Labour's post-conference pitiable policy announcements have depressed me.
What will it take to break the accursed connection between keeping people expectantly dependent, one way or the other, and political power-grab?
I deplore the contemporary 'victimhood' society but hell, we are all most certainly victims of one particular group. Politicians. Our franchise makes us victims of their boring bribery. Yes, they aren't even imaginative in their cajolery any more. The bribes are recycled and renamed; bribes that are enabled by forced wealth redistribution which all must submit to or face the legal might of the state.
But here is the very worst aspect of this despicable process.
The politicians turn people against people. Groups against groups; individuals against individuals. They do it knowingly and purposefully by manipulating one of the most powerful human emotions - jealousy - and its companion - resentment.
So, conveniently for the politicians, we start hating each other instead of hating them. But why? Especially when the abhorrence results from the leftists stirring loathing of the so-called 'rich'. After all, Labour and Green politicians are well within their own prescribed boundaries for qualifying as 'rich pricks'.
But low income people are too busy glowering about the unfairness of farmers supposedly not paying tax, to recall that politicians don't risk anything or produce anything. Politicians don't have incomes subject to the cruel vagaries of the weather. They aren't subject to the harsh physical realities of farming. Or the see-sawing economy.
Unbelievably politicians are even accorded recognition and kudos by dependent voters for revealing just who isn't pulling their weight. Like the employers. The very people who provide us with jobs and livelihoods. They are the greedy bastards, they say. Not us politicians, consumed by playing you off against each other to ensure our continued comfortable circumstances and regular ego massages.
And don't tell me National didn't bribe voters in the latest budget. Of course they did. They continued the handouts and hampers of various goodies despite their patent lack of affordability.
We are played for fools. We delegate our responsibilities gladly and take perverse pleasure in the battles that result. The battles that the biggest bandits, politicians, orchestrate through the most cynical play on human nature - evocation of the politics of envy.
Are we really so devoid of self-respect, so pathetic, as to keep submitting to this embittering exploitation? Would we let others in positions of relative power blatantly play us off against each other for their own gain? Isn't such an utter milking the hallmark of dysfunctionalism?
My faith in democracy is vanquished. I am squashed beneath the heavy abeyance of individual autonomy. I am surrounded by unseeing fools. And worst of all I don't know how to end this post.
An exhortation to rise up and throw off the shackles of dependence? Bah. All we are seeing around the developed world is revolt against the loss of entitlements.
The only people who will read my post and empathise belong to a minority so small we cannot even obtain a piffling, paltry portion of parliamentary presence. Let alone power. And how distasteful. To need to join the game to have the merest chance of scuppering it.
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