The legacy media in the UK have finally caught up with the population and noticed that things are not going well. It is however too little, too late. To be fair, they are not capable of coordinating sufficient attention to prevent social collapse. The news cycle, the hopeless, mindless craving for novelty that captures eyeballs and sells your attention to advertisers, is relentless. Do you remember Jonathan Munro? He is the smug man who insisted that edits made by Panorama were “normal practice” although they wrongly made it seem as if the US president was inciting violence. A fuss was made, briefly. Tim Davie resigned. But Munro is still there, Deputy Director of News at the BBC. The cycle cycled on.

The ridiculous Covid-19 Inquiry is about to restart its Public Hearings with Module 10, "Carefully Ignoring Vaccine Injuries and the Destructive Futility of Lockdowns." The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) was caught withholding data about excess deaths but argued that releasing the data would lead to the “distress” of bereaved relatives if a link were to be discovered. It's a bold argument, akin to refusing to prosecute Harold Shipman because bereaved relatives might suffer “distress” if they discovered that granny had been murdered.  Leaving Shipman to carry on shipping souls over the River Styx. But no matter, the news cycle washed it away. It is not just young people who suffer from a reduced attention span.

Every day brings a new idiocy, of taxation, of diversity or deindustrialisation. Germany, France and Great Britain are racing to see who will go bust first. To quote Annabel Denham in the Telegraph, the Great Britain is now "a country where 28 million private sector workers are expected to support nine million who are economically inactive, six million public sector staff and 13 million state pensioners." No wonder those who are free to go are leaving.

At the time of writing a great fuss is being made about Peter Mandelson's chicanery. That is strange. There are much worse things going on right now. Perhaps the concern is that Mandelson has been revealed in a completely un-spinnable way as a sleazeball. The majority of politicians are greedy, vain, clever-clever toss-pots like Petey, though mostly less capable.  So they attack him ferociously to keep the focus on him lest we notice that he is not an oddity but an exemplar of the mountebanks who have screwed the country since crude ambition supplanted noblesse oblige. Alternatively it is a limited hangout.

Far more significant than l'affaire Mandy is the fact that most of the people notionally running most Western governments, institutions and NGOs are inept, deluded or simply evil.

If you are paying tax in the UK you might reasonably ask, “What am I getting in return?”

Practitioners with sanity and competence are besieged by bureaucrats in every field.  Some people still get wonderful treatment from the NHS, many more cannot get a GP appointment.  Some superhuman teachers still manage, in spite of the Department for Education, to deliver a meaningful and inspiring education.   Many children suffer banality, indoctrination and indiscipline.

Some police forces still attend crime scenes and arrest criminals.  Many others are a rainbow-painted embarrassment. Some councils collect rubbish, maintain parks and mend potholes.  Most rapaciously exploit ratepayers, close libraries and promote unwanted Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. 47.6% of all social housing in London is occupied by immigrants.

People in positions of bureaucratic and governmental authority have been promoted to their level of incompetence for aptitudes that are entirely the opposite of what is required. They are good with spreadsheets and blue sky thinking and DEI. They are so focussed on ideological goals and abstract measurements that they fail to ensure that basic, practical necessities are delivered for their fellow citizens.

The collapse is universal. Alongside the crumbling infrastructure an equally disastrous social destruction has been underway for a decade or more. Europe is over-run with migrants, and the indigenous population is divided against itself: old versus young, left versus right, state versus people, pragmatists versus ideologues, all fired up and amplified by our millefeuille society. Thanks to the world thin web people can have wafer-thin connections to others all around the world and virtually no connection to those in their immediate vicinity. And even worse than that physical estrangement, few people nowadays socialise online or offline with people with whom they disagree, hence they sustain simplistic and antagonistic views of anyone outside their group.

All over the West there are people who fundamentally misunderstand their own existence and the world about them because their understanding is built on ideologies.  They believe, like Plato, that what is real and really important are not complex, tangible, material situations but abstract ideas which are necessarily simplified and reductionist.

Tragically many young people cleave to ideologies and believe they are climate-change-warriors or transgender heroines. They are doomed to disappointment. Weirdly there is some truth in their claims that, for them, “words are violence” and they feel “unsafe” when faced with people who disagree with them. They are indeed unsafe, because their self is a construct of performance and ideology.  They try every day to embody an abstraction or see in the world unscientific unrealities and are destined, every day, to fail.  They lack an autonomous emotionally authentic felt-sense. Their safety is grounded – or better ungrounded - in an artificial persona, a performance of a person, rather than in acceptance of the welter of emotional, intellectual and experiential stimuli which manifest alongside our feeble will. Their being is threatened by reality every day so it is not surprising they live on the verge of hysteria.

So here we are, a nation divided by delusions, suffering the end of exhausted and exhausting dysfunctional systems. Big Tech won't save us. Much of what it has to offer is becoming less and less popular. Everyone who wants an electric car has already got one. We don't want more annoying touchscreens. We don't want incessant upgrades. We don't need more AI slop. Perhaps we can dream of a glorious fustercluck wherein the HMRC's magnificent Making Tax Digital is hacked and relentlessly and unstoppably refunds to the self-employed the taxes they have paid since 2015. More likely there will be chaos and blackouts and street fights and grotesque injustice.

This year it is going to kick off. And it will be a mess.   Soon something unexpected, foolish or ridiculous will hit us and the remnants of the social contract will be swept away. Maybe we will have to learn how defend ourselves and cook over an open fire again.  

Nevertheless all over the world there are good, sensible, kind people. I hope you know many of them. The last hundred years have shown us, yet again, that Top Down doesn't work. So the decent solutions that emerge from this disaster will be Bottom Up. For myself, I see more and more the need for humility and for courage. I have tremendous admiration for our forebears and I marvel at the beauty, the elegance and the order of the civilisation that we are squandering. We are being assaulted by the delerium of social media, net zero, public relations and political posturing. This is our modern version of the fog of war. If we are fortunate the fog will be blown away and we will be able to find our way out of the wreckage. I hope we are fortunate. I haven't got the answers. But perhaps each one of us has one small, important part to contribute. I wish you all the best of luck.

If you fancy a laugh as you discover the historical origin of a core component of modern madness, you could read "The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it". 

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