Can this last?
A couple of years ago I had some serious surgery. The operation was successful, but somebody left something that was meant to be temporary, to help the operation, was left in place for a couple of weeks too long.
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That seriously delayed my return to normal life, as it made learning to walk again much more difficult. One friend, seeing me confined to bed for an unusually long time, said I ought to sue the surgeon.He seemed surprised when I replied, “but this is Zimbabwe”. If he ever tried to walk across a busy road he would have discovered that Zimbabwe is truly a country without law. We have become a land of thieves. If I sued the surgeon, he could always bribe the judge, but the story doesn’t end there. There is usually someone higher up who can extract a bribe from the judge, or rob him/her in some other way or reward them with titles – political, academic, maybe even ecclesiastical.
There are a lot of “Honourables” and “Doctors” around these days. We have created a whole hierarchy of exploitation. As a wise poet once said: Big fleas have little fleasupon their backs, to bite themand little fleas have lesser fleasand so ad infinitumWe have heard our society likened to a pyramid, with the Big Thief and his family at the top; he needs to give something to extract service from people on the next layer down, his stooges and hangers-on; with him they can say to the rest of us “We rule you”.
Below that are his propagandists, the State media (have we any other?) and usually a few tame “bishops”, “apostles” and “prophets” join in with “we fool you”. (We have a large corps of these.)And so on, down through the armed forces and “security” services (“We shoot you”) to the beggar who sleeps on the street, and some of them succeed in picking the pockets of those in the layer above them. People on every level are extracting something from the ones below, but to get away with that, they need to pay someone in the layer above who gave him/her their position.
If they don’t keep that one happy, they lose their position. You might think that a society so riddled with corruption can’t last long, but look at it closely and you will see that there is some profit in it for nearly everybody. And don’t forget there is a network of big international crooks, whether in Russia or China, London or Geneva, America or Azerbaijan, who help to prop up the top man as long as he doesn’t get big ideas about breaking loose from them. I suppose a system like this might last for a very long time; nearly everybody is exploited, but they are also exploiting somebody else, and in their world everyone can be satisfied with what s/he can get and tolerate losing a bit by theft or bribery.
In an ideal world, it could be stable. The trouble is that it all runs on greed, and so this world is not stable. Once people get greedy, it becomes a habit they can’t break. The whole world is run this way; the “Honourable” wants to be an “Excellency”, the “Doctor” wants to add “Professor” or another doctorate, and every millionaire wants to be a billionaire. In some countries you even find a woman has a title of Mrs Doctor and if she is really ambitious, she may become Doctor Mrs Professor Doctor X.
This devalues both money and titles, so the chase for more builds up speed. Money and “honours” get concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, so the number of people who are unhappy increases. Sooner or later the rulers get so greedy that there is not enough money or enough titles to go round.
They begin to fight among themselves. All we can do is keep out of the way so that we don’t get caught in the inevitable bloodletting. Sit tight and hope we can build something better on the ruins.Of course, our situation is more complicated because the whole world seems to be in that final stage, where money and honours are not enough; now people seem to think they can demand a Nobel Peace Prize for warmongering or the right to dictate where the matches of the football World Cup are to be held.
Some aren’t satisfied with owning half this world’s wealth, they want to own the moon and Mars as well. Maybe that increases the opportunity for us; our Big Thief can’t expect much help from the bigger thieves, who are too busy trying to pull each other down.
