The sword that was politics was snapped in two by the knee of capitalism many many years ago. Capitulating to profit our political elitists now cling limpet like to archaic traditions of state, traditions that conceal their now malnourished mindset, mindsets locked in past glories with nowhere to go but inside of themselves, and without any fresh ideas or the imagination to create them, they are left surrendering all in the name of profits. The game of freedom has been played out and everything is up for grabs as this system of mediocre minds cascades inwards with nowhere to go but down, playing a race card here or a security card there, our political establishment offers us nothing but their collective fears, as they jostle for the attentions of a nation of people who’s egos have been crushed so savagely by the austerity, that the profitable system they represent created in the first place. Like sluggish and blind worms these worshippers of capital blind us with their projected ignorance. Choosing algorithms over humanity real, they project darknesses and dire bogs with their swamp like thoughts, their thought processes now hamper all around them like they were of glue, slowing all to a halt, clutching at straws they talk of immigrants, refugees, climate changes inevitability, until it has become clear that the needs of these few vastly outweigh the many. Yet with an unfathomable ignorance the democracy game continues, that that was once of vigorous importance has been reduced by these malnourished minds, minds that clearly cannot grasp concepts like deadly and virus, or global and warming, or child and poverty, if words are combined then the political mind will evade them.

If the fall of humanity has one single reason, it would be psychological. We have collectively agreed that profit is good, but our value system is all in our heads, we as species invented it, nurtured it and then lost control of it, to the point where we cannot afford to fix our own planet because we would lose to much of the imaginary paper stuff we possess, and in order to possess more imaginary money, we fuel our own devastation to grasp it. We are born, judged by economics, our lives have boundaries created by it, and for the very vast majority we are debilitated by it. Whilst those in power are now too rich to even display brain cells, and seem proud to have never needed them. So much is this the case that I have to ask if ignorance has become a Darwinian tool of politics, an evolution of sloth like merit that has us all trapped by its methodology of blunder and error. Yet for all of my personal disgust at modern politicians all I see is their collective fears. Racism is fear. Ego is fear. Economics is fear. Power must be terrifying for minds like theirs. For all of these words though what is fear?

Article One. All human being are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

When I was a child I watched raindrops hitting the leave on a tree and as each struck leaf fell then bounced back, I wondered if the universe was playing the tree like it was a piano. Creating a harmony of randoms, raindrops are something we all understand, those rhythms that repeat around us all are a harmony with out hands, but lately Mother Natures notes have become erratic, and her buoyant elasticity is about to snap shut.

The geopolitical world has failed to reach a single target to stop the destruction of nature. Every one of the 2010 Aichi goals to protect wildlife have been missed. Not one has been achieved.

When ignorance leads the charge it will with inevitable fears turn into a stampede. Initially stevesevilempire was meant to be ironic, but with an ironic twist the atheist who’s bible is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has become an evil symbol to the wordplay of ignorant politicians who have relabelled right and wrong so often they have lost sight of it all together.

Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

Freedom of speech has always come with a responsibility for your words, but where is that responsibility in our political world? Is there any of that responsibility in our corporate world order? Judging from Exxon Mobils payments to climate deniers there is none.

Politics is treachery.

I could argue that humanity is stalled, the entire human species is caught between its fight or flight response. Stuck in situ by our own modern psychologies, glued to the path of massed extinctions we plunge head first into a decrepit future. In the lead, a blissfully ignorant political elite, stumbling behind them are the rest of us chasing their scrap like offerings. Algorithms reduce us all to the lowest common denominator, politicians reduce our mindsets even lower. Collectively with broken democratic expressions in play the preconception that democracy is good is about all that is holding many countries together. I include Britain in that comment as the entire nation has been reduced to impoverished spectators by a very broken system. A system that seems purpose built to demolish imagination is worth nought.

It was human imagination and ingenuity that gives modernity it’s accumulative power. Look at your modern world, a world where even light is a pollutant as none of us see the stars at full strength very often. So cut off from the universe are we, that following the lead of ignorant fantasists is now a new normal, chasing their latest scape goats is nothing but a new fashion craze. Our politicians are not even required to perform well let alone tell the truth, and what impact that has on the rest of the society beneath them is going to be catastrophic. There are necessary risks and unnecessary risks, and modern politicians are now all about unnecessary risk taking.

Economics is a prison.

We invented money, it’s is a collective psychological value system, and it is humanities number one religion as nothing human can move very far without it. We all chase it. We all collectively need it, just to survive, we need money. Yet money is very good at telling entire nations what they cannot do. Britain will never have a space program because we cannot afford it. We cannot avoid the climate disaster that is ahead because it is to expensive to fix. When we math out air quality illnesses , they are worked out at the financial cost they cause to the society, not in the beating hearts lost or the misery that causes, but how many Pounds Stirling it costs. Pick a disaster any disaster and the damage is measured in?

Our entire life from birth to death is within the boundaries that money and economics creates. In Britain many peoples lives are defined negatively by their place of birth (postal code) and by the socio economic standing of the community they live in, trapping millions to a lousy life and life style. Around the planet the misery of massed poverty is measured in billions of people. The haves and have nots have been a truer expression of the last 5000 years of recent human history, than any of our Movies, Books or Education systems have shown. Yet not content with poverty stricken populaces our corporates have decided to attack intelligence.

The assault on science started slowly, decades ago, with the Tobacco Industry, yet that created a template that was inherited and used by the fossil fuels industries and many others. The template was denial and the logic was the potential profitability that a decade or three of denial can create. Throughout every industry that process has rippled, it has escalated and socially devalued science to the point where anti vaxxers would deny people who want vaccines. This is a point of decay for our entire species. A starting place for an ignorant and suicidal stampede to our extinction, and with the leaderships we have and the psychological weight of capitalism to drag us under, that extinction is now guaranteed, because of profits.

Societies are manipulable.

As a human being right and wrong are vital tools, as a photographer though they just slow you down, the human being in me despises that truth, but whatever the situation I am photographing is, I am thinking visually. That is all, cause and effect and balancing the frame of it. A lot of my colleagues are looking for political or human narratives, but a narrative is a creation, it’s not real, the real world is not a stage play, where full stops and commas make it all logical. Our entire global society however can only work with a combination of preconceptions and narratives. Yet reality is often left behind by these created story lines. I was asked recently why newspapers are not making profits, and in reply I said. “Because they are not giving people what they need they are just giving them rhetoric and narratives.” Having lost track of how often picture editors have said. “Nobodies interested in this.” My reply is at least an honest answer. Looking at the system of journalism is alarming too. An owner or state buys the rag or television station, and then feeds their views on the direction the organisation should go. This leads to an editorial oppression as they interpret their instructions. So journalists then get their instructions via this process. Most owners have close political ties, and an almost institutionally bias has now become a normal. This happens all over the world. Polarised presses push the team they represent forwards until journalism decays to little more than politics and adverts.

In Britain we have the NUJ, (National Union Of Journalists.) If anyone should be a member of the NUJ it is me. However I cannot join them as the NUJ has never tackled this fundamental issue within its industry. As journalism has been reduced to preconceptions and regurgitating political attempts to control social narratives, what could I do other than rant about it in a London Freelance Branches NUJ meetings. With climate denial I saw NUJ members objectively attack science for so may decades that I almost gave up journalistic photography altogether. Remember when 99% of scientists came out about climate change? How often did you see the climate deniers outnumber the scientists on television? How often was your perception about climate change manipulated by brought and sold mercenaries? The corporations funded the deniers, yet no one asked the questions that mattered as a decision had been made to debunk it. Objective it was not. Making the NUJ members involved a part of a club I cannot join. Not that anyone cares.

Look at the world around you and how often have you read or watched something that has reflected it? In the UK due mainly to austerity policies, we have a rapidly expanding and obvious problem with homelessness, but how often is this very prescient problem touched by our media. How often has any real issue been hammered by the BBC. All you will see is politics, politics and more politics. Ramming home the importance of a politician or political party is not journalisms only goal surely? Watching the British governments response to the very real danger of the Corona Virus has been the most hit and miss political failure to date. Seriously if making 500 plus often contradictory decisions about a crisis is good leadership, then I am a penguin. Let my flippers point out that track and trace is day one epidemiology, and here we are racing to the second wave and track and trace is still not operable. So when journalism should be warning us all its telling us about is Donald Trump groping random women instead. Which is not acceptable but should it be the lead story? However we could lead with the truth that humanity cannot afford Trumps climate denials at this dangerous stage. What with the traditionally creative accounting employed by every British government we are doing our best to tackle the virus and our environmental impacts. Even though not one single English river passed pollution testing this year, then the word best will have to have an update about what it means.

Puppies and Kittens.

Two weeks ago, I was pondering why Killer Whales were attacking boats around Malta, I could give you a hundred reasons for this sudden Cetacean development, it is sudden too, as throughout history apart from minor conflicts with fishing catches, humanity and Orcas have never had any conflict. Yet the Orcas have a problem, and because the majority of the reasons I was coming up with had the word human attached to them, the Orcas are trying to deal with us. So as I was thinking this development through and purchasing a 2nd hand reflector at the London Camera Exchange, I got a call to go to Trafalgar Square for a protest. With hindsight I wouldn’t have worn my favourite NASA comfort hoody, but I was wearing a face mask. So having raced up the Strand I was confronted by the scientifically challenged holding a protest. David Icke and his merry band of conspiracists were out in their thousand and they were unhappy with the massed conspiracy around the Corona Virus. So as usual right and wrong flew out of the window that is Steve and I went to work photographing them.

“Take the mask off you don’t need it.” Lets face it if I am being shot at I like flak jackets, and if a mask can reduce my exposure to a potentially deadly virus then guess what? I will wear one. I lost track of the number of times I was called an idiot, and found out that NASA didn’t go to the moon, and that Bill Gates was nasty, and that 5g is fatal, and that the world is flat with a dome over it, and that the queen is a lizard, and that we have all been micro chipped by deranged NHS midwifes, and that the Metropolitan Police are a tyranny, and that the government is part of ZOG, and that a large crowd of crazy people are still crazy, and also a lot of aliens are running everything, which is kind of crazy as anything smart enough to travel the cosmos would do a better job than our political brigades could, surely they would. People were doing a lot of finger pointing as well. So far it all sounds relatively harmless, and even in a hoody that says NASA I didn’t feel in any way threatened, unless boring someone to death counts. What I saw was the blur of denial, people choosing fantastical conspiracies over very real ones. Reality hurts, and fantasy doesn’t. I can add this observation, most people didn’t cope very well with the necessary lockdown, and that includes me.

Now having spent my life photographing humanity, I have encountered levels of crazy way beyond these massed conspiracy theorists, after years of exposures I know that humanity is one crazy primate, in fact if I am honest I should say. “Humans? It’s hard to find a sane one.” Even our history is insane. I understand see rabbit chase rabbit, but the rest of it? During the lockdowns people began to trawl the internet in an effort to save their remaining marbles. 7 billion voices screaming for your attention, advertisers selling stuff you cannot be alive without. Fantasy blurring with reality. Entertainments selling second hand logic and unbelievable cruelty. As society shrank to four walls a lot of people looking for a way out have found it in denial. Reality is rolling at us like a freight train and we are hiding behind elusive psychological mechanisms, lurking like rats in our fantasy of a society, and using ignorance as a tool. Ignorance will achieve nothing and fantasy is just another narrative.

In reality the pandemic is being made worse by very bad leadership, bad economic models and bad journalism. If people mistrust the journalists and politicians then they look for truth online and elsewhere. Another face of reality is that we are running out of time to resolve climate change, we are doing more damage to the environment, and those ecosystems that we rely on to survive are diminishing year on year and day by day. We have run the gauntlet of modern capitalism as far as we can, and we are collectively on a cliff edge and about to jump. Another obvious reality is that a lot of vocal people no longer trust basic science, and that reality is because a lot of money was spent fuelling the mistrust. Here is a point, almost every ecosystem on the planet is under stress, and when the stresses are to much they will snap, cascading causally we will create our own downfall. Pollution is now out of control, as pollutants of all sorts mix, life will find it harder and harder to thrive. Our weather systems are changing around us. Our planet is about to get less supportive for life too. This is not a narrative it is reality. We cannot control ourselves as is clearly evidenced by the damages we are doing, when a tech giant like Apple can avoid recycling it’s products, products that are deliberately built to become obsolete, what do we do about it? When Exxon Mobil, and the Koch Brothers can fund denials left right and centre and still gain unfettered access to most governments, where are the conspiracy theorists, and why is this simply a given thing. You see on the one hand we have run out of time to fix the problems we are still creating, on the other we have a small window of opportunity to change our ways.

Tool Kits.

The history of humanity is the history of climate change. When the first explorers arrived in Tasmania, they discovered the native peoples who lived there. Tasmania had been cut off from Australia by rising sea levels, isolated for ten thousand years. What baffled the Europeans was that the Tasmanians were the healthiest people they had ever met. What baffled them further was that as hunter gatherers they had more leisure time than anyone in Europe did. What really blew their tiny sea fairing minds was the tool kits the Tasmanians used. These were stone tools and grass bags and baskets. Native Australians had over a hundred separate tools for different purposes, the Tasmanian had 21. However the people were healthy, and particularly happy as a society. That is until more Europeans arrived. Their extinction was a slow and painful process. Throughout our history humans have had a tough time with the constantly changing climates, climates that forced our evolution, we emerged during a period of ice ages, yet given the chance we have chosen to bring climate change back into the frame prematurely with our emissions. Surrounded as we are by millions of different tools, we have not found happiness, nor have we found security. The brain pan is the same but in a gluttonous binge we have demolished biodiversity, we have industrialised every process and profited from it. Whereas the Tasmanians had the skills to survive well, we have not. You can try and deny it but our false sense of human entitlement hides behind a veneer of destruction. Actions are now needed not rhetoric and debate about the environment. Which leads to the point of these words.

Humanity is running out of time.