Shaw on Money

This quote is from a play by George Bernard Shaw Major Barbara, and it seems to sum up the Tory attitude quite well. It appears that Shaw did not intend this comment ironically and the protagonist of the play wrestles with her conscience of taking money from morally dubious sources for use in charitable work. In the preface he earnestly explains that "they would take money from the devil himself and be only too glad to get it out of his hands and into God's". This passage is also taken from the preface - again via the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations.

"The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilisation, the one sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honour, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness."

This could be read different ways, but I think the way that Tories read this is that poor people are a disgrace to themselves, not to the nation; that poverty is a product of laziness and weakness on the part of the poor. That is to say that the Tories blame the victims of greed and oppression for being poor and downtrodden.

We can see that this underlying view is moderated to some extent by the liberal zeitgeist, but they're like racists that have learned to hold their tongues in public for fear of disapproval, but in private still find foreigners hateful (and their is a lot more of this here than anyone is admitting).

So being ill, and poor, and requiring support, is not a situation which stirs the Tory heart, the way that it moves the Left. The Right would gladly sacrifice the weak few to make the many stronger. They probably would not put it in these terms, but it's what it boils down to. To the right self-sufficiency is the highest good. To have to pay taxes to support the weak is something they oppose in their bones. This is partly why they wish to privatise everything. For private companies and the competition of the markets represent to them the apotheosis of the Darwinian view of evolution - privatisation, be weeding out the weaker members of the species, by preventing them from reproducing, makes the species stronger. Sadly they don't seem to have updated their ideas about evolution since Darwin and the Victorians. They certainly haven't read any Lynn Margulis for instance. Competition always creates more losers than winners, by definition.

The right are also deeply influenced, it sees to me, by Ayn Rand's ideology of rejecting altruism and embracing selfishness. If only, she said, everyone rationally pursued their self interest, the the maximum Good would be produced. And her ideas where enthusiastically taken up by economists who are the only people in the world who still believe in human beings making rational decisions! The trouble is we aren't rational beings, and she certainly wasn't. Given the disastrous results of the "greed is good" view of life, it is surprising that anyone at all believes in it. Markets and competition produce one or only a handful of winners, and a large number of losers. Is this not a summary of the credit crisis we're currently in. No bankers have gone to prison for defrauding us; a few people have been enriched to an astonishing degree and most of us are worse off and will being paying for it the rest of our lives. In fact those greedy people are the weakest members of our species because they endanger the many, they impoverish the many, they degrade our societies and communities. We need to weed them out, and suppress their regrowth. They are parasites, feeding on our blood. We need to think more in terms of balancing cooperation with competition. Cooperation means we all win. Competition only allows for one winner in each race.

Unfortunately the people in government are not vulnerable to poverty, and never have been because they increasingly from backgrounds of hereditary privilege . They have enough money and assets already to never have to work again and still live comfortable. They'll pass that on to their children along with introductions into positions of power. And they are dismantling the system which might counteract that, which might democratise education. Britain's brief flirtation with a meritocracy, which allowed leaders like Margaret Thatcher to rise to power from humble beginnings, seems to be over. Money makes the world go around for these people. Money is the most important thing. And not having it, or relying on handouts is once more coming to be seen as morally reprehensible.

I don't want to advocate violence, but I think the world would be a different place if Cameron could just be viciously mugged and beaten, or have his home burgled. Maybe then he'd have a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability for a moment. The fucker is so thick skinned though that one wonders what it would take for him to empathise with someone dependent on welfare. Let him contract a wasting disease while still in office and have to resign to a life of doctors visits, humiliating tests, drugs with unpleasant side-effects. Let him be incontinent, or unable to feed himself. Let him suffer a mental breakdown. I don't exactly wish this on him, but how else is he really going to understand what effect his policies have on the rest of us?