It must be said that I am one of the most pessimistic people that I know. This is very much shaped by the kosmos in which I find myself in and likely a genetic disposition; both of which are crucial in character formation and one's view of one's self and one's place in the kosmos, and indeed the kosmos itself.
The way that I have been treated in the past by people who should have behaved better, leads me to believe that people are universally awful. The conclusions that I draw from my faith, lead me to make what I think is the reasonably logical conclusion that people are universally awful. My reading of disciplines like history, economics, the law, ethics and philosophy, also leads me to believe that people are universally awful. My experience both inside and around law courts, especially Criminal Law, Family Law, Commercial Law, yet again leads me to believe that people are universally awful.
It is a very real possibility to suggest at this point that I suffer from a massive dose of confirmation bias, but when you also consider that we have institutions like the police force and the law, insurance against fire, theft, and deliberate injury, the military generally, as well as the existence of charities and government agencies who exist to correct the effects of the universal awfulness of people, then I have good reason to believe that people are universally awful.
Nevertheless even with a glass half-empty approach, this does not mean that I have no hope at all that things can be better; quite the contrary. If the glass is half-empty then this means that it needs a top-up. If there is one thing that I can glean from my reading of history it is that on history's page at every stage, society is always either perpetually less than ten years from going through a Golden Age, or a an absolute abomination of a horrorshow. Selfishness is always a constant because human nature never ever changes. Likewise, when ordinary common folk realise that collectively and in community that they actually have more power than the few, things change very quickly. Every single generation has to fight the same battles again and again and again. This is simultaneously awful because there is no final victory and simultaneously brilliant because there is no final defeat either.
The sad truth is that since the beginning of time, the kosmos has been run by rich and powerful men. As little as 250 years ago, people could be and were owned by other people as chattel goods; to be worked and bought and sold. This was only stopped because people fought to have it stopped. Business people owned the workers and the land, and if any slave objected they were flogged or or hanged and that kept them in order. The other sad truth is that the only real wealth in the world is land and resources that lie in, on, an under it; and the only real source of power in the world, is who gets to say what happens to the land, resources, and the people.
It wasn't until the Reform Acts of the 1830s and then movements like the Abolitionists, Combinationists, the Chartists, the Trade Unions, the Suffragettes et cetera, that people who actually do the work in the kosmos, had any rights at all. The Abolitionists fought for the right to consider people as more than merely chattel goods to be bought and sold. The Combinationists fought for the right to organise and collectively agree to things. The Chartists fought for the right to extend the franchise, that is the right to vote, to ordinary men. The Trade Unions fought for proper working conditions. The Suffragettes fought for the right to extend the franchise to women. The point is that none of these things were given. Again and again, even the right to be considered as worthy to be spoken to and to speak, must be fought for. It is never ever voluntarily given up.
At its core, democracy and the right to speak and to speak up is a fearful thing for the rich and powerful who do not want to listen. It took me a while to find the following from Adolf Hitler's 1925 nasty piece of work on why he became an anti-Semite but along with his evil evil swirling piles of nonsense, he basically asserts that he thinks that democracy, would lead to dictatorship:
And in politics he (Jews) begins to replace the idea of democracy by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the organized mass of Marxism he has found the weapon which lets him dispense with democracy and in its stead allows him to subjugate and govern the peoples with a dictatorial and brutal fist.
He works systematically for revolutionization in a twofold sense: economic and political.
Around peoples who offer too violent a resistance to attack from within he weaves a net of enemies, thanks to his international influence, incites them to war, and finally, if necessary, plants a flag of revolution on the very battlefields.
- Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler (1925)
Perhaps the kindest way of looking at this is that the one thing that he recognized was that if people knew what was going on and organised themselves and had the right to organise themselves, then things would change in a way that he did not want or like.
He used the Jews and the Communists as an excuse to get into power, and he also held out the promise that if the people gave him the votes and give him power, then he would give people jobs. Well, he did do that in a way, he sent half of the unemployed to work in munitions factories and the other half of the unemployed to go and serve in the army. Also to be fair, Hitler did recognise that if he did away with democracy then it did allow him to subjugate and govern the peoples with a dictatorial and brutal fist.
While it might be valid to paint Hitler as monolithically evil, it is worth remembering that even he does not exist outside of context. His rise to power came after the Gilded Age in which the rewards of the kosmos went to the rich and powerful. He then fought in the war which was supposed to end all wars; which was fought by machinists and chemists finding new and interesting ways to kill people; all directed by the rich and powerful.
Perhaps I have not made this clear enough. We lost one hundred and five million people in two World Wars. That's one hundred and five million souls spent as the coin of the battlefield, just to pay the price of price of capitalism and imperial competition, the selfishness of the rich and powerful, and the insidiousness of the worst of humanity. It was only then, after human nature, stripped of all its skin, laying bleeding on the ground, was held up in lights to be universally awful, and it was only then things did change quickly.
Things like universal healthcare, old age pensions, public housing, and even the provision of electricity and water services in a lot of cases, only happened after a horrible price was paid. The British Labour Party before the end of the Second World War had this to say in its 1945 manifesto:
In the years that followed, the "hard-faced men" and their political friends kept control of the Government. They controlled the banks, the mines, the big industries, largely the press and the cinema. They controlled the means by which the people got their living. They controlled the ways by which most of the people learned about the world outside. This happened in all the big industrialised countries.
Great economic blizzards swept the world in those years. The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. These men had only learned how to act in the interest of their own bureaucratically-run private monopolies which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.
Similar forces are at work today.
- British Labour Party Manifesto, 1945
Similar forces are at work today, today. How very easily that this could have been written in 2023. During my lifetime, the rich and powerful have done an excellent job of degrading the welfare state, and have very successfully stolen back the things which our grandparents and great-grandparents fought and died for. The constant refrain coming from the same hymn sheet of the rich and powerful, is that we can not afford to extend decency to ordinary people because there isn't the budget for it.
The awful truth of the matter is that in times of war, Generals and Field Marshalls are not turned away because they happen tp exceeded their budget for the month. When the enemy is raining down bullets and other munitions fire in war time, you do whatever is required.
I think that it is absolutely scandalous that the rich and powerful people who will absolutely send millions out onto the battlefield to spend the coin of the battlefield, which is human blood and the lives of human souls, refuse to adopt that same principle in peace time.
What do people want in peace time? They want jobs. They want to be paid decently. They want somewhere to live and preferably to own their homes. They want a good education for their kids. They want health care and protection from disease. They want to be protected in their homes. If they're old, they want to be looked after. If governments can not do this in peace time, then they do not deserve to be within a million miles of the levers of power. The ultimate test of government policy should be whether or not those obligations are met.
And even me who is the perpetual pessimist, whose base assumption is that people are universally awful, knows that if people fight, they can occasionally achieve decency for ordinary people.
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