Yesterday I learned that
Boris Johnson, the Kleine Kaiser of London, feels strongly that instead of
griping about those with wealth, how they extracted it from us and the tax they
pay or mostly do not pay we should be grateful to them for living among us,
ruling our lives, spending part of their loot on services to them giving jobs and
be humble in our thanks.
We have been here before
historically, inevitably, down the millennia it has been a feature of
absolutist and elite societies for those at the top to demand not just
obedience, deference, respect and taxes, but gratitude as well. In the last century we have all those archive
films of vicious and gruesome rulers being cheered by happy underlings weeping
for joy at their servility.
In the UK it was not quite
as bad but it was a feature of the past that the landowning lords and lairds
might expect that their tenants and their labourers should be filled with
gratitude for the generosity and consideration of their social superiors. At
local level this could be extended to those higher up who tended to ape the
attitudes of their superiors.
In some cases it went
beyond documents or advertisements in the local press or related obsequious
articles and took physical shape, sometimes large scale. A choice example is the Percy
Monument in Northumberland. It is not just bowing and scraping, Boris
Johnson style you peasants, it is giving hard earned cash to prove your worth
as an inferior.
The essential issue is
globalisation and how it is going to impact where and how. There is a strong case made in
"Time" that it has just started (hat tip
family) and despite bumps along the road has a long way to go. The difficulty is that this seems to entail
ever increasing expansion and a pace of change for the larger.
In the 21st Century
something we have lost sight of is the idea of sustainability. During the last decade of the 20th century we
heard a great deal about just how much further the human race could push its
demands on resources and exploit the planet.
The concerns expressed then still have their force however they might go
against the grain of human greed now more evident than ever.
It is not sustainable to
have an economy dependent on a large financial services sector which commands
the bulk of its wealth and dictates overall activity. For many places notably those with large
urban populations it is not sustainable to maintain rapidly increasing population
growth. It is not sustainable to have
increasing and unbridgeable divisions in a society associated with extremes of
wealth.
So why should I, or anyone
else in the Atlantic Isles, be grateful for what is happening in London and to
those who are worsening the situation by the year?
Perhaps you should be grateful because without this flawed system (which is at least very much less flawed than any other yet devised and tried) there would not be much of an economy at all. That socialist governments past and present have given us an abundance of evidence to support that fact the lesson is not being learned by most of us.
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