Inequality is central to understanding what happened or how people voted in the referendum. The gap between those at the top and those ignored at the bottom is so wide that the people at the top are not really informed about the pain and agony of those at the bottom based on the expectations that people have for their lives. It may not be nice to talk about and it may make people with vested interest uneasy but it is a reality -- widening inequality and the way many are made to become disposable and expendable in the EU economic system. Yes, this is true even in a place like Europe or the United Kingdom. For many, after all the pride in a civilization that traces itself back to Socrates and the ancient Greeks, or even the teachings of the Bible, after all revolutions and philosophical treatises about human dignity or progress that have been written in the West, to come and end up with this kind of "crap" in the name of market union or progress, is an anti-climax. People are feeling economically less secure and they will use any means to express their frustration when given the opportunity. The world and all its struggles is now just for a small elite at the top, increasingly, this is the trend.
What happened reminds me of the documentary "Trillion Dollar Bet" which is a NOVA (SCIENCE PBS) documentary. The central question was whether economics can be science and part of the documentary focused on Long Term Capital Management and the dream team that thought they had a scientific formula to make money that is infallible. But the day of reckoning came. Actually, the incident was a warning well ahead of time for the kind of thing that happened in 2008 that led to the Great Recession. In the documentary, Professor Paul Samuelson at one point said, do not believe something just because it is elegant or elegantly stated. He was referring to some mathematical equation that was used by Long Term Capital Management.
What led to the surprise results to many people in Europe or the world is that people have believed what the elites of the world and their media are saying to themselves. They ignored the fact that for over 20 years, Europe or the EU have increasingly focused more on economics and money making ignoring other equally important concerns in any project of creating a decent human society -- the question of justice, fairness and inclusive growth or development. They just relied on text book analysis of the aggregate benefits of common market and union etc and assume everyone was alright with that when they examine their lives. But this kind of union benefits some people while marginalizing others. Yet, increasing EU and even British companies want to compete in the global economy like those of the U.S. and the way you do that is to to be more concerned about making decisions that will please the money makers more than other groups of people. Democracy has little meaning if it is just a mechanism for providing public relations and endorsement to elites' agenda that care very little about the struggles of people in communities that are considered peripheral to the movers and shakers of the economy or those that are sometimes called "Masters of the Universe."
Inequity will be a defining issue in the 21st century in so far as neoliberals pay only lip service to it. The issue is not that we want to create a world where everyone is equal. That is a straw man. But as Barrington Moore Junior said, in every society, people have a sense of what is fair and once you crossed that line, you will encounter resistance.
In today's popular economic and political parlance, any serious talk about justice, fairness, equality and inclusion are considered to be concerns that slow the efficiency and ingenuity of the market. State spending for the poor is increasingly reduced. It is better to talk about efficiency and increasing productivity without much talk about distribution. Well, the voters in the United Kingdom have sent a signal. I have no regret if the EU is dismembered because ordinary citizens in their various countries feel Brussels is more concerned about increasing market competitiveness and efficiency even when any success that comes from that is not intended to be fairly shared. The results of the success go increasingly to a tiny percentage of the elites who use some logic to explain away any moral and ethical concern about such unequal distribution. Here is a confession of one person who participated in those centers that make money, and in many cases they are as much a threat to society as they can be of help:
If an influential regional organization like EU is just primarily catering for the educated and those high human capital that can move freely to work, those with money to invest with human capital etc, while doing little or nothing to many that are considered expendable or disposable except for political reason or elections, I care less if the EU disappears. I have no sympathy for any institution in the world that will not take justice, fairness and equality seriously. We cannot create a society where everyone is equal but it is naive to assume we can resolve such fundamental issues that no decent human society can solve by just using nice economic rhetoric. Nietzsche's answer is that ultimately people will judge things with life itself. Many in this forum are well educated about the racism of Europeans during colonialism and how the nationalist movements in Africa brought them down. But now, as Nietzsche woul say, we use our lives to decide whether to remain in our newly formed countries in Africa where we are presumably free, or to follow the Europeans to their countries and live there because our lives tell us that it is better, irrespective of any well-documented critique of white oppression of blacks. It is the same thing with all the talk about free trade, common market etc. People will use their lives to judge a situation and frankly, the analysis I saw on BBC television using colors clearly shows that to understand what happened, you have to understand who are those people living in a place, what is their situation in life and how did that influence their vote?
At the end of the day, people will use their lives to judge the situation. I know that in many African countries, if there was to be a free and fair referendum about whether Europeans should return and run the affairs of some states or countries, in many constituencies the referendum will pass. It will pass not because the people are stupid but because they will use their life to judge the postcolonial state. And the answer is, irrespective of all nationalist rhetoric, in many African countries, many citizens feel betrayed by their ruling elites. Their quality of life has drastically diminished.
As the article below from the Guardian indicates, those who have money voted to remain, and those that do not and do not make it or the system does not help them to make money, voted out. We may not like it but everyone uses his or her life to make decision. I am not surprise that immigrant concerns, and sovereignty issues came up on top of people's concerns. It is not simply a question of hating immigrants, but when you read the article below you will see how the immigrant phenomenon gets under the skin of some people and becomes a question of lower quality of life: No jobs, and depressed wages. Here is the article:
Samuel
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