The criticism of selfishness, or the closely related term of disparagement, 'arrogance', is generally aimed at a person who does not need to cultivate the goodwill of those that criticise them. Hence, social association is usually between those of similar economic means, where there is sufficient need for such cultivation as to preserve social calm. By contrast, when there is disparity, the richer party will tend to neglect the poorer's interests, resulting in justified resentment issuing in accusations of selfishness (and, or, arrogance).

In any section of the wealth gradient, I would hazard the guess that there is more variation in wealth from richest to poorest as you move up the wealth curve, with the result that accusations of selfishness are more common than amongst sections lower down the curve. Hence increasing degrees of solidarity are found as you move down the income gradient. Poorer people aren't intrinsically nicer; they just have to be.

What's Wrong with Recent Poems?

Dismal profundity;
Melancholy self-satisfaction;
Preening humility;
Condescending appeals for pity;
A lazy attention to detail;
A laboured wringing of great significance from tiny amounts of damp matter;
A social and political gradient of cartoon simplicity, and always viewed from the same perspective (la bas);
Pompous leaning on great names from other countries;
A cheapening of death and disability by over-use;
The weird assumption that dirt, or suffering, or deprivation is news to the reader, to the world of reading;
A monotony of tone, a low drone;
Ambulance-chasing melancholy;
Predatory compassion;
History on the pattern of the Hovis advertisement;
A half-concealed, half-advertised contempt for uneducated family relations in conventional careers;
An obsession with excretion;
Gloating over the deaths of failed lives;
Never less than very important (except when self-consciously eschewing significance in the name of still greater meaning);
Identical emotional material projected onto a little-varying set of props;
Maps, inscriptions, glyphs, decodings, graffiti;
The implication that all the lives depicted would pass away in vain were it not for this poet;
Tension and failure, with compensating joy only in a sordid and polluted form;
Slave romance;
Overburdened childhood vignettes;
Superstitious omni-significance;
Christ! (the poet suffers to save the reader, and are you grateful?);
Illness and insight;
Contempt for health;
Explaining too much lest something fine slips by (the ‘clock on the golden section: ten to three’), or too little lest the vacuity of the situation becomes apparent;
Solipsism;
Objects usually broken and old;
Lassitude, made flesh in the rhythms of the verse (if any);
Insistent demands for attention;
Sensitivity speaking in the language of a dictator;
Tired nihilism;
World-weary knowing all;
Sombre colours of decay enlivened only with flesh tints;
A world in which to flourish is failure; and failure is the sole merit;
Single point perspective;
Hushed tones in church (the world a convenient altar for self-worship);
The easy romance of spatial dislocation (translation; travel);

Overworked thesaurus;
Bleating, but crying wolf;
Sanctity of the sordid;
The authorities are always bullies;
Misery memoir, mirth as contrast only;
Bleeding hearts are worn upon the sleeve this year (and all years);
Moaning;
Brand names, particularly for alcohol;
Curiously irresponsible (no children?);
Jaded;
A supersensitive soul denied better fare;
A ‘prisoner’ begging through imagined bars;
Self-harm;
Disorder preferred;
Litter adored;
Public transport;
And a natural world that achieves reality only through the speaker's gloom.
That's what.

Laocoon’s a beauty but
My neighbour wrapped in tubes is not;
Her dog agrees, and seems to think
His god-provider needs support.

No catharsis here, high rage,
A patriotic will to act,
Convulses all his parts at once,
In apoplectic tip-toe dance.

She sneers perhaps at this mistake,
But errs herself in thinking that
His rippled swags of angry fat
Are mobilized on her behalf.

An ancient native visual map
Sees snakes embrace a fellow tyke;
His leader, pack, extended self,
As men would feel in smaller groups.

And with unerring common sense
He savages the serpent's head,
And not its rumbling metal gut,
Which lies, neglected, some yards off.

The dog assumes that he and she
Confront a common enemy.
Their social frame is under threat,
A relative, perhaps, attacked.

And thus the shock when Mum, for fun,
Assists the beast in trouncing him;
Reproachful eyes are made at her,
Whose causal agency is clear.

The laughter gives it all away,
His frowns are risible, and tears
Of high perplexion stand
To say I’m honest Pug betrayed.

This terrifying bafflement,
A breach in his domestic dream
Revealing possibilities
Too numerous to undertake

Or choose between, amuses us;
The incapacity and fear
Confirming like a nervous joke
That stern dulotic mastership,

Which took a pup and made it drunk
Upon a propagandous love
Diffused throughout the human nest
To sterilize our slaves and maids.

We farm these helpers ruthlessly,
With iron hand and chocolate bone,
And sculpt their features over years
Producing strains of inquile beasts

To serve our lordly purposes
As sleek and hairless instruments,
Or live as tolerated fools
Upon a dandling woman’s knee;

While dimmer hounds provide a girl
With model lovers, strong and warm,
Devoutly tractable yet fierce,
As melancholy harem guards.

Our moral calculations fail
To generate a clear result
From this confused ecology
Where none is Justice, none is thief.

A dog is but an acid’s egg,
A million sterile eggs the price
The twisted speculator pays
That one may blossom millions more.

And carried out upon our tide
The canine gene-bag ripples, bobs,
And is disfigured on the swell
Of man’s now overblown success.

The revolution is at hand,
And all such lackeys, running dogs,
May soon be free to mate and die
Beyond this court’s oppressive law.

What is the curse of oil? Why does it fall on some countries and not others? The answer is simple: when the income passes to states or governments it will either be consumed in activities that would not be required by a freely choosing population or malinvested in capital that provides activities that are not required, which is equivalent to consumption but over a longer timescale.

When it passes to private hands part will be consumed immediately to deliver immediate benefit, and part, in many circumstances the larger part, will be invested in such a way as to create energy consuming operations in that country (and elsewhere) that produce wealth, in other words it will be invested to provide something required by human individuals, and thus a return on that investment.
Oil is no curse, any more than coal is or was to Britain. It depends crucially on where the income flows and how it is spent.

We land
Or so it seems to us, autocthonous
And proteinaceous mushrooms,
And then we die.

My expanding universe,
Extending family,
Contracts to one room,
One short view of the garden
(No man’s longer).

No thick roof hides us from
Our sun’s neutrinos,
No monkey’s coat of dullness
Long wards off knowledge;
A single drip’s a soaking.

The hills are fitness contours,
And now you too have felt
Today’s indifferent landslip,

Or seen the mists which promise rain.

It is one of the fundamental lessons of broad literary reading and of historical study that the human mind has been much the same over time and geography. Careful reflection on what we can discern of the mind of an ancient author, and allowing for the projection we inevitably make of our own mind into that of another, there are broad similarities. Indeed, the reality of projection, which I am so far from denying that I emphasize it, is indeed a proof this suggestion. The fact is that we are able to project ourselves into the writings of even a distant period without much torsion or neglect of the kind that we must enter into when, for example, creating cartoon narratives of talking animals or vegetables or vehicles. That is in itself rather remarkable. If the human mind had changed very significantly it would simply not be true.

Indeed, it seems possible to me that the brain may have an approximate maximum level of informational complexity, consisting of the evolved structure and the information it acquires, and that this accounts for our intuition that there has been little or no change in the mind over history, or indeed between pre-technological (and pre-literate) peoples and our own time. We certainly represent the world in different ways, and as a consequence are much more successful at manipulating the world, for these mental representations are much more accurate and adequate to our purposes, and in that sense they certainly can be termed more complex.

But the difference in the brain itself is, all told, not that great, and most of the variation in complexity that we observe is accounted for in the representations and other structures external to the mind, and the greatest barrier to understanding a person in distant period is the lack of such clutter.

If any one doubts that the sly brilliance and sideways glancing insight of Bernard Mandeville's books has left them, even at this date, three hundred years after their publication, uncomfortably warm to the touch, they should read Skidelsky and Skidelsky's treatment in their rigoristic and sincerely puritan tract, How Much is Enough? (Allen Lane: London, 2012). (In case you are wondering, the answer is 'Whenever the Saved cry Stop!')

Mandeville, one of the finest naturalistic observers of human behaviour ever to have graced our language is dismissed in one line as a 'scribbler', and then in the next crowned with thorns as the 'Machiavelli of economics'. When a book harbours such conflicting views we can be sure that a nerve has been touched; and Bernard Mandeville MD knew of all the most sensitive spots in the hypochondriacal well-wisher, with the consequence that the pained reaction is strong beyond concealment; Mandeville is bad, bad, bad in both ways, a hack, a part-time writer of doggerel (actually capable Hudibrastics; but economists and philosophers cannot be expected to know such things), and he's wicked too, an eponymous Devil of a man, a cavalier and satirical malcontent, perhaps a Satanist, certainly a cynic.

And yet, as S&S themselves allow, for they are decent souls in spite of being an economic Lord's Day Observance Society, Mandeville is to his great honour and extensive credit, a thinker who takes and considers men and women as they are and not as finger-waggers would have them be.

Nevertheless, S&S ignore his views, as perhaps they must; for if Mandeville is right (and he is) then their recommendation for placing limits on consumption would not only make all mankind virtuous by curbing the boundless flight of a hook-billed psyche whose wings though viewless are forged by nature not the angels, but would also, in the same sermonising breath, make it grindingly poor, with even the humblest desires unfulfilled. If you are 'for honesty', and S&S most certainly are, then you must be 'for acorns' too. However, Skidelsky and Skidelsky say you may have a certain number of grams of quite nice cake. That is mistaken. Acorns it is, and Dr Mandeville retains his position.

Commentators more or less sympathetic to the Conservatives are dismissing UKIP grumbles about electoral reform by suggesting that the First Past the Post does in fact reflect the country and that in the face of failure to secure more than one seat the party will now melt away. On the latter point they may, in part, be right. The dissapointment will be intense, especially for those who had not voted for some time and were drawn out of seclusion by the promise of making a difference. Such people may, perhaps, retreat into despair once more; and who can blame them? But the effect on the core of the party's nearly 4 million voters has the potential of galvanising them, and giving them a new sense of purpose. They now see that it is possible to collect a vote of national scale, and to deny the Conservative party a resounding victory. This will be attractive both to those who see UKIP's as a potential parliamentary force, and to those who think the party's role is to put pressure on the Conservatives to alter their policies. The latter group have every reason to congratulate themselves; they have pushed the Conservatives into much more robust positions on a whole range of issues, made it difficult for the leadership to ignore the backbenchers, and have reason to expect further success as Tory analysts seek ways of attracting, say, half the UKIP vote, without disaffecting the 11 million that they already have.

But the most important effect of the UKIP vote is independent of any immediate political consequences, and relates to the drift of public opinion and its long term effect on changes to law and constitutional practise, as described by Dicey in relation to the Nineteenth Century. The public can now see three parties, one of the right, two of the left, that have polled 7.4 million votes but are represented by only 10 MPs. This will not produce concrete proposals for electoral reform in the short or even medium term, but it is certain to contribute to a current of public opinion already in motion. As we know from the history of the late Eighteenth the whole of Ninteenth and the early part of the 20th Century, steady pressure for electoral reform eventually delivered universal suffrage.

Indeed, those who defend First Past the Post are in a similar position to those who resisted reform during that period, and some of the arguments are similar, namely that the existing system produces stable government, and does, in spite of its apparent oddities, produce governments and even parliaments that represent the mood the country. These points had substantial merit in the past and they have merit now, and they will be recognised even by those who nonetheless conclude that there is something in need of reform. But it is doubtful if such pragmatic arguments can save the reputation of a system where large numbers of votes go almost unrepresented in parliament, while sectarian interests such as the separatist Scottish Nationalist Party can gain 56 of the 59 the seats in Scotland with only 1.5m votes (which is less than half of the Scottish electorate, and about 2% of the population of the United Kingdom).

First Past the Post is on the way out; it won't go soon, but it will go, just as the electoral system of the 18th Century did, and it will go for the same reason, a gradual loss of credibility. Even those who see practical advantages in the status quo should understand that inflexible adherence to a system in which there is steadily waning confidence may result in social and political instability. It is often forgotten that England in 1817 was regarded by skilled observers as dangerously volatile, and Castlereagh took the remarkable step of suspending Habeas Corpus. This was recognised as undesirable, but simply thought to be necessary. We are a long way from such a situation, but there should be no doubt in anybody's mind that forces such as those we are considering here have major disruptive potential when frustrated.

It should also be recognised, on the basis of 19th Century experience, that even prudent and delays to reform intended to better reflect the political opinions and interests of individuals create the conditions in which collectivism can flourish, and ultimately, in the course of prosecuting its agenda, severely restrict human freedom. This is to be avoided.

Labour's performance in the election is much poorer than I expected, partly because I didn't see through the faulty opinion polls, as to my knowledge some campaigners on the ground most certainly did; but also because the anti-Scotch vote in England seems to have benefitted the Conservatives (and perhaps UKIP) rather than, as I believed likely, the Labour party. I do not understand the reasons for this, but am willing to grant that it might be that the increasingly collectivist rhetoric produced by the Conservative party (the detoxification strategy) succeeded in offering a guilt-free home to English partriotism. In which case the rebranding must be accounted a partial success.

But the character of Labour's disaster, and it is most certainly that, is not immediately apparent from the seats won, and it is to the number of votes cast, which tells a very different story, that we must turn. The following table lists these figures for 2010 and 2015 and then calculates the difference and the ratio of the two numbers:

Both Conservative and Labour received more votes in 2015 than in 2010, but viewed as a multiple of the number of votes cast in 2010 neither party achieved any dramatic increase in 2015. That said, Labour did receive 740,000 more votes. Clearly, Miliband failed to break through; but there is no case for suggesting that the public turned their back on him, except in Scotland where they clearly did; indeed, when approximate allowance is made for the offsetting effects of the Scottish catastrophe, it would seem that Miliband did in fact mobilise significant numbers of extra votes in England. Doubtless this is what underlay much Labour confidence during the campaign.

More obvious and perhaps still more significant are the collapse of the Liberal Democratic vote (-4m); a surge in the UKIP vote (+3m); and a surge in the Green Vote (+900,000).

The collapse in the Liberal Democratic vote is the most striking of all. Even if we assume that the lost 4 million account for all of the increase in the Conservative, Labour, SNP and Green Party votes, there are still over 1 million missing voters, and I find it difficult to believe that many of these voted UKIP. It would seem that Miliband can reasonably be criticised for not attracting these disillusioned LibDems, indeed for actively repelling them with a harshly European-style ideological socialism, evident more in his tone than the literal sense of his announcements, rather rather than the blander well-wishing variety that is traditional in the United Kingdom and certainly drives the Liberal Democrats.

The increases in the SNP and the Green votes are of course both important, but I don't think that Labour's managers can actually be blamed for either of these problems. The rise of intense Scottish Nationalism is a phenomenon that no party has succeeded in addressing, and to which there can be no easy answer. Only a vigorous, practically religious, supranational collectivism would have had any chance, but the only version open to any party was the much less potent Unionism against which the SNP is already in successful rebellion. In any case, supranational collectivism is comparatively weak in the face of nationalism since it appeals only to the vanity of the electorate rather than their pride and self-interest.

With regard to the Greens, it is arguable that Miliband could have tried to make his party appear still more concerned about the environment and opposed to economic growth, but only at the risk of looking absurd in the eyes of some its staunchest supporters. In fact, it is notable that climate change has been almost absent from the election campaign, perhaps confirming suspicions that our anxieties are largely centred on the human sphere; "L'enfer, c'est les autres".

Of all the results, though, it is that of UKIP, which has most relevance to an understanding of the significance of this election, and an also to an evaluation of Mr Cameron's performance. About 3.9 million votes were cast for UKIP, equivalent to a striking 1/3 of the total number cast for Mr Cameron's Conservative party. Furthermore, UKIP's number is an increase of nearly 3 million on 2010.

The electoral counterfactual that should be troubling Conservative party strategists is the scenario in which these voters or at least a quarter of them voted for Mr Cameron and delivered an overwhelming victory rather than the slight though welcome because very surprising majority that has made him Prime Minister once more. Nigel Farage's achievement is to have mobilised a larger number of converts than any other party, and to have done so in the teeth of considerable media opposition, and in spite of fairly aggressive Conservative attempts to bag the game that UKIP were stirring up.

The fact that UKIP's astonishing political creativity has been rewarded with only one seat is bound to cause considerable dismay in that party, and could result in this newly assembled and undisciplined cohort disbanding in disgust. But it might equally cause sufficient anger and general embarrassment to increase pressure for major electoral reform. If we divide the number of votes cast by the number of seats, we find that the three largest parties in parliament have votes per seat ratios in the low tens of thousands: SNP, 26,000; Conservative, 34,000; Labour 40,000. By contrast the Green Party's one MP represents over 1 million voters, and UKIP's Mr Carswell must take his seat in the House of Commons knowing that he is the sole voice in that assembly for 3.9 million people. This is not symptomatic of a democracy in sound health.

Systems in equilibrium are remarkable. – We know of none, for the concept is purely theoretical and without empirical support. Indeed, it can only be generated by taking a view of an observed system that is arbitrarily truncated fore and aft. All known systems are open and dynamic; energy was transferred to them, and is leaking from them. As Heraclitus says, everything flows, everything changes. At the most general level, this is the distinction between the theological worldview and that of the naturalist. The believer maintains the hope that there is, somewhere, an equilibrium to which we can ultimately return. The naturalist sees no evidence of such a thing.

It is this hope for stable equilibrium that marks out the green world view as fundamentally religious. From stabilising the climate to the steady state economy we see ghosts of a longing for equilibrium. The socialist world view is the same. And of course there are many other instances across the political spectrum; nostalgia for the past, seen as a stable system, arbitrarily truncated fore and aft, a longing for an authority capable of maintaining a stable hierarchy, a fear of the astonishing and indeed terrifying dynamics of competitive commercial societies.

Perhaps it is simpler to see many religious and political views as driven in large part by the pursuit of an equilibrium state 'suggesting', as Lewis observed of the arts, 'perfect conditions for one organism' ("Inferior Religions", 1917), and this is curiously true of both individualist and collectivist approaches alike, since both are driven by individual preferences, for all that collectivists say to the contrary.
In other words, these systems offer the subject a suspension of hostilities, man and world, man and man, and this is so agreeable a prospect that we are willing to contemplate the most extreme difficulties in the achievement.