the monolith

In Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the “monolith” is a large black rectangular object that pops up again and again through human history. In the first scene it stands tall among a gang of apes, driving them mad with its presence. And thousands of years later it drives humans, and viewers, a little crazy. It’s an enigma. Purposefully unexplained by the filmmakers; there to provoke debate. It’s also an easy analogy of modern politics, which is constantly affecting us, vital to us, but driving us a little mad like those apes. It is cold and unknowable. An abstract concept, just out of reach, summed up in most of our minds by images of drab men in grey suits stuttering in the glare of news cameras. Everyone in sight is claiming they know exactly what’s going on while, paradoxically, we have never been more in the dark about the inner workings of our governments than we are now.  

I awoke early morning after election night to see if Labour had kept up their early lead into the final results. Seeing the Conservatives still in power wasn’t a nice start to the day. But politics’ remove from reality can be observed in the response to this. I’ve seen everyone from politicians and news sites to Mock the Week panelists give a wink and say they know who really won the election. The answer being Jeremy Corbyn of course. Were these people reading the right polls? Or did they forget to tune in after the start of the night? I understand the sentiment but regardless these people live in a Conservative government – made more insidious now with the addition of the DUP – and saying Corbyn is the real winner is just a way to celebrate a non-win. A way to claim the election for themselves and ignore a reality where they still have more work to do to change the country.

A university lecturer told me that my generation (those damn millennials) has access to more knowledge, due to the internet, than anyone before us but that we are the least political generation he has ever taught. Less likely to protest for our beliefs, even kick up a fuss for them. The lecturer told me that the last few years have been the first time students have arrived at university not knowing the difference between Left wing and Right wing politics. Could it be that the ability we now have to type a few letters, click search and easily access any information, answers to any questions, has made us take this information for granted? The knowledge that it is all out there, meaning someone else knows it, enough to tell ourselves we don’t need to know it? The answers are there but they remain hidden inside the monolith.

A good analogy is the “vegetarian argument”. I’ve seen videos of the cruelty done to animals in meat factories, and even without this the fact of eating an animal when alternatives exist is something I know is horrible. I understand my life is worth no more than these animals. But I love bacon, steak, chicken, pork, all of it. It makes up more of my diet than anything else. So my mind, with very little rebellion from me, will tell me that as long I know and sympathise with the animal’s suffering that that is good enough, and because I know what I’m doing is wrong then I’m not really part of the problem. And wallah! I can continue to eat meat with a clear conscience. Never accepting that my attitude doesn’t matter because animals are suffering regardless.  

Now transfer this to politics: a lot of people hate Capitalism, just don’t know why. It’s cool right now to hate Capitalism and Consumerism. “Down with that Capitalist establishment”. “The man just keeps getting me down”. But this attitude works in Capitalism’s favour. Look at the Occupy Wall Street Movement – if you don’t know, Occupy was a protest movement in which people took to the streets and parks of New York, camping out for a few months in 2011 in protest against the greed and corruption of Capitalism. Their slogan was “We are the 99%” in reference to the bonkers state of wealth distribution in the US. But nothing came of the protest. No policy changes, no enlightened system, no fairer distribution of money. But why? Because it was a hollow protest: the protesters asked for change but had no idea what they wanted to change to. They had no plans or specific ideas. They camped out and hoped the spectacle of what they were doing was enough to jolt a seismic change into happening.

People will continue to throw blind hate at Capitalism without really knowing what it is. They think Capitalism is a system devised by the devil to keep them bored and miserable in a job they don’t like. They turn on the news to images of destruction in Syria or Iraq and think: that’s down to Capitalism. They think every money-based problem in the world is down to Capitalism. In George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell writes that, contrary to some people’s beliefs, humans aren’t just walking stomachs, moving from one meal to the next with a session of sleep and maybe a shag to break these meals up. Hobbies and socialising will only take up so much time, meaning work will take up a large portion of everyone’s life and will make that person useful to humanity. Work is not oppression; it’s a part of every economic system. As is trade. And war and villainous governments are facts of the world, not of a system. Capitalism is surely broken – it’s killing the planet and it’s dividing its people – but, excuse the cliché, blind hatred of Capitalism is to throw the baby out with the bath water.

People want change but when they look at politics they only see the monolith, grand and unknowable, giving nothing away. People who try to educate themselves run into a wall of jargon and over-complicated language. People talk of the differing views of Orthodox-Marxists and Leninist-Communists. Or they claim how a Right-wing, Liberalist Democracy is, through the influence of Neo-liberalism and free-market Capitalism, starting to resemble a totalitarian dictatorship. And this is just the start of politician-speak. Language is used to keep people out of politics. It creates an elite club within a field we are told involves everybody. Language and reality are always deviating in politics. So many governments tell their people they are a democracy, but are they? In the history of America, every elected president has been the candidate who had the most expensive marketing campaign. This is no coincidence: democracy and Capitalism are circles on a Venn diagram that frequently overlap (and clash). Us damn millennials grew up with footage of an illegal war in Iraq as background. Did a democracy decide on this?

In the 1940s George Orwell wrote an essay titled “Politics and the English Language” in which he wrote that most politicians use language to avoid what they are really saying, cloaking their true agendas in rhetoric and wordiness. It is disheartening to see that most politicians haven’t read it. Or maybe they have but they read it not as a negative critique but as a how-to guide.

To be a winning politician you must have the skills of a magician. A Houdini who distracts the audience with the graceful play of cards in your hand while the real trick is happening in your sleeve. Look at the Conservatives in the last reaction: they spent more time posing doubts over Jeremy Corbyn’s skills as a leader, making claims about him being an IRA sympathiser and etc., hoping it would take away focus from their own policies. In an interview, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek said he believes the “green” culture of recycling, categorised bins and stand-by lights is pointless. That these are such small measures that even if they were followed by everyone they would still only act as a small blip of improvement on the health of Mother Earth. Whereas corporations continue to dump pollution and waste, by the hundreds of tons, in locations all over the world. They profit off of the destruction of the land. Just last week one of the greatest Antarctican disasters of all time happened. The green culture deludes people into thinking that everything that could be done to help is being done, and that they are doing their part, while hiding the fact that the system that governs the world’s economy is the real killer of the planet. The magicians have done such a good trick most of the audience think they’ve worked out the magic without even knowing what the trick was. 

A final thought: I was listening to The Beatles’ album Revolver recently and it came to me how political of an album is it. Not in the lyrics – it’s a very personal album lyrically. But the sound, it’s so vibrant and full of rebellion. So personal but so open about it. It was an innovative album at the time, in the lyrics and the sound. Go listen to it now and it’s easy to see why music was such an important part of the 60s hippy culture. The summer of love! The Beatles, The Who, Jimmy Hendrix, Cream, The Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead. Other than some select songs they had few songs between them that were specifically about politics. But the sound was political. It was raw energy bursting from speakers. It was the sound of freedom, love, free speech, peace and connection. No wonder the hippies thought they could change the world. Looking back, the counter-culture of the 1960s was only a dream that didn’t make the transition into reality, but it was a beautiful and educational dream nonetheless. Compared to this, it’s strange to think of how music is never part of the modern political discussion. That is because politicians want to cut politics off from the rest of life. Nothing as pure and invigorating as music can be allowed into the discussion. They need to keep politics as boring as possible; their exclusive club must not extend itself to anyone but the most conformist and well-trained persons. But this is all a delusion. The sound of George Harrison’s guitar will always have infinitely more to say about the world than the speeches of Theresa May.