Friday Feelings — 9th Edition — The Bad
I stand by my appeal and effort to emphasise The Good. However, as the shitchurn of the General Election and the utter uselessness of political coverage rumble on unabated, this Friday, my feeling is directed toward The Bad.
There’s so much interwoven with wealth, class, and power that it’s virtually impossible to have a reasonable dialogue about these things with a measurable quantity of hope for change of perspective. We are raised within a system built and defined by the rich and powerful. The scope of our education is determined by the same strata. The news and information that is presented to the public is broadly set by these same people, and — at a minimum — it is filtered through their lens.
The situation has grown so ludicrous that it is now portrayed as a personal failing if people don’t secure multiple jobs to make ends meet, if necessary. Nurses — already underpaid and overworked — were encouraged just this week by a soulless business executive off the telly to get a 2nd job.
The meaning of life is not to toil away in work. The system these people have created, however, is reliant on just that. We are all born, wherever it may be, for the sole purpose of filling their armies, turning their soil, and labouring to increase their already unimaginable wealth. The rhetoric that they use persuades people that the only value they can have in this life is to be found in the pursuit of wealth, and that if you work hard enough, or long enough, you’ll taste the good life.
When someone rises from the nothing of their completely normal and in line with virtually everyone else’s existence to become rich, their stories are often highlighted. They declare, “Anything is possible, if you work hard enough for it, or want it badly enough.”
Bullshit.
These stories don’t prove possibility. They illustrate just how incredibly rare this step upward is, and they act as a drug to lure people further into the trap of work making you free — because that’s what the score is. Businesses try to minimise costs to maximise shareholder return. For all the fluff to the contrary, “business" in general is a legal barrier between the classes. Prevailingly, businesses are owned/operated by and return shareholder value to the wealthy/ruling class. They function as both a legal shield (ie it’s not awful people engaging in criminality who create unsafe working environments, but rather a “business" which can be penalised with a fine) and a control mechanism (ie if you don’t do/abide by whatever your employer demands, your ability to sustain your life and that of your family will be under threat).
By extracting wealth through essential things like rent, the ruling/landed class can take ever more of what workers earn. And, because they’re rigging the game, they can suppress wages, cut hours, diminish the quality of working conditions, etc we are increasingly faced with the prospect of a society in which the squeeze tears us in half.
But this is broad stuff. They use data and broad analysis to justify their actions by reducing us all to statistical inputs. It’s why computer says no. It’s why machine learning and AI are only going to accelerate these processes. They obscure individual humanity in a wash of scattersets and charts.
I want to talk about specifics.
I want to talk about Angus.
Three and a half years ago, we met some of our best friends in England for the first time. We had been social media pals for a while, and Jo* (actual name, not changed) was organising a massive fundraising drive/event for The Cystic Fibrosis Trust. Friends of Jo and Alejandro* (changed to make it less thoroughly Devonian) were struggling with CF, so they wanted to help.
I was graciously asked if I would play music for a street fair that was the culmination of the effort. I was happy to, and me and the fam drove to Devon for it. I played on a truck in the high street. It was a fantastic day.
We had the good fortune of meeting some of our friends' friends. One of these was Angus.
Angus had a friendly smile and exuded the glow of someone who has a proper sense of humour. A quick joke and an unfettered laugh.
Angus had Cystic Fibrosis.
We, too, became social media pals, exchanging the odd light or heavy-hearted banter. I learned that he and Alejandro had a penchant for a dicey meme. He would become ill, and then better again for a while, but always with an altimeter that told him to brace for impact.
One day, he crashed.
I am not a medical professional or a pharmaceutical expert. I didn’t know Angus well enough to be intimate with the particulars of his condition. But I knew his smile and the tug of its absence.
Angus had Cystic Fibrosis, and he died.
An American pharmaceutical company developed a drug, marketed to the UK as Orkambi. The drug is effective in treating some of the underlying causes of Cystic Fibrosis, rather than simply containing symptoms, I believe. It is estimated that approximately half of those in the UK with CF might benefit from Orkambi. Maybe Angus would have been one of them.
But the drug company wanted the NHS to pay £104,000 per year, per patient for the drug. Recently, it was announced that a price had been negotiated (undisclosed) that would allow Orkambi to be available for treating UK CF patients.
Angus died while the company and the UK negotiated.
The same pharmaceutical company has developed a new, even more effective drug, called Trikafta.
The requested price?
£240,000. Per patient. Per year.
There are approximately 10,000 people living with CF in the UK, and it’s estimated that this drug could be effective in up to 90% of cases. The cost would be £2,160,000,000 per year. Just in the UK.
Angus died while the company and the UK negotiated. Lost in the thresher of capitalism, where greed and hoarding of wealth and power facilitate a kind of madness, and many of us will be sacrificed in similar ways.
How much was Angus’s life worth? How much is yours?
I can tell you this: He was worth more than some stupid drug.
And the world would be better off with him in it than the sea of Smauglike shareholders for whom nothing will ever be enough.
But, Angus wasn’t special, in an important sense. People suffer and die all around us every day due to preventable conditions. That’s The Bad.
And it needs to change. Wake up.
