Since the days of Thatcher, Kohl, Chirac and Craxi what has happened in Europe is very simple:
most of the poor have been guaranteed and given very basic support;
the middle classes have got all sorts of welfare benefits for free;
pharmaceutical companies have been encouraged to grow mega-rich by doping
three-quarters of the population with anti-anxiety drugs and promising miracle cures;
and agri-business has been heavily financed to poison the land and to a lesser extent most of the people - all so that the rich and powerful and would-be rich and powerful can have a free hand
to get richer and richer, while populations become more and more dully aspirational.
Moreover:
Capitalism now depends on working mothers who pay others (and other working mothers)
the lowest wage possible to look after their children. (But not so much in Germany...)
Dystopia is just around the corner – because children soon will be sent to kindergarten
as soon as they are shit-trained…and will become excellently-dull collaborators.
(Further reading: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, or any of its excellent predecessors.)
*The European Parliament is bizarrely peripatetic.
7 comments:
I checked my Tagesschau and found two French news channels on the internet about this election. Nothing yet on the US internet about it, but then it is still early in the US, especially California. Despite seeming early American indifference, all is watched carefully by financial-political analysts. There are many speciality-specialist audiences in the US and what passes for US public opinion is not what the media projects it to be. Poverty in Europe is not what it is in this country, and the situation of agribusiness, which we think of as an American phenomenon, is indeed serious now for you, too. Quelle dommage!
Wait ... we're not yet in Dystopia?
People in Europe can no longer opt for a workless life of hunting (which our murderous kind considers recreation) and gathering in "nature's supermarket". Our present world is one of wage-slavery or the dishonor of "pan-handling".
Surely hunting (even for "recreation") and gathering in "nature's supermarket" cannot be said to be "workless"...
I had to look up pan-handling and found that it simply means begging. This, if you have ever tried it, is not only a very difficult kind of work, but also very brave, requiring a lot more guts than I have. (I once tried busking in Paris, but within 5 minutes a gendarme arrived to move me on, and I gave up, my slight resolve having completely vanished.)
Are you the Bazompora who has a page on youTube which reads:
'Neocolonialism, the mother of Genocide.
The Homo Consumens is easily swayed by the charming politicians, moved to admire the bright among them and to never doubt that these fatherly faces are using his tax money and their mandate, to craftily plunder the eternally "developping" countries.'?
Yes. Disappointed?
I used the term pan-handling idiomatic after our American counterparts, to avoid meaning a brutal life of at the mercy of passers-by and instead designate those like myself who asked for and live of "free money".
A hunter-gatherer was a lifestyle where one's compulsion and effort mainly overlapped and whether this is work depends on how you define work. Now, I do am aware that present-day hunter-gatherers have miserable lives, due to the privatisation of resources, their forced conversion, persecution and vassalage by sedentary peoples, including my own. Everyone except the old money is a serf now, so how can we not yet have attained Dystopia?
I am not disappointed at all, Bazompora. (But I am wondering what your native language is: Bazompora is a French name, but you do not write like a Frenchman...)
There are many people who are able to avoid being wage-slaves and self-regarding prisoners of Aspiration. We live quite successfully in the interstices and cracks of the increasingly-totalitarian Nation State. I was never properly employed (except for occasional fill-in teaching) in my whole life, and many of my friends are - and feel - free. Not as free as the Baka and Mbuti were, of course, but surprisingly free - and in remarkable mental and physical health.
On second thoughts - je crois que ta langue maternelle est la langue principale de la Belle France sinon de l'encore plus belle France Profonde - où je me trouve actuellement (en Rouergue).
Navré de vous décevoir, mais ma provenance est beaucoup moins ensoleillée. Il en va de même pour ma résidence, qui elle aussi se situe dans un coin plutôt vert pour l'agglomération Bruxelloise au centre de la Belgique.
Despite my acquaintance with French vernacular, I am brought up as a netherlandophone, een Nederlandstalige in een verfranste stad, hence why writing like a Frenchman doesn't come from my fingertips. As to Bazompora being a French name, it surely could not be a native one. I was also once told my name were Greek, even though I know for a fact that it's a given name in Kirundi, the common language of Burundi.
History has shown us that, the closer to the end of an empire, the better the treatment of servants within the empire gets. Of course empires eventually collapse and so then do the greatest horrors recommence. Then, there's also that progress in medicine is likely to continue regardless of where you declare Dystopia, meaning that the slaves of the future could be more healthy than the serfs of the present. And an ever expanding universe of consumer articles might have them think themselves more free than less. What then, would be the remaining signs of a Dystopia?
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