Faustian Deals

Recently, I unfriended someone who turned on one of my f'list on Facebook with a display of the most arrogant, self-serving spite I have ever seen: spite I refuse to permit on my timeline, point blank.

It is in that light that I made a comment on another blog, wherein some similar ranty spite appeared in the comments section.

Here is the tail end of the ranty comment (unedited - poor spelling is the original ranty author's).

"Sorry sympathy of working people has well and truly ran out for those that want to live of others. Support for benefit cuts and caps has never been higher.

Question is why has it taken this long to enforce??"

Here is my reply to the ranty comment.

Not all working people.

There is a point where a civilisation can rise above the level of grubbing; where how much something costs, such as a system of social welfare, is less important than its value to and effect upon society - a chance for the poorest to attain social mobility while not having to worry about where those bills are coming from; a society where the poorest can live out long lives in as rude health as the wealthiest.

And then you get the tipping point, where a society begins to degenerate. Where, rather than talk about ambitious plans for giving the whole of society a chance to do something with their lives, people become burdened with a false sense of entitlement and sit on their stoop and complain about other people having life better than them.

It's always the other man who's "workshy," "scrounger," "unfit mother," "Bolshy lazy sponger." It's always your taxes that are paying for the nice shoes on their feet, their nice haircut, the smile on their faces.

And that bitterness seeps in and poisons everything. Compassion is a fool's dream; social programs warp in your perceptions into a grotesque parade of the poor supping at a trough of your precious money or literally leeching the life from your veins while you sleep at night.

Day and night, that poison works its way into the brain - that addiction to self-righteous pompous middle-class Charles Pooter "Diary Of A Nobody" fury which looks about as dangerous as a penguin carrying a handgun.

The poison worms its way into the tabloids, which ooze with slimy politicians whose only ambition is to line their pockets, and whose only ticket - the one thing they want you to vote them in for - is that they can offer you, not an actual solution to your problems, but a continual supply of the indignant stuffed-shirt toxin that keeps you awake at your work.

That toxin that prompts you to talk about "everybody has a job, and those who can't get a job mustn't want one," and urges you to look about how much something costs you rather than how much it costs somebody else as well - or rather, to look at things such as social care in terms of "I don't need it, so why should I pay for it?" rather than "I'm only doing my bit at work for me and mine. This - taxes, NIC - is my way of doing my bit for my country and the people who live in it, and who might come home disabled from defending it. From defending me."

We're a degenerate nation. Gone to the dogs? Yeah. Only, we're the dogs. We're the mangy, scruffy mutts who've forgotten that we used to be as kings in this world. And you know what used to make us walk as kings?

Pride in our twin greatest achievements - our NHS, and our welfare system. The two things that, together, served the nation more than any wars ever could.

We're not going back to a glorious past, with this nothing little Captain Mainwaring attitude of ours. We are, collectively and with our eyes wide open, going forwards towards a future as ruins, in ruins.

And it all started the day the first shouty little man complained that compassion, ethics, altruism were playthings for fools. On the day that the first ambitious git of a nothing politician looking for a vote heard him, and offered him a Faustian deal.

As a nation, we are sick in the head. It's a brain thing, and it's terminal. Our bodies haven't realised it yet. They haven't realised that they are the cause - that if there is a doom upon this place, it it not the ignorant louts in power, nor the ignorant louts in the press and media. It's us, the ignorant louts that put them there, because they alone can feed you the drug you want.

Spite. Malevolent, self-righteous, indignant, spite.

And it's from addiction to spite that we have killed ourselves.