Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer space, says one of the cleverest men in the world, one Wole Soyinka. Almost 14-million people voted for a 21st-century politician, Boris Johnson with 19th-century sentiments, who happens to be the head of a 21st-century party, correctly named, The Conservatives, an altogether 19th-century political organisation in Britain, that anachronism that pretends to be a democracy. This win for “BoJo” is bigger than that other anachronistic politician who introduced a new world order in the eighties when she, Margaret Thatcher applied the heterotopia, white supremacist socio-political ideology of neoliberalism to the world, and marked the beginning of the end for life as we know it.
We have thus confirmed two irrefutable actualities that empires never die; they only grow bigger, at least the modern Anglo American Empire. The perennial questions swirling about of how it is possible that the most technologically advanced people on the planet can vote in a far-right racist, who also happens to be a misogynist is meaningless and arguably, immaterial. The signs have been there since the late seventies, early eighties with the rise of that global behemoth that funds every political party, exports labour to developing nations and controls the mass-media. Between 1979 and 2018, the American economy (read Wall Street) grew six times bigger, yet the median wage increase for the average worker has only grown by under $2000 per annum.
The number of newspapers, books and publications, together with the rise of the internet has increased by an order of magnitude, giving the average person unprecedented access to the combined knowledge of The Library of Congress several times over, but the dichotomy of “knowledge poor” people and the electorate increases. How is this anomaly possible and what is the explanation? I believe it starts at our birth when we are formally inducted into the world and taught values, principles and thinking that is described as our collective “socialisation” but a more accurate term would be conditioning and/or even brainwashing. From the moment our mother hears our first tentative cries to our first day at school, college and university then our first jobs, we are destined to be taught the importance of a “discipleship” to the totalitarian global religion of the corporates. We are bombarded by billions of bits of sensory information throughout our first 18-years as apprentice disciples, learning the trade of obedience and unquestioning acquiescence to power, all power. The church, the state, the media and the corporation exercises an “Orwellian” death grip over our existence that’s almost impossible to break, partially because it is easier to ignore, let go, “go with the flow” or leave it to others to fix. BoJo isn’t an anomaly; it is in the order of things and as per the modern-day corporate script for our lives, completely expected. Many of the media portents have long warned us about this “singularity” when being a slave to the system, or that the system holds a lien on our life from the cradle to the grave is normal. I argue that RACISM and the CORPORATE dictatorship is the new normal and has been for a few decades now, it’s just us doing what we do best; we lie and we deny our miserable reality. Pope Francis put it rather unsubtly when he remarked, “ The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.
