The Funny Side of Doomed.

Teresa May’s plea for MPs to ‘hold their nerve’ as part of our negotiating stance with the EU seems a noble call for heroism, a period of silence with guns at the ready. At the eleventh hour we will achieve victory, you know like what we did in WWll, or some western staring the Sundance Kid. I mean there’s no way they’ll think we’d be actually stupid enough to leap off this cliff into that raging torrent and survive the rapids and the inevitable hundred foot waterfall: and live to tell the tale. Is there? Hard to say. I mean I’m not hearing Barnier rallying the 27 with ‘lets just wait till the last minute to give in.’ He just keeps saying ‘no’, which is rather like the two hundred Mexican soldiers on the landward side of the cliff; and, more importantly, without the problem of a cliff behind them. But it is true they really do want us to stay members of the EU. So basically this has nothing to do with the Mexican soldiers, it’s the ‘I will if you will’ negotiation between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or in this case the two Conservative factions, the Others and the Rich Bastards. Now I think I’m right in saying screen writers will type anything so long as it’s a good story with a romantic interest and a happy ending, so surviving a cliff dive, raging torrents and a hundred foot waterfall with nothing worse than damp clothing is a fictional necessity but a barely credible reality. So either Barnier, not known for his sense of humour, says ‘Only joking you guys’ or it’s time to strap on water wings and a hard hat. Basically Teresa you can’t give the game away and expect to win.

American Binary.

Beginning in the 30’s with Edward Bernays creating the public relations industry America has a long history of triggering our unconscious to the tunes of whatever that industry is paid to produce. That change from satisfying demand to creating it transformed the public’s choices to what ‘we choose you to want.’ The cart overtook the horse. When Betty Crocker cake mixes weren’t selling Bernays suggested adding an egg would make mothers feel good. They took the egg powder out and Betty became a success. When cigarettes weren’t selling to women he branded them as ‘torches of freedom.’ The power to manipulate emotional triggers has given immense power to the advertising industry. That’s well documented but are we now suffering from an unintended consequence? When one formulated a decision prior to this change it had some intellectual depth; it required thinking about. Post this change has triggering our unconscious to be the decision maker made decisions far easier to make? Has advertising, in its unconscious tinkering, created an era of facile decision making based on easy unconscious responses. There are degrees but that’s the direction. So question: Has advertising’s use or abuse of our unconscious created a nation of lazy emotionally led thinkers? It’s an important question. It can only lead to bad decisions, bad outcomes and bitter divisions. Brexit and Trump are merely symptoms of this much deeper malaise. True it wasn’t perfect before, far from it. Germans didn’t want Hitler’s war but he sold it to them. So another question: How can we create a social structure that puts important decisions in the hands of those best capable to make them? It’s painfully obvious our current government, however committed, industrious and intelligent they are, are too deeply disconnected in their political bubble to be our ‘best capable.’