As you read this the conservative leadership election is complete and the winner is announced tomorrow. This is after five weeks that felt like five years with candidates appealing to a small set of rich folk, right-wing cock Wombles and that annoying bloke pontificating in the pub. It’s likely Truss will win, who will do anything the right asks of her or looks like it’ll work towards the nutty economics in the book she helped author.
I don’t discuss politics much. Even on Twitter it sort of comes up occasionally but is in no way a common factor on my timeline. This isn’t because I ignore events it’s just my social media is already three different topics so adding a fourth is madness. I like to do the same with this website and keep it to the thoughtful fandom remit.
But, what the actual hell? I’m a bottle half full person. I tend to have a high locus of control which means I can change my environment and my experience and I expect that of others. I’m fine with change. I believe change can happen. Complexity can be made actionable and problems can be solved. It’s effectively my day job.
Yet I still believe everything is possibly fucked.
Since posting this blog on 4th September 2022 we have had disastrous actions by a bunch of economic terrorists in the UK government on 23rd September 2022. I have not updated this blog with the specifics of that but the GBP has tanked and the Bank of England had to intervene to rescue pensions. Crazy times.
We’re screwed
Let’s face it the reasons we are screwed are mounting up and this is probably not an exhaustive list.
Climate change. It’s done. It’s here. All I can hope for is it doesn’t get bad in a way that impacts me as I don’t have children. How depressing is that? I just want to get through the rest of my life without financial ruin due to climate change. The problem is so much of it is already baked in even if someone delivers a press announcement that all causes for it have stopped while you are reading this blog.
Economic disparity has been accelerating since 2008. Like a rocket reaching for escape velocity. Those whose wealth is based on equity, property and land get richer and those who rely on something as simple as earning a wage have been holding steady if they are lucky. I can’t be the only one who wished they’d shoved loads of money into stocks between 2008 and the pandemic? Apparently, it just made money without any thought or effort you just needed the spare cash. It’s getting to the point we are literally on the edge of entering a dystopian science fiction show where the rich live in cities floating in the skies looking down on the masses.
Economic apocalypse. While the energy crisis can be argued as temporary (is it though?) due to global events and a function of UK markets it’s going to be crippling. The values attached to these energy bills is set to deliver economic hardship on people, possibly death, businesses are going to bust en masse and even public sector service delivery is going to be dragged behind its energy bills. Just consider hospitals? They have to find the money for those energy bills from somewhere? It has the potential to be nothing short of an apocalypse. It’s going to go beyond the concept of a recession.
The NHS collapse is sadly going to happen. Hell, hasn’t it already happened? I honestly believe the pandemic hammered the final nail into the coffin along with the long-term drag of ageing demographics, the lower but sustained demand of COVID and the knock-on impact of the energy crises on health. Whatever the health service is going to look like it ain’t the 100% by taxation model it exists in now. Are these problems solvable? Yes. Is a model in which some people pay small amounts bad? No. No politicians is going to tinker effectively with this totemic religion of the national consciousness though.
The whole Brexit thing. I’m done discussing the incredibly stupid but you just can’t avoid it as we’re left dancing on the head of an impossible political pin so you can’t escape it. I still have an underlying frustration that we were shaping and leading an institution that delivered us a lot of benefits while having everything in place to make sure we were not impacted by anything we didn’t agree to! We had a very unique membership deal. Yet we threw it aside. I’m over the whole rejoin conversation because the basis on which we rejoin will be very different as we gave up the perfect relationship that no one will give us again.
Being done with democracy, when did that become a thing? Yeah, I know, it’s a 2008 thing. I guess it’s all part of being left behind, society falling into tribes, the tribal marketing of the internet and a good old return to dictatorships having some advantages. Apparently, they get stuff done, but I’m not sure that’s panned out recently.
The bloody sewage situation can be argued to be minor compared to what has been mentioned but I am intensely angry about it. I live on the coast. I have access to an award-winning beach and, yes, the award is won over multiple years including 2022, and we’ve had a sewage warning. We don’t have direct sewage outlets but enough crap has been released in the surrounding area we got a warning. Seething.
These things come in cycles. All countries, no matter what the individual national narratives, go through cycles in which they feel better or worse about themselves (sometimes correctly, sometimes not). We are definitely in an all-is-shit moment. We’ve been here before and we came out the other side to one degree or another.
What has happened before will happen again and all that.
The problem is this time I feel the problems are too big, the political leadership too lightweight, our cultures too fractured, too many people finding solace in the past rather than forging solutions for the future and the way we relate to the world is shrinking when it should be open and expanding.
The direction is going in the opposite direction that is needed to solve these existential challenges.
A Star Trek Moment
a time of significant change in a situation; a turning point.
In a vain attempt to bring this back to some semblance of thoughtful fandom I honestly think we are at an inflection point, very close to one or we’ve maybe even passed it in the last decade. The point where we can’t just continue as normal. The point where we can’t just wait it out and then go back to normal.
We ain’t going back to normal.
The almost utopia of Star Trek only came into being for humanity after economic turmoil, a climate crises, nuclear war and us becoming slaves of genetically enhanced despots. We could not find a better future for ourselves and a radically different way of looking at how we relate to each other and the world until we’d almost destroyed ourselves.
It seems we are going to push ourselves to the brink just like our fictional selves. Hell, if we wait long enough maybe some crazy billionaire will give us the genetically enhanced despots? At the moment we’ve just had the delusional incompetent ones we’ve enabled.
It seems idealistic or insane depending on your point of view to suggest a near Star Trek like moment is what’s required, but I think it’s true. The problems are too big. The big one, climate change, definitely needs action across nations in coordination and it can be argued our economic ones are intertwined with that so they do as well.
What constitutes our expectations of life, economics and how we view the world needs to change. The direction of travel is that individual and national action, while important, have less impact in resolving these issues and charting a way forward.
Hence the Star Trek moment.
And, Finally…
I’ve been a perpetual fan of human ingenuity and our ability to forge our ways out of a crisis. Possibly the biggest damage inflicted by the financial crises in 2008 is a sort of long crisis of people slowly realising that this might not happen this time for the factors outlined in this article.
Are we really going to take the long-term, coordinated across nations steps to solve some of these issues? Sadly, I don’t see it happening. Even when decisions have been made at a national level I don’t trust them to be adequately thought through to mitigate harm due to unintended consequences.
Do I go around surrounded by a cloud of doom? No, but this is because I have a marvellous ability to ignore problems I can’t ultimately control.
It’s not because I’m bottle half full about it.