20 Widely Accepted Orthodoxies We Now Know Were Pure Nonsense
If there is one thing that the global corona virus pandemic has proven, it’s that a lot of popularly believed ideas and orthodoxies, which underpinned neoliberal, free-market economies, turned out to be so much hot air. Our politicians have been lying to us (surprise, surprise). In some cases, they were so wrong, they were deadly.
Here’s some things we never have to listen to, with a straight face, ever again. In fact, anybody who espouses these tropes can be openly mocked and laughed at, in their face. The proof is now in and we have it:
1. There’s no magic money tree
It turned out there was. When the economy was teetering on the brink of collapse, the governments of the world suddenly found wads of money they had evidently been hiding in the bottom drawer. Bail outs, grants, subsidies, loan guarantees and quantitative easing all suddenly appeared. The things they insisted we couldn’t afford, as a society, just months ago, now must be government-funded, by sheer dire necessity. Austerity was a cruel choice, not an economic fundamental. Indeed, politicians and business leaders have been falsifying economic fundamentals for the longest time, to keep the population bamboozled and supportive of their elite-favouring agenda.
2. You can’t work from home
Astonishingly, huge numbers of people are currently working from home and the digital network infrastructure has mostly handled the load. People remain motivated and dedicated. It turns out that the supervision and management function is hugely overrated, meaning that all the mingling and commuting, in a frenzy to reach the office by 9, was only a silly game. It gave business owners the illusion of control, but at the expense of the well-being, travel costs and free time of their employees. Also, open-plan and hot-desking offices turned out to be an extreme biohazard.
3. Broadband is a luxury and a frippery
Broadband turned out to be mission critical for the economy, when people were required to isolate and remain locked down in their homes. The economy couldn’t currently function at all without it. The national broadband infrastructure was not just for entertainment purposes, it was also the necessary ingredient in keeping people connected, without travelling. A lot of work that is being done at home right now couldn’t be done at all, unless we had broadband. That means it’s worth investing in, as a public good and improving its quality of service, resilience and reliability. We dithered on this for decades and privatised competition didn’t solve it. Time’s up.
4. Posh, rich guys know the most and know best
The more atavistic and unaware people in our society still believe this and tug their forelocks at their leaders, no matter how much they are found wanting or how terrible their track records. For anybody still capable of rational, dispassionate thinking, however, it is self-evident that the posh, rich guys have no better grasp of the situation than anybody else. In many cases, they’ve demonstrated that their grasp and capacity for decisive leadership is very much worse, the consequence of which is that many more people will die needlessly and miserably, than if they had been competent. They do not have a monopoly on wisdom, moral fortitude or courage, despite their privilege and plummy accents. Quoting Latin or Ancient Greek doesn’t get you far in managing a pandemic.
5. Profit is more important than people
Our beloved leaders initially thought that keeping the economy going, even if it meant a few pensioners would die, was the right priority. “Who cares?” was their attitude to potentially thousands of needless deaths. This is well-documented and on record. It turns out that most people don’t agree with this ethically bankrupt stance. Were it not for France’s reputed threat to close the border, public outcry and heated arguments by scientists who know what they’re talking about, we might still be following this course of action.
6. Britain is a meritocracy and meritocracies are good
The best people have not risen to the top. We can readily observe that with our own eyes. We have billionaires trying to profit from public subsidies, without giving up any of their own wealth, business owners lying to people about the safety of drinking in their pubs, hotel operators firing their staff, then backtracking, in order to qualify for grants. We have seen all kinds of low life acts, from people trying to personally benefit from the crisis. The government wants to wave through unlimited draconian powers, in what is a clear case of overreach. We’ve seen that the people that are supposed to be the best that society has to offer have behaved the worst, while the real heroes are the nurses, doctors and front-line clerks keeping us alive. The current government openly cheered when a pay raise for nurses was defeated in the House of Commons. If this is a meritocracy, who needs it?
7. We’re prepared for a no deal Brexit
If we genuinely were prepared for a no-deal Brexit, those preparations could have been pressed into service to handle the corona virus crisis. Things would have gone much more smoothly and there would have been less “making it up as they go” in government. However, it’s clear that there has been no contingency planning or preparation. The cupboard is very bare. If we decide to blunder into a no-deal Brexit, on schedule, after the damage done to the nation by the pandemic, we’ll be hammering the very last nail into our own coffin. Indeed, Europe itself may be so depleted by the crisis that it may have to reform just as radically as our government is forced to. The same nonsense orthodoxies were promulgated over there, too.
8. A capacity for unlimited violence equates to national security
Calling out the military, who are all trained and tooled-up for violent conflict, doesn’t make your country any safer, in the face of a pandemic. Soldiers die of viruses too. Indeed, much of the way they operate simply turns them into unwelcome disease vectors. Their weapons are useless against a virus and their ability to keep law and order will be totally undermined by their own panic and indiscipline, when things get out of hand. In other words, they have the potential to become a public danger, rather than an aid to national security. The problem is, they evidently have little understanding of any of this. Buy as many tanks, bombs, submarines, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, jet fighters, grenades, and other assorted military hardware as you like — none of it will keep more people alive and healthy because we have it. Soldiers should have been growing food.
9. Hard work makes you rich
The hardest working and most necessary working people, right now, are the lowest paid and this government has made a virtue out of keeping their living standards intolerably low. Now that we all depend on them for survival and they’re working all hours, at insane personal risk, they still aren’t making bank. Indeed, the banks haven’t even suspended their bank charges. If hard work made you rich, these people would be rolling in it, but they aren’t. That’s shameful.
10. Billionaires are self-made men
It turns out that our billionaires are utterly reliant of millions of customers and thousands of employees to be that rich. Without those people, they’re not. So, which part of self-made justifies their net worth? I can’t see it anymore. Their genius for financial engineering and algorithms doesn’t amount to much, when there are no customers and nobody to fulfil the orders.
11. Trickle-down economics works
Yeah, right. We’ve had quantitative easing being fed in at the top of the economic pyramid for how long now and what good did it do anybody? It was all blown in stock buy backs, inflating asset prices, but making those enterprises no more resilient than they were before the re-floatation of the economy, after 2008. If the money had trickled down, people would not be in such a precarious financial state now, more than two million Americans would not be registering as unemployed per day and those companies would not require bail outs. Trickle-down economics was an evidence-free assertion — in other words, a con. We’ve all been had.
12. You can succeed as an entrepreneur, even if nobody has any money
Millions of self-employed solopreneurs are in the process of discovering that it doesn’t matter what you do or how hard you work, how good and necessary your product/service or how wonderful you are to work with as a supplier, if clients and customers have no money, none of that counts for anything. You can’t succeed in business, if nobody is spending.
13. Markets and business will find the best solution, through market forces
They haven’t. They’ve had their go and didn’t deliver. Enough said.
14. Efficiency matters more than resilience
For decades now, the obsession has been with efficiency and paring things to the very bone. We’ve made a virtue of just-in-time delivery and lean organisations. What has that gotten us? It’s made just about every organisation as brittle as hell, with no capacity to absorb shocks and no resilience to recover quickly from them. There’s nothing in reserve, no capacity for substitutions and no slack to make up for sudden deficits. Efficiency has become a religion, while we ritually sacrificed systemic resilience. We’ll pay a heavy price for that folly. Resilience always mattered, but now we’re having the fact brutally exposed to us.
15. Trust in the authorities
One thing my parents and grandparents learned from living through two world wars, a famine and the Russian Revolution is that trusting the authorities can get you killed. This has been amply demonstrated once again, with the time lost and wasted, while the official government advice was to get everybody infected as quickly as possible, then pray for herd immunity to develop. They didn’t know what they were doing. They have little better knowledge now. Trusting in the authorities can and will get you killed, when they get it so badly wrong. Indeed, a lot of people are going to die in the next few weeks, because they trusted the authorities.
16. Deadlines are crucial
Considering current circumstances, not really. Deadlines have come and gone, been changed in an instant, reprioritised and have been relaxed, when people just didn’t have the capacity to cope. Burnout and the frenzy of busy-ness was an arbitrary imposition, it seems. Why were we so stressed about deadlines? All it did was ran down our mental and physical health.
17. Internet service providers have data caps to keep the network fast and responsive
Internet Service Providers, to prevent people hitting their data limits while working from home and on-line schooling during the lockdowns, took their data caps off their services. The load was greater, but barely more than service providers would experience with a hot Netflix release, even while people were video conferencing. Internet speeds did not appreciably degrade. The entire basis for charging people more for going over data caps turned out to be bogus.
18. People are paid what they’re worth, according to their value
Pull the other one. We are utterly dependent on the people that fix the pipes and sewers, the people that take our garbage away, the delivery drivers that bring our food, the grocery store clerks and all our incredible health care system workers. They are the most valuable people we have. They have never been paid what they’re worth.
19. Healthcare is an employee benefit
Nope. It’s a fundamental human right. Limiting healthcare to people working for corporations is not only barbaric, but self-defeating. We’re all only as healthy as our sickest community member. The only way to ensure the public is healthy is to treat healthcare as a human right, not a perk of the job. Otherwise, we are fooling ourselves and simply enriching private healthcare providers and insurers, for no tangible benefit.
20. Manufacturing security isn’t important
When you urgently need respirators, that’s not the time to discover that there are no domestic respirator manufacturers with sufficient capacity, that you’re competing for supply, through trade, in competition with nations with much deeper pockets and better trade relationships, or that all of the necessary components are made in China. It’s not the time to school government ministers in the realities of design and manufacturing lead times, the investment in tooling and training required to make things other than what you’re making and the lack of design expertise, if the things you now urgently need were not previously made here. That’s exactly where we are. We were told that we could innovate and design here but manufacture overseas and that financial services would replace manufacturing. It turns out that hedge fund managers and bankers can’t produce respirators on demand. Once you lose the component supply ecosystem and intimate familiarity with production processes, you can’t even innovate. The people that might have become stellar engineers realise there is no money or recognition in it, so drift inexorably into financial services and never learn to engineer. In short, unless a nation retains the capability to make things domestically, we’re all stuffed.
So, there you have it: a brief list of some of the biggest deceptions that have ever been foist on a population by greedy, selfish people. Shame on us for believing them. The refutations against these nonsense assertions were always available to us, if we had bothered to look. But we didn’t.
Fool us once — shame on the deceivers. Fool us twice — shame on all of us.
