Ireland is now little more than a Troika experiment in social Darwinism

By Tony Galvin IT'S beginning to dawn on me why the Troika is always so happy with us. Here we are, watching one of the hallmarks of a civilised society â€â€ caring for those least able to care for themselves â€â€ being whittled away cut by cut, and with each slice of the knife the Troika boys and girls seem happier and happier. [private] Admittedly I bought into the whole balancing the books, living beyond our means palaver for a while there. But then the realisation dawned that the whole foundation of western culture, the very axis on which neo-liberal capitalism rotates, depends on not balancing the books and facilitating as many people as possible to live well beyond their means. So the truth as regards the Troika is quite sinister indeed. We're now nothing more than a social Petri dish, what's being done to us is a malevolent experiment to see how many supports can be whipped away from a society until we arrive back at Stone Age level. Once the boffins see us descend into complete chaos they'll publish their findings, the Troika will have a yardstick, and know precisely how far they can push the likes of Italy and Spain. What's one little country when the whole EU is at stake? Think of Ireland as a loss leader, something to be sacrificed for the greater good. That'll make you feel a lot better as you watch the country crumbling around you. The plan is quite ingenious and it's ticking along nicely. Why do you think the areas being savaged are those involving educational supports for disadvantaged children, care packages for the elderly, social welfare benefits etc? Why just this weekend Comrade Joan Burton has confirmed that the latest target is the Old Age Pension. Not Joan's pension, of course, she and her fellow champions of the working classes have ensured their cosy set-up remains untouched. No, the pension being targeted is the one to which workers have contributed when they were fortunate enough to be in work. Now along comes Joan, whipping the ladder up at a time when those who haven't clocked up enough stamps to get the full Contributory Old Age Pension haven't a hope of working longer to make up the contributions. Ingenious or what? NAMA cowboys are paid €200,000 a year by the state, but a worker will now need a PhD in maths to figure out basic pension entitlements for a very basic pension. Ten more years of this and we won't know ourselves. When we hit rock bottom we'll have a clean slate and the opportunity to start again from scratch. Pol Pot, the Cambodian leader who, for some reason, was named after a Connemara pothole, decided to do just that and in 1975 turned the clock back in his benighted country to the year zero. He decided that anyone with an education, himself and his cronies excepted of course, had either to be reformed or eliminated. Old Pol spent a good few years studying in Paris himself but wasn't too hot on passing exams. Those who did pass them didn't fare too well in his killing fields. He ordered everybody to evacuate the cities and towns and marched them out into the countryside to lead pure, agrarian existences. Of the population of eight million, it's estimated that up to 1.7 million died. Do the figures ring a bell? Our pre-Famine population was eight million. Pol tried to strip away what he considered the contamination of civilization. Comrade Joan and the Troika are developing their own version. Extinction with a human face, historians of the future will dub it. We won't all be marched out to the bogs to begin new lives. EU environmental directives would never allow it. Think of the impact on the unfortunate frogs and butterflies. No, we'll be whittled away, bit by bit, until all that's left will be fit, productive and very docile citizens who'll ask for nothing and get even less. Children, pensioners and those not capable of work are a luxury this sclerotic society can no longer afford. Red Joan and the Troika are working on a new era of survival of the fittest (with the agreement of Fine Gael and their New Era programme for government). That's the conclusion I've reached. We're entering an age of social Darwinism. What has passed for civilization is slowly being rolled back and soon we'll be living as our more hairy ancestors once did, when life was red in tooth and claw. Not that I see anything wrong with this. I've always been a bit of a Darwinist myself. Eat or be eaten will soon be the only rule as capitalism draws towards its logical conclusion. There's a certain symmetry to the little people being devoured by the very beast they've been tricked into feeding. Marx may have got things awfully wrong when it came to communism but he was right on the button when it came to capitalism. This sow is eating her own farrow â€â€ the great middle class to which she gave birth.   â€Â¢ â€Â¢ â€Â¢   Civilization is overrated and simply too expensive to maintain So how can at least some of us survive this apocalypse? Here are a few ideas: Law & Order: My hypothesis (a fancy word for argument) is this: There must be a baseline level of criminality. It may drop from time to time, which makes everyone happy, and it may rise, which makes the place go mad. But in the end equilibrium is reached and things carry on as normal, which is pretty awful anyway. We'd probably have the same levels of murder and mayhem irrespective of whether we had a police force or not. So why not measure the cost of employing a police force, running a court system, maintaining prisons and keeping desk jockeys in the Department of Justice calculating their increment entitlements? When you have all this added up, compare it with the estimated cost to society of living without them. After all, police forces have only been around for a century or two, what did people do before they came along? They had stocks, gallows and transportation. We already have transportation; it would only take a minimum investment for each town to set up stocks and a gallows. Yes, law and order as we know it would be a bit rough and ready at first, but after a year or two things would settle down to a monthly hanging, a bit of flogging and for minor offenders, a day or two in the stocks. Mob rule has received a bad press, what do you bet this negative image was put about by those with a vested interest in maintaining the current system? We could model our new system on the one operated by the pirates of the Caribbean. They had a code, quite sophisticated, and most pirates stuck to it. Those who didn't walked the plank. Let's be honest, the most useful function our Garda force serves is to take a goodly number of potential criminals off the streets and put them in uniform, and to provide off-the-shelf spouses for nurses. It's a vastly expensive Community Employment Scheme and matchmaking service. Believing otherwise is like pretending social workers are there to assist people in their daily lives and that traffic wardens improve traffic flow. The world could get along just fine without most of those who claim to keep it turning. Naturally, my thesis is backed up with solid research. Statistics have shown that 83% of serious crime occurs irrespective of police activity. 73% of such crimes are never solved. This means we are employing a huge police force to deal with a very small percentage of serious crime. I made up these statistics but as most people accept such stats at face value, and even more just skim columns like this to pick up a few titbits that confirm their own prejudices, I'll probably get away with them. Statistics show that 93% of readers never read past the first statistic so most won't read on to discover I'm bluffing. Those who do are probably certifiably insane or would never admit to reading my scribblings in the first place, so I'm safe enough. If you're still with me, keep taking the tablets. Education: The schools are closed for half the year as it is. Why not simply close them for good and give the kids a permanent holiday? If they need to read and write then let the Australians or the Americans teach it to them when they arrive out there. Like beef, export the young on the hoof. No, education is something we can no longer afford. It's a luxury. China and India are producing engineers and the like by the new time. They have the advantage of economy of scale. Close up the third-level colleges too and outsource all our training facilities. Health: Just stop treating people. Statistics collated since Adam and Eve filled out the first census form clearly show that most of us are going to die. Is it really necessary to bankrupt the state just to prolong the process? As a society we have developed an unhealthy obsession with living. Get over it. The survival of the fittest is the way forward. Health services are simply eroding the gene pool by keeping alive people who could be serving a more useful function as fertiliser. Who needs civilisation? It's a jungle out there. â€Â¢ â€Â¢ â€Â¢ Quote of the Week   'It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black.' â€â€ Charlie Brown [/private]