If you want to know how you came to having your political opinion (whatever your preference) and how it has evolved, can I suggest something? Watch the new documentary series by Adam Curtis, called ‘Can’t get You Out of My head’.

It is a fascinating tale of geopolitical shifts that have allowed us to become the confused and some might say broken society, we are today. A series of geopolitical misjudgements, coincidence, and bad luck have allowed us to be ruled, not by politicians but financial institutions. People like Boris Johnson are in effect, leaders by proxy, or puppet politicians if you like, acting as representatives to big business.

By watching this documentary, you will become confused about your existence and what you stand for, but it will give you an insight into how human beliefs have been formed. It may make you feel differently about who you want to be. Even if it doesn’t, it is a fascinating documentary all the same.

Rewriting History

Personally, my big beef with what the UK has become, has always been my angst towards the rewriting of history by political parties. Their desire to return us to an ideology that didn’t exist. An attitude that if it’s broke, go back and repeat the same mistakes. Faux nostalgia plays a huge role in erasing historical fact.

Try telling some people that Churchill was utterly hopeless in many departments and you could find a patriotic boot caving your head in. Try telling some Labour Party supporters that the early 20^th Century unions were systematically racist, or that Bevan was at one point, a political admirer of Moseley, and they won’t have it.

By whitewashing history and only bleating on about the successful bits, the people, the masses, or whatever you want to call them, are cajoled into thinking there was once a golden age. This was a period when everything was so much better, the country was united, everyone had food on the table and knew their place. All nonsense of course but try telling that to sentimentalists.

Individualism

Anyway, what I did find interesting, is the rise of individualism and self-actualisation. This is virgin territory to me so excuse any naivety, but it is, in effect this. After mass workers movements faded at the end of the industrial revolution, the employed masses became singular rather than a group who thought and voted as one. As steelworks, mines and other huge employers shut, so did the political movements within them.

Shaken by this and unable to garner mass followings, political leaders turned to financial institutions for support, instead. From there onwards the shift in politics and geopolitics changed, perhaps forever. Rather than politicians telling financial institutions how to conduct themselves, the boot is on the other foot. That’s why when the banks collapsed, we had to bail them out; we had no choice.

That’s the problem, the banks are running the new world order. We can’t stop them nicking all our money again and we can’t vote them out. It is a conundrum that I have no answers to, but it explains why no one went to prison when the banking system crashed in 2008.  perhaps all the people who have become individualists have to unite and vote for someone willing enough to change path completely?

Uniting a nation of individualists driven apart by Brexit, must be near on impossible and whoever tries will be mercilessly targeted by the billionaires who have bought up the media outlets. They will be traitors, Marxists, commies, you name it, so they probably won’t bother.

Maybe you like it that way, but that’s not a democracy.