A back to basics approach to reinvigorating participatory democracy in an era of authoritarian ‘hard man’ nationalism, race-baiting populism, and centrally focused neo-liberalism.
In June 2015 I wrote a great screed with the same title regarding how our Irish Democracy had been whittled down to the bare bones of access and transparency in order to shore up the bad debts of some of Ireland’s and Europe’s supposed insiders and elite members. You can read it
here.
It went into great detail on the spirit and substance of the Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann) and illustrated how, for the sake of a three line preamble to the articles detailing the rights and entitlements of Irish citizens (Articles 40 – 45) the constitution was rendered without substance or power to prevent bad government, mad government or even dangerous to know government.
I ended the blog essay with a call for the Irish people to demand a constitutional referendum on the Articles (40-45) with a view to altering or erasing the ‘get out of jail card’ preamble and assert the Irish citizen’s sovereignty and supremacy over their own destinies as is right in our democracy.
Eighteen months on, I have a lot more to say.
Democracy itself is at stake now, not just in Ireland but all over Europe and the democratic west. What we have witnessed in 2016 both with Brexit and the US election has been festering since 2009. The West has forgotten what democracy is; confused neo-liberalism with liberal values, laissez-faire politics with personal freedom, and an economic race to the bottom with economic progress.
In short we didn’t get the Mona Lisa we were promised but a caricature without value or beauty.
What we see around us is a coarsening of our debate in protest at the reasonable demand that arguments be made in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Name calling and rallying cries to the angry mob….sorry….’will of the people’; logical fallacies and outright falsehoods; not so veiled threats and hate speech against the victims of neo-liberalism are now commonplace across all our media and social media. It’s OK to act like a dick because you might just get elected.
Well, we've sailed in these choppy seas before and not just in the 1930’s. We had this atmosphere of exploitation, intimidation and division in the 50’s and the 70’s to early 80’s. Just have a look at Reelin’ in the Years on RTÉ (yes, I am recommending a programme on RTÉ, because there is no editorial or voiceover, just news footage, captioning and the music of the day). Looking back at the news footage of my teen years (1984 – 1991) was a really sobering experience.
I recall the dreadful state of Dublin city centre full of junkies and drunks; I remember the murders of gay men and single women in the bushes of our local parks; I remember the drug gangs and their bloody feuds; I remember paramilitaries and security forces colluding to murder the defenders of civil rights; I remember the gang violence at the weekend in the suburbs and I remember the dole queues. Naturally, Ireland hemorrhaged young people during these dark times. I was one of them.
And then….U2 got on the cover of TIME magazine, Ireland’s soccer team beat England in Stuttgart and something profoundly changed in our country. We began to believe in ourselves.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and we saw East Germans for the first time; they were a rum looking lot with their, comically small cars, naff stone-washed jeans, and mullet hairdos – they looked just like us. That’s the moment, I recall, that I began to believe in a better future, a wider horizon; like the rest of Ireland, I saw that we weren’t just Craggy Island but part of a new Europe.
The Single European Act came into force on July 1st 1987 delayed by seven months by us and Europe had to wait as we brought our concerns all the way to the Supreme Court courtesy of a self-taught Georgist economist by the name of Ray Crotty. In this landmark test case (Crotty V An Taoiseach) the Supreme Court ruled that significant changes to EU treaties could not be ratified by the government of the day without an amendment to the constitution allowing for that change.
Despite red faces whenever we had to deal with our European neighbours, Ray Crotty did Ireland and its constitution an enormous favour in achieving that result and forcing a referendum of the people on the question of the Single European Act. We are unique in Europe that our government cannot railroad the Irish people into any agreement or substantive change in our role in Europe without holding and winning a referendum on the right to sign.
This may seem a folderol to the untrained eye but Mr. Crotty was on to something. Ireland was never truly Euroskeptic like the UK but our country now enjoyed a very powerful brake on any move to dilute the sovereignty of the Irish people over their destiny. In short, we could not be bundled into runaway trains or pushed down slippery slopes without a period of debate and reflection. There are many other states in Europe who actively envy us our creaky, rusty Trabant of a constitution.
There have been many other treaties since the SEA in 1987 and there has been a referendum for each treaty held by successive Irish governments (through gritted teeth mostly). Ireland blotted its copybook a second time by rejecting the proposal of the Nice Treaty in June 2001. The Nice Treaty was in effect the introduction of the technocrat into our lives, handing over significant sovereignty to unelected and secretive bureaucrats. If ever the centralisers of Europe needed to know where the Irish people stood it was then. Many of the smaller states in Europe who had their voting power effectively diluted took note of how one small country of less than 5 million people could hold out for concessions just like the French and the British usually do.
Not to be derailed from their centralising zeal by an uppity minor state whose government made a big show of wanting to be ‘down with the technocrats’ but couldn’t bring their people with them, the European Union came into effect in 2009 with the signing and sealing of the Lisbon Treaty. Europe was no longer legally a consortium of separate countries but a legal personage capable of negotiating international trade agreements over the heads of their 500+ million citizens. Of course the treaty should have come into effect in 2008 but there was a delay caused by….you guessed it!
Again, Ireland got her concessions and her politicians got their embarrassment; these concessions were two very important ones and one that we are still debating today: Neutrality, Taxation and Abortion. Whatever I may feel about the third one, it is written down in the constitution and we will be having a referendum to decide about that just at the same time as the Pope’s visit; curious, that.
In Europe we are not liked by the centralisers but we are very valued by the democrats. This is real reach and influence.
Thank you and rest in peace Mr. Ray Crotty; you served Ireland’s interests well.
When it comes to reinvigorating democracy and championing the concept of a Europe of equals, Ireland has shown the great powers that she is still rebellious and free-thinking. We are not alone in this and, funnily enough, with the honourable exception of Greece, who invented democracy in the first place, the rebellious and free thinking states are at our end of the continent. Iceland, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and even England on its day have called a halt to the hijacking of the very precious ideal of true solidarity between nations. We are an independent bunch, we rain-drenched, wind-blasted, seagull raided savages of the north.
During the near decade of the EU proper post Lisbon, we have witnessed with dismay creeping dehumanisation of European citizens, communities, and in the cases of Greece and Ireland, economies; all for the wish to have a centralised mono-cultural Europe that ran as smoothly as a Swiss watch. There is of course vast differences in languages, cultures, ideologies and traditions across our continent. I have argued for a more modular approach to Europe’s regional economic challenges in a blog called “Horses for Courses”. The point I want to make here is not to rehash what we all understand about our differences and long may they prevail (vive la difference!) but to remind us all that we share one thing no matter who we are and where we come from: democracy.
Democracy is the glue that holds our continent together, that allows us to peacefully cross borders, and to meet in the middle of each argument should we so choose to do so. Democracy is so much more than a system of election and government; it is a fundamental desire to be heard and to make a difference in our world. It isn’t simply about personal freedom but, as I stated in my last blog essay, “The Rise and Fall of the House of Solon” it is about taking responsibility for one’s own destiny and not slavishly accepting what has been handed down to us by ‘the powers that be’. Democracy is the precious legacy handed down from our grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers and mothers to us and, like that gloriously engineered and precise Swiss watch, we truly do not own democracy because it is supposed to be handed on to our young and future generations.
In many ways the EU has done a fair job in resisting a ‘race to the bottom’ culture and in fighting to retain and preserve much of our beautiful landscape but, without democratic oversight and fair and balanced election processes as well as counterbalancing centralised power; we cannot sit easy in our chairs because we are seeing the next generations not valuing this great gift. That is not democracy’s fault, that’s our fault. In allowing the very important decisions; decisions relevant to all of us, young and old, rich and poor, to be thrashed out in secret and only the very minimum of information being surrendered to us (as is the way with technocrats – they jealously guard their narrow knowledge) we have forgotten that democracy is a business held in the open and shouted down from the rooftops.
If you want library silence and orderly applause as you make your point, totalitarianism is there. If you want the opposing view to be shouted down into a fearful silence, fascism is your man. If you want every decision being made by a small group of bureaucrats on your behalf, well Stalinism is an option that ticks that box. If you want to be able to say anything you want and do anything you want even to the point of killing anyone you want, have you considered martial law? If you want to surrender all responsibility for thinking and forming an opinion of your own to your betters, absolute monarchy is just up your alley. If you want a harmonious existence which rules over all living things and never wish to be bothered with doubt and dissent, theocracy is for you. If you want technocracy and big business to be in charge of all economic, social and domestic decisions, that’s actually called oligarchy.
None of these systems even approaches the freedom and choice given by democracy.
Here in democracy-land it is noisy! It is fractious! Disagreements are violent and deeply felt. One woman’s Utopia is another man’s Hell. We do not agree even most of the time. Dissent is in the air no matter what the proposal. Here’s the thing; here’s what the Ancient Greek lawmakers and philosophers understood that we seem to have missed: Democracy is supposed to be like that!
Dissent is part of the process of debate, compromise, and agreement. There is no point to debate if there is just an ‘either you’re in or you’re out’ binary choice. That’s not democracy, that’s flicking a coin. There is no point to debating with someone who will not listen, who wants to shout you down, with someone who dismisses your reason, intellect, and right to choose because you disagree with what they want, who threatens you, someone who gets aggressive, maybe even punishes you. That’s not democracy, that’s an abusive relationship. Get a divorce.
Democracy isn’t about how you look, sound, whether you are well dressed, how great, rich, successful, charming, charismatic you are – these things matter to salesmen, preachers, and con artists not to democrats. Democracy is about the idea, it’s about making a decision that all parties can live with and will honour and defend, even if they do not fully agree.
That’s democracy.
That’s what we have received from the days of Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles. We received a means to decide upon actions together without having to brandish weapons or disembowel goats. This is truly why democracy has outlasted all other political systems and will never truly die. If we lose democracy, how else do we decide, paper-rock-scissors? This is how we come to intelligent, wise and just decisions that win agreement and frees us to act with faith that our cohort will act alongside us.
Lose democracy and we are back to chinless in-breds marching ten thousand men up to the top up the hill and back down again. We’ve done that. We’ve done that so violently and so brutally that we cannot look our children in the eye and say: “Sorry, we lost your democracy. Would you like a brutal military crackdown instead?”
Truly it is their democracy; it will always belong to the future. That is why it will always be present.
Every two decades we face this same challenge. Every two decades, agendas that have no care for Europe, its people, its culture, its landscape, its heritage, its wildlife but they care only for power or riches or resources to build an empire come rattling their sabres and calling us schoolyard names, trying to take from our hands what they cannot truly carry themselves.
Don’t fall for name calling – kids do that. Don’t fall for false comparisons – apples aren’t oranges. Don’t fall for strawman arguments – no army deploys straw. Don’t fall for whataboutery – debate is one idea at a time. Don’t fall for logical fallacies – we know those bring us nowhere near agreement.
Do not fall. Stand. Smile. Then calmly and respectfully debate until the bastards have a seizure.
Remember that democracy is the greatest gift you have to pass on. The power to think, rethink and then decide. Yes, it takes a bit longer than many would like in central Europe but we love it just the way it is because we have all had our say, we have all made our decision, and we can live with that.
Democracy has been fighting Authoritarianism since Athens fought Sparta and the result has always depended on the same factor; if the people care enough then democracy wins, if they don’t then authoritarianism wins. Any measure to alienate the people from their own right and responsibility to make their decision free from fear is an agenda that is anti-democratic and thus, anti-European.
So that’s why democracy matters and is worth fighting for. Here’s how to fight and how to win.
Rule 1: Not all democracies are equal.
The word ‘democracy’ is very attractive for what it promises – the right to be heard and have a say – but, not everything that calls itself ‘democracy’ fulfils that promise.
Take for instance the various blends of democracy available in the world today: Christian Democracy, Consensus Democracy, Progressive Democracy, Social Democracy, Economic Democracy, Liberal Democracy, Libertarian Democracy, Republican Democracy, Elective Democracy, Representative Democracy, People’s Democracy, Conservative Democracy, and Theodemocracy. None of these political systems resemble one another and yet they are all ‘democracies’
.
Clearly, democracy is a popular word in politics; because very few people object to being entrusted with making their own decisions; it is the state of adulthood. However, when one thinks about the two most powerful nominal democracies in the world we have the USA which is an oligarchy where money and corporate influence far outweighs the interests of the people (according to Princeton University, not me) and Russia is a managed democracy or illiberal democracy where the people’s interests are suppressed by intimidation and state propaganda (according to the same study). Neither the USA nor the Russian Federation’s citizens enjoy the privilege of living within a democracy that responds to them or offers them options outside of what the elite has programmed for them.
Now imagine living under these two systems of government as someone that elite doesn’t particularly like; can you spot a difference?
Democracy, very simply put, means the citizen is king.
Blending this idea with ideologies or preferences for one citizen over another is nonsense. It is either democracy where everyone gets a say or it is not democracy. Mixing in a religious, social, economic, hereditary, military, or corporate agenda to the system and you no longer have a democracy. Failing to defend democracy from the toxic chemical cocktail of blended or ideological democracy is as stupid and self destructive as allowing bacteria or chemicals flush through your drinking water.
So let’s look at what democracy actually is. Here are the base criteria for there to be a democracy.
1 – Human rights and freedoms: If your will is to have any value and power then it must be free will.
2 – Citizen means Citizen: There can be no weighting or preference of one voice over another.
3 – The right to vote in secret: There can be no fear or favour placed on a person’s choice.
4 – The right to protest: The mandate is the power given by the people to do what they have chosen. It is not ‘carte blanche’ to do as one likes; fail to honour the mandate invites the people to protest.
5 – The right to speak and to be heard: No matter what your intention, silencing a dissenting view to your own by threat, shame, intimidation, or just blocking out the available media with your ads is a denial of the robust debate demanded by democracy; it’s not a popularity contest, that is tyranny.
6 – The right to change the status quo: If people’s votes have no impact over their destinies because of a status quo outside of the power of the people that is called hegemony, not democracy.
7 – The right to hold power to account: The democratic mandate is not an invitation to mess up the populace in general for your five year term with no recourse to the very people who voted for you. People vote for a course of action and the person who promises to do it; not for that particular person alone without a manifesto or a plan.
So….given these criteria….how could any system but ‘the citizen is king’ deliver even half of the great wealth and opportunity that democracy has given our people? Only democracy, pure and simple, delivers on all of these criteria. Mixing democracy with any other agenda fails on at least one if not many of these criteria.
Thus, why would I even consider joining up, sacrificing my time, or spending my energy on a party that forced me to forfeit some of my freedoms to conform to their ideal? Looking at it, some of these ‘democraceens’ (looks like democracy, sounds like democracy but is entirely synthetic), are actually at a loss to define what exactly their ideal is – Hello, Progressive Democrats, Social Democrats, and People’s Democrats; in one sentence – what’s your ideal, again?
The first and most responsive form of democracy in the entire history of democracy is Participatory Democracy; every other form of monarchmocracy, democracy-lite, democonomics, and demopolitik has had its fifteen minutes of fame and failed, failed, failed. The system of democracy as practiced in Ancient Greece (albeit, now with more people allowed to participate) has managed to provide debate and agreement for every conceivable problem, conflict, and situation over the last two and a half millennia. Every other system has come up short and we have always ended up paying heavily.
Participatory Democracy is far more robust than the representative democracy we currently have in Ireland because it holds apathy at bay and keeps a beady eye out for rising tyrants. The cult of Eamonn DeValera, the strokes of Charles J Haughey, and the bank bailing Troika could not have happened if the people of Ireland not only had a real say in what was happening to their country but were obliged by their system to debate and decide by vote on all of these events. Clearly Fianna Fáil would be very opposed to Participatory Democracy (all the more reason for me to champion it).
Rule 2: It’s not all about power.
The folly of pride, eh?
Pride and a haughty manner cometh before a fall. We have always enjoyed the high and mighty landing on their arse after humiliating people they deem to be their inferior. It’s a comedy trope writers have used since the Talmud told the story of Nimrod’s Tower of Babel. Knowing what we know today, it is nonsense to claim that anyone wanted to build a tower leading up to the heavens. Obviously we are in the realm of mythology and symbolism when we deal with Old Testament tales but the rationale behind Nimrod’s plan was not so different to the reason the Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids.
Nimrod’s vision was that, once he crossed the threshold of the clouds, he might be able to talk directly to God (or Gods, seeing that he was probably Zoroastrian). Now, the thing about this tale is that it makes sense if Nimrod was seeking to have a better view of the stars. Most tool age societies had an intimate relationship with the stars, revealing as they do a measurable calendar. To a hunter/gatherer society this knowledge is not essential but to an agrarian society like Ancient Egypt and Ancient Babylon it was the difference between bounty and famine.To ensure the information was maintained with accuracy and not spread about to become confused, these ancient societies codified that calendar with religious ceremonies and mysteries that only high priests could be inducted into and thus, they held the power and influence over their societies.
Today our economists and technocrats behave in precisely the same way but they are not protecting measurable phenomena but the means of their preferred measurement and interpretation. Every part of economics is interpretation of results and not facts in their own right.
These technocrats appear to lack any overall vision or direction as to what they wish to achieve or, if they do have an end goal in mind, they are certainly not sharing that with the rest of us. What the modern high priests of technocracy are after is power, first and foremost.
It’s not about power, though. If I become the tyrant of the world with absolute authority over the lives of every single human being, can I make a caterpillar become a bee? Are flamingos aware of my mightiness? Will trees stop pumping out oxygen just because I say so?
No. Power, in purely human terms, is a paltry thing.
All the money, strategy and fakery needed to maintain unjust power builds up until it simply cannot be sustained and the entire edifice of falsehood implodes and people just sort themselves out. That’s what happened in 1989 to the comical propaganda machinery of the USSR and East Germany especially. That fate is coming to the soon-to-fracture Republican Party, bringing the US duopoly crashing down with it. As a person who values democracy, it can’t come quickly enough for me.
There is no point to lusting after power without a good long term plan or vision. Everything you attempt to do will be tainted by failure and your legacy will be something people want to forget, not want to commemorate. Not that the people’s approval matters to despots and power junkies but getting power is a painful, laborious, and exhausting job. Holding on to power is even worse. This is why so many people who strive to achieve power so they can overthrow a corrupt regime ultimately form their own corrupt regime and they end up being overthrown in their turn.
Power is useless without control and purpose; without a goal.
Rule 3: Build a better future from facts.
Democracy is a system made up of debate, argument, counter-argument, proposal, compromise and then agreement. Clearly what happened in the UK and the US in 2016 is not democracy but it owes more to reality television than politics. This 3D (Deliberate Dumbing Down) strategy beloved of spin doctors, rabble rousers, and campaign managers is more embedded than many people realise. The rush to mass and mixed media coverage where information is now a tradeable commodity has brought us to an era entitled ‘Post truth’; much like ‘Post Modern’ was a buzz word in the 90’s.
‘Post Truth’ is the result of a determined and well established strategy that was deployed across our media, our news gathering, our journalism, our social commentary and our political discourse since the attack on the twin towers in 2001. Some claim that ‘Post Truth’ started with Bill Clinton’s denial of having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky but that was a story that the media broke, brought to the people, and forced the president to make a categorical denial which was proven to be a lie.
That wasn’t ‘post truth’ that was journalism.
The Iraq war story of the wounded ‘heroine’ soldier, Jessica Lynch, evacuated from the battleground after having fought like a lioness, been captured, tortured and raped by the evil regime of Saddam Hussein then rescued by the heroic actions of US Special Forces etc, etc, etc. A lie composed by a consultancy called the Reddon Group for Donald Rumsfeld to silence criticism against the US adventure in the Middle East. It was never about protecting the US and Europe against weapons of mass destruction but a mop-up operation after the failed outcome of the first Iraqi war, waged to shore up Kuwait’s oil siphoning of Iraqi oil reserves. That was the first complete ‘Post truth’ story of the 21st Century. There have arguably been many others. Photo evidence is popping up of ‘disaster actors’ all over the internet. These are disasters in which US citizens are killed. This is ‘Post Truth’.
Not all information is fact. The phrase ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ reveals that what matters is not the information but the accepted filter through which it is passed down to us in our news media and our political pronouncements. If we cannot trust the filter then the information is useless at best and damaging at worst. So to build out of erroneous or biased findings any platform for change is to invite disaster. Yet every positive breakthrough that humanity made in our recorded history was initially met with ridicule and scepticism even though they were based upon observed and recorded facts. What matters is that we persist against the received wisdom of the day.
It is essential that we control the filter, we align the prism and we drill down to the facts that reside in the mantle of informatics and metrics. North Americans love their statistics and so this last presidential election was the most analysed and parsed in the history of US politics; still the pollsters called the result incorrectly right up until it was obvious that Donald Trump had won the states he needed to win the White House. Even with the most advanced number-crunching and the richest constituency-level historical data, the smartest men in the backroom got it wrong because they preferred the filter that appealed to their prejudices and preferences. The secret in politics is not number-crunching but recognising the difference between facts and trends.
Facts are reliable and stable; they do not change without a truly seismic shift or never at all. The height of Mount Everest is reported to us as a fact and yet it grows in height every year by one or two millimetres. Therefore the height of Mount Everest is a trend; slow-moving and negligible to the climber but nevertheless not a fact. The boiling point of water changes by one degree every 1000km in height; that is a phenomenon that doesn’t change so it is a fact. The boiling point of water is therefore dependent on how high up or low down one is boiling the water, which forms a trend.
Nothing presented to the Irish people by the Troika to justify the bailout was fact but a slanted interpretation of trends. None of the ensuing legislation, quangos, or stances has been based on fact but has been influenced by trends dressed up as facts. I can in, one way or another, show that the same is true for every poor decision that humanity has made in its recorded history.
The facts regarding Ireland’s economic position are not and have never been truly revealed by the Troika or our own government but they are betting on market trends and opinion trends. That’s right, they are making bets, they are gambling. I don’t recall any of this being made clear at the last election.
What is currently fact in our country is that a bank that had completely divorced itself from fact and even reliable trends was included in the list of banks to be shored up by the tax-payer because European banks and investment houses had plunged too much ‘capital’ into the bank in order to make a profit out of Ireland’s housing and construction boom. These banks refused to take their losses like other businesses had to because of their pre-eminent position in the central command of the EU and ECB. The ‘capital’ they ploughed into Anglo-Irish bank was also ploughed into other ventures at the same time (see: The $100 bill and how much it is costing you) and thus their loss was compounded with debt to other creditors and we ended up paying a bill for the entire continent’s banking sector because our government saw that the ECB might just collapse Ireland’s economy.
Might, not would.
It is my opinion that nobody in the civil war parties knows how to negotiate. The fact is: no capital as in physical currency was invested in Anglo-Irish Bank but electronic value credit. The fact is: Ireland’s people have been evicted, impoverished and disenfranchised abroad for the sake of virtual money that didn’t physically exist. The fact is: this nonsense will happen again unless the Irish people default on the Anglo bailout and just save their high street banks and savings.
Rule 4: It’s easier to fight for something than against something.
Every Bond villain, every super-megalomaniac, every scary corporate ideologue in fiction or on the movie screen eventually gets a monologue in which he or she reveals the vision of a ‘better’ world that kicked off their whole minion army thing in the first place. A truly great villainous monologue is one where even the hero is somewhat tempted to agree that it is a good plan. Basically it is the difference between being just Dr Evil and a credible villain is the difference between saying ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ and ‘for the best possible tortilla Española patatas one needs tomatoes, potatoes, chorizo, peppers, spinach….and three eggs which I must break.”
See what I did there?
It’s the same process but villain number two, let’s call her Dr. Anthrax, presented her nefarious plan in a manner which would appeal to anyone except vegetarians. How has Dr. Evil managed to convince even one minion with the meagre promise of a runny omelette? It’s not the vision that matters but the imagination and ambition of the person you share it with. If your vision can excite that imagination, if you can harness that person’s ambition then congratulations, you have a minion.
Which brings me to my astonishment at the success of a bunch of grey faced men in identikit business suits stating in bad English that ‘Austerity was necessary to protect the euro mechanism and stabilise the European project’. Hardly the stuff of Shakespearean battle speeches! How did they manage to get away with that gobbledegook?
Well they did have all the cards. What austerity has taught the European citizen, especially the Irish and Greek citizen is that Europe is no longer a democracy but a tax-farm calibrated for insider dealers and merchant bankers. What is increasingly apparent is that our representatives both in our national governments and in the wider European parliament are essentially the paid minions of people who have never sought our mandate and have no interest in whether we thrive or die.
There’s plenty to hate about that scenario and plenty to protest against. However, protesting against something is giving it a sort of credence. Protesters appeal to their representatives to heed their displeasure or even desperation at arbitrary rules put in place to shore up the interests of people to whom they owe no official allegiance. How long can one maintain a state of active protest? Protesting and dissent are emotionally and financially draining for individual people. At least trade unions have the budget and structure to maintain a strike action over a long period. See how quickly the Irish government went into negotiations with the LUAS drivers and the Garda union and yet, the people protesting against Irish Water have been marching for three solid years.
There is an easier way and it doesn’t require running the gauntlet of Gardaí or commenting on the President’s height. Fighting for something involves going out and making the better way a reality in our communities. Take, for instance the work of You Are Not Alone helping our homeless through the winter months or the work of The Hub; challenging repossession cases in the Irish courts system.
In the case of You Are Not Alone, people who would otherwise die of starvation, exposure and loneliness are saved every day by the work of volunteers who deliver their time, energy and good humour without fail; how? They are doing something positive, they are fighting for the dispossessed not fighting against a blind, deaf and very dumb government. They are simply doing the right thing.
Now take the Hub, how can the Hub, self-taught lay litigants and supporters, achieve more success than the state sponsored MABS service and various barristers who charge €500 upfront to merely look at a litigant’s briefs? They are fighting for something. Yes, they are fighting against a very corrupt sheriff, counsel and judicial establishment who are nakedly biased in favour of bank representations as they receive a payment for each case delivered. However, the Hub’s focus and attention is on the tenants and homeowners who have been sold down the river. To date MABS has saved 0 homes in the courts – that’s not what their mission is – the Hub have saved dozens against Goliath-like opposition.
These volunteer groups are joined by many others such as ICHH, PATH, and more established organisations such as the Peter McVerry Trust, Focus Point, Alone and they have the same thing in common; they are fighting tirelessly for someone and they have done this for years; the good fight has become their lives. As a full time carer I personally understand what the good fight feels like. Every setback, all the official stonewalling, the interminable form filling and letter chasing are easily compensated a hundredfold when I manage to twist the arm of the official agency and get what Mike was always entitled to. Fighting for something and someone you care about is less tiring and dispiriting than pissing your anger and energy up against a bureaucratic wall.
Not that it’s easy-peasy; not that, as a person I have off-days and get depressed at the constant stream of negative stories in our media; of course I do and my goodness, I know why Brian Dobson looks like he does! The fact is political change can only come from building from the ground up for something better as opposed to constantly seeking to smash what is already there – which is why I could never be a Socialist or a Communist. The argument about seizing the means of production, ousting the bourgeois etc. is simply too taxing, to unfocussed and too blunt to form a reliable foundation for an entire civilisation. The left was always going to lose with these ideals.
Envy is too puny an emotion to feed a revolution long term; as France taught us, it degrades into anger and vengeance. There is a better way. We are the beneficiaries of a better way as I write. When I need to confirm a date or a source, I merely have to access two or three online sources completely for free and I have better accuracy than someone writing out from the Smithsonian Library thirty years ago. I can, at the click of a mouse or a swipe of a smart phone, access information bases located in Europe, the United States and even information bases based in what used to be known as ‘behind the iron curtain’. The internet has gone beyond the Iron Curtain.
In giving HTML to the world for free and not for his own profit, Tim Berners Lee liberated information far more than Steve Jobs, Mark Zukerberg or the guys at Google have. In that ‘fighting for’ gesture he changed the world for the better and more profoundly than all of the tech and data companies could put together. This one action ensured that information (accurate or false) was made available to everyone who could touch the internet. The world of government propaganda, controlled information, and agents provocateurs is gone forever. The world of ‘post-truth’, selfie culture, and disinformation is purely the fault of our own apathy and laziness.
Make no mistake, however, that once one manages and controls one’s own filter to all the data that swills about in the internet, for good or ill, one controls one’s own world.
How to control that filter? Deploying the critical thinking that was born in Ancient Greece, of course!
Rule 5: No human rule deserves to be written in stone.
Think about civilisation for a moment. Where have we come from? Look at the similarities between our ancestors and ourselves….they are numerous and diverse. Now look at the differences between our ancestors and ourselves… Every difference between Garalt Canton of the 21st Century and Bishop Garalt of Mayo of the 8th Century (yes, he’s real) is purely cultural. What we have in common is all the needs for life – shelter, food, water, heat, clothing and company. What makes a difference between us is purely cultural and technological. The laws that Bishop Garalt of Mayo accepted and lived under are abhorrent to me and, I’m sure I would be an outlaw in his world. Likewise, his desire to preach for a theocratic courts system would have him imprisoned in today’s Ireland for being a dangerous religious fundamentalist. We both control many aspects of our culture and much of our available technology. We do not control life itself – the very thing we share. Culture changes all the time. Our history books create a pretty narrative about how change is caused by kings and battles but that is completely untrue, the inverse is the truth: it is the change that provokes the battle in the first place. This is as true for the crusades as it is for modern day Syria.
We live amidst great change. How we learn, how we express ourselves, how we write and what languages we can access have all profoundly changed since the days of Oasis versus Blur. We now consume data more than we consume manufactured products – that’s a good thing for our planet and a bad thing for our economies – we even think and argue differently than when we wrote angry letters to the papers. At the moment we are beginning to question how our information is delivered to us because we have seen the harm not just to our politics but to our moral compass by consuming infotainment and advertorials instead of reading ethically sound, professional news gathering and reporting. What Garalt Canton of the 21st Century and Bishop Garalt of Mayo have in common on this score is an innate mistrust of the ‘false prophet’ that is paid-for media and propaganda. Bishop Garalt was ‘martyred’ by the Saxons in Tallaght because he preached against the propaganda of a Saxon invader king. I’m doing the same thing; I am preaching against the propaganda of a Globalist invader technocracy and I’m not afraid to go to Tallaght because the citizens of Tallaght know better than most that I am speaking fact and presenting truth.
The rules and regulations written by men, even those rules and regulations written by men but of ‘divine’ inspiration, have no business ruling over people many, many generations later. Otherwise, we should be slaves and serfs on our own land as once we were. We have moved on and we are not ever going back; not for gods, not for kings, and certainly not for insider dealers. Our grandparents’ generation built a country from scratch under the yoke of an autocrat regime and a theocratic state religion; no mean feat. My maternal grandfather was instrumental in the bus service of Dublin city and my paternal grandfather worked to bring our national customs and excise up to scratch. They did nothing heroic or glamorous just what was essential and needed by the people. The Dublin city I live in would be as exotic as Las Vegas to them but I hope they would largely approve. The fact is they could not possibly consider the challenges faced by my generation just as I can’t truly imagine what life was like for them when they were young men. I could never judge the past by my modern standards just like I have no business judging the future by what I learned in the ‘80s when Bono was still cool and not habitually called ‘a pox’. What I recommend is simply for now, not for many, many generations into the future. I will entrust democracy to the next generations to fight their battles. What my grandfathers gave me, what I wish to pass on, is the very best tool for the job.
I stated at the start of this essay that the Irish Constitution could not be changed but for a positive result in a referendum of the people. That tool is not to be locked away behind a protective wall and held from the hands of the people. By all means make that wall glass with “In case of Emergency” written on it but change happens, and it happens quickly. The Constitution has been described as ‘a living document’ by many politicians but they don’t truly believe it much like I doubt senior clerics in many world religions truly believe in an all-seeing God, given their private behaviour.
The constitution is a living document insofar as it is a document that is supposed to reflect the rights, responsibilities, ethics and limitations of a living people, not the other way around. Our constitution is not a sacred document handed down to us by archangels – and nothing may be enshrined in the non-sacred – but a framework, a canvas for the people of Ireland to sketch out and then paint the society and legislature they desire and deserve. Patrick Pearse is dead, Michael Collins is dead, John Charles McQuaid is dead, Eamonn De Valera is dead, and Charles J Haughey is dead; their time as the arbiters of Irish character and politics is over. It is time for the people alive today to leave their mark upon our constitution and to ensure that our living document accurately represents us.
Just as with social justice and marriage equality, so let it be with economics. What successive UK and Irish governments have refused to accept is that capital such as state assets may not be converted into income unless the full value of that capital is invested back into the state. That is what Article 11 of the Irish constitution stipulates clearly. This information was long established in the economic rulebook. The limitation is there in black and white as an omission not carried on from Article 10. Until our political and economic representatives – not masters – acknowledge this and return those revenues and royalties already bartered to ‘balance the books’ there can be no peace for them; nor can there be co-operation with the people.
Rule 6: Democracy belongs to the future, not to the past.
The current crisis in the mainstream media and traditional ‘thought leaders’ such as newspaper editorials and columnists is due to the fact that their entire industry is calibrated to one generation only and that generation is dying off. There is no mass economic backfill because they have not attempted to appeal to a new generation; not seriously. The days of a newspaper being the filter focused to reflect the opinions and prejudices of one section of society are over. Now, your message must be parsed and balanced a thousand fold, essentially saying the same thing but in a thousand subtly different ways to catch the attention of a thousand different people.
As the ad men of the fifties taught us, it’s a very short hop between mastering mass communication and mass brainwashing. The mainstream media is failing because it is no longer sufficiently subtle to truly influence the modern reader. I say ‘reader’ but I know that is no longer true; news is no longer a simple reporting of events but a consumable good prepared for a particular palate. There’s nothing inherently wrong in wanting to read a paper that largely reflects your self-image but, given how deeply Google and Cambridge Analytics have drilled, remaining in the echo-chamber of your own comfort zone is intellectually and psychologically suicidal – you become what you used to hate.
Don’t agree? Let’s look at fifty years ago throughout the west.
Fifty years ago, there was a mass movement among the young to overthrow the static values and sure narratives of the world they found themselves in. So, they painted their naked bodies and put flowers in their hair and danced extremely badly to incomprehensible guitar solos and abused drugs and had sex with one another. Basically the baby-boom generation decided that a third world war wasn’t for them and they would make love not war. They were ‘flower people’, embracing necklaces, scarves, loon pants, coloured sunglasses and grew their hair long until only the beard informed you what gender the hippy was. Now look at those same flower people commenting on a generation that has only known a US at war, rolling racial tension at home, a land of division and rising paranoia against the ‘others’, a planet of melting ice caps, superbugs and extreme weather, your classic sci-fi dystopia; and – instead of apologising for their messing up our pristine world – calling this generation who are reacting with justifiable horror and hurt ‘Generation Snowflake’. The punks were right: never trust a hippie.
Don’t like that picture?
Well then, maybe we can change some of the assumptions that have been carefully inserted into baby boom culture; the whole ‘we don’t want to support those who won’t work’ argument, for instance. Nobody gets a gold watch when they hit 65 anymore. Nobody can hold down a job long enough to warrant a gift of that value from their co-workers anymore. If they get a card and a few drinks they are lucky. Nobody in generation snowflake will be able to legally retire and draw a pension at 65 if all goes the way of current neo-liberal thinking. Nobody can afford that starter home, much less inherit the farm because all property is now tied up in ensuring that generation flower power get the best end of life care; end of life care they denied to their parents.
Did generation snowflake come up with ‘neo-liberalism’ – essentially starving public services of funding from general taxation so that it could be privatised and monetised by the pensions industry? Nope that was generation ‘Are you going to San Francisco?’ Did generation snowflake come up with globalisation – effectively exporting all sub-management level labour to cheaper markets and then flying the products back to western markets to sell at massive environmental cost? Nope, that was the ‘I was there when Jimi burned his guitar!’ generation. As education and training improves in the former third world those menial jobs then move onto the lesser developed markets until they are replaced by machines – meanwhile generation snowflake can’t even hold down a paper round for the imported competition.
Generation X has largely built the Data infrastructure to take the weight that Capital can no longer carry. The Millennial generation, I hope, will complete the energy infrastructure to ensure that we can set about replenishing our world with plant and animal life and clean water for all. Even a lower paid worker or a welfare recipient can, with careful budgeting, run an iPhone off a reasonable tariff. Think about that, someone who societally would be at ‘rag and bone man’ level now possesses a hand held device that gives them access to more information and processing power than the CEO of IBM in 1999. The generations are mixing together, they are mashing up their skills and opinions; much like Rap DJs used to scratch and remix classic soul albums into new sounds.
Yes, there are clashes. The millennial generation are laughably easy to tease with simple trolling but they are learning to troll back! They know that ‘it gets better’ is only true when they show the courage to demand better and refuse to back down. University campus liberal values of the 60’s and 70’s are antediluvian to a modern society that is dealing with a fluid gender spectrum and ‘third wave’ feminism. What seems ‘snowflake’ to someone who made ‘free love’ at Woodstock is reacting to a generation doing exactly as they once did which makes them the ‘bad guy’ and the ‘square’.
Well, we all get older but not everyone grows up.
Generation snowflake will be able to vote in greater numbers over the next five years. Baby boomers will continue to die off – just look at the fallout from 2016 alone – meaning their interests and values will slowly diminish in the political sphere. The US election proved that completely.
I genuinely believe that societal and political change is cyclical and whatever the motive force, we are at a moment of change – profound change – "the fall of the Berlin Wall" change, only bigger. What I can hand on to the next generation far greater than my impressions, ideas and arguments is the best gift anyone alive could possibly receive: Democracy.
Democracy means what I have already defined above and not the politicised capitalism employed by the Economic West in the war-torn Middle East. That cocktail of hybrid-democracy is merely 19th century imperialism of local leaders propped up by the super nation with the fig-leaf of media spin.
Democracy as defined throughout this essay quickly sees through that shell to the dark slaver’s heart within. As I keep on stating, there is no point to slavery anymore because machinery is the most efficient supply of labour. The democracy that I hope to pass on is the democracy that doesn’t build empires of stone, armies, resources and palaces but builds an identity of ‘one among many’; an inclusive empire of the mind. The democracy I am talking about invites everyone to participate or not, it invites everyone to reach for their dreams or not, it assists the acquiring of knowledge, the generation of culture, the promotion of
joie de vivre – without having to show an immediate cash profit or cultural result.
If Western Capitalist economic hegemonies are indeed collapsing, then either we fill that vacuum with what serves our best interests or we suffer under a state of chaos and warfare that serves nobody’s long term interests. In this essay I am like a magpie that shamelessly steals from the greater minds of the past to enrich the discourse of today and lay the foundations of a stellar future.
If you want a long future, then build upon a deep past. No system is as long lived or as durable as democracy. Technocracy, globalisation, and neo-liberalism are now going the way of neo-conservatism, laissez faire/light touch regulation and the various politico-economic experiments we have been subjected to since the end of World War II.
It’s time to leave the cocktail making to the barman and to sober up. There is no get-rich quick form of democracy and economics that can stand the ravages of ‘…Events, dear boy, events’ than a steady economic growth, regulated and answerable to an engaged electorate.
A generation who have lost their childhood amid the economic wreckage of post-crash, post-bailout Europe will now have to deal with post-Brexit fallout. Ukraine versus Russia is not going away; there are millions of Syrians still to teem out from that betrayed country and nearly everyone who has eyes to see understands that Turkey has gone ‘Authoritarian’ and will be a major military force on Europe’s border.
The time for playing about with 19th Century ideologies and early 20th Century time and motion thinking is past. Our inherited democracy is the only glue that can hold 740 million people together and keep them safe.
Stand up and debate - even if it upsets liberals and snowflakes alike.
