We are not to blame (and someone else must pay...)

Don’t you just hear this all the time? We seem to live in a society where the individual is never at fault but everything keeps going wrong and it’s always someone else who is to blame (and who should therefore “pay”).

We Don’t Want No (self-funded) Education..

A few months ago tens of thousands of students marched through London, demanding free education and voicing their fury at the Government’s withdrawal of the education maintenance allowance. Opposition politicians induced in their heavily jowled complexions a hue redolent of deep indignation and lowered normally shrill tones to expound at length upon the terrible long term damage to society of the loss of such academic essentials  as Classical Greek studies etc. As ever, all proportion immediately absented itself from rational debate, although not quite as quickly as cold rationality. Woolly academics knotted their eyebrows and intoned with near mortal seriousness that this was the modern day equivalent of the barbarians sacking Rome. It would not do – the government must recant and reinstate what it had just withdrawn.

The problem with this of course, is that Governments don’t pay for anything. They don’t have any money – its “ours”, so to speak. They are not income generating, just a reasonably inefficient distribution network for the incomes of others.  It squeezes taxes out of those who can pay and then uses the proceeds to run the country. But that doesn’t stop a lot of people seeming to think its sitting on a great hoard of loot, like Smaug, Tolkien’s evil dragon from Middle Earth. There is no loot – Mother Hubbard’s cupboards are bare.

Pensions – we won’t pay!

It’s the same with pensions. We don’t want to pay for the pensions needed to sustain us for the ever extending lengths of life we are busy living. Or, more correctly, we “want someone else to pay”; anyone but us because, you see, it’s not our fault we are living too long and saving too little. Generally speaking, most people appear quite positive about the likely year of their demise gradually receding into the future (see last blog). Given the fury about Pensions though, you could be mistaken for believing quite a lot of folk are rather annoyed about this inconvenient longevity now being foisted so unfairly upon them. “We didn’t plan on living longer – it’s not our fault – somebody else must pay”. Who? Those planning to die sooner, or perhaps our kids and tax payers of the future?

Past generations of governments have also been adept at concealing behind a curtain of lies the ever growing pension liability elephant-in-the-room. It has been a gross dereliction of responsibility. Now that elephant has burst through its rice paper curtain, trumpeting its hunger in the form of a financial black hole of billions of pounds. Now we will all pay to fill that hole, one way of the other.

It’s the Bankers Fault – We Won’t Pay for Their Crisis

This is quite a popular refrain. They should put a tune to it and release as the iTunes free download of the week. It would do very well. Unfortunately it’s not quite as good as it sounds.

Who would deny bankers are a wretched lot and certainly, much of the 2008 banking crisis can be laid at their doors (those that are still open of course). Some of those banks are gone (Lehman’s), some are propped up with public money (RBS) and some are so numbingly deeply in debit that only Central Banks will lend to them (the unhappily named zombie banks of the Eurozone).

But bankers can’t be blamed for individual debt. For far too long too many people have lived unaffordable lifestyles as a personal choice. People are in hock up to the eyes and higher. For instance we have had years of mad house price that fuelled a debt based buying binge on the assumption our properties would just keep getting worth more and more. Our bits of land and lumps of mortar were being accorded values that, with a little semi-sober reflection, were simply crazy. Many are now in the trap of negative equity with debts that they cannot repay as wages stagnate and unemployment soars.

So, when exactly does personal responsibility kick in? Or perhaps that went out with the high street when internet shopping changed the status quo for ever. Virtual shopping, virtual goods, virtual money (and credit has always been just that) and virtual responsibility, or perhaps it was also outsourced to the Far East, and we just never noticed it had gone, like so much else.

So, this is not someone else’s crisis, where we are the angry but innocent victims of the faults and errors of others. We are the guilty too for we have, as individuals and as a society, been:

·         Voting for and believing lying governments with their lying chancellors who told us they had fashioned a form of socialist nirvana that others would fund (that being those self-same nasty Banks again paying the taxes to which our politicians became addicted); that we would be sustained forever by increasing government spending and the sweat on the brows of others in far off lands, whose cheap goods we devoured without thought;

·         As willing participant in this illusionary state, borrowing and living on credit often so far beyond our means to afford that now we risk losing all. We refused to believe these days could ever come, knowing of course that ultimately they would, as they now have.

The whole of the “crisis” is about much more than the Banks.  It’s about a whole way of life that is foundering because it has not kept pace with the new rising East and because, perhaps, at its most basic, it is unwilling and unprepared to confront the future, which will be very different from the comfortable oh so recent past. And, in response, it has sought to build a great, mighty wall of laws, and rights and trade restrictions all cemented together with petty short-term politicking, all so this great fearful outside can be kept at bay. But, like all walls (save, ironically for China’s Great Wall thus far) it is now crumbling and fast.

It is this East, in the form of China, India and others, that has as its values; a work ethic that for the “west” (and the rest for that matter), is intimidatingly unconstrained; levels of education in key areas (science, engineering, technology) that generates hundreds of thousands of super-skilled,  determined and ambitious graduates every year and a competitive advantage that has streaked ruthlessly away from the “35 hour weekers of the west” comfortably shackled in their working time directives and dreams of early and long retirements that someone else must pay for.

Of course the west can respond to this challenge. It still has enormous wealth, knowledge and ability. To do this however, the West must realise that it’s not the rules of the game that have changed, it’s a whole new ball game, and the other kids are setting the pace.

Future Shock

In 1970 futurist Alvin Toffler wrote his famous book of the above title, which was all about what happens to people overwhelmed by technological change which takes place too quickly for them to cope.  For all that, the world of 1970 now seems as technologically remote from 2011 as 1900 must have seemed in 1970 and even Toffler would probably admit it has changed beyond what he could have imagined.

Increasingly so, it seems as if everything is changing at an ever accelerating rate. The “life-long familiars” of our worlds are vanishing fast and the facets and features of our lives are now morphing into ever more sophisticated versions of themselves, evolving and merging as they simultaneously spread their technological reach out ever further, ever faster. For the first time in human history, we are observers of a technological evolution taking place at hyper-speed. We see more change in a period of 24 months than our recent ancestors would have seen in their whole lifetimes.

Where is it all headed?

The faster it moves the more difficult it becomes to predict – what’s obvious of course is that there is no foreseeable destination; it’s the long “now” that races away from us into the haze of the strange decades ahead. Watching it take place, it’s moving too fast to be controlled. Who would deny we are already on the downhill sprint to near invisible yet all powerful computing; the hardware is busy vanishing into ever smaller versions of itself yet each generation is exponentially more power and versatile than its “parent”.  Soon it will disappear into the very material of our lives, under our skin, our clothes, and every device we own, out of sight yet immensely powerful and permanently awake. And when all these devices and smart programmes are interconnected and communicating 24-7, will that challenge our very concepts of sentience?

How long now before software is developed that can develop smarter versions of its self and thereby become responsible for its own destiny. Such a concept challenges our very preconceptions of our own position in the natural pecking order of “life”.  In 1970 such a statement would have been ridiculous; the stuff of hard science fiction – now we can speculate about whether it might not already be happening. The fiction in science fiction is under threat.

All around us this technological revolution is taking place. It’s not that is good or bad, such terms in themselves seem naively out of place and quaintly redundant – we are cumbersome, static, biological witnesses to another form of evolution, not on the comfortable, glacial speeds of the more natural kind with which we are so familiar, but one that, in the proverbial blinking of a couple of eyes, continuously contorts and twists itself into ever more fantastic technological “miracles” that our grandparents would never have believed possible.

When is a human more than a human?

We laugh at the endless succession of z-list celebs undergoing hilariously bad makeovers. Like the weirdly plump, plaster of Paris like face of Paul McCartney who in some expressionless, pinched way now looks younger than he did in 30 years ago. Or Madonna, like some phantasmagorical nicotine blond harpy who defies time and the aging process thanks to science (and kabala). How old is she now – 40 or 60 – it’s impossible to tell. Yet these attempts to hold back the process of ageing (for millennia the dream of the powerful) represent the first crude steps in what will in pretty short order develop into real life extension technology. Life spans are already increasing (much to the distress of pension fund managers who watch their liabilities soar in parallel) and medical science will only add more years to that tally. What will lifespans be in 200 years? Would you put money on the likelihood that people might not be living for 200, 300 or even more years? The fact is, the longer you live, the longer you’ll stay alive. As Lemmy once said, the secret to long life is not dying.

Prosthetics are another area of amazing progress, no doubt accelerated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The artificial will soon easily catch up and accelerate effortlessly past the biological with its vastly superior evolutionary speeds; it will only be a short while before the paralympians are able to out-compete the purely meat Olympians – Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter is already leading the way in more ways than one. No wonder other athletes object to competing against him. They can see where this is going. Oscar can upgrade his legs.

But that is only half the story. Even today many people think of prosthetics as limbs, hands, hips and the like. Yet, they are becoming ever more sophisticated, replacing ever more human parts, and enhancing others. Silicon chips will soon start assisting the brain. Research is currently being conducted in the area of retinal microchip implantation. Elsewhere Intel researchers say that by the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer. Instead, users will open documents and surf the web using nothing more than brain waves. You could be forgiven for wondering why it would take until 2020.

What we are seeing is that our brains are merging with our technology. Not long no doubt till, a few chips can be strategically inserted to boost specific intellectual facilities and enhance the senses. The potential is almost too vast to understand - the implications tantamount to the rise of a new and increasingly superior life form on earth.  This may seem like some science fiction story – but it’s not and science is already moving in this direction as this is it this kind of enhancement to our intellectual capacities that will enable us to keep pace with the developments of what was once our own technology but which is now set to take on a new and much more equal relationship with us.

So what does that mean for the concept of a human being? Science has the potential to enable someone smarter than a biological human being. This philosophical Rubicon is almost here, now. Will we have begun to evolve into something else?

A Technological Event Horizon

It’s as if we are all headed to an invisible point beyond which we cannot imagine what will happen. In that sense we have already crossed a sort of technological “event horizon” in that such a momentum is building that it’s already too late to stop or slow down. Not that we should, although its technological and high speed, its evolution and you can as much stop and backtrack it as you can reverse engineer a sausage to get back your favourite pig.

The shock of the future is now and its voltage it starting to soar.

The Titanic Sets Sail

So the great Euro farce rolls on. The question the markets all want answered, not unreasonably, is “How will you repay your debts”?

And the answer is (part 1)…

Germany thinks the answer is by sort of… well… doing away with everybody else’s democracy, telling them they will be punished for over borrowing (when very soon no one will lend them money anyway) and introducing centralised fiscal management, by committee, from the loathed and unpopular Brussels.

Then you get 5 feet of French President to sell it to the quivering victims of 10 years of failed Eurozone experimentation to boost his election prospects. This is not a recipe for success.

The huge, great obvious problems remain, almost blissfully undisturbed by all this frantic squabbling. There is a huge lack of productivity (except for Germany and Scandinavia), too much welfare state (which compounds the productivity problem) and living standards that have accelerated with alarming speed, most notably in those countries least able to afford them.

And therein is the problem. Europe is not a single country and one-size-fits-all economic rules don’t work. The solution being applied is not far short of taking a family of 27 shoe shopping and Dad (Germany) saying “well, I’m size 9 so let’s have 27 pairs of size 9 shoes please” and then wondering why no one can walk straight.

And the answer is (part 2)…

It is now almost a foregone conclusion that the Eurozone will collapse unless it transforms itself from an angry and frightened conglomeration of unequal, indebted countries, into a single “legal” state. That means the countries of Europe will become the “provinces” of a Super state, thus enabling full fiscal and political union and control. That will enable the more stabilising distribution of wealth and the application of rules that all are able to follow. But that will mean Germany has to pay for the rest because it is by far the richest and most competitive area. It’s the model that works in the USA and China, and in the UK, where, broadly speaking, London and the south east share their wealth with the rest of the UK. Whether it can be made to work in Europe is a very different matter.

The Great Escape

Cameron has vacated his cabin on the good ship Eurozone, just in time. Given its direction of travel this was always going to be a forgone conclusion. Despite the choking and gasping in the press (and the puerile tweeting of the leader of the opposition), the main players will have known this was all but inevitable. Being stuck on the pier when the Titanic leaves port is no bad place to be. Britain is going to find the going increasingly tough, but it has made a decision that leaves it responsible for its own fate, which right now, would be a better bet than that of the Eurozone, which is still not facing up to the terrifying scale of its problems, instead choosing to force its respective nations into an ugly, undemocratic and increasingly resentful half embrace.  

Europe’s leaders should remember Abraham Lincoln’s famous words in 1858: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free”.

His words, spoken over 150 years ago, in a way are eerily prescient of the situation in which the Eurozone now finds itself.