VIDEO 1 BY MOON / WATCH AND SUBSCRIBE TO MOON ON YOUTUBE

“The British Empire did not go away- it became a bank”. And that bank is collapsing. Crime, poverty, addiction, and prices are skyrocketing. The health care system (NHS) is on the brink of collapse. No one can afford property anymore since there is a massive real estate bubble. Rental and food prices have also exponentially increased. The government’s policies of austerity, mass migration, and general neglect have led to this situation. But at least Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife made £142 million in profits on their investments last year, so at least they will be okay. Conclusion? The UK is clearly ignoring its working class. Never give up on the people who break their backs to build your future. It has never worked out well for any country that has ignored them.

VIDEO 2 BY SARGON OF AKKAD / WATCH AND SUBSCRIBE TO SARGON OF AKKAD ON YOUTUBE

The political class and the managerial class have betrayed Britain. Trust is broken. It is not racist to not want to let millions of low-skilled workers and dependents flood uncontrolled into a country that is suffering from a massive shortage of housing and high-skilled work

If a country’s leadership chooses happy-story PR and toothless reforms in the hopes it will all blow over, these subterfuges have the potential to push dissatisfaction beyond the point of control.

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Whatever else we might say or think about the leadership class, they tend to have a keen sense of self-preservation. The ability to issue optimistic visions of sunshine and unicorns with a straight face is valuable, to be sure, but so is the ability to sense that the BS is no longer working and something must be done to stave off a potentially career-ending collapse of confidence.

As a general rule, the ability to maintain a delusional confidence that it’s all going to work out just fine tends to end very poorly for the leadership class. However sincerely it may be uttered, let them eat brioche doesn’t resolve the extreme asymmetries that generate revolutionary disorder. Something more is required, something that either reduces the asymmetries of wealth and power or gives the appearance of doing so.

Staving off revolution requires some action that benefits those for whom the status quo is no longer working. While borrowing and distributing “free money” works for a while, this profligacy generates its destabilizing dynamics, and so eventually reducing the asymmetries of wealth and power requires the leadership to take a chunk out of the perquisites and spoils of the financial elite.

Since the leadership class is either beholden to the financial elite or has dual membership in both clubs, the leaders are quickly declared “traitors to their class” even as they are acting to stave off the overthrow of the predatory financial elite that pushed asymmetries to destabilizing extremes.

In other words, the leaders saving the financial elite from the consequences of their own rapacity will get no credit from those they’re saving. Rather than grasping that giving up 10% of their gains will preserve the remaining 90%, the infinite greed and hubris of the financial elite locks their minds in a delusional fantasy that their wealth and power are “deserved” and therefore untouchable.

That the system is rigged so that every pitch is a gentle toss and every base hit becomes a home run is conveniently ignored.

That doing nothing could lead to a one-way ticket to Devil’s Island issued by a revolutionary government doesn’t compute. That they could soon be fighting over the MREs occasionally flung from aircraft doesn’t penetrate their hubris-soaked echo chamber of entitlement. The task of saving their own class falls thanklessly to the leadership.

Policies that would have been rejected out of hand as politically impossible become normalized as leaders rush to stave off revolution. The historical path from complacency to denial to policy extremes is well-worn: at the start, the leadership tries the sunshine and unicorns cover story. When this fails to satisfy the disenfranchised mob, the leaders issue grand-sounding edicts that suggest “hope and change” is right around the corner.

Once this well-used ploy fails to quench the social distemper, then the leaders accept that “when things get serious, you have to lie,” and so they lie, at first to cool the ugly sentiment and then to buy time.

Eventually, some real action has to be taken, and then it gets dicey. There are mistakes to be made in any policy choice: doing nothing can trigger disaster, but so can doing too little or too much. The luxury of calibrating a response is no longer available, and so extreme policies are thrown at the wall until something sticks.

Those who counseled caution are cashiered, for their advice led to the current crisis. Those who counseled radical responses are elevated and freed to unleash whatever they claim will work like magic.

But alas, by this late stage, magic is in short supply, and extreme policies set off second-order consequences no one anticipated, except perhaps those overly cautious voices who did not understand that the option of good choices had long since dissipated, and the only options left were bad or possibly worse than merely bad.

The extremes of wealth-power asymmetries that generated the crisis are eventually matched by equally extreme policies designed to stave off the overthrow of the ruling elites. If these actually rebalance what was allowed to drift out of balance, order and stability can slowly be restored.

If the leadership chooses happy-story PR and toothless reforms in the hopes it will all blow over, these subterfuges have the potential to push dissatisfaction beyond the point of control, and predictions about the next stage of events become folly: beyond this event horizon, anything becomes possible.

In other words, Everyday Life includes far more than the financial statistics of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the stock market, wealth, and income. Everyday Life is fundamentally about relationships, agency (i.e. control of one’s life and ownership of one’s work), the fulfillment of life’s purposes (livelihood, family, friends, community, and self-growth), leisure time, and the experiences of everyday living, both the stressors and the joys.

1. The balance between labor and capital has been skewed to capital for 50 years. Labor’s political power and share of the economy have declined while capital’s political and economic power has become dominant. This has driven income-wealth inequality to extremes that are destabilizing the economy and the political-social orders.

Increasing the sums labor can borrow to keep afloat only works until debt service consumes all disposable income, crushing consumption. The end result is mass default of debt and the erasure of debt-based “assets” held by the financial elites (top 10%).

Labor will have to restore the balance with capital or the system will collapse in disorder. History is rather definitive about this causal chain.

2. Process and narrative control have replaced outcomes as the operative mechanisms and goals of the status quo. The illusions of limitless “progress” and “prosperity” have generated a mindset in which outcomes no longer matter, as “progress” and “prosperity” are forces of Nature that can’t be stopped, so we can luxuriate in Process–completing forms and compliance documents, submitting reports to other offices, holding endless meetings to discuss our glacial “progress”, mandating more Process, elevating managers who excel at Process–with the net result that building permits that were once issued in a few days now take months, bridges take decades to build, and incompetence reigns supreme.

To obscure the dismal outcomes–failure, delays, poor quality, errors–narrative control is deployed, expanded, and rewarded. The managerial class has been rewarded and advanced not for generating timely, on-budget, high-quality outcomes, but for managing Process and Narrative Control: everything’s going great, and if it isn’t, the fault lies elsewhere.

The net result of this structure is that the competent either quit in disgust or or assigned to Siberia, while the incompetent are elevated to the highest levels of corporate and public-sector management.

3. The dominance of monopolies and cartels has fatally distorted markets and politics, undermining the foundations of everyday life. By eliminating competition and buying political-regulatory complicity, monopolies and cartels lock in ample, stable profits, profits that are increased by squeezing labor and reducing the quality and quantity of goods and services, to the point that quality services and goods are either luxuries available only to the elite or simply unavailable at any price, as the knowledge, systems and values required to produce high-quality goods and services have been irrevocably lost.

4. The dominance of digital communications in everyday life has increased the unpaid shadow work we’re forced to do and injected new forms of narrative control, digital hypnosis, addiction, and derangement into daily life that cannot be reversed in any meaningful way other than drastically limiting our exposure to the toxic flood tide.

So where does this leave us? We’re on our own. The status quo is incapable of unwinding the fatal distortions generated by the dominant economic structures, and so it is also incapable of “saving” us from being seated at the banquet of consequences.

Rather than becoming enraptured by the apologists and cheerleaders proclaiming everything’s great, launching a lifeboat and setting a course for land is a strategy with much higher odds of success.