As John Lennon said.... Imagine

WORSHIPPING A FALSE GOD

I don't watch BBC's Question Time too often.  It mostly infuriates so what's the point?  The panel is invariably packed out with right wingers and you can almost guarantee that the audience will contain a ukip plant (by which I do indeed mean an unthinking vegetable) who'll try to drag in the irrelevance of immigration no matter what the subject.  But occasionally there is someone invited who is not just a decent human being, but also clear thinking and articulate.  Step forward Armando Ianucci who stood out as a voice of reason in one recent episode.

So it's no great surprise to find him writing this piece in the Guardian and getting right to the heart of what's currently wrong with our society.   It's all about the money.

As Ianucci points out we are being conned into believing that the most important aspect of our lives is money, the economy, business, banking - call it what you will for these are all sides of the same coin (sorry....).  How have we got ourselves into the position where the needs of real people, the great majority of people, are considered secondary in importance to something that doesn't actually exist?

Now saying that money isn't real isn't very fashionable, is it?  It goes against everything we're told by politicians, the mass media, business representatives.  Or, to put it another way, by all the people who have power over the rest of us and are getting richer and richer.  But money is only a social construct.  It's an abstract.  People can exist without money, but the reverse does not apply.

Consider an apocalypse scenario in which organised society has broken down.  What advantage does the rich person have over the poor one?  None at all, for money, wealth, is only of value within a particular ordered structure.  And if we want to rid ourselves of this curious god then it's the structures, and the culture underlying them, that need to be changed.

The so called 'laws of market' are not like the laws of physics.  The later are immutable, the former were made by human beings and can be amended, unmade, reconstructed as we see fit.  If there is the understanding and will to do so.

Of course anyone who challenges the orthodoxy of the Establishment will be derided, because it's the Establishment that sets the rules, that frames the questions which shape the answers to be allowed.  There is no room for diversion, let alone imagination or vision, as Natalie Bennett was made all too aware of recently.

There is no easy answer to this, other than the insidious power of thought and desire for change.  If there is ever to be another way of doing things it will take many years to get there, although a start can be made by reversing the disastrous policies, and associated greed, of what in the UK we usually call Thatcherism.  In other countries we have seen the rise of Syriza and Podemos.  In the UK there are only the Greens, and to a lesser extent the SNP and Plaid Cymru, who provide a mainstream challenge to the prevailing doctrines, with movements like UKUncut and Occupy showing that the desire exists, but in a form which is not yet ready to create a mass movement.

It's a plus to have a public figure like Inanucci speak out in terms which object to the way things are, and point out that it need not be this way.  Societal and cultural change  is never going to be easy - turning a supertanker would appear to have the agility of a ferret in comparison.  But that's not the same as impossible.