All Of Us

One of the most hateful things about being a socialist - or to be more accurate, someone who believes in the concept of society - or to paraphrase that, someone who isn't stupid and accepts all the evidence of how the world works - is that almost all the major problems of the world become systemic. A good chunk of the reason for the popularity of right-wing thinking is that it's easy. If someone fucks up, it's simply their fault. "System" and "culture" and "society" don't count as mitigating factors to right-wingers. This is why, ultimately, The Wire was such a left-wing show; it was a programme that presented a world where individual actions didn't really matter, and where institutions could affect the lives of the ordinary like lumbering, uncaring gods. If you're a right-wing thinker, you'll always find a scapegoat; scapegoats are part of the belief system. If you're a left-wing thinker, it's bloody difficult to blame anybody.

And yet collective responsibility is a difficult principle to instinctively follow. Like, yay for the oneness of mankind and all that, but ultimately we think of ourselves as separate, distinct beings; if we didn't, we wouldn't have evolved very far. That's not argument in favour of right-wing individualism - just because evolution encourages something doesn't mean we have to do it, and there's nothing more tedious than people arguing against left-of-centre thinking with the old adage that "people aren't really like that" - rather, it's just a reminder that being left-wing is difficult.

'Course, at the moment, we know who we should be blaming. It's all the bankers' fault. Obviously.

But.

There's no denying the fact that the very concept of NAMA, the very idea that we rush in to help the banks while unemployment spirals and we talk glibly about cutting the dole, is uglier than Joan Bruton in physical congress with a small pony. These institutions represent capitalism in its rawest form, but they cheerily haemorrhage money and we have to bail them out? It's sickening, even before you factor in how unrepentant they all seem. But hey, banking is a sickening industry. It always has been. It's a collection of of money-obsessed, self-interested individuals who give a fuck about nothing but an adolescent coked-up gambling game; it's a miserable, obscene trade.

It's also a trade that we have spent the last few decades elevating to a warped parody of nobility.

This is the issue with "bailing out the bankers"; it's aesthetically an ugly thing to do, but it's sadly inevitable, because we've constructed our society around what they do. Even Anglo-Irish, a tiny bank exclusively devoted to catering for rich arseholes, wasn't allowed to go to the wall. Why? Because it would be catastrophic. If Anglo-Irish goes to the wall, all its assets are sold off; a rash of property is dumped unceremoniously on the market; the price of property plummets further; more people wind up in negative equity. 'Course, even being in negative equity isn't any real problem, unless of course you ever need to move, and then you're suddenly fucked good and proper. Letting Anglo-Irish fail would have fucked over countless blameless people on relatively low incomes, and that's the bank that nobody really cared about.

It's worth remembering that, over the last decade or two, our culture has increasingly linked wealth with achievement. We're asked to admire the Bill Cullens and Michael O'Learys of this world, on account of how they're wealthy; huge swathes of our population work in marketing, or social media consultancies, or advertising, or any other number of worthless 'professions' that exist to help people chase cheap profit but create nothing worthwhile; those who question our trashy, money-chasing culture are sneered at as pinkos or hippies that don't understand how the system works. We voted for the PDs, for fuck's sake*. We rejoiced when Loveable Oul' Charlie cut taxes and pumped up inflation. We now describe property developers as the devil, but tens of thousands of people bought houses solely to "get on the ladder". As Stewart Lee so beautifully put it, we began to view homes as investment opportunity rather than somewhere to live.

Or, you might remember a few years ago; at the behest of our insurance companies, and for the benefit of consumers (because we're all happy to describe ourselves as consumers, even if we baulk at being accused of living in a consumerist society), billboards began to appear about insurance cheats. A hotline was set up. People making false claims, they said, were the real problem with the country. Did anyone complain? Don't be daft; back then, we were happy to demonise the odd twat in ten thousand who claimed four grand to which they weren't entitled. When the developers (who are scum, remember) were making more money than we could imagine, who was getting the slagging in Ireland's most popular newspapers? Benefit frauds, and people claiming disability allowance when they could probably walk with a bit of an oul' limp.

It's worth remembering that we aren't bailng out the bankers, we're bailing out the banking system, a tiny but important facet of the Celtic Tiger (ooh, remember that?). This is the culture we created, of greed and materialism and dismissing those on the outside. The banks were squarely at the centre of that culture; now that it's all gone tits up, it's a bit fucking rich to be so righteously furious that they went ahead and embraced it. Our banks did exactly what they were designed to do, a government that we elected cheerfully allowed them to do it, and all the disenfranchised people of Ireland did was shrug their shoulders and stroke their MacBooks. So it's too easy, too cheap, to blame dem fucken bankers. There's nothing more pointless than criticising someone for doing something they've been culturally trained to do.

Let's be clear, there's all sorts of issues with NAMA. It's unaccountable, it's not transparent, and it appears to be designed largely to circumvent government incompetence. It's also probably not the best way of dealing with the lack of finance in the banking system - frankly I haven't got the faintest, because all that fiscal shite bores me to tears, and even people who study it only come up with guesses. All I'll say is this; enough of the crowd-pleasing caricature of Bankers And Developers feasting on the tears of tiny babies. We're bailing out a system that we created, as indeed we should. We're complicit. We made them. We are them.

*I should state at this point that "we" means "we as a society", as part of that "collective responsibility" thing I was talking about before. I want to make that clear, because I'm going to be using "we" in that sense an awful lot, and if you roll your eyes and say "well I didn't vote for the PDs," then you're missing the point. I didn't vote for them either. It's still my fault, because I didn't have all their voters killed, which is what I'd have done if I cared enough.