simple

so I read this piece, and it seemed to sum up what i feel is just so wrong about the world. this particular part struck me:

'We all pretty much said the same thing,' Joffe recalls. 'Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don't imagine you'll be welcomed.' He remembers how Blair reacted. 'He looked at me and said, 'But the man's uniquely evil, isn't he?' I was a bit nonplussed. It didn't seem to be very relevant.'

exactly. the world is full of people who make the simple complex and the complex simple. much of life is easy to understand. people are rarely as complicated as they make out. you can mostly understand them in terms of greed and fear, it seems to me. the greed is an outcome of having evolved to survive privation--yes, that's a bit of evolutionary psychology, but the suggestion that we have a psychology that evolved to be a particular way is not ridiculous, even if you think it's wrong to conclude that women and men are how they are because they evolved in particular ways. (most theories of evolutionary psychology are simpleminded apologias for sexism, because you cannot know why we evolved one thing or another; you can only make the broadest-brush suggestions: so while we can say, i think, that we evolved to cope with privation, because after all, we must have suffered privation, and other things: our varied diet, our strong preference for fat, our adaptability, suggest that too, i don't think you can say that men are more function-oriented because they hunted etc etc.) but we don't strike me as all that complicated, although we build complicated worlds, usually pointlessly.

but, see, Blair didn't have the sophisticated tool he would have needed to nut out Iraq. he has no mind for it, because he is cunning but he is not clever, smart but not a thinking person. he can only conceive of societies as masses that follow leaders, and can be shaped as leaders want, because he has the illusion that that is what happened in the UK. it's not, of course. Blair has a monolithic sense of "good" and "bad". money good, god good, having good, going without bad. he couldn't parse Bush because he had to make him good or bad. that's not easy. i mean, is Bush bad? which is the true picture, the one he paints in rhetoric, of a man who thinks he is doing god's work, trying to bring freedom and peace, or the caricature we make of him, a puppet of oil interests, doing evil without a second thought?

i don't really know, and neither do you. maybe he's a fool; maybe he's a villain. he breaks things either way, so he's bad in that sense, but isn't it worse to intend wrong?

maybe i only think like that because i don't think i ever intend harm, but i do some from time to time. maybe i am incapable of analysing how people are without injecting myself into the equation. but i think that's okay. i shouldn't anyway be using a different standard to judge you by than i use for myself, should i? i don't think Kant actually proved that, but i think he gets a pass because we feel it.

i know what you're thinking. he is criticising Blair for taking a simplistic view of people, but he's saying that people are simple. how is he different? but however simple people are, their interplay isn't always. i mean that what they are pursuing may be easy to define in simple terms, but the process of their pursuing it may not. Blair cannot see that.

i noted that he wants to be European president, if the position involves having power. but what would he do with it? his "legacy" is to be remembered as an underachieving liar (well, underachieving may be too generous, because i suspect that his greatest lie was the suggestion that he had any ability to achieve anything for us), a glib entertainer with no core, who promised the world and delivered nothing much, a man who was only interested in the power and not so much in doing anything worthwhile with it, and finally, and most importantly, a murderer, willing to cause the deaths of many thousands of people as an exercise of that power that he stabbed and sleazed his way to obtaining.

we should not make him president of Europe. we should jail the fucker. but in this world, he will get statues, not manacles. pity.

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:21 am