The G20 summit and Huxley’s dystopian pharmopsychological remedy for the coming Summer of Rage

March 31, 2009 - PRLog -- The summit, which is largely seen already as dysfunctional, is a setting where nearly all of Mayfair’s hotel's street-level windows and doors have been covered in protective blue panels for fear that the many protests planned for this week's summit could turn violent. In addition to that, the security operation was thrown into chaos when it emerged that the entire network of central London's wireless CCTV cameras will have to be turned off because of a legal ruling.

Gordon Brown, who championed the summit as his self-survival package, now looks around him at the chaos, even before ministers of the world's most wealthy countries get a chance to meet. It has been reported that President Sarkozy has threatened to wreck the London summit if France’s demands for tougher financial regulation are not met.

The regulatory changes he alludes to are those that are needed to make the financial system function. How to reform international organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, are also on the agenda and are likely to fail.

No, Flash Gordon will not be able to rise to the occasion as Master of the Universe and may well be lucky to come out of it unscathed; more likely he will be brutally battered and all alone in Bretton Woods with a picnic basket given the debt he has recently amassed for future generations to repay.

As far as China is concerned, Wu Xiaoling, a former vice-governor of its central bank, said recently: “It's impossible for any concrete agreements to be reached at the G20. We shouldn't pin much hope on it.” She argued its real purpose was symbolic: showing that global leaders were acting together to tackle the crisis.

The stars of the show, the nascent “golden couple”, are reportedly paranoid enough to bring more than 100 Secret Service bodyguards, three armoured helicopters, a dozen armour-plated cars and people-carriers; and within minutes of them landing at Stansted, the Obamas were said to be flown by either a Blackhawk or Sea King helicopter into Central London where SAS troops, who have a secret base nearby, are expected to work with US Secret Service agents to ensure a “ring of steel” round the Obamas.

Meanwhile, organisers have said on social networking sites that they plan to “reclaim the City”. Only last week 35,000 people descended on the capital from all over the country, with an anarchist group breaking into a disused pub on the fringes of the City to set up a nerve centre to co-ordinate the G20 protests. And an organisation called the “Convergence Crew” has declared that they were “almost ready for the Summer of Rage”.

The Thanatos Syndrome spoke of how whole truth should prevail and that it is a disaster when only one kind of truth prevails at the expense of another. If only one kind of truth prevails then nothing stands in the way of a demeaning of and a destruction of human life for what appears to be reasonable short-term goals. And what better one-sided truth than the financial market scams?

Indeed, this summit looks like being akin to classic Kafkaesque alienation for the world's long-suffering populace. The G20 is supposedly the meeting of political minds on the global financial crisis, one that has already seen France revert to its long-standing mistrust of free markets, globalisation, capitalism and “fat cat” bosses, with Nicolas Sarkozy adopting rhetoric that has seen him caricatured as Karl Marx. And this is just one example of the lack of consensus, with its stark pre-meeting revelations that the French do not want more stimulus packages, but a more “moral” capitalism.

In this, the French have perhaps led the way ahead of the Summer of Rage, where the financial crisis has seen record public support for strikes and street demonstrations, a rise in extreme protests such as taking bosses hostage, and a surge of support for the extreme left.

But to solve these tensions, maybe we should give a wry nod to Kierkegaard’s existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism and poetry. Or even, disingenuously, by invoking the calming effects of Huxley’s dystopian pharmopsychological remedy?

Anthony Burgess knew his dystopian satire alright when he wrote "A Clockwork Orange", widely considered to be his magnum opus, but then Huxley implied the opposite with the benefits of the Soma pill in “A Brave New World”, a ritual drink of importance taken by the early Indo-Iranians, which served in the book as a false symbol for any regime of universal happiness.

So how did Huxley turn a future, where we're all notionally happy, into the archetypal dystopia? If it's technically feasible, what's wrong with using biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether? In truth, Huxley’s visionary world was neither “brave” nor “new”, only contrived to exploit the anxieties of a bourgeois audience about Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism, which looks like what is on the agenda at the G20 summit, that is if France has anything to do with it.

Aptly, Huxley tapped into, and then fed, our revulsion at our Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning and eugenics and, by extension, the vagaries of free market economy to be discussed this week, in which "happiness" is derived from consuming mass-produced goods and, most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma.

But as perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma underwhelms. It is not really a utopian wonderdrug at all; it is more akin to a hangoverless tranquilliser or an opiate — or a psychic anaesthetising SSRI like Prozac — than a truly life-transforming elixir. Instead, soma provides a mindless, inauthentic “imbecile happiness” — a vacuous escapism which makes people comfortable with their lack of freedom.

But that’s not really the point; Huxley had an altogether different agenda in mind. He was seeking to warn us against scientific utopianism and he succeeded all too well. Although we tend to see other people as the hapless victims of propaganda and disinformation, we may find it is we ourselves who have been the manipulated dupes.  And with it, the Summer of Rage which will undoubtedly distend into anarchy and revolution if those responsible do not start to make amends and find answers to what now must be considered The Greatest Depression.

If the build-up to the G20 summit is anything to go by, we have to admit to all being duped by the triumphalism of laissez-faire capitalism, with the only winners the very group America’s founding fathers warned us to be very wary of: the bankers.

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