Fossilized Fishhooks
De-Fossilizing the economy
At age ten I would not have suspected Anthony Buckeridge — author of the many misadventures of Jennings and Darbishire — to have a plan B. Only in the early 1990s, long after I stopped reading children’s books, did he break cover as an environmentalist and write recycling into the life of that fictional prep school.
Back in the mid-’50s, I was attracted to his stories, not because I envied the presumed privileges of an elite fee-paying education — a world away from my own State provision — but because the schoolboy slang and wordplay weirdly gave me license to challenge convention within a strictly constrained home life. Imaginative invective, ambiguity, and Jennings’ literal interpretations of adult non-communication could not (surely) be regarded as offensive — fingers crossed. That perverse spirit of deliberate misunderstanding as a way of questioning conventions persists.
Listening today to Jason Hickel, I realize that a single word aptly describes the prevailing politics of this beleaguered island. The word applies also to its leadership as much as the discredited economic systems now being dragged ever further away from the urgent reforms that our climate and humanity so badly need.
That word is fossilized and the preservation it implies is also what fuels our descent into chaos. This is not just the dependency on fossil fuels but the unquestioning adherence to woefully inadequate economic beliefs — global enslavement to monetary madness from which there seems no escape. ‘Fossilised Fishhooks!’, as a shocked and alarmed Jennings would have said.
Can you imagine the glee that would have enthused a latter-day Jennings as he surely blew apart the myths ritually expounded by his (‘prehistoric’) teachers? Austerity? You must be kidding me. Jennings would, of course, have conjured a plan A along with several secondary options in the unlikely event of failure at the first hurdle. Advocates of Modern Monetary Theory are similarly driven by the shock of realization. Their front runner — Plan A — is year-on-year decarbonization to progressively shrink the climate threat at the same time as a new anti-colonial crusade to rescue the Commons by de-commoditizing life’s essentials to ensure their removal from mythical market forces, and herald the restoration of welfare investments. Fossilized Fishhooks compounded.
But Jennings would not have stopped there.
As an aid to his revolutionary remit, he would have invoked a particularly powerful curse directed at those who have led people so far astray.
Only the most toxic in his armory of concentrated curses would suffice.
For those who resist, for those who knowingly fail to object, for those whose greed and inhumanity lie at the extreme of the monetized me-me-me spectrum, only one ethically corrected (non-life-threatening) curse could possibly apply.
May their socks rot.
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This Groupe Intellex article forms part of the Governance series.
