It’s Friday night and normally fans of LSS would be getting ready to enjoy one of our scintillating cocktail revues. But we’ve come across a story that is so moving that we felt that you had to know about it. Because it casts a disturbing light on the future stabilities of all our societies and we doubt that this is just a British phenomenon.
You’ve heard of energy poverty, right? It’s been around since the 2008 crash, where people have had to choose between heating or eating, because they’re so poor. Well now a third dreadful choice has come along-they have to choose between heating, eating and keeping clean. They can no longer afford cheap essentials like soaps and toothpastes-if they want to keep eating, that is. Our link [1] to the hygiene bank will tell you all you need to know. Good people, they are.
Why does this worry us at LSS? Because it’s a clear sign that society is now going backwards. For over 150 years one of the clearest trends in human history is that people have generally been getting cleaner. It’s not as if soaps and disinfectants are particularly expensive, either. Their manufacture and distribution should be facile in a modern society. If suddenly people are getting dirtier, something somewhere is seriously wrong.
It was always our conceit that capitalism was the least worst of economic systems, in that it always ensured some distribution of basic necessities, however unequally. Its competitors, the various socialist and theological societies, have always tended to fail on this basic fact. A sure sign of the coming failure of the Soviet system was its shortages and rationing of basic items.
If our own system is beginning to show these symptoms(and others, like declining life expectancy) then that is worrying indeed. In Britain this will be a particular problem for the Conservative Party. It has been both politically and ideologically dominant for decades, pushing the ideology of low taxes and necessary inequality, along with the vast media ecosystem of newspapers, think tanks and pundits that support it. Yet all propaganda systems fail in the end: even readers of The Sun will eventually notice shortages and hardship. History has given no more guarantees to the Conservatives than it gave to the Communist Party of the USSR. Will they act in time?
[1]ttps://thehygienebank.com/who-we-are/what-is-hygiene-poverty/#:~:text=What%20is%20Hygiene%20Poverty%3F%20Hygiene%20poverty
#poverty #hygiene poverty #inequality #capitalism #socialism #communist party #islam #christianity #health
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