This is the mathematical definition of convex optimisation:
The study of how to make a good choice when confronted with conflicting requirements
I saw this last week and was quite intrigued: first, because it uses the word convex; and second because it sounds like Benthamism applied to mathematics – a good choice when confronted with conflicting requirements.
In the 21st Century West, we live in concave societies. A concave society looks like this:
On the surface at the top there, there’s some daylight when it comes to information – but most citizens are somewhat foggy about what it all means. Either side of the fog are the folks who think. They’re on solid ground in full sunshine. So there’s a minority of Grounded people, and a large majority of people too busy, distracted or dense to care one way or another. These are the Foggy people.
They have cold feet about what’s going on, but thinking hurts and so they sort of slide about aimlessly. In fact, their feet are cold because they’re walking on thin ice. It breaks pretty regularly, and is getting thinner all the time, so they fall into the shaft below. As a result of this, they become the Shafted people.
As you can see, as they descend down the shaft, everything gets murkier until it’s pitch black, and then they make a soft landing in the cave at the bottom.
Hence the name Concave society: it’s all a con, and if you don’t remain alert all the time, you wind up in a dark cave.
Once the Shafted are in a deep, dark cave, they can’t see anything…and they can’t hear the Grounded yelling down the shaft, “You’ve been shafted”…..and they can’t get back up again, because the walls are too steep and slippery….but – just to be on the safe side – in the cave itself are a few bright screens saying ‘Soon you will be out of this cave and in a Paradise flowing with silk and money’.
The icey bit at the top of the shaft is called a Level Playing Field, in order to reassure the Foggies. The people who invented the name – and the shaft, and the cave – have been floated off the surface to an etheral zone beyond the fog called Above the Law. There are not very many of these people, but they do run everything. They are called the Legups.
They cost all of us an arm and a leg, and they leg it with all the money at every opportunity.
Foggies come in all the sizes and all the colours. Some wear cavalry twill trousers with grey shoes, others carry slogans from the 1970s, quite a lot of them say ‘smash’ and ‘zero tolerance’ and ‘kill’ all the time, while others still simply hate everyone who isn’t Progressive or female. But most of them sit on sofas, moan a lot, eat pizza, and want to be famous. The three things that ensure they will fall through the ice eventually are a smug spare tyre, a tendency to stamp feet, and having fat heads.
Not satisfied with the rate of conversion from Foggy to Shafted, the Legups now want to rebrand the Grounded citizens Non-Violent Extremists, or NVEs. This will enable them to create kangaroo courts. In these courts, the defendant will be tied to a kangaroo, which hops straight into the fog, and straight through the ice.
The term non-violent extremist is an oxymoron. We know this because the description was invented by David Cameron – a moron who went to Oxford.
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The obvious alternative to a concave society is a convex society. A convex society looks like this:
As you can see, this is much simpler. Society is a convex glass shape – totally transparent and with a tough shell to protect it from real enemies. The Citizens are by far the biggest consideration in it, but everyone comes under the penetrating glare of an equally applied Rule of Law. Because the convex glass focuses and intensifies the Law’s rays, the Law will – eventually – even penetrate to the turds floating about in the moral sewer below. There is no such thing as Utopia: there will always be turds in sewers. But in a convex society, they have very little power in the long term, because the citizens have all been given a proper rounded education, and can thus tell excrement from excellence.
In the current climate, there is no alternative to corporate dystopia if we do not aim for a convex society. I have just invented a new Thing called CONVEX. It stands for
The Congress of Non-Violent Extremists
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What follows is a sort of first stab at the philosophy behind a movement called CONVEX.
Is it possible to be extreme and non-violent? The answer is that, in a truly democratic society, no it isn’t. If you hold an opinion and express it strongly – thus inflaming the passions of others so as to cause violence – then, some would say, yes: you are being directly non-violent but also indirectly violent. But they would be wrong.
“He hit the dog” is a transitive grammatical form. If you hit a dog, then only you are being violent. As the textbooks rightly say, ‘In functional grammar, transitivity is considered to be a continuum rather than a binary category’. Quite so: if you ask a passing policeman to hit the dog, he is the one being violent, not you. If the dog then bites both of you, you have only yourselves to blame, but that’s not germane to the issue.
The mistake we have made in the last sixty years is to encourage the idea that, in Law, people can be incited into violence. This may seem to happen frequently in life, but if it does then there is something seriously wrong with the culture. In psychiatry, the view taken is that you cannot be incited by another…that your reaction to strong words may be indifference or violence, depending on your personality and history. Neuroscience would tend to support that assertion – as indeed would common sense.
But incitement to violence is enshrined in the Race Relations Act. Which, as we know, has over half a century spawned an industry of unthinking wishfulness and, ultimately, the neo-Nazi idea of ‘political correctness’.
Much of this comes down, yet again, to taking responsibility as an individual, in return for being given a healthy dose of liberty by the State. In Nazi Germany, the citizen had some liberty, but no direct responsibility: the State did everything. At the Nuremburg trials in 1946, several defendants tried this “only obeying orders” defence, but the Court rejected it. It was right to.
Specifically in relation to Adolf Hitler, many of the accused tried to say that Hitler’s magnetic presence made them obey him – and do things they didn’t want to do. This too was rightly dismissed as a defence: Albert Speer, Erwin Rommel, Adolf Galland, and would-be assassin Von Stauffenberg all met Hitler frequently, while regularly disobeying his more vile and/or idiotic commands.
The place we have reached after some 46 years of legal denialism and muddled legislation is truly Orwellian in nature: in 2014, the Prime Minister David Cameron now proposes a new form of crime: being ‘a non-violent extremist’. Grammatically, legally and logically, it is an oxymoron; but by and large, as far as the British media and public reactions are concerned, it has gone through to Theresa May at the Home Office as a suitable subject for legislation with little more than a few head-shaking murmurs. Now the figures-fiddling conman we have as our Chancellor has (for some unknown reason, as it’s nothing to do with him) taken up the ball and demanded we have a new code of law within which you can be an NVE criminal without breaking the Law.
This is legal thinking on the same level as the later inbred Bourbons.
It will be hard for some folk to see my argument as anything other than hair-splitting in “the dangerous situation in which we find ourselves”. But I believe that such a viewpoint should pay more heed to how we got to here…and why we were able to travel along that road so quickly in the first place.
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A society – a culture, a tribe, a nation – is either civilised, or it isn’t. As with pregnancy, you can’t be slightly civilised: there is either a strong set of moral and ethical values underpinning the legal code, or there isn’t. And there is either equality before – and no escape from – that legal code, or there isn’t.
We have got to the stage of ‘needing’ draconian legislation (and USSR-style rationales for it) because we have gradually eroded the fundamental nature of a healthy Citizen/State relationship: equal responsibility on both sides, and mutual respect.
We have allowed the things that used to live under damp stones at the far end of the garden to come out into the daylight, and – eventually – run the economic, legal, judicial, bureaucratic, police and political functions of our society. They in turn have (gradually at first, but then with open relish) pushed through laws to suit their agendas, not to create the greatest contentment of the greatest number. They have, in a word, nurtured that which always destroys liberty and democracy in the end: privilege.
Let us examine the specifics of this particular “crisis” that the West now faces. We find ourselves hated by Islamics around the world, and with a large number – in excess of 15,000 – alleged Muslim terrorists in the UK. The first situation was created by a blatant attack on Parliamentary procedure, the BBC, the Legal code and the Civil Service by Tony Blair and the truly disgusting Alistair Campbell; and the second was strongly aided and abetted by the immigration service running scared of pc-bound lawyers ever-willing to stress the human rights of those who bomb, shoot and decapitate those they do not like.
One example: we all suffer long waits and tiresome queues, invasive searches and inconvenience at airports these days because of the hijacking/bombing activities of an infinitessimal percentage of the population. Yet nobody will grasp the nettle and say we need targeted (rather than universal) searches.
In turn, the unwillingness of the Left (and its media camp-followers) to tackle the relentless power-grabbing lobbyists of the British Muslim Council under Iqbal Sacranie enabled that organisation to come within inches of securing legislation making criticism of Islam illegal whether the critique was true or not.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the new ‘laws’ to control NVEs with EDOs (Extremism Disruption Orders) are even more destructively agenda-focused and designed to crush free speech than Sacranie’s devious 2005 lobbying for laws making any and all criticism of Islam illegal.
How does all this tie into the concept of ‘privilege’? We all I suspect have a tendency, when thinking about privilege, to conjure up mental images of public schools, banks and large stately homes. But there can be no doubt at all that some of the more extreme – there’s that word again – versions of feminism, child abuse mania, anti-racism, pc, and tabloidism enjoy enormous privilege purely because they are all allowed to fabricate and get away with it.
These people call it ‘free speech’, but what they really want is license…aka, privilege.
Moving into broader areas of social and economic ‘science’, both multiculturalist and neoliberal beliefs have been discredited to the satisfaction of practically every neutral on the planet: both have an appalling track record of failure and negative ramifications, but both are still seen by the majority of British media and politicians as a cultural ideal.
These ideas, organisations and minorities have used ex cathedra assertion over and over again to attain what is clearly a privileged status they do not deserve. The fact-free ascendancy of same is a major contributor to the feeling many thinking citizens now have…..and which a frightening percentage of MPs and their agents exploit: that the bigger the lie you tell and the more ridiculous it is, the more likely it is to be given the insouciant nod of assent.
Among such outrageous mendacity I would include – purely by using the empirical evidence to hand as the objective arbiter – that the ISIS videos show grizly beheadings, that Britain’s economy is rebounding, that more jobs mean more people better off than before, that we have Equality before the Law in Britain, that the Rebekah Brooks verdict reflected events that occurred in Newscorp, that our economy is rebalancing, that the European Union is democratic, that Britain needs more immigrants, that social services given to privatised companies have produced lower-cost honesty and greater effectiveness, and that nobody in the Monday Club was ever a paedophile.
The bottom line I have reached in my own analysis of this process, in the immediate contemporary context, is that because naive, disproven and muddled ideologies have been so ruthlessly used to justify personal gain and power, we find ourselves hated by foreign Islamics and at risk from some who live in the UK. And the reaction of a State run by sociopaths for the elite minority to that outcome is not, of course, to bow out gracefully: its reaction is to invent idiotic terminology like ‘non-violent extremist’.
The same unwillingness under New Labour to recognise a problem of child abuse in the care system (or ethnic taxi drivers trafficking in infant children) turned into farce during 2009, when Ed Balls seriously suggested vetting 12 million people with access to schools, care homes, and Secret Courts. Had he and Harriet Harman – the Ministers for families and women respectively – done their jobs as Ministers rather then turning a blind pc eye, the tiny pervert minority could’ve been rooted out quickly. But when cornered, most perpetrators did the same thing: use a feigned homosexuality to exploit their privilege as being above the Law….so above the law, in fact, that police officers routinely accuse citizens of being homophobic – a crime that simply does not exist.
All is bitter irony once the syndrome takes hold across the social spectrum. Officialdom paid from Citizen taxes fails to regulate merchant banking away from risk…thus our taxes have to clean up the mess. So too, gungho foreign adventures, pc nonsense and perversion of justice produce a broadscale political dereliction of duty…thus our taxes go up yet again, but our Freedom takes another knock.
But above all, the long-term effect of this, the effective privatisation of politics, is not just an unhealthy transfer of power from labour to capital: more than that, it is the achievement of an electorate so depoliticised – and State organs so politicised – that the intention of those who stand to benefit from this is clear: they wish, by destruction of the Rule of Law, and open repression, to create – with the added danger of surveillance technology – an irreversibly dictatorial Corporate State.
The dictatorial supply chain of corporate goods already exists if a software supplier can wrest control of my personal computer and force me to adopt a poor quality update to their systems. It is not enough to say “Well don’t use them then”. That strategy cannot work in a monopoly.
The biggest lie of all is ‘free market economics with zero State interference’. After two decades of neoliberal theory being applied in the UK, we have seen a virtual supply monopoly for multinational companies, and the biggest State bailout of banking in history.
And now – as the chute draws ever nearer – we find denial on an insanely industrial scale: that derivative debt at 12 times the value of global economic activity is just fine, that the eurozone’s central bank isn’t really a battleground of opposing views, that a plummeting oil price doesn’t reflect a global economic slump in demand or the US bringing Putin to heel, that Russians shot down the MH17, that the falling gold price is a natural market event, that people falling off the US NFP dataset have found jobs, that celebrity sex with willing teenagers is paedophilia, that any day now the Greek economy will recover, that sex abuse victims never lie in order to make monetary gain, that austerity can stimulate economic growth, and perhaps most worrying of all, that the Labour Party is still a real Opposition in a country based on political pluralism.
The Labour Party does not oppose any of the pernicious things being done in our name by the majority at Westminster. Be it bombing Islamists, supporting the aims of the US, Anti-terrorism Laws, the NVE definition, the EDO proposals, continued membership of an autocratic and disastrously failing trading bloc, or the determination to make monied power the basis of political Party finance, the Ed Miller Band is on board with all of it. The LibDems oppose minute bits of it, and UKip opposes EU membership.
We do not have a functioning Opposition in Britain today, we have several shades within one oligarchy….an oligarchy more controlling than the Soviet Bolsheviks. It is yet another reason why we need a movement like CONVEX.
I have no idea how it would work, because I’m not a personality-cult fascist. But in broad terms, I envisage a web-based movement (apolitical) using the influence of voting weight not money to go above and beyond the corrupt politics of our era. It would be something wanting to attract affiliations – a union of decency, if you like – and dedicated to real reform of our constitutional, economic, fiscal, educational and cultural mores.
Overall, I would find it hard to improve on the Tweet put out yesterday by Free Rolf Harris activist Lizzie Cornish:
I’m too old, tired and distracted to run this myself. I see my job largely as having been a leader in stressing the need for it. I will do whatever I can to facilitate parts of it. But other arses now need to part company with the sofa.
Over to you.
Connected from yesterday at The Slog: It may be called 2014, but 1984 is here. Wake up to reality.
The Slog 