That double-faced companion

Above all things he feared imagination, that double-faced companion, friend on one side and foe on the other – friend in so far as one distrusts it, and enemy if one goes trustfully to sleep to the sound of its sweet murmur.

Ivan Goncharov – Oblamov

Spinoza distrusted imagination, seeing it as the primary form of defective and deceptive thinking. However, both his view and Goncharov’s may have been influenced by the absurdly superstitious worlds in which they found themselves.

These days we value our imagination, often equating it to creativity. Yet I think Spinoza and Goncharov had a point and we should distrust its sweet murmur. It seems to me that vast swathes of political reasoning are little more than the sweet murmur of imagination swirling around some more or less nebulous utopian core.

Impossibilities dressed up as possibilities, like a dream where we swoop and soar through fluffy clouds supported by nothing better than the power of the unconscious mind to pooh pooh physics.

One day there will be an app for people who hanker after a more active imagination. An app which knows our habits and limitations will trawl the web to find some imaginative yet personalised possibilities complete with bespoke ads and special offers...

...and that’s enough imagination for one day.

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Where our enemy hides

In my view a significant proportion of the public sector generates junk. This is largely achieved by ignoring efficiency and by gold-plating regulations.

The private sector also generates junk via market logic – if the customer can be persuaded to accept it, then junk it is.

So we end up with two broad types of junk and have been conditioned to accept both. This is politically convenient because it generates an endless source of misdirection over those we see as the political good guys and those we see as bad. Good junk versus bad junk.

In order to form an idea of an unknown situation our imagination borrows elements that are already familiar.

Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu

The real problem seems to be one of power – obviously. If governments, bureaucracies or global companies have too much power then they abuse it by filling our lives with junk. They don’t necessarily abuse it because ratbags are running the show, although that’s often the case, but because there is no adequate opposition. We are insufficiently junkphobic.

So we have far too many regulations, far too many constraints on individual freedom and vast global companies buy their way into the corridors of power and our lives. These trends are obviously not desirable, but the surest way to misunderstand them is to present modern politics as an antiquated left/right dichotomy.

There is no left/right dichotomy except in our political traditions which have long outlived their usefulness. The same applies to traditional political parties.

The only political issue is who has the power, what they are doing with it. If those with the power collude as they now do, then we have power structures which cannot be effectively opposed from a traditional left/right standpoint.

So the only political reality is global trends in political and economic power. The old left/right dichotomy doesn’t even come close to an adequate narrative.

This is not where our enemy hides.

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A letter to Mr Nigel Farage MEP

Dear Mr Farage

EU debate with Nick Clegg: suggestions

 

Please accept my congratulations on your accepting Nick Clegg’s challenge – one that, I hope, he will have good reason to regret having made.  May I offer some points to raise in the debate?

 

Not “why should we leave?” but “why should we join?”:  Some argue – and I think they’re right – that the English Constitution cannot be altered without the express consent of all parties, including the Commons speaking for themselves, not through elected representatives. If that is so, then all acts to date of the British Government and Parliament implying surrender of sovereignty in any degree, are ultra vires.  Why not offer Clegg that as a hypothetical starting point, and ask what reasons he could give for us to surrender our sovereignty to the EU? This shifts the onus to him.

 

College of Europe: What exactly did Clegg learn in his year there, and did he make any oaths or give any undertakings that might conflict with his duty as a British MP and Minister?

 

UK Parliament: continuing the conflict of interest theme, should all in either House who have been EU Commissioners or otherwise stand to lose their EU pension and privileges if they fail to represent a pro-EU point of view, not merely declare their interest but recuse themselves from voting or taking part in any debate that has an EU dimension?

Yours sincerely

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Frankenjigsaw

Politics has become the art of the impossible.

We have a dysfunctional economy because we have a dysfunctional society, and vice versa. The pieces in the jigsaw box don't match up with the picture on the lid.

The picture shows people providing manufactures and services for each other. Families are holding together through thick and thin, and raising their children with love and discipline. Tax rates are low because money velocity and employment are high and few need to call on the safety net of the Welfare State. After paying for the necessaries of life, there is money left over to save for emergencies and old age, and saving is worthwhile because the currency keeps its value. The country is self-governing and at peace with its neighbours. Our leaders work for our best interests, arbitrating fairly between the demands of different groups.

The pieces we have now don't make that picture, and they don't even fit each other.

Our leaders have given our law and governance to the EU, effectively abandoned border controls, sold our economic base to foreign interests and combined to oppose electoral reform that would make them more answerable to the voters.

So to distract from their comprehensive failure, they select victims to be the lightning-rods for our anger. The recent "life means life" ruling on prisoners is to give us the illusion that our judicial system is independent of Europe; benefit claimants are demonised so that we don't ask why we haven't got jobs for them to do; economic immigrants, because they cannot be excluded, are to be treated as second-class citizens (in terms of social benefits) when they arrive.

This is reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revolution, the cynical sowing of factional discord to secure control at the top. It feels like an era is ending, and those in the know are looting the system before the collapse. If Martin Armstrong's theory is correct, it's all inevitable, part of the long-cycle economic pulse that is bringing both Marxism and representative democracy to an end.

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For Wisley, read the UK

In the latest edition of the Spectator, Melissa Kite is distributing leaflets on behalf of a local action group, about the proposed massive (2,175 houses) residential property development in Wisley. The beneficiaries, she claims, are based in the Cayman Islands (though in 2012 there was also some legal dispute in Jersey, another offshore tax haven) and stand to make a billion pounds, tax-free.

Kite says that she has been warned off her campaign by people who told her they would "wear her down"; Surrey County Council seem to have managed it in the case of another residents' association chairman at the back end of last year.

The nominee company in the Jersey case was Prestigic (Wisley) Nominees Limited Company, whose address appears to be the same as that of Prestigic Holdings Limited (Chairman: Adrian Goldsmith). It also shares that address with a chi-chi Indian restaurant called Gymkhana; the horsey connection might vaguely appeal to an equestrian fan like Melissa.

We in the UK already have to import half our food, and I don't know of any program to convert housing back to arable land. Once it's gone, it's gone, and Heaven help us if we're ever in a food crisis again as we were in the 1940s.

In any case, I have long thought that we don't have a housing shortage. Here is what I wrote two years ago (3 September 2011):

"Panellists on Radio 4's Any Questions? and Charles Moore in this week's Spectator magazine agree (with lots of others, it seems) that there is a housing shortage in the UK and the only question is how to satisfy it. I beg to differ, or at least think we can question the assumption.

1. "According to The Empty Homes Agency, there are an estimated 870,000 empty homes in the UK and enough empty commercial property to create 420,000 new homes", according to the BBC website section on Homes.

2. There are over 245,000 registered second homes in the UK, according to Schofields home insurers.

3. The 2001 census showed that average home occupation in England and Wales had declined from 10 years before, from 2.51 to 2.36 persons.

4. According to the official Housing Survey of 2008/9, 7.7 million households were couples with no dependent children; there were also 6.2 million single person households (up from 3.8 million in 1981).

5. The same survey showed that the average (mean) dwelling had 2.8 bedrooms, rising to 3.0 bedrooms for owner-occupiers. Fewer than 3% of households were defined as overcrowded.

6. According to a 2005 Home Office study, there were 310,000 - 570,000 illegal immigrants in the UK, a figure which MigrationWatch thought to be underestimated by 15,000 - 85,000. This is a separate issue from the 8.7% of the population who are economic migrants to the UK, and whose real net contribution to the economy (after taking into account all benefits to which they and their dependants may be entitled) is a matter of debate.

We are not in the situation we faced in 1945, when soldiers returning home from war squatted on military sites and even caves. The modern "housing shortage" is an arbitrary notion."

Fight on, Ms Kite.

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Breaking windows

From Wikipedia

The broken window parable has interested me for years, because much of what we do seems akin to breaking windows.

Much of what we do seems :-

Designed to fail so we can do it again.

Designed to fail so we can buy another one.

Designed to fail so we need regular maintenance.

Designed to fail so we need regular policing.

Designed to fail the vagaries of fashion.

Designed to be laborious so we need more staff.

Designed to be complex so we need more consultants.

And so on and so on. It seems to be a feature of almost any society - promoting wasteful activity once we have a full belly and a warm hut. When we can afford some illusions to keep reality at bay.

Even a Dark Age village may have been able to feed a travelling story-teller in return for a night or two of entertainment - to keep reality at bay.

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Byways

AK Haart wonders about the uselessness of much research, calling it "remunerated gossip" (a phrase that might be re-used to describe modern Parliamentary proceedings). 

Yet we never know where a line of enquiry might lead, and how profitably. Look at penicillin: Alexander Fleming was not the first to discover its bactericidal effect, and when he did he soon gave up trying to exploit it. 

Edward de Bono, the "lateral thinking" man, noted that we come to useful ideas or solutions in roundabout ways and only then build a straight path from A to B. The internet - which itself has developed into something nobody expected - is bound to result in countless fruitful connections being made, by the sort of creative intellectual bummeln that web-surfing allows. 

Granted, there will also be rubbish and (apparent) dead-ends, but if one in a billion notions gets us somewhere, then 2.4 billion users playing with the Net on pretty much a daily basis are certainly going to come up with something.

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