On a more serious note
Typically my blog is filled with Facebook quizzes and meaningless apologies to non-existent readers for not having written anything for months on end, but I feel it’s about time I wrote something with depth.
Sitting on the bench in Evelyn Gardens at 4.20am, I always have a lot of time for reflection. While I would normally frequent the same bench to enjoy my favourite Class B pass-time, tonight was a night of empty baggies and desperate, futile grinder scrapings. So, instead, I was smoking a king-size roll-up, and watching the beginnings of another Monday in London. The sun had already risen behind the looming grey clouds, and I had a feeling that things weren’t going to get much brighter today.
Throughout my life I’ve suffered seemingly random bouts of insomnia, and this week has been no exception. Normally, I would lay the blame upon my exams or a piece of coursework that was due, or even the occasional woman trouble that seems to come with the increasingly occasional women in my life, but recently I’ve been wondering if perhaps there’s something else to it. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been developing an overbearing apathy, which has only seemed to worsen with time. People tell me that my problem stems from smoking too much weed, and part of me wants that to be true, but I know that my herbal intake isn’t the problem. There’s something much darker causing it — the fact that I have an exam at 2pm today and am yet to sleep feels like the least of my worries.
So what on earth were my bigger worries? Sitting on the same bench, looking across the road at the same beautifully architectured church, I pondered this question in great depth. I usually avoid this kind of perusal of my subconscious — deep thought without anybody there to validate it tends to see me remembering and dwelling upon the shit in my past that would best remain buried and fragmented — but all I could feel this morning were a sense of detachment from the world and a sickening disgust towards the people who were simply out to serve their own needs.
I’ve read a lot, and been told even more about the real state of modern human society, and the more I read and hear, the less I want to believe it. And the more I hear, the less I can disregard.
We are all living in a global empire, where nation by nation, the world is being chewed up, swallowed, and defecated back into place as a well-templated victory for those who rule. Institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, posing as a saviour to the monetary needs of failing third world nations, give out enormous loans to allegedly save the impoverished. When, surprisingly, these loans cannot be repaid, conditions are imposed upon the nation: their electricity suppliers, water boards and other public amenities are put up to auction, trade restrictions are torn down, and soon large multi-national corporations move in. These corporations set up their businesses, using their huge capital to lower their prices and undercut those of natives, exporting the nation’s valuable natural resources (whether oil, diamonds or foodstuffs), and soon people are forced to work for these corporations for a pittance in order to earn enough to survive.
This, sadly, is again, one of my smaller worries, but my biggest worry of all lies very close to it. These empirical corporations all seem to run under the same golden rule: maximise profit, regardless of the social or environmental impact. It is this golden rule which scares me the most. Greed-fuelled profit maximisation is the biggest constraint on our development of technology, culture and society in general. Ever since the industrial revolution, our technological development has been stifled by those aiming to cut corners and reduce costs – spending money on researching new technology is, after all, spending money. Furthermore, if an improvement in technology were to lower the price of a commodity, then where is the incentive to improve at all?
Take the car, for example. In order to use your car to travel, it needs fuel and regular servicing. If we are such an advanced race, then why do we have to spend so much money as consumers on having our ‘advanced’ technology repaired and maintained? Now imagine that every car in the world didn’t have a petrol/diesel engine, but instead had an electric motor — we could travel for a fraction of the cost and not be concerned about filling our streets with caustic exhaust fumes. In fact, there are electric cars available that can travel 300 miles on a single, inexpensive charge cycle, with performance equal to that of a similarly priced petrol car and a much simpler design with less to go wrong. So, why aren’t we all driving clean, efficient, reliable electric cars? The reason is simple: there is much less money to be made from efficient, reliable cars — if we aren’t paying almost a pound a litre for a diminishing resource, and spending hundreds of pounds a year to keep our cars running, then how can oil companies and car manufacturers earn their keep? They can’t, so they buy up patents for related technologies and make it near-impossible for development to occur.
So why don’t we hear about this in the news? Consider News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, better known to you and me as owner of The Sun, The Times, 20th Century Fox, Sky and countless other newspapers, magazines, TV stations, etc. This corporation, and others like it, are the people who control exactly what we see and hear in the media. It stands to reason that business would not be booming quite so well, were they telling us the truth and endangering the profits of fellow companies.
I hate this feeling that we are being told bare-faced lies to keep us from realising the truth. Whenever I hear the term ‘terrorism’ in the news, used to describe someone standing up for their livelihood, I start to see the hideous irony behind it all — if terrorism is supposed to be controlling a populous through fear, then you have to wonder who the real terrorists are.
Then again, I could be wrong. I hope so. I’m sorry if this doesn’t make much sense, but I hope I’ve got my point across. I could wax lyrical about the many other aspects of this establishment, but I fear that the more I say, the less I will be taken seriously. And that is a sad truth about the world.