We are Binge Watching our own apocalypse and didn't notice we have reached the end of the cliff.

Last Monday's total solar eclipse brought night to the daytime skies over my city. When it occurred, street lights turned on, and the air became cold and damp as if it were three in the morning. Night's dark sojourn at 2:20 in the afternoon lasted for two minutes. Then the afternoon returned unscathed to its normal 2024 cost-of-living crisis routine.

Photo by Matt Nelson on Unsplash

The crowd in the park where I went to witness the eclipse applauded the return of the light. They clapped the way an audience would to a magician after his saw-a-lady-in-half-half routine was completed- revealing his assistant to be no worse for wear.

The eclipse was a natural phenomenon that- for the briefest of moments benignly altered our normal. Judging by the conversations I heard around me- those who witnessed the eclipse felt grateful to be a cognisant citizens of this universe. The gratitude was only skin deep because most drove to the park despite the climate crisis, and ignored the homeless begging for change on their way out. But that is human nature for you in the 21st century. We are conditioned by a consumerism that desires experiences to have a streaming platform appeal, where we can binge watch and then move onto to another diversion.

Like the total solar eclipse, gratitude for political policies that change our lives, for the better was short lived. This era loves to ignore or forget things that are important for the well-being of not only our lives but all of humanity. Too much like too little information makes us easily enslaved by a ruling class.

Take the post-World War Two Welfare State created to foster democracy through economic fairness for all citizens. It's gone now, and unlike a total solar eclipse won't ever come back without hundreds of millions of people dying in a war to break free from their chains of exploitation. We got rid of it because the rich told us it was being abused by the poor. And we believed them hoping that our allegiance to the well being of the the wealthy would make them want to reward us for our loyalty. That didn’t work out as we had hoped.

It took forty years, but neoliberalism tarnished everything with a veneer of corruption. Governments, culture, journalism and business stink like day-old fish rotting in a bin because of the nefarious erosion of democracy through concentrating wealth in the fewest of hands and leaving the rest of us indentured to debt.

It diluted mainstream left-wing politics making them an appeaser of capitalism rather than a foil. There is a bleakness to this century that is unique. It is as if Orwell’s final sentences in 1984, where Winston Smith has been reconditioned to love his oppression is now true for all of us.

Despite the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s and the inevitability of a terrible total war on the horizon, it was a more hopeful decade than ours. Left-wing politics and trade unions had leaders with the teeth to fight for societal change rather than fighting for more lucrative book deals, speaking gigs and salaried positions at think tanks. That the leadership of most British Trade unions stand in solidarity with Keir Starmer, a Labour Party leader who wouldn't have been out of place as a cabinet member in David Cameron's 2010 austerity government is strong evidence that socialism, the Welfare State and living wages for all isn't organised labour's cup of tea anymore.

The USA in the 1930s had FDR as President, who understood that poverty and a lack of individual and collective purpose through meaningful, fairly paid employment was the quickest route to a fascist dictatorship. Now there is no politicians, no political party or hope for that type of earnest desire to make a society for and by the people again. We are algorithm’s that the 1% use to enrich themselves by manipulating our desires, wants, fears and loves.

Today work is neither fairly paid nor purposeful. It is a grind that leaves workers with the sour after taste from being cheated of a more enjoyable life from everybody above them.

In the west Democracy has had its chips and it is delusional to believe that a battle for the Presidency between Biden and Trump will be beneficial to the ordinary citizen regardless of who wins. It has essentially become a election over who will have the best table manners when they serve up the vulnerable, the refugees, the migrants as well as the worker into the fascist jaws of the 1%. 

There is no simple hack to fight against the end of liberal society because democracy was eclipsed by fascism orchestrated by the billionaires of tech, media, big energy, telecommunications and consumer goods. Neoliberalism is so pernicious because it made us all collaborators in our enslavement to the 1%. People are petrified of losing the little they have; so they make bad political choices- like voting for fascists or believing that centrist incrementalism is pragmaticism rather than remaining frozen in a grotesquely unfair status quo. The way ahead is going to be dreadful because there is no past to return to because the entitled  destroyed all of it.

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent. Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John.