Take A Break - Have A Life...

We - collectively and severally - today have been musing on the issue of personal empowerment and the rights of the ordinary citizen: rights that most people appear to think that they don't possess. Most people below a certain age in the UK seem to subscribe to a fatalism that belongs in the pre-enfranchisement era; that they simply have no recourse to the law on their own behalf and have as a consequence, no voice in the world. Alongside this misapprehension there co-exists a sense of entitlement to material wealth no matter the circumstances; that somehow the disenfranchised are entitled to exploit the inequalities inherent in our current models of society despite the law. This polarised view of personal empowerment lies at the heart of our problems, politically and economically. 

The politics of envy are always pitted against the politics of greed: the kind of crass simplification of a society best left to the Daily Mail's of this world: stupid, foetid and vile in equal measure, and offering nothing more than the kind of knee-jerk reaction that leads back to and feeds off the status quo of societal life. Mao Tse Tung [I grew up with the old Western spelling] said that 'Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."' Whatever caveats he threw at it subsequently to qualify this utterance don't make this apparently revolutionary statement right, cause it ain't: it's a partial historical observation which conveys only a crude and violent method of achieving but momentary change. Real and lasting change is always evolutionary and can only be achieved through rational thought and debate, peaceful protest and a wearing down of the old guard through due process and legislative amendment.

Even in today's Britain, the general population have already many more statutory rights than they imagine that they have: they either simply don't know them or even how to exercise them if they do. We used to have, even during the era that sought to erase our citizens' rights - Thatcher's Eighties - grassroots organisations that fought back against the tide of disempowerment - I was for a couple of years an active member of one here in North Wales - which gave back a voice to those who thought that they were lost to a system that they thought they had no control over: we demonstrated otherwise to good practical effect. We need now, more than ever, to spread the word that ordinary people can fight back at the system that has betrayed them. It's not an easy task and will not always be successful in the short term in effecting change for the good; but the more accurate and truthful information people have access to, the more empowered they will eventually become.

The disinformation of social media should be the very first target of a new information age: sever the ties of the manipulators from their control of people's behaviours: replace false information with the reality that change can - as it has in the past - always - through education and information - be achieved for the common good. It could be that as simple a step as cancelling all your socials and joining your local library, instead of doom-scrolling AI slop, will be as transformative a step as you will ever take in your life. Disengage from the clamour of spurious connectivity and seek the comfort of actual family and friends. Look to yourself and your own, first and foremost, and help others to see that there is another path to take other than the nihilism and despair that currently seems to be the de facto state of humanity. It's up to us all, collectively.