The Tyranny of Cognitive Dissonance

What happens when our beliefs and values are not what we do? Could the answer be responsible for an awful lot of problems in the world?

Parents, teachers and others involved in raising children, almost all want to do their best for the children. A large part of that work is helping children to know how to be a part of their community: to understand the shared values and beliefs and to make those ideals part of who they are. Frighteningly often though, those values and beliefs are not the values and beliefs that shape what people actually do. This sets up a conflict between the self we are and the self  we beieve we should be. How we reconcile such conflicts can have significant costs to ourselves and those around us.

In Medieval Christianity, the idea of salvation of the soul through Jesus Christ was a very powerful cultural concept that enabled people to work together despite living in difficult and precarious conditions. Perhaps inevitably though, this personal aspiration exposed people to manipulation by the Church, to enrich and empower itself. At a time of great political factionalism and weak civil institutions, this was not an unmitigated curse, for the Church contributed to learning and political and cultural stability. However, the Church's control over people was much rooted in setting people up to fail. The standards and sacrifices required to enter the Kingdom of Heaven were set such that most people knew they were failing. While this gave the Church the power over people it wanted, it did so at the cost of oppressing people's sense of self worth. This in turn could result in people giving up and becoming shamed and degraded, or struggling on, but in ways that their creativity, empathy and vitality were suppressed.

The truth of this was evidenced when liberation came. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern France in particular, the Cathar religion took hold. The core belief of the Cathars was that the material world was sinful and that the heavenly soul was locked into a sinful body, destined to be reincarnated until life was lived perfectly. While not sounding like a promising belief system for a healthy state of being, it was in effect liberating. Men and women were nearly as sinful as each other, so mysogyny was much reduced. People could accept both the inevitability of being sinful and aspire to express their better selves. The result was a well ordered, creative and dynamic society.

Certainly in terms of creativity, learning and personal development, the reformation of the sixteenth century was another similar psychological release, out of which came the age of science and the industrial era. However the release of the spirit is best seen as a release from the tyranny of contradiction between belief and how life is lived. Today it is unexceptional for women to excel in all aspects of work, life and culture, but even now many western women constrain their ability to express themselves in their lives in avoidance of the residual conflict between themselves and cultural beliefs about women.

Class and cast systems are yet another belief system that facilitates structural social oppression. Working class white settlers in southern Africa needed racism as a belief system to enable them to take on the same powers  aristocrats had used to oppress their ancestors. Only by believing in some inherent difference can the oppressor justify to himself his brutish and exploitative behaviour to another human.

Conversely, the oppressed is then caught in a bind. To accept the oppressors belief of his inferiority is to become complicit, not just in his own enslavement, but also in the suppression of the creative and empowered self. To resist though is to live in a state of conflict. To inwardly resist and outwardly comply is to live in the oppressive state of contradiction.

That such states of contradiction are normal in all societies is explained by Cognitive Dissonance Theory, which holds that we will adjust our beliefs to avoid the distress of doing one thing and believing another. While this explains how people become complicit, it needs to be recognised that there is a high personal and societal cost in putting large proportions of the population into a state of psychological oppression as a means of gaining social compliance. Conversely, a society becomes much more creative and dynamic when this oppression is not strongly in action and it is therefore a key function of the modern state to understand and work to remove dysfunctional contradictions in society.

This tends to be a slow process, requiring the courage and conciousness of the oppressed. Here organised labour, feminism, gay rights, BME rights and disability rights have common cause in the face of resistance from the oppressor classes. With the emergence of the transnational super rich as the new oligarchy, with their highly rewarded servants in finance, advanced technologies and the new monopolies, whole new populations are being brought into an oppressed state in which expression is stifled. Awareness of the need to prioritise action towards a sustainable prosperity for all is in daily conflict with being powerless to be other than a disempowered worker, a debtor and a consumer. Resistance to this infantilism tends to be distorted to the blaming of some group of 'others' to avoid the consequences of true resistance, which include social ostracism, poverty and vulnerability.

The current drift towards fascism in Israel can be explained within the same paradigm. After years of being the oppressors of the Palestinians, the escape route for Israelis from the cognitive dissonance of holding the belief of themselves as progressive, democratic rationalists that live under the rule of law, has been to adopt the belief that the Palestinians are lesser beings. That non-Israelis do not also believe this is an indication of their inferiority and their opinions can be invalidated. While to some extent Israeli Arabs have had the opportunity to be complicit with their own oppression and to adopt the reconciling beliefs, Palestinians in the occupied territories have to a great extent been forced to live as excluded resisters. The organisation of such a society is extremely difficult as the main roles for compliance with the oppressor is as agents of oppression. The alternative is organised resistance, however futile. The difficulty and futility of more normal economic and social organisation constitutes the most insidious aspect of the oppression as it leaves Palestinians with no safe way to resolve the cognitive dissonance of their situation. In deliberately failing to understand the effects of this oppression, the Israelis, like the whites in southern Africa, create and enforce a difference between themselves and their victims that is then used to justify their sense of superiority and therefore their oppressive actions. What the Israelis fail to see is the irony, as this same process was in play when the Nazis were engaged in the Holocaust.

The importance of understanding the role of belief and the practice of power in social psychology needs to be much better appreciated in our political discourse if we are to have a political economy structured to enable people to fulfil themselves and to contribute to our sustainability. The threats to the survival of modern humanity are substantial and it is only if we can move past this culture of systemic oppression that we can expect to be able address the much more serious issues.

Taking on 'Mafia Capitalism'

Are the Mafia Capitalists a symptom or a cause of crisis?

As much as the left loves to split to a thousand passionate opinions to confuse and confound the unwary, opposition to what David Graeber calls 'Mafia Capitalism' is proving a unifying force. As the gangstas in suits commit one act of blatant robbery after another and pass the bill to the poor, we watch in disbelief and horror as the world of 'respectable' politics and media rallies to their defence. Opposition is ridiculed and marginalised, while every law is passed needed to enable police and security services to 'manage' dissent. Such is the power deployed to constrict momentum towards reform, both mainstream media and academia are largely self-policing.

Academics though may prove to be the 'Mafia Capitalists' greatest threat, although the path of radical social scientists is far from easy in the current climate. Over the last few years, the Australian economist, Steve Keen has had a rough ride following the success of his book 'Debunking Economics'. Professor Keen modelled the idea developed in the 1950's by Hyman Minsky, that lenders become less risk averse the more stable the economy behaves, resulting in risky lending that causes the next crash. The led him to look at the historical relationships between non-government debt relative to the size of the economy. In 2005, three years before the crash, he was able to successfully support the court claim of a family in Australia that had defaulted on their mortgage, that the lenders were taking an unreasonable risk that they, but not the borrowers should have been aware of.


Steve Keen then went on to show that the neo-classical economic models not only could not predict crashes correctly, but were not suited to a predictive understanding of macro-economics as they did not take into account the effects of money, debt and banking. Abandoning the mainstream approach, Steve Keen has gone on to develop a model that draws on basic accounting techniques to look at the effects of debt on the economy. A stunning conclusion has been that if the rate at which total debt increases does not itself steadily increase, then economies go into recession. In other words, the basis for capitalist economics is the exponential increase in debt. This is another way of saying what we all know: capitalism is addicted to growth, despite our being on a finite planet. Steve Keen's observation is though, extremely important in that it offers detail to our understanding.

As we look at the criminal and near criminal activity of the finance industry and some of the largest corporations, together with the complicity of politicians and regulators, we need to consider the context in which they are operating. Is it essentially a highly corrupting environment. That doesn't justify their behaviour, but it probably explains it. That environment is about money and money, where it comes from and what it is used for is something that needs to be understood if there is ever going to be real reform that can enable us to have a better and more sustainable society.

The invention of double entry bookkeeping in fourteenth century Italy enabled one of the most significant evolutions of money: fractional reserve banking. Without fractional reserve banking (in which banks lend against the same reserves multiple times in accordance with their sense of risk, or the regulators sense of risk) there would be no modern industrial capitalism. Fractional reserve banking effectively creates money as debt. If a borrower has an idea that he or she thinks will make more money than the amount needed to repay with interest, fractional reserve banking allows the money for the investment to come into existence for as long as it is needed before repayment is due. When it is repaid, that money ceases to exist. Today in the UK, 97% of all money is created in this way. This means that if all debts were repaid, 97% of all the money in the economy would cease to exist. All that would be left would be the notes and coins in circulation plus the money used to enable banks to settle affairs between themselves.


While fractional reserve banking has, for better or for worse, enabled the development of the modern economy that has brought to the developed world a standard of living beyond the dreams of the richest medieval lords, it may now be the cause of our current 'Mafia Capitalism'. There are quite a few big problems with this sort of capitalism and the more global the economy becomes and the closer we get to resource depletion the bigger these problems become. Until the twentieth century economic growth as measured as GDP struggled to be greater than 1% a year, even in the most developed economies. This reflected the very slow rate in the exponential growth of money available for the purchase of goods and services, a key constraint on growth. However, as mechanisation brought down the labour cost of goods and governments began to use fiscal policy to increase the money available for consumption, GDP growth over 10% became possible.


Fiscal policy is essentially a form of government banking. Governments borrow money, spend it into the economy in ways they think helpful and then recover the money through taxation to pay it back. If it all works out, the benefits of a healthy and well educated population, together with the increased demand created by having more money in the system, will result in a bigger economy.


In the years following the second World War, fiscal policy was used to rebuild the economy. This left private bankers to do very boring lending. Exchange controls and banking regulations restricted their opportunities to take risks or explore new areas of lending. Although the United States had similar controls, the US dollar was being increasingly used all around the world for international trade. This created a high demand for dollars that enabled the US government to sell US Treasury bonds at high prices. This in turn enabled the US government to turn into the mighty military machine we see today. Dollars had to be kept in dollar bank accounts that were subject to US banking regulations that controlled how many times reserves could be leant out. However, in 1955, the Bank of England gave the green light to London banks offering unregulated dollar accounts. This resulted in a vast increase in the amount of US dollars over which the US government had no control. This was to result in the steady erosion of banking regulation and ultimately led to the US abandoning the Dollar's link to gold, the deregulation of consumer credit and by the 1980's, the end of exchange controls and the dominance of private banking in money creation. By the 2000's the regulation and control systems had become as lax as in the 1920's, with some important differences.


The collapse of the British Empire and the end of protected markets for British manufacturing left the UK economy in a precarious position. Competitors in manufacturing had distinct advantages in attracting new investment, not least because the UK government's key role in maintaining money supply prior to Margaret Thatcher made it highly susceptible to political pressure, both from industry and trades unions. This produced the high inflation of the 1970's. Other countries had similar pressures, but were not so burdened with complacent management, ageing infrastructure and an appalling history of industrial relations built on a history of abuse, arrogance and greed. What Thatcher and Reagan did was to transfer most of the responsibility for creating money away from the state, by deregulating finance. This allowed debt to explode and with it the corruption processes in finance to accelerate.


In its search for winners for the UK economy, a few sectors were backed. The Empire's military industrial complex was adapted to meet the global demand for weapons that was fostered during the Cold War. The UK chemicals industry that had also built up to meet the needs of the military, was adapted to meet the demand for pharmaceuticals. The Empire's oil and mineral extraction companies were also backed. However it was the Empire's finance and trading networks that were given special concessions. In the 1980's the City was given the go ahead to develop as a centre for financial piracy. A combination of deregulation and quiet collaboration with the development of the offshore secrecy and tax evasion jurisdictions in the remnants of the Empire, were used to challenge the ability of governments to operate fiscal policies or control on money created as debt. The UK was once again a world player.


As a world player, UK based corporations and banks were encouraged to see themselves more as part of a US lead global economy. In collaboration with the US, international treaties on trade, resource exploitation and intellectual property were forced on other countries. This created a reduced risk environment for banks, as well as massive lending opportunities. Some of the best opportunities were in financing the transfer of manufacturing from the developed countries to the emerging economies in the Far East.


This created a corresponding need to be able to lend to maintain demand in the developed economies. This was achieved by inflating asset values in developing countries and lending against the inflated values. Houses that forty years ago required one full time income to repay a mortgage now required two full times incomes. The effect was to inject vast amounts of money into the economy, a large proportion of which went on purchases of energy and manufactured goods from the Far East. Much of this money in turn was used to purchase assets, including shares, bonds, land and property, creating a prolonged bull market.


This of course was a one off bonanza. The UK now has the highest level of debt relative to income of any country in the world. This is not mostly government debt. The government debt problems are largely due to the UK having done so much to undermine taxation both here and abroad. The unrepayable debts associated with the UK are household and finance sector debts.


The government's response to this problem has been short sighted and unjust. To pump money into the economy has been its biggest concern, so as to keep the system from imploding as it has in Greece. To achieve this it has done everything it can to encourage increased non-government debt. Hence we have had stimulus to the housing market, student loans, and money pumped into the banking sector. The government has also tried to expand the process of privatising tax revenues, through creating private sector contracts to deliver government services and infrastructure, all of which create assets that can be used as security for borrowing. The extent to which government borrowing increases is a measure of the failure of this policy.


The government's other strategy has been to suppress wages. This has been achieved by withdrawing support for people not in employment. Suppressing wages compensates for the lower productivity resulting from decreased investment in efficiency. It also cuts the governments own wages bill. Behind all this is a desperate hope for a miracle. Without the UK suddenly finding some new industries it can become a world leader in, it is in very serious difficulty.


Trying to reform this mess is going to be extremely difficult. As part of a global economy and with the country tied into countless treaty obligations, the freedom for any government to act, while at the same time maintaining the stream of imports upon which we rely looks more than daunting. Among all the world's larger economies, none is more dependent on maintaining growth driven by capitalism and none is worse than the UK at delivering real value.


On the positive side, if it can be seen that way, this means the UK is where reform is most needed. It is not difficult to envisage the progression of the current policy leading towards our becoming dominated by an oppressive, but anonymous, international oligarchy to whom we are perpetually indebted. Indeed many of our politicians appear resigned to this. This though is not the inevitable outcome of our current situation.


Clearly the reason we are in this situation reflects some fundamental systemic problems. The narrative above is intended to promote the concern that it is money itself that is struggling to be fit for purpose. Over the millennia, money and the mathematics with which it is described and expressed has been progressively evolving. Fractional reserve banking in conjunction with fiscal policy by governments constitutes the state of the art in money and has a demonstrated history in stimulating both supply and demand. However in a world where supply and demand is generally out of balance between national economies, are these money tools appropriate?


As production efficiency rises, do we need a different way to pay for things other than using money created as debt, whether that debt is repayable to the bank or as tax to the government? How should we distribute entitlement to the products of industry? To make the challenge even more complicated, how can we make so that what we demand when spending money is closer to what we actually need when living in a finite world with a growing population and a climate at the tipping point of change? How can money be changed so that it values the present and the future more equally, when our tendency is to favour consumption in the present?


Assuming there were answers to the questions about money, what sort of political framework would be required to sustain a reformed economy? Would we need to use political power in a much more detailed way and if so what would be the compromises to personal freedom? Despite our cultural difficulties with working closely with others, would we need to empower some sort of communalism as the best way of balancing individual expression with a more constrained relationship with consumption?


At present our politicians are mostly avoiding everything discussed here. This is not because they are all ignorant, but because in times of danger it is safer to be as close to the centre of the herd, even if it is charging towards a cliff. This is not very comforting, but reflects the reality that our current system will carry on longer if no one acknowledges that it is bankrupt. If we await the systems collapse, the takeover by the international oligarchs and the emergence of fascist politics will be the most likely outcome. The alternative is to try to find some creative answers to some of the questions raised here and to at least have a political faction ready to step forward during the moment of uncertainty in crisis, with some alternative to tyranny and a courageous commitment to the future. That demands that people in reformist politics engage creatively with academics and other thinkers to develop policy. The slogans have their place, but real reform is a deadly serious business with critical outcomes for us all.

Global Governance: Today's Historical Struggle

The idea that our understanding of the world and its history is full of lies, errors and uncertainty is not something we are disposed to consider. We take most of our reality on trust. In practice this rarely lets us down at any single moment. Most of the doubtful reality is not part of our daily lives, but rather is enmeshed in the shared world that frames our lives. Much of it never touches most of us, so if it is untrue we find out after the event and can usually not be that concerned. The world we know of through shared media is frequently a manipulated version of a partial truth. Ownership of the reality frames we share, is what advertising and propaganda are about. Just as this control enables brewer's waste to be sold as Marmite, so it enables corporate capitalism to shape our futures. It enables the leaders of nation states to squander on the military and form alliances to advance their favoured systems to control the world.

So used to are we to thinking of ourselves in terms of our nations that we are blind to the limits of meaning of nation. In the 500 years since navigators sailed around the world we have come to understand the earth as a finite space with millions of interconnected systems describing all the flows and processes that are the living planet. This big world is watched by countless satellites, while other satellites bounce information, instantly linking distant friends and the spokes of global corporations.

As the impact of humans upon the earth, its life and its stability grows greater, so too does the need to understand our shared predicament, not as nations, but as citizens of the world. For this to have meaning though, the world needs some system of government that is appropriate and legitimate. To some extent there is a system of global governance, but much of it is neither apropriate nor legitimate. It consists of a hotch potch of treaties, institutions and trade agreements that are the product of military, financial and industrial coercion as much as of genuine mutual interest. This global government is of course dominated by the United States who are reluctant to compromise with the competing powers emerging in China, India and Russia. Each of these powers is ultimately willing to use the threat of armed force to express their independence and perceived national interest. It is though, the smaller nations that are constantly made vassal to the greater powers and collectively they constitute an ill served interest, frequently vulnerable to poverty and war.

The Irish economist Richard Douthwaite suggested that climate change and the global inequality of nations could be addressed by creating a global trading currency based on carbon emission rights allocated to nations on a per head of population basis. This would effectively be a one off subsidy to the poor, but would have the sustainable benefit of replacing reserve currencies with a fit for purpose trading currency. This is probably the first step towards a more legitimate world government system. Equally there is a need to see how laws and treaties need to change such that each country can best adapt to become more equitable and sustainable, while retaining as much power over their cultural and linguistic diversity as is compatible with our shared interests.

Meanwhile, however, the nations of the earth continue to struggle. The US and its allies in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, aggressively push a US centric model of globalisation that is frequently backed by military might. Around the world, the western cultural, financial, media and academic models define people into situational stereotypes that limit expression and frequently mock culture and religion. The opposition to this arrogant dominance becomes an opposition to global government and global systems.

This leads us to our current position. Amid the struggle to create a global system of governance, we live out our daily lives. Our news of this struggle is not presented for what it is, but as a confusion of dispersed events, each packaged for our understanding. Collectively these packaged stories of our time describe the frame in which we understand our lives and the lives of others. As the struggle deepens and becomes more intense, the stories we are told through which to understand the world and its events become more and more enmeshed in lies and half truths. Rather than this creating a call for better global governance, the effect on most of us is a desire to retreat to the safety of nationalism or religion: shared institutions we believe once worked for us.

The Palestinian Nightmare Is About To Get Worse

Any peace agreement between Israel and Hamas that does not offer the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank a viable future is paving the way for the Palestinian holocaust in the next few years. That such a peace agreement is highly unlikely means saving the Palestinian people from annihilation as a people is now the responsibility of us all.

What has become crystal clear over the last month is that the US, the UK and other Western governments are unprepared to stand in the way of Israeli aggression towards Palestinians in the occupied territories. It would be nice to think that the western governments were shocked to realise the limit of their policy options, but it is probably less naive to assume that in practice the long term future of the Palestinians has already been sacrificed in the interests of strategy.

Israel is thoroughly intertwined with the Western powers, in a way that no other country in the world is, including the United States. Israel and its friends in the Jewish diaspora are highly involved with the politics of Western countries. The Israeli software industry is critical to the functioning of Western economies. Israeli military equipment companies provide critical components used by Western armed and security forces. Israel is a key part of Western military intelligence systems. Israel is a key part of the financial secrecy jurisdiction system and its financial institutions are closely integrated with the Western banking system. Israel has made itself such a useful friend, it is not an enemy any Western country is willing to make and they know it.

In this sense, the failure of Western governments to stand up for the Palestinians in Gaza as Israel commits what can only rightly be described as genocide, is just a reflection of the power reality in play. The easiest thing now is for the politicians in the US, the UK and in Europe to back whatever peace agreement Hamas and Israel are prepared to accept and just hope for a miracle. That miracle though is highly unlikely.

What is far more likely is that Israel will continue to leave the people of Gaza festering in impossible conditions, but will allow sufficient weapons into Gaza to enable some resistance next time they make a major provocation. This then will be the excuse to force the 1.8 million people of the Gaza strip into refugee camps in the Egyptian Sinai, followed by the total demolition of everything in the Gaza strip and its annexation into Israel. Any reaction in the West Bank will then be used as a justification to push the Palestinians there into Jordan, followed by the annexation of the West Bank. As a humanitarian gesture, sufficient Palestinians as Israel needs as cheap labour will be given Israeli citizenship on condition of complete servility.

When this happens, the West, with its relationships with Israel in their current form, will do absolutely nothing. Concurrently the Islamic State or its successor may have been used to redraw the map of the Middle East, opening the way to a carve up Jordan and the creation of Palestine on the East Bank. Lebanon may become part of Assyria with Iraq shrinking to its Shia south and Kurdistan expanding as an independent state. It is hard to guess the strategies being considered.

As tidy and as tempting as such a solution to current problems may be, what this actually contemplates is a humanitarian disaster, as awful and as dangerous as the grand plans of Nazi Germany. Millions of people have already been displaced and face an uncertain future. The future for the occupied territories described above adds millions more to the regional catastrophe.

At stake here is far more than the lives and welfare of the Palestinians; it is the integrity and values of our civilisation. If cynical expediency is our governing principle as we enter into the most dangerous period of human history, we can all expect to be crushed like ants by the tyranny of great power as we face existential constraints. Between us and that horror there is a thin line of mediocre politicians. If we can force them to stand up for Palestine, we might be able to hold back the growing tyranny. Should we lose this battle, it is uncertain where the forces of compassion will ever regroup.



  

In A Very Modern Genocide

In the standard model genocide, the perpetrators have the tendency to behave guilty, like mugging street gangs. They dress up like baddies and make outrageous statements in a kind of language only they can really understand. They know they are breaking the law, but do it anyway. In a sort of way there is something very honest about this. The people who supply them with weapons do it very secretively and try to pretend they are nothing to do with it. Often genocidal governments don't even bother to justify what they are doing, but deny anything is going on, or create some group of out of control bandits who do the killing for them. Israel sees all that as far too old fashioned.

Israel plans its genocide with the help of international law experts. The law says you should warn the civilians that they are in a place where you are going to kill people, so, no problem, warning phone calls and leaflets are provided. The law says self defence is ok, so you make sure the people you are going to kill have some ineffective weapons and are angry and desperate enough that they will try to use them. The law says force must be proportionate. Well this is a matter of opinion, so you need a busy public relations department that keeps telling everyone that any massacres and wholesale terror is proportionate and in self defence.

All spokesmen have to speak the same way as the people around the world that you are trying to convince. Where the business of the mass killing of children can seem indefensible, phrases that help to distract judgement are carefully prepared and repeated. Specifically it is vital to make out that the people you are killing and terrorising are actually the people terrorising and killing your people. This does not need to be true, just keep saying it is.  Here there is a clear advantage if your people look the same as the people around the world that you are trying to convince that you are the nice guys. Nice clean modern houses, streets, clothes, shops and so on will help western people identify with you. By contrast, western people will not identify with women wearing scarves, standing in rubble and crying to the heavens. They may be upset by the dead bodies of brown children, but they wont identify with them as strongly as with some minor damage to a neighbourhood that looks like somewhere people like them might live.

Buying friends in high places in western democracies is cheap and exceptionally good value for money. Western politicians have two big concerns: raising enough money to get voted in and once voted in being able to maintain the energy supplies necessary to keep their economies going. Here Israel and its friends can do the double wammy. The people in democracies don't like paying for politicians and if they do they tend to want something in return, like having their countries run for the benefit of their own people. This is a serious constraint on a politicians career and can seriously undermine access to lucrative directorships and consultancy work later in life. Israel and its network of friends offers the modern western politician a sound deal: "We arrange some nice big donations to party funds for all electable parties; all we ask is that you sell us weapons, oppose any sanctions against us, stick up for us in public, denounce our enemies and if you want to go the whole hog, give us some of your taxpayers money. In return we will sit in the Middle East as your contract security force, ensuring that those bolshy Arabs never turn off the oil."

Despite very effective PR, genocide is messy and calls for a "ceasefire" are inevitable. Its vital not to be seen to be in a hurry to get all your killing done in one go. Remember, direct killing is only one tool in the genocide tool kit. Terror, starvation, economic destruction, disease, withholding medical supplies, destruction of infrastructure and places of worship all help to undermine the viability of the people you are trying to destroy. To avoid being the bad guy, always attend 'peace talks'. Its not necessary to actually comply with ceasefires: normally some act of everyday viciousness will be enough to get some aggression in return and this will excuse a resumption of killing. If further killing seems likely to be counter-productive, back off for a few years, using other genocide strategies and then give it another go. 

And then there is the matter of the weapons supplies. For any mass killing operation, to be seen as the good guys its very important to have very modern killing equipment. This helps claims of "surgical" killing and perhaps more importantly it makes the killing system look like the killing system of a modern western democracy. Now of course some of this killing equipment must be imported. Don't be secretive; its important that suppliers share in the guilt of war crimes.. However, to protect suppliers from any future litigation, don't get upset if weapons are supplied with a disclaimer: "The contents of this box are supplied on the condition that they will not be used for any illegal purpose". This means that if by some outrageous act of international treachery, Israel's friends turn on them and decide that bullshit is bullshit and that Israel is in fact just a bunch of genocidal lunatics, the shit wont stick to them. Well who ever said genocide was easy.

Ukraine: The Real Power Games

As Russia consolidates its hold on Crimea, there are some very odd features to the response to the crisis by the West. On the one hand they are trying to use the established forums to push Russia into an uncomfortable position, while probing for the response to Russia that does not look like climb down and which doesn't cause financial and economic disruption. On the other hand they are proceeding with a takeover of Ukraine, taking advantage of the countries weak position to tie it to the West. However the real objective of the West's moves is probably part of another chess game.

The West is ultimately concerned about the unknown implications of a powerful, rich and well organised China. The US is the sponsor for a number of Pacific rim countries with residual disputes with China. An emergent and confident China will want to resolve these disputes in its favour, but if it does, it will show the West to be weak, opening the way for China to push the West to obtain better access to trade and natural resources. It is this chess board that is dictating the choice of games the West is choosing to play at a more local level. The results for many countries and their people are often awful.

This is no-where more true than for Syria. Syria is sponsored by Russia and the West wants to remove Russian sponsorship for states that oppose it. It has failed to use isolation and sanctions to bring down the governments in Iran and Syria, so now it is seeking to isolate their Russian sponsor. This is not a strong strategy as the Russian government already has a nationalist and despite appearances, isolationist remit. While Russian businessmen have invested around the world, they have done so in ways that have left the West more vulnerable to financial sanctions than Russia. Europe's dependence on Russian energy means that Russia has the freedom to run many isolationist strategies and policies (including on internal issues), without losing its major sources of revenue. Keeping Syria in a state of chaos is protection for the continued dependence of Europe for gas, as it prohibits the building of new gas pipelines through Syria to bring alternative supplies from the Gulf.

Similarly, the Russian support for Iran is enabling Iran to supply China with oil outside of the dollar trading system. This is exactly the kind of practice the US is keen to stop, as it undermines its economic stranglehold on the world's economies. 

So there is a convergence of interest between Europe's concerns regarding energy vulnerability and the US's concerns about growing Chinese power and its ability to clip the wings of US power, both in the far east and its hold on trade and finance. This has led to the US's other strategy: to bind its 'friends' into closer trading agreements that will in effect define the borders of the US Empire. Exploiting regional insecurity, the US is effectively subjugating both Europe and its Pacific allies. Creating insecurity in Eastern Europe will no doubt help doubting European governments consider this all to be necessary.

What is far from clear is if this strategy will actually work. While increasing the depth of US power might mean that China will not risk pushing its case on land disputes, equally it may make no difference. The likelihood that Russia and China will further explore common ground in how to thwart the West is very high. 

The longer term danger in all this is that the world becomes dominated by a number of big power blocks that are held in balance to each other, but are unable to reform themselves internally without becoming vulnerable to the others. It was this sort of structured instability that underlay the other causes of the First World War.

Ordinary people struggle to affect decisions on keeping a local hospital open. Helping our leaders not to plot the way to unavoidable conflict is something that would require a global movement with a clear vision for managing the world's affairs in the interests of us all. Now That's a tall order.

Family and Clan: Refuge from the Failed State

The failure of our civilisation is likely to be when it fails to address the challenges of working as one people to survive climate change, resource depletion and how to live sustainably when there are so many of us. As much as these are very difficult challenges, the failure will ultimately be due to our inability to work together and to avoid the invitations of the powerful to turn us all against each other. To avoid this failure, we need to look again at the role and potential of family and clan.

Family is the basic political unit of our society. It has an economy, a social and cultural purpose and a role in the defence of its members from disease, hunger and violence. Families have networks of related families and family friends, together forming clans, but beyond clan, this intimate political system has no existence.

It is the life that we each lead outside of family that feeds, forms and shapes the other political system. This is civilisation. We go to school, we work for companies or the state and in return companies and the state provide the resilience to disease, hunger and violence, enabling the family structure to change and more flexible roles to develop.

This has been enormously liberating. Men's lives are no longer committed to the physical protection of women, children and the elderly. Freed from the daily fending off of rampaging neighbours, men no longer qualify for a full-time unpaid nurse waiting at home. People who want same sex relationships are no longer weak links in the family. Priests can no longer call on family leaders offering God's protection for their charges. The creative energy of everyone has the potential to contribute to the greater good.

This places an enormous responsibility on the companies and the state. Not only must people believe that companies and the state can be trusted to act for the common good, they do have to act for the common good if the civilisation is not to fail. This is why symptoms of serious corruption and collusion against the common good are such a serious concern. Where family is still strong, the instinct is to use it to protect its members when civilisation is failing. Where family is weak the vulnerability of individuals to the failure of civilisation to protect is a betrayal. Inevitably this is felt most by the poor, many of whom have learned from bitter experience that companies and the state are always willing to betray them if they are failing.

A result of this is that families and clans living on the edge of our civilisation, herded into social housing estates, struggle to reconcile the rules, obligations and values of family and clan with those of a wider society that tenuously supports them, but offers no right to participation.

Faced with the consequences of years of growing corruption and conspiracy to enrich the few, David Cameron's government has in effect started pogroms against this marginalised minority. Companies and the state have failed to manage our country so that it can offer everyone meaningful work, good housing, good education, good health services, secure pensions and a general sense of secure prosperity. Their response has been to decrease wages while forcing people to work. The persecution of the marginalised poor has little to do with saving money, but everything to do with forcing others, who previously had access to better jobs to accept what ever they can get, rather than be unemployed.

For many individual people who would otherwise have been stuck in the world of the marginalised poor, this policy presents them with a more accessible society. Staying on the margins is no longer as viable and the needs and expectations of family and clan can have less hold. For the majority of the marginalised poor though, these are years of real hardship. They are socially vilified for their poverty and for their culture. If they are of immigrant decent they are vilified for that too. Not being one of them is more important than asking why our civilisation is being managed by a complacent, self-interested elite, at a time when the people of the world need leadership with intelligence, courage and compassion, committed to working with the great challenges we face.

It is tempting to think that reform of the state is what is required. Conviction that the election of a better group of people into the high offices of government could ensure the reforms needed, is the rational for participation in democratic processes. There is in fact very little reason to have any such conviction. No political party can be said in any sense to have a power base that is built from the ground up. They are funded by the rich and powerful for the most part. They do not have a role in our communities. They do not have a place in our clans. They do not know our families. It is up to each of us to join them as individuals. They are not of 'us', but we can be of 'them', on their terms, with their rules, their power system. However, even if the political parties did and could reflect our interests and concerns, do they have the power? The answer of course is that they can not in a world where we are one inter-dependent family, all facing climate change, resource depletion and the challenges of being so many in a finite world.

What we can do is to change our culture and our values to recognise both our shared reality and our need to address it together. We have a corrupt system of money, administration and international relations and although we depend on it, it is a threat to us. Our response needs to be to develop alternative ways of working together where the rules and values are ours. We must again look to family and clan, but with an open mind and an open heart, seeking to build a society of clans that reaches across the world in a spirit of mutual support and tolerance.

This means taking back a level of responsibility we have delegated. It is not OK to have friends and relatives who are sexist, racist and homophobic. Its not OK to have friends and relatives who work in corrupt organisations and the organisations that dis-empower us. If we have money and resources we should invest them to benefit family and clan, but only where we know our family and clan are committed to working for our common good. People think of family and clan as being a problem, but it is being closed that is the problem. It is developing meaningful relationships that reach into all areas of our lives that is a problem. It is not respecting the values and ways of others that is a problem. If we think that humans can ever survive our current challenges without dealing with these responsibilities, we have a problem. What we all need is the opportunity to participate, fully and meaningfully and without compromise, in making so that we each belongs to a participatory society committed to the common good. If we can't entrust this to companies and the state, we must work with who we know. 

This though should not be to abandon the kind of political processes we are familiar with, but rather should aim to see the emergence of a political party of the clans. This party should demand of its member clans a commitment to principles and values and in return give true representative power to the elected spokespersons for the clans. Such a party could never go to war without the consent of the clans. The party could never work for others against the interests of the clans. In turn the clans could not conspire against the interests of the families without appeal to the party. All this would of course make daily life highly political, but that is the cost of being in a responsible society. 

We Have a (rather big) Money Problem and Nothing Will Get Sorted Out Until We Sort It

How money works is probably the biggest, least understood, threat to our civilization 

There was never a more powerful myth than money. To build a complex society, ordered through rights and responsibilities, many strategies have been tried, and each has ultimately explored its limitations. In slave based societies, there was wealth created by those with responsibilities, but no rights, but such societies could only develop by the state creating money that could be taxed and for the state to command the responsibilities of the people. This created public works, large armies and temples: the artefacts of the ancient civilisations. As a system for engaging the talents and creativity of people it was limited. As a system for encouraging risky investments by individuals it was limited. Patronage commanded.

The innovation of double entry book keeping created an alternative source of money: private credit. There were now two money systems in operation. Money created by the state, recoverable as taxation, and money created by banks, recoverable as interest and the repayment of debt. In both instances the value of money lies in the demands associated by its creator.

This creates a balance of power between the state and private finance. If the state constrains the creation of private credit, it can become the commander of the economy. If it lifts constraints on credit then the banks and commerce assume greater power. 

When the state controls credit and expands the extent of public works, it can find itself responsible for economic activities unsuited to an organisation whose purpose is its own power. Democratic control of the state can help to bring a public benefit focus to the state's purpose, but equally it can corrupt its purpose as it panders to the electorate's short term desires. This can easily become a process of creating more money than there is an intent to tax, with the result that there is inflation. 

By contrast, when credit controls are lifted, the bank's assume the position of being the primary source of money. They too have a weakness, for the banks are taking a risk with every penny of credit and unlike the state can not enforce their debt collection by threat of incarceration. In consequence they each seek to gain the security of assets of stable value, such as land, property and government debt. Inevitably this leads to these assets being over-valued. Further assets are then invented by manipulation of the law, such as on intellectual property, or by manipulation of trade, such as in financial instruments. This enables the expansion of credit and in consequence, the money supply, but with a corresponding demand for money for the repayment of debt. Inevitably though, the credit created for the purposes of asset inflation is unable to repay the its debt, other than by increasing rent. Since rent is the cost of utilisation of an asset, this means that the yields on inflated asset prices, become in effect a tax by the banks on the productive economy. In combination, the impact of these consequences of uncontrolled credit are highly distorting on the behaviour of both the economy and society. 

As a greater proportion of money becomes associated with inflated asset prices, the potential for further increases in the money supply as credit becomes limited. The resulting decrease in the rate of increase of credit is of itself a cause for deflation. The state can not use interest rates to control credit, because credit is controlled by the lack of assets that can offer a sufficient return to be regarded as security. 

This puts the state into a bind. If the state increases interest rates to increase the return on savings and to encourage the utilization of assets, the resulting asset deflation would put the banks into default. This would give the state no alternative, but to create money to acquire the deflated assets and make them available for productive use. In the process it would destroy the countries financial infrastructure and would have to take responsibility for its reconstruction. 

If the state were to create money to replace the decreased liquidity arising from the decrease in the rate of increase of credit, it would then need to create a corresponding increase in taxation if it were to avoid inflation. However in an economy operating as part of a global free trade system with capital mobility this is not an option. There would be downward trading on the currency, resulting in a rise in the cost of imports, including energy. This in turn would result in a contraction of the economy, including a decreased ability to repay existing debts to the banks and a collapse in asset values.

The states only other direction for action is to put its own existing capacity to create money and demand tax for the provision of public works and services forward as an asset for further private credit creation. This is what privatisation is in effect. The government creates a monopoly as a contract to deliver a service to be paid for by money raised as taxation. This can then be used as security for further credit creation. In this way a wide range of services are transferred to the private sector, with the general benefit of pulling the economy away from deflation.

This however is just feeding the monster. Just as pushing house prices up to the lowest viable yield ratio is a one off action, so is the transfer of public services to the private sector. After that economic growth requires rent income from other sources. This could be from exports, or from theft. 

Theft in this sense goes far beyond the legal meaning of the word. It means taking from some population, their accustomed rights either at home or abroad,. In the UK this has meant an attack on the accustomed rights of the poor and the disabled to benefits and public services. It has meant denying to immigrants the rights normally accorded to everyone. It has meant sending soldiers to fight the American imperial wars to force weaker countries to surrender their resources. It has meant surrendering our sovereignty to trade agreements that steal our right to decide the values by which we shall live. The humiliation of these thefts is increased by the bonuses the bankers pay themselves and the wage rises our politicians vote themselves. 

This though is a doomed game. Theft of this sort breeds discord and rebellion. It causes people to turn on each other, breaking the compact that delivers a peaceful society. It destroys the culture of the weak, leaving them without hope or a sense of belong. It throws the educated into confusions of cognitive dissonance that can leave them vulnerable to tyrants. Above all though it is unsustainable. 

The value of money can not be vested in either taxation or debt repayments in a global society that needs to work towards a global social equity and environmental sustainability. Money given value by taxation will create the tyranny of the state and if the state produces excess money there will be inflation. Money created by private finance as debt, creates the tyranny of the corporations and if there is too much credit causes deflation. Nor is there a balance to be had between the two, when taxation is a function of nation states and credit is global. 

The late economist Richard Douthwaite proposed that there should be a global currency linked to the demand for fossil fuels, with the pollution rights allocated across the world per head of population to each nation. The demand for the currency would distribute wealth to the least energy consuming, with the depressive effects of limited supply falling on the demand for fossil energy. This would both destroy the competitive advantages of maintaining a trading currency (for which easily traded debt instruments are required) and enable individual nation states to develop currencies for internal purposes. 

Much more thought is needed on the question of currency reform, but we can see at the moment a terrible contradiction in our current arrangements. Our generally accepted ideas about the aims and values of a modern society call for greater power for individuals and communities. This is at odds with a state of ever growing power and at odds with the ever growing power of corporations and finance institutions. Even more it is at odds with a combined system that is unable to address the larger social and environmental issues that all of us on earth are facing.

In a complex society we use money to describe our rights and responsibilities. Either we must be creative in the ways we develop money to reflect what these rights and responsibilities need to mean, or we need to create an alternative to money. Sadly time is probably not on our side, so for all the failings of money it makes more sense to focus on the evolution of money than on inventing something else. What, however, we can not afford to do is to fail to understand how our political, social, cultural and economic dynamics are being shaped for both good and bad by the money system we are using. Every day this issue is being neglected is a day when the poor and the weak suffer and a day less to get our management of our affairs on a sane footing.