The Quiet Road

At 10:40 this morning, it was announced that “EU finance ministers have formally approved the €85bn rescue package for Ireland along with its terms and conditions”. Brace yourself for a shitstorm, Ireland. And to the rest of Europe I say… “witness your future”.

It’s starting to look like a fait accompli. Barring either a popular revolution or a massive swing to the left parties (Sinn Féin or The United Left Alliance) in the New Year election, the Irish people are to be saddled with a huge debt they did not run up.

It’s like a nightmare from the 1980s. Like nobody’s learnt the lessons of the failed IMF interventions, the Long Depressions and deprivation, the political extremism and social fragmentation. Imposing these kinds of policies in the face of an ongoing global recession is utter madness. I’ve heard all the conspiracy theories about why the institutions of global capitalism would want to provoke this kind of economic collapse… but none of them convince me. They require too much vision from people we know have none. They require a level of organisation from the political elite that their overt incompetence precludes.

Later this afternoon, the government will reveal what is widely expected to be the most draconian budget in the history of the nation. The minimum wage will be slashed by almost 15%, welfare payments will be cut to the bone and the public sector is likely to be gutted. Meanwhile individual taxation will rise, but tax on corporate profits will not. Beyond that, what few state assets that were not privatised during the boom years will be flogged off — probably to the same international financial institutions that created the massive debt now being transferred to the Irish taxpayer.

And it’s all so bloody unnecessary. Yes, the Irish government needs to balance the books. We are spending more than we’re earning and that’s unsustainable. But the idea that the best way to balance the books is to dump a hundred billion euro of private debt onto the state is beyond insane (and there are sensible people suggesting the 85 billion could turn into as much as 220 billion before this whole thing is over). It’s free market ideology run riot.

And what’s more, it’s clearly not going to work. Ireland couldn’t generate that sort of income even in a global environment of massive economic growth. So, with the spectre of energy shortages looming ever closer and the consequent global depression, we’re out of the realm of extreme optimism and into sheer delusion.

Which is why the “bail out” and today’s savage budget are unnecessary. Ireland will default on this debt. Anyone who suggests otherwise (I’m looking at you, The Government) is a blithering idiot. We will default on the debt the markets have saddled us with, and possibly withdraw from the single currency.

The only choice we have is the manner in which we do this. We can do it now while we still have some assets and a cash reserve. Or we can delay it for a few years by delivering those remaining assets into the hands of global capitalism. Our leaders have chosen the second option and have thereby guaranteed themselves a place in history alongside Quisling, Pétain and other collaborators with external tyrants. The conditions of the bail out, for example, include transferring our last remaining cash reserve — the national pension reserve fund — into the banks, so that the banks can repay the bondholders. It’s criminal, and those responsible will not fare well in the long term.

I’ll write some more about this over the next couple of days once I’ve heard the budget and digested the implications.

Let me conclude with a short video. Although it’s a speech from a US senator and deals specifically with US policy, it resonates far beyond. And it should be required viewing for those about to open our doors to the rapacious hyenas of international finance.

Click image for more info

A minor observation about the current chaos in Irish political and financial circles. The opposition parties; specifically Fine Gael and Labour; are demanding an immediate general election. The government insists that it needs to hang on for another month or two in order to pass the budget measures required to secure the IMF / EU bailout. To this, the opposition parties respond with indignant bluster but little else. They profess outrage at Fianna Fáil hanging on to power. They portray it as a denial of the electorate’s right to be heard on this uniquely important issue. And they promise to vote against the budget from a minority position.

Fine Gael and Labour are engaged in the politics of cowardice and dishonesty. They are cowering beneath the onslaught of the IMF, using Fianna Fáil and The Greens as increasingly fragile barricades. Let’s be 100% clear about this… if either party really wanted to trigger an instant election, they could do so at the drop of a hat. Fact is, they don’t have an alternative plan and are completely devoid of ideas and vision. These parties — our next government if polls are to be believed — are desperate for Fianna Fáil to sell us out to the IMF and absolve them from responsibility for the shitstorm being visited upon us by The Markets. If there were an election before the budget they’d be exposed as charlatans, forced to tread the same weary path as the current discredited lot. Ideologically incapable of considering radical alternatives.

And make no mistake, they could trigger an election. All it would take would be for Enda Kenny (Fine Gael) and Eamon Gilmore (Labour) to call a Press Conference and announce that they will not be bound by the impending Fianna Fáil four year plan and budget. Pledge to revisit both immediately after the next election. It would pull the rug out from under Cowen and force him to hold an election as soon as possible.

But Kenny and Gilmore are unwilling to force the issue. They’re hiding in their minority position. Condemning the actions of the government while steadfastly refusing to intervene, despite having the means to do so. They’ll watch as Fianna Fáil kick the crap out of the poor then take office and lament. All the while complaining about their hands being tied. About how they don’t have the power to change things.

Bullshit. They do have the power, they don’t have the wit. And so, they will watch this country get bled dry.

The European Banks gave out billions in loans to the Irish banks. The Irish banks were badly run, lost all the money and are functionally bankrupt. So the IMF is now insisting that the Irish taxpayer borrows the equivalent amount (from those same institutions!) and bails out the Irish banks with it. Then the Irish banks will pay back the loans they took from the European Banks. Leaving just the newly imposed Irish sovereign debt to the European banks remaining. To add insult to injury, the imposed loan is at a far higher interest rate than most of the original bad loans were.

Still angry and getting angrier about all this. This monstrous nationalisation of private debt shouldn’t be permitted. It is fundamentally unjust and the system that demands it is corrupt and immoral. There’ll be a march in Dublin this Saturday (click the image above for more details). It’s being organised by ICTU (the Irish Congress of Trade Unions) but is completely non-aligned and aims to give voice to public discontent rather than being a message specifically from the Unions. I urge my Irish readers to attend.

And I urge my overseas readers to take note. Because what’s happening in Ireland is the new face of international finance capital, and it’s not stopping with us.

All a bit surreal over here at the moment. It’s one of the very rare occasions where rolling news isn’t repetitive… everything’s changing so quickly, almost by the hour. Seems as though Ireland, with 1% of the population has managed to generate over 10% of Europe’s total debt. A little excessive. We’ve got a 4 year plan, a looming budget, and ever more grim prognostications. So the men from the IMF are stalking the halls of power, wielding arched-eyebrows and briefcases. “The Irish need supervision”, is the message. “Someone’s got to put an end to our profligate ways.”

But it’s a false narrative. I’ve already lambasted the Irish property developers, bankers and politicians for their part in our downfall, but it’s worth remembering that they were a symptom of a widespread disease. Ireland’s crime is to have been the most enthusiastic proponent of a global obsession. We embraced the delusion a little tighter than others. But it was a shared delusion, make no mistake, and it certainly didn’t originate here. That debt we’ve run up? It’s in Euros. It’s not like we were printing our own money all this time. The European Central Bank (ECB), along with a couple of UK banks, were funding all this madness. Irish bankers were meeting with their European counterparts and saying things like, “You know how property bubbles usually burst? Well we’ve got one over in Ireland that never ever will. Seriously, it’s going to expand forever.” And their European counterparts would say things like “Finally! We’ve been looking for one of those for ages! Mind if I chuck in a few billion?”

The sudden arrival of these serious looking men from international institutions onto our streets and televisions isn’t because they’re worried Anglo-Irish Bank might go out of business. Or rather, that fact in itself doesn’t worry them. No, it’s the damage they’ll suffer should it occur which has drawn them to our shores. Be under no illusions here, the job of these men — and the Irish government that is aiding and abetting them — is to legally bind Ireland to the debts they incurred. They made a reckless bet on a 100/1 shot, and are now demanding the horse’s owner absorb the losses. It’s a nonsense. But it’s a dangerous nonsense.

We really should have gone the route of Iceland and let the chips fall where they may. We should have defaulted. We should have calmly announced that a bunch of financial instutions making insane bets with one another had bugger all to do with the Irish public. Consequently the Irish public won’t be paying for it, thanks very much.

But we didn’t go down that route. And we didn’t because the people making decisions for us now are the same we people we elected to prevent this happening in the first place. If there’s one job of government more important than almost any other, it’s to ensure the country doesn’t go broke on your watch. Fail at that, and surely you forfeit the right to make further decisions on behalf of the nation. Certainly the moral legitimacy of those decisions must get called into question.

But even if this gross act of piracy wasn’t morally indefensible, I’d question its consitutionality. Not that I’m a constitutional expert, and I suspect my interpretation might be broader than most, but it seems to me that recent government decisions have brought it into conflict with the very first Article of the Consitution…

The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible, and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions.

I love the word “genius” in that sentence (I like to imagine it was a ‘2am decision’ that got it included in the final text).

I think there’s definitely a case to be made that the current Irish government are radically curtailing Ireland’s sovereignty over its economic life. And when the government wants to do something unconstitutional, they need to hold a referendum first. Are there any constitutional experts out there who can tell me whether that’d be the basis of a realistic court challenge?

Don’t get me wrong, we have a large budget deficit and that’s definitely our problem, and we need to deal with it. But it’s far from an insurmountable problem and it certainly doesn’t warrant having the IMF beam in. We have a balance of trade surplus and we are arguably one of the few potentially self-sufficient nations in Europe… we can feed, house and clothe ourselves and still make an income from foreign trade. So the fundamental ability of Ireland to survive isn’t at issue here. What’s at issue, and the only reason the IMF are here, is the bank debt. And that’s their problem. Punishing the Irish workforce, and the hundreds of thousands now out of work, the Irish pensioner, patient and pupil. It’s fundamentally unjust.

And it’s not made any better by a media coverage that constantly uses words like “humiliation” and “shame”. We’re so bloody Catholic, I tell you. The Taoiseach is forever being asked how much “personal shame” he feels over this. It’s important stuff to us here. The names of great Irish heroes of the past have been invoked. Collins, Pearse, Connolly… was it for this they died? And de Valera is surely turning in his grave.

One thing I’ve found fascinating though, from a cultural perspective, is just how much this crisis has highlighted the disgrace into which the Catholic clergy have fallen in this country. If this economic collapse had happened even just 20 years ago, the voice of The Church would be one of the most influential in framing the entire narrative. And with a bitter irony for those of us who condemned the level of Church influence over Irish society, they’d almost certainly have been on the right side of the argument on this particular issue… opposing the stringent cuts to welfare, the minimum wage, health and education that loom large in our future. And they’d have been a powerful voice in favour of raising taxes on the highest earners — quelling some of the opposition that such a move would face.

But today the Church is nowhere to be seen, though our Catholic obsession with shame and guilt remain. The endless panel shows are devoid of men of the cloth.

Perversely, there’s a part of me that thinks this process might be a good thing for the country in the long term. With resource depletion going to hit the global economy like a freight train in a few short years*, it might not be a bad idea to get a bit of a head-start with the powerdown (do our initial stumbling while there’s still a semblance of an international safety net to help us avoid serious injury). It’s hard to know though. Maybe going down first just means the rest will fall on top of us…

So yes, all a bit surreal over here. Just this morning the government collapsed. And that might not be the biggest news story of the day. There’s hours to go yet.

There’s a famous Irish rebel song, A Nation Once Again, with the following refrain…

A Nation once again,
A Nation once again,
And lreland, long a province, be
A Nation once again!

Written around the time of the Great Famine, it yearns for a time when the people of Ireland are in control of their own destiny and no longer just a province in someone else’s empire. Several rebellions (including the most significant, in 1916), one war of independence and one civil war later, Ireland eventually achieved self-determination and threw off the yoke of foreign rule.

Remarkably, during the past few weeks our government has reversed all that. And I can only assume that the relative lack of public outrage is down to the fact that most people have yet to realise that’s what’s happened. But when they do…

Well, to be honest I don’t know what’ll happen when they do. If economist Morgan Kelly is correct, it’ll result in Irish society taking a dramatic lurch to the right… with the traditional parties eclipsed by the rise of an anti-Europe, anti-traveller, anti-immigration party. Kelly has a better track record than most with regards to our current crisis, having been repeatedly denounced as doom-mongering only to have his predictions borne out by subsequent developments. So, predictably, politicians and pundits have been rushing to denounce him yet again.

I think he’s right about the scale of the problems looming in the near future, though I’m less convinced by his claims that Ireland will lurch rightwards. My own reading of Irish society is that we’re more likely to lurch left. Socialism is part of our cultural DNA. Our constitution is infused with it, and almost every one of our national heroes was “of the left”. I think we’re more likely to see an anti-market backlash rather than a descent into xenophobia. Leastways I hope so.

Of course, it’s not that the Fianna Fáil / Green coalition secretly sold the country back to the British. That particular empire is long gone and besides, they have their own problems now… I doubt they could afford to take us back — even at the knockdown price which would be accepted by our betrayers in government. No, this time we’ve been delivered into the hands of international capitalism. It’s a more abstract empire certainly, but no less ruthless.

How did we get here?

Just over two years ago, it emerged that a small group of people had managed to comprehensively torpedo the Irish financial system. These people fell into three categories… property developers, bankers and politicians. The developers, driven by greed and stupidity, took out massive loans to buy overpriced land on which they built houses, hotels and offices that nobody needed and for which there was no market. In total we’re talking about tens of billions here. For a country the size of Ireland it’s an absurd amount of debt.

The bankers, driven by greed, stupidity and cocaine happily approved the loans without bothering to consider the consequences. In many ways they were worse than the developers who at least technically did their job… the empty houses, hotels and offices do actually exist. The job of the bankers on the other hand was to approve loans with a half-decent chance of repayment. Nobody expects them to have a 100% track record, but to have so spectacularly misjudged the market demonstrates that they simply hadn’t the faintest idea what they were doing. If the developers had been as bad at their jobs as the bankers, every day the news would be filled with stories of buildings collapsing.

Worst of all though — and given how utterly useless our financial sector was, that’s really saying something — was the performance of our politicians. Charged with passing our laws and with protecting the people of Ireland, the government somehow neglected to make “destroying the Irish economy in pursuit of personal profit” a criminal offence. The deregulation of our financial system, the lack of oversight and the enthusiastic support for unsustainable practices brought the nation to its knees. What’s worse, having allowed this to occur on their watch, our government decided it would try to put things right not by protecting the interests of the Irish people (i.e. those they are legally obliged to represent) but by protecting the interests of the very financial institutions that created the mess.

It’s a staggering sell-out of Ireland. One that will last for generations to come. And as this slow collapse plays out on the world stage it is vital to remember that the massive millstone of debt that now hangs around the neck of the Irish people was not incurred by them. It was incurred by private businesses (banks and developers) and legal liability lay squarely on bond-holders.

This is an important point and one that’s not stressed nearly enough. There was no obligation on the Irish public to pay for the debts run up by the banks. The international bond markets were legally obliged to absorb the losses when those debts turned bad (as many of us predicted they would do). They took the risks. They would have reaped the rewards, in interest, had the debts been repaid. And yet, the government of Ireland has decided that rather than allow this to happen, they would instead repay those debts from the public purse. It’s nothing short of a massive expropriation of public funds by the private sector. And it’s all happening out in the open, as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

Good old capitalism.

Remarkably, it now seems as though the bond markets have engineered a situation where they’ve eliminated any and all risk of loss by ensuring that it gets covered by public taxation. It’s welfare fraud on an unprecedented scale. And it gives investors a licence to take more and more foolish risks because they stand to lose nothing when their greed and idiocy inevitably results in disaster.

Instead Irish schools and hospitals suffer. Individuals whose jobs have evaporated thanks to this obscene mismanagement of the economy find themselves with an increasingly threadbare social security net. Councils are forced to slash services and the youth of the nation once again finds itself forced to choose between emigration and poverty. And all this is being imposed on us by our government in order to insulate international bond-holders from the losses they themselves incurred. From the risks they took. The poor, the sick and the vulnerable are forced to suffer the consequences of the reckless greed of the wealthy.

And it’s so disproportionate it beggars belief. While with one breath politicians assure us that every sector of society must share the burden, with another they tell us that a rise in corporation tax is not on the cards. It was corporations who created this problem, yet far from sharing the burden equally, that’s the one sector not being asked to contribute in any significant way to the solution.

If you ever needed evidence that the government of this country places the interests of the free market above the interests of the Irish people, this is it. As a result of government policy, tens of thousands of people in Ireland will be faced with choices like whether to skip some meals or to pay the gas bill. They’ll put off doctor’s appointments to ensure their kids get new shoes. Their savings will disappear as they try to keep up payments on their mortgages, all the while receiving nasty letters from banks who defaulted on their loans.

People mutter and shake their heads, but beyond the metaphorical, there’s not even much fist-waving going on. With the exception of the recent student occupation of the Department of Finance building and the chap who drove his cement mixer into the gates of The Dáil, there has yet to be a response proportional to the crimes being committed by our government and the markets they serve.

How long before the barricades arise?

I read this in the Irish Times today…

Three castaways on a desert island find a crate of canned food. The first, a theoretical physicist, comes up with a model of a machine that can open cans with astonishing efficiency, then realises there is no material to build the machine. The second, an engineer, tries to open the cans with everything available – stone, stick, coconut – but all in vain. The last one, an economist, steps in and starts: “Let’s assume that we have a can opener…”

Ha Joon — author of: 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism

This, more or less, was the first message that the new leader of the British Labour Party sought to communicate.

Ed Miliband
(as red as his necktie)

His first media offensive didn’t take aim at the savage public sector cuts being implemented by the tory government. It wasn’t focussed on the terrifying levels of control that undemocratic institutions (the financial sector, corporations, the media, markets) now possess over modern society. Or the dreadful mess they’ve made with it. He didn’t even use the publicity generated by his election to establish clear water between himself and the thoroughly discredited governments of his predecessors.

Nope, the ironically nicknamed “Red Ed” chose instead to assure the nation that he is — in essence — no different to every other career politician within a mile of power during the past couple of decades. He is of the Ineffectual Centre, and don’t anyone forget it. His dismissal of the unions was a dismissal of the ever-dwindling working class. Sure, he knows he’ll have to submit to some photo-ops in factories, supermarkets and (wearing a hard hat) on one of Britain’s few remaining construction projects. That’s par for the course for any politician, whatever the party.

Just please don’t get the impression he actually represents those people.

I’m convinced that the “Red Ed” nickname is, genuinely, nothing more than the result of lazy tabloid headline writers who like the rhyme, despite knowing nothing whatsoever about the man’s politics. Yes, he has said that his own ideas for cutting the deficit involve less spending cuts and more tax increases than the tories (or indeed than Alistair Darling, the author of the last New Labour budget). But it’s pretty marginal stuff. He’s certainly not talking about nationalising essential industries or shifting away from a profit-driven model of economic activity (which, whether you agree with them or not, would be the kind of ideas that actually warrant the sobriquet “Red Ed”).

As power has drained out of politics, so modern politicians — even those at the very top — have become middle management. The aims and values of society are dictated to them by markets and tabloids. And like middle management the world over, they have a little bit of leeway as to how best those aims can be achieved and those values upheld. But it is only a little bit. They certainly have almost no control over the aims and values themselves.

Ed Miliband, newly elected leader of the Labour Party, has spent his first day at the helm desperately trying to reassure markets and tabloids that he is willing to toe their line. That he has no plans to challenge their leadership. And that he certainly has no intention of representing the people who actually elected him.

Which, I suppose, makes him perfectly qualified to be the next Prime Minister when the current UK government fails.

Back in April I predicted that the collapse of the Irish economy would lead to a new wave of Irish emigration. Figures published a few days ago confirm that this is now underway.

In fact, in a survey of EU members, outward migration from Ireland is already almost double that of Lithuania — the country with the second-highest rate. The Irish per annum emigration rate currently stands at 9 per thousand people. That’s almost 1%. Which is very high indeed. What makes it even more startling is the contrast with a decade ago when Ireland’s inward migration was the second highest in the EU (at 8.4 per thousand).

Of course, this fact suggests that much of the current exodus is a result of our immigrant population returning home. The people who came to Ireland to meet the massive demand for labour have seen that demand dry up, and those who didn’t put down roots are now moving on to pastures new. It’s a strategy that served the Irish well for almost 200 years.

But according to the Economic Social Research Institute, while returning foreign nationals do make up the largest percentage of the current emigration, young Irish males also account for a very large proportion. Of course, it’s hardly a coincidence that this particular demographic would usually form the bulk of the workers in the construction sector. When the choice is between an ever-decreasing dole cheque or a job in exotic climes, a lot of young men find themselves choosing a one-way ticket to Melbourne.

And even the fact that an increasing number (albeit still a very small number) have chosen to join the British army and seek their action in Helmand province rather than the nightclubs and beaches of Australia doesn’t surprise me. Personally I don’t ever get bored, but I’m told it can be a powerful motivator*. After all, what other explanation can there be? I can get my head around young British men signing up to be shot at, half a planet away from home. Misguided though they are, I assume they believe that at some level they are protecting British interests, and that’s important to them.

Presumably though, that can’t be the motivation for the average Irish lad who signs up. So it must be boredom. Either that, or they just want to do violence to strangers.

I dunno, maybe I’m being harsh. Maybe they seek a kind of nobility… the life of The Warrior. Honour in duty and all that stuff. Frankly I think it’s all a big con. Defending your home from attack… yes, there’s an honour in that. But flying to Central Asia to kill people who pose no real threat to you or those you love? There are vested interests who want young people to do that, and they’ve fed them a bunch of lies to get them to willingly comply.

It’s been the same for millennia.

Of course, the youngsters getting shot at beneath a British flag in Afghanistan don’t exactly form a significant proportion of the new wave of Irish emigration. They are merely a dramatic example of the desperation that faces many, now that the corpse of Celtic Tiger has finally begun to stink. For me, growing up in Dublin in the 1970s, Ireland was a place that promised little and delievered even less. The generation born in 1990 were raised in a completely different Ireland. One that offered excitement, prosperity and fulfillment. Leastways, that’s how it seemed.

The reality, of course, wasn’t like that at all. Built on debt and absurd claims of everlasting growth, it was the hollow promise of consumerism. A dark, gaping emptiness that gnawed away at the soul of Irish society. Better to be promised nothing and take delivery of it, than be promised happiness and fulfillment only to take delivery of alienation and neurosis. The Celtic Tiger was a hoax from the start. Even the good days weren’t all that good. Yeah, we’ve got plasma screen televisions and BMWs but we’ll be paying for them long after they’re landfill.

Trouble is, the generation leaving their teens now have been raised on those promises. Indoctrinated — like so many others, the world over — by celebrity culture and advertising. Genuine fulfillment in family, friends and community becomes almost impossible to achieve when you’ve been raised in a culture that savagely undermines them. From infants they’ve been shown a world where wealth equates with happiness. And denied the opportunity to test it for themselves, they simply don’t understand it’s a lie.

The general election campaign is coming to an end over in the UK and the public will soon place an ‘x’ in a little box on a sheet of paper… this act — performed every four or five years — is modern democracy in action. Government by the people. Apparently.

This particular election is being contested by three main parties plus several smaller ones. And although there is a real possibility of the smaller parties gaining a couple of seats in parliament this time round, the British electoral system is heavily stacked in favour of the larger ones (of course the “local” parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will all win seats in Westminster, but I’m concentrating here on parties with a UK-wide presence… my knowledge of Scottish and Welsh politics is severely limited and Northern Irish politics have little bearing on the UK as a whole, mired as they still are in local sectarianism). Indeed with the recent surge of the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls, it’s possible that the Greens, UKIP, Respect and others will be even further marginalised by the consolidation of power on the centre-right.

And let’s not be under any illusions, all three (Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems) are centre-right parties. None of them propose real change, none of them — despite claims to the contrary — can be considered progressive, except by twisting the definition of that word until it means almost its precise opposite. All three are dedicated to free market capitalism even as they pay lip service to public service. All three promise a “return to growth”, betraying not merely a sorry lack of imagination but also a dreadful ignorance; one so extreme that it’s difficult not to suspect it’s willful; of the current situation regarding energy resources and global sustainability. None of them will even use the word “sustainable” except, oxymoronically, as a prefix to the word “growth”.

The single most important issue facing British — and global — society has been utterly ignored by those campaigning to run the UK for the next half-decade. So whilst a very real, very serious and very physical problem has begun to manifest around us, anyone watching this election campaign could be forgiven for concluding that the only issues facing the modern world involve the social graces of those seeking election and the artificial construct known as money. Currency, debt, money… it’s essentially a human-created system for which we have written (and if we choose, can re-write) the rules. Energy, food, natural resources… these on the other hand are the building blocks of the physical systems by which human life is maintained. Our mistake is to have overlaid the former on top of the latter, and then somehow forgot we did so; so that we have fallen into the trap Korzybski tried to warn us about… that of confusing the map for the territory.

“Getting the economy moving again” has become the mantra for all sides in this election campaign. And one of the ways they intend to achieve this is via a radical shake-up of the welfare system. While I agree that the question of how society supports those without an income is going to become a huge one over the next few years, the ideas being considered in the current political mainstream are wrong-headed in the extreme. Based — as they are — on a mistaken belief; that maximising employment is a good thing.

However, considering what we know to be true about the short-to-medium term sustainability of energy resources (see my recent three-parter on Peak Oil if you don’t know what I’m talking about), this brings me quite neatly to the first of my ‘Unpopular Ideas’. Namely that:

Unemployment is a good thing

I’m aware that this sounds vaguely “wrong by definition”, like suggesting that racism or beating up old ladies is a good thing. We have been conditioned to accept certain premises by the very structure of the society we’ve created. And those ‘structural premises’ are difficult to shake off. If, however, that society is fundamentally flawed (and unsustainability is perhaps the biggest flaw that any society can suffer from)… guilty of what Gregory Bateson calls “epistemological lunacy”… then we are obliged to re-examine those initial premises.

… the premises work only up to a certain limit, and, at some stage or under certain circumstances, if you are carrying serious epistemological errors, you will find that they do not work any more. At this point you discover to your horror that it is exceedingly difficult to get rid of the error, that it’s sticky. It is as if you had touched honey. As with honey, the falsification gets around; and each thing you try to wipe it off on gets sticky, and your hand still remains sticky.

Gregory Bateson | Pathologies of Epistemology

Nonetheless, we must try to rid ourselves of the stickiness before we make too much of a mess. Because when our continued survival (perhaps not as a species, but certainly as a civilisation) depends upon those premises being corrected, then it’s surely a matter of urgency for us to do so. And one of the first of those premises that gets called into question when re-examining society through the filter of decreasing energy resources, is the notion that people should be encouraged to be economically active; furthermore that such economic activity should be maximised.

See, I’m not claiming — by any stretch of the imagination — that being unemployed is a good thing in our current society. Our society, after all, is specifically designed to make unemployment relatively uncomfortable in the hope of minimising it*. What I’m suggesting is that we need to re-imagine our society as one that views economic activity as a necessary evil; itself a process to be minimised. We need to reshape society so that the basic needs of all members are met, while consuming as little energy as possible in meeting them.

Energy, after all, can be defined as “the ability to do work”. Indeed, in physical terms, the SI unit for work (the joule) is identical to the SI unit for energy. So, as I said recently…

A recession is another word for a decrease in economic activity. And because we have built a world that is unable to tolerate such decreases, we strive to avoid recessions and to quickly overcome them via a “return to growth”. It seems to me, however, that we should perhaps view our current recession in a more positive light. We should perhaps find a way to use this slowdown as a springboard towards a powerdown. As unemployment rises, we should be looking at ways to accommodate this as a positive thing, rather than viewing it negatively through the lens of our old premises and searching for ways to reverse it.

I’m not suggesting that our society — in its current form — is capable of sustaining a continuing decrease in economic activity and the subsequent large-scale unemployment such a decrease will bring. I’m instead suggesting that a continuing decrease in economic activity is completely unavoidable, and society must be remodelled in such a way as to turn this to our advantage.