……how the legal system evolved to protect the property of the robber barons.
The Pocket History of England – Introduction
.
The Pocket History of England – Introduction:
Political Will or The Capitalisation of Knowledge
Introduction to 6 following Parts.
Political will is the determination to apply attitude through the deduction of purpose and the employment of strategy.
Flagging political will is the tendency to use family and/or domesticity as an acceptable excuse for compromising your ideals. It is also the tendency to compound that compromise by using the search for ‘qualifications’ as a legitimate demand on your time. Particularly when you do so in the face of the knowledge that your time is actually required elsewhere in the pursuit of your supposed ideals.
Carreerism is the middle-class privilege to indulge in processes of supposed self-betterment. It is the ‘non-materialist’ escape hatch for petty ideological materialists. It is the delusory ladder up which otherwise well-meaning should-know-betters are diverted by already cynicised should-know-betters who have already sold themselves to the capitalisation of human knowledge.
Human knowledge has become a commodity just like oil, coffee, and uranium. Supposed centres of knowledge have simply become stock exchanges specialising in the trading of this commodity. There are even established currencies. Certificates, degrees, fellowships, research grants are all trading units of the commodity. And all the jobbers and brokers furiously scuttling about trying to control the market have as their reward credibility and its material trappings. They get offices and telephones; secretaries and filing clerks; subsidised travel and club memberships; research assistants and sycophants; not to mention secure and adoring home lives. These are the rewards of cornering an aspect of the market.
Now you’d expect the sons and daughters of the ruling classes and the ignorant or indifferent members of the middle classes fully to endorse this racket; fully to savour its material rewards. But what of those of you who don’t claim to be either of these? Those of you who are supposedly enlightened and caring seekers after knowledge for knowledge’s own sake? Why are you playing this stupid game? What’s your real excuse?
Yes, of course, there’s the family and mortgage and mouths-to-feed angle; there’s the incremental scale. And, of course, there’s the ‘change-from-within once the credibility is achieved’ angle. But really, who are you trying to kid? That’s like saying boycotting South Africa was damaging the Black community. It’s an excuse.
What we have all been slow to realise is the way we have been materialising human knowledge; the way we have staked it out and tried to attribute to its sections a capital value. It is not the vast communal resource bank we pretend it is. It has just become another aspect of the wheeling and dealing for power; the male dominated preserve of extending the ego.
Some of us have become so prostituted as to sell our intellects to the pursuit of particular forms of knowledge because that’s where the heavier capital can be found.
We seem to have lost sight of the fundamental fact that processes extend themselves through the processors. We play these prostitution games thinking we’re in control and that our personal ideals can remain intact until such time as we’ve ‘reached’ some illusory stage in our lives when we can take our ‘hard won’ credibility out of the game, again act ‘independently’, and then, finally, begin to live up to our ideals.
But it can’t be done. We’re not that profound. We place ourselves in situations of prostitution – and become prostitutes.
.
© 2004 Deacon Martin
.
.
The Pocket History of England – Part 1
.
Part 1 of 6
The Pocket History of England
Part 1
The Queen is Queen by a complicated and convoluted consensus. People kneel because, historically, it was the only way the Robber Barons could agree to stop trying to kill each other and each other’s Peasants.
Initially, amassing bands of Peasants and Lackeys and flinging them at the bands of Peasants and Lackeys amassed by the other Robber Barons in defence of arbitrary claims to pieces of ground was the most important pastime of the Robber Barons. They used to have a good time because it kept them fit and the Peasants could always be relied upon to co-operate. If ever this became too much of a strain on a Robber Baron’s Peasant resources, he had to forego the pleasures of this, the most noble, pastime and settle for amassing bands of dogs and horses and chosen Lackeys and flinging them at foxes and stags. This would give the Peasants a chance to rebuild the economy: get the crops going, rebuild the wagons, re-fire the forges, rebuild the roads and fortifications, and most important, reproduce.
The Barons had no difficulty controlling the Peasants. They simply entrusted chosen Lackeys with their flogging. It is the peculiar nature of a Lackey’s character that allows this to take place. Lackeys are people with little or no internal self-esteem who are constantly on the look out for someone in “authority” who can provide them with some (self-esteem). By careful manipulation of this supply of synthetic self-esteem the Barons were able, and still are, to call upon the Lackeys to do the most outrageous things, including flogging Peasants into producing the wherewithal for their own destruction.
But things sometimes got out of hand such that the battles became larger and more drawn out and began to render stabilisation-of-the-economy periods impossible even for the most diligently flogged Peasants – to the extent that even the Barons’ own standard of living began to be affected. So, in order to preserve and maintain this fundamental aspect of the economy (the Barons’ standard of living), they the Barons, found themselves needing to agree to revere a third party – a separate office.
Into this office, with the suspicious support of the other Barons, was placed a Baron whom the other Barons agreed to call King.
This King walked on thin ice. He could only “lead” where none of the people who’d agreed to let him lead had any vested interest. This usually meant Foreign Wars. But, this position of compromise was delicately balanced. Initially meant as a means of ensuring that no particular Baron should suddenly acquire undue power, start grabbing land again, and thereby endanger the stability that everyone with any power comes to crave, the decision gradually took on a meaning of its own. The King gradually became the office through which all righteous action in the name of stability came. And gradually it became impossible to determine whether the righteous action emanated from one or more of the supporting Barons or from the King himself. Thus the King accumulated more power until his “divine right” became inargueable, incontestable, because no one could afford, or was willing, to stick his neck out.
Things kept on in this way for some time. But eventually, as must happen, all good things must come, if not to an end, to at least an apparent transformation. What happened was that the Peasants began to get Religion. Christist Religion. The bit of the story about Christists which warmed the hearts of the Barons was the bit which taught people to know and appreciate their place. This was good for stability which, as it happened, was good for Barons.
But some of the Peasants noticed that, besides teaching appreciation of place, Christ also taught equality of humans. Then some Peasants also noticed that the Barons and their Lackeys were generally quite pleased with this Religion unless the notion of equality came up. Then they became distinctly displeased and killed, maimed, and deported (depending on the degree of their displeasure) any Peasants known or even thought to be giving this radical and unruly notion any undue consideration.
After a period of time in which many Peasants suffered and died in great loneliness the rudiments of Peasant mobilisation, fuelled by this unruly concept of equality, began to emerge and began to demonstrate some of the awesome power that Peasants, working together, actually have.
The concept of “King” began to crumble and many of the Barons were at first very shaken. Many of them stuck to the “divine right” principle, because it was the only one they knew or could think of, and got killed. Many of them were more cynical and detached and waited out the storms.
When “Parliament” began to emerge, the surviving Barons pressed for their “rights” as only Robber Barons can. So effective were these surviving Robber Barons in pressing for their “rights” that they were able to justify, through Enclosure Acts and the like, driving the now less governable and therefore less profitable Peasants off the land altogether and bring on to the land vast quantities of sheep to replace them. This made life much easier and more profitable for the Barons. and much more difficult, as usual, for the Peasants. They were crowded into the cities where the new “industry” was beginning to gain momentum. The Peasants, now completely cut off from the land, unable even to grow their own food (and maimed and killed when they tried to do it on the few tiny parcels of “common land”.) were forced to compete with each other in search of work at the new monolithic manufacturing establishments, the Factories.
Because the nature of their predicament changed so drastically in the “Industrial Revolution”, what headway the Peasants had only just began to make in their rural settings was lost. The nature of their exploitation by the Robber Barons changed. Instead of having the Peasants flogged by their Lackeys, the Barons de-humanised them by depriving them of the land and making them the servants of Machinery. The Lackeys were put in charge of the Machinery and instead of flogging the Peasants, they manipulated them by threatening to cut them off, individually , from their new, enforced, and only means of sustenance – the Machinery.
The fact that the Machinery belonged to the Robber Barons was a direct consequence of the Barons having, for generations, killed and flogged people who questioned their ownership of the land and its produce. The currency they were able to concentrate enabled them to “purchase” the Machinery (“purchase” here meaning paying Peasants subsistence wages or less with currency derived from generations of Peasants’ labour on the land to build the machinery).
This now subtley altered predicament caused the Peasants much anger, suffering, frustration and disease. Being forced to compete (there were so many of them driven from the land) for subsistence wages meant, inevitably, taking less than subsistence for impossibly long working days. It meant living in overcrowded and neglected dwellings (also, surprisingly, belonging to the Robber Barons and their Lackeys) and sending their children out to find work.
It took many years for a new Mobilisation to develop, but Peasant history is full of brave men and women who, right from the start, set to work trying to correct the balance and who were sacked or maimed or killed. Because of the determination and courage of some of these people the concept of Combination came into being and became the Peasants answer to the Machinery. Combinations were the forerunners of Trade Unions. They were organisations of people who would agree not to service the Machinery for less than a subsistence wage. These organisations were declared illegal by Parliaments full of Robber Barons and Lackeys and many Peasants were fined and beaten and imprisoned for even discussing such organisations.
Such were the appalling living and working conditions that the Peasants had no choice but to persist with their Combinations. This sometimes meant taking action against fellow Peasants who, without considering what they were doing to Peasants in general, would continue to compete for work and take less than subsistence wages. These were bad and unhappy moments.
But the Mobilisation continued to gain momentum and finally emerged with some “rights” to organise and even some Parliamentary representation.
But the going was slow, and tortuous.
/ to be continued.
.
.
The Pocket History of England – Part 2
.
Part 2 of 6
The Pocket History of England Part 2
Over the generations, the Peasant Mobilisation continued. Their Combinations, now becoming known as Trade Unions, began to be accepted by the Robber Barons, their Lackeys, and the Parliaments they tended to dominate.
There are any number of complicated explanations as to why these Unions eventually became acceptable. Some would have it that the Peasants had become an irresistible force which would have toppled the new industrial system had not concessions been made. Some would have it that the Barons and Lackeys themselves relented and allowed these organisations to proliferate because they could see, in them, a new potential for far more effective manipulation of the Peasants. Some would have it that the emergence in force of a new character, the Merchant, brought on, in their own interests, social changes which made the acceptance of Trade Unions seem virtually insignificant.
It seems likely that all these explanations, and others, were at least partially correct and contributed in their own way to the legitimisation of Peasant organisation. But at this point it is important to recognise the way in which the emerging Merchants began to carry their own struggle.
Merchants were people who, in the midst of the new industrialisation, the new urban stress, perceived ways of escaping the direct rule of the Robber Barons on one hand, and the inexorable slide into Peasant poverty and exploitation on the other.
What they perceived was that, in separating the Peasants from the land the Robber Barons had effectively separated the people who were doing all the work from the further responsibility of distributing the produce of the work.
This is an important point and needs clarification.
When the Robber Barons had their Peasants on the land, the Peasants tilled the soil, herded the livestock, developed the crafts, and generally got on with things. All the Barons had to do, aside from occasionally flogging or killing Peasants, was to sit back and let their “share” of the produce flow into their castles. The Peasants not only produced everything, they even brought it all to the very tables of the Barons. Not only that, the Peasants also fed and maintained themselves out of their own meagre portions of what they produced.
So, when the Barons kicked the Peasants off the land and into the factories, certain administrative problems arose. The Peasants could no longer feed and maintain themselves out of their own produce; nor could they bring produce to the tables of the Barons. This was because they no longer lived right there on the land supposedly belonging to the Barons. They couldn’t grow potatoes and carrots and bring the best part of it to the Barons by way of “rent” because they weren’t there any more. Instead, they were crowded into the filthy cities and showing up at the Factories where they would do their work at assembly lines and then go away again. Their lives weren’t inextricably wrapped up in their work anymore the way it used to be when they were on the land. They were separated from the produce. The manufactured goods would come out at the end of the assembly line, often never even seen by the Peasants doing the work.
The Barons and their Lackeys began to realise that the good old days of letting the Peasants do everything had gone. The Peasants weren’t distributing the goods because they were no longer so completely immersed in the whole process of producing. They were just showing up for their daily shifts, being paid their pittances, and going away again. They weren’t even able to bring any of the produce home because, a) you can’t eat steel or wool and food was all they could afford, and b) they were only handling the Machinery; they rarely even touched the finished product.
So, because the Peasants were no longer able to feed and maintain themselves in the course of their regular work, and were also unable to bring produce to the tables of the Barons, a whole new system of distribution had to be set up.
This is where the Merchants came in. The Merchants were, for the most part, Lackeys with delusions of independence and non-synthetic self esteem, but were also, later on, Peasants with specialised crafts and skills and delusions of betterment. What they saw was a whole area of administration over which the Barons could not possibly exercise complete control. So what they did was offer to undertake this task of distribution but on the basis of taking a share of the produce for themselves. Thus was born the middle-man. And thus was born the large scale introduction of “credit” and “common currency”.
The Merchants soon discovered that the “value” of any given thing is not necessarily related to what it might have cost to produce. In a “Free Market Economy”, the “value” of a thing is whatever you can squeeze people, especially Peasants, into paying. On this basis, many of the Merchants became extremely wealthy and, thereby, extremely powerful. The most ruthless of them began, in some ways, even to rival the power of the Robber Barons themselves.
While all this was taking place, the bulk of the Peasants were still plodding on with their Trade Unions. Through a series of long, drawn out meetings and campaigns, failures and successes, they began finally to emerge with the rudiments of a national organisation. This took the form of a Trade Union Congress and, later, a Labour Representative Committee which developed, gradually, into a new parliamentary presence, the Labour Party.
Unfortunately, human communication being what it is, there began to emerge a discrepancy between those wielding economic power in the form of large sums of credit or currency, (ie The Barons, Lackeys, and Merchants) and those wielding, or trying to wield, social power in the form of support from memberships. (ie The Representatives – a new character.)
The thing about economic power is that it is very, very easy to wield (money doesn’t ask questions or argue). And the thing about social power is that, done properly, it is very very difficult to wield (members do ask questions and argue).
For example, a wielder of social power, or Representative, wanting strategically to deploy one hundred members would have first to draft a letter calling for a meeting. This letter would have to go to all the members who would, hopefully, find time to attend. At the meeting, the Representative would have to explain the entire policy and rationale behind the deployment. The members would discuss and question the entire issue and would then vote. If the vote was in favour and didn’t require referencing back or further reports, the physical task of deploying the members as agreed could be embarked upon.
An extremely efficient Representative might get through this process in about three weeks.
By contrast, a wielder of economic power, whether Baron, Lackey, or Merchant, could strategically deploy one hundred thousand pounds in less time than it would take a Representative to draft the letter calling for a meeting.
As the discrepancy between the wieldings of economic and social power grew, so did the problems in communication between the Peasants and their Representatives.
/ to be continued.
.
.
The Pocket History of England – Part 3
Part 3 of 6
The Pocket History of England
Part 3
The problems in communication between the Peasants and their Representatives grew. And so, therefore, did tensions. The unwieldiness of the Peasants as a force for deployment created misunderstandings among both the Peasants and their Representatives. The Peasants began to lose faith in their Representatives because of what they perceived to be the Representatives’ inability to respond successfully to the initiatives of the Barons and Lackeys.
The Representatives began to experience conflicts of interest between what, in the interests of rapid, successful response, they knew to be right for all Peasantry and what they could successfully communicate by way of rationale to that selfsame Peasantry. The Representatives felt that if they limited themselves to carrying out only those policies which they were able, successfully, to communicate to their members, they would effectively, in view of the prevailing levels of ignorance and lack of sophistication among Peasants, be tying their own hands behind their backs.
Out of this conflict of interest arose a sincere frustration, and out of this frustration arose, among some of the Representatives, a sort of paternalism, a sort of superiority, a sort of feeling that there was not really much point in trying to keep the Peasants informed. That, in the interests of rapid response to Barons’ initiatives, it was more effective, without lengthy and time-consuming consultations, simply to make decisions, and to issue directives.
This, of course, gave way to a distancing between the Peasants and their Representatives.
And this distancing, of course, gave way to feelings of disillusionment and disenchantment and, gradually, certainly among the Representatives, to the rudiments of righteous contempt.
This didn’t make many people happy, but you can bet it made the Barons and Lackeys happy.
So happy did the Barons become, that they even began cynically to commiserate with some of the ‘top’ Representatives. Such was the Barons’ fear of the Peasants that they strove to make these commiserations as public as possible – the more successfully to drive the wedge between the Peasants and their Representatives. Such was their fear, that they even stooped to making many of the more pliable of these Representatives into Knights and Lords; thus placing them, in a hollow sense, on a par with themselves.
Such was the stupidity of some of these Representatives, and such had the distance now become between themselves and their Peasants, that they actually accepted these dubious honours – they actually assented to this peculiar reversal of the Social History that had been and still was O so long in the writing.
So now the problems of the Peasant Mobilisation were twofold. On the one hand, there was the discrepancy, in terms of speed and efficiency, between the strategic deployment of social power and the strategic deployment of economic power. On the other hand, there was the stress and distancing that this discrepancy created between the Peasants and their Representatives and the ways in which it was exploited to the full by cynical Barons and Lackeys. But there was more to come.
Somewhere along the line the Printing Press came into being and into more and more regular use.
At first, this looked good for the Peasants. Here was a way of disseminating information speedily and accurately. Maybe now, communication among Peasants and between Peasants and their Representatives could be brought to a reasonably efficient level. But, as is so often the case with new technology, the use to which the printing technology was put was determined by it’s “owners”.
And who, one might ask, were the “owners”.
Well, it hardly needs explaining that, in much the same way as they had “owned” the fields and the produce, and, later on, the Machinery and the Factories, the Barons, coincidentally, ended up “owning” the Presses as well.
This is not to say that the Peasants had no access to these Presses. In fact, it is probably fair to say that they were first to see the usefulness. They started banging out leaflets and posters, pamphlets and treatises, popular histories and broadsheets, until even the Barons and Lackeys couldn’t avoid noticing the potential here.
With their superior economic power fully wielded, the Barons and Lackeys were able to commandeer the Presses. Not only that, they were able to commandeer a whole new class of “Professionals” (more about Professionals later), the “Press” itself. The Press consisted of various ‘educated’ (they could read and write) offshoots of the Lackeys and the Merchants who specialised in having an interpretation of any given event. There is nothing inherently wrong with people having interpretations, but people of the Press, being almost exclusively in the employ of and, in effect, descendant of a particular section of the population (Barons, Lackeys, and Merchants), their interpretations tended to reflect and protect with astonishing consistency and accuracy the views and vested interests of this section of the population.
Such was the strength of the economic power behind these people that they were able far to outstrip the few struggling Peasants and Peasant Combinations in terms of producing and distributing interpretations. This meant of course that not only were the Press able, in a sense, to write history on their masters’ terms but also to re-write past history in the same way until, eventually, their particular view of events past and present came to be accepted, almost unwittingly, by the bulk of the population as the way things actually were.
This was, as usual, good news for the Barons. And, as usual, bad news for the Peasants and, more particularly, for those of the Peasants who were still struggling to present a Peasant interpretation of events.
Added to the problems of communication already faced by the Peasants, the Press presented an enormous advantage to the already preposterously advantaged side of the wielders of economic power.
Control of the Press also meant that the Barons needed no longer to fear the broadening electoral franchise. After all, when you control the formation of opinion, what does it matter how many people are allowed to contribute to the opinion. Let them all “vote”. Even people without property. Even women. Even Black People. In fact, if you can delude people into thinking they are in control, they are less likely to want to seek it.
Clearly, Peasant Mobilisation was beset with difficulties. The rifts between Peasants and their Representatives became even more fraught. But, almost as if to prove that God either doesn’t exist or, if he does, that he hates Peasants, a strange process began to emerge.
You will have noticed how, throughout the course of this History, the social ranks below Baron have gradually become more fragmented. At first it was just the Barons and Lackeys at the top of the heap of toiling Peasants. But now there are Merchants, the Press, and even at times the Representatives as well. But others began to appear too, as part of this strange process. The strange process was of course the one whereby significant sections of the population where seduced into being pleased with themselves for not being a Peasant. It didn’t seem to matter where on the fragmenting scale of control these people found themselves just so long as they weren’t on the bottom. Among these people, interest in preserving the status quo would become as rabid as the highest Barons’ in the land.
The prime example of this tendency was the Professional.
The Professionals were another category of offshoot from the Merchants and Lackeys (and sometimes the Barons themselves). Like the Press, they could read and write. But unlike the Press, they chose to specialise in particular, believable skills. Many of these skills were, on the face of it, important, and their pursuit could, on the face of it, be lauded in terms of collective social benefit. However, due to the nature of the prevailing obsession with rank and the fact that the ranks were to a degree fragmenting, many of these Professionals became caught up in the nonsensical compulsion to determine where in these ranks they fit and then to defend their positions vigorously. The skills and their pursuit became, therefore, secondary issues to later aspirants to Professionalism.
So concerned were some Professionals with the preservation of their “status” that they devised closed groups and associations to exclude from their skill area anyone they considered might not have the same commitment to the preservation of their status. In many ways, these associations and groups parallelled the Combinations and Unions of the Peasants, but, because they were already committed to the preservation of hierarchy, none of the Professionals were maimed or killed or deported in the way many of the Peasants were.
So, from the Peasants’ point of view, things were again going badly.
Just as they had begun to wake up to the fact of their horrific exploitation at the hands of the Barons and their ilk – the fact that they, the great majority, were being screwed, blued, and tattooed by a tiny minority of gluttons and power-mongers – their own solidarity became impossible to maintain because more and more of the population were finding cosy places in the hierarchy between the majority at the bottom and the minority at the top. And, far from being critical of the minority at the top, all these people with their cosy places were becoming critical of the majority at the bottom for “rocking the boat”. To these people, their petty cosiness was far more important than that great and prevailing injustice which had been strangling and stifling society from the very beginning and was continuing to do so by ever more sophisticated and devious means.
But all the Peasants could do was to keep on relying upon brave individuals among their number to keep abreast of the changes and develop appropriate strategies in response and to carry on the historical struggle for fairness and justice.
/ to be continued
.
.
The Pocket History of England – Part 4
Part 4 of 6
The Pocket History of England
Part 4
For Barons, enough was never enough. Even though they had everything going for them; even though all the advantages were on their side, the Barons were still very rattled by the efforts of some of the Peasantry.
Information was, by and large, being disseminated far more efficiently and effectively and a broad recognition of the extent of the exploitation was, possibly, beginning to emerge. Even the self-interested Merchants and Professionals were beginning seriously to question some of the “fundamentals” of the system.
But the Barons were not through yet. They began to devise the biggest confidence trick the world had ever known.
To get the scale of this “con” into perspective, one must understand the ways in which the Barons and their favourite Lackeys had been applying their expertise in exploiting Peasants to the rest of the planet. While the Peasants in England had been trying to win some rights, the Barons, inspired by the Merchants, had been maiming and killing Peasants the world over in order to get them, too, to produce the wherewithal for their own destruction. Many of these Peasants, because they were darker of skin, were treated even worse than the English Peasants who at least had the good fortune to have the same colour of skin as the Barons. These darker Peasants suffered appalling living and working conditions as they drew from their own land the raw materials needed by the white Barons to build themselves lifestyles of unimaginable self-indulgence and machines of war to protect them.
But, coincidentally enough, there were other white Barons from other European countries indulging themselves in the same sorts of things. Quite often, they would bump into each other and, for a bit of sport, get back into the old game of flinging Peasants and Lackeys at each other. The old game was made even more exciting by the inclusion of some of the new machines of war that their opulent life styles had allowed them to develop in the course of killing and maiming the darker Peasants. But this was, after all, sport, and the gentlemanly white Barons could always overcome their differences to share some self-indulgences and to discuss how uppity some of the Peasants ‘back home’ were becoming.
The enormous “con” really arose informally out of these games in the farflung corners of the globe. The Barons began to notice a curious willingness among all the strata of the societies at home to immerse themselves in a sort of hysterical fever called “nationalism”. Such was the desperation of many humans, even many Peasants it must be said, not to feel at the bottom of the social heap, that they were happy to join in the euphoria of denouncing whole other societies, particularly ones made up of people with darker skins, as being lower than the lowest Peasant in their own.
Many people found this refreshing and exhilarating and the Barons could sense this. So they hit upon the fantastic idea of building up all this hysteria into a World War.
The world had never seen a war like this one. It was called “The Great War”; the “War To End All Wars”.
It began in the minds of the Barons as just another gentlemanly fray. Nobody of any importance would get hurt, just a few Peasants. Most of the Barons were related anyway.
But, once things had got underway, even the Barons began to realise that they’d created something bigger than anyone could possibly have imagined. The new machines of war chewed the earth; darkened the skies; spit the Peasants of both sides into scenes of greater horror than ever before thought possible.
The horror was so stupefying that even Peasants who managed to survive it remained in a state of shock for years afterward. Many of them never recovered.
From the Barons’ point of view, these were embarrassing times. On the face of it, the stupidity of their greedy obsessions and the stunning incompetence of their attempts to stay abreast of the catastrophic circumstances they themselves had set in motion were exposed for all the world to see. How could anybody implicated in such a monumental disaster arising out of such a cynical, such an unnecessary, such a blatantly evil game ever get away with it.
Well, fortunately for the Barons, their control of the communications technology stood them in good stead. And because, to a greater or lesser degree, many of the Merchants and Professionals were themselves implicated in the stirring of the “nationalist” fever, they, for their own reasons, had no interest in trying to disseminate accurate information about who had been doing what for which reasons. The Barons, surprising even themselves, were able to dissociate themselves in the public eye from any of the blame.
The great mass of the surviving Peasantry were either still in shock or too exhausted even to notice. And the few brave ones who did notice and managed to say anything about it were dealt with quickly and efficiently by Barons and Lackeys who, if good at absolutely nothing else, were always able to maim and kill Peasant ‘troublemakers’.
In fact, from the Barons’ point of view, things really turned out rather well. Many of them had profited quite handsomely as their factories, staffed by Peasant women working for next to nothing to help the “war effort”, poured out guns and ammunition. And, as it turned out, a whole generation of potentially uppity Peasants had been decimated. They’d had the stuffing kicked out of them. It would be a long time before they would be having uppity thoughts again.
It was the good old medieval times again. The war was over. The economy had to be rebuilt. Keep the Peasants busy doing that, and the Barons could be left free to plan the next one.
Yes, would you believe it.? After the horrors of the “Great War”, there were still people around who were stupid enough to think that another one might be a good idea.
But planning for the next one turned out not to be quite as simple as planning for the first one. For one thing, the Barons, finding the ranks of their Lackeys swelled with the influx of the self-interested split-aways from the broad body of Peasantry (ie. Merchants, Professionals, Representatives, the Press), found themselves having to assume an even higher degree of distance and righteousness. Already dissociated from the broad majority of the seething masses, they began to dissociate themselves further from what was becoming a secondary level of seething masses. The swelled ranks of the Lackeys became boiling pots of greed, ambition, and thinly disguised aspiration to Baronhood. Lackeys didn’t used to be like this. They used really to know their place, better even than the Peasants. But now they were becoming quite disturbing and the Barons began to withdraw into themselves to leave these ‘new age’ Lackeys to squabble among themselves.
So two things began to happen.
First, ‘Underbarons’ began to emerge. These were the greediest and most ambitious of the Lackeys and Professionals. And they gradually came to fill some of the space abandoned by the original Barons.
Second, far from losing their power by withdrawing from the squabbles, the Barons discovered, to their delight, that such was the insecurity among the Lackeys; such was their lack of genuine self-esteem, that they seemed to revere the Barons even more; to fawn even more at every diminishing opportunity. Even the really greedy and really ambitious ones seemed only too happy to grovel whenever a ‘real’ Baron appeared.
This tendency filtered down to the Peasants too. Now, all their anger at the manipulations and the administrative abuses directed itself at the more prominent Underbarons, and the original Barons, by a peculiar twist of informational fate, became objects of great fondness. Everybody, right across the whole social spectrum, forgot the Great War, that colossal blunder, that ultimate act in cynical manipulation, the greatest crime in the history of humankind, and the way in which the Barons had orchestrated the whole thing.
But the Barons weren’t able to forget. They remembered the good times they’d had and the money they’d made. They remembered the ‘old values’, when ‘men were men’ and everybody knew their place. And, noting the emergence of the two strange factors above, they began carefully to cultivate some of the more energetic Underbarons, to join with them in some of the planning. And, sure enough, it wasn’t long before yet another con was on the way.
Yes, primarily through the speculations of the greedy Underbarons who, wishing, themselves, to relive the good old days of the Barons and share in the magnificence and profit of human conflagration, and wishing also to divert the more astute Peasants’ and Representatives’ critical observations of the way the economic system was working, yet another Great War, another “War To End All Wars”, was set in motion.
Imagine the broken hearts. Imagine the despair. Imagine the degradation and the frustration of intelligence as yet another generation of Peasants got themselves ready for yet another meat grinding.
Many of the Peasants and some of their more steadfast Representatives had been coming up with some truly enlightened ideas about human organisation and material distribution. These delicate initiatives found themselves usurped, compulsorily prostituted, and put to ‘good effect’ in the “War Effort”.
As is usual with wars, control of it was lost almost immediately. So shocked were even the Barons and Underbarons, who had originally thought it was such a terrific idea, by the escalating violence and scale of the war that they had to grope around looking for systems for organising that were based on intelligence rather than greed. And as there were no Barons or Underbarons whose intelligence outstripped their greed, they quickly found that they had to call upon some of these enlightened Peasants and Representatives to devise systems of organisation that saw to it that everybody received enough of whatever was available in order to keep everybody working to keep the ‘war effort’ going. Enlightened ideas for organisation and distribution made sense to everyone when finally put to work without the hysterical villification of the Press and the opposition of the Barons and Underbarons.
After several long years in which this strange situation persisted whereby society was being run almost fairly in order to maintain a horrible war machine; in which, essentially, the Peasants were conned into trying to rationalise yet another hideous mess created by Barons, this second great conflagration eventually ran its course and died down.
But the awful injustice of the con job didn’t end there.
It extended itself to destroying the only real gain of the entire conflagration. When the insane con had finally run its course, the rudimentary but enlightened system of organisation and distribution, for which many ‘ordinary’ people had made monumental sacrifices, was thrown away again; trampled and abandoned. With the exception of many of the Barons and Underbarons who, co-incidentally, had got richer, everybody found themselves back where they were before.
History seems to keep doing this, particularly to Peasants.
It always seems that the nearer the Peasants get to the equality of resources and opportunity that they’ve been seeking for centuries, the more vicious the struggle becomes.
/ to be continued
.
.
The Pocket History of England – Part 5
.
.
Part 5 of 6
The Pocket History of England
Part 5
After the second enormous debacle, the second swindle, the second great conflagrating confidence trick, many people became wary.
Many people, Peasants, Representatives, and even Professionals, began to be suspicious of grand Government announcements and sensational headline features in the Press. Many people began to question authority.
But, not enough.
Even after two such spectacular demonstrations of what unbridled greed and ambition among the rich few coupled with unquestioning ignorance and obedience among the poor many can lead to, many people could still not see that economic fairness, rationality, and justice is necessary to achieve social fairness, rationality, and justice and that both are necessary prerequisites to political fairness, rationality, and justice. Many people still felt that the most important things were their own cars and houses and washing machines and they still couldn’t see how their own indifference to the broader issues left space for the Barons and Underbarons to carry on with their cynical self-indulgences and games.
And somehow the very fact of the co-existence of the growing wariness of some of the Peasants with the growing materialist self-interest of others opened the door to more and more vicious attacks upon the more enlightened Peasants and some of their more steadfast Representatives. It seemed as though the Underbarons (for it was really them running the show now), encouraged by the indifference of so many of the people, could heap more and more energy and resources into suppressing or distorting or hystericising the views of this wary minority.
This came primarily through manipulations of the “Media”, which now included the new television and radio “Broadcasters” as well as the Press, and became a sort of thought war. But it also took the form of more and more militaristic responses to public manifestations and more and more secretive, counter-espial responses to public organisations.
Some of these more wary Peasants, Representatives, and Professionals began to make associations between what was happening in England and what was happening elsewhere in the world. They could see the patterns recurring all over the planet. They could see that what was now happening to Peasants of darker hue was actually a repetition of their own history, their own exploitation at the hands of the economic controllers. They could see that, as English Peasants became more effective in defending themselves from the mindless speculation of the English Barons and Underbarons, so the English Barons and Underbarons took their speculations elsewhere, to places in which Peasants were still being maimed and killed for trying to organise to protect themselves.
This tendency drove the more wary Peasants, Representatives, and Professionals to greater degrees of concern which in turn distanced them further from the rest of the people who were still more preoccupied with their washing machines, hair driers, and colour televisions.
This distancing was ruthlessly exploited by the Underbarons, their Press, and their Broadcasters. It was exploited to the degree that strong feelings of hate and distrust began to emerge between the two bodies of opinion. It was almost as if some of the ‘horizontal’ stratification of society had begun to disappear with the growth of wariness and so a ‘vertical’ schism, developing between those whose wariness outstripped their desire for material goods and those whose desire for material goods outstripped their wariness, became the centrepiece of this ruthless exploitation.
In the guise of stalwart “free enterprise” and, strangely enough, of “rugged individualism”, the Underbarons and their Lackeys (yes, they even had some of them now) began to make international financial coalitions the more securely to stake out their claims to the world’s resources. Vast, faceless organisations emerged with annual budgets far exceeding the annual budgets of most of the world’s national governments. With Underbarons and Barons as ‘Directors’ and ‘Chairmen’ and thousands of the less wary Professionals and Merchants as ‘Shareholders’, the whole business of plundering and pillaging the planetary resources and of exploiting and screwing the less organised Peasants took on a strange respectability which even the most dedicated and enlightened Representatives found difficult to undermine and expose.
The ‘respectability’ of this plundering and pillaging owed much, again, to the Underbarons’ control of the Media. The Media would happily portray the greediest of these “Enterprisers” as Heroes and staunch contributors to the general well being of humankind and would happily portray their greediest speculations as high adventure and gallant, swash-buckling personal risk-taking (which of course it never was – all the rules being in their favour from start to finish). The misery being created by all this among the world’s Peasants didn’t, of course, make very good copy and, besides, many of these Media people themselves liked, as indeed did many Representatives, to “dabble”, as they called it, in this disgusting and immoral speculation in other people’s well being.
So what can only be called Informational Crime began to emerge as a very potent determining factor in the ‘Thought Wars’ and also provided many of the less wary with a wonderful Career Structure.
But the greatest monstrosity, the most stupendously obscene informational crime and the most blatant exploitation of the vertical schism had yet to be perpetrated.
So out of control had the second great conflagration become that a whole new concept in mass destruction was born. Supposedly intelligent Representatives of various kinds supplied supposedly intelligent Professionals of various kinds with vast economic resources (more economic resources than the world had ever before seen concentrated into one research project) to work diligently to develop a system for dividing atoms to make explosions of a magnitude hitherto unimaginable.
No nightmare, no twisted human vision could begin to encompass the immensity of these explosions or the dreadfulness of their aftermath.
But this didn’t stop the proliferation of the system. Far from it. And the proliferation of this concept in mass destruction also gave birth to a whole new system for generating energy: the “Nuclear Industry”. There being no other justification for this new “Industry” than the production of unstable materials for use in systems of mass destruction, many lies had to be told. Because many of the Underbarons and Barons had speculated in the colossal extravagance of the Representatives’ determination to fund this system of mass destruction at all costs, they stood to gain even further if they could further hoodwink the Representatives and the Peasants they represented into continuing, against all the evidence, to throw money in vast quantities at the new energy generating system.
This required considerable creative effort from the Underbarons’ Media. But of course, as so often in the past, the Media proved to be the most effective weapon at the Barons’ and Underbarons’ disposal since maiming and killing.
The real beauty of the Nuclear Industry, besides the obvious one of multiplying fortunes for heavy investors, was the “Security” angle which everyone agreed had to be associated with it. Everyone agreed that you couldn’t let “Terrorists” get hold of any of this unstable material. So everyone agreed that the Nuclear Industry must be allowed to keep as many secrets as it liked. And, before long, just about everything was “secret”, and just about anybody who had any curiosity at all was a “Terrorist”.
Perfect.
The Underbarons and the Barons were the top dogs.
Everybody beneath them was twice split (quartered if you like); on the one hand between being a nobody or having status, and on the other between wariness and materialism.
And anybody who asked questions could be vilified by an uncritical and sycophantic Media and, if necessary, be dealt with under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
/ to be continued
.
.
The Pocket History of England – Provisional Conclusions
.
Provisional Conclusions…
Of course, time moves on, and we begin delicately to discover that all these distinctions are meaningless.
Peasants, Barons, Lackeys. We are all the same. Every Baron knows, to himself, that he is nothing but a Lackey in Baron’s clothes. Every Lackey knows, to himself, that he is living a lie; that he is using socio-economic constructs to improve his faint-hearted impression of himself.
And every Peasant, we know, has the true capacity, if given the slightest chance, to walk the face of the earth in dignity; to contribute to the Common Understanding; to claim a minimum rightful share of the material world in order to share in getting on with the problems we all face with regard to the indifference of the cosmos.
We discover, or re-discover, that every one of us knows, internally, that there are no differences. We re-discover that the entire business of creating differences and believing in them is an offshoot of very primitive behaviour; the sort of behaviour, in fact, that we’ve always assumed we left behind in the caves.
The whole pretence, for which people have to suffer and die, is nothing but an hysterical response to not knowing what the fuck is going on; to not having the slightest idea of where we fit into the universe and what we’re supposed to be doing.
All of the pretences are social constructions upon which those of us who should have known better have come to rely.
Those of us who should have known better are those of us who’ve had the time and the space, the ‘leisure’ if you like, to contemplate these things. Those of us who haven’t had to toil ourselves senseless just to stay alive. Those of us who have actually spent large parts of our lives supposedly absorbing formal information. Those of us who are unimaginably free of the constraints and responsibilities and agonies of survival on a day to day basis.
But in our anxiety not to lose the social constructions around us, not to lose the ‘status’ we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that we deserve, we fail to face up to the overpowering fact that we don’t know, any better than any other human, why we’re here on this planet in this reality.
In primitive societies, all kinds of elaborate understandings were constructed about why what was taking place was taking place. As we look back or down upon them, we are amused. But how much more do we know. We still haven’t even really scratched the surface of understanding even the scale of the problem let alone come anywhere near an understanding of the nature of the solution.
Every member of every society that ever was believed that the dominant truths of the day were the ultimate truths. We now assume that what none of our ancestors ever knew about “reality” is that it’s full of molecules and atoms whizzing around. And that light shines through it, bouncing off it, this way and that, at 186,000 miles per second.
How quaint they were not to know this. How clever we are to know it. But what we ‘know’ is so ephemeral. It changes so fast. Today, some of us can see that. And seeing that is perhaps the real measure of how far from our ancestors we may have come.
But most of us turn our backs on this uncomfortable, this disorienting aspect of knowledge. Instead, we concentrate on the primitive task of assembling social constructs. We busy ourselves ordering our immediate environments and doing so usually in terms of short-sighted, short-term material self-interest.
And perhaps some of that’s OK. A little bit of displacement activity can help to get over the main horrific anxiety. But, like the primitives, we over-involve ourselves in the busy-ness. We become so totally immersed in the displacement activity that we forget not only what we’re displacing, but also the very fact that we’re displacing it.
In the old days, in the dark nights, the elders used to tell the youngers the reasons for everything, to soothe the fears of the youngers and thereby, in a sense, their own. But the elders knew they were making it up. They knew that nobody knows. But after a few generations of making and believing, the “truth” emerges; solid with the years; steeped in tradition; cured by time and secured by repetition.
Nowadays, we still do the same thing. We believe all this rubbish from our, admittedly younger, elders. And then, as we become elders, we catch ourselves passing it on, just as if we knew it was the truth.
So, where does this leave us.
Clearly, it is our various insecurities and self-indulgences which are inhibiting our collective application to the main task – the task of assembling human knowledge.
A certain amount of self-indulgence cannot be avoided. It is even, perhaps, important in maintaining our balance as we confront this disturbingly impossible task. But some degrees of self-indulgence are obviously affecting our application more seriously than others.
For example, many of us are desperately struggling to keep from dying; to keep fed; to keep heat in our bodies and the bodies of our children.
Many of us are thus distracted from the main task. The fact that we are thus distracted is directly attributable to the indulgences of the economically advantaged who, by virtue of their “ownership” of unnecessary quantities of land, goods, and houses, create unnecessary stresses on our collective economy which could otherwise be providing these to all our members at a minimum level of pain and struggle for all.
This minimum level could assure that more of us have more time with which to deal with the main task.
Dealing with self-indulgence in the economically advantaged does seem to require some determination, and, yes, some force. Clearly, they’re not going to let go of their own free will. History has shown us very very few examples of this.
For one thing, they’re rigid with fright. Their whitened knuckles grip their material possessions and economic advantages in a state of unthinking near-hysteria. But it must be understood that the cost of their self-indulgence is too much for the rest of us to bear any longer.
The rest of us want to get on with the vast problem of assembling human knowledge. We want do this before human knowledge destroys itself.
But as we apply ourselves to the task, we come, consistently, up against the brick walls of economic constraint. We come up against arguments of “profitability” as though somehow a divine message had got through that all human endeavour must make money. We come up against cynical hypocrisy as we recognise that the very arguments about “profitability” are coming from the economically advantaged who have long since sewn up all the avenues to profit known to man in their own short term self-interest.
If there was a saving grace; if these people were themselves using their economic advantage to the advantage of our collective struggle with ignorance; if they were applying a superior intelligence one might expect to be arising out of this economic advantage, there might be an argument for saying, “OK, keep up the good work. We’ll mark time until you’ve got some news for us.”
But the evidence is completely to the contrary. All we are seeing is the proliferation of more and more magnificent examples of human greed, arrogance, and self-indulgence.
And besides, history has shown us, time and time and time again, that when you give people economic advantage over others, they start playing power games; they start trying to manipulate the lives of the economically disadvantaged.
The intelligent among us know there’s no excuse for it. We know we have to try to sort out these economic disparities.
We know that time is running out. We know that in many corners of the globe the last conflagration has already begun.
We know that the time for pretending it’s not happening is passed.
So, let’s not waste any more time. Let’s just get on with it, shall we….?
.
.
Deacon Martin on Youtube
© 2011 Deacon Martin
.