tijaco

why we are doomed.

Inspired by: Collapse of Society | Neel + Jordan

There is barely any ambiguity in my mind at this point – identity politics is a symptom of complacency, which in turn causes the ends of empires.

Many people talk of Australia being a complacent nation, most notably Kevin Rudd. But this complacency seems to have plagued the whole Western world. Identity politics seems a symptom of this complacency. Instead of looking forward, looking to create something bigger and better than ourselves, we are inwardly focused. We focus on our own identities and how they might be benefited. We focus on politics only when it affects us, or our perceived identity. If we were focused on building something greater than ourselves, we wouldn’t be so enamoured with these identities.

Society seems like a shark in this way. We must keep moving forward, otherwise we will fail.

But society has kept moving forward. Technology is changing and progressing fast than it ever has done before. But this progress is being done by a particular few. The rest have stagnated and become self-obsessed, perhaps as a result of those significant few engaging in the progress of humanity. The complacent majority, those who feel they have no social mobility and no path towards building a better future, become indulgent in their own identities.

Rather than focusing on ourselves and our own feelings and desires, we should be looking externally, towards building something greater than ourselves. But in order to build something greater than ourselves that is constructive rather than destructive or ambivalent, we need to understand ourselves first. This understanding is separate from self-obsession. It is simply an acceptance that we are here and that we have choices.

This is a form of minimalism. We need to accept that we are here and that we have choices, but not much more. Rather than attaching our identities to parts of ourselves or our communities that we can never change, we should attach our identities to the choices that we make. Not the choices that we have made or that we will make, but the choices that we make in the present.

The decline of societies is characterised by a destructive tendency to focus on ourselves rather than something bigger. This was the case in the Roman Empire, and it took over a thousand years to get back to the opulence that once was in ancient Rome. Today, we could not fathom our world being set back twenty years, to a time before smartphones were ubiquitous and the world’s information was in our pockets.

Climate catastrophes are present in many societal collapses from Easter Island to Scandinavia. Today, we can see a global climate catastrophe a few decades out. We can envisage path around it that will come at very little societal cost. In fact, the path around it will provide us with many societal gains. And yet so long as we are focused on our own identities and continue our self-obsessed ways, we will make little progress.

Identity politics has been around for decades, on both sides of the nonsensical left-right divide. In the last decade, it has gone to a new level. People so obsessed with the colour of their skin, the parts between their legs, the people with whom they want to sleep that they forgot to look bigger. Identity politics even plagues the biggest issues of our time. People taking climate action for the approval of the tribe is cancerous.

There are actions people can take in subverting the climate catastrophe that are far more effective and far less visible. But to take these actions is to expend real effort to help build something which is bigger than yourself. If you are too self-interested, you are more likely to show up to an ineffective protest without real demands and without any real answer for why you are there.

In a society with the luxuries that we have, there is time to be complacent. It is almost inevitable that we will be complacent short of some leader to move us in the right direction. Societies rise and fall, but if you are in the society itself, it’s difficult to determine which is occurring. A good indicator is the focus of the population. Are they building something bigger than themselves, like the Chinese ethic to build a better China? Or are they focused inward, engaging in parades of self-worshipping pride marches and self-pitied unorganised outrage?

It is clear which nation is rising and which is falling. It is clear which is motivated, and which is complacent.

To turn this complacency around requires vision and a rallying of the population around a common cause. This common cause is best characterised by symbols of well-defined meaning. Nazism executed this well, and there are always lessons to be learned from the greatest atrocities.

Some individuals will move towards ideals and others tend to move away from ideals. To create some vision of a better future, we should define what exactly we move towards and what exactly we move away from. What these things are is up for debate and is a worthy debate to have. My two cents would be that we move toward a world in which people are focused on bettering the society itself and that we move away from a world in which people are focused on themselves, i.e. their identities.

If the society was founded on such a principle, it would be more resistant to these times of complacency and self-obsession. Instead, there would always be a mindset to make the world better. There would always be a floor to be raised and new stairs to climb.

I am afraid that the ecological collapse might already be unstoppable and that the self-obsessed populous will get in its own way in trying to avoid it. If we look to the past and map our own society on to previous experiences through history, our future looks bleak. But perhaps we can turn it around. That is my only wish.

putting fire restrictions on firefighters

One of the Federal Government’s key responses to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic hardship that it has caused has been the JobKeeper program. This program was supposed to provide $130bn to businesses to retain their staff through $1500 fortnightly payments. Labor widely labelled the scheme “a great idea, very poorly implemented”. Instead of directly replacing wages, the flat fee given to employers to pass on to their employees whose salaries vary only showed the Liberal Party’s incompetency. Over 2 million workers who were newly-employed casuals and migrant workers were excluded, showing the unfairness of the scheme. In saying that, the projected $130bn being injected into the economy showed a willingness of the Liberals to take onboard the concept of government stimulus, even if poorly executed. That is until months later, on a lazy Friday afternoon, when the $60bn accounting mistake was announced.

To use an analogy from the Australia Institute’s chief economist Richard Denniss, if an economic recession is a fire that we need to put out, the water needed to put out the fire is governmental stimulus. If it is applied in the right way and on the right scale, we can avoid the vast majority of recessions, including this one. The proof for that is the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan’s work to stimulate the economy meant that Australia was one of the only developed economies to avoid a recession. In this case, the LNP, having apparently learned that governmental stimulus worked, tried it in their own way. The fact that they spent $60bn less on the stimulus than was once thought means that around half as much water is coming out of the fire hose than we thought. What they did next was decide that we didn’t need that extra water and use marketing spin and household analogies to frame their incompetency as a win for the taxpayer. As Denniss put it on the podcast Follow the Money, “it’s like putting fire restrictions on the fire fighters”.

To explain why the government does this, we need to revisit economic theory and explore how the government benefits from this. The Great Depression of the 1930s was a key point in time for economic theory. Before this time, the general consensus was that market economies go through booms and busts and there is nothing governments can do about it. Then, John Maynard Keynes came along. His theory was that the government should instead go into ‘debt’, spend money in key parts of the economy to facilitate demand and get the economy back on positive momentum again. This was the general consensus for a time, until neoliberal world leaders Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came onto the scene. A neoliberal (“neo” = new, “liberal” = free market) is just a funny name for someone who thinks that we should go back to the pre-Keynesian world. This ideology is backed by virtually no evidence at all and is highly counter-intuitive when you consider how the economy works. To this day, with the exception of the United States who have neoliberals on both sides of the political aisle, this dichotomy is what characterises the “left” and “right” of economic policy.

Those who believe in “neoliberalism” are most often very flexible with their ideology. Most are willing to give it up when their friends are in danger, and this is usually characterised by bailouts, subsidies and grants for big businesses. Neoliberalism, at its core, is all about promoting big businesses. To reduce government spending is to reduce government programs, meaning the working class has even less power when interacting with the corporations. But when the corporations are in trouble, the government will still be there to help, even if it seems an abandonment of their ideology. Those in the Liberal Party believe this fantasy for a number of reasons. First is the fact that there is a revolving door between government and industry, as best reported by Michael West Media. If the politicians know that there are sweetly paid deals waiting for them on the other side, that is clearly going to influence their decision-making. A second reason is that much of the political donations and lobbying comes from big businesses. Only doing what is in their self-interest, they promote a neoliberal ideology but never forget abandon it when the time comes. Third, there is a wider propaganda machine built around the neoliberal ideology. There are thinktanks like the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and Australian Taxpayers Alliance (ATA) funded by multibillionaires with only their own interests in mind, universities and the media all funded and controlled by these monied interests. There is almost an inevitability that a certain amount of the population will genuinely believe this damaging fantasy, especially when it is so firmly in their self-interest to do so.

To explain the $60bn bungle made by the Liberal Government, all we need is the pattern of complete incompetence that plagues this party. To explain the decision to paint the mistake as a positive thing for the Australian economy, we need to go deeper into why the government believes such a nonsensical ideology. It is painted in self-interested corporations, politicians and media moguls. To change the ideology of a nation is a massive task which will incorporate changing the media landscape, the way governments and corporations interact, and the way people take part in democracy. The recession caused by this incompetence will hopefully provide some environment for change.

a vision not to be wasted

Australia has the potential to become a superpower of the 21st century. There is going to be an inevitable change happening over the next decades as the whole world starts to address climate change. Whether or not we will do enough to keep the warming below 2 degrees above preindustrial levels is debatable and is a very valid debate to have. This is clearly a problem that we need to solve and addressing it as such hasn’t seemed to have produced enough action. Ross Garnaut’s vision of Australia taking the opportunity of climate action is a different framing and an incredibly powerful one in my opinion.

Australia has some of the the best renewable energy resources on Earth. It doesn’t take long to understand this. We are known as one of the sunniest countries in the world and in Northern Australia, we have incredible expanses of land which are the among the best in the world for producing solar energy. Even in the worst parts of Australia in terms of solar capability, it is still entirely feasible to run whole communities with solar power with plenty of surplus. In terms of wind power to be converted to renewable energy with wind turbines, parts of Southern Australia are some of the best in the world. Similarly with solar, even some of the least windy parts of Australia would be feasible to run communities on wind power. To summarise – the north has world-leading solar resources and decent wind resources, while the south has world-leading wind resources and decent solar resources. This means that Australia could not only power our own increasing needs with renewables, but we could easily power 200% or even 700% of our needs with renewables.

Now, to talk about the costs. There is a difference between the payment models for fossil fuel and renewables-based energy. Fossil fuel energy needs less upfront costs, but it has lots of ongoing costs. Renewables, on the other hand, require substantial upfront costs, but the ongoing costs are incredibly minimal. It doesn’t cost so much to start digging a mine and burning it off to spin a turbine, but you have to keep paying for new trucks, more employees and lots of maintenance costs ongoing for the life of the fossil fuel power station. For renewable energy, it requires a fair amount of capital to buy a bunch of wind turbines and/or a bunch of solar panels. The ongoing costs, however, are incredibly minimal. There is very little maintenance needed because the system just powers itself. Once those initial costs are paid off, the electricity becomes incredibly cheap.

So, if Australia has massive renewable energy resources and renewable energy can create cheaper energy in the long-term, then what could we do with all of our incredibly cheap, surplus energy? This could facilitate a manufacturing boom in Australia, and this manufacturing boom will be encouraged by global markets. There are many industrial processes to create the materials that we use every day which are either emissions-intensive or energy-intensive which, if you are running on a fossil fuel-dominated grid, is emissions-intensive. The processes which are emissions intensive like steel production need technological changes in order to improve those processes and create steel in a way which doesn’t produce emissions directly. In the case of steel production, the emissions-free production requires far more energy. Where do we have a lot of cheap energy? If we act right, Australia. The processes which are energy-intensive but not quite so (directly) emissions-intensive could also find their home in Australia simply due to our very low electricity prices.

A key part to this puzzle is a chemical called hydrogen. Hydrogen has many uses, especially in a decarbonised economy. It can be made several ways. One involves gas and emits carbon monoxide and is the likely method that many politicians who are paid by gas companies will be speaking about in the months to come. It is very important that we define how the hydrogen is being made for this reason. The second method of creating hydrogen is by electrolysis of water which takes the H2O and separates the hydrogen from the oxygen. This requires a lot of electricity which, should we be powering our grid with renewables, will mean that we have emissions-free “green” hydrogen.

One reason why this is so important is that hydrogen is quite difficult to transport. There are two ways to transport it. You can transport it as hydrogen itself, but because hydrogen is one of the smallest molecules known to us, we need to first liquify it. To liquify hydrogen, you have to reduce its temperature to close to absolute zero which is around -273 degrees Celsius. This is incredibly difficult. Especially if you are in a country with lots of very cheap electricity, you are better off creating it close to the point at which you need to use it. Another method of transporting hydrogen is to turn it into ammonia, which we will talk about later, and transporting it that way. This will likely be preferable to transporting liquified hydrogen but it will likely still be better to create it at the utilisation point. But what is hydrogen actually going to be used for? One use for it is to make green steel, which I will get to. Another is to make ammonia, which I will also get to. The third use is as a transport fuel, especially for long-distance and freight travel like cargo ships and trucks where batteries are not yet feasible.

Let’s start with ammonia. Ammonia is used mainly for explosives in mines and for fertiliser in the agricultural sector. The way we create ammonia is through the Haber-Bosch process which takes hydrogen and nitrogen to create ammonia [N2+〖3H〗2=〖2NH〗_3]. This process doesn’t itself produce emissions, but the way in which the hydrogen is created often produces emissions, as noted in the paragraph above. If Australia becomes the home of green hydrogen production due to our low energy costs, and since it is quite difficult to transport hydrogen, Australia would have a strong competitive advantage to producing the cheapest, greenest ammonia on Earth.

Moving now to steel production. There are three main ways to make steel that I will explore here. The first, older method is by using coking coal. This produces CO2 emissions in high volumes and in a decarbonised world economy is not ideal. The latter, and more modern, two methods of steel production are by direct reduction of either gas or hydrogen. Producing steel by direct reduction of gas emits much less than does the older method, but there are still plenty of emissions which won’t be tolerated in the decarbonised economy. The final method, direct-reduced steel using hydrogen, is the path to “green steel”. So long as the hydrogen is produced using electrolysis with renewable energy, the only emissions produced in the steelmaking process is water. Given the stated advantages of green hydrogen production in Australia given our competitive advantage when it comes to renewable energy, we have yet another competitive advantage.

Australia is the biggest exporter of iron ore in the world, sending large amounts to low-wage countries like China for steelmaking. In the early 21st century, this supply chain made sense as we might not have been able to compete with these low wages. In a world where high-emissions steelmaking is made infeasible by government policy or market forces, Australia sees a huge competitive advantage in making our own steel. The biggest iron ore mines, the best hydrogen capabilities, and the fact that hydrogen is so difficult to transport all combine to make Australia the only reasonable place to base the world’s steel production. To do so anywhere else would be inefficient.

The process why which we create aluminium is another which becomes important in a decarbonised economy. Aluminium is known for how energy-intensive its manufacturing process is. Aluminium smelters are often set up near to power stations so that the supply of energy is strong and consistent. There are emissions produced in the process itself, but much of the emissions can be sourced to the grid from which it draws its energy. If the electricity grid in Australia is green and cheap on a global scale, market forces even without carbon pricing will make Australia the home of yet another key commodity in the 21st century economy.

This is only the start. Not mentioned here, there is also massive potential in carbon sequestration in the vast expanses of Australia, with a carbon economy already established in Europe. There is potential, and already plans, to run undersea cables from the Northern Territory to Singapore, paving the way for direct export of surplus energy from Australia to South East Asia. Producing hydrogen and exporting it as ammonia, especially for freight ships, is another potential area for research. The lithium, nickel and cobalt produced in Australian mines as well as a now-faded car manufacturing industry and workforce shows the potential for Australia as an electric vehicle manufacturing hub. The rise of automated factories and their need for cheap energy rather than a cheap workforce could even move the consumer-side manufacturing from Asia to Australia. At this point, we would be capturing all of the value-added from mine to consumer product. We would be a real force to be reckoned with.

Should these companies be structured properly, the right taxes be paid and the right social programs implemented, we could do some much needed healing to some of the marginalised communities of our nation. Solar projects, especially throughout the North of Australia should be purposed with channelling funding into better social programs for remote indigenous communities in a long overdue effort to close the gap. First and foremost, there should be sensitive communication and collaboration with the indigenous communities about cooperating to take better care of the land and heal some of the scars that past policies have created.

There are plenty of reasons for optimism in Australia to make the most of the inevitable transition to a decarbonised world economy. All we now need to do is to communicate this vision and vote in leaders who are willing to take these bold steps toward a new and fairer Australia.

a commentary on a failed nation

America is a failed state. You could easily argue it has been a failed state since around the end of March when coronavirus really started to ramp up and you saw that the Trump White House was going to do nothing constructive about it. Now, there are what looks like millions of people in the streets protesting the death of George Floyd. If it wasn’t a failed state from the pandemic, it is certainly a failed state now.

But in all of the media coverage I have seen of the protests, they all seem to connect it all back to the one issue of racist police brutality. I am not saying that racist police brutality isn’t a problem in America – the stats reflect that it is a massive problem. But the size of these protests points to something a lot bigger than that singular issue. You cannot start such a large fire without a lot of fuel. The killing of George Floyd was the spark, but there is far more fuel to this fire than racial issues in the US.

Their systems are more than broken. They are on their last legs. Inequality in the United States is at record highs. The social security net is horribly weak. No guaranteed healthcare. A university sector that is either prohibitive or puts students in eternal debt traps. There are vast homeless communities around Los Angeles that are essentially slums. All this, in the richest country on Earth. All this before the pandemic.

Through the pandemic came the biggest shift of wealth in United States history, as if there were any more wealth to shift from bottom to top. Trillions of dollars in bailout money for huge corporations, many of whom probably either didn’t need it or shouldn’t have needed it. And what benefits were there for the working class? A $1200 check. Crumbs of crumbs to get them through the biggest financial downturn since the Great Depression. In the months to come, whenever the despotic president decides to declare the pandemic over and the ban on evictions and foreclosures ends, we can expect yet another crisis.

Add on top the fact that many workers are being sent back to work without any protective equipment, without adequate testing and having virtually no choice. If you have to pay the rent and you only get paid when you arrive at your job, what choice do you have? For many, losing their job means losing what little healthcare they have. They are being forced to work during a pandemic so that they still get their healthcare to treat them when they inevitably catch the virus. The end of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and his insistence on playing nice with the Democratic Party has likely disenfranchised even more people. Even the hero that they could rally behind is making his own concessions, with a fear that he might be seen as the next Ralph Nader, aka a principled politician unwilling to compromise on what’s right.

If George Floyd’s killing is the spark, the Black Lives Matter protests the kindling, then perhaps it could trigger a more substantial fire with some more substantial changes. But that is one problem that this movement has, at least for now – there doesn’t seem to be an end goal. Without an end goal, and especially without a clear leader to communicate that end goal, chances are it will register as a blip on the radar of history, even if having to be stamped out by military intervention.

There are a few leaders who could stand out in a way that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King did, and they are beginning to show their faces. Speeches from rapper Killer Mike and from renowned political icon Cornel West have provided the first glimpses of this much-needed leadership.

Cornel West’s interview on CNN painted a picture that is rarely presented on their corporate screens. Making the point that that the Democratic Party has taken the strategy of “black faces in higher places” who have gone on to become “too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to the militarised nation state”, undoubtedly referencing Barack Obama and the lack of change seen under the only African-American president. What Cornel West speaks about is not the singular issue of racist policy practices but to the system as a whole as one which saps the meaning from working class lives.

In January, a world war seemed on the cards. Now, a second US civil war seems more likely. What comes next for the United States in uncertain, but what we are now seeing is the beginning of the end of an empire. The decline seemed obvious through the pandemic, but still progressed at a gradual pace. In the last week, the decline has shifted into overdrive.

Jack Lang. Gough Whitlam. Kevin Rudd. What next?

In a period of seemingly forgotten Australian history, we came as close as we ever have to civil war. It was the Great Depression in Australia and the federal Labor Party and Jack Lang’s New South Wales Labor Party were at odds. With loans being paid back to the British, Lang preferred to defer interest on those loans and engage in Keynesian economics – an innovative feat at the time – with those funds. At a time when the federal government was only a few decades old, the most populous state’s Premier had far more sway in political debate than they may have now. Jack Lang’s refusal to release funds upon the federal government’s order led him to his dismissal. On the night of his dismissal, Lang’s police force was told to be prepared. On the brink of civil war, Lang decided to keep the peace and walked away from the fight, fearing the bloodshed of a battle with a newly formed national military. British imperial interests rose above Australian sovereignty.

Decades later in 1975, Gough Whitlam was the next casualty, this time with a new empire involved. As was expertly chronicled in William Blum’s Killing Hope, ironically available on the CIA website, the US involvement in Whitlam’s dismissal is not often talked about in mainstream media. This would be because the US influence has never left. The United States’ problems with Gough were numerous. He threatened to pull troops out of Vietnam at which point the CIA considered him equivalent to the Viet Cong. His suspicion of Pine Gap took the US distrust even further – and he was right to be suspicious as they were spying on his own government from within his own territory. The third strike may have been his desire for Australia’s mines to be nationalised in order to fund his many programs that would support the working class. The United States has never taken well to a country taking control of their own resources, with the list of examples too numerous to even begin. And so, on 11th November 1975, only weeks after 'the big fella' Jack Lang’s death, Gough Whitlam was sacked and media narrative that Gough was running the country out of money began. The doings of the faded British Empire in this saga are yet to be revealed, with the letters from the Queen to the sanctimonious prick John Kerr to be revealed in the coming weeks. But do not let the media hype around these letters distract the eye from the US influence in the events of 1975, and don’t be fooled that this influence is a thing of the past. Why else would the red baiting around China be so prevalent in our media today?

Kevin Rudd’s situation is the one for which we have the least evidence, but the patterns have been established and he was the ideal candidate. A man happy to negotiate with China who, let’s not forget, are Australia’s biggest trading partner, was likely the first of his wrongdoings in the eyes of the US. Much like Gough Whitlam, a desire to nationalise the mines, or at least tax them at a reasonable rate, was a second shot. It was plenty enough. Perhaps the competence shown throughout the GFC and the popularity gained from it was a third – a man that popular is dangerous when he cannot be controlled. With a CIA-aligned Mark Arbib in close quarters, a hostile media at play and sharks circling for their own political gain, Kevin Rudd was ousted in 2010. Just four years later, we said goodbye to Gough Whitlam, his memory shaded in lies as the truth of his own ousting not yet widely told.

First we had Great Britain. Next, the United States with likely collaboration from the fading Brits. Third, the US seem to have done it on their own. Now we ask, who next? A keen political observer would see that China is the next world superpower. Whether they will be a true empire is a separate question. While Western empires from the Germans, the British to the United States, have always been quite open about their ambitions of conquering the world, China seems to be different. Perhaps a non-expansionist, economic empire is on the cards. The only counter examples are Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet, but these are all regions that China has always considered to be part of China, and can be dismissed on that basis. There is little evidence for China being truly expansionist other than putting some African countries in debt traps, which in imperial terms is light work. While this could be the start of a seemingly unending cycle of expansionist empires rising and falling, the outcome is certainly far less clear than it would be under a Western power.

Whatever the future holds, Australia needs to learn its lesson and become a sovereign nation. With our renewable energy resources, in the next decades we will have the biggest opportunity of becoming truly independent since the squandered mining boom of the early 2000s. Will we learn from our mistakes and fulfil our potential, or fall back into the imperial trap?

References: * Neel + Jordan Podcast – Dumb Phrases * William Blum – Killing Hope * John Pilger – The British-American coup that ended Australian independence

a rant on some powerful tools

People generally act in their own self interest. This is quite clear when I observe politics and the general community’s reaction to certain political events. It always seems that the only time someone will really take an interest in politics is when it affects them personally or some part of their identity group. The coronavirus crisis has brought this to the fore. Countless people who I had never seen showing interest in politics or any part of their democratic duties were now up in arms, they had an opinion on something. All it took was the feeling that they themselves might be affected.

It is clear once you start seeing the world through this lens that people don’t really care about anything other than themselves and their perceived identity groups. This isn’t a cynical statement; it is just true. The same concept applies for people good and bad, smart and dumb – but the way it is expressed changes. It could be policies that directly affect them, such as a tax rise or a cut to their pensions. It could be policies that do not directly affect them but might affect their identity group. An example of this might be someone who came from a working class background but who makes far more money than the minimum wage, fighting to raise the minimum wage. While it doesn’t affect them directly, it does affect their perceived identity group – that’s still self-interest.

Then we can extend it to very indirect effects. Take the example of climate change. Many people, like it or not, only believe that there should be more action on climate change because it will improve their social standing. They do not actually understand much about how it works and so they probably cannot stand strong in a debate against a sceptic. If you are believing in something so strongly which you cannot even explain succinctly, there is clearly more to it. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we dismiss climate change activists on their face. They are clearly correct that more action needs to be taken. But the fact that they cannot explain why they believe what they believe means that in all likelihood, they were simply born at the right time, in the right place, surrounded by the right people and jumped on the right bandwagon. This will sound an extreme statement but it is true: if they were born in a very different time, in a different place, surrounded by different people, these people without real critical thinking may have been followers of the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany.

My point is that we need to be conscious of why we are doing certain things and why we believe certain things. There will never be a sole reason and a sole purpose, but it does help to at least think about why. Is it because you want to fit in to a certain community? Is it because you feel that you need to represent some identity group which you belong to? Is it because of your values? To understand where these beliefs come from is an incredibly powerful thing. If you start to understand where these actions come from, you can start to control them yourself and make decisions about where your actions come from in future.

We do all act in our own self-interest. I am not sure there is any way of changing that. But we can change what that self-interest is by changing how we see ourselves and how our identity is shaped. If we attach our identities to concrete things that we cannot change about ourselves – our gender, race, sexuality – then we can easily be taken by ideologies that idealise these things. If instead we choose to attach our identity to things that we can work towards, things we can change, things that are deeper and that any person can fulfil given some discipline, then we insulate ourselves from this concrete divisiveness. I believe the aim should be to identify with your values. This way, your self-interested actions will be directed in a very precise way. You will be directed towards something deep which you can share with each and every human, rather than dividing your neighbours based on surface level characteristics.

Identity politics is powerful, but it can also be incredibly dangerous. It can be used to empower, but in doing so it can also tend to divide populations. Identity politics will never cease so long as we hold our identities close. If identity politics and self interested actions will always continue, then the shaping of our identities should be undertaken with the most care. How we define ourselves shapes our actions in the minutia of individual daily activities, but also the activities and the priorities of nation states and empires.