Wednesday 18 September 2019

consensus - part 2

Read Part 1 first!






I've been thinking about the history of the last thirty years and how the Consensus emerged. They’ve been encouraging me to write about it, to look at how it has developed. Sometimes it feels like I‘m back at uni in here. It’s not government and it’s not democracy. It’s politics by lowest common denominator in my book. I'm beginning to see that, well, it has its points. Democracy always was flawed. Always was the art of the possible. I see that now. When l went into public service I really thought I was a force for good. I was a force for good, dammit. Hold on to that thought. I had a clear vision. Able to — well, yes, take the consensus, take the common sense approach, see what people really wanted and cut through the crap. And make a real contribution to public life. It wasn’t for personal gain. I just got a buzz from it, you know. I guess all politicians have that in their blood. I saw myself as a breath of fresh air. A force for change. God, I sound like an election advert — a bad one at that.
When it all started to go wrong, was when I lost the common touch, perhaps. I see that now. Stopped listening. Believed too much that I knew the answers, perhaps. Began to think I knew better.
The wars. The bloody wars. That’s where I went wrong. One of them quoted George Bush at me the other day. He said something like This will be the first war of the twenty-first century. Afghanistan, that is. Why were you in that mindset that there must always be wars — conventional wars, peoples against peoples, that is? I told them my heart had sunk when George came up with that. I was all for no wars. We had a chance at the beginning of the new millennium to make that our goal.
But this was a new kind of war. The war against terrorism. I got caught up in all that. It just seemed right, something we had to do, we couldn’t just sit back... A crusade, they said. I told them my heart sank when George called it that, too. Wasn’t that all an illusion?, they said. Just national interest when it came down to it. Or the first of the Commodity Wars — and in fact those are just national interest wars too. No, no, I said you’ve got it all wrong. But...
You see, I get defensive when they interrogate me but I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. They keep hammering away at this. l was fighting these old wars, these blood and gristle, national wars; and yes, Iraq was the first of the commodity wars, it turns out. Fighting people for the oil and the water and the food; for the decent land and the raw materials. That’s where it all went rapidly downhill from there on. It's easier to see that now - it wasn’t at all easy to see it then.
And that’s the time when the Consensors emerged and their wikinomics and their co-operatives and their barter economy and their bloody wanky social networking... Well that’s how it felt at the time. Irrelevant to the big picture it seemed. Just a sideshow. How could I have known where we were headed? I never got into all that computer stuff. I didn’t really understand the significance of what was happening.
Irrelevant to mainstream business and mainstream politics, despite all the media hype. That’s how it all seemed to me then. But slowly they were chipping away, building this new politics, or this new Consensus. We didn’t call them that then of course. Neo-hippies, we called them then. l think it was Dave that came up with that one.
Democracy is dead, they said. Look at democracy as it operates today, they said. This is something I do know about — the emergence of modern democracy. The Chartists, the Luddites, all that.
It’s a proud tradition. They agree with me. Democracy was a necessary step. A step to what, I say. To consensus. Of course. People fought and died for democracy and I’m proud of them. We’re proud of them too. And of those that died for Consensus.
When modern democracy emerged in the early 1900s, it was to fight the excesses of the rich: wilful exploitation by absolute monarchs and dictators; it was to put power in the hands of ordinary people. Revolutions across Europe, and we even got close to it in Britain. It was to fight corruption.
But look what happened, they say. It’s true. Slowly the rich and powerful clawed it all back, will always claw it back. So you had a nation’s richest business men forming parties, taking over control of the media, forcing the country to their will. Russia, Italy, Thailand — even the US in many ways. Even Britain: I admit it.
In the third world it was even worse. After the rush of imperial powers to get out in the fifties and sixties the tribal leaders and the colonial satraps were shepherded in to run the spanking new countries, and no-one else ever got a chance even to get started. At the dissolution of the soviet empire we saw almost exactly the same thing.
I understood all that. l was a student of all that once.
But I thought democracy could shine through. I thought, especially when l was leading Europe, that we could make true democracy happen. Sometimes I felt that the UK and Germany, Holland and the Nordics were the last bastions. And how successful were you?, they ask. It‘s rhetorical, of course. Because not successful at all. If anything, the rich and powerful were more and more able to pull the strings; they got richer and richer and the poor got poorer.
So this is their theory. The consensors emerged because democracy failed and would always fail, in their view. They saw that the wars we were fighting thirty, twenty years ago, the national wars, the commodity wars, were a diversion, opium for the people to distract from what was happening at home. And the rich, ever more cunning and clever, used every means at their disposal to distract people from reality.
So why didn’t I make the leap when the Consensors emerged? Well, I’m really not up for that vast conspiracy theory view of history. That way lies all the failed isms of our recent past: communism, fascism, you name it. That way lies madness. It never was a conspiracy: just a series of cock-ups.
And because it all seemed irrelevant then, and l was too busy to notice what was happening. Too old maybe. I did try to reform politics. The old left and right no longer holds, I used to say: I was always banging on about that. That was my whole platform in Europe. But the big leap was getting rid of leadership, management, power, they say. Power corrupts, leads to distortions, poor decision making. Short termism.
Maybe it does. Sometimes lately I feel too tired to argue.
I looked at the official version of history — the Consensus version - or whatever it reads today. Because, like in soviet times, it’s constantly being rewritten.
I noticed a change in the description of my time in Europe, when I looked this up today. When I pointed this out, they said, But that is the whole point, Old Guard. History is consensus. Apparently, it will be rewritten as more information comes to light and as considered judgments are made across all those with an interest. I realised some of the changes in the Europe entry came directly from the conversations we have been having. But when I think about it, maybe they’re not so wrong: history has always been a bit like that. I think it was Napoleon who said: History is the version of events that people have decided to agree upon.
So perhaps they’re right.

Today the subject was growth, or lack of it. Why were we so obsessed with growth? I think sometimes they genuinely want to learn. I expect what I say will all fetch up in their wiki-history tomorrow. I’ve been reading their version of events on the business front and it could do with a few rewrites.
Why were businesses run like fascist dictatorships?, they asked. Tell us, we want to know how you rationalised that. And you know, the thing is, I’m not sure now. l remember we talked a lot about corporate governance, social responsibility, all that. But did we do anything? Enron, the bank collapses, the commodity market scandals. l read an interesting article about this the other day. Once upon a time — not that long ago really — companies were run, yes OK, they were run for profit — but they knew about producing something, too. They were run, often by generations of the same family who understood steel making or jam making or whatever it was, the ins and outs of it, and they took pride in what they did. They expected the business to go on for generations: they had long term plans. Somehow this all got lost and companies were only interested in short term profits and more profits and more esoteric ways of making profits. Shareholder value was all. Gambling on commodity futures; asset stripping; financial vehicles that became more and more complicated, a house of cards that we suddenly discovered would fall at the slightest knock. How did that happen? Could we have stopped it?
I saw Dave again today. He was in the centre when we went for lunch again. One of my ‘guides' was there with him. They came over and sat with me as I tucked into my delicious eco-neutral protein pack.
Dave seems to have calmed down. He was definitely on the edge before but a lot calmer now. We were chatting away like old times. But he’s changed a lot. It was he that coined the neo-Hippy tag for the Consensors. Yet now he’s starting to talk like them. The guide looked as pleased as punch. It was funny to see the guide in the flesh rather than on the teiescreens.
I mentioned how I’d been thinking lately about what happened to capitalism. He agreed with me about losing touch with real business.
‘When did the captains of industry lose touch with doing what they were good at and turn their companies into money making machines to turn short term profit? It was when they embraced business fascism,’ said Dave. ‘That‘s what I call it now. We could have done so much more at the time. Top down management was the only model. And growth.’
‘Growth? You had to have growth,’ I said.
‘Why? Why did businesses have to get bigger and bigger? Why couldn’t they just produce what they were good at, year after year, and be content with that? Why were we locked into this model where every fat company had to get fatter, so it had to create demand, so people had to be persuaded to always want more?’
‘lt was the way it was all organised,’ I said. ‘You know that better than anyone. You were right in the thick of it. Companies borrowed to expand; then to pay off the loans they, well they had to expand more.’
‘But why? Why did it take the Consensus to see through that, that, that m-mirage?’
Was it a mirage? I thought about it and we were silent for a while.
Then my guide perked up. You have always said that you were driven by a desire to fight the Carbon Explosion: couldn’t you see that the obsession with growth was its major cause?
Dave blurted out loudly so people around turned to look: ‘Yes, wasn‘t it blindingly obvious?’
I looked at him. ‘You tell me Dave, your friends were part of it.’
‘Yes, I was part of it and it was blindingly obvious, even at the time, but...’
But what? The guide coaxed it out of him.
‘We felt there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.’
‘Exactly. Out of office in an instant.’
But I’ve been sitting here since I got back from the centre pondering that. In the end, the Consensors did a thing about it. Did lots of things. If we’d joined them, how much quicker would things have been resolved or at least improved? How many lives would have been saved? My family’s, even?

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