Population « Critical Mass

I wrote this post at the airport while waiting for my plane:

One of the comments on our Indiegogo campaign page mentioned the need for good music; it was a passing mention, but it got me thinking about a song I remember and still enjoy: Istället för musik, Förvirring by Bob Hund. The translation of the title (and repeated chorus) is Instead Of Music, Confusion. Here’s the video:

So here I am in Heathrow Airport, sitting in a packed cafe, drinking my coffee and waiting to catch my plane to San Francisco. To my right, a couple from Finland in their late fifties. In front of me, the counter; servers from South America, Asia and Eastern Europe serve the non-stop flow of customers. A cart rattles by piled high with trays, clattering on the corrugated metal floor. To my left, a row of tables, all occupied, everyone’s nose buried in their food, their phone or their laptop. The one or two exceptions that prove the rule stare off into the middle distance.

From speakers mounted throughout the room, some warbling approximation of what people call music nowadays burbles away, inoffensive lifestyle wallpaper – what I call “music for people who don’t like music”. Branded hoardings surround us on all sides, reminding us how great this place is, how pure the company is, how fresh the food, how healthy and homemade all the sandwiches trucked here from the depot are.

Directly next to me, maybe three feet away, two men stand at the coffee countertop where they drop sugar and milk into their cups. They talk to each other in low tones but I can hear every word. Why wouldn’t I? They’re right there.

In fact, I can hear everything said at the counter. They’re right there as well – ten feet instead of three.

A server breezes past, drops a tray onto the stack on the counter with a clatter and moves off again. Back and forth, back and forth. The gritty sound of plastic wheels rolling on laminate and steel. The clang of the coffee machine as another dose of grounds is chambered and then blasted with hot water.

Outside the cafe, an alarm goes off briefly – for ten seconds the rotor squeal pierces my ears.

I like traveling, principally because it is absolutely the best way to meet new people, and I love people. I’m fascinated by their stories, their faces, their ideas, their relationships, the way they behave, the way they make their decisions. That’s why I would have studied anthropology at university if I hadn’t been so singularly convinced that I was going to be in a platinum record-selling rock and roll band when I was a teenager. That’s why directing in particular attracts me – interacting with, examining and understanding people. Their motivations, their emotions, their actuality.

So if I love people so much, why make a film about population issues and crowding? Why write about the distractions, the noise, the intrusion of this fairly typical public place?

I love music as well. I play the drums, not so much these days though – my shoulder ain’t what it used to be and my bald spot doesn’t look very sexy under a spotlight. Zappa said “music is the best”. Stephen King calls it “the fabled automatic” for its ability to transport us instantly to a memory, a state of mind, an emotion. Magic, pure and simple.

But music is based on principles of melody, harmony, form and composition. Even dissonant music, of which I’m a big fan, has order within it, intentionality. Two of the most important elements of powerful music are restraint and quiet. The guitar solo you love probably wouldn’t be so beautiful if the guitarist tried to play every note on the guitar the whole time. Restraint. The part where the song pares down to a single instrument, holding a pulse or tune, and then it builds, slowly, tremendously, to a thundering climax that makes your heart race, your hair stand up, your skin go goosey – if it was full-on loud with everyone playing at once for the whole song, it would lose its power. It would lose its implicit order, its intentionality. It would cease to be music and instead, become confusion.

The beginning of Jungle Boogie, when the bass kicks in, is one of the funkiest moments in the history of music. If you don’t find yourself moving to it when it takes off, get your pulse checked because you may be deceased. Why is it so balls-to-the-wall funktastic? Because the bass isn’t playing up until that point. When it kicks in, you notice, because it is new, insistent, intense.

John B. Calhoun, the doctor whose experiments form the narrative backbone of Critical Mass, described a phenomenon among the rodents which he called “overliving”. As more and more rodents crowded together, they bumped into one another ever more frequently until it became unbearable for them. Too much unintentional contact with one another eventually made meaningful , intentional contact between them less likely, even impossible. A society, which is fundamentally a network of individuals communicating meaningfully with one another for their mutual pleasure and benefit became instead a muddle of competing noises and competing interests. Connections were briefer or non-existent, lost in the cacophony.

Going back to my three-chord punk band at the age of sixteen, which morphed into a prog outfit playing twelve-minute through-composiitions – there were four of us. Perhaps with five, ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty people, we might have written truly exceptional material, way beyond what only the four of us were capable of. But if there were fifty, a hundred, a thousand people in that band, what melody, harmony, form or composition would be possible then? Would it have been music, or confusion?

When I set out to make this film, I wanted to learn about the subject of population and introduce people to it so that we could have a real dialogue. I wanted to know what kind of music we used to play, what we play now and what the songs of future will be if we don’t change anything or could be if we do.

I love people, just as I love music. That’s why I think we should have an open conversation about what is going on around us, so that in the future we, our children and our children’s children can have music instead of confusion.

First of all, let me apologise for the long gap in writing, and for the lack of new comments being approved. Both of these have reasons:

1. I have been flat out trying to finish the film (which is looking good) and my writing/thinking time has been minimal.
2. I have not approved any new comments for a long time due to the preponderance of spam clogging up my dashboard. If anyone knows a fast way to delete over 1,000 comments from handbag- and shoe-bots rather than by 20 at a time, please tell me! We will be getting some kind of human-confirmation device installed shortly, and then hopefully all of these Viagra and SEO peddlers will leave us alone.

On to more pressing business – this post will be a little more like a news digest than a developed opinion, mostly because of my aforementioned lack of time, but also because the links speak for themselves.

Most of us who follow the news out of the US have been stunned at the backwards nature of the discourse there on contraception and reproductive health. I say backwards in no inflammatory way to imply mental incapacity – “backwards” is a perfect description of the direction signified by this swell of mostly conservative, mostly Republican, mostly male bleating about the issues. These so-called controversies are dragging America backwards in time. Here’s a smorgasbord of ridiculousness*:

– Terry England comparing women to animals.

– Sam Brownback promising to sign a bill taxing abortion.

– The Pope, as usual, having high-handed moral opinions about everything other than child abuse.

– Bill O’Reilly being Bill O’Reilly.

– Arizona being Arizona.

– Colorado setting up a possible challenge to Roe vs. Wade (the case which made abortion legal in the US) by the back door (pun not intended).

– Utah bans sex ed.

Before those outside of the US get too smug, here’s what’s up in Russia.

*Because of my aforementioned shortness of time, all of these links are from Raw Story, although you can find these stories replicated in most other media outlets.

Tied in with all this wrangling over what seems to the rational mind to be the most basic interpretation of human rights, we have the ongoing debate over whether long-term (i.e. after 2050 at the earliest) population stability or shrinkage is a catastrophe for modern economies. In a nutshell, this centres on the fact that modern economies are predicated on growth (in order to provide consumers for mass-produced goods and in order to provide an ever-expanding labour base to service debt and pay liabilities). Since population growth inherently demands economic growth, in the sense of more goods and services, and since economic growth is represented almost uniformly as the only way forward for any nation’s economy, this debate unintentionally represents a deeper question, namely: Are human beings economic components to be ‘brought online’ according to the needs of the market, or should the market perhaps adapt to the needs of human beings?

Exhibit A: This New York Times article by David Brooks.

Exhibit B: This excellent rebuttal on Slate.

Lest I run the risk of writing a blog post without being overbearingly opinionated:

1. Women should have contraceptive/reproductive health care if they want it, and that access shouldn’t depend on what other people think.

2. Abortion is a matter for the couple, not for the government, the church or any other organisation. I’ve known enough women who have had abortions to know that none of them entered into it lightly. That’s about as far as any man’s opinion should intrude on the matter as far as I’m concerned.

3. Anti-homosexuality measures/discrimination/inequality are just plain rude. Stop it, America. And for that matter Russia, Uganda, Malawi…oh, the list is too depressing to go into.

Trying to finish a feature film with no money can be mentally and emotionally exhausting, and never have I worried more for my own sanity than when I found myself agreeing with Pat Robertson. Scary stuff. It must be the end times…

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

What makes this movement so special and, from my perspective, so poignant, is that there are no enemies here.

Some of you will have been beaten or arrested by the police. Non-protesters may have had personal property damaged during the course of these events. The police may have had abuse or worse hurled at them for what they are doing in seeking to control the direction of these protests. Those of you who have been hurt have not been hurt by your enemies. You have been hurt by your brothers, your sisters and those who one day will be your strongest allies. Why do I see it that way?

The law is such that the police will enforce it as ordered regardless of its substance. In instances when the police have used heavy-handed tactics, they have done so because they are upholding the law as it has been explained to them and along the lines by which they have been instructed to do so. This is not a semantic point, but a very important key to our future as social beings on this beautiful planet of ours. A change in the law will change the behaviour of the police.

The police force is exactly that – it is a force, a tool which does the bidding of the hand which wields it. I may personally disagree with a great deal of the laws currently on the books, and I may wholeheartedly disagree with the manner in which those laws are sometimes enforced, but the police are not the enemy. They are our brothers and sisters, born into a way of life they did not build, conducting their life in accordance with the information they have been given over the course of their lifetime. With whom does the blame lie if they have been given the wrong information, or told to enforce unjust laws? Is it the fault of a child who has never been taught language that he cannot speak? In all of this action and rhetoric, the true tragedy is that we are falling prey to the exact divisive strategy which has allowed us to be governed so unjustly for so long.

When the laws are changed to better suit the idea of justice and governance that befits us as an intelligent life form, the police will be on the front line of keeping those laws intact. The neutrality of the police may be a most incomprehensible thing to those witnessing violence as a result of it, but that neutrality is also to our advantage.

Police men and women who will use baton and pepper spray to subdue those allegedly violating public order will steadfastly turn those weapons on whomever is designated an opponent to public order, no matter how it is defined. If this is the case, as I believe it to be, then we have no enemy in the police. They are human beings, just like us, and the structure which they are a part of has convinced them that we must be watched and subdued.

The police in Britain and across Europe have undergone some of the most stringent cutbacks in wages, man-hours and employment numbers. These protests stand, among other things, for equitable wages in return for fulfilling work. These police men and women are the people we are fighting for. They just don’t know it yet, and if they do, they have pressures of their own to account for their silence as they wait patiently for the law to allow them to act in accordance with their beliefs.

Whether or not people should follow orders they disagree with is by the by. It is both dishonest and unfair to expect them to behave differently to how we think we would in their place, because we are not in their place. They are not our enemy. There is no “they”. There is only “us”.

So this is the crucial aspect of this movement that must be shouted from the rooftops. Any human of flesh and blood who resides within a society whose laws and financial system bind them is one of us, because that is who we are and that is what we represent. One who has no enemy also is no enemy. This is the way in which peace can be built on the foundation of compassion.

This movement is exactly that – a movement. Like a nuclear chain reaction, movement can become a revolution over time if a critical mass is reached. If enough of us really begin to see each other for the commonly bound humans that we are rather than the social roles into which we are divided, then the rest falls into place.

The media calling for an agenda, for a plan, misses the necessary process of a movement:

– We become aware of something wrong, so we move towards where we think the answers may be.

– We find over time that we are moving in concert with others like us, and in that shared understanding of seeking answers, we begin to help each other to formulate the right questions.

Looking for answers is not an egotistical activity. Anybody who can help us in our search is an ally, anyone who hinders us in our search simply has not yet found the drive within themselves to begin looking. This is how we move together; this is what a social movement is. This is not about the selfish imposition of a certain preference on others who do not share that preference. This is about openly stating what can be factually supported, regardless of how much the media choose to leave out or ignore, regardless of how current comforts mollify people into defensive acceptance of the status quo. Again, they are not the enemy. They are us, and they will figure it out one day.

True revolution begins in the mind. If we learn the ways of the oppressors only to replicate those ways when we have replaced them, then we have achieved nothing. The only true revolution begins with the realisation that we are all one. Beneath political and social definitions and dynamics, there is no oppressor and oppressed. There are only vulnerable, fearful people manipulated by deeply rooted buttons which those who wish to retain power know how to push.

I am one of those vulnerable, fearful people, but I am trying my best to awaken my mind, to awaken the wellspring of compassion within me which fears no-one because by fearing, I avoid understanding and empathising. I try to acknowledge what my buttons are and observe how they are pushed by others, by information, by activity. Only then can I see how close to everyone else I am, because we are all just as vulnerable and just as fearful as I am, since we are all biologically the same and exist within localised modulations of a single social structure.

Those who currently wield power and influence, who line their pockets, manipulate markets and governments in order to extend their power and undermine opposition – they are also not the enemy. They too are us, but they are confused. They have become confused by the very system which they are struggling to maintain as it wheezes and grinds to a halt around them. They think their power is real. They think their money is real. They think that by defending their claim to power, they can hold onto their money, which in an evidently circular manner, is also the fictitious source of their fictitious power.

Any threat to power can be very frightening. This is why ideas are the commodity most tightly regulated in our cultures. Our modern global system is built on piles of abstractions and unquestioned assumptions. To maintain the structure of this ideology, built as it is on quicksand, only a superficial amount of idea variation is tolerated before the protectors of the structure crack down.

People march all the time, for St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, Gay Pride. They protest against war, they petition embassies and picket the White House. But none of these variations comes close to the sea change in structural thinking that this movement can bring about if it is preserved, if it maintains integrity and does not collapse in on itself or become what it offers to replace.

If the purpose of this movement is to simply replace the current way of doing things with a structurally identical but ideologically different way of doing things, this movement will fail because it will find itself fighting against ideas which oppose it, just as revolutionaries have throughout the ages.

We must structurally alter the manner in which we govern and inhabit this planet as a species. Doing it for Jesus instead of Yahweh, or Allah instead of Jesus, or science instead of religion, or money instead of science – these are all the same thing. We have always done the same thing, and we all know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

In this way, it is not the wealth of a small number of people which is the problem, nor is it the tax avoidance of large companies. These things are examples of the hypocrisy that our system engenders, but they are not the enemy. Getting bogged down in this level of discourse automatically plays to the system of averages and financial valuation which has confused so many of us for so long. Believing that justice is a simple matter of us getting our hands on what other people have is exactly the kind of thinking that got us to this point in the first place.

Capitalism is not the problem. All economic systems are capitalist systems because capitalism is simply the use and management of capital, most commonly referred to as surplus wealth. Whoever told you that capitalism is somehow different from other economic systems does not understand economics.

The deeply extractive, materially fixated, morally bankrupt, ecologically and socially destructive number games which are played world wide right now are simply a washed-out perversion of an underlying economic truth which has been lost over time, namely that people require access to goods and services in complex societies and the easiest manner in which to distribute those goods and services is by the use of a common means of exchange which frees the labourer from needing to find a supplier who wants the thing he produces. I can buy shoes with money instead of trying to find a cobbler who needs cucumbers or hats. This is a social service which is necessary for any society functioning above a certain threshold of size and complexity.

The fact that money has been turned from a service into a thing, and in so doing has been concentrated in very few hands which seek to perpetuate their control of that money and the system which allocates it does not constitute a proof that money is somehow evil or unnecessary. Like all gods, money gets a bad rap for what fundamentalists do in its name.

People have the highest degree of learned behaviour of any animal which has been studied, and as such, we respond very quickly and unwittingly to social and structural expectations. We thank someone for a meal we didn’t enjoy, we get a job at a faceless big box store and begin using the words “we have” to describe the selection of goods on offer. We identify with structures and social norms, and it is those things which must change if there are to be really meaningful alterations to mankind’s trajectory going forward.

It can no longer be a social norm that goods arrive before us with no provenance and no moral association other than our desire for them. It can no longer be morally (let alone intellectually) justifiable to bang on about economic growth in the OECD nations when the major purpose of growth is to support the growing debts we accumulate through a persistence in allowing money to be created as a debt-bearing thing rather than circulated as a debt-free service.

The strict extractive system which is currently in place in the OECD nations, centred on taxing the people in order to service debt generated wilfully, will never resolve inequity either at home or abroad. The emphasis placed on work (particularly non-productive work) is a by-product of a system which requires work in order to meet the basic needs of life.

From birth, we are told we live on someone else’s property, eating someone else’s food, wearing someone else’s clothes. There is no birthright for the modern citizen. We were told that democracy meant no taxation without representation, but what we have is no representation without taxation.

Brothers and sisters, in the streets and squares, in the offices and apartments, in the banks and agencies, in the police and military, we have a lot of hard work to do. We can only succeed if we do it together, with compassion for one another. With the world’s population hitting 7 billion at the end of this month, there has never been a clearer sign that we sink or swim together on this pale blue dot. The immaturity of ego, which wants for itself and cares nothing for external consequences, must grow to a mature and compassionate understanding of our responsibilities to each other and to the planet.

Asking for what the wealthy have is irrelevant. We should have something far greater in our sights: a real birthright for every living thing on this planet, in balance, understanding and peace.

I’ve been watching as the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City gains momentum. Worldwide, similar movements centred on similar flash points of discontent have been bubbling up. I attended the first day of the Occupy London protest, and I filmed some footage I have compiled into a short film which is embedded below and also available here to download for free under a Creative Commons license. If you find something of value in it, please feel free to download and share it as widely as you see fit, with attribution as appropriate.

I have wanted to write something about this situation but I couldn’t come up with the right idea for how to approach this very important issue from an honest place. However, after seeing this video of USMC Sgt. Shamar Thomas berating the NYPD for their behaviour, and after seeing and speaking with the police and protesters here in London about why they are doing what they are doing, I feel the best way to address this from my perspective is as an open letter. I hope that I have done justice to the principles of all the people involved in these recent events.

It is the way of all movements, no matter how well-intentioned, to pass over time into self-serving corruption. Many years ago it was realised that without a common medium of exchange, the melon farmer would only be able to get shoes from a cobbler who wanted melons. Over time this basic concept of money as a necessary service for the functioning of society has too passed into self-serving corruption.

Here in the UK, at the Conservative Party Conference, Prime Minister David Cameron states that the only way out of a debt crisis is to pay off our debts. According to his speechwriters, the way for the UK to prosper is for households to pay off their credit cards and their overdrafts. How inspiring a message to the people – in this time of austerity and crisis, of uncertainty, the best idea our government has is that you should pay off debts to people who pay themselves in excess of 200 times the average national wage.

In Greece, another general strike is crippling the country. Riot police in faceless helmets stride the battlefield of central Athens, gassing and clubbing people who are their fellows in defence of an establishment which is cutting police wages and benefits as well.

The howling winds have quieted for the moment in Portugal and Italy, as Greece is watched closely by bankers and governments alike for signs of what is to come.

Meanwhile, for the first time in at least a generation, protesters have gathered in and around Wall Street, fed up with the blatant unwillingness of their government to crack down on the financial terrorism which is sweeping the globe from the nerve centre of lower Manhattan. This terrorism, at the root, is based on a Big Lie.

The clue to the Big Lie is in David Cameron’s speech just as it is in the false concern of the troika now watching Greece implode. The Big Lie is this: the debt can be repaid. Everything else about this situation, from the endless talk of bailouts and tranches to the austerity measures and “fiscal responsibility” of government ministers, is skin on baloney.

Austerity will never work. Bailouts and tranches will never work. Less benefits, less welfare, lower or later pensions will never work. The debt can never be repaid.

Since the ability to do work in this kind of system is based on the availability of money, and since money comes into existence through the creation of debt, there is less and less money in the system as the debt is repaid, meaning the only way to get more money into the system is to take out more debt. David Cameron has either been very badly advised or he is fronting for the worst kind of criminal fraud.

There are many ways in which financial wizards can explain this, but underneath the abstractions and models of the economic jiggery-pokery is the heart of the Big Lie:

– Money is created as debt by the banks.

– The money which is created is only the principal of the loan and not the interest owed on the debt.

– Therefore there will never be, under these conditions, enough money in the system to pay off the debt.

The bank creates £100 when I promise to pay it back at 5%, but in order to pay back £105, I have to get the extra £5 from somewhere else, because the bank did not create it. That £5 can only be gotten at the expense of someone else who also needs it. As I struggle to get that £5 at the expense of my fellows in society, the bank sits back and waits for the interest. Their only competition, at the upper level of this game, is not for money but for how much more money they can make than the other banks. In the trenches, it is me who is struggling to make money or not. The bank will never have that struggle under the current system. Why? The banks have an enforcer.

Who bestrides the world, making it safe for capital and enterprise, ensuring financial stability? The IMF. The IMF’s highest decision-making body is the Board of Governors. The Board of Governors is comprised of representatives from all the member-states, usually either the finance minister or the governor of the central bank. So as the IMF imposes rules and conditions on Greece, Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek finance minister sits on the governing board of the IMF, ringing in the changes. Where does the IMF get its funding from? The member-states. So Greece is paying for the IMF to impose rules on it, and the finance minister of Greece is voting for the rules against the will of the people. This privilege cost Greece €1.3 billion last year alone.

In the UK, Parliament just voted to almost double the British contribution to the IMF. Why are the people of the world paying for the privilege of having rules imposed on them by an unelected extranational body? This article from an Irish perspective has some good commentary on this.

If this seems like a dizzying game of three-card monte, good. It is. Like three-card monte, the game is rigged.

On Wall Street right now, there are people trying to force the reforming of the government whose founding document guarantees the people the right to remove a government that has failed them. In Europe, the public is groaning under the weight of the unpayable debt mountain they have been forced to shoulder. There is talk of the euro fracturing as a currency or even the EU splitting up. There is the usual murmur about “instability”, “capital flight” and even war. However far-fetched these events may seem in our modern milieu, they are all possible and in some cases inevitable if the Big Lie is not publicly exposed and eradicated.

The only way to do that is to demolish the founding principle of the Big Lie, which is that money is a thing. Money is not a thing. It does not exist. It cannot be created, or destroyed, in any truly meaningful sense. Money is a service. It is a proxy for the energy involved in doing work.

The melon farmer needs shoes even if the cobbler doesn’t want melons. As long as the money holds commonly agreed value as a medium of exchange, the service of money can be provided. The cobbler knows that he can exchange the money for a hat even if the hatter doesn’t want shoes, and so forth. This is what money is for – it is a public service, not a thing to be created from nothing and accumulated by the few.

As long as money is a thing, it will be created by those who wish to manipulate it and accumulated by those who wish to use it to give them power over those with less of it. The time has come for money to be reinstated as a public service, a commonly agreed medium of exchange coined and circulated by the elected representatives of the people in order to facilitate the true productive work and wellbeing of the people themselves.

Let the banks and the politicians who shill for them pass into irrelevance and obsolescence. We do not need their games or their rationalisations. We must repudiate the Big Lie if we are to survive as a society of free individuals in community with shared aspirations. Otherwise, we will suffer the depredations of war and fear until we are all slaves to the debt which cannot be repaid, to the thing which is not a thing, to the substance and consequence of the Big Lie.

In Africa there is a proverb: “When two elephants fight, it is the grass which gets trampled.”

It is time for the grass to fight back.

On Wednesday September 21st 2011, The Irish Examiner ran an editorial by Steven King (not the horror author) on the world reaching 7 billion people. All personal politics aside, the main problem with the article was that it was in many places a direct copy of a speech delivered by Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked Online, at a debate at the Battle of Ideas in London on October 30th, 2010.

I know this for two reasons. First, because I was filming that debate for my documentary almost a year before King published his editorial. Second, in order to bypass my possible self-delusion in spite of video evidence, I obtained a transcript of O’Neill’s talk from a third-party website in order to compare it with King’s article.

Although I will not go into the background of O’Neill here, this article will give anyone with a high pain threshold a very good round-up of the origin of the network which has its roots in the Revolutionary Communist Party here in the UK, later known as the Living Marxism (or LM) Network whose peculiar brand of “humanism” is a beautiful demonstration of Orwellian doublethink.

Leaving aside the questionable motives of the original author and the spurious nature of the content, let’s merely compare the texts:

O’Neill (30/10/2010): “The main Malthusian idea I want to challenge is the idea that resources are finite. The idea that the Earth itself is finite. The idea that we live on a finite planet and therefore we can only have a certain number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food.”

King (21/9/2011): “the notion that we inhabit a finite planet and, therefore, we can only have a certain maximum number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food, must be challenged.”

O’Neill: “It seems commonsensical to say that the Earth is finite, and a bit mad to say that it isn’t, but it’s important to recognise how fluid and changeable resources are. It’s important to recognise that the usefulness and longevity of a resource is determined as much by us – by the level of social development we have reached – as it is by the existence of that resource in the first place.”

King: “It might appear commonsensical to say that the Earth is finite, and slightly perverse to say that it isn’t, but it’s imperative to understand how fluid and changeable resources apparently limited are. It’s important to recognise that the utility and longevity of a resource is determined as much by humankind — by the level of social development we have reached – as it is by the amount and availability of that resource in the first place.”

O’Neill: “Resources are not fixed in any meaningful sense. Resources have a history and a future, just like human beings do. The question of what we consider to be a resource changes as society changes.”

King: “So, resources are not static in any meaningful sense. Resources have a past and a future, just as human beings do. The issue of what we consider to be a resource changes as society changes.”

O’Neill: “So in Ancient Rome, one of the main uses of coal was to make jewellery. Women liked the look of this glinting black rock hanging around their necks. No one could have imagined that thousands of years later, coal would be used to power massive steam engines and an entire Industrial Revolution, forever changing how we produce things and transport them around the world. “

“Two thousand years ago, the only way people used uranium was to make glass look more yellow. It was used to decorate windows and mirrors. You would probably have been locked up, or subjected to an exorcism, if you had suggested that one day uranium might be used to light up and heat entire cities – or indeed destroy entire cities at the push of a button. “

King: “the supposed limits to resource-use have been transgressed time and time again by advances in human productivity — whether that is in terms of discovering that coal could be used not just for jewellery, as it was in Roman times, but to power an entire Industrial Revolution, or the use of uranium to heat and light (or destroy) entire cities, or the so-called “green revolution” in agriculture.”

O’Neill: “Thomas Malthus himself, the messiah of modern-day Malthusianism, argued in the early 1800s that food production wouldn’t be able to keep apace with human reproduction, and as a result there would be ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ that would sweep off millions of people. Yet in his era, there were only 980million people on Earth – today there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat.”

King: “Malthus argued that food production wouldn’t be able to maintain pace with human fertility. Yet in his time, there were only one million [sic] people on Earth; today, there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat.”

O’Neill: “Malthus’s problem was that he saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His fundamental pessimism meant that he considered it impossible for mankind to develop beyond a certain, nature-enforced point. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the industrial revolution and various social revolutions, mankind did overcome many social limitations and found new ways to make food and deliver it to people around the globe.”

King: “Malthus’s problem — shared by much of the environmental lobby today — was that he saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His essential pessimism meant he thought it impossible for mankind to advance beyond a certain, nature-enforced level. His essential pessimism meant he thought it impossible for mankind to advance beyond a certain, nature-enforced level. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the Industrial Revolution, mankind did overcome many social limitations and discovered new ways to make food and transport it to people around the globe.”

O’Neill: “The idea of sustainability is anti-exploration, anti-experimentation, anti-risk – all the qualities we need if we are going to make the kind of breakthroughs that earlier generations made with coal and uranium and other resources.”

King: “the whole idea of sustainability is, at core, anti-exploration and anti-experimentation — the qualities we need if we are going to replicate earlier generations’ innovation breakthroughs.”

O’Neill: “The ascendancy of the Malthusian outlook can really be seen in the way people are frequently discussed these days: exploiters, the mere users of resources, the destroyers of things.”

King: “We need to think about people as positive agents of change not mere users of resources, destroyers of things.”

O’Neill: “we created the means for extracting and transforming those resources; we created cities, workplaces and homes on the back of those resources; and every time, we managed to get more and more stuff from fewer resources and created new resources along the way.”

King: “We created the means for extracting and transforming mineral resources. We created cities, workplaces and homes on the back of those resources. Every decade that passes, as a species, we have managed to get more and more stuff from fewer resources and create new resources along the way.”

Well, that was fun. So who is this (un)masked man who publishes his opinion in the form of other peoples’ words?

Steven King, or, to give him his full honorific, Dr. Steven King, is currently the director of the New Delhi office for APCO Worldwide. The man has degrees from three universities, one of them Oxford, and for years was the chief political adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party. He ostensibly left politics to join the Policy Exchange, a British think tank where he worked as the External Relations Director from 2006 to 2008. The Policy Exchange is “powering the renaissance of the centre right” according to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

I’ve written about the creeping (and creepy) influence of the think tank system before. The Policy Exchange isn’t to my knowledge affiliated with the IEA/Antony Fisher crowd, but the intellectual high ground they profess to inhabit can be shown as quicksand very easily nonetheless. Today, the Policy Exchange are having a debate at the Labour Party Conference called “Remonopolising power? Reforming the electricity market”, which is sponsored by Oil & Gas UK, who describe themselves as working “to strengthen the long-term health of the offshore oil and gas industry in the United Kingdom”. So both major political parties in the UK are participating in a debate about energy issues which is sponsored by an industry lobby group which recently danced on the grave of the mooted EU offshore drilling moratorium. The only other speakers were representatives of Policy Exchange, another think tank called the Regulatory Policy Institute and a representative of the lobby group sponsoring the whole sordid farce of “policy-based democracy”. Policy written by whom, based on what and enforced by what public mandate, one might ask. As we will learn from the heads at APCO, this falls under one of the global PR machine’s primary strategies: “the imprimatur of a respected third party”.

So back to Steven King, now that we’re familiar with his pedigree. He works for APCO Worldwide, one of the largest PR companies in the world. Frankly, I’m at a loss as to where I can begin with these people. Let’s just go through their greatest hits:

In 1993 APCO founds TASSC (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition) on behalf of Philip Morris after secondhand smoke is classed as a carcinogen; the intention of the “grassroots” movement is to “prepare and place opinion articles in key markets”.
In 1995 APCO, on behalf of Philip Morris, spearheads the “tort reform” drive to stem the rising tide of product liability suits. APCO also represented Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha that year after the adverse press caused by the detention and execution of nine environmental activists including Ken Saro-Wiwa.
In 2007 Ken Silverstein gives an excellent account of a meeting he took with executives from APCO while pretending to work for a company interested in livening up the image of Turkmenistan – I won’t go into further detail here but his article is a riot.
Speaking of riots, that same year Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat in India, hires APCO after over 1,000 people were killed and thousands more injured in riots in 2002 which Modi was accused of turning a blind eye to. In 2005 he was refused a visa to enter the US on the grounds that he was “responsible for, or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom”. This from an American government that had Muslims detained without trial at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. Go figure.

Oh, I almost forgot. TASSC, the APCO front espousing concern over “junk science“? They’re also the leading purveyor of doubt-fog on other “controversial” scientific topics like pesticides and climate change. George Monbiot outlines their role at length here. With reference to my previous article about the Institute of Economic Affairs, it’s worth noting that Ralph Harris wrote a screed about secondhand smoke during the same period as APCO’s campaign against the “controversial” scientific assertion that breathing in secondhand smoke might be bad for you.

This PR strategy/trend appears again and again – multiple “unconnected” sources producing counter-intuitive, market-led objections to common sense concerns about the social or physical environment. So how is it any surprise that a representative of APCO publishes an “opinion” in The Irish Examiner that happens to tie in with exactly the market-uber-alles corporate dogma peddled by the clients of the company that pays his salary? What is surprising is that a man with three degrees working for one of the world’s largest PR firms puts his name to an article largely copied from a source which goes unmentioned and unacknowledged.

Even more shocking, or, perhaps worryingly, not shocking at all, is that an established newspaper will accept editorial opinion from a representative of a PR firm retailing specific market ideologies without pointing out that the same guy saying that human population growth is not a strain on our biosphere works for a company that defends dictators, excuses human rights abuses, casts doubts on the carcinogenic effects of smoking, refuses to see pesticides as potentially harmful to humans and classes climate change due to CO2 as a controversial theory.

I cannot help but see a certain irony in Steven King arguing the “human ingenuity beats scarcity” case with words he plagiarised. Perhaps honesty is a finite resource.

So it has come to this. Outside, sirens doppler back and forth every few minutes. My street is one of the quiet ones. The looting is restricted to areas with high street brands.

The irony here is so thick it could cure anaemia. London is overrun by looters, smashing in windows, tearing open shutters and making off into the night with armfuls of tracksuit bottoms, DVD players and flatscreen televisions. The streets are strewn with hangers.

The purported flashpoint of this widespread disorder? The shooting of a young man in Tottenham, north London named Mark Duggan. He was shot by the police in what can generously be described as an opaque incident involving an exchange of fire that may or may not have involved the police accidentally shooting each other and blaming it on him. The people smashing into sports shops and electronics stores probably don’t even know his name. They’re too busy, in the words of this girl, “getting [their] taxes back”. With Duggan’s death fresh enough to be bandied about as a cause, the rioting could be somehow explained as a form of protest, an eruption of vitriol from the disaffected youth inhabiting the poorer districts of this city, struggling to find a role in society that won’t involve performing oral sex on disused railway platforms or stacking shelves at Tesco.

How is this anti-establishment sentiment made manifest? By what can only be described as violent shopping. Rampaging through the communities they grew up in, they take out their frustration at a lack of occupation or engagement on the shops and businesses that provide employment in their area, they smash-and-grab the luxury items which are supposedly the fruit of all the social climbing, work and effort our society enshrines. Their generation’s grand gesture of disobedience is straight-up Western-style consumer-capitalism, pure and uncut, direct from the amygdala. Take whatever you can get your hands on for yourself and trash the commons with impunity. They are not inhuman, they are not confused, they are not wrong – they’re us, except they’re doing it here and with no sense of irony. Protest 2.0, London-style.

In Cairo, during the uprising, it was the Egyptian youth who linked arms to protect the Museum of Antiquities, the cultural heritage of their long and respected history. Here in London, if any of these kids have been to a museum, it was after being dragged there by force during a field trip (if their school still had the budget or in fact a subject which included things you’d find in a museum). While there, they glumly trudged the halls, occasionally looking over the dusty artefacts of the past with dull eyes. After all, with a smartphone that has wi-fi and full colour interactive gaming, with Twitter, with Facebook, with Bebo, Myspace, Blackberry Messenger and YouTube, how the hell is a museum supposed to hold a young person’s attention unless they’ve been taught to respect and cherish a slow offering up of knowledge and beauty directly proportionate to the attention one pays? These people have been marketed at since birth. They have been groomed in a manner more insidious than the tactics of the most hungry-eyed paedophile. Their sense of self, their very existence, has been mediated by the economy into which they have been prepped for entry.

From personalised ringtones to Celebrity Big Brother, every possible act of engagement or empowerment has been a commercial transaction for them. Every sub-culture becomes an economic sector. Anything they were taught was only on the syllabus because of its utility in the “knowledge economy”. Who needs to know history or facts when there’s Wikipedia? Who needs maths when there’s a calculator? Who needs handwriting and spelling when there’s Microsoft Office and spell check? Who needs music or art classes when there’s no demand in the marketplace for those skills? Or should I say skillz?

They have been raised as consumers, not as citizens. Consumers have gadgets. Consumers have the respect of business and government because their jealously guarded (and coveted) money is the closest thing they will ever possess to the keys to the kingdom. Even the university education which their parents received for free or for £1000 a year will now cost them £9000 a year if they can get into a university with what little useful knowledge the state allows them to have for their parents’ taxes. After all, don’t we need competition to deliver the best results to the consumer?

Given the opportunity to take to the streets, they come out in force as consumers, not citizens. Their protest is against their lack of spending power, their lack of a flatscreen television, the meddlesome need of government to extract taxation from them for services from which (if they reach their dotage) they will never benefit. They are the purest incarnation of our free market, consumer ideology. They are competing against the law for the best results a consumer can ever hope for, which is something for nothing. And they are winning.

While pundits are onscreen in the coming weeks for the mandatory hand-wringing, while Parliament is debating the inevitable emergency police powers which will bring water cannons and maybe even rubber bullets onto the streets of London, these consumers will be at home watching it all on their new televisions, comfortably toasty in their new tracksuits. They will be re-absorbing the narrative of their activity through the mediated world we created for them, a world which still does not contain a sense of genuine community, of productive work, of social justice, fairness or equality.

Our government decries the violence on the streets of Brixton, Tottenham, Lewisham, Camden, Woolwich, Croydon and Birmingham while levying taxes for wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Our deputy mayor is disgusted by the looting of electronics from Curry’s, electronics that have been made for slave wages in a Chinese factory rife with worker suicide and abuse, because that kind of throughput is more “efficient” (read “cheap”) than producing things ourselves using well-compensated labour. How dare they smash their way into a Tesco supermarket and steal food, while Tesco itself runs an approximate £2 billion profit margin annually while purposefully opening up “express” shops next to successful neighbourhood grocery stores, driving them out of business with tactics designed to bypass local objections? How can they set pubs on fire? How malicious is that? Those pubs sell beer from upstanding brands who buy barley from countries wracked by famine while our government bleats about food aid. Whence cometh such cannibalism? Where indeed could these misguided looting fools have gotten these kinds of ideas?

Did these evil thoughts filter into their minds by osmosis? Are they possessed by the Devil? Or did they grow up in single-parent homes on sink estates, surrounded by the remains that “wealth creation” leaves behind, dreaming of a way out? Did the debt-ridden financial system of this country drive both their parents into working long shifts with irregular hours to suit our 24-hour culture, leaving their children in the hands of everyone’s favourite babysitter and pacifier, the television? When Mummy’s hours were cut by Tesco after they put in self-checkout machines, did Mummy have to take a second job to make up the wages she lost?

However did these young people acquire such a bizarre combination of hatred and brand loyalty? How indeed.

As for where this unexpected outpouring of violence came from, the establishment need only cast an eye over the recent past. The dissenters in this country has tried every possible way of reclaiming power. We marched against the invasion of Iraq in our millions. We marched, petitioned and protested against war, against spending cuts, against privatisation, against crony capitalism, against bank bailouts, against globalisation, against corporate tax cuts, against job losses, against pretty much everything we wanted stopped. Did it change a damn thing? Did it stop our government from doing whatever the hell they wanted? Hell no. We even voted against all the major parties in the last election and ended up getting two of them in power instead of none.

In response to the latest raft of austerity measures, students came out and protested for a cause, en masse. It got messy, but hey, nothing like this. Response? Jowly outrage and zero engagement with the demands of the vox populi.

So now, after every avenue has been explored by the public consciousness of this country in an effort to make itself heard, it has come to this. Every one of these thieving magpies on the streets of London tonight is carrying with them a piece of our collective humanity. The frustration at not being listened to, which is even worse than not being heard. The anger at a system that functions in isolation, unaccountable, unresponsive and fundamentally undemocratic. The loneliness of having no community, of families working ceaselessly to meet their obligations as the rising tide drowns everyone without a yacht. The cognitive dissonance of having a millionaire Prime Minister tell us we’re all in it together before flying off to an arms fair in the Arab Emirates as a sales rep for UK Plc, only to now come home early from his family holiday to decry violence.

This is simply the newest manifestation of a festering sore as old as the hills, as untended as a gangrenous limb. There will be other manifestations, make no mistake. If the response of the power structure is to entrench itself, to bring in draconian public order measures and to ignore the underlying root of the problem, this will happen again, only worse and worse as time goes on.

If the individuals in a given society can be considered as parts of an over-arching holistic consciousness expressing itself above the level of personal human awareness, then the collective id of Great Britain just had a serious outburst.

It has been said that violence is the sign language of the inarticulate. If that is true, as I believe it to be, then how much more pronounced are the violent linguistics of the forcibly muted? That this violence turned inward towards the ranks from which it swelled is akin to the self-hatred of the alcoholic, beating himself up about being a drunk instead of laying off the sauce.

By what metric can we judge the behaviour of these people once the nature of our society is taken into account? What transgression can we hang on them which does not originate with our own behaviour, negligence or neglect? Having no sense of community? Having no moral compass? Wanting what they haven’t earned? Taking what does not belong to them? Exploiting the weakness of others through violence? Opportunism? Gluttony? Ignorance? Hypocrisy? Madness? Where can we draw a line that distinguishes their actions here from our collective behaviour as a society both here and in countless, far-flung places?

Whatever the conscious motives or underlying machinations, the metaphor of these riots is the real message, a message which we ignore or underplay at our peril.

Postscript: The word “shopocalypse” was coined by my friend George Arton and, in keeping with recent events, I looted it mercilessly. Shout-out to The West Londoner for keeping the news feed going all night.

UPDATE: August 14th, 2011 – It has been brought to my attention by my diligent commenters that George may have overstepped the mark when he claimed ownership of the word “shopocalypse”. It appears to have been in circulation since at least 2007. Any confusion is between him and the true coiner of the word. I am staying well out of this one.

I’ve just uploaded a new podcast with the guys from Positive Money.

The Magic Box of Money Creation with Ben Curtis and Ben Dyson of Positive Money by Critical Mass Podcasts

Talking to them about money creation really got me thinking about the predicament we find ourselves in these days. For a society such as ours, money is the enabler of activity, the lubricant, the expedient, the salve, the reward, the goal. It seems utterly mad that so few of us would really know where it comes from, how it comes into being and what kind of pressure that places on our system.

I spoke at a conference a couple of weeks ago and they asked me to hang around for the round table discussion after my presentation. I joined the table which was discussing population growth. The head of the table was pressing for us to come to an agreement that we could present in the closing remarks. His main interest seemed to be in asserting that Britain was filled to capacity with a population of 63 million and that therefore projected gains from immigration which would take us to 70 million over the next decade or so were bad.

A general air of discomfort descended over our table, no doubt helped by the posh Middle England/ NIMBY-ness of our discussion leader. I’m not one for political correctness but it did feel that his statement about immigration was at best disingenuous. Several people in the group raised perfectly valid points about the manner in which we in the UK live and consume and were summarily dismissed.

I decided to take a shot at explaining that from my perspective, complaining about immigration and population pressure was not going to be constructive unless we looked at the economic and social system that makes those things inevitable. I began to talk about the manner in which money is created, which automatically demands growth to service debt, which demands more work and more workers at all times. I wanted to get across what I consider to be the key point of the issue, which is that we have built a pyramid scheme instead of a sustainable economy. A pyramid scheme requires an ever-increasing supply of new participants in order to function. If you have an economic system that categorically cannot function without a constant influx of new people, you will never reconcile the pressures caused by more people without fixing the system that demands their presence. In a modern, complex world, that system is driven at the root by the way we create and distribute money.

The head of our discussion interrupted me to say that I was going off topic into conspiracy theories, that we were talking about people, not economics. When I attempted to stress the connection between the two, he told me that I was “getting on [an] economics hobby horse again” and changed the subject. This man was a well-to-do, well-respected retired journalist of over thirty years experience. He was at a conference intimately targeted at environmental issues and without reservation I am sure that his heart was in the right place. However, if (a) people feel that money is irrelevant to environmental damage and population growth or that those who see the connection are peddling conspiracy theories, and (b) those people are the good guys, then (c): Houston, we have a problem.

I hope you enjoy the podcast. Please check out what Ben Curtis and Ben Dyson are doing with the Positive Money project – it’s one of the most constructive things happening in Britain right now and they make killer videos too.

I’ve had an article about the challenges of transition published by Transition Voice. Feel free to have a read.

Last night, I dropped some friends off at their hotel after a lovely evening. We said our goodbyes and I headed for the Underground station nearby. On my way, I passed several darkened doorways, and in two of them there were homeless guys settled in for the night. Both of them were reading books. My curiosity got the better of me and, as I passed the second guy, I asked him what he was reading.

“Boolean algebra,” he said, tilting the book forward to show me pages covered in symbols which, as far as the depth of my understanding went, could have just as easily described interstellar space travel as algebraic logic problems.

I asked my new friend how he got into the subject. He told me that he was an electrical engineer, working on synthesisers and other technological artefacts about which I am totally ignorant. He got very excited talking about the different sound waves that his book described. Apart from the dirt under his fingernails and a missing tooth, there was nothing about him that would keep him out of a job. He got laid off during the recent crash and subsequently lost his apartment. I’m sure there was more to his story, but he wanted to get back to his book and I had to catch the last train home. I left him in the doorway, huddled up in his sleeping bag.

Years ago, I shared an apartment with a Filipino man and his wife. His wife was a trained nurse and he was a telecom engineer. They were living in London and working as a cleaner and a carpenter respectively. They shared the box room of the flat and sent every penny they made back to their son in the Philippines. Their earning power in the UK was better than it was back in the Philippines, even with all their specialised training. I remember how shocked I was by the idea that a nurse got paid more for mopping toilets at Heathrow Airport than for saving lives in her home country. I was younger then.

In Britain in 2011, and throughout the so-called developed world, people with valuable skills have lost their jobs and their homes through no fault of their own, no failure in their field of expertise. They sleep in tents and doorways, waiting for the upturn that will make their skills economically viable again.

On my way back to the station, I passed a Starbucks. They were hiring.

Category Archives: Population

Instead Of Music, Confusion

Time travel is possible…if you’re a dick about women’s rights.

Between Two Mirrors

The Big Lie

In Other Words: The ‘PR’ stands for Plagiarism

Shopocalypse Now

Positive Money Podcast

New article published by Transition Voice

Complex Mathematics for the Homeless