“It’s always our leaders who want to fight, never the people.”
I'm toilet trained and don't need the potty anymore
As I’m writing this parts of the UK are being hit by gale-force winds. The government spokesman came on the radio to tell everyone to stay indoors. Please note his use of the word ‘tell’.
As I write this the new US leader is upsetting everyone in Davos, when I say everyone I mean our political and business leaders.
Faced with an epidemic of child abuse our European leaders want the Tech bros to scan social media users, their private chats, and encrypted messages. They then want all this data passed onto the Police, the so-called CSAM regulation proposal. The Europol stance is that this would be a great thing and should be extended to surveilling for all types of crime. “Because even an innocent image might contain information that could at some point be useful to law enforcement”. Throw all this data into an AI system and away we go, and away goes our personal data, to be analysed and used to ‘fight crime’. Link this to the 500bn dollar Trumpian AI project and we can see that it’s going to go far beyond anything Orwell imagined. It is, of course, another example of treating the symptom and not the cause. It is, of course, our leaders finding new ways to control us and maintain their power-over.
Around the world, various leaders have convinced small, medium, and large groups to engage in conflicts. 233,000 people are estimated to have been killed in conflicts in 2024, an increase of around 25 percent compared to 2023 and double the number killed in 2019. This is significantly less than the approximately 1.19 million people killed in road accidents each year but it is still an obscenity.
Warlords, elected (fraudulent or fairly) leaders, and power-seekers, all behaving like schoolyard bullies but there are no teachers to intervene. Here comes the bully with their hench-people, they push some people around to assert their dominance, they exclude them, they steal their stuff. Same story, different scale in the adult world.
Long-running conflicts, such as that between Israel and Palestine, are inflamed by the political process itself as politicians adopt tough 'hawkish' policies to get themselves re-elected, according to a new study.
Most media, newspapers, magazines, etc, even ones that present themselves as being liberal promote the idea that the natural state for people is for them to be led. They are currently fixated on Trump. Simon Tisdall, a senior journalist wrote an article recently entitled “Donald Trump will huff and he’ll puff, but if Europe’s leaders rise to its defence, their house will stand”. Another dribbling, thoughtless, apology for leaders. Another article pretending that these leaders are effective, cost-effective and useful.
The journalists of these same media will also use a lazy and misleading journalese. They will say, for example, that Russia has invaded the Ukraine. In fact it was the leader and his henchmen who decided to do it. As in the title, which is a quote from a Palestinian commenting on the war in Syria, leaders take us to war.
At some point parents/carers stop being the primary carers and protectors of their children. Children grow up to be adults and the general idea is that at some point they stop being suckled. They then stop needing their nappies changing, eventually they take their trainer wheels off. At some point they start to take on responsibility for their lives, earn their own living and pay for their crimes. In fact we simply exchange one breast for another, one ‘protector’ for the next. We continue to accept being told what to do. We see it as being normal that there are leaders and their agents (the police etc) who boss us around and use their agents to enforce their rules. Why? When a lot of people don’t agree with a policy or direction they can do little except await the next elections, and hope they will be free and fair, or go and protest. The freedom to do the latter is becoming more and more constrained even in the most liberal democracies. Protesting is rarely effective.
Leaders need to enhance their social status. Leaders wish to leave a historic trace. Leaders act to accumulate power-over. Simon Tisdall, in his article, says ‘How Europe emerges from the crisis year of 2025 will ultimately depend on the quality and unity of its political leadership’. He mentions Ursula der Leyden as one of the leaders who could sort stuff out. She is an unelected leader who seeks to accumulate more power-over to the role of European Commission President. Donald Trump was elected, we can criticise the process and the impact of certain billionaires but the election has been generally recognised as ‘free and fair’. This is the opposite of how Von der Leyen became president. No universal suffrage, no vox populi, just an in-house secret vote away from the public eye and voting booths.
Anyone who stands up and asks why we need leaders is immediately branded an anarchist. This goes hand in hand with the whole create factions, identify scapegoats, divide and rule paradigm that we have accepted for too long.
Faced with economic crises leaders around the world are putting the economy first and the environment on a back-burner. Environmental legislation is being watered down or abandoned. These leaders are joyfully raising the flag of economic growth, drill, drill, grow, grow. Sod the environment, the tech bros will find some techno fix that’ll also make lots of money for the elite. It’ll all be fine, they say, most of the major shit is going to land on the heads of the younger generations. We can leave it to them to sort it out, we can concentrate on getting more power and more wealth.
Leaders infantilise everyone else, they arrive with their promises, we give over our power and autonomy and hope for the best. So far the best has been successive wars, worsening environmental crises, accumulation of wealth by a minority and a waste of human potential.
Monocultures are virtually unknown in nature. Most sophisticated food farming systems seek to avoid creating them. Yet we accept monocultural political systems as being inevitable. The idea that each community should be able to decide how they want their local area governed is anathema. Yet local communities are diverse and political systems should reflect this. It may be that one community prefers to have a ‘strong’ leader, another may decide they want a queen or king, yet another may wish for a more participatory democracy. Surely each community should be able to decide for themselves? After all the local people know much more about local conditions than the far away leaders of today?
It’s time for us to climb out of the pram and refuse to be pushed around by some ersatz parental figure. It’s time for each community to take back power and responsibility. It’s time that we start thinking for ourselves. It’s time to start refusing to bend our knees to the two forms of bullying, been beaten until we agree or/and being argued into submission.