“Don’t make cheese sandwiches if you can’t afford the ingredients” is a special kind of eternal wisdom that transcends all context.
When I first saw the headline, I thought the old bag was quoting Confucius.
People should not make cheese sandwiches if they cannot afford the ingredients, Ann Widdecombe has said.
The former Brexit Party MEP, who joined Reform UK earlier this year, insisted there was no “given right” to low food prices amid the current levels of double-digit inflation.
Ms Widdecombe was taking part in a conversation about BBC research that showed the cost of a homemade cheese sandwich has jumped by a third in the past year to 40p.
Asked what her message would be to consumers who could not afford to pay for basic items such as a cheese sandwich she said: “Well, then you don’t do the cheese sandwich.”
In fact, there is no “given right” to anything.
German philosopher Max Stirner was right about rights.
“Rights” are a spook.
The only context in which rights can actually exist is within a real social contract, and there is no social contract. I don’t agree with Stirner that social contracts are naturally invalid or impossible (or whatever it is he was trying to say), but without a social contract, you do not have any rights at all.
It would be hard to pinpoint when the social contract in the Western world broke down. But at this point, you are paying taxes to a government that refuses to guarantee physical protection from violent miscreants, and that alone means that, as an absolute matter, the social contract has broken down. There are many other examples of things happening in the Western world that prove the social contract is defunct, but on the most fundamental, basic level, a government exists to protect you from bodily harm and ensure you are capable of maintaining possession of your physical property. We all know that the Western government system no longer makes these guarantees, and yet, they continue to charge taxes. As the government is the mediator between individual citizens, a breakdown of the basic agreement between government and people means that no social contract exists, and we now live in a chaos waste.
I would argue that you have to have some kind of underlying transcendent shared belief system to uphold a social contract – in the case of the West, this would have been Christianity and/or Enlightenment-oriented notions of “natural rights” – and that the gradual erosion of the shared understanding of man’s role in the universe led to an aggressive tyranny.
Probably, in the ultimate and cosmic reality situation, it was the progressive transformation of definitions from those of Christianity and Platonic notions of man towards less defined Enlightenment ideals that signaled the start of the decline.
But it doesn’t matter how we got here. It’s a moot point.
There is no social contract, which means you do not have a right to a cheese sandwich or anything else. You are an isolated individual, at the mercy of a faceless, fluid, and fickle tyrannical power structure that claims to exist in a void. The tyranny’s status inside of the void means that it is capable of defining all terms of reality itself. In lieu of defined rights stemming from a social contract, you have arbitrary pronouncements justifying absolutist dictates.
There was a Mind War, baby – and you lost.
Going back to the most ancient state of man, individuals existed in groups wherein it was taken for granted that the individual will contribute to the agenda of the group and the group will therefore provide protection and sustenance. This was the case in the tribe, the clan, the city, the empire, the republic. The most basic assumption is this agreement between the individual and the group.
If we currently had a valid social contract – which is also known as “a society” – the bread makers and the cheese makers would be capable of delivering their goods to an individual who was able to work at a job that pays a fair wage via the exchange of monetary notes of a relatively static value. Therefore, the willingness to work would ensure the “right” to a cheese sandwich.
This hag who declared that your right to a cheese sandwich is now voided by decree was railing against people who live on state benefits. Living on state benefits is obviously an anti-social behavior, but the emergence of this kind of anti-social behavior however many decades ago should have been a warning that society was decomposing. Society cannot micromanage individual anti-social behavior on a mass scale. Within society, a single anti-social individual should be subject to a system. If large groups of individuals begin engaging in rampant anti-social behavior, society is failing.
Anti-social behavior at scale has been rampant for a good while: promiscuity, divorce, drug use, homosexuality, blasphemy, atheism, women in public society, the breakdown of national identity, the abuse of governmental power by corrupt persons and criminal cartels. These behaviors are now promoted by the state because a tyranny cannot abide a valid social contract. The reason people engage in anti-social behavior such as living on state welfare benefits is that they no longer feel a duty to society. In the case of immigrants, who are a large group, they never had a sense of duty to the society (blatantly, these immigrants played a primary role in breaking down the society, creating the chaos waste in which the tyranny can declare itself “God of the void”). Society has been purposefully, systematically imploded, and now the tyranny is blaming individuals, isolating them, denying them their cheese sandwiches.
“The economy” may have once been better defined in real terms, but at this point, it is simply an opaque and immoral mechanism of mass social control. We are living in the age of satellites and dancing robots. Given the state of material abundance created by technological advancement, there is simply no scenario in which a society (the group) could be failing to provide the citizenry (individuals) with cheese sandwiches. They talk about the economy as if it is some ancient deity that must be placated with sacrifice. This is nonsense. It was more logical for a tribal chieftain to blame a malicious spirit for a failed harvest than it is for the government to blame the economy for the absence of cheese sandwiches. The tribal leader does not have the ability to change the weather, but the technological system of overwhelming material abundance we live in has the ability to deliver cheese sandwiches.
The reason you can’t have a cheese sandwich is that there is no society.
The society collapsed because the foundations were undermined by malevolent and malicious individuals who exploited the rate of technological development to restructure the relationship between the individual (citizen) and the group (state). They did this by systematically promoting anti-social behavior on a society-wide scale in the midst of the human being’s adjustment to the Machine Age.
The tyranny is a conspiracy of individuals. This is true on its face. You can point to specific individuals who have shaped the direction of society on purpose. But it is also a system that transcends individuals and maintains a constant velocity, as if guided by some otherworldly force. This is clear in the fact that the individuals maintaining the tyranny do not understand the purpose or goals of the tyranny, and therefore it is much different than a simple criminal conspiracy to acquire monetary benefit. Free from the direct hand of individuals, the tyranny seduces individuals through various means, and they then perpetuate it based on various personal delusions and sensuous personal agendas.
The goals of the tyranny, like the tyranny itself, are profoundly opaque. If we look to their stated goals, we find them to be nonsensical gibberish; they are talking about creating a singular world government, drastically reducing the population, using technology to defy death, and then building some type of space empire. These are not rational goals, but delusions created by deeply troubled persons in order to justify the unjustifiable. Reading the documents of the tyranny explaining its behavior is like reading an Albert Fish letter explaining why he kidnapped, murdered, and cannibalized a 10-year-old girl.
If we cut to the core of the issue, we find that the ultimate truth, which exists outside of the void of the tyranny, is that persons are being denied cheese sandwiches out of sheer malice. What we see from the tyranny is an aggressive and baseless hatred of humans and a desire to hurt them. This is pure sadism.
Unfortunately, we are in the midst of what is known as an “Extinction Level Humpty-Dumpty Event.” The term comes from the fictitious story of Humpty-Dumpty, an egg-shaped creature who fell off of a wall and broke into pieces and could not be reconstructed, even by the most capable of well-intentioned professionals. The society that was broken by the tyranny cannot be reconstructed, and this could, in theory, lead to the death of every living thing on earth. (In actuality, however, the death of all life will not, in fact, occur.)
If a thing is totally destroyed, to the point where it cannot be reconstructed, then the only option is to replace it by building a new thing. We must establish a new society. As a first principle of this society, no human should be denied access to (or otherwise prohibited from obtaining) the ingredients of a cheese sandwich without a clear and reasonable explanation, based on established fact, that can be stated in one paragraph using a fifth grade vocabulary.