I'm reading Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: Duty to Genius. The book details Wittgenstein's complete devotion to logic and truth, however his opinion swayed during his period as an inchoate philosopher. Wittgenstein fervently fought to make sense of the world and experienced deep troubles in even making sense of his ideas to himself, but he most often got there in the end.
Were Wittgenstein alive today, he'd most likely balk at big-party politics in Sweden, the European country where I grew up and live.
In 2021, important political events occurred:
- Sweden delved even farther into being the European country with the biggest growing economic and sociopolitical gulf that divides rich and poor.
- The Social Democratic party reneged their policy to never allow apartment rents to uncontrolledly change.
- The Centre Party reneged their promise to never allow the Sweden Democrats to control the state budget.
- The Moderate party reneged on their promise to not liaise with the Sweden Democrats, a party that is founded to blame immigrants. I've previously detailed their doings here. Most of the Swedish Democrat top party line is embrittled with scandal, xenophobia, and one of their very top people (Björn Söder) is next to an actual SS camp guard in this picture.
- The Christian Democratic party reneged on their promise never to liaise with the Sweden Democrats. This party is hell-bent on staying in the Swedish government as they risk not being part of the Swedish parliament after the next big state election; therefore, they liaise tightly with the Sweden Democrats. What would Jesus do? Hopefully not hook up with extreme right-wingers just to stay somewhat relevant; yet, here we are.
- The Liberal party reneged on basically all of their core values to try and stay in government. They're in the same pickle as the Christian Democrats and swim in nearly the same extreme waters.
While the Sweden Democrats continue to try and white-wash (pun unintended) their past and present into trying to make people believe they're something other than a party built on hate, racism, and xenophobia, they collaborate fervently with Moderaterna, the second-biggest political party in Sweden.
Ulf Kristersson, party leader for Moderaterna, and Hédi Fried, psychologist, author, and Holocaust survivor
This image is of Ulf Kristersson, the Moderate party leader, promising Hédi Fried, Holocaust survivor, that the Moderates would never liaise with the Sweden Democrats. This picture was taken in 2018. The Moderates started deeply collaborating with the Swedish Democrats in 2019, around the time they seem to have become aware that most Moderate party voters who left the party instead chose the Sweden Democrats.
This reminds me very much of Plato's cave metaphor; many people living in Sweden seem to think politics are alright, that it's as always: a few parties fight it out and agree on what's best for all.
Not really so, anymore.
Sweden is a country that is steeped in social-democratic values: equality for all and a strong state that provides universal healthcare, free education, and other benefits via taxation.
What Milton Friedman called the 'neoliberal experiment', the serious switching of politics for market action, was successfully implemented on a global scale by the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher governments. As a result, we now have a handful of people like Jeff Bezos, who single-handedly could end world hunger and a plethora of health crises in the world. They won't, which is part of an extreme problem. We use their services and goods, even though they're content with every single day allowing tens of thousands of people to starve to death.
Sweden has largely avoided the two-party system of the USA and the UK, until now. Of course, the liberal and bourgeoisie illusion that there is much difference between parties in most two-state nations remain: see how the USA works. For example, the difference between Bush Jr. and Obama was not great. Remember what James Madison said during the conversations to write the American constitution: 'the goal of the government should be to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.' That thesis runs right to the contemporary period.
Sweden has been ruled by political blocs before, so this two-way, black-and-white type of thinking is not new. What is, on the other hand, new in Sweden, is the extremely sudden shift of fundamental values for some political parties. The parties I mentioned in the bullet points above have mercurially shifted politics that would usually only be enforced through dictatorship.
Instead, we now only need to swipe down a couple of times on a party Instagram page to find diametrical thought systems. Oh, wait, they've deleted them. Oh, well.
Except, it's not oh, well in any sense of the term. Lethargy must be fought, tooth and nail.
The Moderate party now try and toe the Sweden Democrat line by using gang criminality as one of their main propaganda points in Sweden. One of their current propaganda posters states that 'Gang criminals won't be committing much crime when we double sentence times', or something to that effect.
To criminologists and other people who care for science, decades of intellectual work has cemented knowledge that threats of long-time incarceration do not deter from crime. It has no effect on people who may or might commit crime.
I wrote this post about Swedish gang-related crime three years ago. I still believe in what I wrote. It's still true.
It's also important to note that Ulf Kristersson, the Moderate party leader, has committed various crimes. From the top of my head, I think of how he used nepotism to acquire a Stockholm apartment and also of how he illegally hired a cleaner for his apartment.
Do as I say, don't do as I do.
All of this rhymes very badly with how the Moderate party don't really want to tax the wealthy and not condemn financial crime nearly as hard as violent crime, even though the implications of financial crime are far more destructive and affect far more people, even generations, than violent crime does; this naturally means that people who won't fight financial crime are after populist points, often deflecting their own personal and party problems.
By the way, violent crime is - year on year - going down in Sweden, statistically speaking. This is of course not spoken about by the Christian Democrats or the Moderates, and certainly not by the Swedish Democrats, whose entire political worldview is based on blaming immigrants (not from the Nordics) for our problems.
It's funny to see how parties with 'democrats' in their name are the ones who most anti-intellectually are into limiting how 'others' live.
Jimmie Åkesson, the party leader of the Sweden Democrats, joined his party at a time when they were known for their catchphrase 'Bevara Sverige svenskt', which translates as 'Preserve a Swedish Sweden'. He did not join to change the party. He is friends with several members of white-power band Ultima Thule, whose drummer, Ulf Hansen, openly has claimed that 'the white race is under genocide'. Never forget how the BBC questioned Åkesson's so-called ethics in this interview, which until and after that point has rarely happened in Sweden.
Don't forget how William Petzäll, parliamentary representative for the Sweden Democrats, experienced drug problems and was then shunned and abused by his own party, and ultimately died from a drug overdose at age 24, in the year 2012. Fast-forward three years, and Jimmie Åkesson is seen in a TV couch talking about his gambling addiction. He was not shunned, nor abused. On the other hand, the Sweden Democrats ethics department is mercurial, built to fit their needs. N.B.: treating someone badly for any kind of addiction is abhorrent behaviour.
Do as I say, don't do as I do.
Speaking of ethics, Ebba Busch, the leader of the Christian Democrats, was this year sentenced for grave defamation. When she held a press conference on the matter, she extremely bizarrely enough told everyone who wanted to comment on the matter to 'donate money to all of the organisations work to prevent the sexual exploitation of children and to fight pedophiles in Sweden'. Words escape me in trying to describe her mental debacle. She also said, 'I confess to a crime that I, in my heart and soul, believe that I'm innocent of.' In 2016, she wanted harsher sentences for libel crime.
The typical anti-democratic pattern recurs: our rules are here for you, not for ourselves.
When Ludwig Wittgenstein went into the First World War, he asked to be assigned to that most dangerous of places: the observation post. In a diary entry, he wrote this:
Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. Maybe God enlighten me. I am a worm, but through God I become a man. God be with me. Amen.
He was shot at. He collected his thoughts. He started formulating them.
Undoubtedly, it is the knowledge of death, and therewith the consideration of the suffering and misery of life, that give the strongest impulse to philosophical reflection and metaphysical explanations of the world.
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Wittgenstein had Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus published in 1921. This is a work of immense and profound importance in many fields, not just philosophy. If Wittgenstein had not been part of the military machinery of World War I, the book would likely only have dealt with logic. Instead, the nearness of death that he came to experience profoundly affected him and his writing. This nearness to life (as with death) is what is needed of humanity at this very precise point in time, to act with vigour as never before, to avoid extinction.
We are at a precipice. There are choices that must soon be made to secure the survival of humanity, or we will soon, as a species, perish, and with us take the lives of countless other species. One foundational building block to make this happen is the universal knowledge that every life has equal worth. Once we recognise this, we can start to redistribute wealth, quickly deal with dismantling and remanaging what is currently killing us: capitalism, xenophobia, and extreme disparities between groups of people.
The climate catastrophe must be dealt with in more than revolutionary ways:
The first thing to say about the COP26 conference is that it demonstrated, yet again, the breathtaking capacity of high-level diplomats to discuss issues of human survival almost entirely disconnected from reality. For example, it was considered an achievement of the conference that, for the first time, the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy was officially recognized as a cause of climate change.
The only way that we can consider this progress is in relationship to the flat-out absurdity that the previous 25 COP agreements had all failed to acknowledge the long-established reality that burning fossil fuels is responsible for producing about 75-80 percent of the greenhouse gases causing climate change.
Robert Pollin: Polychroniou, C.J. 2021. “Chomsky And Pollin: Protests Outside Of COP26 Offered More Hope Than The Summit.” Truthout. November 22, 2021. https://web.archive.orghttps://web.archive.org/web/20211202063125/https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-and-pollin-protests-outside-of-cop26-offered-more-hope-than-the-summit/.
The most important thing to do, is to remember that The People have The Power. And The People can take The Power back at any moment.
The “last, best hope” in Glasgow was not the conference of 120 world leaders, but the competing event that was taking place in the streets outside. They are the ones who can compel the powerful in government and corporate headquarters to act expeditiously to use the options available to avert the race to destruction and to create a better world.
C.J. Polychroniou https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-and-pollin-protests-outside-of-cop26-offered-more-hope-than-the-summit/