Blind Ambition

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Here's the thing - a Tory leadership contest, an article in The New Statesman, a film about the Everest business called "Sherpa", and the freak weather currently descending on Europe - have coalesced today to further convince me that some form of state consensus and control - preferably global - is essential to rein in the excesses of capitalism and to at least mitigate the damage already wreaked on the planet and the majority of its inhabitants.

One, a speech by a candidate for the Tory leadership, Kemi Badenoch, which offered more hands-off government, couched in the apparently empiricist terms of the engineer she erstwhile is; two, Nicholas Lezard's piece in The New Statesman about the erosion  of society's appreciation of the value of the humanities in tertiary education; and three, the continuing spectacle of rich people 'mountaineering' on Everest. And four: the mad weather.

Kemi Badenoch's pitch was intelligent, considered and her delivery appeared as unscripted as Rishi Sunak's looked completely staged. As a young black woman with a 'proper' career outside of politics, she is extremely credible and attractive as a prospective leadership candidate, and one the opposition would do well to be wary of: but she sits well to the right of the party politically, espousing some views that I would much rather not entertain, even if I were of a conservative persuasion, which I am most definitely not. 

Lezard's article highlights the lamentable trend of equating educational value with monetary reward: the business case for knowledge acquisition. Lastly, the absurd, tragic spectacle of wealthy people paying enormous amounts of money to achieve the 'goal' of 'climbing' the highest mountain in the world. When tragedy inevitably struck one year, the victims were all Sherpas, and the Sherpa community effectively went on strike in deference to their dead on the mountain; one of the 'client-climbers' was heard on camera asking the 'expedition' organizer if he couldn't have words with the militant Sherpa's 'owners'.

Mind-boggling, that in the twenty-first-century, we still have people so assured of their position and privilege, that they can feel it OK to refer to other human beings as someone's 'property'; mind-boggling that a person of colour feels that 'white privilege' is an over-estimated concept; mind-boggling that culture - the very foundation of human endeavour that has informed our core being - is rapidly being sidelined in the Gadarene dash for profit at all costs... 

All of the above are symptoms of a materialist, neoliberal mentality that infests so-called 'civilized' society today. The end product is not only cultural Philistinism, but also the herald of its inevitable outcome: irreversible social and climate damage and our ultimate demise as a species, the majority of the world's population being the innocent victims of the activities of the venal bastards who hold the purse strings.

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