A couple of weeks ago, Ken invited me on board the Right Where You Are Sitting Now team to contribute a regular column... but what the hell to write about?
“What do you want to write about?” was Ken’s response.
That’s when I realised that being given total freedom is sometimes more complicated than simply being told what to do - which is probably why the planet is in the appalling state that it is today.
Western civilisation, it seems, has degenerated into a society of numbskulls - its population has become decadent, self-obsessed, submissive and soft. All the signs are there for total collapse and, in my opinion, this collapse is well deserved.
As political institutions throw tax-payers money at failing banks, the population inwardly release a sigh of relief, hoping that this temporary fix won’t affect their mollycoddled lifestyles. We live in a world of finite resources, yet our entire culture is built on the concept of accelerated economic growth. Anyone who hasn’t realised that the present economic model is unsustainable deserves to go under with the rats on the ship. Anyone who hasn’t realised that our politicians are sticking a band aid on a gunshot wound to the head is not paying attention and not thinking rationally. The message is simple: our economy is doomed and you, the tax-payer, will foot the bill.
Personally, I like recessions. Back in the Reaganite/Thatcherite 80s the prospect of having no future produced an abundance of creativity. When people get hungry they get angry and when people get angry they get creative. Back then, youth culture was organised, aggressive and a threat to the establishment. The Poll Tax Riots - and in particular the Battle of Trafalgar on March 31st 1990 - had a direct and positive effect that some will argue resulted in Thatcher’s downfall eight months later.
Today’s youth, however, couldn’t muster enough creative aggression to throw a rotten egg at a Starbucks’ front window. Cheap alcohol, affordable gadgets, celebrity worship, reality TV, and a politically correct education system have all produced possibly the most submissive and ill-informed youth in generations. Those kids who are disillusioned direct all their aggression towards the people in their own community - destroying private property, their own environment, and ultimately themselves. Meanwhile the rest of us act passively, forking out for the damage and going about our day to day business like the gormless drones that we all clearly are.
This has not occurred accidentally, and I would argue that this submissive culture has been deliberately engineered to keep the population docile and manageable. One example of this is the current drinking culture. I myself love drinking beer, but my heavy consumption of it goes hand in hand with social interaction, conversation and cordial debate. Where does one indulge in this? At the local pub, of course, where fewer and fewer punters congregate these days due to the rising prices within such establishments.
Yet alcohol has never been cheaper. Just take a trip to your local supermarket and you’ll see nothing but 2-for-1 deals and bottles of oblivion on sale for less than two quid. The message is clear: they want you drunk so long as you’re not socialising, interacting and processing. The pub might be the final haven for meeting a varied cross-section of your local community, where people come together from all walks of life to learn, share ideas and ultimately test out their own theories over of a few pints of bitter. Many an uprising has been dreamt up and subsequently executed from a local beer hall or boozer. They - the people who control things - know this, so they eliminate the interaction and replace it with distraction.
So what to write about indeed?
Well, given the condition of these troubled times, and the lack of oomph from the population in general, I thought I’d introduce my dear readers to the concept of Armchair Anarchy in the hope that it might awaken one’s inner rebel. As disillusion sets in over the forthcoming winter of discontent, the message I want to get across is that you are not powerless.
Many things can be done and a whole infrastructure still exists to allow you to create utter havoc within the boundaries of the law. Each week I will cover a different issue and hopefully encourage you, the reader, to take the appropriate course of action.
Whilst much of this will be approached from the standpoint of being a UK citizen, I hope that my international readers will be able to adapt my proposals to fit in with their own cultural background and legal system.
So instead of leaving you hanging on until next week for your first lesson in the Academy of Armchair Anarchy, here’s some simple advice to get you started...
Contact Your MP.
After all, that’s what the lazy-assed melon-farmer is there for and why he/she gets paid over sixty grand a year. According to the Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament: “Members have a duty to uphold the law and to act on all occasions in accordance with the public trust placed in them.”
This means that they work for you, clodhopper, and that they are obliged by law to look into any issue you may have with the way the country is run. Right now I’ve got my own MP looking into problems I’ve been having with the folks who issue the Council Tax. So far he has responded quite well, but seems to have sidestepped my query regarding the rumour circulating that my council are one of the 108 local authorities in the UK who have invested tax-payers money in Icesave (the ironically frozen online division of Iceland’s national bank). He doesn’t realise it yet, but he will answer my question, and if the rumours turn out to be true, I will expose my local authority in the media.
Over the last 20 years I have contacted my MP around half a dozen times and on each occasion he/she has acted accordingly and solved my problem to my satisfaction. Sometimes they require a little prompting, but rest assured they’ll jump through hoops of fire if you coax them properly.
The key here is to make them work for a living, and when an institution or authoritative body is investigated by a Member of Parliament, the last thing that institution wants is unnecessary exposure. Local authorities, for example, are notoriously bad for being systems that are run on automation. When a member of the public prompts their MP to investigate that system, someone working within it has to be held accountable. Since no-one will ever want to take personal responsibility for the screw up, you’ll get the result you want pretty much most of the time. (Right Where You Are Sitting Now article).
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