I write this at a time when the UK is in the throes of a political crisis on membership of the European Union.  To understand what is causing this crisis, an understanding of theories of the Other and a longitudinal perspective on historical development are necessary.

In pre-history, through archeological investigation, we know that humans were based in small, unconnected groupings, tied to the local land they inhabited.  And evidence shows how little things have changed over the centuries.  Small settlements from neolithic times are towns or cities today, ancient places of pagan worship are now the sites of churches, etc.  We still live, roughly, in the same places we did several millennia ago.  And ways of life and ideologies have moved as slowly as the physical world, our mindset as much primitive as modern, with ancient and erroneous notions still superstitiously held alongside an overly confident belief in civilised advancement.

In the UK, the early history that is endorsed by the establishment and learned by everyone is of ‘great men’, skipping over ancient tribal development and Roman occupation to the individuals deemed worthy of note, to those around which national legends swim.  It is a history that mythologises and exalts the individual agency of the privileged few.

The point at which conventional UK history faux-starts, it was considered the duty of a monarch to wage war, with many tales of ‘glorious’ battles enshrined in the pages of history books.  A king was considered a failure if they did not wage war successfully.  However, the country usually prospered during a peaceful reign and was bankrupted during war, but this is generally not talked about.

For example.  Richard I is a heroic image in UK history, but he is heroic only in fiction: he despised England and was never here.  As a Plantagenet, he preferred to stay in France when not on his Crusades.  He was a brutal, self-centred man.  Whereas his brother, John, spent most of his life in England and managed it to a form of prosperity, but he is the villain in legend.  Why is John a villain?  Because he collected taxes.

There is thus a suppressed hidden history, as it runs contrary to the interests of the powerful.  That is, subtextually, the histories of ‘great men’ are a form of propaganda that justifies the violence of the rarified class pursuing war in expectation of personal gain, loot.  They are histories of violence, of kings and their armies unifying a surrounding countryside through force, of the ‘great’ weaponising rape and slaughter.

The history that is not taught by the establishment is of incorporation and enslavement, empire-building by those with a big stick.  It is a history of aggrandisement at the expense of the little sod, like the farmer simply struggling to eat who would be arbitrarily thrown off his land by thugs brandishing swords.  For those at the bottom of the food chain there was a fraught struggle to survive, with violent crime and theft clear options and endemic.  War was not a glorious adventure, it was conscription into an army that probably meant death in battle, but you could eat (or pillage and thieve with impunity) in return for lining others’ pockets.  A short and bedevilled life for the poor.

And people were indoctrinated into the false moral imperatives of religion in order to justify the rapacious activity of those with a big stick: killing and looting was done in a good cause, in the name of God.  There were religious sceptics, but they were given the choice of obeying canonical law or being cut out and cut off.  It is best to doff your cap if the alternative is losing your livelihood or being pilloried (as in the stocks) or being burned alive.  With the right hand they preached virtue and righteousness, and with the left hand they took your soul through threats and violence.

Over centuries, for the ruling elite, this pattern of grabbing by force as a moral duty persisted as the main mode of economic activity, i.e. taking rather than creating, and led to the consolidation of realms and the advancement of techniques of war.  It was impossible for the lowly to organise against such societal exploitation, as they did not have the resources of the powerful nor the means of communicating with each other.

However, there have always been mutinies in armies: put a large group of men together and they will talk, and turn on their leaders if they are not convinced they are being treated fairly.  An army was the biggest threat to vested interest and kingly rule, being a large and organised force; and rulers have always been very concerned about the welfare of their armies, and we have sayings like ‘an army marches on its stomach’.  But fighting men are still cannon fodder, despite being fed: although those with wealth and power will make concessions when under threat, they will only make enough to retain control and keep the lower orders quiet.

But, in those countries lucky enough to benefit from land-and-resource-grabs, there was an unforeseen side effect that led to the advancement of science and thought: success in wars of exploitation created wealth and put food on plates, the population grew (with occasional fluctuations) and the well-fed and leisured, the sons and cousins of the aristocratic soldier of fortune, began to invent things beyond advanced weaponry.  A key moment of this progress was the invention of the printing press, as it enabled communication and dissemination of ideas between people in distant places, thus facilitating the spread of notions that questioned the systems in place.

Fast forward and, eventually, came the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the age of rationalism (that was deeply irrational in many respects).  The existing modes of social exploitation and beliefs were taken apart, empirical evidence and practice became the avowed new modes, and the archaic social-governing system was replaced with a better one.  But it was still a misguided and flawed ideology: The Rights of Man did not apply to women or black men, no thought at all was given to the rights of nature (animals were to be preserved in aspic and catalogued, not preserved) etc.  And it unleashed a selfish-acquisitive-individualist mindset in the entire population (what about me?) that still rests in modern capitalism.  Most importantly, the power still rested with those with the big stick, there were just different people holding the stick with different self-centred goals.

Warfare advanced with rationalist experimentation, leading to large European empires in the 19^th century.  Weapons became sophisticated and any fighting could be extremely brutal, culminating in the two devastating world wars of the 20^th century.  And war advanced into the nuclear age: assured mutual destruction (not a sensible option).

Because of the rationalist development of modern warfare, it has now become difficult to subjugate other lands and take their resources without suffering massive losses yourself.  To complement this, media has advanced along with the reporting of war, so it is harder to lie to people about the atrocities or avoid invoking the ire of others looking on.  People can now see the impact of any war at the push of a button.

But the privileged are conditioned to take through centuries of practice.  As warfare has become a problematic and difficult pursuit, lands already held have become consolidated into spheres of influence and the nations we have today, ruled by the people in those spheres of influence with the guns and wealth.  So, power still rests in the hands of the people who wield the big sticks, but they cannot run around the world fighting anymore without serious consequences for themselves – talking, and not provoking other countries, has become necessary – which means they have turned their attention to maintaining control of what they have, their countries, by giving their public just enough to keep them subdued, like a token vote or a new television, while retaining the majority of power and wealth themselves.

But the nationalist model, the localised sphere of influence and power, is now becoming outdated through the internationalism of capital and media.  The traditional yoke of ruled control over regions is slackening.  We now live in a world where we can see its furthest reaches instantly through current media.  We are all connected.  Lowly members of society can talk to other lowly members of society in distant lands.

But the vested interests have not kept their power for so long without knowing a trick or two.  They have become international too, with overseas unregulated bank accounts to hide their money and yachts and properties around the world.  Communications have become key, to convince and indoctrinate the mass to their way of thinking, to their benefit.  Propaganda, which speaks to a target audience.  Disinformation to protect their unequal share.  The vested interests use subtle techniques, and blatant lies, to muddy the waters, that feed off national and local myths that have been indoctrinated and in-bred during the long history outlined above.

A modified virtual warfare is thus still waged: wars of social ideology, done subversively (and sometimes overtly) through internecine conflicts and covert activity, economically and digitally, through financial markets and social media.  It is merely sublimated warfare.

It underpins the history of human society that the wealthy and powerful always actively seek opportunities for holding greedily onto what they have.

The pressing lesson of this history, when placed in the light of environmental science, is that the age of nationalism must end or we will plummet into the species abyss: we need to move on to sensible planetary government, cooperate and end selfish acquisition, or destroy ourselves and the planet as we know it (some would say it is already too late).

The EU is an arm of a potential future planetary corpus: it is not something to wreck or leave.  However, the vested interests are losing their power in the UK to the more equitable bodies in Europe, so they have used social media, nefarious practices and other propaganda to make the public feel that the EU is undemocratic and taking ‘their’ country from them.  In fact, the EU is more democratic, based on numerous countries and proportional representation, and is only taking the power away from our elite, the vested interests who have gained their power and wealth by exploiting everyone else, as their sphere of influence, their power, is incorporated into a more consensual and broader political and social system.  The toys of privilege are being taken from the self-centred children of the monied, so they are greedily fighting to maintain their privilege.

There is thus a propaganda campaign that sells deceitful myths and erroneous ideology in order to safeguard the interests of a wealthy minority.  Every trick in the book, and some that aren’t, has been used to promote ideas that will benefit the wealthy and vested interest (including, ironically, calling the EU the ‘elite’).

But there is more to it.

I whole-heartedly recommend that everyone should read up on theories about the Other.  Here is an idiot’s version (mine) as it applies to the EU referendum.

Othering starts with the individual.  Everything beyond a person’s bodily shell is Other, not you.  The Other is essentially unknowable in its intrinsic being, as you are confined to your own shell and cannot transplant yourself elsewhere, into the Other; so your perspective of the Other is filtered through your own interests and perceptions, not actually the Other but your view of the Other.

With Othering comes a split with regard to interaction with humans: fear of the unknown and uncontrollable, but also comfort in recognition and similarity.  Humans are the most complex environmental objects with agency, that need to be carefully managed as they can be dangerously more powerful than ourselves, yet they are also the phenomena closest in comparison to the self, which we are fascinated by in our innate and unavoidable self-absorption.

There are less Other others than others (sorry, I couldn’t resist that sentence).  That is, there are degrees of Other.  Your family are less Other than your friends.  Your friends are less Other than the wider community.  Your local community is less Other than the nation.  You own nation and culture is less Other than foreign nations.  In short, proximity and similarity plays a big part in Othering.

Negative discrimination is Othering, usually based on easy marks of identification, anything that marks someone or something as different.  For example, racism begins with the colour of the skin, then the funny accent – things that are immediately Other than you – yet this is ‘skin-deep’ thinking as it does not penetrate the truth in the slightest, and the person under consideration may be a doctor or otherwise highly intelligent person.

These discriminatory modes are underpinning the EU debate.  The EU is presented in terms of an alien force taking away your natural rights, and has been for a long time by the UK press.

Propaganda is appealing to nastily-based phobias, fed by streams of unconscious thought that run darkly in the minds of people, primordially stirred, stoked by cheap political rhetoric and headline-hungry press.  Irrational fears are presented as ‘common sense’ which, at first glance, they can appear to be; but they require further analysis than easily seen appearance and, in fact, beyond the visible to get at the essence of matter(s).  This is sense, but uncommon.

The red warning light that immediately indicates neurosis in those who wish to leave the EU, or, more accurately, the supporters of those who wish to leave for gain, is the focus on immigration.  Of course, they argue that they are not neurotic or racist just because they talk about immigration; but that is only what their conscious mind is telling them, whereas a closer look shows their unconscious is saying something quite different (and, in some cases, the racism is quite conscious and the neurosis is clearly on the surface).

I like to refer to the Leave campaign as Out, as I presume that a lot are homophobic too based on psychological profiling.

The sad thing is that there is comfort in the Other.  A shared existence and cooperation is stronger than individual action.  A knowledge of difference expands the mind and helps to better understand life, taking a person beyond his limits.  If only we could stop narrowly naval-gazing, or, more accurately, if only the wealthy and selfish in power could stop being greedy and stop stoking the fears of people for personal gain.

Consider and connect with others to make the world a better place.  Do not reject the EU based on phobias, because they’re Other, and let the vested interests pull the wool over your eyes again.