The hidden 21st century Question: are you on the side of little People or big Money?

It's time to restore the balance between Mammon and Mankind

Down at the nearby beach here in Gambia there is a restaurant, inside which are several shelves of paperbacks donated by tourists, over several decades, for others to enjoy or abhor. I rarely visit the eaterie any more, because the owner has promoted a misogynist pig to the post of Maitre d' - a man who should not really be allowed out in public without a minder, let alone inflicted upon those wishing to take advantage of culinary hospitality. Occasionally however - after my morning walk along the beach - I pop into the eaterie to grab a small bottle of water and scour the pulp-library for gems.

About six weeks ago, I borrowed a paperback to read from there, entitled Modern British Short Stories. It was published in 1987, and the anthology's soi-disant 'Modern' monnicker has not - if I'm being honest here - worn that well. I was almost immediately struck by the degree to which the story-tellers were glued to their era and its fashionably adopted half-truths, and had not a scintilla of awareness about the massive changes that were about to engulf us all.

As I read the offerings of the literary giants of the day - Doris Lessing, Graham Greene, Alan Sillitoe, Muriel Spark and so on - I could not escape the feeling that the judgements made in the stories were not just tediously suffused with pink-Left bourgeois values, they also hadn't moved on much since 1967. Hindsight is of course an easy critique to apply, but by 1987 the raw material for any genuine soothsayer had already arrived.

The 'personal computer' was not a newborn baby, it was a status symbol. Equally, the Thatcher/Reagan neoliberal economic revolution was a very obviously destructive force dtermined to wreak revenge on skilled working class culture. The Saatchi-Levitt myth of a 'Global Village' was in full vogue and - for those of us at the sharp end of new wave ad agencies - something we felt was intrinsically antithetical to Sovereign independence, regional Earth culture and natural economic competition, as opposed to mercantile quasi-colonial monopolism.

It wasn't until I got to Page 189 of the compilation that I came upon John Fowles' short story masterpiece The Enigma. Not only was the forty-five page tale a searing analysis of fashion masquerading as science, it also held a real shock for a reader encountering the mystery thirty-five years later. For the enigma in question simply couldn't remain a riddle today.

The Fowles yarn tells of a conformist middle-ranking lawyer and Tory backbench MP who disappears without trace. The first thing that strikes the 2025 reader is that such a bewildering vanishing act would be impossible today, because the missing person would be carrying a smartphone that would record exactly where and when he dumped the track-and-trace spy. In and of itself, that reality would clinically narrow down the where and why of his disappearance....as well as all the sites visited and Google Play apps he might have added or deleted - such actions providing yet more clues.

Digitalised central bank currencies will soon make any such form of escape bid even more traceable, because without his smartphone to buy food, the escapee would quickly be picked up.

However, the real and inestimable value of this short story is its fascinating examination of the human condition whereby the pressure to tribally conform is part of our genetic wiring....but at one and the same time, the sworn enemy of independent minority philosophy and opinion. For today's fringe minority frequently makes fools of the majority by becoming tomorrow's mainstream - which in turn is then challenged by another interpretation...and so ad infinitum.

The characterisation in The Enigma is sans pareil in my experience, and it drives the plot with consumate skill. At the end of the piece, we still don't know what really happened to the missing person; but we know for an absolute certainty that Homo sapiens would rather die than be controlled to the point of existential asphyxiation.

You can read The Enigma at this link.

The experience outlined above brings me back to the Emerging Trump-Musk White House in particular and RFKJr's role in it [see yesterday's Slogpost] as well as the nature of our species socio-cultural divide in general.

I will try to clarify the divide more exactly by using a snippet of ongoing personal experience - for legal reasons, no names, no pack-drill - that involves nothing more than commonsense analysis of behaviour; ie, the old research adage yet again - "Harken not unto what they say....but rather observe what they do".

For over two years now, I have been working closely - in both a personal and business sense - with a tourism hospitality supplier. As a result of this, I own two apartments. The nature of Gambia's bureaucratic chaos is something one has to accept up to a point, and one of the particularly frustrating symptoms of this is the time it takes to transfer the deed of ownership from vender to purchaser. I paid the supplier's solicitors a large sum in fees to effect that transfer....and I continue to pay - always promptly - the management fees (for the venue's upkeep) charged by the supplier.

Almost two years on, I have no signed paperwork at all from the supplier's solicitors, and the Government bureaucratic backlog dodge is wearing distinctly thin. A week ago, I despatched a polite email to "admin support" asking for this lack of ownership proof to be remedied as a matter of urgency. I have not even been given an acknowledgement of receipt.

The bottom line is that my supplier is quick to demand management fees, but slow to rattle the cage of its solicitors who have done nothing at all to justify the fees I paid them.

And the conclusion is very simple: when the issue is money for them, my supplier jumps through hoops with all the agility of a circus lion. When the issue is supplying a simple service to allay the concerns of a client - to destress a human being without monetary gain - my supplier is too busy to bother.

Ultimately, the issue here is putting money before people

And so - loop back further into both the brilliant John Fowles analysis of human escape from monied angst - and a new US Administration where the sole obsession of the Trump-Musk inner circle seems to be monied power, but the goal that drives Robert Kennedy Junior is affordable citizen health.

This really is oil-and-water stuff. It is not going to work, it will end in tears, and most important of all, the result may well be yet another migration of power away from the elected assembly towards the unaaccountable corporatocracy of Mussoliniesque fascism.

It is the neoliberal model of economics and its inhuman preference for fat-cat privilege that has brought us to this sorry and dangerous place. It is in turn the failure of UK Labour and US Democrats to do anything more than posture about Third Ways, LGBTQ, BLM, loose migrant policies, chairs not chairmen, Gay rights, climate change, 'safe' vaccines, pandemic drivel and the surreal Grab-Bag of New Normalism.

It is the lesson our Century forgot:

Enjoy the weekend.