Standing at the bus stop this afternoon I was thinking to myself how utterly unnatural is was to spend days like these inside. What was the point of millions of years of evolution and millennia of painstaking technological progress just to end up lacking things we took for granted as chimps?

Ok, there's the vent, here's the post. I am, after all, a creature of habit.

There was a feature on BBCN24 tonight about the security of modern cars. Basically it's now so hard to break into your average new high end motor that thieves don't bother. Great stuff, technology making things better etc etc.

Of course the down side is that thieves are now far more likely to target older, shitter cars, ie. the ones most people can afford. While this technology improves the lot of a minority of people, the way it comes about actually makes things worse for everyone else. Watching this it struck me that this is the kind of thing that counts as progress in our society today.

Another feature on BBCN24, (there's just nothing else on TV,) described how a wider variety and greater volume of work was being exported to India. A bit of idle pondering led me to see this oft reported issue in a different and much wider light.

We're basically introducing a limited number of, relatively high paid jobs into the country. With these jobs, and the consumers they create, comes the rest of the west, supermarkets, brands etc etc. The thing is there are far more people than these industries can employ so pretty swiftly you get a disturbingly familiar three tier system.

there's a tiny group of guys right at the top who own and run the businesses.

there's a much larger group, though still a minority, of people in 'well paid' jobs,

there's everyone else, with nowhere to go and nothing to do,

Sound familiar? It seems that we're exported much more than jobs here. It'd be almost nice to think that we're spreading this system and remaking other nations in our own image. I say nice because the, more realistic, alternative is that we're actually just former victims of this system, already utterly conquered. We are not remaking anyone in our image, the system is remaking us all in its own.

Nice huh?

Well these two recent thinking points married up quite nicely with a concept long established in my mind. Capitalism claims to use competition as an engine for progress. The flaw in this, once seen, is painfully obvious.

While competition can drive progress for certain groups, the winners, it can only do so at the expense of others, the losers. If competition is your engine then there is no way EVERYONE can succeed. In this system the only way to get anywhere else is to climb over other people.

What we're talking about here, however, is more than just capitalism. This goes beyond economics, this is a mindset, an ideology and, as is often case with mindsets and ideologies, a system of social control. What the two issues mentioned above demonstrate is that:

a) Far from offering opportunity our current way of life is geared towards keeping people in their place. Money is used to improve the lot of the few at the expense of the rest. Of course this makes it harder for the rest to join the privileged few and so we spiral downwards.

b) This new financial faith is spreading across the world. The religious and political beliefs that prove most effective at centralising power and controlling people are generally the most successful. There are, after all, always people looking for a big stick to beat those around them.

This latest stick has been custom built and is trimmed down to the essence. Gone is the pretence of morality or even the need to justify actions. This stick beats not in the name of some invisible god or intellectual ideal but in its own name. It is its own motive, method and reward.

Now I don't know about you but I find that to be some scary shit. Of course it's no good just bitching, we need alternatives, escape routes, a selection of other ways. I'd say exploring some of these might just take another post or two but I did here something on the local news recently that might be a start.

Some ordinary working bloke at a factory kept getting headaches and falling over. He tried various things but nothing seemed to help until his boss suggested that maybe he should get a scan. Unfortunately he found that the NHS waiting lists were prohibitively long and there was no way he could afford to go private.

What happened? Every single employee chucked some money in a hat and they sent him for his scan. The private scan found he had a brain tumour but luckily caught it in time to operate and save his life. The guy didn't drop down dead because the people around him each did their own little bit. Sounds good to me.