Wednesday 24 March 2021
Infamous and irremediable
It was one of the tolerated scandals of Sambir, disapproved and accepted, a manifestation of that base acquiescence in success, of that inexpressed and cowardly toleration of strength, that exists, infamous and irremediable, at the bottom of all hearts, in all societies; whenever men congregate.
Joseph Conrad - An Outcast of the Islands (1896)
There is no doubt that the UK establishment is powerful - as they are in all functioning nations. It has the money, power and narrative controls to do as it chooses. The only constraints are broad constraints such as economic reality, the outer limits of believability and the remarkably broad and forgiving limits of internal incompetence. Because of course, establishments usually forgive themselves for their incompetence.
The coronavirus debacle highlights this as nothing else has within my lifetime. We voters are less than pawns in a partly covert game and are likely to remain so. To my mind the dispiriting aspect of the whole sorry mess is that far too many people are not disposed to analyse political issues. They dislike and ignore conclusions which vary significantly from interlinked establishment narratives.
This crucial weakness is made worse by establishment narratives which include threads of misdirected criticism parody and even satire. Or a façade of challenging opposition which may be challenging but rarely represents significant opposition.
If establishments begin to rot from the inside then nothing much can be done. We have lies, corruption and incompetence in any establishment, but if they become too prominent, where is the way back apart from a resurgence of honesty and integrity? Where would that come from here in the UK?
As things stand we appear to be doomed.
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2 comments:
The UK establishment remains strong, but is existentially threatened by two major trends. The first is an internal crisis of legitimacy due to the internet. As noted here before, "We've got the internet now, so we know you are a bunch of liars!" My guess is that the Covid controls imposed on us by the government are far more strongly resisted than those imposed, say, during the Spanish flu. We are slowly becoming a nation of sceptics.
The second trend is globalisation and the interconnectedness of ideas and supply chains. The establishment are in fact pretty powerless when faced with multinational tax avoidance, the spread of new ideas like radical Islam or new products like pornography, and disruptions to international trade. How will it end? At the moment, it looks like Chinese vassalage, but after a long uncomfortable decline.
Sam - I've not seen much resistance to the Covid controls. Many people seem to approve of or tolerate them as necessary inconveniences, although as we know, sceptical views are very easy to find on the internet.
There appear to be various aspects to the power of the establishment and it is easy to frame optimistic versions too. Numbers could be one. Many monster global businesses need huge numbers of customers to spend their money, the more the better.
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