The economist Eric Schumacher once wrote that people who work in large bureaucratic organisations lose the ability to think independently. I am frequently reminded of this concept as I read the reports of how our bureaucratic state institutions repeatedly and daily treat people with callousness and calculated cruelty. Whether it is in immigration or the departments responsible for welfare or housing etc. the same patterns of behaviour, the same stories about indifference and degrading treatment surface in our press and media all the time. Even those of you who do not live in the UK must be aware of such reports. There was an article in the British press this week reporting how an immigration official told an applicant that 'it's my job to piss you off.' Can you imagine the sickness that his penetrated the mind of such an individual who is simply doing an everyday job? How does an ordinary British working person who probably has a family and goes home at night to walk the dog and go to a football match at the weekend become infested with such poison that they take pleasure in making people's lives a misery? I am minded to consider that such people are not really any different to those who happily worked for the Nazis or Stalin's KGB. In other words there is essentially nothing special about Britain that would prevent the Holocaust or the Gulag happening here. I was brought up in a society that taught me that we were better than that; as I have mentioned before, education truly is a process of unlearning.
The right always portray the state as a bad thing, a necessary evil Karl Popper called it. This is wrong. The state is neither bad nor good, it is an institutional reflection of the personnel who operate and direct it. If the state is staffed by bad people pursuing bad policies it will be bad, but the opposite is also true. The British state is indeed bad at this time in history because it is a reflection of bad and malignant personnel who direct its policies and its operations and who have persuaded its permanent staff to implement cruel and vicious policies in a cruel and dehumanising manner. If I were ever to become part of government, I would immediately sack the entire management structure within the Home Office as they have become corrupted beyond redemption under the Tories. They reflect a corporate lack of intelligence and ethical purpose because any decent human being would refuse to implement the policy imperatives demanded by the Tories. The British civil service however are quite happy to implement policies and procedures the Nazis would have been proud of. What we see in both the UK and the USA are policies being created by hatred. The UK hates foreigners, Europe, immigrants etc. and the 45 hates any and every thing that happened under the Obama administration. The 45's hatred of Obama is a wonder to behold. He also, of course, hates immigrants, coloured people, women and just about everything that isn't nailed down.
Charlie Chaplin made a film that demonstrated how the human being in a modern industrial society simply becomes an adjunct of the machinery that dominates his/her life. In those cases I am discussing it is the bureaucratic machinery that affects a person's thinking. It is quite ironic how the people who preach individualism spend so much time and capital stripping everyone of their individuality. Add to that a dehumanising dominant ideology that strips the satisfaction out of work and life in general, that replaces a nation's cultural achievements with consumerism and that teaches that people are of secondary importance to profits and that some people are obviously inferior to others and not worthy of normal considerations and you have all the foundations of a totalitarian society, an Animal Farm. The sooner that Scotland can sever its ties with Westminster the better because the British are, in the words of the song, on the road to nowhere. If the USA is not careful it will follow soon. The 45 thinks that the US can stand alone, but, just as no man is an island, neither is one nation. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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