(Why Brexit is) the Perfect Catastrophe - Eudaimonia and Co - 0 views
-
that’s what Brexit is really all about: empire’s ghost, the need to dominate and control, the inability to be a true equal in this world, the desperate dream of supremacy
-
despite the fact that the majority of them would now cancel Brexit in a second referendum, nobody much seems to understand the urgency of scale of the problem at issue here. There’s just a sense of weary frustration. But if your country was going to run short of food and medicine in approximately two months — wouldn’t you want to, well, stop it? So why do both sides in British politics seem not to care?
-
About half of Britain’s medicine comes from the EU. Half of its medicine. Like food, medicine is perishable. Like food, it must be transported with care. But now even the most minimal checks will disrupt the process — even under a soft Brexit. Wham! A nation goes short of medicine. How badly so? Well, consider for a moment that Britain imports all its insulin. What happens when even 20% of that insulin spoils? 30%? 50%? Where will it come from, exactly? Who will pay for it?
- ...13 more annotations...
-
What do you think life will be like when the interest rate is five percent higher? Ten? You will be wiped out. It won’t take years. It will just take months.It will happen with stunning, vicious, disbelieving speed. People become homeless. And jobless. And broke. And hungry. And sick. Is this sounding catastrophic enough to you yet? Do you think I’m kidding around? Can you pick any holes in the logic above? Go ahead and try. Don’t you think I would already know? This is the real deal, my friends, bona fide self-inflicted catastrophe, without parallel in modern history
-
shortages have devastating second and third order effects, like stagflation, depression, and collapse
-
People, now having to focus on bitter self-preservation, do something paradoxical and foolish — they swing harder and harder to the right. Think Weimar Germany becoming Nazi Germany. Am I saying Britain’s going to go full fascist? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. I am saying that where the economic effect of even a soft Brexit will be economic catastrophe, the political effect of the economic effect will be a vicious circle, a feedback loop of ruin.
-
To undo sudden falls into poverty, a society needs to invest in itself — build hospitals, roads, schools, even just dig ditches. But a society of people focused on self-preservation doesn’t choose that often. It chooses to “tighten its belt” at the precise moment everyone should agree to just shower everyone else with money (it’s imaginary, remember?). In this, the economic effect of Brexit will be devastating, middle class implosion, working class immiseration — but the political effect will be even more lethal: it will produce a loop of austerity.
-
What happens when a society chooses austerity — apart from the fact that it gets even poorer, so it chooses more austerity, so it gets poorer, like America? What are the sociocultural consequences of austerity? Just look at America — the canonical example. A culture of intelligence, grace, wisdom, and truth becomes a loutish, brutish thing. People are turning on one another economically — now they do so culturally. Racism and hate all rise. But so do ignorance, folly, greed, and spite — because people are living much, much harder lives. You can’t get insulin — remember? Who’s fault is it? Maybe it’s that nasty Jew’s fault. Maybe it’s that dirty Muslim’s fault.
-
all the most lethal maladies of the body social — authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, kleptocracy
-
Remember all those shortages of food and medicine? See those American hedge funds, hungry for more profit? It’s a marriage made in hell. Brits will have to import American food, medicine, and so forth. But it’s a rip-off. It comes with broken systems attached to it — deficient healthcare, jobs that aren’t, pay that never rises, savings that are spent desperately buying it, because it costs an exploitatively huge amount in the end
-
Brits will be harvested for more and more profit every year — just like Americans have been, by their banks, corporations, hedge funds, all their institutions. There will be more NHS, no more BBC, no more M&S — there will be HMOs and Fox News and Walmart. There will be engines of exploitation and abuse more vicious than Brits really understand still exist
-
Brexit is the bitter, stubborn, stupid last stand of the colonial empire-builder — the one who imagines, shaking a fist, sneering at this world in which he is no longer on top, that he is still the master his great-grandfather was.
-
That is the dead end of the road Brexit goes nowhere to — one’s own self-colonization. Destroying one’s own society — in the name of power, control, dominance. So one can climb over the jagged, jumbled ruins and cry, “But see! I am still the master! Here is my dominion!!” Never mind it is is just a wasteland now — at least you are in charge of it all again.
-
Only the colonized can tell you what it is like to be colonized. When you are, stupidly, astonishingly, colonizing yourself. How you are. That you are. But it is at that precise moment the fallen colonizer, dreaming desperately of empire, haunted by its ghost, is least likely to know anything but the insatiable need for power and control at all.