Politicians always have a story that transforms this dull rather ordinary looking individual into something quite different. These people who look rather like your unimpressive neighbour claim to have charisma. They are imbued with special qualities denied to the common man. Usually these stories come from a shared stock of charismatic images. One that is constantly brought up is how hard was the politicians childhood and how they overcame immense difficulties to achieve their current position. Recently a new story has become part of the common stock of images, the politician as revolutionary. However it as a special kind of revolutionary, what they are doing is overthrowing the tyranny of past thinking. They are much like Nietzsche’s iconoclast taking a hammer to those false idols that trap people into a false way of thinking and behaving*. While Nietzsche was taking a hammer to the Gods and idols of the Judaic Christian tradition, the current revolutionaries are taking the hammer to the idols of the Social/Christian democratic state. They as did Nietzsche believe that these idols encouraged the development of a feeble civilisation, one which suppressed the great men. A civilisation that reduced all to the most mundane levels of living, great men were forced to live the life of the mundane middle which prevented from fulfilling their potential. He despised the UK a society which through its democratic system gave ordinary men the power to rule over the great or the supermen. Similarly today’s political revolutionaries believe that the welfare state has given rise to a culture of feebleness which has led to the current political malaise.

One of the most detested aspects of the social democratic state for them is the dependency culture. State benefits created a type of person that rather than be go-getter looking for work and constantly trying to improve themselves, would instead rely upon the state for handouts to support them and their families. These people were a drag on society and in urgent need of change. I think General Kitchener best epitomises this way of thinking when he objected to the introduction of pensions for war widows in the First World War. He thought this would encourage the wrong kind of man to join the army, one who wanted to get killed or wounded so he or his family could benefit from state handouts. This type of thinking is very prevalent today. Politicians constantly talk about families that live from generation to generation on benefit, families in which no one has worked. Their solution is to reduce benefits to a level that are just sufficient for human survival, so the misery of a life on benefit will be the incentive to make people want to work. This one act will change the feeble creature of the dependency culture into a go-getter that is proud to work and prides themselves in supporting their family.

The lack of evidence to support this policy of cruelty does not matter. Whenever research is undertaken into the unemployed it never produces evidence of a work shy population. One estimate suggests that there are only 33 families in which the parents and then the children have never worked. However such evidence can be dismissed when the popular media can always produce stories about inhabitants of the work shy benefit culture. It is for politicians the morality of the hypocrite they can do evil in the cause of a greater good. Misery and suffering become merely the start of a life cycle that propels the individual towards the good life.

There is one fallacy in this revolutionary logic, it assumes that there is a career path out of poverty for the work shy. However in a low wage economy it is impossible for this new generation  of strivers to move out of poverty. This is the culture in which the strivers have to take two or three jobs to survive. There is little scope for such people either amassing the savers to improve their life circumstances or shave the time study to achieve the qualifications to improve their life chances. What is wrong with our society is not the people but its lack of opportunities? The economy is designed or structured to produce few winners and many losers. In an unfair society which denies an increasing majority of the population the opportunity to live a decent and civilised life, what is needed is a story to justify this unfairness, a story that turns moral dross into moral gold.

One is that told by our new generation of revolutionary politicians. They believe that it is the culture of the welfare state that has produced a generation of the feeble minded. People who lack the drive and initiative to improve themselves. Demolishing the welfare will be the shock these people need, it will transform the general population.  There will be a few degenerates that will be mired in poverty, but the rest will the strivers and achievers. The latter group will be the winners who will be rewarded with the material rewards that characterise the good life. This story has the virtue of demonising the poor as deserving their fate, a just return for their lack of drive. It’s a persuasive story but one that has little foundation in reality. In an unfair unjust society even the hardest working of the strivers can be denied a good life.

There is another story circulating about the unfair society and that is that it the natural outcome of a  the meritocratic society as suggested by the writer Toby Young and the sociologist Peter Saunders. Evidence shows that the IQ scores of the middle classes exceed those of the lowest classes. The argument is that higher income is the just reward for possessing the greater intelligence. However there is doubt that can be cast on IQ as a measure of real innate intelligence. If coaching for the IQ test can improve markedly the individuals test core it cannot be a valid test of innate intelligence. Innate intelligence just is there it can’t be taught, if these tests were a real measure of innate and not acquired intelligence, training in these tests should make little difference to the final score.

What unites this new generation of revolutionaries is their high income. These revolutionaries don’t live in garrets or hovels plotting change, they live in big houses and enjoy the lifestyle of the affluent. It is not unusual for these new  revolutionaries to enjoy six figure incomes, profitable second jobs can be as a columnist for a newspaper or lobbyist for a city finance company. Revolutionaries don’t live the comfortable life they are driven by a desire to change the unfairness of society, an unfairness manifested in widespread poverty and misery. These new revolutionaries wish to increase unfairness, inequality and poverty. Rather than accepting the self image of these new revolutionaries they should be seen as the really are stripped of their revolutionary romantic aura, they are merely the spokesmen for the rich and powerful oligarchs. These politicians rather than ushering in a new revolutionary age are the reactionary spokesmen for a new generation of backward looking oligarchs. What they are spokesman for is a hatred of modernity.  The oligarchs associate modernity with all that they hate which can be reduced to taxation and legislation to improve the life chances of the majority, which they see as reducing their opportunity to make money. As one of their spokesman so eloquently put it, its immoral to increase taxation on the well off. Making excessive amounts of cash and not paying taxes is the new approved morality of these new revolutionaries.

*Nietzsche ‘Twilight of the Idols’