Survival, psychopathy, and Smurf porn.

Quick, I need something to take my mind off Smurf porn. I’m serious. Why? You don’t want to know, okay? All right, it has something peripherally to do with Edward Lear’s Jumblies.[1]

So imagine a score of crackly, old horror films full of cliché. The evil scientist/boyar/monster, having picked off a small percentage of virgins from the village in the valley, is cornered and desperate in his Gothic castle. It is touch and go whether the hero, equipped only with vitriol/crucifix/battleaxe (appropriated from above the fireplace), can rescue his inamorata (the latest victim of the scientist/boyar/monster). But then the cavalry arrive and provide an irritating distraction. The cavalry is always in the form of the entire population of the village armed with pitchforks, scythes, and torches. The villagers have realized that whilst the scientist/boyar/monster can pick them off one by one he is unable to deal with them all at once. Co-operation, mutual aid, collective will and strength win the day, survival is shown not to be the prerogative of the single, Nietzschian Übermench but of those who choose to work together. Hurrah, good old Kropotkin is vindicated!

Of course you could argue that the lumpen mob has failed to appreciate the superior genius and iron character of the misunderstood individualist and has simply destroyed what it could not understand – and indeed who amongst us does not feel a pang of pity when King Kong[2] falls from the Empire State Building – but let’s leave that one for another day.

My therapist and I agreed the other day that captains of corporate commerce, of politics, and of the media show clear and incontrovertible signs of psychopathy. An inability to empathise with other people is necessary to be able to exploit them in the interest of gaining personal wealth and power. Anyone who wants ‘survival of the fittest’ to refer to whomever can best rend with tooth and claw had better reflect that in a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world it is best not to be a dog.

I do have some conservative, American, Republican friends, believe it or not. I once said to one of them that poverty has never cured poverty. He laughed: “You couldn’t be more wrong! I know of scores of rags-to-riches cases!” I laughed too, because I knew he hadn’t seen the irony of what he had just said. I am sure he had seen ‘scores’ of such cases, but what he had not seen was the abolition of poverty. I will readily grant that the conditions of poverty can act as a stimulus to a certain minority of people who possess a strictly limited range of talents[3] that they can deploy to climb the greasy pole; once they are up that pole, however, they do not reach down, wealth remains concentrated and poverty remains stultifying and self-perpetuating. My friend’s ‘scores’ are a meaningless drop in the ocean. The untruth in the ‘American Dream’ is that anyone can get on if she or he works hard; the reality is that the only guarantee from hard work is aching bones.

I am watching with a kind of amazed horror as the United States tears itself apart politically and economically. I do not think I can recall any time when consensus politics has been so absent in the US. From the moment that the current President took office and declared that his aim was to foster cross-party collaboration in the national interest, those in political opposition set their faces against any such thing. He hadn’t been there five minutes when powerful interests stirred up right-wing protest in one of the most cynical campaigns of astroturfing it has been my misfortune ever to see – apparently he’s a communist, a Muslim, and wasn’t born in the USA. Oh no one with any pretence at respectability mentions his melanin, but co-incidentally the Aryan-supremacist fringe has been going in for a lot of chest-thumping and willie-waving.

Right now we are witnessing the unusual sight of statism and capitalism failing to support each other. The USA needs to tax or borrow urgently in order to function and in order for its infrastructure not to disintegrate rapidly, but the right digs in its heels and refuses to allow the rich to bear any of the collective burden for the financial and fiscal crisis, forgetting that business needs a stable state to maintain a stable market. Probably some shadowy Bilderberger [4] will whisper in a few ears and the state and capital will come to some accommodation at the eleventh hour, who knows.

All of which actually brings me back to a point I keep making in this blog – the failure of the American Revolution. I am sometimes asked why I believe that the American Revolution failed when clearly the USA is the richest and most powerful country in the world. Well leaving aside the possibility that it is on the brink of irrecoverable disaster and may soon find its political power eclipsed by China, I ask in return whether wealth and power were what the Founding Fathers were aiming for. I answer my own question – no. I believe their goal was liberty. However it was liberty as conceived in the minds of 18c, classically-oriented, propertied, educated, slave-owning, white men. Any other liberties that exist in the USA have not been granted by the beneficence and wisdom of the FFs but despite them. The codified constitution[5] with its checks and balances was a noble experiment and, as a fall-back, has been used to a limited extent to argue for the extension of certain liberties and the maintenance of others. However any greater advancements have been achieved by mass upheavals (the freeing of the slaves, the Civil Rights movement and so on) and despite the constitution not because of it. Left to its own devices the US constitution as conceived and formed by the FFs underpins an inherently conservative status quo and prevents progress rather than stimulating or allowing it. It failed the Native American and it failed the Norteño who were swept aside – in some cases pursued to extinction – as the imperialist juggernaut gained speed in North America. It fails still in US foreign policy when the supposed bastion of liberty backs up repressive, royalist regimes[6] such as Saudi Arabia, organizes military coups simply because it dislikes the political colour of a democratically-elected government elsewhere[7], and denies its perceived enemies any shred of the legal protection it would extend to its own citizens (yes, I know, I’m banging the Gitmo/Abu Ghraib drum). Furthermore I have this fundamental question to ask: can there be any such thing as freedom where there is advantage? In other words can freedom really co-exist with inequality? Is a society truly free if it has a system which perpetuates poverty?

I’ll leave it there for now and get off my soap-box.

What?

Oh all right, you win.

____________________    

[1] Far and few, far and few,

          Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

     Their heads are green and their hands are blue.

          And they went to sea in a Sieve.

[2] Did you know that in Denmark King Kong is known as ‘Kong King’?

[3] Would I suppress these talents (ask my Republican friends)? Not if they could also be usefully harnessed to mutual aid, no. If they are simply a manifestation of psychopathic tendencies don’t ask me – I’m not a psychiatrist! By the way, I do not believe that everyone who succeeds in business by dint of her or his individual efforts is a psychopath. I specifically exempt a particular friend, a ‘self-made-woman’, in whom I find no such thing and whom, despite our political differences, I have always found to be an admirable person. We are not made on assembly lines and there are always exceptions that test all rules.

[4] Here is an interesting site run by an organization campaigning for a press conference at all Bilderberg venues and for all conference decisions to be made in the public interest. Good luck with that.

[5] I’m deliberately using a small ‘c’ here to express all the statist and super-statist machinery put in place, not simply the ‘Constitution of the United States’.

[6] To my mind this goes back a long way, right to the beginning of the Colonial Rebellion when the insurrectionists allied themselves to absolutist France.

[7] I will admit that Salvador Allende’s elected communist government in Chile was hardly a success in its own right, but nevertheless the USA both overtly and covertly worked against it and ultimately supported the military coup that led to the many years of Pinochet dictatorship. I also note that the CIA to this day maintains that it played no active role in the coup. It is an interesting historical study.