Breaking Red?

It’s disturbing when your life views are up-ended. I’ve never really understood people. By that what I really mean is I don’t empathise – I am fully cognisant of your nasty venal urges and baser instincts and I want none of it. Observing the human race from the outside I’ve come to understand that my detachment has always been my strength. Given the choice of committing teamwork I’d rather commit something much more certain and final. I’ve never wanted much and most of it involved being left alone with a bit of peace and quiet.  

I’ve often dreamed of living in a simple shack, far from any settlement, reached by a forbidding track and away from prying eyes. Yesterday I spent all day on a building site in the middle of nowhere. But this was no mean bothy; rather it was a luxury development of eye-opening grandiosity. The principle house – there are three others - will go on the market for £4.5million and its kitchen alone is fully twice the size of my entire house. Readers, I shit you not, I have the plans and I’ve done the calculation.

Of course it has a pool; for that price it would be unthinkable for it not to. And obviously as standard comes a gym, sauna and steam room, entertainment complex (whatever that entails) mini-cinema, eight car garage and views to die for. Hell, it even has a purpose built bat roost – yep, an ersatz barn as a sop to displaced wildlife. They have thought of everything. Actually, they haven’t… yet. For the development has been tortuous and the saga goes back years as the site owner clearly has more money than he knows how to deal with and is apt to change his mind on a whim.

Take the pool: The pit is dug, the retaining walls of reinforced concrete have recently been poured and the footings for the grand, vaulted enclosure are in. But yesterday he was seriously considering moving the whole thing and enlarging it. The underground cabling for landscape lighting, fountains, gate control and driveway lighting were being sketched on the plans because they need to go in some time soon, but even during the discussion the position of the main gate was changed three times.

This was all doubly frustrating because not only is it a waste of time and money and effort and an exasperating demand on the patience and good will of all the contractors involved, but the client was genuinely unconcerned that it was all going to add a small fortune to the costs. Just back from his third skiing holiday of this season alone he sat there with a beatific calm, not a worry in the world; he seemed to ask, what else was he going to do with all that money? And then it dawned on me – this was just a hobby for him – no bankers were creaming off interest, no prospective buyers were screaming for completion. He’ll be ready in his own good time.

As I settled into the long drive home I couldn’t help but dwell on what I’d seen and wonder whether, with that wealth, I would even bother to be involved with the world of work and other people. If I had that sort of dosh I’d be so fully retired and remote that National Geographic would set out on expeditions to try and prove I existed. In fact, sod that sort of dosh; for the cost of the kitchen alone I could retire today. And then I realised I wanted a small piece of what he’s got and I want it before it’s too late.

Gold plated barbecue? Why ever not?

As I drove home through the night the events of the day receded into memory and felt more like a dream than reality. It dawned on me that I was experiencing envy, something I’ve tried hard to resist. But behind that envy a tiny prickle of something; what was it? A sense of injustice? How was it fair that somebody who seemed not to care about money had so much of it? Why, if he didn’t appreciate all that he’d got, did he need it all? Why wasn’t more of it coming my way? And then I had the horrible, crashing revelation that, far from not understanding you humans, I was becoming one of the worst kind. Fuck me, I thought, don't tell me I’m turning into a socialist?

The Da-doo-dah Code

So, I had an interesting Twitter conversation last night with one of the few left-leaning coves who follow me. (I’m surprised I don’t have many more – oh well…) He is on a mission to convert me – gawd bless him – from my right-thinking view of the world and embrace his compassionate and bountiful vision of the left. He’s a genuinely nice guy; I’m sure he means well. But…

Among his arguments are that I am “just a tool of the rich”, a “cheerleader for the very people that are raping you” and “one of the cattle”. Well at least he agrees with me about the last one. People are very much like cattle – a few bulls, a lot of cud-chewing cows and plenty of short-lived juvenile bullocks. (That’s steers to my American readers – oh yes I have some… Okay, I have one.)

My guardian angel firmly believes that the right-wing elite operates some darkly cynical mechanik to keep the masses down - not educating them, deliberately creating a welfare-dependent underclass for the tax-payers to despise (although I’m not sure how that helps the cause of either side) and controlling the media to spread its poison.

But, you see, that’s far too complicated, just like religion. It requires an enormous effort of faith to maintain a belief in something that presents no actual evidence. Of course, maybe it’s me that’s wrong, but you’d have to convince me that my wielding of Occam’s razor has been wildly off-target.

Let’s take a couple of points.

Under-educating the masses – I see forty-plus years of removing the rigour of basic education, largely pushed through by the overwhelmingly left-wing teaching unions, leaving students incapable of learning effectively. Being cruel by trying to be kind and yet, despite all that, some still manage to get off their arses and succeed.

Welfare dependency –By removing the stigma of not paying your way in society, the left made it acceptable to sponge off others - and look how quickly the unemployable took to it. Something for nothing? Who wouldn’t want some of that?

Media manipulation – Rupert Murdoch doesn’t actually control the world. Leftists just think he does because The Guardian and countless other branches of the left-wing propaganda machine tell them so on a daily basis. And of course the most pervasive medium of them all – the BBC – is largely regarded by those on the right as a left-wing tool. It’s prurience, not politics, that sells ‘news’.

If the conspiracy theory of right-wing overlords manipulating and controlling on such a colossal scale were true it would require an effort of coercion only hitherto seen in closed, despotic countries or cults. But these days we have the Internet and nobody gets away with anything for long without some little put-out snot-nose blabbing to all the world about how unfair it all is. Boo-fucking-hoo.

Winners and losers, that’s what it all comes down to. Simple as. The winners want to hang on to what they’ve fought for. The losers want it for themselves. Anybody ascribing anything other than selfishness to human motives in general is deluding themselves that we transcend nature itself merely by being the great ape, Homo Sapiens. 

Humans are resourceful and opportunistic and make a living however they can. If the state lets them scrounge, they will scrounge. If the NHS offers wider and wider treatments for more and more nebulous imagined ailments, people will develop those ailments. And if an opportunity arises to make billions out of the hard work of those who will work for subsistence wages, both sides still make a living, however uneven. I just do not see the hand of conspiracy in any of this; like I say, too complicated for mere humans.

So, it comes down to what you want to believe. Do you go for the possibility that hard work and thrift will reward you in the end and that anything is possible – the politics of hope? Or do you go for the low-hanging fruit of egalitarian, re-distributed wealth – the politics of envy?

The rhetoric on both sides is appealing at times and it’s the interplay between the two that broadly maintains the status quo. I could go on for days on this theme, but as far as the electorate’s position goes, I can think of no better simile than Indecisive Dave from The Fast Show: