Consciousness of Sheep
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A friend recently shared a link to a petition concerning water pollution. This has become a headline political issue in the UK, where the privatised water companies have failed to invest in the treatment infrastructure which is supposed to prevent sewage being discharged into our rivers and seas… a problem compounded by neoliberal deregulation of the house building regulations which allow building companies to connect new developments to existing infrastructure even if there is insufficient capacity – the result being that when it rains, as it is wont to do here in the British Isles, raw sewage overflows into storm drains. Clearly – as almost all of our politicians agree – something must be done.
Therein though, is one of the big unspoken crises of our age. Because nobody knows how to actually do anything anymore. Mary Harrington at UnHerd recently drew attention to this in an article about that other growing political issue in the UK… potholes:
“During a recent campaign visit to Darlington, in which he promised to address Britain’s pothole-ridden roads, [prime minister Rishi] Sunak pointed out a particularly large offender to the national media. But even after becoming, however briefly, Britain’s most famous bit of missing tarmac, it took another two weeks before anyone came along to fix it…
“[The Tories’] solution to potholes is not shovels and tarmac but more regulations and fines. And, collectively, the result is dysfunction in our national executive: an anxious, purposeless, neurotic cycling and re-cycling of thought, chronically un-translated into action — because those who thought of them lack the moral confidence to propagate their vision among more practical members of the polity.”
With this in mind, I began to think through just how many – if you will excuse a bit of managerial-speak – measurable and time-bound steps would be required between my signing that petition about sewage, and an end state in which British rivers and coastal waters no longer have shoals of Taff salmon bobbing around in them. It turns out that even the petition was a scam – not an official government petition which, with enough signatures, would at least require a parliamentary debate, but rather a data-harvesting exercise designed to grow the income of the corporation running petitions.
This, in turn, is an example of why I have lost all interest in the incessant whining of the fake-left. Because like the political class, the fake left makes political capital from inaction. This is not to say that they don’t do things – I am on the mailing list of a local activist group who regularly insist that if we all stand out in the rain and wave placards around, every decision from the coronation of King Charles to the local council’s closure of the library will magically be reversed… which, it goes without saying, never succeeds.
Meanwhile, in the online culture war, we learn that this politician “was owned,” while that one “was shredded.” But despite the carnage this lurid clickbate suggests, nothing ever really changes. The neoliberal uniparty remains in power, and the technocrats continue to steer everything in the same direction… at least in the days before the neoliberal revolution, the technocrats pretended that they were implementing the politicians’ manifesto pledges. These days they practically rip up the manifesto as soon as a government is elected… “Whaddayah gonna do about it anyway?”
And, of course, what we are going to do is to set up an online petition, stand in the rain for an hour, and make a YouTube video claiming to have “destroyed” the minister. Meanwhile, neoliberal business as usual continues on its merry way entirely unperturbed by our righteous indignation.
This is the great unsung success of modern imperialism in its “stakeholder capitalist” disguise… it has completely neutered its opposition, even to the point of convincing its non-opponents that in some way it is on their side… “No, really, ESG investment rules and carbon quotas will definitely cool the global temperature. And don’t forget to bung us another $100 billion for that nuclear fusion reactor which can never provide the clean energy we promised.”
The great fusion con is an example of the same crisis of governance that Mary Harrington observes with potholes. And once you see it, you realise that it is everywhere. Because the whole purpose of the neoliberal revolution was to neuter government and reduce it to an organ which does little more than shovel out corporate welfare to anyone capable of spinning a good enough story. We saw it most recently during the pandemic, where billions of pounds were thrown at fly-by-night companies which failed to deliver everything from respirators to coveralls. It is the basis of a cancerous consultancy industry which couldn’t exist in a world where governments were still able to do things for themselves. And it laid the ground for a host of parasitic outsourcing corporations which run just about every former government function you can imagine… until they fail, of course.
As we discovered in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum seven years ago, not one of the 480,000 people employed in the UK civil service had the first idea how to go about negotiating a trade deal. Nor does anybody in the permanent state remember how to operate a railway, an energy grid or a water company… which is why, despite persistent failure, these public monopolies keep getting handed back to the same private companies.
Critical infrastructure is the point where air-headed policy and activist fantasizing run head-on into the limits imposed by the physical universe. And for anyone paying attention, we observe this failure becoming more common by the hour. So called “green energy,” for example, has outrun the grid infrastructure upon which it depends… something the grid engineers have been warning about for decades. In the same way, all of that WEF guff about fourth industrial revolutions, the internet of things, and the dreaded singularity, is being derailed by the lack of communications bandwidth, the increasing cost of building the new communications infrastructure, and the high cost of the energy needed to power it all. Even those pesky potholes are merely a symptom of a decaying transport infrastructure which threatens serious disruption to the real-world, just-in-time logistics which keep the economy functioning.
Perhaps, if only we lived on an infinite world, awash with all of the cheap energy and resources we desired, we might find a way to muddle along. After all, when Thatcher and Reagan began the neoliberal revolution, new oil from the North Sea, the North Alaskan Slope and the Gulf of Mexico was just putting in an appearance, underpinning the deregulation of the western financial system that generated the debt-based boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. It was that debt-based boom which allowed Clinton and Blair to cement the revolution in place… the majority of us placated by the illusion that our houses were earning more than we were. And so long as the oil and gas kept flowing, the boom could go on indefinitely.
Which brings us to the crisis of governance today. Despite the incompetence of the chancers and ne’er do wells who rode the wave of populism behind Brexit and MAGA, the underlying popular desire to “take back control” is all too real. It is nostalgic, of course… conjuring the ghost of a by-gone post-war age when governments administered the critical infrastructure upon which national economies were based. It was a time when elections could really change the way things were done, and when governments would embark on massive projects like landing people on the moon, developing commercial supersonic flight, and even attempting to construct functioning Welfare States and Great Societies. Those days though, are but a distant memory. Under Clinton and Blair – both lawyers – governments no longer administered change, but merely legislated for it. And under Cameron and Osborne (PPE graduates) and their successors, even the drafting of legislation had to be outsourced… which ought to leave you wondering why we pay more than ever for a government which seemingly does less than ever with each passing year.
So, where does this leave us? We face a raft of crises which I refer to as the bottleneck, including: antibiotic resistance, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, cyber-attacks, energy shortages, famine, financial crises, governance failure, infrastructure failure, microplastic contamination, migration waves, natural disasters, nutrient run-off, ocean acidification, resource depletion, soil depletion, war, water shortages, and weapons of mass destruction, to name but a few. It is possible that the online conspiratorium is correct, and that the residents of Versailles-on-Thames are fully aware of our predicament and are keeping it quiet so as not to panic us. More likely though, our modern-day Marie Antoinettes, safe in their metropolitan pockets of gated affluence, are simply unaware of the crises washing over us. And even if they were, beyond setting up an Apocalypse Working Group, it is doubtful that they would be capable of responding anyway.
Which is simply to point out, dear reader, that you are on your own. Because, for all the noise emitted by the self-identifying vanguard of the proletariat and their MAGA/Brexiteer opponents, both continue to believe that the route to salvation lies in grabbing “levers of power” which were disconnected decades ago. Playing musical chairs with the people in the debating chamber may make for good theatre, but with a permanent state technocracy that has long since forgotten how to administer anything, little beyond the most superficial change is possible by electing your chosen team to government. Meanwhile, the growing bottleneck crises will force radical change on us whether we like it or – more likely – not.
As you made it to the end…
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