Kenneth Minogue: The Servile Mind

[Liam]

Haven't read it yet (although it's out already in Australia and the UK), but sounds fascinating. Quoting from Amazon:

One of the grim comedies of the twentieth century was that miserable victims of communist regimes would climb walls, swim rivers, dodge bullets, and find other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West at the same time that progressive intellectuals would sentimentally proclaim that these very regimes were the wave of the future.

A similar tragicomedy is playing out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from Third World nations pour into Western states, academics and intellectuals present Western life as a nightmare of inequality and oppression.

In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia's love affair with social perfection and reveals how that idealistic dream is destroying exactly what has made the inventive Western world irresistible to the peoples of foreign lands.

The Servile Mind looks at how Western morality has evolved into mere "politico-moral" posturing about admired ethical causes--from solving world poverty and creating peace to curing climate change. Today, merely making the correct noises and parading one’s essential decency by having the correct opinions has become a substitute for individual moral responsibility.

Instead, Minogue argues, we ask that our governments carry the burden of solving our social--and especially moral--problems for us. The sad and frightening irony is that the more we allow the state to determine our moral order and inner convictions, the more we need to be told how to behave and what to think.

[Heteronym]

This book has been on my list for a few weeks; the topic seemed fascinating. But I'll for the softcover edition.

[Eric]

This book looks interesting. When Milosz analysed the communist toadies and conformists, maybe he didn't realise what sort of people would be running the West a little later on in history.

The tragedy with Europe is that while we have had many stories about how heinous Nazism was, there are still too many naïve people that think that communism is quite OK, and should even be emulated by the righteous. Unlike Nazism, which is dead except for small bands of ill-educated thugs in the former Russian-Soviet Empire (e.g. East Germany and Russia), communism appears to be very much alive, not least in capitalist-style China, which tricks gullible people in the West into thinking it is democratic, while it is in fact exploiting working people to produce products to sell to the West for the profit and glory of the Chinese élite, under conditions that amount to slave labour.

So I shall try to find a copy of this Kylie Minogue book.

[Liam]

this Kylie Minogue book

Won't THAT be the day! However, I do love Kylie. Her latest album Aphrodite was the BOMB.

[Heteronym]

This book looks interesting. When Milosz analysed the communist toadies and conformists, maybe he didn't realise what sort of people would be running the West a little later on in history.

Eric, communists do not run the West, unless you consider American presidents like Bush senior, Clinton, Bush junior and Obama communists, and European leaders like Merkel, Serkozy, Berlusconi, Putin, Blair and Cameron, and even would-be socialists like Zapatero and Hollande communists. Left, right, that classic binary no longer makes sense. There's just the party of money.

[Eric]

To answer Heteronym in #5, thank goodness communists have never managed to get so far as to try and run the West. Look what they did in Russia and China, states that naïve people still think should be ruling the world. Communists in those two countries murdered millions under Stalin and Mao, and unlike Germany, have never apologised in any recognisable way. In both these countries it is business as usual as far as centralised repression is concerned.

If you study the history of both mainland China and the Soviet Union (aka Russia) you will find that both countries, unlike Britain and the USA, have had bouts of sheer paranoia, where quite innocent people have been murdered by the million by slavish robotic people who followed orders - just like with the Nazis.

As you have, Heteronym, criticised the people who actually have to make decisions in the Eurozone, rather than commenting from the sidelines as we are doing, what would your personal solution be to the fact that southern European countries have been cheating the system for years, and are now getting their come-uppance?

Our West European system is self-regulating. It is unlikely to collapse completely, because too much is at stake. But Germany cannot go on doling out subsidies to useless, cheating, and lying countries for ever. One day these countries will either have to pay up or leave the European Union and restore their own floating currencies. Russia survives because it can pump up oil and gas to sell to those Western European countries that have none of their own. Russia thinks it's being clever because in that way it can blackmail Germany. But Russia has virtually no business infrastructure or savings economy. Russia always thinks tactically, never strategically. It is just counting on the fact that supplies of oil and gas will never run out. There is no thrift there, only profligacy, oligarchs and penniless alcoholics. We have a problem with rogue bankers in the capitalist West. Russia has a much deeper structural problem. And China appears to survive on slave labour.

There are, luckily, people who write books and who are not completely servile, sycophant and willing to murder their fellow citizens.

[Liam]

leave the European Union and restore their own floating currencies

Eric, you probably mean the EZ then. A country can be part of the EU and not have the euro as its currency, like Latvia or the UK.

[Heteronym]

As you have, Heteronym, criticised the people who actually have to make decisions in the Eurozone, rather than commenting from the sidelines as we are doing, what would your personal solution be to the fact that southern European countries have been cheating the system for years, and are now getting their come-uppance?

Re-industrialize Europe, for starters, start producing things again; stop buying from China, blacklist any country that manufactures goods using slave and child labour. It's very easy to criticise South European countries for being poor, calling them lazy, but the fact is most of their industry was lost to the Chinese and other Asian countries. Return the dollar to the gold standard. End the euro, or at least allow countries to print their own money, since the euro is the only currency in the world that doesn't do it, impeding countries from devaluing their currency, a solution that in past crises could be used but not anymore - we're all prisoners of the euro now, much to Germany's satisfaction. Regulate the markets and the banks - countries like England, which produce very little, pretty much live on banking services, like parasites; make it harder to make fortunes on speculation and gambling on the ruin of countries. There are many solutions, Eric, but your beloved Western leaders have decided sacrificing their people to poverty and precarious jobs in exchange for corporate payoffs is much easier.

[Heteronym]

Eric, I wasn't being nonchalant; I was being realistic: no country has ever paid its debts in full; countries borrow money, contract debt, then pay bits, contract more debt, borrow some more, et cetera. All countries do this and it's a matter of knowing how to manage the debt. No country produces enough GDP to pay off its debt in one go, otherwise they wouldn't need to borrow money. You speak as if England, Germany and Scandinavia don't have debts either.

It's funny you keep talking about the Southern countries, but last I checked, Ireland was in the North of Europe, and Iceland was the first European country to go bankrupt. What this crisis has exposed is ancient pet grudges between countries and false divisions - North Europe vs. South Europe, and whatnot, instead of addressing the fact that this problem is global, a consequence of the volatile, deregulated, greed-friendly free market system we're prisoners of, and that this can happen to any country. In fact, the threat that it will happen to Germany and England is why Merkel has finally relented in the last European summit, finally accepting that we need to invest money on growth measures and that CEB needs to start printing money and lending it to countries at smaller rates. Merkel isn't stupid - she may play up the North vs. South speech, but she knows Germany is on the brink of collapse, if Europe falls, Germany will be dragged with it, a prospect I'm anxious for.

[Eric]

Indeed, both Iceland and Ireland are part of the mess zone. But neither have had endemic swings between fascism and communism, and are still poor by EU standards. Bad management can be remedied but Iceland only consists of 300,000 people and Ireland about 6.5 millions. Ireland has had plenty of internecine strife but no fascist dictatorship, and Iceland was perhaps at its worst in the 14th century.

On the other hand, Spain has 46 million people, Italy about 59 million, Portugal 10 million and Greece 11 million. Add that up, and when considering bank loans, debts, taxes, etc., you get roughly 125 million people. Ireland had a boom recently, but that was mostly paid for by EU loans. They are again in the doldrums, but with some hope of getting out of the mess. The Icelanders allowed their top people to do some dodgy deals with Russian oligarchs and alienated Britain and the Netherlands by refusing to pay their debts to them. Their economic boom has also come unstuck

What is most important is economic stability and the willingness of the population of any country to actually act rationally over a longer period of time. It is not countries in the northern part of Europe that are in economic trouble. It's along the Mediterranean where the biggest problems appear to lie. I would be rather surprised if Germany is "on the brink of collapse". That is a Weimar scenario. You can only lend and print money if you know that in the long term, payment will be forthcoming.

[Liam]

I must say, I was actually rather surprised with Iceland. I thought Scandinavians were supposed to be thrifty and cautious, and to always look ahead toward the future. Perhaps someone at the top, as Eric suggests, was fixated on profit so much, they forgot to look after the country's actual economy.

Ireland has always been a mess. Winning independence from Britain is their greatest accomplishment to date (that, or St Paddy's little snake holocaust), but look what happened right afterward. Finland also became independent (from Sweden and Russia) and quickly rose to become of the most economically stable states in Europe. So the Irish can't blame it all on past occupation (though it should be taken into consideration).

The Irish immigrants here in the States have adopted the basic Anglo-Saxon mindset of Work = Good, Idleness = Bad; many of them are genuine workaholics and have wealthy houses and such, to show for it. Their cousins across the pond, meanwhile, are nowhere in the same league.

I really want Ireland to fix its problems and become a stable state, I really do; it is probably my favorite country in Europe and maybe even in the world. But looking at the way things are going, I grimly doubt it.

And what the fuck is with Europe's fixation on sports? Greece was falling apart and yet there was more talk about the upcoming match with Germany than about how they were going to feed their kids. Is that a defense mechanism or something? If so, they could have picked a more exciting area of interest to fixate their minds upon. Sports are boring.