1984(19): Home-Owner-ism

From 1984 by George Orwell

... it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction...

Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity.

But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

That's the clever bit, you see.

The dominant ideology in Anglophone countries, whether by accident or design, is Home-Owner-Ism, which has only developed into a fully-fledged set of political-economic-ideological beliefs* since the 1960s or 1970s.

Unlike IngSoc, Home-Owner-Ism does not divert excess productive capacity into warfare (and thereby destroying it), it diverts excess productive capacity back into property values. This is achieved principally by restricting the number of houses that can be built; steadily reducing the tax burden on property ownership (while increasing it on everything else) and diverting as much money (a lot of it being taxpayers' money) into the banking system as possible.

So whoever happens to have been on "the housing ladder" the longest is not just top of the heirarchy, but accrues the benefits of all the excess productive capacity as well - in plain English, earnings before housing costs are relatively evenly distributed (according to skills, effort, luck etc) but disposable income after housing costs is vastly greater for those who have paid off a mortgage than it is for first time buyers - I don't mean one-and-a-half or twice as much, it is more like five or ten times as much. Unlike in 1984 where the Inner Party members keep all the power but live relatively meagre lives.

I cheerfully admit that George Orwell probably didn't mean the book that way, but even in his book, there appears to be a complete lack of new residential construction. The Proles all live in Victorian back-to-backs and the Outer Party live in blocks of flats constructed in the 1930s. When he and Julia meet up in the countryside, Winston is quite surprised to see that urban London suddenly stops and all around are it are green fields, meadows and forests.

I argue a lot with Home-Owner-Ists, and they are also masters in DoubleThink, which makes them very slippery opponents indeed, but I will cover that some other time.

* I say "beliefs" in the strict sense that a lot of people genuinely believe that half of the UK by surface area is developed or urbanised. It's not, about ten per cent is developed or urbanised.