Friday, 28 May 2021

The decline of Western democracy. 

Recently in Britain a self-centred, would-be political genius, Dominic Cummings, denounced the Health Secretary for his lies and for both Secretary Hancock and the Prime Minister, Johnson, for their mistakes that meant 'tens of thousands' had died unnecessarily in the Covid 19 pandemic. Cummings had run the Brexit campaign, which brought Johnson and the Tories roaring into government and placed himself, for a month or two, as the guru of British politics. The guru rapidly discovered his plummeting fate. Johnson had fitted up his own holy man - himself. The 'political genius' therefore finally decided to become a rich(er) nobody - for now. Funny, if it was not so dangerous.

Here is another advisor. This one, Paul Krugman, is, unlike Cummins, the genuine article. He won the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics. He is a sustained 'New Keynesian' economist and supports Biden so far. A few days ago he published 'The banality of democratic collapse' in the New York Times. 

Cummings attacked Hancock as a complete disaster and Johnson as an 'unfit Prime Minister'. That was the main issue for the media. More interesting was Cummings's version of the three failures of the state and government that he also proscribed in his 7 hour prattle to a Parliamentary Committee. The failures were -  not accepting outside genii to run things; basing a government in peril because of its chopped up parts that ran separately under the civil servants; - and allowing the single horror of the PM to have the power to decide everything. (Both Johnson and Corbyn were called 'donkeys controlling lions'.)

Cummings sees the weakness and errors of Britain's state and government from the platform of his own brilliance (now swept away) and the dominating bureaucracy (which also stood in his way.) His main reform in answer to Britain's crisis was to set up combined leadership groups, led by a scintillated leader like himself (not elected) to 'get it done', managing the organisation over everybody's head!  

Krugman's essay offered a quite different study of western politics in the US. The incipient role of the Good Old Party, the (new) Republicans in particular, were dismantled and explained as a warning in respect of the US democracy. 

Essentially, Krugman exposed the new Republican Party as a turning point in the US. The example of this turn was the continued maintenance of Trump's central role, not just among a public layer but in the continuing leadership of the Republican Party. That leadership now overwhelmingly supports Trump's political direction, and, most significantly, the obviously hysterical notion of the so-called theft of Trump's presidential vote. It is patently obvious that the vote was not 'faked'. Yet all of the major leaders of the GOP maintain the fake. This amounts to a clear shift in the US's party structures.

The Democratic Party remains a coalition of various parts of the US (no doubt mostly directed by New York and the West Coast wealth). The GOP also retains parts of the US's capital and wealth but is doing something new. It is continuing to build a cult. And the cult subordinates the (albeit dubious) public democracy up to now in order to fuse together a permanent social block, based on racism and patriotism. The block will undoubtedly be manipulated. Today it is the fantasy horror of the Democrat's socialism. Yesterday over 40 states already reduced the franchise under the screen of 'sly immigrants' and criminal, read African-Americans. Tomorrow something else. Texas has just destroyed abortion tights. These initiatives flow into the cultist construction, setting up the 'Good Old' America that will be run by the GOP. 

What is this? It is the systemic narrowing of what previously stood for western democracy. Of course the developed West has never actually used democracy to manage and run the place. Most of the important decisions rarely found their way via the franchise from the 1920s onwards. Capital determined the flow of decisive politics. Since WW2 certain shibboleths were set up to 'manage' what certainly could not and would not be managed by any western type democracy. In the UK, first Empire, then the City of London coupled with 'there is no alternative' ran the show. In the US, world capitalist domination was promoted with anything other than a vote. In Europe, the EU and the German Banks decided europeans' fates. 

But here is today's paradox. Even Cumming senses something shifting about what Covid 19 and the new type of PM that now, apparently, stands for britishness. Krugman spells out that the republican leadership, half of republican America, are openly deciding to dump even their dubious democracy in the US, in favour of changing their main political machine. 

The paradox in the so-called democratic West is that the West has discovered that it is now that it has to find a real role in the new decade for their parliaments and senates. Global capitalism is faltering. And if the parliament and senates cannot be seriously controlled, a la Trump or the EU, then they will need to be replaced. We see the fringes of that across Eastern Europe, in Macron's mini Napoleonic domination, the shift of the British Tory Party, plus the new set of curbs on voters and the increased police powers against real democratic, public, action. One way or another states in the West will have to recoup in the fading light of international capitalism and the global successes of the past. And accept their previously carefully managed democracies, which are under greater strain than anytime since the revolutions in the early 20th Century. 

The direction is clear for the West's apparent democracy. As globalisation subsides so state measures will be needed to maintain economics via politics. If the politics do not work, what democracy remains will be shaved, dictator by dictator, to the bone. The alternative is a deep and real democracy, starting with the economy we need and want.   

The greatest political crisis

Andrew Marr was the political Editor of the BBC from 2000 to 2005. He is now running his own Sunday morning show. He is well known in the UK media but most people of course will have never heard of him. But he does have a significant role in the political world of the UK, so when when he hinted about his own views it is worth a look. When he was asked at first Marr restrained himself. 

"I cannot tell you now because I will lose my job." 

But then he did offer a general, wider perspective of his judgement of future politics. He commented in an interview with Ruth Wishart in the Glasgow Aye Write Book Festival -  

"At some point I want to get out." This is not all he said. "What I would say safely is that I think we are going to go through a period of politics - the next 20 years - much more turbulent and much more interesting and testing and challenging that anything we have seen in the last 10 years, which has been big enough." This blog agrees with that view. But Marr's predictions are countered by a big majority of modern prophets, at least in the West, who see the future as 'getting better all the time'. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, particularly those anchored in the main universities, at the top of corporations etc., claim the future is mainly bright. So we look at some of the biggest potential milestones that suggest Marr's more dubious and turbulent future. 

Consider war.

There are great conjunctions that generally criss-cross the world. In no particular order, and accepting the interconnection between and across all of these suggestions, we start with the most dangerous - the place of modern wars.

Right away there is a legion of pundits that promote denials about modern wars. Compared with the 20th century they argue that, so far, wars have been smaller and less deadly. Look, they say, humanity is becoming more sensible and less-accepting of war. The world is getting less violent. Hmm.

Oneearthfuture.org is a public US organisation that exists to oppose war. It has studied the measure of the relative comparisons of wars in recent centuries. It is well known and its particular focus is not aligned in any political direction. Recently, an OEF study was published, 'Is there really evidence for a decline of War?' The significance of this publication was an inclusion of sizes of population that was first taken into account in the number of battle deaths. The limit of the analysis was the definition of wars as interstate wars, not including civil wars. The conclusion is presented as follows; 'the last two decades (up to 2020) have indeed been more peaceful than average...On the other hand, the statistical record provides little, if any, evidence that this recent peaceful period represents a long term decline in interstate war.'

A short term absence of the major state to state war, measured for example by WW2 - and its 70 million war deaths, offers several reasons for hesitation among the rulers of big states. The death roll; the impact of atomic war; the refusal of large scale (mainly) working class people in the front lines; all of these seem insoluble - for the moment - in any sort of major state to state conflicts. As a result, virtually all of the state wars since 1945 that have happened were imperialist adventures, most of which have caused immense destruction, made the victim countries worse and barely achieved the large states' goals.

The idea that is generally led by US scholars, believing in a Pax USA, and that are now still hovering on the rather sickly 'End of History' flag, may like to consider that the US is only just now deploying from its longest ever - and its most failing 14 year, Afghanistan war.

And the dangers of war now? Certainly we can drop any idea that humanity has any current power to decide for (or against) war. Sadly, humanity does not get to decide wars. It is people like Trump, with his denunciation of China's plague, that initiate wars.  Indeed, the political rash of wars, that demonstrate, over and over again, that Western imperialism, in particular, constantly loses its imperialist wars (albeit that it often destroys the countries that finally heave the imperialists out) is therefore shifting the new war theories of the generals.  Paradoxically, large states against other large states and civil wars are, once more, preparing future agendas. In the Pentagon, the argument is now about winning a first strike in favour of keeping down the enemy, or a good, old, normal war, together with parallel threats about the nukes. (4315 US nukes now available.)

How has this new shift - preparing a full-on, major state to major state war and civil wars - happening? It is the decline of capitalism-imperialism and the subsequent waning economics of the US that is the present answer. Countries, like Britain, accepted their decline - but only after success in the Napoleonic wars and failure after 2 of the greatest wars in the 20th century. That is why the US is preparing for war.

Consider young people. 

The World Economic Forum spells out the conditions of youth today, across the globe and from the recent past. 42% of all people in the world, including children, are 25 years old or less. 18% of the world's people are 18 years to 25 years old. Nearly half of the world's young live in sub-Sahara, Africa.

In 1995 there were 200 million children in conflict areas, in 66 wars. By 2016, 357 million children were in 52 wars and conflict areas. 

In 2000 there were 377.5 million children in schools. In 2016, 263.0 were in schools.

Between 1997 and 2017 the overall youth population (above 16) grew by 139 million, while the youth labour force shrank by 35 million. 70.9 million were unemployed in 2017 and that is rising.

Despite the decreasing condition for young people, 49% saw Climate Change 39% saw Conflicts and Wars and 31% saw Inequality as their overwhelming problems. 56% disagreed that their countries considered young people's views.

There is little to add, except the growing political anger of the newest generation that, including advanced western countries, are perfectly aware of the reduction of the conditions of life that they are experiencing compared with their parents and carers.  

Consider the planet.

There is now a vast and global effort, led in action by the young, forcing the most meagre steps from the corporations and their politicians, to transform society. Such a global perspective invariably contains a number of perspectives but the increasing argument owns up the real purpose of capitalist economy and its defenders. A new version of how people could and should live is genuinely in front of daily life. It is effecting all aspects of our civilisation.

The obvious failing of the old days of roaring capitalism makes the norms of our politics and economics - our structures - more and more absurd and dangerous. There is (at the moment shielded) a fight for just who will dominate the planet. The sooner the real conditions are fully exposed, the failure and decline of capitalism, the real world wide existence of the 2 thirds who live in medium and low income nations, the danger of war will force direct action. And the realisation that the Earth and its people are the sole life that we will ever see in the universe,  demonstrates the necessity for fateful, structural change will surely break open. 

Consider wealth.

There are dozens of estimates about wealth, with all sorts of caveats. Starting (and finishing) with the Wikipedia, in 2008 1% of adults were estimated to hold 40% of world wealth. But by 2013, 1% of adults were estimated to hold 46% of the world's wealth (and around $18.5 trillion was estimated to be stored in world wide - read mainly UK - tax havens. )

This imbecilic aspect of the 'management' of a declining civilisation shrieks for itself. And the figures are getting worse. 

Consider nations.

The fundamental organisation of human activity is largely determined by classes. But two critical aspects often emerge to cloud out these facts. This is a period, which Andrew Marr has hinted, when exploited classes begin to grip and tear the false aspects offered by the ownership of the rich. The tumult he suspects 'in the next 20 years' is the inkling that the next 20 years is not just going to be quicker, noisier, with a lot of changes but also and in-fact essentially, a bitter struggle between classes. 

The aspects mentioned above include the role of the nation. Nations were truly formed in early capitalism to unify society in a common conception, with shared types of work, with types of income and expenditure, with a new and defining emergence of a specific type of personal wealth. The nation has always evoked itself to battle when lower classes demanded rights.   

But, as we see in the case in the case of Scotland and Northern Ireland, 'nation' can now be appropriated as capitalism's power reduces. In the case of the UK, the US and in some European countries, 'nations' will be part of the rolling struggle between classes - a process of many dimensions - and Mr Marr may yet be right with his 20 year prediction. 

The other vail in the struggle between the classes is that 'there is no alternative!' A nation/ruling class makes that particular syllogism or dialectic sound like a common and collective action and decision made where we are all involved in a shared requirement. In the UK, in France, strangely in the US, in Italy, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands political vails are already partly torn away. The working class have moved to bargains with their politicians. Choices are selected on the basis of key political decisions, not a sense of political commitment with the state. Of course this has both a right and left aspect. But there is little doubt that class choices now feature on the basis that they will not decide simply on prior history. Paradoxically, this begins to reduce the grip of 'nation.' 

Last comment.

Neither of the main social classes are prepared for the destruction of capitalism. But both are prepared for struggle - across a swathe of western countries, in parts of the Middle East, countries in South America, particularly Brazil, in south west Asia and both north and south Africa. 

The milestones mentioned simply give the sense of the new politics but yet its deeply under-developed  background. 

Nevertheless, capitalism, while never having been so wealthy, so apparently universal and claiming the future - it has never been so weak. 

Hard Labour

Sir Kier Starmer, Labour's shadow Prime Minister, just changed his shadow 'cabinet'. Political media were universally unimpressed. One of the many pieces of under-developed commentary that popped out of his head was a fatuous insistence that 'I will entirely take the blame (for the flat failure of Labour's recent election for councils, mayors, political police chiefs and the Welsh and Scottish partial parliaments). Sir Keir's second decision, after 'taking the blame', was to throw out key figures of his leadership - except of course, himself. Wet, wet ,wet. In the end Sir Keir had to re-install his main, shadow-cabinet minister into a new post, because she had been voted as Labour's deputy and had decided to stay.  

London, Manchester and Liverpool held the mayoral Labour vote. Manchester increased it. The Tory drive into the Midlands and the North East continued. Scotland saw the start of victory for independence and Labour came in third behind the Tories in Scotland. Only Welsh Labour could crow that they nearly won a majority in the Welsh Parliament.

Virtually every known public media pundit, from across both the unhappy right (that still worries about the PM Boris) and the ragged part of the liberal left, have suggested that the 're-construction' of the British working class is what has suddenly changed politics. But a little thought contradicts this strange idea. For example it supposes that the British working class, say those previous to the Thatcher period, would have been lapping up Sir Keir (and dumping Boris). Which would leave us today with the idea that it is the working class's political changes that are failing Sir Keir! 

On the other side, if you listen to Blair, Labour only started winning elections because it became Blair who built an empty but smarter Tory-type party! Sir Keir was too traditional for Blair. In Blair's world, the working class had changed completely. Thatcher's legacy had been swallowed. So, Sir Keir was too busy checking the water and trying to dissolve the remnants of the mass party that Corbyn had built. He did not manage to out-Tory the Tories! 

This palaver is becoming 'common sense' both inside and outside the Labour Party. But its bedrock actually emerged from the deep relationship between British Liberalism and the origins of the Labour Party. In modern times it was summed up by Blair's 'Middle Way' but there were many historical stages of LibLabism, which has become the specific feature of the British social democracy. And, in this Labourite world, it is the curious and sometimes incomprehensible 'do-ings' of the British working class that is blamed for the failure of the would-be, morally profound, Labour Party - that works so hard and without (only a few) millionaires. Now some analysts suggest Labour's political failure was a result of the worker's (new?) cultural shifts, instead of their ancient class politics ...    

So much tosh is needing to be squashed. Sure, there have been great economic, social and political changes across all the classes since 1945. And part of those changes in the British working class was certainly related to the increasing shared approaches of the two main political parties over the years. Social democracy in Britain (and in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries) have dissolved or is dissolving. The British social democratic decline is part of a Western development. Which is part of the world wide (failing) globalisation. The social democratic parties have largely responded to this fact - but not to the actual deep and increasing decline of the real changes of the working classes. Social democracy cannot do that. It has always been set up to maintain the working class within the interests of a system that can offer reforms. Easier when you have an empire. Insoluble if the historic concessions are dissolving in thin air. 

The main features of the working class in Britain (and across the West) are the reduction of its funds. Funds are the acceptance of income, deriving from various sources. Throughout working class history, work has constantly changed. From farm labourers to car factories to private carers. The division of labour has been organised and reorganised and reorganised again in the name of profit. Today, the shift of Western workers, especially the youth, has taken a global feature in that a distribution of their labour turns more and more away from what used to be high-ended pay and resources to underdeveloped and semi-developed payment, coupled with increased work time. 

More recently, working class funds now include the diminution of public welfare that were won previously in bitter battles in parts of Europe and East Asia. Fully private old age welfare now dissolves the public remains of health and welfare. Private developments that used to provide funds for the working class are reduced or removed, as with transport and housing. In other words, the modern change in the working classes is the constant drive to remove or cut working class funds, with wages being the most heavily reduced among the young. 

Why does this elementary crisis of the working class not force politics to challenge and change a system that is so unbearable? 

Farm labourers (shoe makers, coal heavers, cotton weavers etc) found it very hard to collect their class together, bring their demands together, and to create mass action, in the early 19th century. Yet the Chartists nearly broke the most powerful state in the world. The car factory workers in the 1930's USA led the New Deal much further than FDR. Their strikes and lockdowns provoked new state governors, linked across the continent from ports in San Fransisco to the New York rag trade and increased wages and maintained employment in a desperate period. The Social Democratic politicians may have shot their bolt today. But working class people can and will again create the means to build up new unities and bring in old and new workers' unions to take up the major crises of their lives. There are new hints already surfacing. The Scottish young want independence for what? To put up flags and sing patriotic songs? No. This is a new unity beginning to work out the design for a new society. A large part of the UK NHS is working to define its base in society and the means to guarantee its resources independent of Westminster. 

To summarise; we are not getting working class decisions to 'go Tory' - anymore than the working class supported Thatcher in the 1980s. Working class people determine immediate and direct responses in what is a field, the far distant political classes, of little interest and less connection. Following the 1950s in Britain, Westminster politics as such were seen, gradually, as a deeply disinteresting part of society, largely owned by a different class. Indeed, after WW2 the working class has trailed away from the interests of Britain's so called democracy and, latterly under Blair, even the remains of the Labour Party. Inevitably, the association with the mystical politics in Westminster only erupts where there is a direct interest and, as working class life becomes more difficult every day, only a direct interest works for obvious reasons. 

Attlee delivered the NHS. Thatcher, after defeating the most radical unions, sold out public housing. Boris threw down Brexit. But politics does not belong to the working class. They have to make their own. 

Here are some examples of working class politics in the UK. Bristol youth, led by black youth, the most impoverished sector of the city, toppled a slaver's statue in the river. The same people have started the battle, now enshrined by the Queen's speech, to push the police back against their new rights to stop demonstrations. (The core of the Jilet Jaune movement in France.) Black Lives Matter and women's self-defence have broken out of the lock-down defined by the police and Westminster politics. Major meetings are trying to bring the NHS into the hands of those who need it. It could be added that 10 million voters stood by Corbyn's reforms - despite the real role of Westminster politics and its powerful allies. (The well expected tragedy was the failure of Corbyn and his MPs to set up a new party based on the 10 million.) The voters in Scotland have decided their own politics - which will have to break Westminster if it is to win. In Northern Ireland a new Ireland is being created - outside the UK. 

The real creation of working class politics is yet to come, but from the Charter, the mass unions, the beginnings of the Labour Party, and now the growing response to the deep difficulties of working class life, there is more than hints of a new sort of change. 

Can Biden change the world?

The politics of capitalism in our world is now in the hands of US President Biden. Biden has surprised everybody with his $4 trillion plan to invest US structure and improve working class living standards. Together with his tax proposals for the rich, he has projected a state intervention that supersedes FDR's 1933 'New Deal'. Is this a man close to meeting his maker - hoping for a good report at the pearly gates? Who can tell. What is obvious is the potentially huge shift in US, and US capitalism's line of march. Or so it seems. 

Here is a fact about the world's money just now, followed by a comment that sums up where we are at politically, as well as symptomatic public actions that shake society - at least in the West. First, the IMF Fiscal Monitor offered this fact; 'In the last 12 months, countries have announced $16 trillion in (their) fiscal actions.' Second an observer of Spanish politics (apologies for the translation) said 'if the novel parties and the renovated traditional parties (in Spain) are more and more unable to define a future that wins any support of any real kind, the next political eruption will produce the final emptiness of all political parties.' 

Third, in France, from January 2021 to March, another public wave, without shared common demands but with a collective loathsome of the police, rocked French society. 

More generally across the West, the UK's Tory government faces financial insolvency, having nothing like Biden's or even FDR's war chest, and which faces the kingdom's disintegration of its national unity. Germany's decades of their continuous political construction is also failing. In Italy, every version of modern politics has been tried, in every kaleidoscope of combinations, which increases popular despair but without any common perspective. 

The next global axis is here. In front of all of us. A new period of History beckons. Covid 19 is certainly not the premise of the next, decisive moment of most of the world's future, despite the decline of big stores and pushing for working at home in the West. It is perhaps more likely that climate change alone might shift the momentum of the world. But the change we are all facing will mean parts of the planet will have to recreate their whole societies. Heat and fuel is critical, but the world, including its climate, depends on two more fundamental facts. 

First is the two thirds of the people on Earth live in medium or under-developed nations. This is despite the enormous development, mainly in China, bringing nearly a billion people out of poverty, largely due to the retreat of traditional imperialism after WW2. But China's state capitalism is not powerful enough to develop two thirds of the world - and its growing competitive, capitalist, evolution will soon expand itself into stasis and then decline - as with the US and the West in general. 

Second, the engine room of modern society, capitalism, has undoubtedly conquered the world but is no longer able to improve it. 

The long-term pillars of capitalism's immense expansion and development over centuries (1) The extraction of surplus labour, (2) The investment of wealth and (3) Imperialism, are faltering or failing. The most semi-successes in todays' capitalism have been the gathering of immense personal wealth and the magnification of money itself. Taking one example of the modern shifts; previous tycoons built ships, trains, planes, cities etc. The modern rich today play largely with communication and adult toys. Another danger in the novel evolution of capitalism - is the development by money - from the sale of potential money -  as has been shown in its first set of disasters in 2008. 

Capitalism has already absorbed or been defeated by the battles of its traditional imperialism and is unable to make a much further, global, leap. And the extraction of surplus value from the world's labour, from the Apple factories in China to the handful of Filipino workers managing the world's shipping and its ports, shows the exploitation of labour has now become an incongruent and incoherent mess for the management of the capitalist system, except for the multitude of the lowest levels of direct, day-to-day, personal service. 

None of this combination of capitalism's retreats are, by itself, going to create a new alternative society. The incredible melee of the world and its peoples will face a combined and uneven future as we all grapple with the decay of the most dominant economic system in history. We can however offer some of a 'where' and a 'when', today.

The two great classes of society in the world, the toilers and the ruling classes, are both in crisis and particularly in the West. In the West we see upheaval against the series of governments and political parties that themselves become hollower and hollower. As a result we see an eruption but undefined action in the working classes and the youth. Again, there are different stages of these processes with more or less coherence in the anger that prevails. Meanwhile, the historic dispersal of the 20th century working classes deepens. The coherence, where it does emerge, becomes more and more a directly political process, tied to explicit demands; support the NHS wage, independence, referendum, personal political figures etc. 

The ruling classes have the advantage. For example, Biden has enormous resources to curtail the rightward swing that was building up to a new, US revanchist, social revolution. And even Britain's desperate debts, which have already forced cutting the wages of the NHS, have allowed a fantasy politics where Britain's rich rulers seem more attached to working class people in England that anybody else. But, despite these examples, the Western and parts of East Asia now have no version of their progress. Along with Biden and Boris, there is no sense of the future of this class, and the politicians are defending what they can, in the US by scattering gold; in the UK by re-running a version of history. The political leaders in the main parts of the world, particularly in the West, are opening up chaos. 

It will be the front-line of politics in both main classes that will grapple with the alternative to our creaking capitalism.  And it will be political battles, in the US's over China as the symbol of its decline - and its failure over social welfare; in the UK, social-service collapsing, together with the disaggregation of the kingdom. It will be smoke and mirrors around these and many other ruling classes, who are desperately smothering their failure through divisions, pretences and, finally, wars. But it will only be the toilers that can solve this double crisis of both of the main classes.  

One example of the UK. The UK Prime Minister, Boris, undoubtedly believes that he has settled working class votes across the Midlands and the North of England in this week's elections, via his sharing of a cultural commonality. He used the success of the Covid vaccines to substitute for 'getting it done' with Brexit. But working class people in Hartlepool don't love Boris. They can stand him because he appears to grab the main issue and fix it. Tory ideology does not come into it. The clear aims of the 2017 Labour Party, under Corbyn (before the roaring attack both inside and outside of Labour, which amazingly still won 10 million voters) won better votes than Blair. Corbyn won the youth but most voters were not interested in Corbyn himself. They agreed with his future economic program, out of austerity.    

The construction of working class movements is no longer led by industry and mass unions. While remaining critical as examples of unity, unions are inevitably a small minority of those who work now. Temporarily, hesitantly and cautiously, facing the politics of society, the youth and the working class are beginning to build blocs on the basis of common parts of politics. And this is the route for defining the agency of working people in the first instance as the chaos of classes simmers and erupts. Political blocs, including unions, campaigns, mass actions and areas of social unity, will begin the sense of future-being, that so sorely is absent - from our experience of this trap or that fantasy.