Divide and Conquer

Most of our public and online discourse is designed to confuse, distract and divide ordinary people. It's designed to sort individuals into neat, simplistic categories and divert our attention from real centres of power. It's designed to keep us arguing among ourselves about largely inane issues. It's designed to promote one-sided, egotistical reactions to nuanced problems. Social media, a lot of the time, doesn't help with this. We must always remain open to truth and evidence, regardless of whether it accords with our ideological inclinations. 

We need to focus more on what connects us as a majority, and less on what divides us. In my view, British working-class people have far more in common with working-class immigrants from Afghanistan than they do with Boris Johnson. The interests of these groups of people are largely aligned, in spite of superficial differences. Politicians like Boris Johnson, who is a member of an economically elite class, benefit from keeping such people divided. Boris Johnson and other economic elites benefit from divisive rhetoric, whether they're talking about "benefit scroungers", immigrants or political activists. 

But it seems that the liberal-left has also played into this game of division, which I'll get into more later. I feel more and more foricbly that, in order to overcome global injustice, the masses need to radically unify and resist the attempts to fragment and atomise us. This entails overcoming ideological thought and egotistical impulses.

Martin Luther King Jr came to understand that all working class people were oppressed by a heartless economic system that disregards poor people, regardless of what colour their skin is. This shows that MLK Jr was an insightful and subtle thinker. As well as challenging the horrors of racism, he also saw beyond ordinary divides and focused on what connects us as a whole. MLK Jr understood the fundamental causes of oppression and aimed to address these causes, in a practical and meaningful way. 

I'm of George Carlin's view that the quality of our thought is determined by the quality of our language. We'll only progress when we start thinking more about the language we use. This is why I think the term "climate change" is misleading and inappropriate, even though it's so widely used. The climate is always changing. What we're experiencing is climate breakdown or climate collapse. Similarly, the terms left and right, politically speaking, are becoming more and more unclear and outdated. 

Our language, like our globalised society, is arguably stagnant and regressive. We need a new vision and a new way of speaking about it. This vision needs to be based on honesty, transparency, nuance and fairness. Unfortunately, few commentators are attempting to realise this vision, as far as I'm concerned. Many mainstream commentators lack imagination, integrity and courage. 

Many progressives still seem to have undue faith in electoral politics and irredeemable political parties. If people want beneficial societal change, I feel energy needs to be focused on civil disobedience and new forms of governance. For, in my view, our main existing political parties, at least in the US and UK, divert and ultimately destroy peoples revolutionary energy. There are many young people who are invested in these political parties, and are consequently discouraged from initiating real, meaningful change. 

The culture wars are a distraction. This is why they're encouraged by mainstream media and people in power. Anything that divides ordinary people and keeps us arguing among ourselves, whether it's about Trump, Brexit or what politically correct language we should be using, is helpful to those who hold positions of power. The really nefarious, significant things going on, however, are actively concealed by the ruling class. When I say significant, I mean issues that impact life in a drastic and violent way, such as war crimes or ecocide. 

This is why the weight of the ruling class came down on Jeremy Corbyn, who, along with Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, is one of the main victims of cancel culture. During most of Corbyn's interviews, there was mostly a discussion about fabricated or exaggerated issues, and not about the truly important things going on. His treatment was vastly different from Theresa May's or Boris Johnson's. 

In most media discourse, it's very rare that we see a meaningful discussion about Britain's huge role in the global arms trade, or the systematic oppression of poor people under neoliberalism, or our significant contribution to the climate and ecological crisis. This is because the whole of British society is set up in favour of already established, transnational interests. Whether it's the BBC reporting, the Guardian or the Daily Mail, these interests must not be properly challenged. 

Many elements of woke, politically correct and liberal culture have been adopted by Western institutions and powers. There has been a concerted attempt by the Democratic Party, for example, to style itself as woke and "diverse". On the surface this may seem like a good and positive thing, but in reality the Democrats are still pursuing the same policies of war, neoliberalism and ecocide. Thus in substance, the Democrats are little different from Republicans, they simply appear nicer and fluffier. Arguably, the fact that the Democrats are more concealed and opaque than Republicans means they are even more harmful, for their wrong-doings are less apparent and therefore they can get away with more. 

The fact that elements of woke culture are so easily adopted by evil institutions, who simply wish to cloak their wrong-doings, suggests that woke culture doesn't truly address centres of power. This further supports my view that the culture wars are distracting and divisive. We must resist too heavy a focus on culture war issues. 

In the West we arguably live in an identity obsessed, image-laden, narcissistic culture. One reflection of this is the proliferation of selfies and vain Instagram profiles. Such profiles seem to be the ones with most followers. TikTok is dominated either by teenagers doing "dance moves" or "activists" opining on culture war issues. I also see a lot of disingenuous political posturing on social media, which to me is more about social status than anything else.

Our Western societies seem to be more about image and artifice than substance and reality. As mentioned earlier, just because the Democratic Party is more racially diverse than the Republican Party doesn't mean they're doing anything more to genuinely combat racism. This is what happens when we live in a society that overwhelmingly values superficial, commercial, materialistic practices.

Personally, I don't have a fixed agenda and I don't think there is one solution to our societal problems. I don't feel I'm part of a group or movement and I don't buy into any ideologies or thought systems. However, I feel if people are able to overcome divisive rhetoric and egotistical, simplistic reactions, if enough people are able to have a truly healthy dialogue about things in an evidence-based way, across the political spectrum, then many of our problems will organically start getting better. As I said, I also feel people need to focus more on what connects us. 

We are all flowerings of the same universe, the same organism, moving in unison. We are all far more linked than we realise. Who you are runs far deeper than you might ordinarily believe.