Tuesday 3rd March
And here is the voice of Authority again, commenting on the first entry Janek Smith made in what he thought was his most secret little journal…
-[Janek himself would probably describe it as a growing dissatisfaction, a slow realisation that everything is being controlled, manipulated subtly by forces beyond his understanding. What he has failed to grasp is that this may simply be the price to pay for progress. We have a stable Gov and an open and full democracy, or the appearance of one (which is just as important). Well, enough democracy anyway to make most people feel that whatever action Gov takes, ultimately it is legit and fair. And actually it is. Legitimacy, unlike most other things, isn’t conferred – it is assumed. It just might not be what earlier generations would have described as democracy. You see, ‘democracy’, as it used to be configured, kept going wrong; idiots kept being elected, amateurs were running things, everything changing with each so-called administration. It all resulted in chaos. So it had to be changed, re-configured, modified and improved. We really had no choice.
Most people, most educated people I would say anyway, feel well looked after, and that is the real achievement. What else is Gov for but to look after people, and as you must know this is not always achieved by giving them what they vote for. We have almost eradicated what used to be known as poverty. In a way it is the old Socialist dream of a benevolent world. No hunger; homes, work, edu and good health for all. It is just that we worked out that Marx got it quite wrong; people are not all equal. Far from it. Once we realised that we came up with a way of categorising, measuring and treating everyone differently. Differently, but we like to think much more appropriately.
The con-gloms too have at last learned (or been persuaded) to work together; all that competition nonsense that so dominated the last few centuries has been well and truly consigned to History. The Hypercom computers now ensure that no con-glom gets too big, and that almost everyone is employed. Even though most of their work could easily be done by, and is in fact checked by, computers; they are all technically ‘employed’. The con-gloms have realised (or been forced to accept) by the three great financial crashes in the early years of this century, that it is far better to make a smaller regulated fixed profit than to attempt to dominate the market. They no longer compete but work together to keep everyone employed, incidentally creating all these happy consumers. As we like to say, now that everyone is graded in the many strata, the carrot is the ever-dangling possibility of moving up a grade or two, which tends to keep most people in line.
The stick? That’s hardly ever used, of course. The possibility of the existence of the stick is enough to make most people accept that the carrot doesn’t actually taste that bad.
So why is Janek so unhappy in this best of all possible worlds? Why exactly has he taken the drastic and dangerous step of communicating, even to himself, his dissatisfaction? We will find out soon I suspect. He isn’t the first person to have behaved in this way. And in all likelihood he will be writing some more soon.]-