Psychotic Group Collusion.

I’ve started several blogs lately only for them to collapse into descriptions of economic misery or political malaise. OK it’s the election and our overdraft but there’s something behind it all, a prime mover behind the direction we’re travelling. It’s to do with ‘normalise’. The CIA called it ‘group think’ and my term for it is ‘Psychotic Group Collusion.’ Our brain is our inner isolated reflector of our environment. It has no absolute references; it simply makes itself up by ongoing conjecture. As a major part of our environment is other people and their conjectures we create between us a zeitgeist, a sea of mutually dependant conjectures. We have the facility to ‘all go mad together’, hence PGC. And more importantly, we have precious little capacity to realise it’s happening. The CIA convinced themselves there were WMDs, and our children are normalising the behaviour they see on television. Our politicians are all normalised to the ambience of parliament and the city is normalised to big bonuses. This normalisation process continues with time in all groups from family to whole societies. It is and has been occurring to our democracy and capitalism just as it did to socialism and communism. The Berlin wall didn’t fall because of a fault in communism but because communism had normalised communism out of communism. The name remained as the process changed. We still have a House of Commons when there are no commoners left in it, only professional politicians. Similarly capitalism, established to bring workers and capital together to utilise both effectively is now skewed towards capital chasing capital growth chasing capital, and excluding the vast majority of the population. Last year a few hedge fund traders in the US earned over $3 billion each, not from industry, or manufacturing or employing anybody, just simply trading. Our current normalised awareness of currency is not as promissory notes to enable fair exchange but purely as numbers that can be diverted into and from bank accounts by those smart enough to invent new ways of doing it. In fact they’re not even that smart, they just belong to a small group normalised to know how to and believe what they’re doing has no wider consequences other than to make them obscenely wealthy. Perhaps the Greeks are right to revolt against this normalised unfairness. But then we who are normalised to it will think they’re being unreasonable, even trying to bring down capitalism itself. But when there is precious little capitalism left in capitalism they may have a point.