One of the best ways to reach equanimity these days is to unfollow everything. Therefore while I’m still on social media I actually don’t follow anything or anyone (instead I look up individual profiles). It suits my own character (if my 30th birthday has 700 invites sent out, it’s fairly obvious that I prefer holistic approaches to socialisation and people, intimacy is too often a cover for narrowness).
At any rate the original point of my piece is that I read on twitter about how a gay couple were forced out of Burger King and how apparently Silicon Valley has a star troll (a girl) who won’t stop until the white, male patriarchy is dismantled (it’s interesting how it’s no longer a WASP patriarchy).
Other than that I always remember what Noam Chomsky said that (and I paraphrase) that to preserve the illusion of freedom create intense debate in ever-narrower bands of discussion. Okay I messed up that quote to such an extent that now I’ve had to go and link it:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….”
The illusion of freedom, brought on by the internet, is where we are as a society. We can no longer actually dissent from the liberal demo-capitalistic order (Churchill had the final word on democracy being the worst form of government but for all others). I also have noticed that the galloping inequality means that we are actually vindicating Marx’s assertion that return on capital is going to exceed return on labour.
What does this all mean and how does it concern the title of the piece. It’s that while as a Torykip I’m very sympathetic to the idea of capitalism but at the same time it’s now evolved to corporatism. How are we supposed not to notice our new oligarchy? Well by dwelling on ever-dwindling civil rights cases (kissing in a Burger is now the new civil right it seems, isn’t PDA bad form in any case).
Furthermore by concentrating and collectivising power it takes them away from the regions to the centre. When every town, locality and area have larger and larger swathes of authority it decentralises the metropolitan structure. The metropolitan elites would have it no other way but to undermine any pole of authority against them, this is why we are living in the Age of the Death of Common Sense.