The Politics of Being and Place

Being and Place

I would like to write a short commentary on Being and Place, with the express intention of underlining the practical relevance of my philosophical archaeology - excavating and revaluing the past in order to create visions, values, and virtues for a viable and flourishing future society. To come straight to the point, Being and Place are in a parlous state in the contemporary world, particularly the West, which is my principal focus of concern.

The loss of being and, in recent decades, the loss of place is at root the loss of politics in the original sense of the term. In the ancient Greek conception, politics is a science and a practice which involves the search for the best regimen for the human good. Plato and Aristotle proceeded from the assumption that human beings are social beings - politikon zoons - who require a public life - politikon bion - if they are to flourish. The study of politics thus originated as a rigorous method for aiding human beings in their quest for the good life, the assumption being that this good life is necessarily a public life for the kind of social creatures that human beings are. This public philosophy does not denigrate a private freedom or happiness, merely makes the point that it is incomplete, keeping human beings short of realising the full range of their potentials. For completion, a public life which corresponds to and enhances being in all its facets, in relation to others in place, is required.

There is also a strong transcendent, even sacred, dimension to this notion of the political, to the extent that it recognises that human beings are more than material beings concerned with self-interest and survival, but spiritual beings in search of meaning. This notion of the political rests upon a philosophical anthropology which is concerned with the realisation of Being as the condition of a truly human life. There is, therefore, a philosophical ‘ought-to-be’ embedded in the notion of the political and which evaluates and criticizes the ‘is’ of the world according to a vision of what is best for the flourishing of human Being. Such a notion is premised on the assumption that there is such a thing as human being and that it makes sense to write of such things as 'human' needs and healthy potentialities - all notions which have come under systematic assault in the past century. The liveliest thinkers of the age have been engaged on a quest not for the good life in politics but to extirpate essentialism in all forms. The result is a vision of reality as filled with endlessly plastic and malleable 'stuff' to be manipulated any which way according to rootless agendas and interests. Those enamoured of such a view seek to break down, dissect, and dissolve all notions of 'fixed' and stable essences in favour of a fluidity in which the world can be endlessly created and recreated according to whim. The loss of essentialist categories such as form, being, potentiality, lines of development is also the loss of humanity and notions of human nature; it is also the loss of being and of place. The world rendered endlessly fluid, malleable, purposeless, and pointless is a world rendered rootless and fruitless. It is a deliberately and systematically inhuman agenda designed to desocialise and desolidarise human society, with the express intent of dehumanising human beings, depriving them of their essential humanity, dividing and atomising social beings, reducing them to basic matter to be enumerated and digitalised, stripped of free will, deprived of their internal 'yes' and 'no,' to be driven by way of external stimuli.

My concern with Being and Place is to restore the originary conception of politics so as to orient the process of development in history towards the realisation of the truly human society, with all that that entails in terms of relations to each other as well as to environing nature. At the heart of that concern is the optimistic thesis that imaginative rational thought and action are capable of effecting a change towards not merely a new social existence, but a life that counts as qualitatively better in terms of human Being. The roots of such optimism lie in not merely the psychology and biology of human beings, two things which embattled realists are attempting to restate in an attempt to hold the line on the idea that reality is something more than subjective choice and cultural creation. The attempt to affirm that there is some such thing as human nature is commendable, but doomed to failure when presented in scientistic terms - the split between fact and value, with the exaltation of the former as the realm of scientific reason and the denigration of the latter as mere subjective judgement, lies behind much of the current insanity, the return of the repressed (meaning, purpose, human need and potential) with a vengeance. The ancients integrated the insights of psychology and biology with ethics within a normative philosophical anthropology based on an essentialist conception of healthy human potentials and their creative realisation in a public life. That's the integral philosophy which informs and animates the vision of Being and Place. To reduce such non-rational, arational, and extra-rational notions to science is to invite an irrationalism and revanchism that leaves rational minds non-plussed, paralysed, and impotent. These are the people who think that stating the biological facts as to what makes a woman will suffice to address contemporary lunacies. If it were that simple, we wouldn't be faced with the explosion of myriad lunacies in the first place. Something essential has been lost before the final loss of reality.

In proclaiming the 'death of God,' Nietszche called on human beings to envisage a world in which transcendent standards, normative commitments, and essences have been eradicated from personal aspiration and the creative imagination. Nietzsche affirmed the 'joyous science' of human beings courageously living into the future without the need of standards of good and evil as crutches to lean on. At the same time, he feared that such a vision would prove too burdensome for human beings in the mass, with most opting for surrogates in an idolatrous humanism, a secular religiosity based on new idols, and every bit as repressive and irrational as the 'organised religion' it supplants.

This, I hold, is the condition of men and women in the contemporary world. The worst part is the eradication of the anthropological optimism at the core of the ancient conception of the political, the idea that human beings possess certain healthy innate and essential potentials which are to be nurtured and nourished in a public life grounded in moral practices, social supports, and stabilizers and oriented towards a society of truly human being - orienting its members in the pursuit of human fulfilment and flourishing.

In my Being and Place project I emphasise that a certain anthropological - and by extension democratic - optimism is a precondition for human fulfilment and flourishing. That view affirms the three transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness in the context of a moral ecology of good and evil. Whilst these truths are currently unfashionable, they are eternal and will survive their contemporary attempts at destruction. Those transcendent truths are innate and are written on the human soul. In existential terms they gain expression via each individual's own personal 'yes' and 'no,' and are our ultimate safeguard against tyranny and totalitarian control. It is no wonder, then, that these are the very things which would-be universal reformers, managers, and tyrants - those most loathsome of creatures, the bureaucrats of knowledge and power - target first for destabilisation, 'deconstruction,' relativisation, and destruction. It is part of the attempt to destroy common standards applicable to all outside of time and place and supplant them with new standards fashioned in accordance with the arbitrary whims and interests of particular groups. The attack on those transcendent standards is accompanied by a concerted attack on all those things which ground human existence and give human beings a sense of identity, meaning, belonging, and ownership - the family, ascending levels of place from neighbourhood, community, locality to the national polity, God and religion, private property. This is a continuation of the great disembedding with which the modern capitalist era opened. Indeed, it is its culmination, the final enclosure of the global commons, people included, all considered mere resources to be expropriated, commodified, and flogged on the global market.

Social and institutional defences and centres of resistance are broken down and stripped away leaving individuals atomized and alone in face of irresistible collective forces and pressures. Stripped of social, institutional, and tangible supports and defences, the individual still has the innate moral capacity to identify evil, and thereby the inclination to resist evil. In the end, this may be all that individuals have left. So long as this capacity still exists, and so long as individuals have the courage to respond to injustice, then human beings will remain on nodding terms with their essential humanity and thus feel the urge to resist, challenge, and transcend evil and seek truth, goodness, and beauty in personal encounters with others, in social relationships, and in social and political organization. It should come as no surprise, then, that the would-be masters of the Earth would come to target the human moral capacity in an explicit project of desensitization and dehumanisation, taking that capacity out of human hands and placing it in the control of engineers. Instead of an internal, self-regulating, moral order, in which human beings are conscious agents in control of their choices and decisions, human beings are to be herded into the world of the endless 'nudge,' subject to an external regulation of stimulus and automatic response. Instead of moral beings capable of determining good and evil, human beings will be automatons, prey to the standards of those providing the stimulus. Instead of politics there will be a controlled environment in which the regulatory and coercive force of police replaces the close and proximal bonds of polis.

Should such a situation be engineered into existence - and some such thing is in the offing - then the elimination of the political will be followed in short order by the elimination of the human being. It will also spell the elimination of time as well as space and place, with the future being no more than the present enlarged, and the past extirpated. Aristotle in his Politics warned that those who know no history bear tyranny easily, for the reason that they have no standards by which to compare the present. The constant destabilisation of history and tradition is part of a deliberate process of demoralisation. It is a continuation of the capital system's original disembedding and sundering, detaching human beings from their social and moral supports and centres of resistence to render them isolated, vulnerable, passive, and pliant in face of particular programmes of reconstructed order. It is also about erasing the familiar, the loyalties and allegiances that human beings have to tradition and place, their ancestors, all that has made them the people they are. It is about breaking the pact between past, present, and future generations that Edmund Burke heralded as key to humanity as a familial species. It is about breaking down that very notion of familial loyalty, paving the way for the 'new man' and the 'new order,' Year Zero in a world subject to completely rationalized control.

The process of societal 'deconstruction' and reconstruction underway bears comparison with the four stages of ideological subversion revealed by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov:

1) Demoralisation - re-educate an entire generation according to the 'correct ideology';

2) Destabilisation - subvert the operations of the economy, foreign relations and defence systems;

3) Crisis - violent change of power, structures, and the economy;

4) Normalisation - a period of stability, until the next cycle reaches crisis point.

This indicates the existence of a long-term plan to effect widespread societal transformation by way of psychological manipulation and subversion and a concerted denormalisation and “demoralization.” It’s a long game that succeeds by way of confusion, the sapping of energy and confidence, the destabilisation of old certainties, and a renormalisation based on favoured values. The strategy is all the more effective for being so slow as to be intangibe, hidden in plain view. It is a slow process of social, ideological, and moral subversion, rendering the things which confer identity contestible and uncertain, removing the ground upon which people stand, making them feel as though nothing is certain any more let alone sacred. It is a process that, in separating individuals from supra-individual standards, supports, and stabilizers evolved organically in time and place renders them much less than social and moral and much less than human.

What does that mean? It means to alter each person's perception of reality to such an extent that, despite a wealth of evidence to the effect that changes are departing from the things they know and value to be true, people are so sapped of hope, energy, and confidence that they are unable to defend themselves, their families, their values, and their places, from local community to the national polity. People can see what is happening, feel it to be wrong, and protest - but in their “demoralized” state they are unable to resist. People are crying out for a genuine public community but have been stripped of the capacity to constitute such a thing by their own actions.

Bezmenov described "demoralization" as a process that was “irreversible.” In which case it is already too late, and my words on Being and Place are more of a eulogy and a lament for a world and a vision that is passing. I hasten to add that such is not my view, and that there remains hope in the innateness of the three transcendentals, for so long as human beings retain the capacity to discern good and evil, and the courage to take moral stands in face of contemporary exigencies and contingencies. Awareness of the difference between an unjust and less-than-human existing social order and a morally and socially desirable non-existent but potentially existent social order is one of the most important conditions of the quest for the good life. This awareness is grounded in the innate and essential moral capacity of human beings and it is upon this normative philosophical anthropology - and democratic optimism - that the vision of Being and Place is grounded. It is, significantly, this capacity that is being deliberately targetted and uprooted, detached from its sources of nourishment to wither and die, leaving human beings as mere tumbleweed blowing in the wind, without either ground to plant themselves in nor connections to others to orient their direction. To dispense with dispense with the moral anthropology upon which the ancient conception of politics was founded is to renounce the quest for the human being - it is to renounce what it is to be a moral and political being, which is to say, a human being.

The 'place' in Being and Place is therefore to be understood in terms of politics as the regimen for the human good, in terms of the wealth of connections to others, and in terms of the conditions for flourishing for the type of social creatures human beings are. Such a view underlines the place-based sense of meaning, identity, being, and belonging, fostering a sense of 'ownership' on the part of human beings for their environments, and a sense of responsibility on their part with respect to actions and their consequences. At the heart of this notion is a view of patriotism in which we rotect that which is ours and which we know and love intimately. It is all these attachments and loyalties which are in the process of being broken down, uprooted, and supplanted in a radically rationalistic process desolidification, desocialisation, and desolidarisation - social being is being deliberately targetted in a process that is properly described as pathological. The word to describe this process is 'deracinated,' indicating the extent to which human beings are being uprooted from their natural and organic environemtn, from their geographical, social, cultural, and historical roots, from ethics and tradition, from the familial in its widest sense.

The parlous condition of Being and Place, then, is indicative of the parlous condition of politics in the modern world. This is hardly a new observation. The acceptance of capitalism as the governing order encompassing all our lives entailed a conscious and explicit devaluation of the political, a downgrading of public life and notions of public happiness in favour of private individual choice on the anonymous market. In the split between politics and economics, the economics of private choice and satisfaction was exalted over the politics of freedom and happiness as collective, common endeavours. With human beings redefined as private self-seeking, self-maximising beings, politics was reduced to a neutral policing function, holding the ring between competing views of the good.

In origin, politics concerns the affairs of the city-state, the polis, the proximal public entity shared between citizens, based on extensive participatory structures and continuous involvement. This notion of the political died a death with the expansion of quantity, scale, and complexity in the modern world, with what Marx called 'the abstraction of the political state' coming to centralize common power away from the control and scrutiny of the common people. At the same time the capital system effected a split between and inversion of economics and politics, with freedom and happiness relocated from the public commons of citizens to the private sphere of individuals on the market (with the corollary that the more money you possessed, the more votes you had). The problem is that the aggregate of individual desires can never sum to a genuine public, least of all when those desires are extremely uneven in monetary terms. Devalued in the first instance, politics is now a thoroughly debased currency, and it shows. The devaluation of the public realm at the heart of politics in the capitalist world has been accompanied by a diminution of the public imagination. Trained to pursue their own self-interest on the market, individuals cease to see themselves as citizens and come to expect less and less from politics, other than it makes few demands on them and costs them little. People stop seeking collective redress for common problems at the political level. The problem is that the privatisation and atomisation of life unleashes consequences which cannot but be collective, requiring effective collective action. The means and mechanisms enabling such action have been gutted and the will of both leaders and citizens weakened and withered. If the old adage 'use it or lose it' is true, then the West has lost it, from top to bottom. And the only way it may be recovered is through the formation of communities of character and practice within a virtuous moral habitus - the very thing which has been systematically and systemically destroyed. Which is to say that the very qualities which human beings need to constitute and sustain public life are the very things which have been severed at their roots. The age is deracinated, which is to say rootless and fruitless. People in their frustration are calling back the political and the public; deep down in their hearts and instincts they know that a genuine and effective public community is what they need to address their current predicament - and they know it doesn't exist. Rather than lamentation and expression of frustration there is a desperate need to move on to the work of reconstruction - by which is meant the creation of the happy habitus in which the virtues are known, identified, aquired, internalised, and exercised. (I use the term 'happy' here in Aristotle's eudaimonistic sense of 'flourishing.') If moral and ideological subversion is a long-term process, then so too is the work of reconstruction by which communities and connections are restored. This is to argue for an internal self-government as against the external regulation that would-be universal managers and engineers have in store for us.

For too long too many have swallowed the ideology of liberal democracy, cleaving lazily and passively to the belief that we in the West live in democratic policies in which each citizen has a role in determing by what rules and laws and purposes shape govern our existence. The notion of self-assumed obligations remains what it always was, a noble ideal worthy of realisation. The mistake lies in the way that people have tended to take this ideal as having already been realised. Western democracies have fallen far short of the democratic ideal, with voters and citizens increasingly being distanced from the decision-making and law-making processes. Indeed, the rich and powerful have exercised not only the power of decision but also the power of non-decision, determining what issues are worthy of public concern and which are beyond the pale. Again, in the clash between politics and economics, the economics of capital, class, and the corporations has prevailed over the politics of democracy, freedom, citizenship, and equality. There is nothing remotely new in this observation. Socialism in large part was an attempt to reclaim and reassert the political against capitalism, the former speaking the language of politics as against the latter's tendency to frame freedom and happiness in economic terms of monetary value and efficiency and trade figures and production statistics. The devaluation of the political also has its roots in the oxymoronic conception of 'liberal democracy.' The nineteenth century liberals were great critics of democracy, identifying the egalitarian political principle at its heart to equate democracy with communism. Socialists saw this as democracy's great potential for genuine public community. 'Liberal democracy' is a halfway house in which the radical potentials of democracy were neutered in order to preserve the key institutions of liberalism – not least private property, the market and the social inequality which results. There are two worlds in collision in this concept of 'liberal democracy' – the private and the public, the individual and the collective. Liberalism is premised on the pre-social, pre-possessing individual who is free to contract in and contract out of society and public purpose according to self-interest. Such a notion is inimical to ideas of service to a common good, however much that good is furthered by way of the voluntary servitude of a self-assumed obligation. 'Liberal democracy' remained first and foremost a liberal polity, which is to say that the public realm was heavily circumscribed within limits that protected individual rights and claims vis a society conseived as abstract and potentially tyrannical and repressive. It is that liberal conception that continues to vitiate attempts to conceive and reclaim the public in our hour of need – the people who most scream about authoritarianism and the coming totalitarianism are often those whose libertarian views and values work to prevent the emergence of a genuine politics and public community in the first place, making surrogates and abstract forms the only form political community can take.

Point taken, though, the notion of the political as involved in democratic self-governance has been utterly devalued, so much so that politics – the very thing that people need to manage their common affairs as social beings – is treated with cynical disrespect and disregard. The loss of the political is a demoralisation and a dehumanisation, for reasons given above.

The loss of politics is also the loss of Being and the loss of Place.

The loss of Being has been noted by philosophers, thinkers, and writers for the best part of modernity's existence. In To Have or to Be? (1976) social psychologist Erich Fromm argued the case for moving to a mode of being over the frustrations caused by the present mode of having. In the book, Fromm criticises the materialistic obsessions of modern society, what Lewis Mumford also condemned as a 'purposeless materialism,' as turning against the initial emancipatory promise of happiness, freedom, and abundance through the technological mastery of nature (and of people). The 'system' is premised on the equation of endless material accumulation with freedom and happiness. We have come to find, however, that the premises of unlimited production and hence unlimited consumption are not only unsustainable on a planet of finite resources, and therefore that accumulation can never be endless, the material largesse that has undeniably been produced cannot fill the gaping hole where the soul once was - even presuming another goal that has also proven illusory with respect to even distribution. Modern 'men as gods' aspired to be masters of the Earth only to find that they have become masters of nowhere. It's the story of self-made man and his undoing, losing being and the conditions of being, including the wealth of rich and satisfying relations to others in place.

The great promise of material expansion not only failed but, in the attempt to attain the unattainable, turned back upon itself, liberating appetite from moral and social restraint to supplant standards, supports, and stabilizers through uninhibited egotism, selfishness and greed. The problem is not merely that of the old deadly sins writ large - particularly avarice - but of sin being rendered systemic, structural, and institutional, hard-wired into the instrumental purposes of dominant institutions and culture. The result is that people are trying to fight back in the language of their conquerors and oppressors, having been deprived of their native tongue. The feeling and the instinct for commonality is still there, but the terms are lacking.

In the age of liberal modernity and capitalism, public life ceased to be determined by conceptions of what is good for human beings but, ratherm by notions of what is good for the continued expansion of 'the system.' Systemic imperatives determined by the accumulative dynamic replaced genuine ends and their conscious formulation. 'The system' satsified certain needs, principally in terms of their personal interests; any goods greater than individual choice were satisfied only indirectly, of at all. The people with insatiable needs and desires are the ones who get the most out of such limitless expansion. What is called 'the system' serves not common humanity but only itself, by way of the rich and powerful as its personifications. Which is to say that the capital system is a systematic dehumanisation and alienation which puts us at ever further remove from all that roots and grounds us, estranging us from the commons in all its forms, from the familial, the communal, and the traditional, from others, from nature and the environment, from ourselves, ultimately from God. In an attempt to make this deracination and abstraction comprehensible there is a tendency to search for the architects and engineers of this nightmare vision of a totally controlled, ordered, and administered world. No morality play is complete without its cast of villains. The important point to understand, however, is the extent to which the personifications of alien categories are the expressions of alienation, not the instigators. That alienation entails abstracting processes which remove human beings further and further from the path of healthy growth and development. In deviating from essential potential and its realisation, the mode of "having" has supplanted the mode of "being." The capital system has expanded production and delivered on its promises of material largesse, however these have been unevenly distributed. I continually challenge people to determine what doesn't sit right about the claim that human beings are healthier, wealthier, longer-educated and longer-lived than at any other time in history, and in much greater numbers. Apologists for the capital system can crunch the numbers and make the case that the capital system has delivered on its material promise.

The problem, of course, is that this material expansion speaks to just one part of the human being, leaving certain social and indeed spiritual needs unaddressed. That, say the apologists, is not the failure of the capital system, on the basis that the system merely concerns economic means and nothing else. The problem with that apology is that it fails to understand the extend to which the economic motive under the capital system, driven by the ubiquitous accumulative dynamic, has come to be extended over all other areas of life. Relations between human beings thus become purely instrumental, each reducing the other to the status of means of purely personal ends, with the result that all become subject to the external force of 'things' out of conscious human control.

The capital system has delivered on its material promises, but these promises were all premised on a private appropriation of the goods and externalisation of the costs, reinforcing a possessive and instrumental approach to the world on the part of deracinated self-interested individuals. Thomas Hobbes' 'war of all against all' was less a description of the true 'state of nature' than a prescription for the market society to come, an order in which society became a sphere of universal egoism, competition, and antagonism. The rational concern of individuals in such an order is with the service not of the public good nor of public community but of self-interest, with the happy presumption being that the general interest will thereby be served. The economic historian R.H. Tawney described this market society is 'the acquisitive society,' characterised by what C.B. Macpherson called a 'possessive individualism.' (R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society; C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke). The result is a 'society' that barely counts as a society at all in being more like a temporary alliance of self-seeking individuals, contracting with others in order to advance their interests, but otherwise cutting connection and commitment to the minimum. In every mode of life, individuals are induced to focus on “having” mode to the detriment of the “being” mode. If society is indeed a “war of all against all,” then the individual has to devote all his energy and resources to the struggle for survival, with little if anything left over for the conditions and practices of “being.” If this is the problem then the solution seems obvious enough, to focus more on “being” and less on “having.” That solution, however, presumes an identity which, given the instrumental nature of prevailing relations, does not exist. Indeed, for an individual in a competitive market society to pursue “being” at the expense of “having” would entail notions of self-sacrifice of interests that would be deemed irrational given prevailing notions of irrationality.

The truth remains, however, that modern individuals have lost their connection to purposes other than the immediate and the instrumental, have lost their connection to others, and have ultimately lost connection to their inner selves. The paradox of selfishness is that the selfish come to lose their essential selves. Selfishness has been known to be self-destructive since ancient sages told us so. Modern individuals will openly acknowledge the truth of this ancient wisdom. The problem, however, is that individuals are entangled within alienative social relations that make the instrumental and self-interested and competitive orientation to the world the most real and the most rational to the point of being inescapable. Which is why so many, from thinkers to 'ordinary' people, will denounce the effects of an estranged world, and even identify their underlying causes, and yet still seem powerless to do anything about their predicament.

As someone who has lived on the margins of society and its dominant institutions, as someone who has never been 'successful' enough in terms of the dominant forms of socialisation to be conformed and complicit, I can make the claim to be perfectly placed to comment on what's going on here. I have lived as something of an 'exile' within an alien landscape and can see clearly the extent to which much that the properly socialised and normalised take to be 'realistic' is utterly detached from true order, value, and principle. I'm the canary in the coalmine, and I've died several deaths in the past quarter of a century.

In terms of connection and community, in terms of roots, being, and belonging, in terms of meaning and purpose, modernity is off, incoherent, and imploding. Removed ever further from our social and moral matrix, the originary politics adumbrated above, we are dying for want of nourishment;we are rootless and fruitless, thirsting for meaning and connection in a sterile environment.

The loss of politics is the loss of being. The loss of place, tradition, and history is also a part of this process of deracination. The warm, affective bonds, ties, loyalties, and allegiances that keep any community of human beings alive and vital are also being lost. In fact, they are being deliberately and systematically eliminated. In the 1990s the globalisation of economic relations was theorised as the 'end of geography.' Human connection, it was said, was going to cease being place-based and instead proceed electronically in the global environment. The end of geography, of course, is the end of place, which is another way of saying 'displacement.' Human beings are being uprooted from their places and rendered exiles in their own homes, wandering from place to place, following the vicissitudes and demands and imperatives of the market – as the free traders, monetarists, and neoliberals wanted all along. They have their wish. All too late in the day, conservatives are beginning to distinguish conservatism from economic neoliberalism, now that the deleterious effects of the latter are becoming manifest:

“Globalisation is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become – is visibly becoming – a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.”

- Peter Hitchens

Globalisation is the destruction of place and place-based moral and social meaning; it is the displacement of people. It is no wonder that mass migration is one of the most salient characteristics of globalisation, the endless movement and traffic of people ensuring that there will be no 'home' anywhere for anyone ever agai. The only intercourse that remains will be that of money; the only community that of capital.

When national borders are porous, there is no longer a nation; when people enter from anywhere and everywhere, there is no longer a community and common culture or citizen body, only myriad private projects - which is to say we live nowhere. Communities within the nation in a borderless world will simply be overwhelmed. If things continue along these lines then there will be no nations, at least as independent sovereign bodies in which citizens and their representatives make the laws by which they are governed. The remaining political entities will be hollowed out and made subject to the force of external law and institutional imperatives on any number of issues (think health, think the environmental, the scope is endless).

There will be no place. The places whose existence we have taken for granted as our places, the places where we were born and to which we belong, the places which we 'own' in common with our compatriots, are no longer being protected by those who govern us. Instead, they are being attacked and undermined by those who seek to govern us, redefined in terms of the agendas they have always had planned for us. If nations and national borders are not being protected, if governments are colluding with international organisations and edicts to erode borders, then places are not being protected and the rights of the people are not being protected – people and place are being offered up to global gods for sacrifice. In the classic liberal theory, individuals trust government with sovereign power to protect their rights to life, liberty, and happiness (and property), and ensure the conditions which makes it possible for individuals to live their lives, pursuing the good as they see fit. Citizens look to government to protect their interests and establish the conditions in which we may flourish. The problem is that government has never been in as close a relation to the governed as the classic theory postulates. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels wrote that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The direct connection between government and governed has never existed, with business interests and imperatives interceding and having priority. In The German Ideology of 1846, Marx and Engels also described the capital system as in the process of becoming the 'universal mode of production,' encompassing the entire world within its commercial orbit. The source of the contemporary devaluation of the political, and with it the loss of being and loss of place, lies here. Many people are suddenly discovering the problem that generation after generation of socialists have sought to draw attention to – the emptying out of democratic politics and public space. Those who blame the latest cohort of elected politicians for the depoliticisation, demoralisation, and desocialisation should think long and hard on the words former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson write in his memoirs:

Claiming that our failure to act in accordance with his advice had precipitated the [sterling] crisis, he was now demanding all round cuts in expenditure, regardless of social or even economic priorities, and fundamental changes in some of the Chancellor's economic announcements. Not for the first time I said that we had now reached the situation where a newly elected government with a mandate from the people was being told, not so much by the Bank of England but by international speculators, that the policies on which we had fought the election could not be implemented; that this government was to be forced into the adoption of Tory policies to which it was fundamentally opposed. The Governor confirmed that this was, in fact, the case.

I asked him if this meant that it was impossible for any Government whatever its party label, whatever its manifesto or the policies on which it fought an election, to continue, unless it immediately reverted to full-scale Tory policies. He had to admit that was what his argument meant, because of the sheer compulsion of the economic dictation of those who exercised decisive economic power.

Wilson refused to accept this frank assertion of the ‘sheer compulsion of the economic dictation of those who exercised decisive economic power’ since it would 'bring down the curtain on parliamentary democracy', since it amounted to a recognition that the control of policy was in private hands. A good thing too, say economic liberals. On point of political principle, Wilson was right. On point of economic fact, Cromer was right. Given the inherent economic determinism of capitalism as an alienated system of production, Cromer won and Wilson lost. ‘There were severe expenditure cuts and no devaluation. Expansion therefore ceased, the National Plan was abandoned, and nothing was done to make it possible for the spare resources released to go to exports where they could lay the foundation for the future’.

The Labour Government under Harold Wilson discovered that 'the economy' does not bend to the will of government. ‘All the brave rhetoric and policy decisions that led to national plans and new super-ministries, which were to release Britain's creative energies, and restore her to her properly respected place in the world, soon crumbled against what appeared to be technical problems associated with Britain's long industrial decline - the balance of payments, an overvalued currency, sterling as a world currency, outdated industrial attitudes - which in fact were, in part, indicators of a dramatically evolving international division of labour’ (Blackwell and Seabrook 1985: ch 5). This discovery has political implications, in that it reveals that behind the exigencies of ‘the economy’ lie the systemic imperatives of capitalism, imperatives which do not bend the knee to political principle, still less the democratic will of the people. The fiction that the sterling crisis and devaluation of 1967 are simply problems of economic management brought about by incompetent politicians implies that such economic problems can be solved by electing a set of competent politicians. This fiction protects a political system that lives at the behest of autonomous economic processes which are beyond the powers of political control. This is a necessary fiction. Even after the Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Cromer, had confirmed to Harold Wilson that, regardless of the platform on which he had been elected, he had to do the bidding of the markets, Wilson refused to accept the conclusion that this amounts to bringing down the curtain on parliamentary democracy. It does. But for the likes of Wilson the political fiction is far more palatable than having to admit the reality that Marx was right. ‘For what would happen to all our much-vaunted democratic rights and freedoms if it were to be discovered that in all the crucial areas of our common lives there are no real choices to be made? This was of course not a lesson that the Labour Government was going to draw publicly. Accordingly, they attempted the only possible alternative: to put the pressure on those who they claimed to represent’ (Blackwell and Seabrook 1985: ch 5). For those who like their political history tinged with bitter irony, the Labour government turned upon the people who had created, supported and sustained the Party. Rather than deliver a political education with respect to socialism, the Labour Party gave its own supporters an education in capitalist imperatives. Those lessons are now being delivered to the great public, outraged at the way that our sovereign power is being stolen and our rights disregarded.

Conservatives profess horror and outrage at the loss of national identity in light of current developments, but this erosion of the national polity is part of a process that began long ago and which entailed the subversion of democratic politics and the unravelling of community – the process of displacement has been underway for a long time. It is only when we start to question whether Britain will even exist as a distinct nation in the future that minds that slept through the undermining of democracy and community in the recent past start to wake up and raise objections. Britain, like other nations, is a geographical entity but, beyond physical fact, is of increasingly questionable – and questioned – status. The same process is underway in other countries, with each country being vilified and made to feel shame for its past, for its very existence. The nation is an ideal and a dream that is shared by its people. Subject the idea to constant questioning in light of negative experience and it will start to unravel. The process is inherently destructive, not least given the use of the impossibly ahistorical standards of unicorn land by way of negative comparison. If Britain, France, Germany, the US etc are condemned as uniquely bad in one form or another then the question to be asked is compared to what, where, and when? The setting of impossible standards has a deliberately destructive purpose in that there is no possibility of experience ever being able to conform to the disembodied and disembedded ideal. The standard is abstract and its imposition is all part of the process of deracination. The time comes when there are no longer enough people sharing the idea and the dream, and that's the time that the nation disappears, is swallowed up by some other entity. The people, too. It's not only the notion of 'we the people' that is in the process of being eliminated but the notion of the individual man or woman as a human being in possession of a core humanity. Being and Place stand together and fall together.

My intention in writing under the heading of Being and Place is to excavate a certain philosophical anthropology concerning the conditions of the human good so as to create a living and enabling tradition that orients vision and values towards a place to be. I am mindful that Aristotle wrote his famous celebration of the ancient Greek polis at the moment he knew the polis to be slipping into history. The same thing might well happen to Being and Place if we are not careful, and if we do not become proactive in ensuring their proper realisation. I have little interest in writing a eulogy for something that no longer exist, still less a lament. My writing is motivated by a concern that Being and Place are being impaired and stressed and by a concern to identify what needs to be done if we are to move to the mode of Being in Place. That's an optimistic thesis, which holds that the truly human society is still attainable. Failing that attainment it is still worthwhile to put on record what I understand by Being and by Place, so that future generations looking for a way out of the dehumanisation of the Megamachine might have a standard that is more than the edicts and imperatives of their masters.

As I indicated above, the issues that are confronting us are not new but have been a long time in gestation. Many are just catching up with the extent of their dispossession and displacement, but the entire modern age has been founded on the key figures of loss, separation, and estrangement. 'Where there is nothing,' argued Max Weber in 1918, 'both the kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.' (Weber Politics as a Vocation). If Weber was right in 1918, that there is indeed 'nothing,' then why should we now be surprised that governments we trust to protect us are appropriating our power and setting our rights aside? If the struggle between Left and Right, socialists and conservatives, has been empty all along, then those who express shock and surprise in the here and now have an awful lot of reading to do before coming up with a proper diagnosis of the deep-seated, multi-layered problem we face. Weber's 'nothing' indicated the moral and metaphysical void that had opened up in the aftermath of Nietzsche's 'death of God.' Nietzsche had called out the emptiness of the modern world and its existential choice and projection. The modern world has been raised on an orgy of metaphysical carnage, effectively charging individuals with becoming their own gods, choosing truth and goodness in their own way. We are now seeing the effects of such incoherence and see that it is beyond the power of any government, least of all governments imagined as neutral arbiters between competing goods/gods, to protect rights that are based on 'nothing.'

What next? Weber held that the 'free individuals' of liberal modernity were incarcerated in an 'iron cage,' an imprisonment that was all the more total for the way it embraced our very subjectivities and not merely our physical persons:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism - whether finally, who knows? - has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanised petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved’.

Weber 1985 181/2

Weber captured the 'nullity' of the age of narcissism and egoism perfectly, the public realm fractured between so many warring gods, incapable of negotiation, dialogue, and compromise. The 'free' individual is confined within an economic machine that determines the lives of each and all with 'irresistible force.' Weber's 'iron cage' operates as a psychic prison that confines its inmates in both mind and body, the mental chains proving to be the most effective and total. Over one hundred years after Weber spoke these words we are being herded into a future in which we will be incarcerated in a digital cage. This is a world in which there will be no places, no true polities, no nations. The only identity will be digital, with individuals issued with digital Ids. And, like the digital form, human beings will be something less than real, something less than organic, something less than human – artificial, malleable, manipulable.

The undermining of the sense of who and what we are and where we belong is an old trick of expropriation that has been pulled on indigenous people many times before in history – the story of humanity is, in many respects, a story of loss, dispossession, and stolen goods - but is now being pulled on the global scale. This is the final stage of capital's historic process of expropriation, quantification, and commodification, the final enclosure of the global commons, people included.

'Crises' of various kinds are 'happening' everywhere at once. People are being subject to a relentless process of crisis and its management. Democratic processes are being declared unfit for purpose as managers – experts and elites of certain kinds - assume control of public life and policy. Crises are being exploited, exaggerated, engineered, hitting people with everything coming at them from everywhere at once. People are not being allowed to settle, gather their strength, associate and organise with a view to reclaiming their lost sovereignty, autonomy, and power of control. The same process which disempowered socialism and the politics of labour is being applied to national identity. People are being actively separated from their places, histories, and identities, no longer taking their identity from their places of birth, being, and belonging but instead following the edicts and imperatives of external bodies.

“The most effective way to destroy people,” wrote George Orwell, “is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” That denial and destruction comes with the express intent of disorienting people, rendering them confused and passive and hence ripe for reorientation in a way that fits the new order. To have a sense of belonging to a place brings also a sense of 'ownership' and of responsibility, an attachment to a place that brings a sense of loyalty and solidarity with respect to compatriots. This feeling is now being openly denigrated as exlusive and discriminatory on account of not being sufficiently inclusive, inclusive as in abstractly and emptily universal. People are being openly discouraged from thinking that they have identities grace of belonging to places that have histories worthy of celebration. The traditions and organically evolved cultures of people are being denigrated in order to be destroyed and replaced with something more appropriately 'inclusive.'

Simone Weil wrote deeply and sagely on 'the need for roots.' In that work she wrote that “the destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.” (Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, 2003, p.48).

Once you understanding Weil's meaning you will realize that she was right – and that the process that is only now beginning to upset and anger many has been underway a long, long time. As a record of the past, history is as essential to the health and sanity of a nation as memory is for the individual person. Memory is the foundation of identity. A person who is without memory is a person without identity, without personhood. With the loss of history comes loss of place comes loss of purpose comes loss of person. We are caught in the process of deracination begun centuries ago with capital's great disembedding. The people who are seeing radical change underway in the contemporary world need to look further back and see the continuity with the first great expropriation and enclosure of the commons. People were deprived of their orienting and protecting attachments and loyalties, 'freeing' them as rootless individuals to sell themselves on the market at whatever price they could command. Centuries on and human beings are still being deracinated, severed from their sources of nourishment, cut off from their roots. In being made rootless, people are being made homeless, with no place to call their own. The familial, organic, and, indeed, spiritual connection to our ancestors is being severed and with it our sense of the future as something that is our own. The wisdom of the ages passed down through the generations is being obliterated.

“Society,” wrote Edmund Burke, is “a contract… between those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are to be born.” What was once dismissed as a hidebound conservatism now seems strikingly radical and contrary. That contract was broken a long time ago. Margaret Thatcher famously declared that 'there is no such thing as society.' In saying this she was merely repeating the central tenet of classical liberalism, the idea of the pre-social, pre-possessing individual who contracts in and out of society according to self-interest. Liberal modernity has been raised on that fundamentally asocial figure and its effects on social connection and public life have been corrosive. Burke made his statement on the familial contract of the human species precisely as a protest against the forces of atomisation and mechanisation which he saw as eroding organic order. In this, he understood a point that those quick to celebrate the surface level radicalism of the rights of man missed. (Curiously, it is a point that Marx understood in identifying the rights of man as an atomistic bourgeois conception that celebrated the separation of man from man. The 'rights of man' pertain to the liberal idea of individuals as isolated, egoistic beings and form too thin a basis from which to generate the supportive moral and social context which genuine liberty requires. Marx thus writes that the right of liberty in practice 'is the right of private property', the liberty of 'man as an isolated monad who is withdrawn into himself' (On the Jewish Question in Early Writings 1975: 229). For Marx, the 'so-called rights of man' are the rights of 'egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community' (OJQ 1975: 229); they are 'the expression of the separation of man from his community, from himself and from other men' (OJQ 1975: 221). For Marx, freedom is based on 'the association of man with man' as against liberalism's 'separation of man from man.'

I make no apologies for quoting extensively from Marx. Many of those who are only now coming to see the danger of totalitarian suppression of place, person, and purpose tend to equate this 'globalism' with 'bureaucracy' and 'socialism.' Whilst the 'really existing socialism' of the Soviet Union could indeed be characterised as a bureaucratic collectivism, the roots of that collectivism lie not in socialism but in the technocratic and organisational modes of the capital system it seeks to supplant. I examined Marx in depth and at length in order to rescue his valuable insights into our current predicament from totalitarian implication and temptation.

We are being made rootless as part of the process in which humanity is being remade in the image of homo economicus, discrete individuals driven by a combination of internal self-interest and external stimuli. Rootless individuals are blown around the global market as just so much tumbleweed, rolling around in the wind as plants apart from the root system. The displaced and detached go wherever they are blown by market forces. That view always implied the destruction of the past, connection, community, and organic culture. Marx and Engels characterised the capital system as a “constantly revolutionising” - and globalising – mode of production:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto 1848 chapter 1 Bourgeois and Proletarians

Place-based identity, loyalty, and solidarity is dissolved by the capital system; money is the universal acid that dissolves both local and national ground, not to mention the historical and moral ground.

Marx and Engels in The German Ideology noted that the loss of unity and commonality in the material relations of the everyday lifeworld forces redress at the level of the state as ‘the illusory community,’ ‘the illusory general interest.’ Marx was alive to the substitutionist logic of the abstract state and the way in which the state machine comes to sever every common interest or purpose from society and appropriate them to its own ends - or, more precisely, to ends in the service of the process of accumulation. It is worth quoting Marx at length here given the tendency of conservatives to identify socialism with a top-down bureaucratic statism, appropriating the critique of that statism to themselves. The state, Marx argues, can create only the illusory community, appropriating communal concerns from society and opposing them back to society in the alien form of an abstract general interest. The state power - with 'an immense bureaucratic and military organisation, an ingenious and broadly based state machinery, and an army of half a million officials alongside the actual army, which numbers a further half million.' This 'frightful parasitic body’ originates in the series of separations and disconnections which take place in constituting bourgeois society:

Every common interest was immediately detached from society, opposed to it as a higher, general interest, torn away from the self-activity of the individual members of society and made a subject for governmental activity, whether it was a bridge, a schoolhouse, the communal property of a village community, or the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France.

Finally, the parliamentary republic was compelled in its struggle against the revolution to strengthen by means of repressive measures the resources and centralization of governmental power. All political upheavals perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that strove in turn for mastery regarded possession of this immense state edifice as the main booty for the victory.

Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire 1973: 237/8

Marx thus criticises ‘the abstraction of the political state’ (Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State) as a ‘modern product,’ the product of a capitalistic disembedding and disconnection. This abstract state is therefore a substitute community, appropriating society's own interests and forces to turn social power into political force. In the process of political alienation, the government of common affairs is severed from the self-activity of the individual members of society and embodied in the abstract sphere of the state and its officialdom. To achieve the genuine community of real individuals, Marx argues for the restoration of common purposes and powers to the individuals whose self-activity and self-organisation is constitutive of real sociability.

I wonder how many conservatives have the nerve and the nous to properly engage with Marx and absorb the force of his critique, as I, a socialist, have been prepared to absorb the lessons of conservatism? Because that meeting of conservatism and socialism is precisely what needs to happen if the destructive processes of liberalism are to be checked and reversed. All too often conservatives are concerned with the way that rootless and atomised individuals are being blown around a placeless world at the whim of state bureaucrats and autocrats, managerialists and authoritarians who look upon the broad 'masses' not as individual human beings who belong to families, places, and communities but as mere dots to be plotted on a graph, mere numbers to be calculated on a spreadsheet, mere resources to be allocated and reallocated. I'm far from disagreeing with conservative critics of the state machine and its authoritarian controllers, but make the point that Marx made the same criticism, and properly diagnosed the roots of alienation. Conservatives who are big in their denunciation of the state tend to be quiet with respect to its twin alien power of capital. Marx, it should be remembered, criticised both 'the abstraction of the political state' and capital as alienated social power, human beings' own social and communal power in alien external form. Surely the assault on place, on local and national identity, and on proximity is now taking place on such a scale that conservatives can cease covering the role of business, capital, and the corporations in the great displacement – now that it is they and all that they hold dear that is next in line for expropriation and enclosure.

To submit to being made rootless and homeless is to submit to being rendered passive and vulnerable as mere atoms on the global market. That was the intention of the ideologues of free trade and the free market all along, that vision of a desocialised and demoralised people fractured into individuals responding automatically to external stimuli is present in the very logic of economic neoliberalism. Conservatives who cheered on the destruction of socialism and the associations and traditions of labour now stand horrified when they see that their victory has won them 'nothing,' only stripped them, too, of their social and moral supports and their rights.

Human beings as social beings draw a profound strength and an elemental stability from having roots, from knowing that they belong somewhere and to someone, that they have 'ownership' with respect to some place. Totalitarian states set out to destroy all primary and intermediary attachments and associations, all those things that serve to keep individuals from being the total property of the state. Many people are baffled as to why trade unions and other such independent organs and associations of labour are among the first things targetted for destruction and subordination by supposedly socialist state regimes, but there is no mystery at all – all organs of popular control and autonomy are also potential centres of resistance to be destroyed. Family, private property, and religion also offer vital sources of independent thought and action and are therefore targetted for destruction.

“As long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.”

• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vintage, 1954, vol. 1, 340, also quoted in Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, New York, Free Press, 1992

That reference to feeling is all-important in stressing the emotional and affective ties and loyalties that attach people to one another and to place, motivating and sustaining their commitments, practices, and actions over the long-run. The roots of any individual are planted with family and grow from there, but family itself is rooted in something somewhere in being part of a bigger story of a place, a bigger picture, a greater meaning. That ‘family feeling’ is nurtured and expressed in the smaller schools and associations of community. Economic, cultural, and ethical liberalisation here have undermined these sources of social solidarity and moral unity. Those commentators such as Raymond Williams who have focused on structures of feeling and lived experience within the social and cultural aspects of working-class life possess an insight that deracinated theoreticians are often lacking.

Whilst some radicals display a tendency to identify neoliberalism as the source of contemporary ills, their view is narrow and shallow. Neoliberalism is a restatement of classical liberalism in an age of the corporate form. This neoliberalism is an extension and entrenchement of the initial disembedding and disconnection which paved the way for the modern capital system in the first instance, separating people from each other and from their political, ethical, and physical commons.

My point is that modern critics who point to the way that society has been atomized and fractured, as a result of extraneous economic pressures as well as the way that social purposes have been outsourced to the public sector, who really repeating a line of thought pioneered by Marx, but also by a whole range of thinkers who witness the early stages of de-socialisation and demoralization. Not only social purposes and interests, but morality itself no longer belong to individuals. All these things have been removed from society and externalised in extraneous bodies, to be administered and taught by professionals. Police replaces polis, as the social and moral void that opens up through separation comes to be filled by classes of all kinds, parenting, citizenship, rehabilitation etc. Everything that the informal schools of socialization and moralization once taught now has to be taught by experts. Instead of a habitus in which the virtues could be known, acquired, and exercised, society has lost its internal moral bearings, morality has dissolved into value judgements, and good behaviour has become a matter of education. In the process, morality becomes technique, a set of ‘skills’ to be taught and learned as rules and guidelines relayed downwards from the state, instead of a self-education that proceeds through the norms and values prevailing within society, to be mulled over collectively. The result of all these developments has been to undermine both social and moral autonomy, blocking the development of the solidaristic structures that not only bind society together but guide and orient the choices made by the individuals who compose that society.

Today's authoritarians and would-be totalitarians want to undermine and set aside the family and they want to undermine and set aside local identity and thereby national identity. These 'structures of feeling' and centres of associative autonomy and control are being systematically undermined and erased. The result is the dissolution of both Being and Place. If you don't feel as though you belong to a place and to certain persons, and that said place and persons belong to you, then you will feel no responsibility for their fate. As a result, place comes to be reduced to a mere site of resources that anyone can exploit before moving on to the next anonymous place. And the next anonymous people. The 'end of geography' is the erasure of place and, in time, the sense of place; it is the elimination of those structures of feeling that join human beings each to the other, refocusing their attachments and loyalties to something external, something upon which they have been made to depend for their very existence. First there will be no place, then there will be no sense of place, and no sense of belonging or of possibilities for becoming and being. All that there will be is mere physical existence in a global anyplace and anywhere, which is no place and nowhere at all, merely Weber's 'nothing' write large on the global scale.

The destruction of proximal relations and primary loyalties and attachments will strip human beings of their own social and associational supports and stabilizers, rendering them passive and powerless in face of vast impersonal and supra-individual forces. Such rootlessness and powerlessness creates the fertile psychic terrain for totalitarianism. The destruction of unity and community in human scale and proportion will cause human beings to project their need for universality and commonality outwards and upwards towards surrogate forms. You can see how individuals, stripped of social connection and identity, are being 'nudged' psychically in their social deprivation towards accepting digital ID as the means of feeling safe and secure. Digital ID is going to be advanced as a solution to a problem. Crises are being both engineered and exploited in order to keep people in a constant state of anxiety. Exhausted by the endless war of attrition, people will be ready to believe the promises of peace and quiet that entry to the digital cage will bring. Once everyone is tagged and numbered then they will be subject to 'protection' 24/7 from the cradle to the grave. Those who profess shock and outrage at possibilities for the Digital Cage have been paying insufficient attention to the process of rationalization, characterized as it is by the growing regulation of the individual and the decline of ethical autonomy in the administered society. The warnings go back at least to de Tocqueville's analysis of American democracy and J. S. Mill's warning that the most cherished values of liberalism – autonomy, spontaneity, creativity – are threatened by the extension of administration and regulation, by cultural uniformity, and the detailed surveillance of the individual undertaken by centralized state agencies concerned with health, education, work, and the police, the growing documentation of the individual, and by an increasing professionalization of institutions. The upshot is that the osensibly 'free' individual comes increasingly to be regulated within the rationalizing processes of the “iron cage.” Modern society thus comes to be understood as a panopticon society in which the individual is enmeshed within a network of disciplines, policed by bureaucratic means from cradle to the grave. For their own safety and security, of course. The Digital Cage is the logical culmination of such a process of rationalization. Tagged and numbered, everyone is rendered safe and secure under constant surveillance. Once digital ID is accepted and/or imposed, a line has been crossed and citizens have lost their autonomy to become subjects once again. From this moment on your every movement, action, and transaction, and maybe your every thought, will happen under the microscope. The argument will be made that only those with something to hide can object, an argument that immediately identifies conscientious objectors and recalcitrants to be untrustworthy. The trust relations which arise naturally between social beings will erode and die, replaced by a clinical coldness. Only those who have submitted to surveillance will be deemed good and trustworthy. The tagged and numbered, the dutiful and docile, will be rewarded with safety and security for their surrender of their liberty and autonomy. The people who refuse to be tagged and numbered will be those who don't need the 'protection' of the state and don't need any new identity membership of the digital community confers, for the very reason that they know who they are and where they are, where they belong and to whom they belong. Such people have no need of surrogates and are disinclined to believe the promises of safety and security, not least because it entails having their every movement, action, and transaction observed, recorded, and judged. My uncle once gave me a sage piece of advice – never disclose personal information voluntarily. The various institutions and authorities seeking to police individuals from cradle to grave know that information is a power that facilitates control. At the heart of this herding of individuals into the Digital Cage is the notion of 'social credit.' It is being given a 'green' gloss, of course, but what is called 'green banking' is really centralized electronic banking in which financial details – and transactions – will be observed, recorded, scrutinized and judged in accordance with parameters of good and evil that are the preserve of the cental controllers. Judgement Day will be every day in such a system. We now have the most prestigious, the most credentialed, the most expert professional liars divining truth for everyone, a truth which everyone will be obliged to serve and sacrifice to. These authorities will be irresistibly omni-science (all knowing), omni-potent (all-powerful), and all omni-benevolent (so supremely good in acting for our own best interests that only the truly evil can oppose their machinations and manipulations).

We are being openly and actively discouraged from seeing ourselves as beings autonomous in associative place and space and instead being accustomed to accepting our existence as possessions of the state, to be organised and organised by others for our own good. Democracy affirms the optimistic thesis that the individual members of the demos are capable of associating together to govern themselves and their common affairs. That fundamental tenet of self-government on the part of citizens is being undone and supplanted by notions of the external administration of subjects as mere possessions of the state, to be ordered, directed, and used in accordance with ends that are formulated from above and from without. In the early 1990s I set about studying Marx in depth in order to discover if his extensive critiques of modern capitalist society retained any merit. I found that they did. I held the view that there was now an opportunity to read Marx anew now that he had been freed from his Communist and State Socialist prison. That view I now see as overly and hopelessly idealistic, premised as it was on the view that people engaged in politics may one day pay more attention to principle than to power. The sad but realistic truth is that those who enter politics with a view to transforming society tend to value their goals and objectives far more than they do the means of their attainment: such people have little patience for the slow, frustrating, and invariably variable qualities of the flesh and blood members of the demos. No sooner is emancipatory critique released from its institutional straightjacket and the bureaucrats of knowledge and power are back on the scene advancing their plans for perfectly and totally ordered world – nothing, absolutely nothing, about the dead-hand of bureaucratisation, centralisation, and rationalization learned.

Whenever I feel perplexed or despairing to the point I feel a lament coming on, I have found it instructive to think of chess and ask what the endgame is. It isn't, in truth, that hard to find. Back in 1995 for my economics masters I wrote a thesis which speculated on the possibilities for socialism in a now globalised economic environment. Full of political idealism, I held that the capital system was now becoming the universal mode of production Marx had said it would become in the 1840s. The world was now catching up with Marx's vision of socialism as a cooperative mode of production established on a global scale. At the same time I theorised an alternate possibility – an attempt on the part of the rich and powerful to create a global planning authority under the corporate form. In a burst of wishful political thinking, I held that international socialism was not just the healthier and more democratic option but also the more realistic. The globalisation of capitalist relations would lead to universal stagnation, I argued, with globalisation calling forth a global planning authority that capital, as a competition of capitals, simply could not constitute. The result would be stagnation and an intensification of crisis. This global planning authority, therefore, could be no viable, long term solution to the contradictory dynamics of the capital system. I still hold that view to be fundamentally correct. Part of my thesis, however, gave the clue as to why that may not be decisive. In this part I made use of Polish economist Michal Kalecki's argument that the ruling class is always prepared to sacrifice its immediate business interests and suffer an extended period of crisis in order to retain political control of people and resources. There was something about my rational mind that couldn't accept this eventuality and instead went in search of a genuine solution, finding none in the global capital system and the corporate form. But the destruction of associational space, of political democracy, of organs of popular control, and of labour solidarity has given the would-be universal managers and controllers a free pass to institute their global planning authority. The result will be an economic and social wasteland but no matter – that's the plan. Incapable of resolving capitalist contradiction and stagnation, the intention is to institute a global pacification, and economic, energy, and food stress serves the purpose of rendering citizens passive, fearful, pliant, and obedient.

These are the people who are so determinedly eroding the foundations and connections so essential to being and belonging, who are turning place over to anonymous forces, who are taking everything we know and love and turning it on its head, perverting by way of a divisive diabolic mockery, negating everything from which we have drawn and continue to draw a sense of self and identity. And why wouldn't they, given that they have nothing to offer themselves by way of positive visions? Of course they want a wasteland, they want scarcity, they want necessity, they want human beings weak and fearful and incapable of resistance. They want society dead; they want atomisation as a radical desocialisation and desolidarisation. They want human beings separated from and opposed to one another. People, sadly, are easy prey; decades of living a mediated existence mean that all too many individuals are more attached to their phones and computers than they are to their families. That family feeling whose freedom-nurturing virtues Tocqueville extolled is in decline. Many too readily accept the 'news' and information they are fed electronically and are directed to hate and attack all those who deviate from the path that is being laid down.

The question as to what the endgame is is a question which asks what those who are part of this global planning authority I envisaged in 1995 plan to do. The answer to that question is rather obvious and mundane – they plan to exercise control and secure resources for themselves and their kind. Politics selects leaders for the ability to gain, maintain, and extend power. They are now attempting it on a global scale, discarding local and national identity in order to secure the conditions for the entrenchment and extension of the corporate form.

So far, predictable. The more interesting question, however, relates to being and place and asks where on Earth this class of planetary managers and controllers plan to be. It's a pertinent question given the process of displacement that is being unleashed upon the nations of the world. They may well envisage living as anonymous people in anonymous space, electronically protected walls somewhere and nowhere, keeping the masses outside of those walls, condemned to bare existence in the wasteland, at bay. It seems that there is a class of people whose political objective is to make the world's population utterly rootless and homeless. The quarter of a century I have spent in writing, in philosophy, and in political campaigning has been motivated by the ancient vision of politics as the theoretical and practical concern with the most appropriate regimen for serving the human good. Those with the power of decision – and non-decision – in the political world of today are motivated by precisely the opposite concern. They openly discard and deride political ideals and values. In place of the human good they are concerned with the management and manipulation of people. This is not politics but is an anti-politics premised on the death of the city, the death of place and the polis, the death of society and social connection. They want to see the citizens of the world reduced to mere rootless tumbleweed that is blown hither and thither without purpose, meaning, and direction. But when 'the masses' are rolling around endlessly, where will their masters actually be? It is here than the inanities and insanities of the easy response 'money and power' become apparent. Whilst such people secede from society in order to better organise and order it, such 'idealism' flounders on the fact that there is actually no Empyrean height from where to exercise the politics of command and control. 'Where there is nothing,' argued Max Weber, 'then both the kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights' (Weber, Politics as a Vocation 1918). These would be kaisers on a global scale have 'nothing' – they are the masters of 'nowhere.' We can frighten ourselves with predictions of the coming totalitarianism, but it is worth emphasising the politics of despair that is driving the urge to command and control. These people have nothing, they are empty, devoid of solutions to the problems that humanity faces, and they know it – hence their concern with surveillance, control, and regulation. And if we are rendered placeless, rootless, and homeless beings, then the same will apply to them. The philosophical vision I set out in the 1990s under the name of Rational Freedom holds that the freedom and happiness of each is conditional upon and coexistent with the freedom and happiness of all. No one person is truly free unless all are free, and all cannot be free unless they are free within the community of others. When there is no place that we, in being rendered rootless, may call home, then there also no place for anyone, however rich, powerful, and privileged they may be, to call home. Where there is nothing and nowhere, there will be no being and belonging for anyone anywhere. It will be a world of nowhere men and women sitting in nowhere land making nowhere plans for nobody. I don't doubt these characters will do their worst, squeezing 'ordinary' folk in a straightjacket of controls and regulations. They'll come after food, land, and energy. But look to the endgame and see this for what it is – a politics of despair. The increasing despair, financial suffering and horrors being inflicted on the working class is something the rich and powerful think they are insulated from. But the darkness will inevitably eventually spread, catch up and also engulf them!

There is no end game, just levels of tyranny in a politics of despair. These people are empty and weak and succeed only through the continued separation of people from one another, their continued antagonism over the non-issue of the day. Once people unite and seek the restitution of social power, the days of these social parasite are numbered, and that is the only numbering I wish to see. In the 1990s I declared that there is nothing to beat, 'the system' and its personifications really is empty. It is for this reason that Lewis Mumford titled his book The Myth of the Machine, the 'myth' being that the Megamachine is all-powerful and irresistible – it isn't, the bullying and the bribing can be resisted. “All that is solid melts into air,” Marx and Engels wrote, “all that is holy is profaned.” The positive alternative lies in a process of resolidification, resolidarisation, resocialisation, and remoralisation – restoration by way of the practical restitution of social power to the self-governing citizenry.