I came across this survey, which was being touted in a newspaper (I won't say which one because I'd rather that that particular whole media group goes bankrupt; they don't need the advertising revenue); trying to say how generous people are:
https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/45956-what-should-living-standards-look-people-benefits-
- 76% of Britons believe that everyone should be able to afford their utility bills
- 74% think everyone should have the means to eat a balanced diet
- 60% think seasonal celebrations should be attainable for everyone
- 55% think that everyone should be able to afford a television
- 27% think that those on any income should have the chance to go out socialising
This particular media group was patting itself on the back; trying to suggest that only through voluntary means, should anything get done, and that we should look at how generous people are.
All of that sounds good and proper until you realise what the other side of those equations are.
A quarter of people think that poor people don't deserve electricity or clean water. A third of people think that people don't deserve holidays. A staggering three-quarters of people surveyed think that poor people don't deserve to see their friends, or possibly even have any friends at all.
I won't say that I am surprised at this. There has definitely been a cultural shift over about the last fifteen years, where you have a very brutal and cruel rich and powerful, dictating to people how to think. This looks very much like Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theory of the rise of The Stupid, being weaponised for fun and profit. People are easily convinced to hate people who look different from themselves because at the centre of the human heart, is the beating out of a selfish rhythm.
This current gilded age is slightly different to the previous gilded age of the 1890s to 1914 because this gilded age comes with the leftovers of the post-war welfare state. Things like mass literacy, sewerage systems, telephony, gas, and electricity, were mostly constructed around the world with monies raised by governments because the people had actually fought in two world wars and won the moral justification and ability to make a claim at law, to things that they aught to have.
Curiously, the winner of the post-war peace, which was unashamedly the United States, never actually paid the price for modern civilization in anything like the same degree as European nations did. Consequently, it has spent the past 80 years marinating its brain in the myth that it constructed for itself, that it was rampant individualism which caused its greatness, and not the destruction of 100 million souls across Europe and Asia, and untold quadrillions of PoundMarkFrankRoubleYens in the destruction of physical capital everywhere else.
If you choose to marinate an entire population in the myth that individuals built the nation, instead of the obvious and easily proven realty that this is nothing more than a cussing lie (quite literally the Eisenhower Interstate System was the biggest and most expensive piece of socialist infrastructure in the history of the world), then what you get is a very small and powerful group of evilly cruel cussjacks who benefit, and an awful lot of people who actually aren't that marginally better off than their forebears were a century before.
The United States' rampant individualism and the propaganda which radiates out like the smell from a maggot infested corpse, has poisoned the media networks of other nations; because there is good profit motivation for doing so. I live in Australia, so that means that American media groups now control one of the free-to-air television networks as 70% of all the print media, and quite a sizable pay-TV outlet.
So it really doesn't surprise me, that Britain and especially the kinds of people who are likely to take part in a survey such as this, have swung further to the crueller authoritarian right. If they were to ask people slightly more pointed questions and ask if they think that poorer people are in fact human, then history has also given us the term "unnützer Esser" or "useless eaters" to describe people with disabilities and others deemed "life unworthy of life.
By labelling some people as a burden on society, it's not a far lap to justify their persecution and euthanasia. Remember, it isn't murder if we don't consider them as worthy of life in the first place.
Over here on the other side of the world, we like to imagine ourselves as being different than our anglophone cousins on the other side of the world but really, the same kinds of people who run media and marketing companies up there, are not only the same people but actually the same media and marketing companies.
Worse, if you actually do bother to look at an empirical measurement at how generous people are, we find that total charitable giving amounts to no more than 1.9% of GDP and if you include donations to religious organisations like churches and mosques, this is only bumped up to 2.7%.
The actual truth is that people are not generous and that the number of people who think that poor people don't deserve even the basic things in life to make it tolerable, is and was and always will be the case. What's worse is that this is only going to get worse in the future.
33% of people rent, and a full 16% of GDP is on rent. That rent is paid out of post taxed income, to the very same scumbags who think that poorer people shouldn't have anything nice ever.
It's hardly surprising.
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