The House Always Wins

Our collective denialism about our "democratic" institutions

Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

I’ve never wanted to write this. I had hoped that people would see it for themselves. But they haven't. Remember this sentence.

Non-stop over 470 days Palestine has been pummelled and all we did was wave flags and ask for the Syrians to lay their lives for a myopic ideology which requires the deaths of Muslims to help free other Muslims. We did absolutely nothing. We watched a doctor walk into an Israeli tank and held placards on social media saying, ‘let him go! We stand by him because we are doctors too!’ and now Israel is not letting him go. Instead, they have tortured him, taken him from torture camp to torture camp and pretended he's a terrorist. Eight billion of us watching and that's the best we could do. We are a disgrace.

Modern humans are weird creatures. They do nothing to improve their condition. They are fearful and cowardly and defer to their occupiers.

Oh yes, we are occupied.

We are completely occupied by the neoliberal, western ‘democratic’ narrative that our whole life is to make as much money as we can and buy as much crap as we can so we can feel better than everyone else who has less. The crap we buy is largely useless, it's largely made by the most deplorable exploitation of earth and human, and when we toss it away a few months later, its journey is the most deplorable exploitation of earth and human. But who cares eh? As long as we can show we were able to buy something for the sake of buying it.

However, whilst feeling superior over the people who have less than us, the kicker is the whole system is designed to make us feel completely inadequate and inferior to anyone who we deem to have more than us. Which ironically isn't just the other mindless money hoarders - but also includes the poor. This leads to jealousy and the politics of hatred which the Western world are masters of.

Poorer people usually have communities, especially if they are from minority groups. It's how they survive. It also means their lives are worth living. Because life isn't about the material goods you can hoard, it's about the connections and relationships you make. It's why the rich - who have no true community and lack genuine love from others, instead creating underground bunkers and living in mansions where they have to pay people to take care of them (which communities do for free, out of love) - try and destroy community. Pure, unadulterated, malignant jealousy; destroy for others what they themselves have not got.

In the UK, since WW2, the government has done this brilliantly. For example, in East London they broke extended families and moved them away from each other via council housing. Your aunts, cousins, uncles down the street now lived miles away and gone was your free childcare, your social network, your heart, your community. Now people in the UK barely know their cousins and hardly visit their extended families. The bond is broken, the community is lost. As a result, far-right hate politics specifically targets communities: they say it loud and clear. Muslim communities, Pakistani communities, ethnic minority communities. Why? Out of boiling jealousy, the same jealousy that was inflicted on them and which destroyed their communities.

I live in the UK, and I know very well about the care home industry. It is a stain upon British people, and I do not say that lightly. A care home is not a nursing home where nurses are required. It's a house where you stick your old people. Your mothers and fathers and grandparents. In my culture, we don't do that. We honour our old and look after them. They aren't a burden. When my gran went to hospital for a couple of weeks and the doctors automatically put a DNR on her files, my father was enraged. She has never had any condition which has led her to be resuscitated before, so why were they hoping for it and planning not to treat her? Doctors? How little care for the value of human life.

The UK cares so little they're intending to pass an ‘assisted dying’ law where people with 6 months to live can pop if early if they want. Of course, no-one can tell you how long you'll have to live, and the whole thing is rife for abuse, but it'll save the NHS palliative care costs and make it a better deal for this American healthcare investors so its a win-win for the psychopaths in charge. When the Lord Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, a lawyer, raised concerns - as did many MPs - about the risks of the elderly feeling pressured to die (so their estate can be taken by others), she was criticised by a ‘Lord’ and told her Islamic beliefs were driving her decisions and she cannot allow them to dictate over Britons. Even in this British politics tried to race bait and make out a Muslim woman proposing that the old and ill shouldn’t feel pressured to kill themselves when they are in the most vulnerable stages of their lives, was demonised as those ‘backwards Moslems.’ If ‘forward progression’ is the pressuring of the vulnerable to die, and you get angry when a minority says it's not right, you really are beyond help.

Western neoliberal extremism - where we are right now - does not care for the value of human life. Lives are nothing but throw-away things used for the rich as their playthings or to exploit. It would have been kinder to end things in Gaza quickly but no, the Israelis exploit Palestinian lives so they can sell their weapons at a premium as ‘battle-tested’. They starve them and laugh on their sick Telegram channels that they'll soon be eating each other, treating them as playthings for their own perverted games.

We are so occupied that we follow like lemmings. We don't even think. We send our kids to school without even a thought about why they may be learning. Kids go to school to learn the basic building blocks so they can work for someone else for the rest of their lives. They learn nothing else of any value to the betterment of their souls. You think it is a coincidence that there is a mental health epidemic among schoolkids and that school shootings are actually part of American culture?

I guffaw, actually guffaw at those who look down on people who pray to a God. What do you think you're doing sunshine?

Everyone has a god.

In the West the god is money and ego. The pursuit of the mighty dollar has entrapped the majority into slavery. Mortgage slaves, loan slaves, energy slaves, insurance slaves. A premium on simply being alive. So entrapped by the worship of money of the exploiters that we have no choice but to pursue money as the exploited; it is the sole goal of the main part of our days. We ogle celebrities as if they are Greek gods and wish to have what they have and be as they are - to be man in the image of god.

The money god requires ruthlessness and the trampling of your fellow man to obtain him. Exploitation, tax avoidance, ‘legal’ corporations to avoid personal accountability for unethical, immoral acts, interest, landlording, patent trolling, political ‘lobbying’ aka ‘legal’ bribery.

The god of ego says your subjective opinions are greater than facts. In our modern world, it does not matter how many facts and how much evidence is presented, subjective opinions matter more than fact. In the UK, the far-right - fuelled by Elon Musk - is trying to ignite a war against Muslims with the lie that they represent the grooming gang problem in the UK. The facts are that white grooming gangs represent a far higher proportion than any other ethnic or religious group. But those fuelled by hate and jealousy do not care. Facts do not matter. We truly are in an age of, “believing is seeing” not “seeing is believing.” We see what we want in anything and everything. Our egos are our gods, and our gods disdain the truth. And the young women victims, groomed and exploited? They only count if it wasn’t a white man who did it.

The God of religion asks for kindness to your neighbours, to turn the other cheek, to reject the exploitation of others and to never oppress.

Yes, I guffaw at those who think they have no god.

The greatest trick played by the Western Empire is to create such an aura around their ‘democratic’ governmental structures that their populations believe that despite the mountain of evidence showing they have been exploited by charlatans, that they nevertheless still work. How can they work, if they have been overtaken by charlatans? Surely that alone is a design flaw in itself?

The UK has a law enacted by said charlatans allowing the PM a complete defence should he agree to put the interests of a foreign state over that of the UK.

The US government - ostensibly protectors of the Constitution - has ignored it completely and trampled all over it. The First Amendment right to free speech, freedom of press etc, has been sh*t on by Josef Biden. TikTok is banned. And now you are not allowed to criticise Israel. Which makes sense when you realise that Israel wields enormous power and was the de facto leader of the US while Biden, clearly struggling with cognition at times, could barely string a coherent sentence together. So while California residents get $770 to help rebuild their lives after their homes burnt down, the money Biden has given to Israel during their genocide is equal to more than $1,850 per person. And the Israelis get free healthcare too. The call is to donate to the California wildfire victims, but record-breaking ‘aid’ to Israel is codified into the law books. AIPAC doesn’t even hide that it bought this election. Americans, your country has been bought by foreign interests and you still think your institutions are hallowed?

Don’t even get me started on international law. We should all by now, know what a complete joke that is.

The truth is, in much of the West - in particular the US and the UK - our institutions have been completely compromised and are going in directions that the populaces do not want. The populaces have two methodologies within their “democratic” systems to hold these institutions to account. They are:

• Elections - every 4/5 years

• Through courts

The problem with elections is that they come around relatively slowly. But worse than that, if there is no representative or group presented that is different from the status quo, then the only option is to vote for the status quo. Ergo, there is no choice. That is what happened in both the UK and US.

The problem with the courts is that the upper courts - the Supreme Courts in both the UK and US - are highly political. The independence of the judiciary is not strictly true. In the UK Supreme Court, judges are recommended by a committee, but the Lord Chancellor - appointed by the PM - decides whether to reject or accept that recommendation. In the US, the President makes the recommendation themselves. The higher up you go in the UK, the more judges make of the idea of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ and their unwillingness to go against laws and decisions they know are completely immoral as they defer the right of ‘law-making’ completely to Parliament. This means that true accountability for laws which actually harm the British people and/or are for the benefit of a foreign state, cannot really be challenged at all. It is also disingenuous to a degree, as the principle of ‘precedent’ in the UK creates a body of caselaw which is in fact, law-making by the courts. In any case, should a court judgment go against the interests of the government of the day (note, interests of the government, not the people), then they can simply enact a law to override it. Simple as that.

In other words, the game is rigged, and the House always wins.

Audre Lorde famously wrote:

“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Do you remember what I wrote above? “I had hoped that people would see it for themselves. But they haven't. Remember this sentence.”

I am unsure how we as the populations of two of the most powerful states on Earth, are able to deal with the situation we find ourselves in. Our institutions, as a fact, no longer serve the populations of our countries. Our institutions, as a fact, are engaging in genocide and other law-breaking activities. Our institutions, as a fact, have trampled over constitutional safeguards making them null and void. Our institutions, as a fact have sought to use brutal state violence and terror laws against us expressing our legal and human and constitutional rights.

I am unsure why anyone thinks that they can make progress within a system so corrupt. But yet, we all do. We all continue with actions which have no consequence. We think we helped bring a ceasefire? No. Our marches did help bring awareness and awakening of many of our own populations, but they did not bring a ceasefire. The resilience of the Palestinians brought a ceasefire. Our actions, on a practical level did very little or maybe even nothing to help stop this genocide.

But yet we continue on doing the same things, like a gambler at a Casino with $100 dollar bills in our pockets, telling ourselves that the next bet will win it all back.

The house always wins.

And we really need to start waking up to that fact.