Everything is falling apart and there’s nothing anyone can do about it

It’s funny and disconcerting, watching the news; an odd and disorienting amalgam of the partially true and the wholly made up. Someone told me that they now find political ‘news’ impossible to watch because they feel they are being fed lies almost constantly. Politicians have turned plausible deceit into an art form. Malice, bad faith and contempt pulsate from the screen, like the primitive alien messages of conformity in the cult film They Live. The posh voices on the radio ring with complacency. Their message is clear: do not believe the evidence of your own senses – do not concern yourself with the man behind the curtain – this is the version of reality you should believe. And, by and large, we do. It’s hard not to.

The worst of it is knowing what is not being discussed, the things considered unthinkable or unsayable, the different versions of reality we are discouraged from entertaining. These parameters, artificially limiting our political discourse, give the impression that, however bad things are, there is no alternative and anyone who thinks things could be otherwise is just wasting their time. The country would be in as bad a state whoever was in power or whatever we did.

While the redistribution of wealth and resources from the poorest to the richest has been normalized – it has become the main business of our politics and politicians – redistribution from the rich to the poor is considered, at best, fantastical and, at worst, economically and socially harmful. Much of the UK remains convinced that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by Labour spending too much on schools and hospitals. They have happily drunk to the dregs the bad and unnecessary medicine of austerity and stand ready for more. Little wonder the current leader of the opposition feels that the only way he can get into power is by pretending to be almost as awful as the current government.

It is as though we are all complicit in a deliberate effort to conceal the truth from ourselves. Journalists pursue not fact but opinion. They are interested in perception, not truth, though not all perceptions are considered newsworthy. With notable exceptions, they are the keepers of the version – a sacred task, which is also, rather conveniently, an exceedingly lucrative one. But it would be wrong to suggest they do it for the money. Most are unaware of their role, and it is this that makes them so very good at it. They flatter the powerful and help them conceal their true loyalties. It doesn’t trouble them that the politician discussing the future of the National Health Service is funded by private health care. Or that the climate change sceptic is taking millions from the fossil fuel industry. They know what they can ask and what they can’t. They patrol the battlements of acceptable discourse. The main output of their work is therefore not truth, the oxygen of democratic society, but political hopelessness. It’s all so beside the point, so poisonously stupid and reactionary. A maddening circus. But what else can we do? We must take our medicine.

Thus, we veer miserably between sentimentality and self-deception, delusion and denial. For much recent human history, we thought progress inevitable. We know now not only that it is not but that it can also be reversed. The things that drive us turned out not to be benign after all. But by the time we realized, it was too late. We wanted to change. There were a few notable episodes. Windows were smashed. Cars were overturned. People set themselves on fire. But, for the most part, for most people, it was business as usual. And, as the neoliberal reaction took hold, overturning the gains of the first six decades of the twentieth century, we made ourselves comfortable, scrolling down our phones or watching the television. We got used to the loss of our rights and securities, accustomed ourselves to hopelessness. We bear it all – the hospital waiting lists, the broken schools and vanishing opportunity to do anything but work or prepare for work, the endless privatisations, the bottomless corruption, the millions of gallons of raw sewage pumped into our waterways so that greedy plutocrats can get even richer – and we keep smiling, even if, for some of us, it is with gritted teeth.

Yet, for all of this, we continue to talk about the future as though change were possible. Alternative realities are constructed in which the language of cooperation and solidarity has been resurrected and made meaningful. We imagine a world in which people are animated by a sense of the common good rather than by naked profiteering. We know that such a world is necessary. We cannot survive unless we change the way in which we organise our societies and the way in which wealth, power and ownership are distributed. But there is no roadmap for this journey and the truth is we have no idea how to get there. Anyone setting out earnestly on such a journey would quickly find themselves lost, unable to continue (the obstacles are immense and often uncharted) or, most likely, devoured by monsters. The mistake we make is to suppose that because something is necessary it is also possible.

‘The old dear stories of possibility. No-one wanted to hear them anymore, but nothing had replaced them.’ I came across this line while reading Joy Williams’ novel Harrow, which is so good it made me want to read everything else she had written. Her earlier book, The Quick and the Dead, struck me just as powerfully. As in Harrow, the action takes place in a desolate, parched, infected landscape teetering on the brink of disaster or oblivion or just beyond it. There is something satisfyingly real about the dislocation among the shifting cast of characters and the fragmented nature of the storytelling. I’ve lately found narrative coherence unconvincing, and in a way almost dishonest. Williams’ characters – three teenage girls united by the sudden loss of their mothers – are confused, unhappy, frustrated. They experience the harshness and unfairness of the world as violence. And their efforts to redress the wrongs they witness, to make good their losses, are partial, inept, foolish and certain to fail. Yet while the wider world either derides or ignores them, it is falling deeper and deeper into the abyss, staggering unsteadily towards the end of human life on this planet.

All of this, it seems to me and perhaps to Williams too, calls for a radical reappraisal of how we respond to the violence and oppression of everyday life, a kind of supercharged compassion that transcends human concerns and eschews human solutions, at least the ones we are used to. But it isn’t all that clear what this might mean either, though that is in a sense the point because we don’t know any more what works or if anything will. It is all different, all of a sudden and in all sorts of different ways, but we find ourselves too encumbered by our habits and all our other luggage to do anything different. To understand what the universe is saying to us we need not only to relearn its language but to forget our own. We cannot take our bags with us on such a journey. But all of this seems so silly said out loud and perhaps it is. There seems to be no sure way of navigating this confused landscape of poverty and instability and loss. But the only alternative to trying may be to vow, as does one of Williams’ characters, to ‘die slowly, day by meaningless day, unenchanted, bitterly meaninglessly aware’, or, as another refused to, to take part in an unending permanent vigil for everything that has been lost.

I sometimes feel that the only emotion one can authentically have in this moment is anger. Everything else involves a kind of denial of reality. But it may also be the case that in amongst the emotional debris, the fear and hate and dismay, there are other things worth holding on to and building or defending ourselves with. There is this concern and this willingness to care, and these things seem so important, but there is also the sense of the ‘uselessness of caring, the uselessness of love’, which Williams puts into the mouth of one of her more frightening characters. In these torn-up times, it is hard to know what to do, what is enough and what is insufficient. We can all work to deepen our connections with each other and with nature. What is less clear is how we get from there to a world in which this counts and makes a difference. What can hope look like in a world that is so unfair and unequal and so very far along a road that leads to more environmental destruction, more poverty and inequality, more abject despair. What could bring about the system change most humans want to see and the planet desperately needs? One thing is for sure. It will not be led by politicians, and you won’t hear about it on the news.

Words written before a funeral

I was watching an old clip of an interview with an ex-KGB officer, Yuri Bezmenov, who had defected to Canada in 1970. It was from 1984. He was talking about espionage or, rather, the Soviet Union’s relative lack of interest in it. There was little, he said, of the sort of stuff we see in James Bond films – no glamour, no gadgets, no heroes. The KGB was much more interested in its efforts to subvert democracy, in effect to change citizens’ perception of reality so that, as Bezmenov put it, no ‘sensible conclusions’ could be formed. The aim was to ‘demoralise’ the populations of Western countries to the extent that, even if they were confronted with compelling evidence of the truth, that black was black and white was white, they would not accept it. His account drew on his experience of planting pro-Soviet stories in the Western press. But it is safe to say that the programmes of disinformation he describes survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, while their focus has shifted away from Soviet propaganda to a more insidious and cynical attempt to demoralise and divide western populations, undermining democratic institutions, polarising democratic politics, and turning people against each other. Factors other than Russian interference are at play, of course, but it is difficult to consider political events of the past decade and not conclude that Russian attempts at interference have been rather successful.

I get the impression that Bezmenov was somewhat inflating the value of his ‘treasure’, and it is difficult to evaluate the testimony of someone who, until relatively recently, lied for what appears to have been a very good living. But the essential truth in his account is borne out in the post-Soviet political machinations of the KGB and its successor agency, the FSB. According to US officials, Russia has spent more than $300 million (£260 million) on influencing foreign elections since 2014, funding political actors it considered useful, including in Britain. Britain has been one of the key fronts of this not-so-very covert war. Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee’s abridged report on Russian interference in British politics (published in July 2020, with the most ‘sensitive’ material withheld) found that Russian interference in the British economy and politics was ‘commonplace’, with Russia using a range of means – from disinformation and cyber warfare to reputation laundering and the corruption of officials at every level, including the very highest – to influence policy and public opinion.

None of this is really news. We’ve known about it for years. Russian interference reached its apogee under Putin’s former personal adviser Vladislav Surkov. Surkov is credited with creating ‘sovereign democracy’ (an illusion of democracy in which the same man always wins) and what is sometimes termed ‘post-truth politics’, the idea that nothing is true or false; there are only competing versions of the truth and unresolvable disagreement as to what is known and how to know it. In foreign policy, Surkov realised, it was no longer necessary to convince an opponent of your ideological viewpoint (or to make them question their own), as Bezmenov had in his work for the KGB. All you had to do was to create a situation in which nobody knows what is true or what is really happening, in which people are so confused and demoralised by competing versions of the truth that they cannot find a way to counter or challenge it. Meanwhile, things get worse, some people get very rich, and nothing ever really changes.

As I say, none of this is news. Democracy has been under attack for decades. Surkov himself has been open about the aims of Russia’s aggressive foreign policy. We know all we need to know about the malign political influence of Russian oligarchs in the UK, the ‘golden visas’, the enablers in the financial, legal and property sectors, the political donations, the money laundering, and the ‘light-touch’ regulation that made it all possible. Our failure to do anything about this is evidence of the success of Surkov’s approach, I suppose. In fact, far from attempting to resist it, political leaders in the UK have sought to emulate it, creating confusion and demoralisation within the British population while quietly introducing increasingly authoritarian, repressive, anti-democratic policies of their own, diminishing workers’ rights, curbing the right to protest, and threatening still more aggressive anti-union legislation.

Just months after the Intelligence and Security Committee produced its report warning of Russia’s influence on British politics and its efforts to subvert British democracy, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ignored security advice and appointed Evgeny Lebedev, the son of oligarch and former KGB officer Alexander Lebedev, as a life peer, with a say over British laws. It is difficult to know what to make of such a bewilderingly brazen act. What can such an appointment mean, made as it was in the face of advice from the security services and the warnings of the Russian report. It is clearly more than just an unfortunate gaffe (the element of calculation in Johnson’s bumbling ‘Boris’ persona has never been adequately recognised). He did it knowing he would be criticised, that some would cry corruption or point to his own murky links to Kremlin operatives. Yet, none of that stopped him. It’s almost as if the aim was to foster dispute, to dismay certain people and to trigger others, to create conditions so disorientating that no-one really knows what is going on, or why, until it is too late. And, in fact, this is exactly what Johnson likes to do, as he disclosed in a 2006 interview. His ‘brilliant new strategy’, he said, in a rare moment of candour, was ‘to make so many gaffes, that no one knows what to concentrate on… you pepper their positions with so many gaffes that they are confused… and then you steal on quietly and drop your depth charges wherever you want to drop them’.

Meanwhile, donations from connected Russians continue to boost the coffers of the Conservative Party. An elaborate funeral is being prepared for a dead monarch, at huge cost to the taxpayer, at a moment when the country is facing an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis. In the same moment, the new king has inherited vast swathes of land and an unimaginably large fortune from his mother on which he will pay no tax. And the new prime minister of one of the most unequal countries in the world is preparing to announce further tax cuts for the best-off and an energy price freeze that will benefit the richest households twice as much as it will the poorest. It’s all so overt, so obviously, criminally unfair. Yet there seems in practice nothing anyone can do about it. The symptoms of our demoralisation are everywhere to see, notwithstanding the wall-to-wall coverage of the death of the Queen (of all the things to be best in the world at, obsequiousness before power must be among the least admirable). Because we can’t do anything about anything that matters, we become absorbed by things that don’t. Unable to see the future, we retreat into an imagined past of lush village greens and hereditary privilege. We mistake the pantomime of pomp and pageantry for the passing of history. While mourners queue for hours to pay their respects and ‘witness history’, it is quietly taking place elsewhere, in the political decisions and deals with the rich and powerful which will determine in which ways British people’s lives will next be made worse. It is as though nothing matters, nothing at all.

The truth is that, in the UK, we are not so very different to Putin and his oligarchs. In fact, Putin and wannabes such as Johnson want the same things: the ability to do whatever they want and a population so demoralised and confused they cannot find a way to stop him or to make their lives better. The sad truth is that even were the British people presented with a clear and costed means of improving their lives and the prospects of their children, they would not vote for it. As Bezmenov indicated in that interview more than four decades ago, the best way to deal with disinformation, what we now think of as ‘fake news’, is education. Yet, over that same period, successive governments have marginalised education for democracy, active citizenship, and critical thinking. Working people have had to live on a reduced diet of basic skills and training for work – the thin gruel from which we are supposed to piece together our lives and loves, fulfil our potentials, and make sense of the world around us. Education should open doors, not enclose us. It should put in our hands the resources we need to change the world and remake it for the future. But that, increasingly, is the preserve only of the rich and their children. For them, the secrets of history and ‘the classics’, the comforts of philosophy and the joy of new languages and cultures. For the rest of us, a kick up the arse and a leg up onto the hamster wheel. It’s all so obvious, all so deliberate, the outcome of political choices, priorities, and values that we don’t seem to be able to change.

The tragedy of all of this is that we desperately need change. We need to be able to see the world differently and to begin to remake it. Yet, for the most part, we appear stuck, unable to engage with the challenges we face – enormous challenges that threaten the fabric of world as we know it. If we cannot use our politics to make people a bit more thoughtful, a bit more equal and a bit happier, what hope is there for changing the way we live and organise our societies to respond to the climate crisis. Little, I fear. As working people in Britain prepare for an exceptionally harsh winter, which will see many more heads pushed below the poverty line, the Truss government’s first major policy announcements were to lift the ban on fracking and the cap on bankers’ bonuses. Alongside the other crises we face, Britain has a crisis in leadership. We have a generation of amoral leaders, elevated to power by the votes of the (mostly) old and wealthy, who have an unhealthy attachment to the past and little concern for the future. In a world characterised by profound uncertainty and hazard, they have chosen regression and repression, holding desperately onto the past and its familiar ghosts, rather than opening themselves and their society up to change and experiment, to hope.

In a world in which nothing is clear or certain, hanging on to the past may seem the best we can do. But it isn’t and it can’t be, not if we are to go on. More of the same just means things getting worse. We are becoming a closed, introspective society, held together by a hatred of difference and a fear of foreignness. But difference is precisely the medicine we need. It is the only thing that can make us well. The struggle for a liveable, sustainable future for all (and not just the rich) is a struggle against conservatism, against repression and obedience, against politeness and servility. As the world education leaders meet in New York to discuss ‘transforming education’, I hope that education for critical thinking and empowerment will be high on their agenda (it was sadly neglected in the otherwise excellent Marrakech Framework for Action, the outcome document of CONFINTEA VII). We cannot rely on governments to deliver the change we need, that much is clear. It turns out that they did not know better. They never did. They were simply stronger, more persuasive, better at getting what they and their friends want. They belong in the past. Instead, we require people sufficiently open, critical, compassionate, and empowered to be the change we so desperately need. We need new advocates, new activists, new leaders – and we need a new education that can deliver that.