The Convivial Society

The specification for a convivial society is made difficult but necessary amidst the absurdity of ennobling self-important spivs, giving out lordships to political party funders and time-servers, selling arms to mass murdering Arab tyrants, doing business with the killers of Tiananmen Square and encouraging the populace to genuflect before a Royal family breeding like rabbits.

Many among us are grateful and content with a world created to serve the market traders, exchanging fresh air, rent seeking money grubbing spivs, a world where the supposed magical powers of inanimate objects like the next iPhone are worshiped, a world where bought and paid for politicians are ever keen to tell us how virtuous it is that the spivs employ people.

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The Failure of the Free Market Meritocracy

Are you willing to continue participating in the more of the same society? Don't you think it's about time you rejected any more of that? We send our children to school to be processed into model consumers; encouraged to believe in self-fulfillment, self-belief, self-aggrandisement and self-delusion. And the designers of all this nonsense tell us that it will add up to some worthwhile outcome but for whom? Where is the wonder of the free market capitalism? Why is it failing to weave its magic to produce Louie Armstrong's Wonderful World?

Our education system fails to enable citizens to make a positive contribution to society, it fails to enable individuals to live well and flourish as human beings.

The clamour for a new generation of grammar schools, selection and a second coming of the meritocracy, that failed the first time around to use its specialness to improve the world we all live in - to create a convivial society - as an alternative to technocratic disaster, beyond the drones driven from Langley remotely to the next great tech' leap forward, autonomous weapons that seek out their own targets in the style of Sky Net.

The wise guys of Silicon Valley are busy working towards the singularity, the point where the machines think for themselves, the point where the machines do the thinking without consideration for what you desire. Google are in the forefront of this charge into oblivion. The financial money grubbers will be queuing up to finance a project that removes the contrariness of human agency from their casino. And our politicians will be there to hand out subsidies and legislative support to their risk taking entrepreneurs. You know, entrepreneurs like Carillion, that left the taxpayer with a bill for £150 million and owing a further £800 million across the building sector. For free market lunatics such social costs are part and parcel of the dynamic money grubbing opportunism they subscribe to.

 

The Failure of Politics

Like most of life's mysteries, no one knows how we ended up with a first-past-the-post voting system that ill-serves the voting public and makes it virtually impossible for new parties to mount an effective challenge to the two main parties. Once politics was about ideologies but that was at a brief moment in time, long gone now. Now, politics is about playing a board game called Duplicity, the aim of the game is to stay in as long as you can - serving no one but yourself whilst encouraging citizens to vote for more of the same every five years and having the audacity to call this pointless charade democratic.

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Beyond Absurdity and Common Sense

Before we construct a menu of items required for a convivial society

we need to list the preconditions for construction.

 

 

 

The Convivial Society requires the rejection of absurdity...

...as a necessary condition for framing a convivial specification.

 

Absurdity...

...stands as a proxy for what some call

common sense...

...those unquestioned reference points that guide people in their daily lives.

Although you prepare yourself for the spectacle, although you know that the peasants are about to start dancing again, you will always be astounded. Idiotic media types shove microphones under the noses of the dancers, perchance to gather an unpolished gem of inspired reflection on the wonderment of the occasion.

It's marvellous, it's wonderful and they relate how pleased and full of joy they are, and how they have travelled miles to stand outside a private hospital in Paddington for a week, to stare at the closed doors or stand outside Buckingham Palace to stare at a piece of paper, announcing a new arrival. Kate Middleton, who married into the Windsor family and metamorphosed into the Duchess of Cambridge, gave birth to a son. An otherwise quite unremarkable event, given that over 2000 other children were born in Britain on the same day, except that this one was inexplicably special... that's the definition of absurdity.

What we need is a bit less Common Sense!

Hegel once famously said that he felt at home in the world when he knew it but even more so when he had a conceptual grasp of it.

There are those among us able to grasp little more than a can of Stella...

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Dismiss the obvious

 

Crucial to our analysis of this world is the idea that nothing is obvious and anyone who says things are obvious should be viewed with deep suspicion.

R. D. Laing once observed that the deluded man finds his delusions so obvious that he can't understand why the rest of the world doesn't want to share them. Frequently, however, people do share the delusions of mad men, they believe things are as they are because it's obvious and then, they call it common sense - they share their understanding with the children, they tell them this is the way the world is, they talk of culture, national identity, heritage and other intangible nonsense.

Then, they go and stand outside a private hospital in Paddington because it's obvious that we need a Royal family and it makes perfect sense to encourage them to keep breeding.

 

Specification

 

Education

The purpose of education should be to simply make people smarter. Politicians talk about children developing critical and inquiring minds but, perhaps, not too enquiring since they may start to wonder why the Chilcot Report took so long to see the light of day and why John Chilcot was given the job in the first place.

They may start to wonder why it was decided to delay and then drop the publication of the second part of the Leveson Report, detailing the relationship between the police and the press. In particular, they may wonder why it took 27 years for the Hillsborough victims to get some justice. And then, they may ponder why it is that the victims’ families seldom, if ever, gain access to legal aid but the barristers and solicitors employed by the establishment are paid for by the tax payer.

Note:

The Chilcot report, began in 2009, stated that at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein did not pose an urgent threat to British interests, that intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction was presented with unwarranted certainty, that peaceful alternatives to war had not been exhausted, that the UK and the US had undermined the authority of the UN Security Council and that a war was unnecessary.

Education should prepare children for the assault of gormless bureaucrats, pin-stripped gangsters, carpetbaggers, charlatans, charity muggers, scammers, pickpockets, pimps, scheming inept duplicitous politicians, jerry builders, lying newspapers and disingenuous marketeers: since that is the world we live in.

We also live in a world with fantastic scope for joy and fulfilment, and infinite interest.

 

Housing

Insist that offices converted for residential temporary accommodation units meet planning regulations with regard to space and ameneties.

"The mandatory nature of the standards was ended by the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980, when the incoming Conservative government sought to reduce the cost of housing and, generally, public spending." They thought it would be a good thing for people to live in rabbit hutches.

Put an end to Right to Buy.

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