Roz Savage

Society and the Veil of Ignorance [Including a personal update at the end, under Other Stuff…] I was intrigued by this recent article by one of my regular reads on medium. com, Umair Haque, on this occasion writing about when luxuries become necessities and necessities become luxuries, which he claims has happened in the US

Rather than defining environmental and social issues as ‘externalities’, our approach sees economic activities as a subset of the social realm, which, in turn, is a subset of the biosphere. This view provides the basis for the emergence of a new set of pragmatic tools, flexible enough to address many of our economic, social and environmental challenges. In a recent blog post, I mentioned the stellar work being done by Polly Higgins and her campaign against ecocide (to criminalise the deliberate destruction of the natural environment). Even if you don’t know Polly, please show your support for her and her mission by signing up to be an Earth Protector, and invite your friends and family to do likewise.

Please indulge me, as we take a rollercoaster ride through the 2016 US election, Brexit, Russia, wildly unethical social psychology experiments, and the coming out of Yuval Noah Harari, to arrive at a tentative conclusion about free will, or our lack thereof. He claims that Trump’s failing businesses were propped up by Russian money, which served the useful triple purpose of laundering the money, putting Trump firmly in the pockets of the Russians, and enabling him to apply to himself the label of “VERY successful businessman” for campaigning purposes. Interview with Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, etc) and Tristan Harris, Director of the Centre for Humane Technology TH: As a magician and expert on persuasion, I learned there are hacking techniques that work on everyone, regardless of age, nationality, or IQ. Put another way, we can’t see the water we’re swimming in, and while we’re in the water we are susceptible to peer pressure, propaganda, manipulation, obedience to authority, even to advertising.

I still harbour a lingering resentment towards David Cameron, who held the referendum in a bid to lay to rest forever the European question and, not to put too fine a point on it, completely ballsed it up by: a) misreading his audience/electorate, b) running a lacklustre Remain campaign, c) not foreseeing that Europe would absolutely punish the UK as the first country to break ranks, and d) not requiring at least 50% of the total electorate to vote for Brexit, not just 50% of those who turned out on the day. Now that we’re starting to see the consequences of Brexit, as companies move their financial and manufacturing operations out of the UK, as we see the impact on funding for universities and research, as the property market slows and dips, the UK becomes the world’s biggest buyer of refrigerators as the NHS stockpiles medicines, and all the rest of it, we are beginning to understand what a post-Brexit UK will look like, and it’s not a pretty picture. Also, given that older people were more likely to vote to leave while youngsters favoured remain, the demographic shift that has taken place in the nearly 3 years since the first referendum, as old people die and young people achieve voting age, would probably tip the balance in favour of remaining in the EU. The reasons to dislike Brexit are many – even beyond the saturation media coverage (yawn), the threat of imports of American-produced food that doesn’t meet European standards, the damage to British job prospects, and the general shame of taking part in an entirely non-fact-based referendum result (the two most Googled terms in the UK were “what does it mean to leave the EU?