This is a story about the pecking order...

Respect my authority. I did well in school and I've risen up the chain of command. I have stripes on my epaulettes and letters after my name. I've got a fancy job title and I'm very well paid. Don't-you-know-who-I-am and I'm oh-so-superior to the likes of you. Back in your place, underling. Get back in line.

Our systems of population control breed subservience. Why don't the workers rise up and seize the means of production?

"I'm not good with numbers"

"I've got no interest in politics"

"I just keep my head down and do what I'm told"

Could there be anything more degrading than having your fellow human beings sitting in judgement over you? Who are they to say "yay" or "nay" on the question of your utility? How dare they decide your fate!

Job insecurity keeps wages down, because workers develop a misplaced sense of gratitude for their income. In hard economic terms, workers get a terrible deal: they do all the work and they only see a tiny fraction of the profit. Why on earth would they do that?

"You're easily replaced"

Yes. While I dislike people who attempt to make themselves into key-man dependencies and build little fiefdoms of complexity to make themselves indispensable, I also think that the commodification of human beings is one of the most awful things that's happening in the modern world.

What happened to the artisan; the craftsman?

Small is beautiful, in a way. Think back to a time when each village had a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker. There was the blacksmith, the miller, the cobbler, the tailor, the farrier, the thatcher. There were apprentices aplenty and sons followed in their father's footsteps.

Of course, it's easy to bring up infant mortality and the large number of women who died during childbirth. Infections and treatable diseases used to be fatal. In the past, manual labour, poor diet and poor healthcare, meant that life expectancy was much lower. People were superstitious and afraid of death and disease. Nobody went skydiving.

Now, nobody has any place. We live with terrible insecurity. We could lose our jobs and have our homes repossessed at any moment. If your job becomes redundant due to ever-advancing technological changes and globalisation, you're unlikely to be able to afford to retrain. Besides, how would you ever even compete with all the people who are already trained and vying for the few available jobs?

What's the purpose of anything? What meaning is there to anything?

It was pretty clear why you got up at the crack of dawn to light the fire in the ovens: because if you didn't, people wouldn't have any bread and they'd be pissed off about that. In the village, everybody would be like "no fucking bread" and "yeah, I know. Shit isn't it!"

Now, why did you work hard at school, go to university, battle through those job interviews and kiss arses as you squirmed your way up the greasy pole; the career ladder? So you can punch numbers into a spreadsheet and give powerpoint presentations? So you can go to meetings and sit on cramped commuter trains? So you can eat pre-packaged sandwiches at your desk, getting crumbs all over the keyboard? Why the fuck are you even alive? What's the point of your existence?

If you're trying to get a fancier car so you can impress your friends and neighbours, or if you're trying to get a pay rise and a promotion, so you can 'win' and brag about how rich and successful you are, then perhaps you've found your purpose. Perhaps status symbols and meaningless job titles are the answer to the big question: why are we here?

What happens when it all goes bang and the whole fucking mess comes tumbling down? What happens when you realise you wasted your whole fucking life? You can't eat university diplomas or bonds or banknotes. You can't keep a house warm with supply chain statistics or flow diagrams. You can't live in an insurance certificate or legal contract. You can't clothe yourself with tax returns, essays, dissertations or theses.

Our world has divided into two camps: the celebrities and the nobodies; the powerful and the powerless; the rich and the poor; the smart and the stupid; the valuable and the valueless.

Did you ever notice how anybody who's anybody is rich, famous, powerful, smart and incredibly valuable to humanity, and everybody else is a worthless nobody who can go to hell? "Everybody else" accounts for 99% of the world's population, by the way.

Who wants to read the autobiography of Ahmad who sits behind the counter at my local dry cleaner? He must be pretty stupid if he's not powerful or rich. He's not famous so he can't have any value. He knows his place, which is about the only good thing we can say about him, right?

Modern society has led to city living because of economies of scale. It makes sense to have a multi-billion dollar mass transit system in a city, to make it easy for everybody to get to work efficiently. It makes sense to build all the high-rise head offices that can hold thousands of people, in one place. The net result is urban solitude and anonymity. Nobody knows who their neighbours are. Nobody knows who the local shopkeepers are. Nobody knows anybody, except the rich famous people who are the only ones with any value: they're indispensable.

One face is the same as another. Two workers who've held the same job title are interchangeable. Hire and fire. Who gives a fuck... human lives are cheap. Make the balloon go higher by chucking more bodies onto the fire.

We are running our economy by the numbers: we're wedded to our spreadsheets and all we care about is that this month's numbers are bigger than last month's numbers. Growth! Growth! Growth! More! More! More!

The top tier - our rulers, our managers, our executives - look at the graphs: are they going up? Who gives a fuck what's going on at the bottom. The tip of the iceberg is in charge of the rest.

You're drowning and freezing cold in the icy depths. You're part of that huge mass of ice beneath the surface, but you'd better not try and climb out of the water or else you'll topple the whole system and plunge the tiny tip into the depths... and nobody wants that, do they?

Chances are that you could do a better job than those in charge, because the country couldn't get much worse: inequality is a disgrace, poverty is rife, depression and suicide rates are skyrocketing, life is miserable and there are few prospects.

We're supposed to be ruled over by a house of commons: ordinary people from all walks of life. In fact, career politicians and massive political parties supported by wealthy donors & commercial interests, completely dominate the political landscape. We live in a plutocracy, as evidenced by the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

I count the middle class in the 'poor' bracket.

Of course, it seems ridiculous to suggest that well paid educated professional people in the middle class are poor - they have the best jobs, high quality housing and disposable income - but within a generation or two, the middle class are going to be utterly fucked. Skyrocketing house prices just don't work: they will erode your wealth, because you want somewhere for your kids and grandkids to live, don't you? Unless you live in a castle big enough for all future generations of your family, you're going to need some affordable housing at some point.

University tuition fees and the cost of student accommodation, comes on top of the private school fees you paid in order to get your little darlings the straight-A grades they needed to get onto the few degree courses that might lead to an actual job. A job doing fucking what exactly?

OK, so your silver-spooned little shits got themselves a degree and a professional qualification in law or accountancy or something, but you're going to have to fork out £100k+ to get them onto the housing ladder. Your terribly bright and brilliant kids now need a place to live near their job - London and the South-East - which means top dollar house prices.

Wealth has been hoarded by the baby-boomers who were gifted it by good luck and the inflation that eroded their debts relative to their incomes. The baby-boomers are now having to fork out all that filthy lucre in order to support their children and grandkids. There just aren't any well paid jobs that allow our special snowflake millennials to support themselves financially, no matter how hard they work.

So, the only group who have a place are the ones at the top of the pile: the ones who already control more wealth than they could ever spend in a hundred lifetimes, and who can easily generate some more because they already have the money, the fame and the power to make a success out of whatever the fuck they want to do. I mean, Paris Hilton is a DJ now, for fuck's sake: she presses the play button on a CD player and people pay to see that fucking shit.

All in all, why bother? Why the struggle? Why the stress? Why the anxiety and and the insecurity and the hideousness of battling over the crumbs from the cake?

We're all fighting with each other at the bottom, like crabs in a bucket, pulling down anybody who tries to escape.

Just stay in your place though. Don't complain. I'm sure those in charge know best.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #economics