Cassandra Voices

Tag: class

  • Fear, Class, and Universal Basic Income

    On the April 13 2024, a man stabbed several people in a shopping centre in Sydney. The morning after, I was walking past the Four Courts in Dublin, when a man approached me making a stabbing motion in the air. I fixed my eyes on him as my heart sped up, but it stopped as quickly as it started. Just a gesture of three or four stabs. I saw there was nothing in his hands, but kept my distance as he passed. He didn’t make eye contact or acknowledge me.

    The experience threw me off kilter. For a second I doubted what I’d seen. Why would someone do that? To scare people? But he didn’t even seem to notice me. Was he on the phone, and accompanying his words with thoughtless gestures, inconsiderate of how it might affect passers by? Or was he lost in his thoughts, unaware of the world, and acting out some inner drama? Safe to say, I looked over my shoulder a few times as I walked on.

    The problem of violence, such as the Sydney stabbing, or the shocking attack on Dublin’s Parnell Square last year, involves many factors: trauma, mental illness, addiction, social isolation, inequality… We could pull on any thread and find enough material to make a case for its importance in contributing to such acts.

    For the mainstream media and politicians, however, explanations are simple. These people are “thugs“, “hoodlums“, “scumbags“. Anyone questioning the role society plays may be accused of giving criminals a free pass, and not holding them accountable for their actions.

    After violent attacks like the ones mentioned, the media is normally quick to assure people that the motivation was not “terrorism”. The distinction seems to be this: terrorism is motivated by an ideology, a political position. A terrorist act has meaning. But these other types of attacks, according to the mainstream, have no meaning. The attacker was “schizophrenic”, homeless, jobless. Therefore, the violence has no sense to it. It is merely an outburst of animal savagery into the pure, clean, bright and ordered streets. The blame does not lie in us, but in them – those who cannot raise themselves up high enough to walk among us in our enlightened ways.

    Violence is like a volcanic eruption. It comes from the lower, subterranean levels of the social body. And we happily ignore the tectonic pressures that are pressing down on those in the depths.

    Dublin Riots.

    Within and Without

    How long before supermarkets are only accessible to those who can prove their bourgeois status?

    “QR codes at the ready, please.”

    Matthew struggled to hold his phone steady as the guard scanned the QR.

    “Let us see here…” said the guard, reviewing Matthew’s data. “An annual income of sixty thousand a year… Very good sir, go right ahead.”

    Minister for Justice McEntee’s vision for the future of public safety paves the way admirably for such a future, with her proposals including mass surveillance with Garda body cameras, CCTV, EU-wide biometric databases, and Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). To quote from Deleuze’s prescient ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’:

    Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighbourhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position — licit or illicit — and effects a universal modulation.

    Our smartphones would be easily integrated into such a system. We could implement it in an afternoon. Of course, some people will complain of the undemocratic aesthetic of such a system, but then when they read the news reports about stabbings, and think of the children, they will put aside their misgivings and gladly walk through the sliding doors with the rest of us. Most of us conformed to a similar QR code system during the pandemic in the name of the public good.

    Instead of radical change, society is on track for a compromise. Instead of asking ourselves why our society causes so much illness, loneliness and violence, we are resolving to create stronger walls between us.

    Europe is already a fortress, a walled garden in the memorable words of Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief. Our world is divided into the lucky few within, and the unlucky masses without. This dichotomy reaches its most absurd form in Gaza, where enemies at Israel’s gate are not outside, but themselves walled in, a city under siege, enclosed by blockades and checkpoint borders, barraged by missiles.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    Golden Tickets

    Western society dangles two tickets into the middle class before the labour force: inheritance and hard work. For many people, however, even the second option is becoming unfeasible. The ladder is being pulled up, and the majority of young people now worry they are going to be left behind.

    Let us step past, however, the despair of the downwardly-mobile middle class, of which much has been already written. What are we to do with those who cannot meet the demands of middle class careerism? If you can’t manage your addictive behaviours (after all, we are all addicts, in one way or another), and you can’t navigate the world of work, what happens to you?

    Those who cannot work are directed to a world of rules, appointments, documents, waiting rooms, lines, interviews, and regular check-ins.

    But what if you don’t have a fixed address? And what if you don’t have a mobile phone? Or what if you can’t keep track of all these requirements?

    If you fail to navigate the Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy, then you have the final frontier; a Diogenes-like existence at street corners, hostels, and cardboard windbreaks. Soup outside the GPO. Spare change. Random assaults by drunken louts who take middle-class disdain for you as permission to inflict pain.

    Stockbrokers, New York, 1966 from United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.03199.

    A Successful Civilisation

    Historically speaking, our civilisation has arrived at a point of absurd wealth. Through industry, the machine, the market, automation, and the outsourcing of backbreaking work to countries with conveniently lax labour laws, we have access to luxuries unimaginable to a mediaeval king. According to the British Fashion Council, we have enough clothes to dress the world for the next six generations. According to the UN, we can feed everybody on the planet. Why then, do we insist on bestowing the fruits of collective human achievement only to those who pass the test of ‘functioning’ in an insane society?

    This hyper complex informational administrative “service” economy is historically unprecedented. And yet we expect everybody to pick up the skills necessary to thrive in it, or we punish them brutally and unsympathetically. We see it as a bare minimum achievement to survive in this strange environment and punish those who can’t live like us with alienation, hunger, and hardship.

    In 2013, eight million 5-centime coins (one per inhabitant) were dumped on the Bundesplatz in Bern to support the 2016 Swiss referendum for a basic income (which was rejected 77%–23%).

    The Case for Universal Basic Income

    I am a proponent of Universal Basic Income (UBI). The idea is simple: give everybody enough money for clothes, food and shelter. The income is different from the dole. Everybody gets it, even if they don’t need it. There’s no need to endure intrusive bureaucratic nosing into how you spend your time in order to qualify for it.

    Most of us dismiss UBI out of hand. But why? Do we fear that a life of safety, satiety and comfort will make us lazy, debased, selfish creatures? It appears to me our current system does a fine enough job at that. If anything, UBI would do the opposite. It would improve morality, because it’s easy to be generous and patient when you are well-fed and comfortable.

    But for all you cynics, to whom I sympathise, let’s put aside the appeal to morality and ask this: Do you really think a basic lifestyle of security and comfort would be enough for most people? I think many people would work simply so they can show off their wealth to others, without needing to be incentivised by fear of ruin. As social animals, our need for status is deeply felt. People will work to signal their vigour, or simply as a way to pass the time and give their life a sense of purpose and meaning.

    And what about jobs that nobody would do for free? At the moment, these are the lowest paying jobs in our economy. We expect the people with the fewest opportunities to resort to them – essentially a kind of slavery. In a better society, the most unpleasant jobs, like cleaning the toilets, would be the best paid. Or maybe we can just build some robots to do that, rather than building robots to make music and art – you know, the stuff that humans actually like doing.

    Anyway, what’s the big deal if people become idle? Let them go for it. Idleness is certainly less harmful than most of the activity that goes on in our civilisation, and earns applause, billions of euros, and occasionally Nobel Peace Prizes.

    Fin Divilly – Songwriter and Performer by Daniele Idini.

    Not just for Artists

    UBI was trialed in Ireland, in a flawed manner, via the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme, which closed in 2022. As the name suggests, a basic income was extended to artists alone. To me, this runs contrary to the most important part of Universal Basic Income: its universality. You shouldn’t need to prove that you are already providing a service to society in order to qualify for it. That’s putting the cart before the horse. UBI is meant to free up people so they can begin to do more valuable things with their time, which should be valuable to society too.

    By granting it only to a certain category of people, it implied that the income was a conditional grant, rather than an unconditional gift. It came across as a transparent deal: we’ll give you money, but we want you to create commodities in return. Rather than challenge the logic of capitalism, opening the way for a new kind of society, it reinforced the existing system.

    I understand that artists were impacted badly by the pandemic, but so were homemakers and carers – are they contributing less to society than professional artists? UBI should be a no-strings-attached gift given in good faith to everybody, not a conditional grant for a cohort of well-respected creatives.

    The flawed thinking behind the BIA scheme was so effective at poisoning the well, and confusing people about the potential of UBI, that it almost feels intentional. A better trial would involve a completely fair lottery, with the name of everyone in the country in the pot. That way, we could see the impact of receiving a UBI on the lives of people from a cross section of Irish society, and all types of socioeconomic backgrounds.

    A lot of people today are stuck doing work they know is meaningless, simply because it pays the bills. The technical term for such an employment, as coined by the late David Graeber, is a “bullshit job”. Far from being a ticket to freedom, bullshit jobs induce a feeling of guilt, low self-worth, and absurdity. Most of us have ideas of what we would like to do if we had more time, if we weren’t constrained by the necessities of earning money for rent, food, and utilities. Ultimately, we are kept in place by a sensation of insecurity. Imagine what we could do if our lives weren’t based on fear.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • The Dying Nerve of the Liberal Class

    Outrage is the currency of the times. Nearly everyone in New York City and a healthy proportion of Americans are by now aware of the latest outrage to command Gotham headlines: the tragic death of a mentally ill ‘black’ man on an NYC subway after being choked out by a ‘white’ ex-marine. Some said the victim died while pinioned in the arms of his attacker. Others said he died later, on arrival at the hospital. After questioning the police let the marine go, and he vanished into the night. He was later arrested for homicide.

    I italicize the words above because they are not factually derived descriptions so much as ideologically derived. Another common recap of the event puts it differently: A deranged criminal, arrested forty  times and released each time by Democratic government, threatened violence to innocent subway passengers. A heroic ex-marine approached him, put him in a headlock and, in UFC parlance, put him to sleep. The individual later died in hospital. Cause of death as yet unknown.

    A Jesuit priest once said that nobody argues about reality; rather we argue about our interpretation of reality. The former interpretation is the version of events embraced by most liberals, the latter by most conservatives and many independents. The liberals have come under intense criticism for their—some would say—extremist approach to policing, or rather not policing.

    In liberal capitals, prosecutors no longer prosecute misdemeanors, and hoodlums of all kinds are released back into the public despite their offenses. Police are decried for systemic racism. Immigration is embraced without question. Whites are reviled. Men are despised. Trans people are celebrated without rest and anyone who objects is deemed transphobic. Gender pronouns are enforced. Anyone expressing traditional values or ways of communicating are labeled with a battery of accusations, including being patriarchal, privileged, racist, sexist, and of committing horrid microaggressions. Social media has been aflame with predictable hot takes from both sides of the proverbial aisle.

    ‘A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.’ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966)

    Apogee of liberal decadence?

    It makes one wonder if we are witnessing the apogee of liberal decadence. A bonfire of ideals. Something of the kind that emerged in Weimar Germany before it fecklessly succumbed to the National Socialists. It seems the liberal ideology of multiculturalism and identity politics has run its course. As I understand it, it was first encouraged in the Sixties as a left counterbalance to the Communist left and, crucially, a form of progressivism that didn’t threaten capitalist profiteering the way Soviet socialism did. From there it progressed through the mild discomfort of political correctness to the full-blown hysteria of misgendering crimes.

    We are now witnessing a liberalism that is by many accounts excusing crime at the expense of its victims. A liberalism that is practicing an extreme form of social engineering, attempting to hire for diversity sometimes at the expense of merit, forwarding reparations legislation as the middle class drowns in debt, and driving immigration even as homelessness among citizens swells. In short, racism and sexism mean that minorities and women are blameless and ought to be privileged at the expense of whites and males.

    I am reminded of passages in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. After being extorted by a small-time crook with mafia connections, the narrator, Charlie Citrine, an effete and wealthy writer and intellectual, is subjected to regular visits from the criminal, who sees an opportunity to expand his horizon of scams. Citrine comments:

    Rinaldo was ticking me off for my decadence. Damaged instincts. I wouldn’t defend myself. His ideas probably went back to Sorel (acts of exalted violence by dedicated ideologists to shock the bourgeoisie and regenerate its dying nerve)…Maybe this was in part a phenomenon of modern capitalist society with its commitment to personal freedom for all, ready to sympathize with and even to subsidize the mortal enemies of the leading class, as Schumpeter says, actively sympathetic with real or faked suffering, ready to accept peculiar character-distortions and burdens. It was true that people felt it gave them moral distinction to be patient with criminals and psychopaths. To understand! We love to understand, to have compassion! And there I was.

    Later he notes that “Goethe was afraid the modern world might turn into a hospital. Every citizen unwell.”

    Seems Bellow—a Nobel Prize winner and one of America’s great pulse readers—had identified decadent virtue signaling liberalism in its infancy. In the name of progress, of multiculturalism and diversity as progress, liberals find themselves surrendering their class privileges and even the conventions of societal security and law and order since these must by definition not be civilization guardrails but instruments of oppression for which we, via our ancestors (sins of the father, in the old language), are wholly responsible.

    Saul Bellow.

    Reenacting Oppression

    What is lamentable in this capitulation is that the minorities—at least in the public realm—to whom bourgeois liberals are ceding every cultural corner seem to have few better ideas than to reverse and reenact the oppression itself, driving toward a mythical notion of equality of outcome that confuses inequality with unfairness. Many have critiqued the ideology, even a small minority of liberals, on a variety of grounds including evolution. Is this justice or thinly veiled vengeance?

    The entertainment industry is perhaps Exhibit A in this phenomenon. Hence the relentless insertion of minority actors into the old vestments of oppression worn by white people in the near and distant past. Blazoned across the marquee of my Netflix app is, “Queen Charlotte,” a beautiful black woman adorned in royal vestments. At once the show denies the historical accuracy of the British/Irish queen and repurposes the oppressed as the oppressor, as though it were some sort of social progress. It is progress in the cinematic universe, as people of color are now playing characters previously withheld for white actors in the interest of historical accuracy. But now fidelity to history has been discarded to advance minority representation in film and television. Soon we will march to make the executioners’ union more diverse. More females manning the gallows. Be careful not to misgender your local hangperson.

    In his prescient comments, Bellow notes Sorel and paraphrases Goethe. Then he cuts to the chase, hoping to explain the feebleness of liberal society, “Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor who said: mankind is frail, needs bread, cannot bear freedom but requires miracle, mystery, and authority.”

    Too true. One can trace the need for the miraculous to the liberals’ desperate embrace of draconian public health mandates and a swift demonization of anyone that resisted. As the hysteria of the pandemic has worn away, the public health response is increasingly seen to have been a series of disastrous dictates from compromised public health institutions beholden to amoral industry. A society of the unwell, gratefully heeding the guidance of benighted institutions. Goethe and Dostoevsky together confirm the worst elements of mankind, realized in the 21st century.

    Featured Image: A member of the Peruvian Army with a police dog enforcing curfew on 31 March 2020.

    Pandemic

    The pandemic revealed the open sore of liberal credulity, as it clutched the hems of the CDC and NHS and the other infallible acronyms of our salvation. But liberals had been trending in this direction for some time. The unforgivable original sin committed by unlettered philistines in flyover states and incalcitrant financiers in coastal megacities was the denial of Hillary Clinton of her rightful coronation—which was to be the capstone achievement of liberal Boomers of the old identity politics left.

    Elevating a black man and a woman to the highest rank in consecutive terms would have been the ultimate confirmation of their identity politics. In the wake of this catastrophic defeat for liberals (a catastrophe in their worldview), the bourgeoisie dropped their long-held antipathy for federal intelligence agencies and embraced the CIA, NSA, and DIA, taking their word as gospel in the prosecution of Donald Trump. How easily they forgot Cointelpro, the slaughter of the Panthers, not to mention their murky proximity to the deaths of both Kennedys and King. So the miraculous authority of the daddy state has once more taken hold of a significant portion of the population.

    It is a perhaps positive sign that on Rotten Tomatoes, Queen Charlotte scored an all-time low audience score of 1 percent (spilled popcorn icon) and just 11 percent with critics. Though it must be noted in fairness that the series has tripled its ratings among viewers since then, now subsisting at three percent approvals. Likewise, the disastrous Bud Light campaign using a deeply controversial minor trans celebrity has thus far engendered some $15.7 billion in losses. Thanks in part to its line of Pride month clothing for toddlers, Target has watched $9B vanish from its coffers in like fashion.

    But the mainstream media wages its holy war. Vogue furiously said of Queen Cleopatra criticism, “Let’s call it what it is: racism.” The Guardian said, “…the idea that you need a white actor is utterly insidious.” The New York Times couched the negative critiques as revealing, “Fear of a Black Cleopatra,” and offered its usual casuistic evasions by declaring nobody meaningfully identified as white in Cleopatra’s time. (Note, of course, how identifying as a race supersedes being a member of an actual race. Of course, liberals have long argued there is no such thing as race, much as transgender activists often argue there is no such thing as biology, aside from a patriarchal construct ginned up by mad misogynists.)

    Writer A.J. Kay nicely summarized the  movement as, “The rigid moral paradigm in which anything short of ‘affirmation’ is bigoted and hateful.”  It is an ideology of total affirmation of ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and women, behavior notwithstanding. Its flip side is the total condemnation of whites and males, behavior notwithstanding. If white, one’s only recourse is to don the sackcloth and ashes, fall to one’s knees, and beg forgiveness from one’s victims. Their response is immaterial. One must atone.

    This stridency is born of extreme ideological bias. We are no longer a united states. We now live in a society of seething ire beset by social division, with a doddering senior citizen in charge, a carnival barker awaiting a second act, a legacy of Camelot calling for a great renewal. Everyone angry. Everyone lost. Some blinded by despair, some by rage. The collapsing scenery is perhaps more Shakespearean than Bellovian, Recall the opening scenes of King Lear, “In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack’d ‘twist son and father… We have seen the best of our time.” As an infamous communist once wrote: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

    Julien Charles is a critic, corporate drone, and New Yorker hoping to call attention to the authoritarian drift of states across the Western world, and the narratives promoted to gain consensus for such measures. He has been published in,  Off-Guardian and The Hampton Institute, among other publications.

    Feature Image: Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama among those in the White House Situation Room getting real-time updates on the May 2011 mission to kill Osama bin Laden.