One Nation .. Two Worlds: From Julijuxtaposed
I don’t think the comfortable but rapidly diminishing middle classes really want to see the poor made poorer, or to gain particularly at their expense. They just believe, albeit very mistakenly, that there’s not enough to go round so they think they’re protecting their interests. They have swallowed the snake oil argument that says this is the way the world works so this is the way it must continue to work. They don’t really know if the poor are ‘undeserving’ but the notion of it soothes conscience and provides convenient justification to instincts, ambitions and actions.
This must not endure. It’s entropic and we all know it, whether consciously or by that nagging discomfort deep in the pits of our stomachs. Actually, we know it literally cannot endure because, if it does, its prognosis will look like a scene from Kozintsev. The plenty-rich-enough really will have to live in gated, high security communities with helicopter pads and armed escorts for exit because the outside world – the real world – will be ruthless, hostile and just a tad lawless. The nightmares portrayed by science fiction all set to become fast approaching realities as the abandoned become increasingly destitute in ever greater number.
We already talk, in jest and seriousness, about the other planet that the 0.1-1% inhabits but really, today’s grimmest quality of life will seem like an aspiration if we don’t get a grip of our leaders and their bloody and bloodied interests. We truly will have two worlds: one with all the good food, clean water, reliable energy, effective medicine, education and technology (for a while anyway); the other: the dehumanising beg-steal-and-make-do environment of arcane feudalism, replete with all its arbitrary day-to-day precariousness.
Right! Melodramatic mini rant over! Back to being forever open and on the alert for all pockets of light and hope…
See Soylent Green, George Osborne and Plutonomy, Think Left.
Think Left 
I suggest that what is beginning to be felt by the fringes, at least, of the middle classes is more – a gnawing fear of a kind that hasn’t really been endemic in this country for 150 years, a fear of a terrible pit just beneath them which they begin to realise could so easily swallow them.
Meanwhile the 1% have embarked on a journey on which there’ll soon be no turning back, as the demonised poor become what, for short-sighted political reasons, those with power have been panting them as – an unruly, antisocial subclass who won’t conform to the requirements of the 1%. Once you create an oppressed mass, you have no choice but to keep oppressing it, forever upping the pressure; and, of course, that is unsustainable.
There’s talk of ‘the return of the workhouse’ and other Victorian horrors. It might be more realistic to see a return of the 1700s, with a new but essentially similar aristocracy of arrogant wealth. Shall we then have to re-travel the struggles of the subsequent centuries? It will be a more bloody journey if we do.
Please wait just five years before you accuse me of nonsensical alarmism.
Rant rant… mine over too, now.
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Oh, I hear you, Sam! Your rant is certainly NOT “nonsensical alarmism” – it may yet be an understatement when I think of where this government is encouraging my imagination to travel!
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Reblogged this on this 'n that.
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