We have riots here in Vancouver, B.C after a hockey game, riots in England after the sad death of Mark Duggan. There are fundamental differences between these two events, and even more so between these and citizen uprisings in Libya, Iran, Egypt, Syria, etc..
Mark Duggan
While the chemistry, the general catalyst of what gets the population to move en masse may be very much the same among all of these incidents, the root cause is fundamentally different. We could say one is ideologically driven while the other is driven for the most part by a much simpler set of personal wants or desires.
There is for the most part nothing wrong with these wants – these ideas. The basic principles, before they are perverted and eclipsed by self-enrichment and wanton destruction, are logically very sound. Many of these ideas were first discussed by proponents of population control as early as 1798 when Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population.”
This is not to say that all of Malthus’s ideas proved to be correct or that they are all sound; some still remain to be proven today. I do think it is for the most part universally agreed, whatever your belief system, that the earth is unable to sustain an ever-growing population. As population increases, if we continue with this current incarnation of capitalism (let’s call it Capitalism 3.0.) for too long, we would of course be headed for trouble.
The trouble is if we stay with 3.0 for much longer than a few more hundred years we could be headed towards a dystopian nightmare of epic proportions. The basic idea is so simple that even I can understand it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being self-depreciating; in a sense I’m being a realist in that these are exceedingly complex issues.
Issues of humanity such as nationalism, secularism vs religion, hegemony, natural resources, global warming, dictators, terrorism….
I’m glad that as with proctologists, there are very well-educated people who like to tackle these issues. I’m not saying they always act well-educated, I’m just saying that if there is a job that requires someone to be looking up asses all day and they are paid well for it – good for you, keep it up.
International politics is surely more glamorous than proctology, but I have this feeling that if you’re a person of character you come home feeling like you’ve been doing work of the latter type all day anyway.
It seems self-evident that overall, globally, the complexity of the governance of billions of people is not something that can be worked out on a napkin in a restaurant (though I have met a number of people in my life who claim that it can be done, and in fact have demonstrated it).
We have come to know there are some basic flaws. One of the most glaring is 3.0’s basic premise of consumption and growth. These are HUGE topics and realistically, you and I trying to delve into them on a blog without having 95% of us snoring by the end is problematic.
But if we want to address at least in part some of the reasons for these destructive mobs in Canada and Britain, we need to see that there is a very strong element of disillusionment, in fact, rage:
“Why is there a universal awareness of this injustice yet absolutely nothing is being done?”
We could be like many pundits and bloggers on the net and reach for the lowest hanging fruit. We could point to human greed and walk away – “what can be done?” Herein lies the problem. It is self-evident that the system is cracking at the seams.
Quantitive easing? This is a nice way of saying that the government prints money, and then buys its own bonds with it. Surely this is a simplification? Surely it is – and don’t call me Shirley.
But even if this is a simplification, do we ever make anything right by obfuscating the truth with mountains of data? And mountains of data we have! Try to comprehend hundreds of years of diplomats, politicians, lawyers, business man, countries, etc, spending millions of hours, discussing, and finally after much ballyhoo, agreeing on international law: the mountains of paper – simply staggering!
The youth are angry and in fact, so am I. Mass consumerism has produced a world where the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is so precisely engineered that as a consumer you get this feeling that you’ve just been had. Our governments, being diluted by capitalist interests, have allowed the competition pool to become increasingly smaller. So small that some of today’s corporations are quite literally in the position whereas they can snicker and say, “where can they go?”
Now that I have opened this can of worms…my last paragraph comes off as left leaning, anti capitalist, etc. Quite the opposite – I fully believe in capitalism and democracy. It is just as I first mentioned above, we need to find a way to get from 3.0 to 4.0. I suspect that 4.0 won’t be quite enough of a revision so for argument’s sake, let’s say in 2100 we are approaching 5.0, maybe even 6.0. The idea is to push the evolution of the thing along – not accept it for what it is.
We need to find a healthy equilibrium by 2200-2300 or humanity could be set back thousands of years, if we are to exist at all. The last time such a thing happened, called the Dark Ages, a powerful unopposed ideology was allowed to run rampant without checks and balances. It could happen again and it would happen for essentially the same reasons – an ideology allowed to run rampant without checks and balances, this time called capitalism.
So in the next edition of “Beautiful Anger” I want to take a closer look at what a very simple Capitalism 4.0 might look like, and if that would ameliorate some of the current distrust and dissatisfaction that is building in societies all over the world. I would also like to look at some of the complex issues that always seem to get in the way of lasting multilateral agreements; and why some people’s oversimplification of these issues is just as damaging as unnecessary complexity.
Until next time.
