Assholes Will Always Be With Us
It used to be said that the poor will always be
with us. Whether or not that’s true, it’s certainly true that
assholes will. It is important to understand this, but not everyone
does. There are people out there who think that assholes will
automatically disappear if some religious or political blueprint is
followed. But assholes seek
ways of being assholes in whatever the system is.
This can
be seen from recent events (November 2013). For quite a few years now
it’s been clear that assholes have been having fun in the banking
industry, pulling in the loot and in the process destabilising the
world for the rest of us; VW assholes have been caught doctoring
emissions test results in their cars, using dodgy IT. We routinely
castigate this kind of thing as bad capitalism.
But
simplistic ideas of an instant cure through some kind of ‘people
power’ run up against recent events in the British Co-op Society,
for instance. Asshole Paul Flowers conned his way up through that
left-wing people-governed organisation. He had already conned a
church. As I write, news is breaking that a couple of Maoist
collectivists have been running a slavery operation over the last 30
odd years.
We hear
from time to time of violent and corrupt police officers. Of school
teachers and care-workers abusing their young charges. Of nursing
staff abusing patients. None of this should surprise us. It’s a
no-brainer that certain kinds of assholes will see opportunities in
certain jobs. Given the choice a predatory kiddie fiddler in search
of a career will avoid lighthouse keeping in favour of something in
the childcare sector. A violent control freak might well fantasize
about strutting his stuff in a police or prison officer’s uniform.
Narcissists and con artists will always want to disport themselves in
politics, churches and trade unions.
Of
course I’m not saying teachers,
police, politicians and the rest are all bad people (as certain tribal chanters
like to believe). Rather, those professions, staffed mostly by decent
people, will always be a magnet for assholes, and vigilance will
always be needed to fend them off. I'm recognising the ever present
nuisance of assholes. And of the falsity of the idea that assholes
are automatically avoided by jumping from one structure to another –
from capitalism to collectivism, say, or atheism to religion.
Assholes to the left of us, assholes to the right of us
In Britain many politicians have been caught out
in asshole behaviour, fiddling expenses and doing back door deals
with business. MPs are under a cloud, have lost respect; the question
is asked, is our parliamentary system doing its job, is it fit for
purpose? Here is an
opening for the assholes
who believe they have the gift of knowing what's best for the rest of
us to throw petrol on the fire. They peddle stuff which is untrue,
but as it's for our own good, it's justified. See -
Then again, if you are a Conservative government which wants to cut spending on welfare, why not reclassify as welfare stuff that never has been before and send out a page of dodgy stats
in order to soften up public opinion? See -
And
if you are a media proprietor wanting to take out the BBC why not
spread false stories about it in your papers? (I love this!) -
http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/no-the-bbc-didnt-put-up-its-staff-in-a-279-a-night-hotel-for#.apv4aEb3z
Here's a more dignified analysis -
My
Asshole Chart
The
Asshole Spectrum
There are degrees of
assholeness. As well as the higher order crooks, many of us at times
operate as assholes in small but pervasive ways. How many of us have
on the one hand railed at tax dodging by multinationals and on the
other hand paid cash to a tradesman to avoid vat? While at the same
time banging on about 'Save the (tax funded) NHS'? That’s hypocrisy
= small scale assholeness.
So
assholeness can be seen as a spectrum. At one end is the non-asshole, who tries to figure out what is the right thing and tries to
do it. The non-asshole will take an action or support a cause because
it is the right thing to do. In real life probably few of us would
qualify to occupy this extreme of the spectrum all of the time. At
the other end is the total asshole, who will take an action or
support a cause solely because it offers personal gain.
As someone who is
concerned about carbon in our atmosphere let me offer, as an example,
this schematic on that issue:
The Politicians we Deserve
'The
only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing' - Edmund Burke (1729 –
1797)
'If
you don't vote you don't count. It's only a century ago that none of
us had the right to vote and we don't want to go back to that route …
Go to Town Hall meetings and give them fucking hell.'(
Johnny Rotten, Sex Pistol, aka John Lydon, at the Cheltenham Literary
Festival 2014)
Mr Rotten
was speaking in response to the well known bletherings of Russell
Brand, advocate of not voting. For the full story see
Mr Brand
seems not to know that many people have been following his advice for
a long time and the consequences are not good. In local and European
elections people take his advice in droves.
If you are
a chancer who wants easy money, you can put yourself up for Europe,
get support and votes from a few cronies – you won't need many
because you won't have many to beat - and you're in. Once in you
don't have to do much except claim your expenses because no-one's
checking on you. When those people who didn't vote get fed up with
what you are letting happen, or read a think-piece in a tabloid, they
won't come for you or set up a rival candidate: they'll whinge in the
pub about Europe being a bad thing.
If
you are a crook you can get power within your local council by
coercing a few weaker people to vote you on to it. It won't take many
because the numbers voting overall are very small. For more on this
see my post, 'The Postal Vote, I toldYou So'.
These
things don't happen because we are the helpless victims of tyranny.They happen because we can't be arsed to get off our butts to exercise our power
over those who claim to represent us.
Cleaning
Out the Closet
At
the beginning I said that assholes will always be with us. Nor are
they a new phenomenon, emerging from evil modernity. We only have to
think of Horatio Bottomley, fraudster and founder of the Financial
Times
and owner of the magazine John Bull
to realise that dodgy people have always wanted to control media and
information. Anthony Trollope's 1875 novel, The
Way We Live Now,
satirised financial corruption of a sort we would find very
recognisable today.
What's new
is the fact that the bad behaviour is being exposed and challenged more
thoroughly than before, and that is a very good thing. To an as
yet small extent, the crap is being laid out before us and those
responsible for it are being called to answer for it. Well, sort of.
Because the assholes are resisting all the way, as you'd expect.
After all they're not going to say, 'Fair cop guv', are they? So for
instance the government has started going soft on continued scrutiny of the
banking sector.
Well, we
vote for the government. We have MPs. If we don't like what they're
doing we have the power to make them do what we want or to find someone
who will. But we won't achieve that by going out and voting once in
five years or by sitting on our butts and not voting at all. It
requires ongoing active participation by the electorate, writing to
let MPs know our views, joining political
parties, attending local council meetings, publicising abuses and
grievances, standing for local council election and using the Freedom
of Information Act - which the assholes are trying to scupper as I
write. Now there's something to give them a hard time about – and
somebody is, of whom more later.
There's no such thing as a world where all will be well for ever if you just mind your own business. Freedom, safety and justice are things which don't occur in nature. They have to be created, and once created they have to be maintained. In my view this is best done where there is a culture of openness supported by law which makes it harder for assholes to operate and easier for us to winkle them out. And where a vigilant and well informed electorate keeps a careful eye on the performance of those whom they place in positions of power.
We can't achieve anything through ill-informed saloon bar chuntering.
And it's no good banging on to the politicians and media if you don't
know what you're talking about, or if your views are based on false
information. It's easy for that to happen because a lot of what
purports to be information is, as I say, intended to mislead.
I'm relieved to find that that help is at hand:-
I
like this website: Full Fact ,which checks on the information and stats used by news media and politicians to see
if they're telling porkies. Unlike that media and those politicians
they explain their reasoning and quote sources of information which
are checkable.
I'm a geek for logical reasoning and scientific method, and so a hero
of mine is Ben Goldacre, a doctor. He pursues publishers of dodgy
research papers, journalistic health scare mongers, snake oil
peddlers, big pharma and bad and lazy research in general. He is also
very entertaining. Here he is on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4MhbkWJzKk
And here's his website:
http://www.badscience.net/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4MhbkWJzKk
And here's his website:
http://www.badscience.net/
The
satirical magazine, Private Eye
is not just that: it's a place where you can find great, honest,
sceptical investigative journalism. Its in-depth special reports on
major topics are required reading. Check it out if you haven't already
at
Somebody's been thinking about how we, the ordinary
electors, can make politicians take more serious note of our views.
(One of their campaigns is about Freedom of Information, mentioned
above.) Click here to find them: 38 Degrees,
And to finish with some comedy: Richard Herring's observations about how non-voters in Euro elections are the reason for Nazis becoming MEPs are painfully funny in his Hitler Mustache routine. You can see the whole half hour here, or to find the bit about voter apathy go to around the 18th minute:
Update, Jan 3rd 2017 - check out my post environment-3-assholes-and-environment for an account of asshole interference in the ozone hole issue in the recent past.
Update October 2021 - These active and effective non-assholes deserve all the support we can give them: https://goodlawproject.org/
