Beware the Mamil

          When I’m out with my litter-picking stick, I often get comments from passers-by, some of whom offer thanks and encouragement, while others tell me that my effort is futile – Sisyphean, even. Two little girls once asked me if it was my job, so I attempted a simplified explanation of the concept of civic duty. They seemed to understand and helped me out for a while, but they soon got bored and wandered off. But it was the mamil (middle-aged man in Lycra) on a bike that worried me.

          He freewheeled up, stopped, smiled and nodded approvingly, tut-tutting about people who toss litter. But he clearly had more to say and soon moved on to fly-tipping generally and abandoned boats in particular. I began to realise that we were not quite on the same page, so I nudged the conversation away from his demonisation of others and towards resolving our common environmental issues. Unfortunately, as soon as he heard me talk of the “ecosystem” and “excess plastic packaging”, he sussed me for a ‘woolly liberal’ and his true colour, Trump red, began to show. He raised his voice for emphasis and proposed punishments – including hanging – for transgressors of his rules, brushing aside my suggestion that it is not lack of discipline, but economic and educational deprivation that cause social problems. Then he started on what he really wanted to talk about – his conviction that covid is not a serious threat and that lockdown has violated our freedoms and ruined our national economy. He would not be queueing for a vaccination.

           I urged him to consider facts, such as the overburdened NHS staff and the statistics of excess deaths but by then he was not listening, rather looking for a fight. At last, giving up on persuasion, I thanked him for the robust exchange of views and pottered off on my mission. People do not like to lose arguments. In an ideal world, our opinions would derive more from demonstrably successful outcomes than hostile declarations and hollow slogans. But hollow slogans, loudly and repeatedly declaimed are, as we all know, highly successful in fixing the views of people who do not, for whatever reason, relate cause to effect.

          Days later, I picked up a book called Basic Income and Sovereign Money, in which the author, Geoff Crocker, condemns the currently accepted model of capitalist economies and, better still, proposes a demonstrably superior one. His starting point is not controversial: “Modern high-technology economies are dysfunctional, delivering not only crisis and austerity, but also pervasive debt, poverty, low pay, inequality and ecological damage.” Anyone who wishes to argue differently must a) have been asleep these last few years or b) marshal evidence to disprove the conclusion. Crocker then proceeds to argue how the proposal that a combination of basic income (e.g. the U.S. government’s recent grant of ‘stimulus cheques’ to every citizen) and sovereign money creation (e.g. the State’s creation of money to bail out the private banks) will uniquely counteract these ills. To follow such an argument, a certain degree of understanding of economics is needed but, far from being seen as a chore, the acquisition of such knowledge should be fundamental to every person’s education, or else we remain pawns in the game of those who do understand and use it to accrue wealth by propagating myths about the creation of value, the distribution of money and the inevitability of debt.

          This is the kind of argument I would like to have with my mamil acquaintance, should we meet again. But, until he personally receives a basic income, experiences freedom from consumer debt and sees the restoration of local authority funding to pre-austerity levels (such that waste collection becomes feasible once more) I fear his mind will remain as tightly bound by misinformation as his body is constrained by its Lycra skin.