Are we stupid?
At this point I’ll inject a personal note. I come from impoverished working class stock. My authoritarian father did two jobs and sometimes three just to provide the basics in the way of rent for our council estate home and food and clothing. His golden rule, the product of his refusal to live on credit and in debt, the “never never” as we working class folk called it, was this: “If we can’t afford it, we don’t look in the shop window.” That was his way of teaching me, and then my brother and sister, to know the difference between NEED and WANT. Today I am of the opinion that if my father’s inherent human wisdom on that score had been universally applied, the de-humanizing, conditioning process unleashed by unregulated, rampant capitalism might have been held in check.
Because I’ve used the “c” word, capitalism, I’ll add that I am not one of those who believe that capitalism per se is the villain. Capitalism is in my view the only system that could be made to deliver for the benefit of all if it was regulated and directed to serve the needs of all. The real villain is the short-sighted and stupid way the capitalist system has been managed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution – by the few in global terms for the few.
What I mean can be summarised as follows… As the 1960′s unfolded our one small planet was divided into two worlds – one for the 20 percent who, generally speaking, were rich; the other for the 80 percent who were poor, lacking some or all of the basic necessities for life. (The most shocking statistic my 1974 film Five Minutes to Midnight gave to the world was that 15 million children under five were dying each year from malnutrition and related, easily preventable diseases such as diahorrea and whooping cough. They were dying in a word from poverty. The film also indicated that perhaps half of the 80 percent were living, as one Indian mother said on camera, “like animals”).
If the capitalist system’s managers had not been short-sighted and stupid, and had possessed some vision, they would have taken stock of the rich-poor division of our planet and said to themselves something like the following. “We must invest in the development of the poor majority in order to bring them, in an environmentally friendly way, into the market place with the purchasing power to buy the goods and services we have to sell if our capitalist system is to have a sustainable future.
They didn’t say that and what they actually did was to flood the 20 percent with credit cards, to enable the affluent minority to live beyond their means, satisfying their need for what they were being conditioned to want – more and more consumer goodies, and getting themselves and The System deeper and deeper into debt. Then came the madness of greedy bankers who turned parts of their institutions into gambling casinos and played games to enrich themselves and which had little or nothing to do with the real economy. (In verbal parenthesis I’ll add that I am one of those who believe that more than a few bankers should be in jail today along with the likes of Tony Blair, George Bush and Dick Cheney).
Changing the way we think would require us to see ourselves as citizens of ONE COMMON HUMANITY. As a result of my own global learning experiences I don’t see myself first and foremost as white and English/British with blue eyes and blondish hair. I am a citizen of the world, period. And frankly speaking, I don’t want an English cricket or football team to win just because I am English. I want the best team on the day to win. (Given England’s humiliating batting collapse in Australia, it’s a good job my perspective is what it is!) If we could all see ourselves in the light of one common humanity, the prospects for creating a world in which every man, woman and child on Planet Earth had the basic necessities for human life would be much improved.
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