Friday, 20 May 2016

Thatcher, Reagan, and the deliberate destruction of ethical behaviour

The British press have been carrying reports about how the insurance industry are trying desperately to avoid paying out for the damage caused by the unusual flooding that Britain experienced last year. This I think is an apt metaphor for the dominant ideology that runs like a poisonous cancer throughout our western societies. As you know, metaphor derives from the Greek, to transfer, to carry over, to alter, and Thatcher's great mission was to transfer the dominant American concept of individualism into the British cultural mainstream in order to alter our way of thinking to allow her to succeed in convincing us that there is no such thing as society. That is what American insurance firms do, they never cease searching for ways to avoid paying their customers for the service that the same customers have paid for in the first place.
 
Individualism is a denial of reality. As I've written before, each person is of course a unique individual, but their individuality is conditioned by their social environment, that is, their uniqueness is tempered by the fact that they are a product of their social upbringing and that their individual personality has been shaped and developed by many external sources. To deny the social nature of the individual is to attempt to deny that each individual has responsibilities to other people and to the society that they are a product of, and that was Thatcher's goal. If there is no such thing as society, then you are solely responsible to yourself and no other person. More importantly, as there is no society, then society has no responsibilities as it does not exist. In addition, there can be no form of morality or ethical behaviour expected of a society that does not exist, and each individual has no moral or ethical responsibilities to anyone else unless they personally commit to acting in a moral or ethical manner. As a result, why should you pay taxes that will be used to provide benefits, health care, education etc. for other people? If they cannot afford such things then that is not your responsibility, is it? In one fell swoop, the Thatcher/Reagan approach completely negates the entire Christian message. The Good Samaritan was a fool, no-one is his/her brother's keeper.

Sequences of events produce con-sequences. We therefore come back to our insurance companies, corporations with neither honour nor decency who are a typical example of the Thatcher/Reagan approach to business and human relations. In Britain we are told that we live in a world where we expect something for nothing, we are all scroungers. Throughout my working life I paid one-third of my income in either taxation or forms of insurance to cover health and retirement benefits. I paid income tax during the bulk of my working life at 35 pence in the pound. Just as I am told that I do not merit the fruits of my many years of contributions, and I live in a society that does all it can to prevent me enjoying those fruits, so the insurance companies adopt exactly the same position. It did not used to be like this until Maggie adopted the poison of American individualism. Modern Britain is a society where justice has all but disappeared, a society where everyone takes and very few people are prepared to give, a society that would prefer that refugee children simply died rather than attempt to help them. What the Thatcher/Reagan philosophy did was make it both acceptable and respectable for corporations and employers to operate without any sense of responsibility, either to people in general, or to the wider society that they operate within. The individual has been reduced to an economic unit, and a unit that only has value to the extent of its ability to both produce and consume. If that unit has no production capacity, either from age, health status, or mental capacity, then it has no value, it is, as the Nazis described such people, a useless eater, and therefore disposable.

In Britain there is no longer any value in the family. This country prosecutes parents who take their children out of school on holiday, irrespective of the fact that many parents have their holidays allocated when their children are at school. I actually represented a lady once who was refused a day off work to get married. That is not a lie. Moral and ethical behaviour have all but vanished in this society by employers and corporations and this development was quite deliberate and planned. Such behaviour is expected, and indeed demanded, from employees and the general public, but does not apply to employers, corporations, politicians, the police, the judiciary and the establishment in general. We have a man who will represent the American Republican Party in this years Presidential election who openly boasts about his determination to employ torture and many Americans applaud this. We have the spectacle of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and the defence of governments and politicians for the degrading and barbaric treatment of people within these institutions. Thus, moral and ethical behaviour has been purged, not only from employers and corporations, but from politicians and governance itself. As I said, sequences produce consequences, and when they hit our societies, remember Thatcher and Reagan. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat 

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