Sensible Politics

A random collection of scraps, yet to be sorted out, that together could outline a Sustainable Future.

A random collection of scraps yet to be sorted out, that together, outline a Sustainable Future.

Now that we are alive, how shall we organise ourselves?

One thing is clear;  we need to change the way we do it now.

If we wanted to make a great society, we would not come up with this.

And 

(The whole money idea is what both makes us so poor, and destructive. I can see us changing it fundamentaly, or even dropping it.)Our relationship with money messed up. O

As long as we all think we need to work so hard, we will give up larger and larger parts our real lives than is necessary to produce all we need.

I have gotten so fed up with the myopic stupidity of our political leadership that I decided to try to make it better.  

I have a few suggestions, observations and explorations, so it’s not all negative.

FIRSTLY it is clear that any society that destroys its environment will not last.

We are destroying the environment, not just for us, but also for everything alive on this planet..

Let's not mess about, in truth we are fucked and unless we really change things very pro-actively.

I have read this subject extensively for over 30 years and it is my conclusion that there will be death throughout nature and we will suffer. This is not definite but very likely.

To prevent catastrophy we need to challenge too many of the accepted truths that we wont be able to do it.

Politicians skew politics. Most politicians and companies simply wont have the vision or will. Put another way, Ecology means lower profits, and companies can destroy politicians, so even though we are talking about the only world where life is, politicians, while skewing most things to the vested interests, still do too little, too late, (and that with bad grace while crowing about how much they do). That is why business, like religion, should have no place in politics. They are vested interests that look after their own interests before anything else and thus skew politics.

The world is at risk and we don’t stop destroying it because we can’t see a way to make a profit out of it. Or more specifically, any thing that includes the price to the planet is prohibitively expensive. which casts us in the role of opportunists'  and thieves.

Look at it this way; our boat is sinking because the people who are breaking it, (are making vast profits out of it). Are we really going to wait for the market to create a "profit stream" allowing you to profit from preserving nature? - Or maybe- we could just stop breaking the boat. Hu? Guys?,,,,  Guys?

No amount of money can replace a single Dodo let alone a whole ecosystem. When its gone, its gone forever. 

During WWII we changed our whole economy. We put people on the land to farm, had rationing, blackouts and all the rest.

But for some reason the Earths ecology is not as important.

Some of the letters here will let you see how out of touch our MPs and systems are. And how the powers that be are actually preventing us from protecting ourselves and Earth. 

Having said that all is not lost now but we have about 5 or 10 years to act.

We will need very concerted effort and vision from the biggest organizing body we have.

The Government is living in a mental bubble and cannot conceive how serious it will be to us humans let alone how we will effect all other life on this planet.

The methods and systems we have at present are not and maybe cannot deal with the enormous task ahead. Unfortunately this at a moment when we really need visionary leadership not the mediocre "telephone Hygienists" and pathetic excuses we have now.

Example, It's no good government saying (Via MP Keith Hill) "Why should I stop polluting if others still do it". Just change some words to see how silly that is. "Why should I stop Abusing Children if others still Abuse Children". Hmm it doesn’t sound so good now. My reply is of course that child abuse is still child abuse, regardless. This is most governments answer to many things, i.e. Investment in road building, airport expansion, nuclear fuels, Lack of rail support, the list goes on.

If we don’t substantially change almost all the things we do now, not only will we experience terrible hardship, but all the species on this planet will also suffer terrible reduction and as the cycle speeds up, sadly most of them will become extinct.

Inevitably as human populations increase and pressure on the earth’s systems increases, as meanwhile, global warming makes droughts that will reduce farmable areas and then starvation will set in. Then people will try to move (This is happening in Somalia right now). As more people move and become refugees the pressure on neighboring states will be extreme, they might even be suffering the same problems, this can destabilise governments and then people die in millions. But this time it wont just stay over there. Countries, faced with total wipe out will not go easy. I suspect many wars over water and farming land. World wide all the natural spaces that can support farming will be doing just that. Any species that doesn’t fit into that or that doesn’t taste nice will go, hunted to extinction or most probably extinction through habitat destruction.

People, when starving, will kill and eat everything. Thus speeding up the process.

Do the math’s: Less Land + More people + Over fishing + Short term farming + Greed motive + Climate Change+ diminishing resources = A Vicious Cycle and a Bloody Dangerous Situation!

There will come a time when you will have to kill starving people just to protect ones food supplies.

Can we afford to put armed guards on fields of crops? That will mean even greater hardship, leading to total or near total disintegration of society, as we know it. That is assuming there are any humans left to carry on. (I suppose humans are incredible resourceful and if life is possible at all, some humans might survive).

I think we are in for a severe shock.

This sounds really dire and I am sorry but having studied ecology and politics for 30 years I think we are in for a severe shock.

Our politicians are worse than useless and, though we vote them into power, they are actualy owned by business.

Political parties actually destroy politics and should be banned along with any "packaged politics" Political parties main concerns are to continue to exist. So naturally they don’t want to speak any hard truths. This is our only political representative, not dealing with the most important subjects of our time.

The parties become more important than the politics they present. Enormous jugganaughts that claim power whether usefull or not. existing to give polititions jobs but not a voice for people.

To be fair, politicians are, to a degree created by the system we have which is clumsy, open to manipulation and altogether rather crude.  

So the way we do politics needs to change, Good grief, is this even possible?

We need massive vision and leadership at this moment in time but instead our idiot credo is "the market will prevail".

We will destroy nature because we cant deal with our own idea, that of money.

Nature is over if we apply the rules of the business market place to it. If we apply the rules of buisness to nature we will destroy nature. How can you make nature justify itself in terms of capitalism? Applying the business ideology of "survival of the fittest" to nature would produce a single vicious predatorily monster who after consuming everything would die of starvation. Which funnily enough is exactly what is happening.

It just shows how out of touch our invented world is with the actual world.

In our world we work to make stuff that breaks and we throw it away and we have to work again to make more disposable rubbish. This parasitic cycle goes on endlessly and nobody asks why are we alive and  "If I am alive, what shall I do?" Or "Now that I am alive what do I want to do with my life?" and the very important question, "Why are we doing this?”

Now that we are alive, how shall we organise ourselves?

If we asked that, we would not create what we have. But to change, it’s a bit like that Irish reply to a lost driver "Well I wouldn’t start from here."

So it becomes clear that so many things, and the way we do things, need to change in so short a time.... The only thing I can do is this, BUT I CAN come up with some ideas.

The cash system itself keeps us in wage slavery

Our collective wealth is greater than it’s ever been. We are wealthier and more productive than the human race has ever been and yet we are all working as hard as ever. It now needs both parents to work in order to have a family, that’s worse than in the 1950s. 

We really lack leadership and vision.

Actually very small bunch have taken control and built power pyramids for themselves, this allows them to direct how we actually live. In the last 1000 years we have progressed from the Feudal system only slightly. The shape and names have changed and also the routes to power have changed. But the actual pyramid hasn't changed much at all and I don’t think its helping.

I don’t think we will ever really be weaned off cash but we have to do other stuff fast because the greed motive is so destructive.

Power pyramids

Everywhere I look I can see money apparently doing good, driving economies etc but as one investigates it deeper things look very different. Trouble is we have spent 8,000 plus years building tribe shaped pyramid shaped structures (deriving from ape family structures,) and spent at least 3,000 years working out how to use money to wield power over each other. It’s very difficult to work out a persuasive alternative. Especially as we regard the use of money as one of the immutable true cornerstones of life. We never question it, and thus it is treated like a religion, where we are the believers. When so many people really believe in something and put so much investment into it, it is very difficult to present any argument that sounds sensible; they all sound mad to those who have no idea that there are alternatives.

The Greed Motive.

We have been given a society in which many things a set up before we get here and we rarely question them. Cash and the way we use it. A system developed over maybe 8,000 years is a very difficult one to trash but it is so integrated in the way we act that it does now need to be questioned.

In part it is a way of measuring work.

It is a powerful way of controlling people.

It has become the only reason to do anything.

Anything that does not make money is not followed up or pursued.

Survival of the Fittest vs. Co-Operation and Integration.

Utter rot. If that were true we would not have the banking system we do now. It is only a part of the system: More accurately it is "Dubious survival for the weakest".

It misses out the really true picture of co-operation and integration throughout nature, which gives a much greater chance of survival that just plain competitive aggression.

It works in the business world and produces vast monopolies, which governments have to tame and split up etc but nature simply just does not work that way. 

We can outwit the Cod in the sea and if we continue to do it we will kill all the cod.

Not to mention that the idea that "cod only exist as a human resource" is horrifying anthropomorphic arrogance. Why is it wrong? Hmm well if you destroy your food supply, you die.

We are not so unique as we like to think. Yes we do have very clever brains but in all other things we are a mere hairs breadth from most mammals. We love nurture our children that implies many things. In Emotions such as Empathy, Love, Loss, Anxiety, Jealousy, anger, Fear, and so many more subtle signs that we recognise in ourselves

I did like Gandhi’s idea that "As long as we have slaughter houses, we will have war".

Power Pyramids:

Bullies, for the benefit of bullies, designed our system.

It’s quite simple really. They don’t want any change that might make them less powerful.

"They" include Banks; all large companies especially Multinationals, Any organisation or institution with an investment in the things, which need change. Not surprisingly they resist the change. It would strange if a company head got up one day and seeing the ecological destruction being wrought by his firm, told his workers to stop, down tools, who would get less strong if people et al.

As long as we all think we need to work so hard we give them larger parts our real lives than is necessary to produce all we need.

The reason you buy crap products is so that you can buy another one when it breaks, thus you get "addicted" to their crap product. Its not by accident the thing is crap. It is meant to break so that you buy another and that is why the maker does not want to make a good one. Why sell a good one for £1 when you can sell 20 crap ones for 50p each; Insane stupidity, criminal waste, self imposed wage slavery. We have given up power over our own lives by giving that choice to a body whose interests conflict with our own.

Politicians strut about telling others how things should be done and these same puffed up incompetents haven’t any idea how the world actually works.

This next piece of "evidence" is a good example.

IE 50 years after the scientists started saying we are doing terrible damage to the world Our UK government has finally been forced by the EEC to make a 50% reduction in CO2 over 40 years sounds good but look at it another way; 40 years after it was obvious change was needed and in an environment when we need a Carbon Negative Economy politicians decided to reduce the CO2 output to 50% over 2 generations. These incompetent Telephone Hygienists have wrested power from the common people and are so biased, twisted, corrupt and lacking in any fore-site or vision or statesmanship have let us down badly. The “Party” system people wont step out of line or tell the truth in case they rock the boat or upset business. Meanwhile that very business which is destroying the planet is also promoting worsening personal economic dependentcy and unsustainably ecologicaly destructive lifestyles.

Politicians Are Telephone Hygienists. Sodding disingenuous bunch of useless, out of touch and ineffectual ladder climbers. Ask yourself if life here has actualy improved compared to what you imagen it could be.

For the last 50 years scientists have been saying there is a serious problem and here we are saying that we will reduce our CO2 emissions by 80% in another 40 years. It is rising at time of writing and this at a moment when if we totally stopped there would still be a serious problem and breakdown of societies.

If we provided ourselves with the essentials on a 2-day week, we would just loose interest in working quite so hard. It threatens manufacturers because you wont be rushing out to work quite so readily, but the Planet will love it. You might even have much more fun.

Sensible Politics