Society or bust.

In an interview with that radical right wing publication Woman's Own in 1987 Margaret Thatcher famously made the following pronouncement:

"... you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

This is utter grade one solid gold bollocks.

Society is everything.  It is what keeps us from anarchy.  It is a framework which nurtures us.  A human being can be broken down into its constituent parts, So much hydrogen, so much oxygen, so much iron and so on. Yet if you were to mix all the required ingredients together in big pot you would not get a human being but instead just a nasty and possibly evil smelling mixture which is neither use nor ornament. You could pass an electric current through the mixture, or at least you could get your strange assistant to do it for you while you laugh hysterically as the storm rages overhead and still you would have nothing more than your original mixture, albeit now considerably warmer.

Society is like that.  Individuals make up society, but on their own they can achieve practically nothing. Without the framework of society how precisely is an individual supposed to look after themselves? Okay, Bear Grylls might manage for a while by drinking his own piss and eating earthworms, but if he gets appendicitis or tetanus even he would struggle to survive, in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he would die. And with a population of 67 million the rest of us would pretty soon run out of earthworms.

Society feeds us, it cares for us in hospitals, it educates us, it keeps us safe, it builds and maintains an infrastructure within which we can do more than just exist. We can be creative, we can enjoy the creativity of others, we can stop worrying where our next meal is coming from, we can get drunk.  We have the leisure to laugh together, and share our worries.  And I quite like that, in fact I like it a lot.

Society is what makes us human and not just an amorphous horde of hunter-gatherers with opposable thumbs and murderous intentions. Imagine how much more greasy the greasy pole would be if we were all just out for ourselves.

Even capitalism in its purest and least benevolent form requires society. It requires a hierarchy which provides a ready pool of labour to be exploited by those at the top, a means of distribution and a market in which they can sell their goods and services.  Fortunately pure capitalism is rare these days.  Profit is still the driving force in many capitalist societies, but usually it is tempered by government intervention of some kind, although the driving force is still profit.

Here in the UK we have a society which is buckling under the pressure it is experiencing, not just from the Covid pandemic, but from years of unnecessary austerity imposed for what are purely ideological reasons. The venture capital vultures are circling, waiting to pick over the bones of anything which fails to survive.

What is the answer?

Well to be honest I'm buggered if I know.  My instinct is to remove the profit motive from anything essential. It would be a start. Any excess money made could be reinvested rather than paid to shareholders in the form of dividends.  I don't advocate wholesale nationalisation of the means of production.  Why would that necessarily be better? But the concept that public services and transportation, should be run for profit is both stupid and dangerous.  If private providers find they are not making enough profit they can just stop their provision.  Who picks up the pieces?  The government, in one form or another.  And the wonderful thing is, governments cannot go bust, despite the theory (once again more bollocks from Thatcher) that a national economy is the same as household spending.

I had real hopes that soon we might see some sanity in this matter.  Now I look forward to an underfunded old age.  I hope I die, not before I get old, but before I need to go into a care home.

If you have enjoyed this please share so others can read it. Thanks T xx.