Eudaimonia – A political vision.

From Beowulf to Battlestar Galactica and from Gilgamesh to Game of Thrones, we all love a good conflict don’t we?  There’s just something fascinating about a great yarn telling the tale of two huge armies butting their heads together and there can be only one winner. We’re all familiar with the archetypal conflict of good versus evil, angels versus demons and heroes versus villains. It’s the one thing that sells more than sex.

However, reality isn’t so simplistic.

Nobody can wear the ‘black hat’ right down to the core of their being and nobody can wear the ‘white hat’ without getting the odd stain now and again. These extremes simply do not exist in real life. Even terrorists see themselves as freedom fighters. To be purely antagonistic to every other person and thing in the world is physically and psychically impossible. 

There is one conflict, however, one endless argy-bargy that we return to again and again without a hint of doubt that we are right: Left wing politics versus Right wing politics. Think about it for a minute: What has been the dominant argument on the surface of our planet for the last two centuries, if not longer? If not since the French Revolution....

We have been fighting on one side or another in this centuries-long punch-up, and ‘we’ means everyone; from hippies to hipsters, from rebels to corporate drones, everyone. 

Guess what?  

There is no ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’ in politics, there is no ‘perfect black’ or ‘purest white’. There are 360º of grey because politics is a continuum not a straight line. Being under the thumb of left wing extremists or right wing extremists is precisely the same experience. Left wing politics and Right wing politics are two sides of the same bloody coin. Neither side is good nor evil. 

Someone loses out in every single political system we have ever devised for ourselves and someone will lose out in every political system we ever devise in the future too. Without each side having both positive benefits and negative consequences there couldn’t be conflict, the question would be resolved. Yet, we’re prepared to risk our annihilation over these flawed ideologies.  

Why?

Socrates and Plato.

Socrates taught us to ‘question everything’ and Plato sought to ‘answer everything’ – how they managed to get on so well I cannot say. Socrates argued that a free thinking man can quickly peel back the veneer of normality to reveal corruption and hypocrisy in any society. Now Socrates was a man of his time so we're not even talking about 'love your neighbour' or 'turn the other cheek' - Socrates was most likely a slave keeper and he wouldn't have seen anything wrong with that. His problem was with the received wisdom that nobility and wealth were proof of virtue. He said 'Prove it!'. In the end he was proven correct by the elite families of Athens and his reward was a cup of hemlock. 
  
Plato was his disciple and he devoted his entire career working on Socrates’ challenge to come up with a political system that couldn’t be corrupted and was fair to everyone. He failed, of course, but he wrote The Republic. We in Ireland deem a Republic as the best available system for our society and I’m very glad of that. We are in no way a Platonic Republic and it takes very little Socratic brain power to reveal a nest of corruption, graft and hypocrisy in modern Ireland. 

The reason we cannot resolve Plato’s riddle of “What would incorruptible politics look like?” even after the guts of 3,000 years is because our universe itself is a system based on conflict between imperfect forces. Matter is the struggle between energy and entropy, the struggle between Ying and Yang.  

There is no political perfection because we cannot mentally or spiritually conceive of that. The closest we can come to Platonic perfection is Eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia (also known as Eudaemonism) is a Greek word, which refers to a state of having a good indwelling spirit or being in a contented state of being healthy, happy and prosperous. In moral philosophy, eudaimonia is used to refer to the right actions as those that result in the well-being of an individual. 

The quest for Eudaimonia is what gave the impetus to the Greek schools of the Arts, Philosophy, Medicine, and of Politics. Without this inner need to live the ‘good’ or ‘virtuous’ life – a contented soul – we would have no democracy or western civilisation at all.

But what has this ancient ideal got to do with modern politics?

Everything that irritates, depresses and disillusions people about their public representatives stems directly from an absence of Eudaimonia. A great quote from the comic George Burns reveals this malaise:

We all have some ‘common sense’ or a sense of ‘the public good’; that sense derives from the concept of doing the right thing to ensure the best outcome for the largest possible group in your population. We have learned from how we were raised by our family and friends what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to having happy, contented children, relatively sensible teenagers and well-adjusted adults.  We expect our public servants to have this knowledge too so we're outraged when their actions show us the opposite.  We have lots of words to describe political failings we just can’t seem to put our fingers on what to call that political ideal. - I'm suggesting we call it Eudaimonia

Once a society embraces the necessity of serving the best possible public good then sometimes a golden age dawns in that society. It’s not just the high watermark of ancient Greece but also the revolutions of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and, most recently, the formation of a united and peaceful Europe. But look deeper and we see that the period directly before these high points in our shared history reveal the blackest pit of hellish war, insane cruelty and widespread political corruption. Before the Renaissance we had the crusades, before the enlightenment we had the century long wars of reformation and counter-reformation, before the uniting of Europe we had the First and Second World Wars featuring such joys as mustard gassing, trench warfare, shell shock, the rise of political extremism, the rape of the colonies and the holocaust.  

We formed a united Europe because we HAD to!

One doesn’t inevitably follow the other, however.  It takes a determined political movement and realistic vision of what is the possible to achieve the stability and good faith required to provoke a new golden age.  Again, George Burns:

Within this pithy, witty remark is the central point of Eudaimonia – true greatness is not granted by immediate or short-term policies but by long term vision and policies which invest in lasting gains for all.  What the dominant economic ideal of our age neoliberalism focuses on is short term policies resulting in quick gains which can be trotted out at election time in order to gain popular votes once every five years.  There is no provision made for what happens after the election except for, more taxation and hardship to pay for the election bribes in four years’ time. 

We now have full scale wars programmed around the American electoral calendar. 
This is insane. If there's anyone out there who thinks it's OK to burn up the necessary resources of our shared future for more jollies today, could they please just go ahead and die soon? I plan to live beyond the next four quarters.

A political vision that undoes the enormous division, harm and corruption of our neoliberal experiment is needed not just for ‘the environment’ or for ‘the economy’ but for each and every one of us who live and work within the sociopolitical system that is the EU. Abdicating from our responsibility to the long term vision of those who rebuilt Europe after WWII into the shining light of freedom and prosperity it is today will condemn this generation to the same judgement we reserve for dark ages nobles, indolent aristocrats and the fascists of the 1930’s. 

Either we strip back the political agendas and design together a win-win system that sustains our future generations and allows them to thrive or we will be condemned as their enemy and we will be punished by them. Democracy itself is at risk over the next five years.  Who in the future would respect the laws and tradition of democracy when it has failed to consider their needs when they were at their most vulnerable as children?  As we have sown by gambling away the vast inherited wealth and wisdom of our war generation for Ponzi scheme style politics so we shall reap the absence of provision for our needs as we grow old and vulnerable in our turn.

And quite right too.  We get what we vote for and we deserve everything we get.

And here we can debate with the tools designed millennia ago to work it out: philosophy. We must reject the false dichotomy of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ because both sides of that phony argument deem the wealth amassed by past generations as ‘fair game’ and both sides give lip service to the future but neither side is committed to granting present wealth to those future generations. By constantly moving between these two false flags we are zig-zagging without making much progress at all.

We have forgotten the basic rules of life that guides all political theory: the greater the majority that benefits from policies, the more stable the society. It’s basic physics. The widest possible base must benefit from the state and be allowed to engage in political discourse or they will grow to mistrust government and be ready to overthrow the ruling elite. How many civil wars do we need to witness in our lifetimes before the penny drops?

So, what in politics would reflect Eudaimonia or a ‘correct action’?

Eudaimonia shows us that ‘action’ speaks louder than words. We must create our own wealth and add it to the wealth we have inherited to ensure our society is well insulated from the economic and social shocks of the present and into the future.  A ‘correct’ action would be what reveals the greatest possible long-term benefit to the people living today and to those who will follow us. Once this simple outcome is our goal, not just the politicians' goal but the entire society's goal then the proper and healthiest courses of action become clear. 

We can be the ‘golden generation’ who had the courage, the determination and the long term vision to change our four pillars of democracy for the better - our legislature, our judiciary, our media and our executive social contract or we can be the generation who did nothing and left our children to languish homeless and hopeless. Just don’t expect one iota of mercy from them when the power is inevitably torn from our knotty fingers. It's going to be like Logan's Run!

The purpose of politics, the purpose of law, the purpose of debate and the purpose of the social contract between citizen and state is to ensure that the society, yes, the society thrives. Economy is a function of society, not the other way around. From that stable position then there may be the chance of an economy that can flourish and become stable in the long term. This has been forgotten by our generation’s version of the aristocrat, the technocrat.

Who are these technocrats and from where do they spring? 
What connection do they have to our societies’ needs?
What expertise do they display on societal questions?
When did you ever hear a technocrat discuss the future of European society?

  

Our society’s values and freedoms are being attacked by a super client called the European Project incorporating the European Central Bank and the European Commission (Two completely unaccountable bodies within the EU) which seeks to programme European life into a multi-lingual version of a U.S. Republican red state even though these US states uniformly underachieve on social and on economic measures.

Why this obsession with what is nothing more than updated 'Time and Motion' men?

I'm afraid we're getting into 'tinfoil hat' territory:  Here's the definition from Wikipedia.

Technocracy is an organizational structure or system of governance where decision-makers are selected on the basis of technological knowledge. The concept of a technocracy remains mostly hypothetical.

Technocracy is the philosophy of technology and specialist knowledge being the virtues that should reveal power and not the mandate of the people. So we're back to Socrates and that cup of hemlock. In short, the nerds rule because nerds apparently know best and they do great bar charts. Donald Rumsfeld admitted that Microsoft Excel was his weapon of choice for the second Iraq war. I urge you all to see a documentary called "The Fog of War" in which Robert McNamara, John F Kennedy's and Lyndon B Johnson's Secretary for Defence counted the beans as Vietnam burned. It is truly fascinating (as in car crash morbidly fascinating) to see just how banal an arch technocrat even back then can make atrocities sound.

Are we all that numb now?

Technocracy was first proposed in the early 1930s as a means to jump start economies hit by the great depression, especially the US and Canada although Russian Soviet Bolshevism also had a technocratic bent.  Basically it was the 'mechanics and engineers bringing about a technological utopia out of the ashes of the corrupt old world' idea.

Just about every dystopian 20th century Sci-Fi novel from Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty Four stems from this simplistic thought process. Running a company and running a country are not like for like comparisons. Companies can go bust and be taken over, broken up and sold by other companies. Clearly, the trauma of these things happening to countries is a price that is too high for any government to pay.

Any national government that is....

A Federalised super state which is run on strict neoliberal theory and employs empathy free technocrats in its executive positions - men and women who don't feel the duty to pay tax into the society as they are above 'all that'; people who earned their stripes working in the financial and technology sectors where there are no allegiances or loyalties just bonuses and terminations - probably wouldn't miss democracy and legal responsibility all that much. 

This is what we're building right now or rather, this is what is being built around us because we don't have a clear understanding of what's happening and what the game plan is. Remember what I said about politics being a continuum? Anyone my age and older can remember the farcical non-news of Soviet 'Pravda' and Chinese cultural propaganda in the 70's and early 80's - it's all looking very familiar to us in the privately owned mass media.

There is no shortage of people prepared to take the quango/corporate/billionaire's pay cheque now and screw themselves up tomorrow when they wake up too late and realise that they have whittled away any solidarity they might have had from their neighbours when their contract gets terminated....and these contracts will definitely get terminated.  

There is a very tight circle of upper administration people who basically act like they stepped out of the Dilbert cartoon; they are the beneficiaries of this cash cow called Ireland and nobody else is allowed near. When that golden teat dries up they will take their bonuses and move to Brussels, Abu Dhabi, Frankfurt or Florida....anywhere that has an 'Economic Zone' - A tax haven, basically. Just like they did at the end of the last government and the one previous to that and the one previous to that.

The neoliberal experiment first named by Friedreich Heyek and then evangelised by Milton Friedman between the 50’s and the late 70’s until it became the dominant culture within our political elites was first revealed in two states within Europe. The rise of fascism in inter-war Germany is well documented by historians. Never forget that the Nazi party’s success began as economic success – they imposed ruthless capitalist principles on political and social problems which gave superb short term gains. That's how they swayed a country.

The other neoliberal state, and this may surprise you, was Ireland. Ireland in the inter-war years also witnessed a resource and wealth grab in favour of new and ruthless elites. Ireland also had pogroms against religious minorities and imposed ghettoes upon the poor and the dispossessed. Ireland's capitalist principles in this period were so short termist they rarely lasted the length of a single oireachtas. The thing is Ireland’s economic 'miracles' ended up being false dawns and short term gains which cost us over time. 

But this was no accident.  

This is Irish neoliberalism.  Ireland became a tax farm for private interests the day we occupied Dublin Castle and it has never moved away from that in the last 90 years. Even now, prosecuting former Taoisigh isn't even contemplated. It is legislatively, morally and psychologically impossible for us.  We would all die of shame, apparently. It would be a unprecedented national crisis! Colm O'Gorman would lock himself in a creche armed with poisoned lollipops and Marion Finucane would have to take to the veil.  Why is that?

The most urgent and important issue we face today, one that has gradually built up over the last four decades and what has caused our economic crash in the first place is housing.  Ireland’s civil war parties have abdicated the responsibility of housing its people to the private sector and the proof is visible under your feet at every bank machine on the high street and everywhere there is zoned land.

Look at houses built for the poor even 70 years ago and compare the build quality and the materials to houses (more so for apartments) that we are building today for even young urban professionals. The two simply do not compare. There has been cutting of corners happening over the last century as the dread hand of ‘maximising profits’ and ‘increasing efficiencies’ took hold over a function that quite frankly would have insulated our economy against the global economic downturn.  

Who advised this?  Why our own home grown technocrats, of course!

Who has all the houses? Why our own super-landlord TDs and civil servants of course!

Could’a, would’a, should’a....hindsight is a lovely thing and I’m sure these arguments were shouted out in their day but it’s not as if Ireland didn’t have a long list of historic precedent to inform this decision. The fact is, our civil war parties and our top tier civil service are allergic to creating state assets, so much so they have happily signed to a binding bailout where whatever state assets we once enjoyed are now up for grabs. That's our collective property being sold by men and women who are on the public purse and have been caught fiddling taxes, overstating expenses, and taking backhanders to men and women who hold no allegiance to Ireland and the Irish and who don't pay tax anywhere in the world. When it's not wearing a FF or FG pin and being interviewed by Miriam O'Callaghan what's that called?

It rhymes with 'left'.

But....all is not lost.
   

The power is in our hands; it always was and always will be. Austerity is a political choice, not an inevitable outcome. We have passively allowed unelected ‘experts’ to impose hardship upon our old and our young with no recourse. So let's get some recourse.  Let's put these technocrats on their mettle using the principles of Eudaimonia. Let's test their long term plans (plans they most certainly don't have) against what we would have done for our own society. This election demand some hard facts and long term policies before you vote.

How can Eudaimonia help here?

Well, what we need is a happy ‘indwelling spirit’ – good morale, good health, good prosperity. Now what would improve the Irish people’s morale?  What would improve their health?  And what would improve their prosperity?

I'm not going to tell you what policies are correct and what policies are 'long term' - each person has a general idea of what is 'common sense' but we all differ on how to apply common sense on public policy.   

What we should do is guide our intelligence towards having a useful evaluation tool for whichever policies you are presented with by candidates seeking our support in this upcoming election. Eudaimonia 

If you want a handy question to ask your candidate:  What is government’s job?

If the answer fails to incorporate the concept of serving the interests of the Irish people then that answer is wrong. "Tigers eat trees" wrong.  Not open to debate - just wrong!

Government is paid for by the people within the society and therefore it is the servant and the property of the people within the society. All other agendas are secondary to the rights of the people over their own governance – that is what is meant by the Executive Social Contract - The people are the client; nobody else. This is what democracy is at its base level and it can never change from that position and remain a democracy.

This time around vote not for promises, payoffs or personalities or party but for democracy.