Treat the symptoms and the cause will go away.

Don't you ever get ticked off by pundits assuming that there are "underlying" or "fundamental" causes for everything? Why do causes have to come from underneath? What if they press down from above?

This unquestioned thought habit is probably rooted (did I say rooted?) in Aristotle or some other philosopher's work, and carried on through the likes of Thomas Aquinas and the fathers of the Church. 

With the advance of science it has taken on new guise with the discovery of the microscopic agents of disease, magnetic fields, cosmic rays and chemical reactions. 

So is a cause underlying because it's too small to be seen? Does it have to be fundamental because you need to probe "deeply" to find it? Or maybe we think it's fundamental because it allows us to frame it as a manifestation of some basic physical "law". 

Opponents of allopathic medicine will tell you that cold medicines should be avoided because they only treat the symptoms, like runny nose and coughing etc., and not the "cause". They ignore the obvious fact that stimulating the production of mucus is the virus's way of creating a warm, moist and nutritious environment for itself, inaccessible to the antibodies ferried by the blood. 

So a pill that helps dry up the mucus makes life harder for the virus. 

Remember when New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had the idea of Zero Tolerance for broken windows as a way of curbing much more serious violent crime? Opinions are divided on whether that was effective, and Malcolm Gladwell preferred the explanation that Roe vs Wade put less unwanted teenagers on the streets fifteen years on.

But you can see where I'm going. 

The hierarchical view of causality has been an unquestioned assumption which underlies (!) so much of our thinking that it generally passes quite unnoticed. It also underlies (!) the illusion of power.

I guess I should come back to that, when I've had more time to think about it.

The British Mirage

The British economy is largely a mirage. If you look too close it will disappear. Behind every loan there is another loan. A three-month rent or mortgage strike by half of Britain's poor would bring down all the banks and almost everything else with it. 

Everything else? What else is left after the big Tory divvy-up? 

When there is more money to be made by ripping out machines and voting yourself a bonus than by putting men to work; and when that money is invested either in luxury flats or commercial real estate rack-rented to fashion brand outlets and all of it leveraged to the rafters you are heading for a nation not of shopkeepers but one divided between loan-strapped landlords looking for renters and the homeless unemployed who can't afford to rent. 

Any government, left or right, will have to come to the rescue of the former by coming to the rescue of the latter, in order to rescue the banks who are hostages to the former. 

Hope that makes sense. 

Because it clearly doesn't. 

The former will be doubly gratified because with the rent money received they can lend to the government at interest (to help pay their own loans) so the govt can afford the social programs which include helping the poor with the rent. 

This hollowing out of the economy can only accelerate with AI and robotics replacing productive labour. 

Two of my friends here in France, whose job and only skill is sexing newly hatched chicks, have been put on notice that their job can now be done by a machine. It might even be an app. 

Some investor made a bomb on that and is spending it in a tropical paradise. 

I won't try to paint Corbyn as a saviour because I think the time for saving England has passed, but if he can walk back some of the damage done to England by Reaganomics and Thatcherism, then hats off to the man. 

Milton Friedman, the Iron Lady's guru, was also adviser to Augusto Pinochet - lest we forget.