Are Brexiteers Stupid?

Yes. On the whole, it appears so. At least, they were stupid enough to be duped by some very clever people who don’t care about them. Of course, lots of people are stupid, most people, and some of them are Remainers.

I blame the parents…or, rather, previous governments using education (…education, education) as a political football. We allowed education in this country to be degraded and abused for decades. Deliberately or otherwise, we’ve been dumbed down.

Now, I’m not advocating the Classics, Latin and Greek, or a return to the days of rote learning, or of writing out pages of dictated kingly history to regurgitate in exams, as I did as much as I could stomach. I’m talking about education in the basics of how our democracy works, placed in the context of valid recent history, to empower the populace to participate in the democratic process as informed citizens (or even as subjects of Her Maj).

I’m talking about education in the basics of critical thinking, logic and epistemology (how we work out what’s true), which apparently nobody ever learns unless they attend a relevant university course or happen to engage with the subjects online. (If you’re wondering what makes me different, why I can judge this near-ubiquitous lack of common sense, it’s because I took an early interest in philosophy, was lucky enough to get a half-decent education in a private school and, when the Internet came along, I did engage in debates on philosophical issues.)

The elites who go to the really posh schools, from which most of our politicians hail, have mostly honed “debating skills” rather than thinking skills, and so conflate figuring out what’s true with winning an argument. Worse, they often learn – despite the overt mantra – that what matters is winning, not taking part. The same ethos of competition has infected all levels of schooling, which is now no longer “education” in the true sense, nurturing inherent talents and interests for the sake of a more rewarding, interesting life, but training to be a wage slave, a type-cast cog in the wealth-creating project of capitalism. Hence the schooling starts earlier and earlier, and plausible people tell parents this is on the grounds that it helps the children get a good start, but what they’re measuring isn’t necessarily a good quality for the person, just the production-line requirement of exam results, and childhood is restricted to early infanthood, after which it’s on with the daily grind.

Since capitalism is explicitly based on the principle of selfish interest, each wage slave is encouraged merely to find the most profitable outcome in any interaction, whether competing for school places, in the jobs market or when voting for their political representatives. Increasingly over recent generations the basis of politicians’ arguments has shifted from personally-held principles to bargaining points, enticements, bribes, to the point where now the parties fall over themselves to offer the impossible.

Our abject failure in these areas is the perfect foundation of a society in which the political class can do what they like in the interests of their personal gain, at the expense of everyone else, and it has led to the perfect storm of Brexit.

Probably “all of us” colluded in bringing this situation about. The immense wealth and social progress afforded by technological innovation in the Global North produced a reckless optimism. This made us complacent in the area of personal development, because if everything in the world is just set to get better and better systematically, nobody needs to study or care as much about anything. Unfortunately, the growth was based on an unsustainable energy source and the treatment of the natural world as a global midden for an increasing human population, which brought us to a slow and reluctant awakening to the horrorific reality, a world owned by a few greedy multinationals, nature ravaged and undergoing mass extinctions, a planet we’ve raped and shat on perhaps beyond repair.

And even as the general population parrot the new environmental-disaster mantra, having doubted it or denied it routinely until Greta Thunberg got in their stupid faces, they are still too stupid to realise that Brexit was just another symptom of the greed and corruption at the end of capitalism. They’re still making earnest arguments for or against a Brexit that was conjured like a sick rabbit out of some vacuous, titled cynic’s top-hat at a Bullingdon-Club stag do. Brexit meant little more than Tory high japes gone wrong, evidenced by Boris “Tank-topped-Bum-boys” Johnson’s face when the result was announced.

Ask Why

Virtually nobody asks why, least of all of themselves. Virtually nobody has been taught how to think, or that it starts with, “How do I know what I just said?”

So it is that reporters can shove microphones in the faces of people on the streets of Britain, as they do every day now as a micro-poll of the country’s mood as we approach the general election, hear the words, “Well, I just want to get out of Europe,” and fail to ask why, or to notice that the interviewee gives no indication they’re ready to back that opinion with reasons, just a blank stare, like it’s obvious.

Or perhaps they think it’s too late for such futile questions. What are they going to hear, “I don’t want straight bananas foisted on me by an unelected elite”? No, if that actually ever concerned anyone back when Boris was lying about it, it will have long disappeared from their fickle consciouness, subsumed in the sediments under the weight of further lies: how it’ll be easy, like having our cake and eating it, opening us up to better trade deals around the world, still trading easily with Europe. It’s now “oven ready” to “whack in the microwave”, as our fatuous leader repeats endlessly.

Alternatively, the accosted pensioner (as it so often seems to be) might trot out one of those truisms that conceal deep strata of unexamined history: “It’s democracy, isn’t it? The people voted. You can’t go back on that.”

Like what you managed to remember thinking yesterday.

Well, you can, and you should in certain circumstances. If, in a court of law, new evidence comes to light questioning the validity of earlier evidence given, the verdict may be overruled. Judges of appeals cases do not claim, “Well, the jury made their decision last time, despite all the lies the prosecution told, so it would undermine justice to overturn it.”

Ah, fuck it, why bother? Six days from now (Friday 13^th) we’ll probably have a Tory landslide (never as gratifying as it sounds), or at best a hobbled, reluctant and in-fighting coalition government, and further rounds of Brexit negotiations or after-Brexit trade deals will drag on for another decade, while the NHS, social care, housing, employment rights, the railways, and the general physical and social environments fall even further into disrepair.

My own voting choices in this general election are an indication of where politics has got to. The principle of democracy, as some of us were told, is that various political parties express their principled views about how to run the country, and voters choose which vision of the future wins, by some definition of “majority vote”. But, having suddenly invoked another channel for democratic expression – the referendum – on the issue of whether we want to continue with the international level of democracy of the EU, and this now dominating the current traditional form of democracy, the parties are trading seat contests like never before, and have stacked their manifestos accordingly. The Remain-leaning Liberal Democratic, Labour, and Green Parties have witheld candidates in constituencies where one of the others has “more chance” of winning against the Brexit bloc, primarily the Tories, and they and the Brexit Party are similarly dancing to avoid stepping on each other’s toes. Politics has become a game of Twister, where parties reach around each other’s strongholds to try to occupy an adjacent free spot, and voters are left trying to make sense of a tangled heap of arms and legs, while some disconnected, greed-intoxicated heads repeat their meaningless appeals and spit insults at the others.

My deepest principles, to give my own sorry situation as an example, point to my voting Green, but, in order to defeat the Cons (currently sitting), the Greens haven’t forwarded a candidate. Despite recent events, “everyone says” that the Greens are a tiny minority party and thus “a wasted vote”, but if everyone says that about a minority, it never grows. This is how we all repeatedly shoot ourselves in the democratic foot. My next choice would be Labour, since I’m 100% “for the many not the few”, but again, general advice is that where I live Labour hasn’t much chance of getting the seat, whereas the Lib Dems have won here before and are probably a more likely second home for natural Tory voters torn away by being Remainers, rather than “Jeremy Corbyn” (parties are just their leaders now), who is probably seen as a raving Marxist in these, the leafier parts of Yorkshire.

There’s also the serious indictment being repeated everywhere that Corbyn has not just been a bit incompetent in dealing with the “antisemitism crisis” in the Labour Party, but that this is because, deep down, he’s an antisemite himself, along with being a “terrorist-sympathiser”, since he had meetings with Hamas and – all those years ago – the IRA. Now, I’m going to leave detailed examination of all that to another day, but I have to say I suspect it is all the result of two things – Jeremy Corbyn has worked tirelessly to bring all sides, including those designated as terrorists, to the negotiation table, first by holding out his hand and speaking kindly to the underdog, which risks misinterpretation by the establishment, and the latter, to damage his political prospects, have capitalised relentlessly on this (not helped by the fact that he is a little naive in his execution of the process, and has to issue apologies later).

It has to be noted that in the case of the IRA, it was only the eventual talks with the terrorist group that led to the current state of relative peace in Ireland, including close working relationship and friendship between its main protagonists, and eventually, in 2012, to the Queen herself meeting and shaking hands with one of those (prior) terrorist leaders, Martin McGuinness…but you don’t see headlines in the taboids denouncing Lizzie as a terrorist sympathiser! Corbyn, as far as I am aware, is working towards future peaceful solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict, along with some of the wider and globally destructive problems of which it seems symptomatic. I know of nobody who knows him well, including Jews, who feels he’s got an antisemitic bone in his body.

It might also be noted that antisemitism is, as it has always been, vastly more prevalent on the Right than the Left, and is now very probably more evident in the Conservative Party than in Labour.

So I have my thinking cut out for me over the next few days. I can’t vote Green, and I’d like to support Labour, and I don’t trust the Lib Dems to have much backbone or be more than Tory-Lite, but I’m also concerned to reduce the Tories’ majority by another seat if possible, and I’m told only the Lib Dems can do that.

Life’s complicated. Similarly on Brexit: intuitively, I lean to the Remain side and voted to remain, but I take honouring the referendum result seriously (despite it being a sham from start to finish) and I’m concerned about the Leave backlash, possibly even a violent one, were we to stay in. The far-right would go ape. There’s also something to be said for people having to lie in the bed they made, and the last opportunity for learning is by making mistakes, and there’s an argument for genuinely having to up our game to avoid recession, although I doubt it’s going to be quite Johnson’s vision of liberating the nation’s enormous potential.

So maybe I should just vote Tory to bring on Brexageddon that bit quicker. Ultimately, I just don’t know how to judge vastly complex global political questions. Duh. None of us normal people could really have a clue, which is why having a fucking referendum about it was insane. Nobody knows whether five or ten years down the line the EU will fall into economic and political chaos, and any country that has managed to flee the sinking ship will feel lucky, or if that great bloc goes on to roll out a clean new world of peacefully coexisting diverse human cultures and forests full of diverse species, while the UK becomes a wasteland tax haven inhabited by criminals and nuclear-waste-contaminated cockroaches.