Analysis of the viral video “My Tram Experience”

Sunday 04 Dec 2011

Today's Sunday Telegraph has drawn my attention to a violent racist video called “My Tram Experience” which has been watched by over ten million people over the last week on You Tube. I have gone blue in the face taking about growth models and economics and finance, it's time for more human interest stories.

When I stated this web site I wrote a lot of sort of elite toolkit articles such as: concepts in technocratic scientific development, why liberal democratic ideology is failing, post-capitalist economic models, investment strategies, financial crisis crisis handling, uk growth models etc. Perhaps these articles will one day find an audience, but they have served their purpose as far as I am concerned, and I have gradually moved past them onto more core problems.

Some examples of my more philosophical style are Steve Jobs and Eastern Philosophy and Plato's Gogias and the problems of journalism. I used to be obsessed by geopolitics and economics for the sake of these things, whereas now my primary interest is watching the intellectual progression of mankind and trying to teach idealism. For example, over the last couple of weeks (since the problematic German auction), the Financial Times has published a whole series of articles saying the Eurozone will break-up unless the ECB starts printing money and buying Club Med bonds in the secondary market. The Telegraph picked on on these stories, but sensed the unwillingness of the Germans to bail everyone out, and consequently started writing articles about how the Eurozone was certain to break-up and how disastrous the consequences of this will be for the UK economy. However, short term events caught both of these newspapers out. Merkel's fighting talk about federal oversight of government spending impressed the makets, and the pressure in fact eased instead of intensifying, so the Euro consequently rallied, Club Med sovereign bonds recovered a little, and stocks went up a lot. For a philosopher such as myself, who can see through all the smoke of claims and counter claims, what is interesting about all this is how the failure of their prophesies impacts the minds of the journalists who make them.

The Telegraph today has a nice article saying the Eurozone crisis is a bit like a Clint Eastwood film. Imagine a bunch of sombrero wearing Mexican bandits at a table playing poker. A preacher, played by Clint Eastwood, walks into the bar, takes off his dog collar and straps on a gun belt. Then he walks over to the poker table and joins in the game. After a while the bandits are loosing, and then he lays yet another another full house with aces high down on the table. The whole bar freezes in fear, the Mexicans reach for their guns, the preacher goes for his. Everyone else ducks, they don't know who is going to live or die, and most of all they are terrified of being hit in the cross fire themselves. The Telegraph says Merkel is playing this kind of live or die Clint Eastwood style moral high ground gun battle poker game with Club Med, and meanwhile the poor British drinkers in the corner have to drop everything and hide under a table.

So the Telegraph journalists are like patriots who wale at the damage Merkel's high stakes game is doing to their economy. They turn a blind eye to her success and their failure in predicting break-up, they just sort of focus on themselves and cry out in childlike helpless anger. The Financial Times are more slick. They responded with a reality distortion field, they claimed the markets didn't rally because they loved Merkel's poker game, but rather because Draghi hinted that he might give some help behind her back. I heard Philip Stephens on BBC radio sounding like a know it all intellectual giving out a lot of wink wink inside track on Draghi money printing which is basically a lot of nosnese.

I prefer the Telegraph's response because it's less full of spin, but it's still non-sense because the UK's appalling economic outlook actually has little to do with the Eurozone. Germany is in the Euro and still growing, the US reported good numbers last weeks. Will Hutton at the Guardian comes closer to the truth of the UK's situation in an article today saying: "George Osborne has no idea how to rescue the economy – but then who has? Even for battle-hardened observers of the British economy, the landscape portrayed by last week's autumn statement was shocking. Now there is official acknowledgment that a country burdened by bank assets five times its GDP and chronically poor productivity is being dragged into the deepest and longest economic setback in modern times – with awesome implications... It could scarcely represent a bleaker picture. In the 1930s, Britain had an empire to fall back on as a protected market to help support recovery; in the 1970s, North Sea oil was to come to our rescue; in the 1990s, the great credit boom seemed to solve the economic question. Nothing like that is going to happen now... What is going to make the years ahead doubly fraught is that the ideologies that used to provide the basis for our democratic discourse have been as torched as the economy. Socialism, certainly as conceived and practised over the past 100 years, is no plausible answer. But equally, nobody can dare argue that the solution is to press ahead with yet more of the free-market capitalism that has laid Britain and the west so low... An ideological vacuum coincides with the most testing economic times for decades. We need vision and visionaries – but what we have is journeymen espousing bankrupt world views."

I now realise that this search for the psychology behind the reporting is the right way to read newspapers. I don't look for solutions to the problems of truth and justice in newspapers, but just to understand the evolving zeitgeist. UK newspapers provide a sort of birds eye view into human nature in the UK. Even the zeitgeist itself is uninteresting, all that really matters is how it is changing. At the top sit an out of touch elite making more and more unbelievable excuses like the Financial Times journalists in the example above. On the right, represented by the Telegraph above, there is a degree of greater honesty, but really they are just externalising their failure. On the left, represented by Will Hutton, the scale of the disaster is beginning to blow their minds, but they are still caught up in self-deception because it's absurd to say "we need vision and visionaries but none can be found". Of course there is vision around, I am on this on this web site and China is lit up in lights like a super nova blazing across the world. The problem with Will Hutton is that he is an ideologist, he can't embrace China's vision, or mine, because he thinks it is offensive, and he thinks our idealism is offensive because he unworthy.

The basic problem that the Financial Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, and the UK generally have is a lack of "shame", and as Plato explained in the Gorgias, if that shame fails to develop the endpoint is untreatable tyranny. When you feel shame burning through your heart and mind you tone down your rhetoric, you loose your viciousness, you become soft and easy to work with, and when you are in a state of humility and piety you can see the divine vision hovering above you. If you look at the UK papers carefully you will see the lack of shame oozing out of their writing. Look carefully and you will see it in its most toxic elite shamelessly deceptive form in the Financial Times, then in its self interested fighting anger form in the Telegraph, and then in its hysterical helpless form in the Guardian. On this web site I describe the UK as the epicentre of ideological nemesis, but not just because David Cameron is lost, but rather because the whole country is sinking in a lack of shame.

Look, I am English, I don't want to say we don't have some good features. But we are so badly off course we are sailing into oblivion, and although we are famous for self criticism, our "it'll be alright on the night" "carry on" optimism is actually a defence mechanism that often allows to us avoid facing our demons. What demons? All demons have their roots in the same evil, a lack of idealism, it just comes in different forms. Describing what is wrong with the UK is a huge task, but quickly we could point out an obvious example, for example, the UK is famous for nimbyism (think of John Major's Church Of England style vision of warm beer and cricket). We could say were we to try and solve this sickness we would become more like Victorian idealists and less like muddle headed liberals. We could say that were this psychological transformation to begin taking place we would see less cringing weepy close ups of peoples faces on the BBC, and more panoramic screenshots of bridges and railways. Our kids would stop reading the Encyclopedia of the Human Body by Dorling Kindersley with its soft sentimental typefaces and engaging pictures, and switch to the sort of austere looking text books people used to read two hundred years ago. I am talking about massive psychological deterioriation of English personality, something so radical it will take enormous amounts of pain to make people reform, something that is so far from our current political debate it is mind blowing. Think about the UK compared to say Italy, we are at the forefront of corruption.

So now I am going to talk about the video called "My Tram Experience". If you haven't watched it do so now, then come back. It's set on the London underground, and it's about a woman who is suffering economically finding herself surrounded by people of all colours and tongues saying: What the hell are you all are doing on this train? Go home to your own countries and leave us alone! It's pretty disturbing, it has a lot of swearing, she is not a very pious woman.

I showed this video to my wife and asked her what she thinks. She has seen a few bad Brits on holiday, she calls them "drinkers", and her first reaction was "oh lovely England again!". Then she said the scary thing is that in a way the woman the right, although she is also wrong.

I said why is she right? She said it's supposed to be England not Africa, the people who say multiculturalism has gone mad have a point. I said why is she wrong? She said people should be free to live anywhere they like. I said look justice is not half right and half wrong, you can't contradict yourself. She said don't give me another one of your lectures about "what is" and "what is not"! I said no this is a simple example of two "what is" principles contracting. On the one hand you feel England should be pure, on the other hand you feel people should be free to make it impure. That's what Socrates calls a self contradiction, the secret of wisdom is to work out what part of you is wrong. The part of you that is wrong is bad, it is the antithesis of idealism, it is self interest. I don't often excite my wife, but I could feel her emotion caught in two nets tearing her mind in two.

So then we got into a discussion about why the woman is, in a way at least, right. She talked about jobs, she talked about crime, she talked about culture. The way she talked I felt she was circling round something, some big issue that she couldn't quite bring herself to point out, and out of which arose an infinity of augments.

Then we talked about why the woman is wrong. She said some people are born in terrible countries and want a better future, they should be free to do marry whomever they want, they should be free to go wherever they want in search of jobs.

I said that's lovely but tell me do you think all people are the same? Do you really believe in this idea of human equality under one all embracing god? Do you remember that third world holiday we went on, it was lovely in the traditional sleepy old village, but when we went into the city it was full of grime and garbage and everyone was trying to rip us off? She said they were cockroaches. I said do you let cockroaches into you kitchen, or do you force them to live outside the house? She said outside of course.

Once she was fired up in this way I went though a list of countries starting with Somalia, and she called them all cockroaches. Then I threw in a bomb shell, I said what about that holiday in Italy? She said arrogant cockroaches. I said what about America? She said fat cockroaches. I said what about England? She said drinking cockroaches. I said what about Belarus, your country? She said they're my cockroaches, and I love them.

That's the whole point about the world, we are all cockroaches, but we love our own kind. We learn to appreciate their positive and negatives, we join together and we evolve together and we become better together.

I read a comment recently by a Chinese guy who said Merkel's idea of a federal Europe is absurd. He said people who imagine different cultures can be forced into one model system are fantasists and engineers blind to human personality. There is no one perfect model, and even if there was it would be something so hypothetical and idealistic every real world society would revolt against it. In the real world each personality type needs a different model that reflects their nature. Plato said the same about his hypothetical Republic, which is why he wrote the practical model of non-utopian government called the Laws.

All my life I have been a cosmopolitian, but perhaps Aristotle's utopia, attempted by Alexander, was the work of a fantasist engineering mentality.

I don't have an answer, but I do begin to understand why Socrates never talked about contemporary political debates. You have to realise that back in Ancient Athens anyone who didn't take an interest in politics was labelled an "idiōtēs" - a private person. They were outcasts regarded as incapable of idealism and virtue, and the modern world "idiot" derives from their expression. Socrates build a system of philosophy that is like the holy grail of statecraft, yet he himself was an idiōtēs, can you understand how absolutely remarkable that was? I have made a big mistake by writing about philosophy from the point of view of real world problems such as the Eurozone or UK economic growth or multiculturalism, because people without a heart can pick up on them and twist them and turn them into a nightmare. Talking about multiculturalism can end up killing idealism instead of creating it. The woman on this video, and Anders Behring Breivik are both examples of that. The opening of Plato's Republic is set in the house of Polemarchus, a resident alien not an Athenian citizen. When Athens turned to tyranny he was executed - for being a foreigner. Philosophy should be taught in riddles, because the holy grail is for the worthy alone. Used in another way and it ends up like that film Raiders of The Lost Arc, it just destroys the world.