is much smaller than from the ones previously mentioned, but the death toll from Ebola has also been exacerbated by several other regional prejudices. Not to mention popular skepticism about the real motives of national and international authorities in trying to control the spread of the disease. This resembles the commonly held but utterly ridiculous assumption a few years ago, even by several heads of state, that the AIDS epidemic was originally caused by the CIA to control the number of Black people in the world, or, alternatively, that it was somehow God’s punishment for homosexual relations.

In India, 700 million people, half the national population, apparently still defecate outdoors all the time, partly because that country is way behind many other countries in providing modern toilets but also because some of those people find that practice to be more natural and more satisfying even after they get their toilets. They either do not know, or they do not care, that outdoor defecation causes many of the most murderous diseases and epidemics that plague their land, as well as infecting their neighbors. But India is only the biggest example of that horrible practice, with dozens of other countries also participating, not only in outdoor defecation but also in hundreds of other completely inappropriate kinds of behavior.

Throughout history, the most important source of violent and premature deaths, not to mention extensive physical and psychological damage that did not immediately kill all its victims, has been sexual assault. Billions of women and girls, as well as millions of men and boys, have been variously mistreated, often raped and murdered, by egotistical monsters, mostly but not exclusively male ones, using sexual desire as camouflage for domination. Although this form of primitive behavior cannot properly be classified as an epidemic, it certainly is endemic in virtually every human society. Nowadays, the methods used by the perpetrators are the same as those that existed long ago: honor killings, forced marriage, excision, the death penalty for adultery, seclusion, premature sexualization, virginity testing, the list is endless.

In each and every case, the monsters and their lawyers have always argued their inalienable right to dominate what they call inferior beings in the most horrific ways possible, domination of those deemed weaker than them being interpreted as a natural outcome of evolution. Sexual assault is at the very origin of the survival of the fittest gambit that is also constantly being used to somehow justify racism and the domination of financially superior social classes. For these monsters, freedom is just a synonym for the slogan that might makes right. Even more now than in days gone by, racism and social inequality are also responsible for millions more premature deaths, all over the world.

Incredibly, the death toll from those particular sources is sometimes compounded by the fact that even oppressed people and classes often try to pass off mistreatment of dominated individuals within their own communities as part of their fight against race and class oppression from outside their borders. For example, some communities go so far as to refuse modern medical treatment for their afflicted children on the grounds that traditional remedies, though useless, are more politically correct. In many such cases, local authorities often uphold such decisions on the completely bogus grounds of reverse racism.

In the USA, as well as in many other countries, millions more people somehow manage to convince themselves that they are fighting for communal freedom when they continue to buy enormous gas guzzlers, in the form of SUVs or trucks, just as they used to do back in the twentieth century. They democratically refuse to listen to any of the constantly repeated ecological arguments about increasing consumption of fossil fuels leading inevitably to unprecedented levels of pollution and harmful climate change. They readily dismiss all scientific projections about how such changes in climate could  cause catastrophic numbers of deaths in the very near future, especially if those changes affect the food supply in many different regions. These people describe doing what they used to do before, even relatively recently, as an exercise in popular freedom, while simultaneously misinterpreting social pressure to control pollution as a form of totalitarianism.

Some of these same people occasionally try to rationalize their attitude by proclaiming that since rich and powerful people can always get away with anti-social behavior, then people in the middle-class should also be allowed to do whatever they want. Their egoism mirrors that of the leaders of the newly industrialized countries, like China, who rationalize their major contributions to world pollution by pointing out that the Western countries and Japan started along the same path a century or two before they were allowed to join in. Middle-class people trying to imitate the rich are also similar to oppressed people in many different parts of the world, like the poor white trash in the southern USA, who find it impossible to abandon racism because they think that mistreating Black people is the only way they can compensate for their own humiliation by rich Southerners, and rich Northerners as well.

Millions of middle-class polluters have also been brainwashed by billionaire propaganda into believing that excessive government is the primary cause for every major problem nowadays, including the series of major recessions that were in fact caused by the colossal greediness of huge private investors. Even after government presumably saved the world economy from impending disaster, with massive handouts to major investors through such programs as quantitative easing, the brainwashed ones refuse to acknowledge reality and cling to free enterprise fantasies instead. They refuse to recognize that private capitalism has always relied on government intervention in order to survive. The same laissez-faire fantasy also afflicts dozens of other countries and millions of other people, including such rather unlikely adherents as the newest prime minister of India.

However, he is only the most recent example of a leading politician combining fundamentalist religious views with libertarian economic policies. The USA practically invented that curious combination of seemingly contradictory belief systems, existing simultaneously within the same overheated brains. That chaotic combination of ingredients has also been copied by several other kinds of religious fundamentalists, particularly by the world’s leading Muslim extremists.

In the USA also, the same people from the religious right who believe in neoliberalism also proclaim that the only way to stop a bad guy carrying a gun is by using a good guy carrying a gun. Their incapacity to think in a dynamic way means that they refuse to realize that as soon as many of those good guys start carrying guns for any length of time, they often start to become bad guys themselves. In reality, as soon as any small minority of people begin to get used to having an enormous advantage over anyone else, such as by getting a license to kill, or by making a million times more money than most other people do, the corruption process starts to take over. It does not take very long for most people possessing some kind of major advantage over their fellow humans to let that power go to their heads and turn into the kind of person that many of them may have originally intended to oppose.

But this process of creeping corruption not only affects potentially murderous people with guns, such as police, criminals and military forces. Most of the world’s reformists, as well as most of the revolutionaries in history, who succeeded in gaining the power to put their political agendas into practice, have ended up betraying the cause later on. Those people gradually started doing exactly the opposite of what they were initially supposed to be doing, thereby contributing to the world’s problems rather than helping to solve them. The Communist Party of China is perhaps the most extreme example of such corruption, among hundreds of thousands of other such betrayals.

What fundamentally differentiates knee-jerk reactions, to any of these potentially catastrophic problems, from people who genuinely use their capacity for free will in a dynamic way, is the ability to understand empathy. Reductionists always interpret free will as the freedom to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences to other groups of people, and ultimately to themselves. They forget that they cannot really be free unless everyone on this planet is free, which is even more evident nowadays than it ever was in the past. True believers in any particular religion, or any particular ideology, cannot justify imposing their faith on everyone else as easily in today’s world as they used to do in the past when most such prejudices were confined to one particular region. In a super globalized world, with so many opposing belief systems vying for attention, trying to impose an extreme version of any one faith on everyone else is just another invitation to disaster.

Similarly, defecating outdoors, or touching corpses, are simply different ways of potentially visiting massive death tolls on one’s neighbors as well as on oneself. Continuing to promote the increased use of fossil fuels is another excellent example of a knee-jerk interpretation of free will, as is supporting libertarian fantasies about non-existent free enterprise, or by opposing gun control. In reality, free will means adapting to current political, economic, social and cultural conditions by abandoning ideological postures that may have seemed appropriate dozens, hundreds or even thousands of years ago but have no justification whatsoever in today’s world. To paraphrase Lord Acton, liberty means having the right to act responsibly for oneself, and for others, without having to kowtow to outdated traditions. Nor, in fact, to the reactionary manipulation of popular opinion by billionaire political action committees, or billionaire governments in ultra-conservative, theocratic nations.

Over the centuries, human beings have become intelligent enough to figure out, at least partially, how the monstrous, natural universe that we are all forced to live in really seems to work. But it remains to be seen if we can become intelligent enough to avoid any of the equally monstrous workings of our own, human nature.

History is Imperfect

I have either been making history (a few times, as shown in the autobiography that opens this blog), writing history (master’s and doctoral theses, published articles), teaching history (35 years, college and university levels) or learning about history for most of my life. The most important thing that the study of history has taught me from day one is how incredibly imperfect everything that happens truly is. There is just nothing in this world that ever works out the way that people think that it ought to have worked out.

To start with, history is imperfect because everyone who communicates historical information necessarily follows some particular interpretation of events, whether in oral form, written form or any other form (such as film or photos). No human being is capable of transmitting any kind of narrative whatsoever without introducing some kind of personal bias. And it really does not matter what the subject is: universal history, cultural history, national, regional or local history, the history of many people, a few people or just one person.

This applies even to those few professional historians who try very hard to avoid any sort of prejudice and who voluntarily submit their work to the judgment of their (extremely critical) peers. It applies even more ardently to those other egotistical professionals who are convinced that theirs is the only possible interpretation that makes any sense. Not to mention the millions of journalists and other amateur historians of all kinds whose output varies in its degree of honesty from one individual to another.

But the more important point is the fact that the imperfection of history completely demolishes and discredits every attempt that proselytizers are always making to convert everyone to the one true belief, whether religious or otherwise. These people, innocently unaware of their own hypocrisy, think that everyone who does not support their obviously correct point of view is being biased and ideological, but not them. This peculiar attitude shows up not only in the often incoherent ramblings of fundamentalist sects, whether religious or political, but also in the official discourse of powerful politicians and investors representing currently dominant ideologies.

Today’s leading ideology is based on faith in democracy, as if the popular majority was truly in power, instead of the infinitesimally small plutocracy that really runs the only theoretically democratic part of the world. These false democrats pretend to be ruling an international community of several dozen supposedly enlightened nation states, practicing free enterprise, free trade and all the other attributes of officially sanctioned neoliberalism and libertarianism. But they are just as supremely unaware of any possible contradiction between reality and their own peculiar ideological amalgam as any extremist professing the absolute and literal truth of whatever absurd, totalitarian concoctions that they may have themselves invented.

Since everyone necessarily possesses a particular ideology, whether marginal or hegemonic, no honest historian can ever completely support any particular side in any particular debate, over anything at all. Moreover, since history is the study of everything that took place in the past and the past is everything that is not happening right now, or in the unforeseeable future, then no honest person can ever accept at face value any particular point of view about any possible phenomenon that has ever existed. It makes no difference whatever whether or not the historical discourse being analyzed is very recent or really ancient; all human discourse is necessarily biased. The truly intelligent and aware people among us are those who admit that no matter when or where they occur, “the facts” are always ideological constructions and no perfect description of reality is ever possible.

The domain in which this shows up in the most obvious way is in the study of geopolitics. For example, probably the geopolitical topic most often referenced since the Second World War is the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine. It is also one of the  most emotional issues that has ever been debated. Every single entity involved in that conflict, such as the state of Israel itself, the different political factions within Israel, all the Palestinian factions and movements that have sprung up over the years, the other Arab countries, the other Muslim countries, the USA, the Christian Zionists, and every other country, political and religious organization in the world, has its own particular take on that conflict. Unfortunately, all of those “takes” are necessarily erroneous, although some of them may certainly be closer to reality than others. As a result, there is no way that any honest observer could thoroughly support one side or the other in that conflict, or any other conflict, without committing some kind of egregious error. Any either/or approach (“you are either for us or against us”) is necessarily ridiculous.

Most observers invariably get all caught up in the specific predicates of any such conflict. No one ever likes to admit that every possible point of view on anything is necessarily erroneous, in one way or another. There are dozens of reasons why some people support Israel and dozens of reasons why other people support Palestine, but none of them take into account the true interests of all the real people directly involved. In an ideal world, both peoples would be able to live together and prosper peacefully in a harmonious, honest, binational state, but no sane person could possibly believe that such a perfect solution could ever really come into being. None of the sides really wants that to happen, ever.

Human societies never work in any utopian way, and every side in every conflict is always corrupted by circumstances and never proceeds in an ideal fashion. During the Cold War, for example, the officially democratic countries fought against the totalitarian communist menace by allying themselves with over a hundred ultra right-wing military dictatorships spread out all over the world. Which meant that though the self-proclaimed democracies did often function in a somewhat more democratic way inside their own countries than the authoritarian countries did, they were not really promoting democracy as a principle. Since every single ideological conflict in the world is now and always has been corrupted by such dubious alliances, one wonders whether or not any of the leaders of human institutions ever truly believe in their own propaganda. Most of the time, ideological principles are used in the same cynical way as commercial advertising, to sell products and ideas, and after the sale is accomplished are not considered to have any intrinsic value whatsoever.

It makes no difference either whichever geopolitical conflict is being analyzed. In today’s Middle East (North Africa and Western Asia), besides Israel and Palestine, there are dozens of similar conflicts and all the other regions in the world have or have had hundreds of other examples to offer. Wherever and whenever political, economic, social or cultural groupings of people gather themselves into any sort of collective entity, each definable group will always try to degrade or to defeat the aspirations and the activities of any rival group. The separating process that succeeds in splitting human beings into rival groups leads each gang of insiders to invent its own particular systems of identification that deliberately make it impossible to find common ground with any of the outsider groups.

Throughout the centuries, in every different region, all sorts of human groupings have competed with each other for the right to exist and once they achieved that right they inevitably sought domination over all the others. Using only recent examples, whether this process takes place at a global level for world domination (the USA, Russia, China, etc.), regional domination (Germany in Europe, Brazil in Latin America, India in South Asia, etc.) or local domination (the UK versus Scotland, Canada versus Quebec, the Hutus versus the Tutsis in Rwanda or Burundi), makes no difference. Every geopolitical or cultural entity is only interested in its own advancement, whenever it becomes stronger, or its own survival, whenever it becomes weaker. In every case, might makes right: the winning side gets to write the official history of every conflict, unless or until the losing side somehow manages to make a comeback and become the new winning side.

Changing the parameters of the conflict makes no difference either. It does not matter in which particular period of history any conflict has taken place, nor in which domain of human intercourse. Tribal rivalries, religious divisions, conflict between the social classes, are all just as complicated and corrupted by opportunism as any of the geopolitical clashes. Today’s regional wars, like those in the past, are always characterized by all sorts of shifting alliances, making it impossible for anyone, including fundamentalist sects, to legitimately claim any kind of purity whatsoever. History makes every conflict dirty and disgusting, with the result that some of the world’s most fanatic purifiers, such as today’s Islamic State movement, often turn out to be nothing but counter-gangs, or agents provocateurs, under the occult control of external forces. For that reason, no one involved in any conflict can ever be truly certain about what he or she is truly fighting for, or against.

This is why it is so ridiculous for true believers to proclaim that their particular ideology is somehow more sacred than all the rival beliefs. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Confucianist or any other kind of religious fundamentalists always treat their own founding texts as literal truth of universal significance, descending onto the earth from some ethereal source. But historical analysis of all those texts always determines that none of them were ever revealed all at once by any (non-existent) higher entity and were in fact always the product of centuries of change and dispute between competing religious and geopolitical forces within their respective regions.

Every supposedly sacred text has in reality been altered hundreds of times to reflect the historical evolution of each host society. In exactly the same complicated way that any theoretically non religious, merely political ideologies, have also evolved over time. Anyone who has ever read anything about the evolution of conservative, liberal, nationalist or socialist ideas knows something about the extremely convoluted process by which ideological orthodoxies come into being. The development of the Marxist ideology is an excellent example of such a process, with its constant divisions between competing varieties of democratic and totalitarian socialists. In the end, the currently accepted versions of the Bible or the Koran are in fact no more sacred than the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin, or even the compiled quotations from Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book”.

But none of this leveling off of competing religions and ideologies into so many separate  forms of human discourse means that people are obliged to give in to moral indifference, or ambiguity. Just because no single interpretation of history has any kind of monopoly on the truth, just because every set of ideas is always corrupted and compromised by being mixed up with all the other sets of ideas, does not mean that people should just reject all possible interpretations of reality in a relativist way. Principles guiding thought and action should still be put forward and argued even though no one can honestly expect any of them to necessarily prevail in the real world.

As anyone reading my blog already knows, I also have my own set of such principles, that I share in some cases with millions of other people. For example, I favor complete social equality between men and women, rather than any forms of male chauvinism, whether blatantly proclaimed or hypocritically disguised. Unfortunately, though some parts of the world managed to go quite a distance toward feminist emancipation in relatively recent times, we now live in a period of almost universal regression. More and more men are moving back to an antediluvian attitude toward women, if they ever abandoned it in the first place.

This has become obvious not only in extreme examples like most parts of India but also among native peoples in Canada as well as within the National Football League in the USA. In most such instances, cultural relativism is being used to camouflage such atavism, including the many cases in which women themselves identify with their aggressors (the Stockholm syndrome), such as in deliberately wearing either far too much or far too little clothing in public. In every case where women are being mistreated, it does not do any good to denounce sexism only on the part of dominant countries, or cultural majorities, or social classes, or even, in the case of the Stockholm syndrome, only among men. Equal opportunity denunciation also requires that sexist attitudes be attacked wherever they appear, in every country, every cultural community and every social class. Religious fundamentalism, cultural isolationism and social degradation are not acceptable excuses for rotten behavior of the sexist variety, any more than psychotic levels of egoism in all the world’s toxic personalities are acceptable excuses either.

Another principle that I particularly favor is secularism, based on the complete separation of church and state. In today’s complicated societies, allowing any one religion to get closer to state power than any of the others is thoroughly disgusting. This principle is also quite useful for women’s liberation, since women are invariably the main targets of the kind of religious exaggeration now known as social conservatism. But freedom of religion is almost useless if it is not accompanied by freedom from religion, for everyone who so chooses. Unfortunately, once again it seemed for a time that many more enlightened countries were gradually replacing belief in mythical mystifications with a more scientific approach, but recently the trend has turned in the opposite direction. People are now combining religion with individualism by cherry-picking whatever mystical concepts they choose to adopt, making a total mockery of every established corpus of belief. Even many scientific communities, originally founded on a firm rejection of belief in any concept that cannot be verified by observation or experience, are now letting religious concepts in through the back door, thereby severely undermining their own credibility.

Another one of my chosen principles is the refusal to accept enormous differences in social equality. Once again, there was a tendency not so long ago among many enlightened countries to gradually reduce the gap between the social classes, whereas nowadays this has been replaced by the neoliberal tendency to greatly increase that gap. This is another extremely dangerous trend that has even been denounced by some establishment thinkers as threatening any future expansion of the world economy. To be sure, promoting social equality too much, to the extent, for example, of giving the same mark to every student during a semester is ridiculous, but the 30 million to one gap between daily incomes in today’s world borders on the insane. Nothing good can ever come from the adoption of the so-called Haitian model, in which billions of ultra-poor people are forced to sacrifice their lives to please a small handful of ultra-rich people. Extremely high levels of corruption are the inevitable result, as in India where it seems that an incredible 97% of the total population (1.4 billion people) is forced to scrounge for a living outside the formal economy!

A related principle that I have tackled in my master’s and doctoral theses, as well as in my published articles and my political activity, was distilled from a long-term study of the troubled relations between economic nationalism and economic liberalism. Those studies led me to firmly reject the ideological premise of libertarianism, to the effect that individual control of everything, most particularly the economy, is somehow necessarily superior to collective control. This premise is based on the egotistical mania of toxic personalities, who use an appeal for individual freedom as a cover for their own elitist domination of the supposedly inferior underlings who, according to them, were born only to serve their superior interests. They claim that the enormous corruption of all public bodies over the centuries has been caused by their collective nature, deliberately obscuring the fact that all public corruption has a private origin, whether in the United States of America, the People’s Republic of China or any other place. In reality, corruption is not at all confined to either individual or collective causes, and is much more universal than any of the world’s religions or political ideologies.

A further, very basic, principle is the need to uphold the integrity of the natural environment. People all over the world are now tolerating extremely high levels of pollution much too willingly, particularly in newly industrialized countries like China but also in richer countries like Canada, in which the conservative government has steadfastly refused for the past eight years to observe any environmental standards whatsoever. According to the Canadian government, the 47 people who died last year in the village of Lac Mégantic when a petroleum train blew up were killed only by the negligence of individual workers and not at all by the total absence of federal regulation of the devil-may-care railway and petroleum industries. The world’s largest polluters systematically refuse to accept any blame whatever for climate change or any of the other consequences of their consistently reactionary behavior. Like the tobacco companies, they throw all the blame back on individual choices and refuse to acknowledge any collective responsibility for anything at all.

As I pointed out earlier, however, upholding progressive principles like these ones does not imply leaving behind a sense of reality. Just because people like me feel that these ideas are far superior to their opposite numbers does not mean that we ought to think that they will eventually triumph. In the absence of any plausible reason to believe in the inevitability of progress, it is entirely possible, and is even becoming probable, that superior ideas could eventually die out altogether. Millions of people all over the world may agree that these principles are the best ones known to mankind, but hundreds of millions of other people do not agree at all. Religious fundamentalists, political extremists and ultra-individualists all have their own principles that are in total contradiction with the ones that people like me support. Where we see good, they see evil and where we see evil, they see good.

Deliberate ignorance on a mass scale, as in the Nigerian Islamist “Boko Haram” movement (“Western education is sinful”), combined with enormous sums of money, being channeled through such entities as the political action committees in the USA or the petroleum dollars of the Gulf states, may soon succeed in wiping out the world’s most progressive ideas completely. If current trends continue, the future of humanity could very well be an atavistic reversal of past development (the scientific revolution, the age of enlightenment) and a universal return to truly primitive ways of thinking. Unfortunately, all the social and material wealth of human societies is exclusively based on more modern modes of thought, with the result that a return to primitivism would undoubtedly eliminate most of the world’s population in the process.

History is imperfect. The final proof of that is the absence of any teleological imperative leading toward human progress. Everything is entirely dependent on ideological choices taken by imperfect people, individually and collectively, whose unfortunate decisions are  often determined by egotistical fantasies of omnipotence and immortality.

The ego epidemic

In the conclusion to my previous post (“Regression trumps Progress”), I referred to the epidemic of hubris that is currently dominating human behavior. Although hubris, the kind of overweening pride denounced by the ancient Greek philosophers, has been around for as long as human beings have existed, it certainly seems to have reached the status of a true epidemic nowadays. Following the collapse of the collectivist ideologies that were popular during the “thirty glorious years” of human development (1945-1975), the neoliberal counter-revolution has installed libertarianism as the governing ideology of our era. Unfortunately, the victory of ultra-individualism could not have happened at a worse time, with today’s enormous population of over seven billion people straining to find the resources necessary to deal with all the social, economic, geopolitical and environmental crises that are currently combining together to threaten our collective existence.

Humanity’s main problem in solving previous crises of this magnitude, such as the First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War, from the 1914-1945 period, has always been the huge gap between reality and perception that prevents most people from realizing what is really happening to them. In today’s world, millions of ordinary people have been brainwashed by the egotistical maniacs of vulture capitalism into believing that it is organized society, cooperation and solidarity that are threatening our survival and not the toxic personalities who are constantly promoting unbridled individualism.

Unfortunately for everyone, a large minority of the world’s population is made up of individuals infected by several different kinds of personality disorders, whose toxic behavior poisons the lives of all those around them. These disgusting people tend to concentrate in larger institutions like private corporations or governments, but they also thrive in smaller social institutions like the neighborhood or the family. As a result, millions of people who now fall prey to libertarian ideologies are doing so because they have themselves encountered increasing numbers of such egotistical maniacs in their own lives, and mistakenly conclude that total submission to such domineering individuals cannot be avoided.

Several years ago, I was so fascinated by the negative impact of the world’s leading bullies on their numerous victims that I decided to read a couple of dozen books specifically related to this social disease. The one that impressed me the most was a work published in 2000 by Marie-France Hirigoyen called Stalking the Soul: Emotional Abuse and the Erosion of Identity. The author pointed out that even though she was particularly concerned about abuse in the workplace, bullies are to be found everywhere. Wherever they congregate, however, even though some of them became aggressive monsters because they were themselves bullied at one point in their own lives, this does not at all justify their attempts to destroy those around them. Many other people who have been bullied just as much refused to become bullies themselves later on.

Hirigoyen is also impressive when attacking the myth according to which the victims are considered to be masochists, or accident prone people, who merely bring out the aggressive side that is supposed to exist in just about everyone. In fact, this is nothing but pro-bully propaganda, invented by toxic personalities and their sycophant courtesans in an attempt to let them get away with bullying their victims to their heart’s content. But the victims do not at all enjoy being victimized and are in fact immensely relieved whenever they succeed, after a tremendous amount of effort, in escaping from the clutches of their gleeful tormentors.

Unfortunately, toxic personalities seem to thoroughly enjoy causing as much harm to others as they possibly can. Some people try to soften the blow by claiming that bullies only act in this way to escape from a lack of success in their own social relations. In reality, however, bullies, who often have more money and more power than most other people, keep on torturing as many innocent victims as they capable of reaching because they can never get too much pleasure out of choosing to mistreat their designated victims.

This kind of antisocial behavior is behind practically all the problems that I have been identifying on my blog, as well as in my published writings since 2001. The long-term existence of this anti-socialism, and its recent acceleration in the neoliberal counter-revolution, is a sort of “answer to everything” as to why so many different aspects of human life have become even more negative than they were before. It is something like a “unified field theory” of recent social activity, outlining how aggression, both active and passive, has overcome cooperation as the current standard of human behavior.

This is the same ultra-individualist trend that was identified as long ago as 1979 by Christopher Lasch in his book (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations), published in the same year that neoliberalism’s Margaret Thatcher first came to power in the United Kingdom. Many more aspects of the same trend were also identified in Tom Wolfe’s well-researched novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Wolfe’s description of “the masters of the universe” (the bankers and the traders) who deliberately set out to ruin the world economy to prove their own superiority over others, turned out to be quite prescient, since he seems to have predicted the 2008 world financial crisis, whose effects are still very much present nowadays.

But it is not just the world’s most important bullies who belong to this current trend in human behavior. The same general approach to life also characterizes the activities of millions of quite ordinary individuals, whose massive egos also prevent them from identifying with any of their unfortunate victims. Today’s overwhelming rejection of civility, or any kind of public spiritedness, also stems from the same root of deliberate irresponsibility. All of today’s egotistical maniacs are governed by similar kinds of cognitive distortion, variations on the theme that although they used to be “mister nice guys” in the past (usually untrue), now it’s “pay-back time” and everyone one around them is just going to have to do what they say or else.

Unfortunately, we are now living in an age of total self-indulgence, in which liberation from the stifling social constraints of the 1950s (“father knows best”) gradually morphed into total dependence on subconscious spontaneity. In other words, a complete rejection of society altogether, in which each individual concentrates all his, or her, attention on immediate gratification of every possible inner desire. Publicist Timothy Leary’s admonition that everyone simultaneously “turn on, tune in and drop out” soon became abject consumerism, driven by the uncontrollable need of investors to convince every single individual in the world to mindlessly purchase “sex, drugs, rock and roll” and every other item that they could possibly cram into a deregulated and often illegal market economy.

As a result, people’s walls were constantly defaced by graffiti, autographs were replaced with selfies, face to face conversations were replaced with cellphone messages, bridges were loaded down with love lockets, and illegal drugs starting being decriminalized, along with many forms of prostitution, artificial insemination, womb renting, vote buying and so on. Even religion was individualized, with each believer choosing among a million different denominations and ceremonies the ones that were most suited to satisfying every particular need for spiritual stimulation.

Deadbeat dads also became part and parcel of the same individualist trend. Although this category of human behavior has always existed, the number of people afflicted with this particular antisocial disease also seems to have significantly increased recently. All over the world, more and more deadbeat dads simply run away from home at the birth of their first child, while the others satisfy their domineering desires by always letting the women in their lives do all the work that has anything to do with the home or the children.

Even in relatively advanced societies, that allow women to have decent jobs, it is still the missis who has to do all the housework, make the children’s lunches, take them to school and bring them home again, go to all the doctor’s and the dentist’s appointments, meet with their teachers in the evening, and so on and so forth. Even when madame makes more money than monsieur, even when monsieur is officially a house husband, the woman still has to do everything domestic, so as not to disturb her man-child’s oddly fragile identity.

A similar category of burgeoning antisocial behavior is the spoiled brat. Again, this juvenile version of social irresponsibility has also existed since the beginning of time, but until recently it was largely confined to children from rich or powerful families of aristocratic or upper bourgeois origin. Nowadays, however, the spoiled brat syndrome has also gone from several thousand cases per country to millions of examples everywhere. The spoiled brat is no longer just the screaming five-year old in the daycare center, nor just the teenage monster refusing to do any household chores, no matter how trivial.

This social type has now morphed into twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, living with their parents forever, flunking out of course after course, and refusing to do any paid work whatsoever. Some of them go so far as to blame their ignorant behavior on the post-recession economy, or even (in some countries) the capitalist system, conveniently forgetting that many of their peers manage to behave normally in spite of living under exactly the same conditions. The spoiled brats irresponsible behavior is really pro-capitalist, however, since it is the unearned income of the speculative investor that has always been recognized as the very essence of vulture capitalism.

In today’s world, those odd individuals who are still antediluvian enough to remain socially responsible can only survive if they try to avoid such egotistical monsters whenever possible. People with normal egos should do whatever they can to keep their different social groups (families, unions, associations, administrative boards, academic departments, and so on) from falling under the control of toxic personalities, as they so often do. Normal egos should also try very hard to avoid sharing property with ultra-egos, such as in condos, inheritances, or joint investments, because the toxic ones will always do their damnedest to ensure that nobody except them gets to enjoy any of the benefits of the theoretically shared enterprise.

Normal people should also avoid also getting into any arguments with excessive egos about any subject whatsoever, because such bullies always claim to know absolutely everything about anything, in every field of endeavor, no matter how distant it is from their own area of expertise. Like the eighteenth century composer Johann Schobert, every last one of these dominant bullies is quite capable of wiping himself out, along with his entire family, whenever he (or sometimes she) pretends to know as much about wild mushrooms as he does about music.

Avoiding toxic personalities on the personal level is definitely difficult, but not impossible. Avoiding their noxious influence on society as a whole, however, is another thing altogether. With every passing day, our world is becoming increasingly ungovernable, as the ego epidemic undermines our collective capacity to resist its evil onslaught. No one knows what the future holds, whether or not human society will succeed in escaping from the totalitarian control of conspicuous consumption. All we can do, as the saying goes, is to hope for the best while preparing for the worst.

Regression trumps Progress

The signs of regression are all around us nowadays. In North Africa and Western Asia, recent attempts at imitating liberal democracy, not to mention the nationalist and communist movements of previous decades, are all moribund. In their place is the current epidemic of hyper-reactionary Islamic fascism, rapidly overtaking all those countries not provident enough to have organized a return to a somewhat less disgusting military dictatorship. To be sure, this medieval Islamic atavism is not confined to the Middle East, nor even to the Muslim world in general, but has also followed migrant populations into the more accommodating sections of Europe, North America and several other regions. The ultra-Islamic contagion is helping to turn back the clock several centuries not only for moderate Muslims but also for all the other inhabitants of the infected regions. Promoted for decades by Western empires and their ultra-conservative Middle Eastern allies, as a useful weapon against nationalism and communism, primal Islam has now become those empires well-deserved nemesis.

Unfortunately, this particular disease is only the most virulent strain of world-wide religious regression, that has also broken out inside the Hindu-nationalist movement, in India and in the Hindu diaspora, to say nothing of militant Buddhist, Confucianist and Shintoist revivals affecting various parts of Eastern Asia and other emigrant communities elsewhere. Not to be outdone, the world’s most popular religion has also exported its own antediluvian versions of Christian fundamentalism and Bible-thumping literalism, infecting dozens of other countries. Based especially in the USA, this particular form of regression also spawned the increasingly popular Christian-Zionist movement, in alliance with the militant leaders of today’s Israel, in which liberal democracy and social-democracy have been recently replaced with a Talmudic fixation on the ultra-orthodox colonization movement.

As has become common with all these religious resurrections, microbial elements of neolithic belief in tribalism, sorcery and magic have also been mixed into the overall pandemic, not only in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also in the imperfectly modernized Western world. Nomadic mythologies, both Aryan and non-Aryan, are being combined once again with neofascist miscegenations of the Christian narrative, just like they were back in the 1920s and the 1930s. Native peoples in Canada, the USA, Australia and several other countries have also had to cope with a similar outbreak of borderline identity disorder, also focused on pre-urban traditionalism.

Another major source of modern regression is the enormous income gap between the social classes, that has been increasing at an alarming rate ever since the libertarian infection also broke out some thirty-five years ago. As a result, the top one percent of one percent, about one ten-thousandth of the world’s total population, has been taking an exponentially larger share of world income than it held during the somewhat healthier thirty-four years that followed the Second World War.

In spite of relatively modest gains in income that accompanied the recent industrialization of several previously peasant economies, the overall social bill of health  of today’s world has been severely infected by an unprecedented dichotomy between billions of underpaid industrial and service workers (more numerous than they ever were before) and a handful of ultra-rich financiers. The middle class that is supposed to preserve social well-being by separating the two extremes is gradually being killed off altogether, as every country in the world competes against every other country to reduce taxes further than ever before on parasitical nodules of potential investors. But only a very few of those hyper-concentrated pools of capital are still interested in any kind of job-creating productive investment, in which the rate of return is so very much smaller than in the pestiferous, exclusively financial transactions that dominate the current world economy.

The world’s richest people, not only those hailing from private-sector financial conglomerates but also those other billionaires who have taken over direct control of nationalized economies, are also trying to eliminate whatever remains of the much maligned twentieth-century welfare state. All over the world, every social program originally designed to help underprivileged people stay afloat at least minimally is being re-engineered so as to transfer less and less real income to such unworthy “useless eaters”. Today’s libertarian survivalists are trying once again to spin survival of the fittest into the epitome of a primitively democratic way of life, each individual guaranteeing each other individual’s personal freedom to compete in a fight to the finish for each and every place in the sun.

Still another affection undermining physical and mental health in today’s world is the incredibly short-sighted but quite popular tendency among decision makers to completely ignore ecological disorders. In spite of overwhelming evidence and daily reminders in all the media, both private and public investors all over the world are constantly pressing ahead with full-scale development of every kind of material pollution. They do this all the time in the most deliberately profitable ways possible, constantly inventing new excuses for doing nothing real to prevent environmental degradation. On the contrary, they consciously pretend that their ways of doing things are in fact ecologically preferable to any of the alternative methods available.

Canada’s Conservative government, controlled by people from the extractive industries, has become a world leader in pollution denial since it came to power back in 2006. They pay the inevitable lip-service to environmental protection, while carefully avoiding any decision that might in fact negatively affect investors sacrosanct bottom lines. Even the explosion of non-regulated petroleum tank cars, that killed dozens of people in Quebec last year, has not done anything to temper their enthusiasm for immediate profit. They have deliberately refused to take any blame whatsoever for what happened, just like they did during the poisoned food scandal in Ontario in 2008. All libertarians all over the world, in both the private and the public sectors, always blame every “isolated incident” of criminal negligence on the workers who carried out their orders and never on the bosses who made those decisions.

Every one of those seemingly separate outbreaks of reactionary behavior is in fact interacting with each other kind of atavism to create a world-wide pandemic of regression. Religious fanaticism, tribalism, social Darwinism and ecological blindness are like four separate strains of infectious disease combining together to bring down progress, rather like the famines in the early part of the fourteenth century that made it possible for the Eurasian plagues to kill millions more people than such epidemics managed to do prior to that time. As a result, all the material and intellectual progress of the succeeding six centuries risks being turned into its exact opposite in the foreseeable future.

During the European renaissance of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a small group of intellectuals started believing in progress, the idea that human beings and their societies were not trapped in any kind of apocalyptic or cyclical prison, but could in fact gradually improve themselves, both individually and collectively. This belief in human progress, originally rooted in the religious concept of the divine spark, led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which Christian anthropomorphism was abandoned by leading thinkers in favor of natural explanations of the universe. Human intellectual development as a concept took on a decidedly secular connotation during the eighteenth century Enlightenment, when many thinkers came up with considerably more radical interpretations of what progress should entail. French philosopher Denis Diderot, for example, famously avowed that the world could only progress once the world’s last king was strangled in the entrails of the world’s last priest.

The industrial revolution in the West, between 1780 and 1880, considerably strengthened this idea of progress by giving it a much more solid grounding in productive economic growth, greatly increasing the potentiality for a much richer kind of commonwealth. The scientific progress preceding and accompanying that economic and social revolution then continued to expand and deepen its effect during what have sometimes been called the second (1880-1930) and third (1940-1980) industrial revolutions, which were in reality conceptual and technological extensions of the first one.

The idea of progress both caused, and benefited greatly from, all the amazing discoveries and innovations that constituted the truly positive aspects of rapid economic growth. Political and social reformists and revolutionaries all over the world then started to tackle the more negative aspects of industrial development by trying to extend the benefits of massively increased material wealth to all the different human populations that were initially ignored or horribly exploited by the pioneering entrepreneurs who managed to turn scientific and technological progress to their own exclusive advantage.

Although the train of human thought has never followed a strictly linear path, it nevertheless soon became obvious to people possessing a progressive frame of mind that leaving behind a belief in magic or in equally mythical religious constructions eventually led to several other logical conclusions. The first such conclusion had to do with the extension of the word “revolution” from its initial appearance in the science of astronomy to its eventual use as a political construct. To put it as simply as possible, using the most well-known example, the revolution of the planets around the sun was found to follow an elliptic curve rather than a pure circle, an idea (among many others) that was rejected by the scholastic leaders of the Catholic Church. For them, individual human behavior on earth could certainly be imperfect but not the actions of their universal God, who would necessarily have made heavenly objects follow a perfect pattern (a circle).

This led the followers of science and secular reality to the conclusion that since inanimate, celestial bodies could behave in such an “imperfect” way, there was no reason at all to continue believing in any of the human social constructs that had been invented over the centuries to justify enormous differences in power and income. In the absence of extra-terrestrial control, if the physical universe was not at all perfect, eternal or unchanging, then human societies did not have to follow any preconceived notions like the totalitarian domination of universal religions, the divine right of kings, or any other such malarkey. Subsequent observers have extended the same train of thought into the rejection of dozens of more recent ideological constructs, such as the free market.

As a result, the concept of progress soon came to include the extension of civil rights to everyone, not just the white male owners of property who originally invented free assembly, freedom of speech and the right to vote as weapons in their fight against the absolute monarchy. This meant liberating women, the other half of humanity, from 6000 years of religious and civic oppression within all the world’s urban-based empires. It also meant freeing hundreds of oppressed peoples in the colonies and economic satrapies of those empires, not to mention minority populations living inside the imperialist “mother countries”.

Recently, however, progress as a concept has been deliberately maligned and manipulated by sycophantic reductionists to mean the opposite of what it was originally supposed to mean. Radical ecologists, for example, have been denouncing “progress” as a synonym for environmental destruction. Multiculturalists have been just as busy rewriting the definition of the right to practice some particular religion as an excuse for doing away with such inconvenient, competing rights as women’s liberation, or taking away children’s rights to a decent education by allowing religious maniacs to confine education to purely religious fantasies.

But ecology is in reality an integral part of progress, since it means making sure that economic expansion really does provide increased prosperity for everyone. Unsustainable development can never guarantee progress for the rather obvious reason that short-sighted, linear expansion will simply collapse as soon as massive dollops of pollution eliminate the human populations totally dependent on breathing, eating and drinking non-poisonous elements in order to survive. Anyone who accuses progress of being anti-environment has obviously not thought much about what the word “progress” is supposed to mean. Ecological fascists should go back and read their dictionaries one more time.

Human rights are also an integral part of progress, as long as exclusively religious rights are not allowed to drown out all the other rights. The right to practice a religion, after all, is a personal choice, not a social one. Modern societies mixing together hundreds of different peoples, believing in thousands of different combinations and permutations of magic and sorcery, competing religious constructs, and primitive forms of ethnic identity, all jumbled up together, cannot possibly be expected to survive if every little group of believers is allowed to reduce everyone else’s rights to fit their own mythical projections. In a world of over seven billion globalized people, universal rights have to take precedence over letting each individual ego make up its own little package of personal behavioral quirks that everyone else has to accommodate because they are supposed to be so much more “authentic” than any other people’s beliefs.

There is also nothing racist about rejecting any of these reconstructed religious fantasies. In the first place, none of these modern egotistical projections of ancient religious practices are historically or theologically accurate reconstitutions: they all combine certain poorly understood ideas that their founders initially had, while rejecting others just as important, and adding all sorts of newer ideas in which none of the founders ever believed. In the second place, these reconstructions are not confined to any particular religious or cultural tradition.

Most importantly of all, it is completely ridiculous for politically correct sycophants to try to compel everyone to accommodate each and every one of these modern religious reconfigurations out of a misconceived fear of committing racism. Racism, after all, does not just mean negative discrimination against some particular cultural entity, it also includes positive discrimination for any particular group. Any form of discrimination on racial, cultural or ethnic grounds is racism; ordinary racism also includes reverse racism.

Evil things that people from dominated, minority groups do are just as evil as equivalent things that people from dominant, majority groups do. Evil people are not better if they come from Palestine rather than from Israel, or from China rather than from the USA, or from native people rather from non-native people. Equal doses of evil are equal, no matter from which human population they stem.

And finally, ego projection, otherwise known as hubris or overweening pride, is the root element of each one of those different forms of reactionary regression. People who believe in magic or similar religious myths are, after all, only projecting their own egotistical refusal to acknowledge that human beings are just another part of the natural universe. Humans in fact do not have any special right to be protected from the consequences of their own childish behavior by any genie, metaphysical father figure or harmonic principle possessing absolute control over everything that exists. Without an adult sense of responsibility for their actions, humans cannot expect “something else” to step in to save them from their own misdeeds. Unfortunately for more modern minds, the indifference of the rest of the universe to human problems and inadequacies is not something that over-inflated religious egos have the courage to accept.

Hubris is also the psychological principle underlying the individualist or antisocial form of egotistical behavior. Those who favor massive increases in the income gap between the social classes are into that sort of thing not so much for material benefit as such, since there are only so many particular items that any one individual can possibly use in a single lifetime. What they really seek is the kind of power over others that accumulating massive gobs of capital and outdoing everyone else on the planet appears to give them over every one of the supposedly inferior peons who surround them.

This is the same master and servant feeling of pure domination that also motivated, and still motivates, all the world’s totalitarian dictators, regardless of the imperialist, fascist, communist, populist or neoconservative ideology that they are nominally supposed to be representing. It is also not at all anomalous to note that many of the world’s most reactionary religious movements have made a very convenient pact with the devil by also upholding material accumulation, according to their favorite dictum, “God helps those who help themselves”.

This selfsame ego projection also explains deliberately ignorant attitudes toward environmental destruction. People who are constantly denying that any real ecological problems currently exist, or who profess to being able to find some kind of readily available technological fix for pollution and climate change, are simply letting their colossal egos get in the way of any real solution. While it is true that human beings are theoretically capable of solving those problems by simply discovering new kinds of natural resources that do not possess the same negative physical characteristics as those now being used, as in the controlled development of nuclear fusion, this can only happen if human societies possess the time, the audacity and the organizational will-power to effect such massive changes.

Unfortunately, there is nothing at all in the way human societies are currently being run that would suggest to any intelligent observer that progress is going to trump regression any time soon. Quite the contrary. Religious fanaticism, libertarianism and ecological blindness, all of them upheld by the kind of overweening pride that currently seems to have a death grip on the human race, make any kind of genuine progress highly improbable. It remains to be seen how this will all turn out, but at the moment the epidemic of unredeemable hubris looks unstoppable.

Corrupt Politicians and their Austerity Budgets

The recently elected Liberal government in Quebec came out with a new austerity budget that closely resembles many other such budgets adopted over the past several years in dozens of other places. This time around, it seems that the provincial government is serious about drastically reducing spending across the board, following the usual rhetoric about the need to eliminate annual deficits right away and therefore make it possible for Quebec to eventually pay off its accumulated debt. To reinforce their message, they have promised to pass new legislation this autumn so that they can roll back salaries and freeze hiring for all civil servants, not just for ordinary ministerial employees but also for everyone working indirectly for the government in the health and education para-public sectors, over half a million people all told.

These drastic, unprecedented cuts, as announced, go much further than any of the previous austerity budgets adopted in the past, since Quebec first hopped on the neoliberal bandwagon during the induced recession of the early 1980s. This latest version of fiscal rigor is being vigorously supported by the usual crowd of libertarian economists and media editorialists, all of whom emphasize how dangerous it is to continue borrowing money to  help pay for such “over-generous” social programs as public transit and daycare.

Spending middle-class taxpayers money on programs popular among middle-class taxpayers would seem like the right thing to do, given the fact that they pay a much larger percentage of tax than the rich do. But the antisocial fanatics always blame popular programs for causing every budget deficit and every debt burden ever created. They always treat every financial crisis caused in reality by the world’s richest investors as a given, as if it was completely impossible to control any of the incredible excesses of the world’s leading egomaniacs. Only social programs benefiting lesser folk, the non VIPs who do not make enough money to deserve deferential treatment, are singled out as the unique cause of every budget crisis the world has ever known.

It is as if the central banks monetarist interventions of the 1980s never existed, as if the world’s leading vulture capitalists never embarked on their speculative binge of strictly financial investment, as if the IT millennial crisis never took place, as if the 2007-2009 world financial collapse of the “too big to fail” never brought us all to the brink of disaster, as if none of the incredibly stupid decisions still being taken even more recently by the world’s most important financiers, had any impact whatsoever on government debt. According to all the mainstream economists and all the establishment editorialists, every single budget problem that ever surfaced anywhere is always and forever the fault of excessively demanding ordinary people, who insist on maintaining public health care and public education in spite of the “obvious need” that the experts feel for getting rid of that populist rubbish once and for all.

The Quebec government has already implemented the first phase of its legislative onslaught, by requiring current pensioners at the municipal level to contribute once again to previously negotiated pension funds, notably through de-indexing. Municipal unions are being targeted as the major obstacle toward eliminating the huge pension deficit, often on the grounds that younger workers are being made to pay for more numerous older workers. The other major argument for canceling collective agreements is that otherwise millions of people in the private sector who have no company pensions at all, or very inferior ones, would have to pay vastly increased municipal property taxes.     

Only a few analysts choose to remember, however, that it was the provincial governments, all across Canada, that decided twenty years ago to collectively transfer a large part of their responsibilities onto municipalities, suggesting that they pay for those greatly increased localized services by “temporarily” ignoring their pension liabilities. However, the provincial governments were themselves merely transferring part of the effect of the federal government’s own previous decision to download many of its responsibilities onto the provinces. And the federal government made that move during the 1990s because of the enormously increased federal debt caused by the monetarism of the 1980s, when the world’s central banks decided to solve the inflationary crisis of the 1970s by quadrupling interest rates. The Canadian government’s accumulated debt, from Confederation in 1867 right through to 1979, about 79 billion $ all told, was then astronomically increased in only fifteen years to over 500 billion $.

The 1970s inflation itself was caused by several different factors, such as the Vietnam War against communism and OPEC’s decision to greatly increase prices of petroleum exports. But a more important contribution to that crisis was the problem caused by the continued use of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, even after the USA had fallen way behind its post-war domination of world industrial production. An equally important cause of double-digit inflation during the 1970s was the refusal of many leading financiers, especially in the US, to sufficiently depreciate the monetary value of their by then technologically obsolete industrial investments.

In Canada, today’s federal debt is still almost as large as it was in the 1990s, in spite of all the transfers of responsibility to inferior levels of government, and all the accumulated debt-service charges paid since 1979. This is because of all the other financial boondoggles imposed by the world’s leading financiers since that time, especially the 2007-2009 financial meltdown. In fact, the Quebec government’s escalating assault on its own public sector is just a relatively small part of the entire world-wide transfer of responsibility for debt from the “too big to fail” private financiers who initially caused all those problems, to the ordinary people who always end up paying for financial hyper-profits, one way or the other.

Unfortunately, not much can probably be done to prevent libertarian governments from using ordinary taxpayers money to pay for rich people’s excesses. In the USA, the relatively small Tea Party rump seems to be controlling US politics altogether, to the astonished delight of its billionaire sponsors. Canada’s Conservative government is also hanging in there for privately sponsored neoliberalism in spite of its hundreds of political gaffes and its ongoing control of only about one-third of the total electorate.

The province of Quebec is another interesting case because voters here recently returned to power the anti-separatist Liberal Party. Curiously enough, the Liberals were  handily re-elected in spite of being singled out by the ongoing Charbonneau Commission into provincial and municipal corruption, as the major source of all that collusion. Quebec’s new premier, Philippe Couillard, is particularly poorly placed to lead a vigorous assault on public expenditure because of his past role as a non-performing business partner of Canada’s king of corruption himself, Dr. Arthur Porter. Porter at least symbolically brings the whole game together for not only having corrupted the McGill University Health Center and the Quebec government, but also for having “duped” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper into briefly appointing him to oversee the Canadian network of spy agencies.

Even though nothing has as yet been officially proved about the criminal guilt of any big-time political leader, the very idea that Couillard should become the guy running the most recent attack on the public sector is almost comically disturbing. The Quebec Liberals have zero credibility for this job since they were the ones most involved in encouraging construction companies to artificially inflate spending on public infrastructure in dozens of underhand ways. The private-sector friends of the provincial Liberal Party may not have had as much negative impact on Quebec government debt as did the much larger boondoggles of the world’s leading financiers over the past forty years. But it boggles the imagination to think that anyone could possibly rely on them to do anything to stop that kind of corruption. Like their Tea-Party cousins, the only thing that they are any good at is convincing middle-class people to pay for the bail-outs of the billionaire class.