Confession - I Don't Like Pensioners

Morning - a surprisingly early Rabbit this Sunday, hope you're all awake to read it.

Being the right age to myself remember being a 'younger person' fairly vividly, I'm aware of the perpetual demonisation of the young which is part of our society and has been for as long as I can remember. The narrative goes something like:- the youth of today are the worst ever, they're all thieves, louts and habitual drugtakers who go round pinching car stereos to feed their crack or smack habit. They're all stupid and lack respect, particularly for 'their elders' (who of course are 'entitled' to automatic and unearned respect for, er, reasons?). When GCSE results go up, it's because the tests are easier - when they don't, this is offered as 'proof' of their collective idiocy.

In short, young people can't win and I feel sorry for them.

The reverse thesis of this is applied to pensioners and the elderly, who of course did nothing more edgy and contentious than bake cookies and sit round a fire attentively listening to war stories when they were younger. If you've been led to believe that mods, rockers, hippies, skinheads and punks were all significant movements of youth who 'had their moments' then think again, as apparently these things never happened. Invented in 1994, 'the teenager' and his/her cousin 'the young adult' have been terrorising our streets for two decades now, much to the chagrin of those who remember when there was no crime, everyone doffed their cap when required and nobody swore.

There are a series of flawed assumptions at the centre of this 'old = good, young = bad' view of the world and it's worth tackling them individually. One misplaced assertion is that pensioners have 'paid into the system all their lives' and are therefore entitled to 'dignity in old age' as a result. The first thing worth pointing out is that the State pension, rather than representing the collection of something you have already paid in, is actually a ponzi scheme in which people currently of working age fund the ongoing pensions of existing claimants. There was no generation of 'noble contributors' who agreed to pay something in exchange for nothing and we shouldn't pretend that there was.

Even taken at face value, this concept of 'paying into the system all their lives' doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Many will have paid in and/or taken out intermittently and, given that welfare has been a valid career option for as long as I can remember, there will be current pensioners who never or hardly worked at all, taking advantage of quite literal 'cradle to grave' provision. The 'baby boomer' generation had free university education, grammar schools and could afford to buy their own homes in significant numbers to name but three advantages those in their 20s and 30s will not have. Then there's the future of the State pension itself, so it's worth asking...who's subsidising who here?

Next we have the depiction of the older generation as wise old sages who have 'been around the block' and should be bowed to on account of their superior life experience. Well, based on my slightly inferior life experience there is no correlation between age and wisdom - in fact it's a bit like the analysis of the cricket player who hasn't played 42 Test Matches, but the same match 42 times. Time spent on the planet is only as good as what is learned in that time, the ability to analyse one's successes and failures, rationalise and then learn the requisite lessons from them. People of all ages and generations have varying capacities for this, from quite a lot to some to absolutely none.

Perhaps the most unpleasant 'word association game' I see played with regard to older people is that with 'war heroes', military service etc. Now I grew up at a time when most of pensionable age would certainly have been around during the Blitz and World War Two, and it's certain that a great many of them fought in the conflict between 1939-45. However, someone who was 18 in 1945 would be 90 now and so nearly all of those who fought the Nazis have sadly left us (RIP). I don't begrudge a former WW2 soldier anything that they might get in acknowledgement of their efforts, but noted the anomaly of the shocking treatment of Nepalese Gurkhas by the British State over many years.

I remember a particularly cantankerous old man telling me that I should listen to him, mainly because he'd been in the army 'defending this country' before I was born. I asked him to name some of the places he'd fought in and the ex-soldier promptly rattled off a list (Suez was one of them). Look, none of the conflicts that the Uk has involved itself in since 1945 have been about 'defending this country' at all. Our 'Ministry of Defence' has actually become a Ministry of War, with young men signing up because there were parts of 'the life' that appealed to them or employment prospects were limited where they lived. I'm not knocking anyone for making that choice, but it's not 'heroic' either.

Another big green tick in the box for our elders is (apparently) that they tend to vote in higher numbers than pretty much anyone else and 'take part in the democratic process', whatever that means. Now this has less to do with pensioners themselves and is really a continuation of the dichotomy that voting = good and not voting = bad, or probably the best I've heard on that theme:- "if you don't vote then you lose your right to complain about what the government does" (so if you exercise a freedom not to vote you therefore lose your freedom to hold an opinion about 'the issues' - lovely). It's true that pensioners do turn out for elections in disproportionate volume, but it's also worth asking why.

There's an important statistic which goes a long way towards providing an answer - pensioners are the recipients of more than half of all welfare payments. This is when you add up the State pension plus all the other benefits that they're eligible for, but begs the question...if you're in receipt of so much 'free stuff' are you more or less likely than the average person to go out and vote for more 'free stuff', or at least for the retention of what you already have? Wealthy pensioners (some of whom live abroad FFS!!) remain in receipt of such perks as TV licenses, winter fuel payments and bus passes, and to suggest revisiting that with a view to taking some of it away would be political suicide.

Politicians know this, and so frequently gerrymander 'the grey vote', usually at the expense of younger people.

As long as we live in a representative and universal suffrage democracy, I suspect this problem will continue - with the campaign to reduce the voting age to 16 meeting major resistance (I actually think age is the wrong end from which to be looking at the question, but support changes that would mean some 16 year olds would get the vote, while some 61 year olds would lose it) it will always be politically advantageous to demonise and caricature the young, while depicting every last member of an 'older generation' as some 'hero next door', who fought off foreign invaders and continuously contributed to our society for over half a century, therefore justifying certain entitlements.

None of them were shirkers, lawbreakers or less than perfect in any way, apparently.

It's another problem that I suspect Sortition would provide a better response to than the representative system could ever dream of. Alas, that won't be happening in my lifetime.

Anyway, thanks for reading that and I appreciate the subject matter may be considered somewhat 'edgy' - will leave you with some music and catch you next time.

The 'Real World' - Where Nothing Makes Sense...

I promised a good mate of mine I'd talk about electoral bribery and an understanding of what it actually means. The concept ties in quite neatly with this, which was what I'd intended to put down at some point in time anyway.

Perhaps I should 'buy a saddle' or something similar, but I've been accused on several occasions of, through things that I have said and written, occupying a space which is "not in the real world", wherever that puts you. I think I get what at least some of those people might have been saying (a few were undeniably idiots and best not dignified with a response, but that's for another night). I've spoken to like-minded individuals previously, who have described themselves as being in the ideas market, a space principally concerned not solely with describing what is happening in front of your eyes, or suggesting remedies which deal with the way in which something might manifest itself, but drilling through all the shit, the conventional wisdom, the factoids and the urban myths, getting as close to the root cause of the problem as you can. I know what the man on the street and the mainstream media are saying, but why did xyz really happen?

This doesn't sit terribly comfortably with the notion of democratic politics, which, unless I'm missing something very profound, is about telling as many voters as you can that you agree with them, saying you love and hate all of the same things and people that they do, while finding a new and unique way to bribe them with their own or, even better if you can manage it, someone else's money. It's basically a ponzi scheme with a nasty thread of mob rule running through its rather rotten core. Karl Marx once described democracy as 'the road to socialism' and he may well have been right on that score - perhaps fifty shades of red is exactly what you're looking for, in which case keep spinning the dice every five years or so. However, those of us who recognise that you can't run an economic tyranny without a political one recognise the inherent danger of democracy without genuine limits, checks and balances.

I've said this before - just because fifty one per cent of people voted for a piece of state action does not confer any greater sense of moral rectitude on that action whatsoever. It may involve the imprisonment and slaughter of the other forty nine per cent for no apparent reason, followed by the widespread looting of their possessions, but plenty of people will tell you that, if that's what a clear majority votes for then it must, must be okay. That's how democracy works, right? Where this ties in neatly with recent 'real world' events is the calls you will have heard for wealthy people and companies to 'do the right thing' and pay more tax than they are legally obliged to. In reality, all we have is the law and beyond that morality is fluid, succeptible as it is to mood swings, a feeling of perhaps being hard up and/or over-taxed to start with. Someone feeling desparate enough will turn to someone, anyone offering easy solutions at the ballot box, someone to blame who doesn't look back at them from a mirror.

Your life is shit and it's not your fault - and, you hear that? It's the sound of morality being flushed down the toilet. You don't have to look very far back in history to see examples of how mass democracy enabled hitherto reasonable people to indulge in viciousness en masse. Ask any German. Or the people who had to flee Zimbabwe in fear for their lives. The electoral bribes for some, be they material, or the re-assurance of simply being told they weren't to blame, came at an enormous, and sometimes fatal, cost to others. That only 'an ideas man' could lead us down this train of thought was an idea re-enforced, confirmed as not having been built on conceit, when I asked one of the 'real world' specialists exactly what he meant by his criticism a few years ago (I remember it because he was supporting the invasion of Libya and I was warning him and another guy that we might end up unleashing something worse).

"Y'know, mortgage, kids, fill the car, that stuff" was his response.

I keep hearing that politicians are out of touch with the 'real world' of 'ordinary people' and I'm strongly inclined to disagree. In many cases, they have probably lived lives that would appear somewhat detached from that of the people they are asking to vote for them. But in terms of what the Great British Sheeple expect from the democratic process, the political class either already have their fingers on the pulse, or the advisers and pollsters recruited to answer this question for them are coming up with the right answer. Sheeple, to put it simply want stuff, and preferably at the expense of someone else. That might be preferential treatment under the tax system (i.e. for being married), some sort of 'protected' status giving them special consideration under the law (numerous and various minorities) or a quite blatant and shameless pre-election giveaway (the recent subsidised pension bonds to buy off the 'grey vote' at the expense of the young).

Take a step back and it quite obviously stinks to high heaven - but here's the tragic and rather unsettling thing. For both the tribal left and the tribal right, it fucking works. If the conversation is always going to come back to 'sweeties for me', regardless of the genuine moral question around the circumstances of who else was asked to pay for them, or the issue of whether or not this was a responsible thing for government to do, then nobody will have time for 'an ideas man' on the doorstep, will they? Not in my real world? If not, then why should I vote for you when the other guy has promised me all this free stuff? Then the same sheeple sulk when it turns out that the same charlatans made the same promises to someone else, this time promising that they would be picking up the tab. Then they ask why politicians don't believe in anything anymore and complain that they've lost faith in the process (snigger).

Talk about answering your own question...and getting the politicians you fucking deserve.  Shithead.

Everyone, the candidates and the voters, know that these are the rules of the game, and the only way in which you have any chance whatsoever of getting elected. I asked on social media recently who would stand up on the doorstep for unfashionable causes worth fighting for like civil liberties, a robust defence of the contribution made my immigrants in the face of frightening hysteria and those who are frequently asked to put their hand in their pockets to fund the largesse showered on others - like the unmarried (now subsidising the married) the childless (paying for the Mick Philipotts of this world) and anyone else who 'misses out' at the expense of someone who is rather frequently and rather obviously not more deserving of that money than the person who earned it. As everyone chases the holy grail of fifty one per cent, who speaks up for the forty nine? Or are they expected to just cough up and then shut up?

I'm going to come back to this at a later date, but hope to have given my mate and anyone else who has read this something which, at the very least, they can argue with. Does mass democracy, minus checks and balances, invariably descend into a pathetic game of mass bribery? And/or is it the case that there ain't no sheeple quite like British Sheeple - with the possible exception of American Sheeple...and European Sheeple? Is blaming politicians for the state of politics a tad rich coming from the very sheeple who put them in power in the first place? Perhaps I'm developing an unhealthy contempt for humanity in middle age, I dunno, but these seem like very valid questions with another round of bribery, sorry, an election, on the horizon. I didn't get 'knocked' last time and had better get my responses ready for when they start harassing me in April - let's hope for the sake of all involved that they aren't required.

Thoughts and disagreements appreciated as always. Take care and I'll catch you soon.