a bonobo humanity?

It’s a well-known fact, though it should be better known, that being super-rich makes you indifferent to the financial struggles of others. Frump, for example, is very crookedly wealthy and takes advice, if he ever takes advice, from wealthy cronies and tries as best he can to place them in positions of power, and yet his impoverished MAGA fans still think he’s the greatest being in the multiverse. Yes, he’s looking bad percentage-wise, but I’m talking about hardcore MAGA fans who will go down with the ship.

This indifference, and selfishness, of the Elon Skums of the world should always be borne in mind when examining your own government and its advisors. Take note, as I have, of libertarian types, as they’re generally into ‘every bloke for himself’ (it’s a very blokey ‘philosophy’, pace Ayn Rand). And, just as an aside, one of the great joys of life consists of telling a libertarian, in no uncertain terms, that ‘free will’ is a myth, and then watching them boil over with rage.

The difficulty of course, with all governments, is that the powerful, aka the rich, are the ones whose voices are most heard. Their voices always rise ‘above the fray’ somehow, and their ‘magical’ wealth always suggests that they have something better to offer to government than any random street protestor.

So what happens when just about everyone in government is super-rich? This happens in Putinland of course, because he’s basically the only one in government, and the same goes for other bizarro ‘governments’ like Turkmenistan and North Korea.

And then there’s the USA…

It’s so hard to ignore that country, it casts its bleak shadow everywhere, especially in the WEIRD world. And of course it has plenty of billionaires, and the biggest rich-poor gap in the west. And considering its extreme jingoism, and ‘rugged individualism’, that’s never going to change. Its Presidential system  is the best/worst example of that individualism. It’s basically an elected Kingship – I’m sure I’ll never see a Queen of the USA in my lifetime. And will they learn from  the Frump disaster and develop a more distributed, inclusive political power system? Never never never. And I wouldn’t care but they interfere so much with other countries, pushing their weight around so that we have to sully ourselves by negotiating with them. Australia, at least, is at a safer distance than most. We need to keep minding our own business, but that’s hard, and it could be that their next King is reasonable enough to draw us in against our better judgment.

I’m meandering on with this, but it seems to me that the human world has become a more unpleasant place over the last few decades, at least politically. Crises will grow – climate change, the nuclear threat (Hiroshima-Nagasaki is fading in the public memory, and I recently heard someone suggesting nuking Putinland), the failing of internationalism, it all  seems to be going the wrong way. I wish I had some decent, non-political focus to take me away from it all, to some calm, steady Lagrange point where I can indulge in purely autistic speculations.

Perhaps I should focus more on the local, Australian scene, but then I’m such a global citizen (sigh), and I suppose I’m too old and set in my income and circumstances (barring some sudden accident or disease, etc) to be too self-concerned. In Australia the arguments are about tax levels, and there is a concern about extreme right movements drawing their ‘inspiration’ from MAGA (I just now typed into Youtube ‘how do I get rid of Sky News from my Youtube feed’ and the result was a whole heap of Sky News videos. I’m not into conspiracy theories, but….). I do have concerns about Australia’s stance re the ridiculous but dangerous Frump declaration of war against Iran, and I worry about the government’s positioning on the David and Goliath Israel-Palestine conflict, with anti-semitism claims being tossed around like confetti. As to domestic politics I suppose I should be ashamed to say I’m mostly woefully ignorant, though the NDIS cuts have caused serious concern among friends with a severely mentally impaired son (a very rare trisomy), and I’m concerned, as I’ve written before, about funding going to private schools from our largely private school-educated MPs. And we also have a rise in MAGA-type noises from the rabid right, which will no doubt subside when Frump carks it.

Anyway, that’s enough meandering, I’ll try ro find something more substantial to write about next time.

See also

on private schools in Australia, the egalitarian nation