Is it the species, Stoopid?
Today's post is considerably more personal than my usual efforts. It is a widely held view amongst many media commentators that said commentator becoming the news is never a good idea. On the whole I buy into that, but then the media hasn't been about "news" in any shape or form for a long time now. As an Octogenerean, it can sometimes help to become an encouraging example of how - even at the age of 77 - one's determination to avoid compliance and keep on complaining gives new hope to others frustrated by 21st century life.
The gist of the Daily Telegraph piece in which I featured last week was really this: 'Old bloke trying to do good in Third World has pension stolen by greedy First World unelected Corporacrats'. For those who would Rule Over Us as Subjects not Citizens, this was a PR nightmare, and the result was capitulation. Finance journalist Mattie Brignal and his editor Chris Evans are worthy of Victoria Crosses because, like me, they prefer justice to ideology. Judging from my inbox over the last four days, deserving claimants cheated by State theft have been encouraged to fight back. Hurrah.
But dark moments haunt the aged.
If one can have too much of a good thing, we wrinklies can have far too much of a bad thing. I'm reaching the end of fifteen months of non-stop stress, yet remain unconvinced that it will ever end.
Over that time period, I have grappled with depraved and corrupt sociopaths in battles about appalling Retail Bank service, exhausting musical sound pollution, State pension theft [twice], spats between banks that make funds transfer an expensive nightmare, blatant censorship of every shade and colour, technical failure of Turkish and Chinese durables, 'Smart' TV technologies that don't deliver, diktat AI drivel, noisy power generators, sanctions and tariffs that are ineffectual and inflationary and - over the last few days - the vindictive insanity of self-appointed management 'Boards' - whose chosen title reflects their wooden nature rather than any valid definition of leadership with empathy.
Many would say, "Well, if you make your own bed, you must lie in it". I think that's fair comment, but there comes a point - when dealing with the power cut we have all been dealt - that the personal emergency-generator runs out of fuel. This is precisely what happened to me yesterday: by the end of the day, I was, as they 'running on empty'. I refilled the emptiness by diving into an - actually really rather good - bottle of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon wine and then retiring to hide under the duvet.
Because I could see no end to the hypocrisy of Homo sapiens
We hear more and more these days about algorithms. For over fifteen years now, I've been proposing Slogorithms. Here's a particular favourite:
'Those who have double standards always want double helpings'
Neat segue here into Edge of Chaos, written by Dambisa Moyo and published in 2018...
This book is a near-perfect example of how an excellent analysis of the PROBLEM then becomes a hugely flawed approach to a SOLUTION.
The opening 88 pages contain a masterful, superbly researched definition of what's wrong with our economic embrace of globalism, and why it has been disastrous for all but the very rich. As to global unrest, she writes 'these movements are united by a common thread: average citizens expressing anger at the impotence and corruption of the ruling political elites'.
So far, so good. All wealth flows to the top ten per cent, financialised service businesses boom as manufacturing shrinks alarmingly, social mobility is in a wheelchair, happiness indices plummet and growth withers away. Moyo calls sustained growth 'the imperative', asserts that economic growth underpins everything, but identifies eight headwinds acting against it - high levels of Sovereign debt, a scarcity of natural resources, misallocation of capital, declining quality of human workers [poor education], falling quantity of working age humans [demographic shifts], widening income inequality [lower consumption], and technological advancement decimating jobs permanantly.
But then, between pages 88-90, what she sees as an insight suddenly takes the story in a different direction: we're told that it's not that globalisation is bad, it's that short-termist political elites have diluted and compromised globalism. In a near ESP moment of reading the mass minds of Homo sapiens, Moyo concludes 'they think they are objecting to globalisation, when in fact they are objecting to an incomplete and impure form of globalisation'.
It's a jaw-dropping piece of Alchemic belief based on nothing....redolent of treating King George's apparent madness: "Your majesty, the leeches dose isn't working, so what you need is higher doses of leeches".
Although coming from an entirely opposite direction, Dambisa Moyo makes the same mistake as Bernie Sanders: she sees neoliberal economics as capitalism, whereas in fact it is monopolism. That is, a determination to knock out all competition and then start charging Command Economy prices.
The bizarre nature of her human mind-reading gaffe reflects the weakness in her otherwise commendably eclectic approach to what's going on: her world view lacks a grasp of human psychology, and is devoid of empathy for those who have become riddled with fear.
They're fearful because the vast majority of mainstream media, Big Pharma, the WHO, the Secret State, the Pentagon, Brussels and billionaires tell them they have a great deal to be frightened of
These insidious players peddle bogey-men like Putin The Mad, pandemics that do not deserve the term, a false certainty of new health threats, expansive intentions by the Russian Federation that don't bear a moment's investigation, a ludicrous image of heroism for the election-killing Vlodomore Zelenskyy and pills that create lucrative addicts rather than real medical cures.
The glaring trend of the last thirty years has been the migration of power away from elected assemblies and towards the unaccountable power of investment houses alongside the revolving doors that connect bureaucratic mandarins and corporate bribery.
Notably, Dambisa Moyo claims to want to 'strengthen' democracy, but her approach to it is disturbingly dictatorial. Like the EU commission, she doesn't trust voters. Unlike the European Union, however, she seems to see senior business players as infallible. So her strengthening of "democracy" goes like this:
- Reducing the frequency of elections
- Requiring Executive Cabinet members to have non-political experience
- Making it harder to repeal legislation
- Mandating voter participation
- Instituting minimum qualifications for voters
This is thinly-disguised totalitarian elitism that would without doubt be open to manipulation whereby the electorate gets more 18th century in size with every year. It is also a formula for keeping the bottom 10% of citizens lacking erudition "in their place" forever.
The idea that there is a correlation between higher IQ and wisdom is either terrifyingly naive, or evidence of New World Order tendencies.
So perhaps her employment record might offer a clue here as to the real nature of Ms Moyo. She joined Goldman Sachs as a research economist and strategist in 2001, and was with the company until November 2008 - working mainly in debt capital markets, hedge funds coverage, and global macroeconomics. Hmm.
She is also a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Global Economic Imbalances. Well I never.
But this was all written back in 2018. So what has Damisa Moyo been doing since then?
Her meteoric rise is highly instructive.
In December 2020, Moyo married Jared Smith, co-founder of the Utah-based cloud computing company Qualtrics.
So tell us all do, Dambisa, what first attracted you to billionaire Jared Smith?
But let's be fair here....she said she wanted to strengthen democracy, and so she is now indeed a member of the UK legislature.
On 8 November 2022, she was created Baroness Moyo of Knightbridge in the City of Westminster, receiving a life peerage in the Queen's 2022 Special Honours list.
She just - you know how it is - didn't want to go through the tedium of getting elected.
Methinks the foregoing Slogorithm doth verily apply. As indeed does this one:
Harken not unto what they say, but rather keep a log of how they behave.
So...is it the Species, stoopid? Sadly, I think it probably is.
We are tribal hunter-gatherers. We're suspicious of strangers, keen to kill, and wired to horde. Most of us think it's safer to be in the middle mass of the herd, safe from being picked off by hungry lions.
Fear of famine after feast makes us innately greedy. The desire to amass money for its own sake is the root of most evil. Honesty with our customers comes a poor last as a consideration, but if it came first, the money would follow....with a far lower cost of sales.
Neoliberal economics practised on a global scale will inevitably produce monopolism and the mercantile wars that create dangerous neocon diplomacy. That's what we have in 2025, and there is no escaping that eternal and empirical propaganda-free reality.
But as I have been suggesting since 2008, the mutualist entrepreneurial model of capitalism is the best way to put the consumer back in the driving seat and ensure that nobody is ever above the Law....thus ensuring the survival of the Rule of Law.
Without the universally recognised and obeyed Rule of Law, there can be no civilisation. This is why multiculturalism has failed dismally.
We do most emphatically need to examine our species failures. But the likes of Dambisa Moyo are the last people we need in charge of the investigation.
Equally however, at the moment, there are too many people in this world desperate to push us around and sign up to an existence that consists of nothing but obedience to everything they want to sell us with no socio-cultural ethics whatsoever attached.
Compliance with their twisted aims is a mortal sin. Another Slogorithm:
Don't be blindly obedient, be selectively objectionable: it keeps the bastards on their toes
Post-Script: I still think that music is a powerful way of getting over an important idea. This is the chorus of a song I'm in the middle of composing right now:
So stop pushing me around
I won't be gagged and bound
I'm gonna stick around
Until what we've lost is found
If there are any good lyricists out there, do get in touch. Usual email - jawslog@gmail.com
