For the past few years on the political front I’ve been concerned about how the US with Trump and with the U.K. with Johnson had taken us down a strange route with reality or may I say non reality from my point of view.
Trump has caused polarisation in the US with his lies and rhetoric. In fact he’s been I believe a great threat to their democracy and the US republic.
Here in the U.K. we had our own mini Trump with Johnson and the polarisation of Brexit. Brexit happened in 2016 when the U.K. voted via referendum to leave the European community. In 6 years we had three conservative prime ministers May, Johnson and now Liz Truss.
The U.K. economy has been directly effected by Brexit why? Simply because we removed ourselves from the largest economic trading block in the world. And through Brexit we have voluntarily enacted economic borders to our disadvantage. It’s made it harder for the U.K. and European business to export goods freely between each other. Not only that it’s effected direct overseas investment in the U.K. economy.
Most nations want to bring down economic borders as opposed to the U.K. who had just enacted them. It’s made U.K. goods more expensive to buy in Europe. Secondly Brexit was about stopping the free flow of Europeans coming to the U.K. to live and work.
Now we have a labour crisis meaning we haven’t got enough people to do the work that European labour would have helped do for our economy prior to Brexit.
Why is there shortage of U.K. labour. I’ll tell you why. It’s to do with baby boomers who have now all come to retirement age. What’s a baby boomer? During the Second World War the men had been away fighting after the war they came home and what did they do they produced lots babies let’s not forget this was prior to contraceptive pill. (which was the emancipation of women)
Back in 1950’s and 1960’s we had economic boom after the war and we had to bring in labour from abroad from many of our commonwealth countries especially from the Caribbean but also from Europe with lots Italians coming to live and work in the U.K. because in southern Italy it was very poor with high unemployment. Italian people were looking for better economic opportunities.
In the 1980’s Margaret Thatcher the conservative Prime Minister closed down all the skill centres which were dotted around the U.K. this meant people who could of gained a new craft skill were prevented from retraining through the government sponsored Training Opportunities schemes.
Twenty years ago I went to see my local member of Parliament about the lack of skill training and nothing was ever done about it. Now we have lack of labour and lack of craft skills to do the skilled work, such as brick laying plastering, plumbing and welding and fabrication.
Why did various governments not see this future problem arising? Short sightedness or pure ignorance on their part? Maybe we have wrong people in power who don’t understand economics or how things are made? Maybe we’ve relied too much on the city of London and the financial markets. Manufacturing over the last 40 years had been decimated. The U.K. was where the industrial revolution started we had famous engineers such as Thomas Telford, James Watts, Stephensons(father & son) Not forgetting the civil and mechanical engineer Isambard kingdom Brunel.
We still have world leading ⚙️ Mechanical & civil engineering companies but many companies have fallen to the wayside such as companies like Lucas,Austin Rover, Leyland DAF but other companies like GKN, Reynolds and Sturmey Archer are shadows of the former selves.
Over past few days the U.K. is going through a financial currency crisis. Caused by two financial amateurs Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng who have a strange flawed ideology of low tax for the rich and trickle down economics for the rest of U.K. citizens? They had written about their ideas in a book called “ Britannia Unchained”.
Bank of England had to step in to buy U.K. treasury bonds to prop up the Pound and to increase bank base rates. Which is a double whammy neither of these two amateurs have been seen anywhere to steady the financial markets. Increased bank base rates will impact the UK mortgage market. People not on fixed term mortgages will have to pay more interests on their mortgage repayments. Why is that so bad? Because mortgage rates have been so low and people have maximised the money they’ve borrowed due to high UK house prices. Our two protagonists Kwarteng and Truss have disappeared off the stage. They both gone AWOL (absent without leave).
The financial markets are a real reality in the making and these two politicians have been found wanting. This brings us to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Allegory meaning; story, picture, or other piece of art that uses symbols to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one.”
In Plato’s Republic he’s having a discussion with his mentor Socrates. Who was Socrates? Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon.
Plato’s Cave
Imagine a group of people chained together inside an underground cave as prisoners. Behind the prisoners there is a fire, and between the prisoners and the fire are moving puppets and real objects on a raised walkway with a low wall.
The prisoners are unable to see anything behind them, as they have been chained and stuck looking in one direction—at the cave wall—their whole lives.
As they look at the wall before them, they believe the shadows of objects cast by the moving figures are real things—and the only things. Their visible world is their whole world.
What would happen if one of the prisoners were forced to leave. What would they see? Firstly the light of the sun would really hurt their eyes and it would take awhile for their eyes to adjust to the sun.
They would see a completely different reality to the shadows of the objects illuminated on the cave wall. We would say a “real reality” of colours of objects, trees, the blue of the sky the sun, birds in flight the warmth of the sun, the sound of the wind. It would be awesome and somewhat overwhelming experience a frightening experience to long life cave dweller living and experiencing a world of shadows. How would they react?
The prisoner would go back into the cave and tell his fellows prisoners what he had seen how would his fellow prisoners react?
Socrates thinks that the other prisoners would likely kill those who try to free them, as they would not want to leave the safety and comfort of their known world.
What does cave allegory mean; it’s a representation of how human beings live in the world, contrasting reality versus our interpretation of it. These two ideas reflect the two worlds in the story: the world inside the cave, and the world outside.
For the prisoners in the cave, the shadows on the wall created by firelight are all they know to be real. If one of the prisoners breaks free and witnesses the outside world, they will come to understand that as the true reality.
However, when the freed prisoner returns to the darkness of the cave, their eyes will have now been blinded by the light of the sun, and their fellow prisoners still inside the cave will believe that it is the outside world that is harmful; to them, that truth is not worth seeking.
The allegory delves into the philosophical thought of truth, and how those with different experiences or backgrounds may perceive it.
The shadows on the wall of the cave are constantly changing, so there is no stability or consistency offered for those who bear witness to them—only a false reality.
They have no knowledge that the real world exists outside of their dark cave, or even that there is a real world other than their own.
Meanwhile, the person who has left the cave will not be able to exist as they once did. In fact, they may even come to pity or feel superior to those who remain in the cave.
The allegory essentially demonstrates the conflicts between knowledge and belief and what happens to a person once they’ve been enlightened. It is an examination on the nature of humanity, and fear of the unknown.
Let’s look at some recent examples of humanities delusional way of being.
Iranian Regime of Religious Intolerance.
Young Kurdish Iranian girl called Mahsa Amini was visiting Tehran with her brother she was stopped by the Morality police for not wearing her headscarf correctly showing too much of her hair under the strict country’s hijab regulations.
She resisted arrest and was thrown inside a van with other women and beaten up by the police and her head was bashed on the side of the van. Evidently there were other women inside to witness the events? Unfortunately she died and story was fabricated by the police about her heart causing her death.
This has started country wide riots not only about woman and hijab but about the intolerance of the religious regime itself.
Russian Ukrainian War
Federation of Russian under Vladimir Putin had concocted a war with a sovereign nation of Ukraine because he wanted to have Ukraine as a another satellite state like Belarus.
He told his citizens that Ukrainians were Nazi’s and a threat to Russias existence.
Putin has Imperial objectives over the Ukraine and made statements lamenting the fall of the Russian Empire. For more than a decade, he has questioned the historical legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood and publicly insisted that Ukrainians are really Russians (“one people”).
Putin has also repeatedly accused Ukraine of occupying ancestral Russian lands and has blamed the early Bolsheviks for bungling the border between the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet republics. This is a conceptually reality in Putin’s head.
What has he done he’s invade a independent nation and committed murder genocide and destruction on a mass scale? For what a alternate reality in his mind.
US Insurrection
Trump and the great conspiracy that the last US election was stolen from him. What does he do but insight an insurrection against the democratically elected US capital building that houses the US congress and senate.
The big steal was a figment of Trumps imagination. Mental construct like the morality police of Iran and the mental construct of Putin.
Brexit
Brexit was mental construct of the right wing conservatives since Brexit we have an ideology or a mental construct of what these ideologues think the U.K. should be like. Low taxation and low welfare with many of rules and regulations to do with the environment work practices and working hours should all be reduced. The “right wing” ideology is to try and create growth and an entrepreneurial economy like a Singapore on Thames.
Now we have hard line ultra right wing Prime Minister Liz Truss who came to power by small minority of conservatives association members. Not democratically elected by the people with her chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng.
What’s happened her and her chancellor have a mental construct of reality with tax breaks for the rich and low welfare payments for the poor.
What’s happened? Reality has hit her and her chancellor smack bang in the face.
So are all these examples of the Allegory of Plato’s Cave? Plato is saying we construct reality in our heads! I would say Plato’s all those thousands of years ago in ancient Athens was correct. We all live in a mental constructed reality, until one day we are faced with an alternate reality.
That can be a very rude awaking indeed for many of us. Like the Iranian regime or like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin now Liz Truss and the conservative government. Most of us find reality hard to comprehend. It’s like a mirror reflecting reality back towards us and what we see we don’t always like!
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/today-in-focus/id1440133626?i=1000580980384
How One Woman’s Death Caused a Civil Unrest