Ping Pong 62: It Is All About Me You Know
In the last Rant the problem of a state actually listening to a people was considered in detail. The issue here being, that once a state starts to listen to a public then that public changes their behaviour and makes the very act of listening problematic and to a degree at least, counter-productive. This fact was one of those that led in the nineteen eighties in Britain and America, to a rather different approach to governance. Maybe, the question was proposed, the role of government is not to listen so much as to lecture its people. That is, it ought to be more about inspiring them to action, and less about understanding and responding to the actions which they already perform. Or to put it another way, it ought to be about helping individuals help themselves, and less about actually helping itself. Fundamental to this creed was that to avoid the trap of a public becoming greedy and unreasonable in the face of responsive government, government itself needed to be both minimal in its spheres of operation, but also had to encourage (or even allow) for other’s selfishness. That is, it had to start with the assumption that individuals were selfish and build a government based upon this type of individuality. It therefore hoped to avoid the problem of being hijacked by sudden selfish demands made by a public that it was trying so hard to help.
This creed of selfish individual and minimal government is of course one that was then in different forms, exported around the world, and became over the next thirty years the dominant economic but also social philosophy. It is perhaps useful in analysing this (now spent) social force, to divide it into five very interconnected tenets or beliefs. These tenets might be summarised as a belief in the market; certain takes on regulation; a degree of opportunism; a reliance on events; and finally an integral divisiveness. In the rest of this Rant, these separate aspects will be considered in turn.
Faith in a supposed market is the characteristic belief of such a creed. This faith comes down to a very simple assumption. Individuals, the claim rings out, are just that – they are individual. It makes sense therefore to allow for and encourage this individuality, and to form governments and systems that enhance it. Ostensibly therefore, all that needs to be stopped are those activities by individuals (crime or bullying) that are actively harmful and rankly unfair. Anything and everything else individualistic, that is, all selfishness or all greed ought to be encouraged. It is only individuals that matter. Onto this faith is spliced quite a different faith (that is habitually confused with it). This second faith comes down to the hope that if the ‘super rich’ are allowed get super rich then the entire community will benefit. If nothing else these super rich ought to pay more tax or perhaps need to hire people to service their industries and properties and so ought to share their wealth around (somewhat). The very existence then of wealth was held to be good in its own right, and likely to produce beneficial effects.
Unfortunately both of these hopes have proved highly problematic and complex. If one lauds the individual over society, one necessarily actively dissolves the bounds that hold an individual within certain norms. The logic of one’s argument is therefore that criminality is okay, if one is not caught, and if it allows an individual to triumph. Or to put it differently, the morals of what is and what is not allowed by any system will necessarily become indistinct and even worse distinctly arbitrary. My tax dodge, is your running off with the pension pot and their spending money that was not theirs to spend; while my robust business practice is simply bullying. - A system then that conjures up such a virulent strain of individuality, is likely to be kept legal only if the regulatory system that enforces the rules is a strong one. The irony being of course that the very creeds of individuality which inspired this philosophy, necessarily discourage regulation just at the moment when regulations matter more than ever. On the other hand that faith in the trickle down effect is also distinctly problematic. The super rich do spend money and so pay tax. But if they are rich enough they can (and do) avoid the latter and minimise the former. The actual amount of money then that comes to the wider population from the presence of such individuals is always limited regardless of the actual amount of money they make.
In a sense the problematic nature of this faith in the free market is of secondary importance. The point of the individualistic system is that everyone dreams that they might be the one. That is, they all will tolerate the super rich for the sake of the dream that they themselves might one day be rich. The rich are more totems then anything economic or useful. As such the entire system is founded essentially on dreams and the momentary expression of dreams, namely credit. It is a system therefore that endlessly encourages and fosters debt. (Credit card companies made a killing the nineteen eighties as well as in the two thousands). More than this the individual creation of debt is catered for within such a system, as with its ethic of responsibility, it will always be comfortable in bankrupting individuals. It can therefore, from within its own logic, both inspire the debtor and yet then turn round and ruin them. Or at least, it could do as long as the entire people were not in debt, at which point of course the entire system risks collapse.
The move to libertarian systems therefore, needs to be accompanied, to make any sense, by a drive for regulation, and in a sense it is. The real problem is, that there is a very marked tendency to regulate the wrong thing. That is, what ought to be required is the regulation of sharp business practice. However this move is rather tricky. On the one hand business will claim that it needs no other regulator than the market, which if it were working would be their sole master. This claim is made in spite of the fact that the role of such regulators is to ensure that the market is working properly (and not then to regulate business as such). On the other hand it is quite easy for companies to create such labyrinthine schemes and intricate to-ings and fro-ings of the business as to make them very difficult to regulate in the first place. Or rather, to require an insider to regulate them. This insider might not necessarily be ‘friendly’ with the business which they regulate, but will certainly share many of that business’s deep assumptions about what is and what is not acceptable. The regulations thereby get hijacked by the community that it ought to supervise.
But one needs caution here before one accepts the dogma that libertarian governments do not regulate. In fact in a sense the endless breaking up of public monopolies (the railways or water supply or telephone) has created a raft of new regulators. Where before there was a simple and relatively unified system in buying a train ticket, there are now a whole variety of different organizations and companies caught up in this simple act. Regulation has therefore taken over in ex-public companies the role of strategic planner. The problem of course is that regulation and planning are rather different. One is therefore left with a system where the regulator endlessly calls for more unified systems, while the companies (whose interests do not necessarily lie in creating such plans) respond in their own way and time.
In effect therefore, regulation has mirrored the role of government. It has slipped being an active and powerful force, and stopped being a real policing agent. Or rather, it is restricted to managing and not regulating companies. The only place it has survived, is in the realm of the public (eg; ID cards). There is of course an irony here. Libertarianism if it meant anything at all, ought to have meant that individuals were not regulated, but it has not. They are regulated and policed and worried at just as much as ever, it is only large organizations which have escaped the regulatory leash…
The role of government in such a state, in a sense becomes bound up with the role of making opportunities for others to make money. Whether it is the break up of public companies (with the guaranteed income streams that flow from these companies) or a generous expense account (in the BBC as well as parliament), government is about the creation of opportunities. And yet of course one needs caution here. The real opportunities so created are really just occasions at which money, at all sorts and kinds of levels can be made. They are therefore new ways to milk a system and not new genuine chances. Government therefore operates by splitting itself into lucrative enterprises and then hiving of those enterprises or that money to interested parties. It does so no doubt in the name of making itself more open and less hands on. And yet the effect of this is to reduce the actual amount of power its citizens have, as once government has been so fractured, then it is only through the market (we punish a company by not using it) that the citizens have power. The problem then is that this ‘power’ has been rendered meaningless, as the government gives money regardless of performance to the companies it has spun off itself.
Perhaps ironically it is again the case that the opportunities opened up are rather easily absorbed by large companies and are only problematically handed down to the wider public. Or if opportunities are expanded (as they have been - say in education) that expansion is made at the cost of fracturing the entire system, and creating odd pockets of opportunity. Education has therefore become a welter of very different schools. Exactly what pupils study and so how ‘well’ they do, has become more than ever, a product of the exact school which they go to. Each school of course has a restricted budget (and number of pupils). One’s exact opportunities in life become then the product of the vagaries of the school entry system. The government then of course is seeking to answer this injustice by allowing popular schools to expand. The problem of course is that they can only do so (within a defined budget) at the cost of pulling the resources from other schools, schools which could be offering their own distinct (it not popular) choices. Schools studying the media might win out over schools studying science – with dubious actual advantage. The problem is then, that the creed of opportunity has created in a sense too much significance too early on, to be managed. We make a choice (the school) really matter (irrespective of wealth or background), and then have to cope with the effects of that mattering.
The last thirty years or so have seen government obsessed with events. In a way it is events (the Falklands War, the Big Bang, the Stock Market Crash of 1989, 11/9, etc) that distinguish governments. A leader therefore at the moment of a big event realizes that this is their opportunity to make a mark. Mrs. Thatcher was it could be said, saved by the Falklands debacle (no matter that in a properly run government it would not have happened). It was this passion to be within the history of events that informed both Bush and Blair’s decision to invade Iraq. They were gripped in the horror of an event and the need to be seen to be doing something – and invading Iraq was something…
The combined effect therefore of government whose avowed aim it is to reduce what government does, and a televisual world, is to make government by event. They (and we) wait upon events and they respond. Power is therefore given to those organizations (terrorist, media or cock up) that exist to produce ‘big and sexy’ events. If events are not sexy enough they are likely to be ignored. Likewise only those events that can appear at least to be ‘sexy’ will be reacted to. Politicians have therefore allowed something else into the democracy. That is in order to ‘look good’ to the voter their require another agency - to deal them issues and a medium in which those issues are dealt with (the media). Governments are no longer a nice cosy relationship between individuals and their government: it is new a rag bag ménage a quatre, that includes politicians, people, the news-makers, and the event managers (the terrorists and the media) as well!
Finally it is a tenet of such governments that they work by creating division. The world became then a rather easy place. On the one side, there were those who were ‘one of us’ – that is the libertarian West and on the other, was everyone and everything else. To be one of the enemy included therefore to be a union official or an enemy government, or the French or social workers or…to be anyone that opposed the regime. The problem was then that this assumption that all opposition was founded upon the same bankrupt morals and could be lumped (to a degree at least) together, distorted the debate in two ways. On the one side, any real engagement with the other party, and with their complexities or differences was lost. One simply dismissed whole swathes of human experience as ‘the enemy’. This was of course very reassuring to the narrow dogmatic individualistic government but disconcerting (and irritating) to everyone else. Unlikely allies were therefore created, and strange bedfellows (social workers were never the same as Soviet Union officials, but one might not have guessed it given Tory Party rhetoric in the nineteen eighties). On the other, arising from this forced union, strange alliances were (and are) created, both on the side of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Osama bin Laden is therefore the product of Western insurgency tactics (used by the CIA against Russia) and Islamic Fundamentalism. The West only saw that here was an enemy of its enemy (the Soviet Union) and not that this weapon might one day turn around to wage war against it…or to put it slightly differently, the problem really comes down to the fact that the world is likely to always, and in every case, be complicated. If one therefore makes it excessively simplistic (and a matter of ‘us and them’) one is likely in the name of that simplicity to be creating hidden complexities elsewhere!
The libertarian philosophies of the last thirty years have then led very far from the Eden promised. In effect they have not amounted to much more than the government of dreams. Dreams make docile citizens, and yet they store up all kinds of monsters and problems which then have a worrying habit of bursting upon the dreaming population with unpredictable results. The system has a degree of such disturbance wired into it; it needed events and yet too many and the system is overwhelm (which is arguably where we are now). The problem is then - out of all the morass of different conceptions about what we are and who we have been, whether it is possible to derive a viable and distinctly modern account of humanity and its justice. It is to this topic that the next Rant will turn, before I finish this series of Ping Pongs in a detailed account (in the subsequent four Rants or so) of what are surely the most viable philosophic contenders to fulfil this difficult brief.
