47094: 6 Watch Out, the Ruling Class Whistle All Your Tunes
But there are those who rule and they know which side their bread is buttered and their business is a different order of dreaminess and depth, one where money is how things are laid out naked in both principle and reality, and police and martyrs were part of that sponged up truth, which was shrewd and the little dastard thought that slipped down into your heart on nights when dreams weren’t being obliging and everything was suffering from being too clear, which made bitterness more a howling recognition than just a reckless pose. And once that truth buckled everything and you started to live through its observation there was no way some of you wouldn't feel parched and sick. And those where fortune had smiled benignly and money had secured them, they looked at the great disturbances and the mystical colours of what was shaking things and recognised it as some kind of threat which would require that somebody suffered, no matter who, nor how, because it would have to be dealt with.
‘ It’s a sickness. The whole stunt. They don’t want to care for anything in the real way. And they don’t love anything really. There’s such a thing as caring too much.’
That was how some even put it even when not immune to occasional fits of doubt. But not many of them weren't so immune. They had a strength that came with truths held in bank balances others didn’t have. Does the eagle understand the vole or iguana? It stands to reason that what they saw as the disturbances flowed out like a rattlers-club, rattling the foundations would be one way of saying it, and in such circumstances there was , as ever, money to be preserved and made, bare-legged, breezy and as fast as could be.
Handbook rule number one : divide and conquer. Generate divisions in the holy alliances and splinter up the opposing hearts, singularise, make unforeseen and contradictory the obvious links. Hide the obviousness of those links, make links nervous and divisions take on auras of courage, daring and antinomian sex. Take sides, build up one against the other, then pull away the rugs, and everything speedily weighted one way then not so much, drilling people into silos and distrustful mobs.
Samples from the handbook: create territorial stigmatisation and blemishes of place talk, as clumsy as you like, and feed in additional stereotypes of race or gender or sexual preference and sideline talk of money so that stigmas follow at speeds hard to follow but amusing and with enough influence to allow earnest talk and infectious demons to game out into several installations, with no reference to economics. Eg:
‘Where did we go wrong, missing the direness of zip/post codes, eg Queens, the Bronx, Milwauki, Chicago, New Orleans, Brixton, Bradford, Millwall, the North, the Irish, The Chinese, Mexicans, Pakistanis, Indians, overweight upshots and incorrigible behaviours – and whyever not, the different respiratory organs of each?’ - coloured sometimes in a gentle way but expressing continually one sense and not any other, such as unemployment, food insecurity and unstable, substandard housing conditions.
So the leaders began to speak their snake-oil wonderment in terms of science and DNA, as if the horror was baked into the genes of states from the very start, which was a very nice thing indeed except for anyone wanting to address the practical and material stakes of the predicament, which was basically poverty across the board and their devil-project of stopping dissent. Their unadulterated plan was thus that dissent politics, in other words, got haemorrhaged out of the talking like it was mere fancies and nothing else, leaving the shimmering Ideal to promote its saints and holy saviours on the hill whilst the money men did their thing, stewing-up the divisive divinities and bug bears of race, patriarchy, homophobia, nativism, transphobia, speciesism sectionalism from their boardroom empires as a replacement for material causes disguised like a wonderful wild animal zoo of Socialism Rebooted. Having made intensities out of these rival generic categories, each hopeless in demanding redistributed goods and bads whilst being in the meantime ruinous of any little hope of building an alliance strong enough to kick over the overclass causing root problems in the first place, problems rooted in, basically, swamps of mass immiseration, anti-welfare, anti-democracy and everything else covered in that thought square. Money stupid, the appropriate advice for anyone in love.
So now, rerouted by great money and its wild native tail which planned to break solidarities and did so, this great shining event fused up the fragmenting thronging so now this new broken reality stood as the truth, and couldn’t even imagine pleading and being refused, which is the way of the world, and so placed itself as a transcendence which, when you reflect a little, is a mighty highhandedness plus mad. There were clouds of truth that hung around that even if you saw them they were treated as no more than soot in snow, or the interior of something that should be closed. Here the dark things, like the middle-of-nowhere disturbance that comes with such thoughts, they didn’t go away but were not easy to say outloud, as if they had swampy rottenness through and through, fuming and dangerous to commence. Nevertheless it seemed to some who were slow to play nice with the feverish times that this mystical socialism, one where you dealt exclusively with agreeable people and did so because it was easier than doing deals with the rest, well, there wasn’t much socialism left in it after all. Just as using history for rhetoric isn’t history, and saying nothing’s changed or everything’s worse when it has and isn’t aren’t forms of diagnosis, and saying culture’s the cause when poverty’s infinitely more so isn’t either, and so on, well, what was being built up was just another entrepreneurial class making a hurried fortune. The new rad politics ignored a landscape of defeats and took each little exception as victory spreading over whatever identity that individual was supposedly representing whilst simultaneously hating and fearing the others whose interests matched.
Read 47094 from the beginning here.
Read the complete novel 'The Ecstatic Silence' here.