Stark Contrasts
Here is the logic:
We live in a society that touts the pursuit of self interest. That tells people they should look out for themselves. And yet we also tell people pretty tales about community and cooperation and mutual respect.
Enterprise and initiative… but we’re all in this together.
The former ethic is for those who succeed to live by. The latter ethic is for those who have to budge in together in crowded conditions because, for whatever reason, they have not acquired enough material success to allow them to live the separated, isolated, private, individualistic life of the rich. The former ethic is for those with a private drive, detached dwellings, grounds, boundary walls and closable gates. The latter ethic is for those in terraces and flats with cardboard walls and laundry racks on their small balconies.
In short, if you live in a tenement or a housing estate, you must be public spirited. You must behave. You must get on with your neighbours. Your lack of wealth is your own fault; it is itself evidence that you do not have the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement… ergo, you must embrace community spirit because you are so inadequate that you must live in a community. Those with the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement can leave the graffiti-daubed, dog-shit-smeared romper room of community, and so need not attempt the cooperativeness that their very success shows to be against their nature in any case.
This is, in a roundabout way, a reiteration of the myth of innate and inborn destiny. It is the same myth that class societies have always told themselves, filtered through the hypocritical bad faith of modern liberalism.
It is not a scripted conspiracy, it is manufactured ideology. As such, it has all the chaos and contradiction of delusion. It is believed, even if it is a convenient piece of bunk. It is applied in a scattershot way, in all sorts of mixed-up and contradictory forms.
The apartheid inherent in it is not seen, is not admitted to, is often sincerely repudiated. And yet its persistence is tolerated, its expansion promoted. Nobody, after all, is ‘in favour’ of divisions between rich and poor. It’s one of those things that everybody formally disapproves of and yet continue.
When the people living in the cramped and dirty corners decide that they will no longer behave themselves, then we see the skull of class society beneath the moisturised, botoxed skin of liberal democratic discourse.
When the poor tear up their hovels, they are ticked-off for damaging their own ‘communities’ – as though this might not have occured to them, as though they might suddenly realise that they are trashing places that they actually find congenial, as though their behaviour speaks only to their own self-destructive madness and does not suggest that they actually find these ‘communities’ to be frustrating, grim, tedious, miserable, degraded places in which to be confined.
It is the same as the witless consolation that is offered to the suicidal. …