Dan Taylor

Undermining the Castle

Prospectors – filth accumulators

See the castle in the distance. We will undermine it by use of cunning and strategy. Let me state the problem first however: It is not so much that every aspect of our lives is dominated by the rule of the rich elite with the weapon of poverty, it’s that this situation seems inevitable and one we each to have to individually make the best of. It’s this way of life or nothing at all. This is the image of authority, the distant castle that looms in the distance with all the ugly intensity of plastic tupperware.

You may disagree that we are ruled by any specific thing. There’s the freedom to go out and buy a newspaper, to travel where you want to, to work, to vote, to say exactly what you mean. Perhaps? I’ll give you an example. We think we are governed, something we vote and consent to, but instead we are ruled. Poverty and unemployment have always been serious ever-present issues, but elections are used to project social discontent onto the current government. Movement is restricted and space is divided up and excluded by CCTV and behaviour orders, passports are required to travel, and these require citizenship. Asylum seekers are kept in prisons and camps. Travelers are deported and ecology poisoned in the name of cheap furniture. India and China, wherever: Capital is global and poverty universal.

We’re lovin’ it

When did we choose to consent to this arrangement? I see suffering mediated and mechanically reproduced, and I detect the humming malignity of the Castle, its presence always close but remote, like mobile phone networks or the self-thwarting musical development of The Fall. I want a word with the manager, but I each time I call the Castle helpline the numbered automated phone system brings me ever back to the first menu. I’ll find him in person.

Manager of the Chavs

Piers Morgan might be the manager of the Chavs. Or perhaps it is Simon Cowell, or possibly President Murdoch, as you always said it was. I say Piers. He has come to power like others such as Blair or Michael McIntyre by an absolutely cynical absence of conscience, talent or goodness, by a sheer lack, a creepy shallowness, an utter void.

The castle relies on crime – it keeps the security forces (police, intelligence, army) justified and employed. Biotechnology and media are used to maintain the population into acquiescent and obedient slaves, a mass brainwashing accepted and fueled equally perhaps by a tiny minority being educated as violent psychopaths. We are only speculators, evaluators of other peoples’ disused office furniture and broken down relationships.“The passive majority already accept that the constant surveillance of both public places and cyberspace is fully justified to protect them from those maniacs who threaten the smooth-functioning of a well-ordered society“[Ballard, Kingdom Come].

Why bother?

The ideology of individualism and egoism has been promoted to prevent a unity, a class consciousness, a shared anger that might actually be driven in an effective direction. And now I’m tired. Beer will be convulsive or it will not be at all. The Manager of the Proles and his friendly team are 100% good, natural, recycled and carbon-neutral. We are controlled by football insignia and we love it. As the EDL have said “we are not anti-anything, we are proud to be English“, hence attacking Muslims and Leftists. How do we defeat this? Within every social movement is its downfall, the egoism which impelled it is turned upon by more insecure supporters. It fizzles out. How do we sustain it?

The contortionism of washed-up sex workers

Snorting America’s best drugs is wonderful – especially for our young millionaires this corrupt castle raises as our menagerie of poor idols. Totems of a compulsive hedonism, a sped-up consumerism without history or nature. I want the best drugs, but I only get third-best, the booze and the cheap TV, but I’m still kept in a retinue of sex-workers which define us all: productive units, individualism now a 19^th century bourgeois concept. Hence the scourge of the disabled body and the elderly body, hence the hatred and televised re-programming of the obese, people who might otherwise be economically productive. We cannot scapegoat them because they have too loyally pursued the suburb existence of socially controlled utterly useless living, with intense periods of mindless energy safely valved into M25 shopping malls, sports events and Freeview. But pointing out the intrinsic contradictions of being a Penge sex-worker are banal and pointless – an expression as profound as texting KELLY U R DA QUORY XX ED X to the rolling comments of Big Brother Live or Sky News Views. We are a troupe of rotting corpses with leaking tits and seeping pricks.

Sleight of hand

Magic tricks aim to confront the spectator with the astonishment of seeing the impossible. With a single card trick, say where the magician reveals the player’s chosen card, the viewer would not (we hope) logically believe the magician has clairvoyant abilities, but the joyful surprise of the trick becomes the overwhelming feeling. The magician aims to impress his audience (perhaps because else he does not feel impressive), and to give them the sensation of having experienced something magical.

We will confront the castle with something magical, something it believes to be truly impossible. With their cameras and drones and CBT experts, the officials at the castle feel they have full view of the vassals. But using the mirrors of Archimedes and mind-bending cunning, we proles will keep our cards hidden. In the sleight of hand, the magician is all too aware that the card-picker is scrutinising each tiny movement and expression. This hawk-eyed vigilance plays into the magician’s hands, for the sleight occurs precisely when the magician relaxes and slides his hand, not when he lurches forwards with violent festivities, which simply serves to trick the viewer into expecting the trick will happen here. One day no-one will go to work, and this will be far more radical than 100 Anarchists getting their heads kicked in at Trafalgar Square.