Them The 1%

We live by stories, but we don’t always see them as such. For many, Jesus being the Son of God is not a story but a fact. And for others the scientific narrative is a fact. Some astrologers talk about ‘planetary energies’ as though they were a fact.

But they are stories, they are human inventions about how the world is. We need those inventions. But we also need to see them for what they are.

After my last posting, Ruan Mor commented that we have currently “the austerity story (austerity for some while the rich carry on trousering vast amounts of money).”

There is a certain truth to this story, enough to make it a ‘fact’. But it is also simplistic and has a very obvious ‘bad guy’ in it, like any good story. It feeds into conspiracy mythology, where you have a very small number of people – usually a shadowy cabal – who secretly control the country, if not the world. In the case of the austerity story, however, the secret is out, for it is the bankers and other wealthy people who have ruined everything and continue to do so. Their excessive salaries prove it. And the austerity is not just for some but for the ‘99%’.

A corollary of this, at its most simplistic, is that the government spending cuts are wrong. It’s as though it’s the bankers and wealthy people who should be suffering, not us, as if they could afford to pay off the country's debts. (I think it's quite right, though, that they should be asked to pay more than they do.) I find a lot of the protests against the cuts hard to understand. It’s basic housekeeping, and it has to be done, because we are in debt, for whatever reason. I can understand protests against specific cuts, but even then you need to suggest what should be cut instead. But the protests aren’t usually like this. The cuts often seem to be billed as unnecessary per se.

People are suffering, not dreadfully, but they have less to live on, and there are more unemployed people. The future seems very uncertain. And it is true that many bankers' salaries are excessive and have been for some years. This is just as true of many CEOs, but it is the overpaid bankers who are the target of so many people’s wrath.

If we took the excess salaries of these bankers and CEOs and distributed the money around the country, it would not go very far. Their salaries, in themselves, do not make other people poor. But those salaries are symbolic of a system that has been allowed to get out of balance. And who allowed that to happen? If you live in a democracy, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t elect a government and then blame the politicians, or the bankers, when it all goes wrong.

For many (myself included), the bankers salaries are representative of what has gone wrong. But that doesn’t make the bankers bad people, or make them the cause of what has happened. I was watching an interview with the actor James Earl Jones. And he said that top actors, including himself, get paid far too much, and that is at the expense of the other actors in the film. But, he said, you don’t therefore refuse your salary, you take what you are paid. Some bankers undoubtedly have been and are greedy and corrupt. But most of them, like everyone else, do their job and take home their pay, and if they are capable and ambitious, they take home a lot of pay. That is the way the system works in all industries, for better or for worse.

Why is Italy in such dire straits? It wasn’t the bankers. It was the government spending too much, because it suddenly found it could borrow cheaply due to its membership of the Euro. And no doubt a lot of that spending was to make the government popular so it would be re-elected, which it duly was. The Italians enjoyed having a corrupt clown for a leader. They knew he was a corrupt clown, and they kept electing him. And the US elected Bush. You could say the reason Italy is in trouble is because it is a democracy. If you had an authoritarian government like China, that didn’t have to be so worried about popular opinion, then the country would not have run up the same debts.

No, it is not the bankers who are to blame. Bankers are bankers, and we need them. It is we the 99% who are to blame for electing governments who didn’t properly regulate the financial system and who overspent and who allowed far too much wealth to be concentrated in too few hands. But we were enjoying the boom times too much to question them.

In the 30s, after the last Uranus-Pluto square, a load of regulation was brought in to control the financial system and avoid another crash. In the 1990s, the regulation was repealed and within a decade or so the same thing happened all over again.

Personally, I’m not big on blaming, it doesn’t necessarily help. But there is a shadow projection going on right now, and it comes from the liberal left, which can make it hard to see, because they think they’re the nice guys. But once you have a collective scapegoating going on, then you have a mob mentality and all sorts of awful things can eventually come out of it. The phrase "we the 99%" says it all: it is the 1%, the rich people, who are the problem, the bad people. And actually it's not, it's all of us collectively, we've fucked up like we always have and always will, and we're looking for someone to blame.

This is the nature of the idealism of Uranus-Pluto. There is good in it, but it also polarises, it divides, it demonises. We worship wealth and we condemn it. What is needed is reform, not revolution. Camping out in the middle of cities isn’t going to do it, because where are the politicians who reflect that mood? Is the West really so enervated from decades of good living that all it can manage is a minority silent protest with no clear message? The Arab world has taken the bull by the horns and overthrown its dictators. We do not need to do that. But we need their energy, and we need to vote in reformers.