Last year’s Oxford Word of the Year is actually a two-word phrase: Brain Rot. If you want to be pedantic and I do in this case because the OUP used to be the pedant’s paradise, the cognitive dissonance they’ve generated in calling a phrase a word, suggests that the decision-makers have actually got the dreaded Brain Rot themselves.
Who’s actually got brain rot? Have you, have I? Maybe before we start insulting each other, how about this? I think it runs through governments and their bureaucracies like rota virus through a cruise ship. Come to think of it, cruise ships and bureaucratic thought-silos have much in common, and so if brain rot is like a rota virus, then it’s more than possible that it affects a lot of decision-making. The old phrase ‘a fish rots from the head down’ is useful here since it’s usually applied to catastrophic government failures that can be sheeted home to someone at the top of something doubling down on very bad advice.
There are myriad examples of brain rot to hand, so let’s have a little debating practice, and look at what’s happened in Australia since the government decided to tax tobacco out of affordability for ordinary folk. Such good intentions, such fine, sunny projections of a healthy non-smoking future were dangled by powerful interested parties that very few raised objections. The ramifications for the powerless interested parties however, have been damaging in ways that are still unfolding. Only this week, we all turned on the news to hear that yet another shooting, another gang murder, happened on Preston High Street, where I often drive, where my friends and family live and work and shop.
Let’s go back a little and explore what has been going on. Not with the criminals – we can all read Nick McKenzie and John Silvester if we want the names and the connections. No, I’m interested in how a government and lobbies supposedly headed by intelligent people landed us in this mess. Groups with differing interests can easily be trapped in diseased cruise ships of their own making. Medicos will want one thing, and will usually have science and good intentions to support them. Economists will want other things, and will support their arguments in their usual let’s-all-be-dismal-together ways. Governments will just want votes. Ordinary people want a range of things: happiness, a bit of pleasure, distraction from worry and pain, bread, circuses and hope. Sometimes they will decide to ignore medical advice and pursue the foregoing things without thinking about being, you know, sensible.
So when the medicos and the economists told the governments that they would get votes and save money on health, the governments listened. None of them asked the ordinary people; they were too busy telling them stuff. Economists said, ‘Price points are a key driver of demand, so you could put up taxes.’ Medicos said ‘End the demand or be disapproved of by us.’ Governments said, ‘what about the taxes we’re already getting from tobacco users and might lose if they give up?’ Medicos said, ‘How dare you bring sordid money into this humanitarian debate?’ Economists looked at cancer and heart disease costs and said governments would save money quite soon because of fewer people getting sick and would get a nice quick boost for a few years from the huge new tobacco taxes. Governments listened to the medicos and then to the economists and said, ‘Where do we sign?’
And all this time the criminals were listening, phoning their contacts and having lots of new ideas about making money.
You can see from the above that I’m taking the side that says the new tobacco taxes have damaged our society, without stopping people smoking. First, and most obviously there are manifestly enough smokers to make contraband ciggies very lucrative. The lessons of US-style Prohibition having been lost on them, our well-meaning nanny-stateniks have made potential criminals out of all smokers. In the process they’ve created a solid income stream for gangsters seeking to diversify from the usual meth and heroin, while greatly decreasing local shopkeepers’ personal safety and increasing their fire insurance premiums.
Over a hundred shops have been torched just in Victoria. Australia’s Tobacco Wars have arisen solely from the economic opportunities afforded to black-marketeers by a medical lobby that persuaded government to make tobacco taxes exorbitant. The good doctors, unfazed by our human propensity for reducing everything to the vulnerable ones making huge money for the worst ones, are yet to admit any error of judgement. Sensible warnings were waved away. Lessons of history and human nature were ignored. Graphic persuasion with horrible pictures on packets weren’t enough, neither was being shamed and banished from all indoor premises: those naughty smokers had now to be punished with taxes that should have meant a windfall for governments.
'The costs keep rising and the revenue isn’t keeping up: governments got less tax money, criminals made fortunes. And the money they’re making falls from little shopkeepers’ and ordinary smokers’ pockets.'
But the tobacco revenue that was so optimistically factored into budgets is now greatly reduced, because people have indeed given up legal cigarettes. There is an obvious loss both financial and social as the public damage shows once-peaceful neighbourhood shopping strips ravaged by arson and gang violence. And those ostracised souls who can’t stop smoking will still get their cigarettes from a local criminal or coerced shopkeeper who’s paying protection to a gang that’s smuggling in container-loads of Chinese knock-offs with unknown levels of pesticides. The costs keep rising and the revenue isn’t keeping up: governments got less tax money, criminals made fortunes. And the money they’re making falls from little shopkeepers’ and ordinary smokers’ pockets.
It's becoming obvious that the medical, government and corporate silos need some external exposure: fresh air means less contagion. In coming to these conclusions about the counter-productive Pyrrhic madness of Australia’s tobacco taxes, it wasn’t necessary for me to listen to any arguments from tobacco companies (who’ve probably found a way to make money out of the gangs anyhow) or even from aggrieved smokers who are faced with choosing poverty or breaking the law. I have never smoked, apart from trying a puff or two in uni, but I look at my friends and family who smoke, and I knew all the arguments about health – the gruesome warnings have been on every pack for years. It’s obvious that smoking is harmful to health, but the silo bureaucrats refuse to learn from history (drug wars, Prohibition) that you can’t stop people doing stuff to themselves without breaking down a part of society’s fabric that might be more valuable than the thing you are trying to get rid of.
It’s a malign conundrum that is going to require the kind of courage and tenacity that today’s politicians lack, since their particular kind of brain rot requires them to walk in lockstep with the talking points dictated by a consensus of powerbrokers whose own form of brain rot makes them resistant to information that comes with only common sense and science as its sponsors. When is the government going to just cut down the criminals’ money tree by ending this madness?
Of course, they’re never going to admit they’ve borked the whole thing and simply go back to treating tobacco like they treat alcohol: not with punitive tax grabs that create new windfalls for organised crime, but with age limits, restricted advertising and, say, a fair tax that covers the medical risks of the activity. Wouldn’t that be sensible, even rational and adult-style thinking?
Instead, natch, they’re doubling down, proposing to load yet another layer of expensive government admin onto the tobacco trade by futilely inflating the existing licence system. And presumably playing musical deckchairs, switching round bureau heads and spending LOTS of our money on it all as their titanic mess sinks further and we all bloody suffer and lose in every way: reduced tax money for smoking-related illnesses that persist because of the black-market disruption to the economic model that used to show smokers’ taxes subsidising the health services.
And meanwhile, the smokers who can’t give up the habit continue to smoke cheap black-market cigarettes because it’s that or lose their bloody houses. They hope that the underfunded medical services will be able to treat their smoking-related illnesses. I hope they’re not wrong. The little shopkeepers who can’t even afford to insure their businesses anymore will continue to sell the illegal smokes because they’re being stood over and threatened with death and destruction by the increasingly rich criminals. There’s blood on our once-peaceful streets while the cost of policing is going through the roof, and we’ve less tax money to pay for it. So: what is driving government decisions here?
Brain rot, that’s what.
Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.