This is something I wrote a few days back in reply to an online acquaintance:
‘For the first time in my life, I am genuinely worried about the levels of vitriolic, assumptive fanaticism in my home country. I look at some of the utterances of the Left, and I don’t recognise anything of my nationality in them.
I look upon Hunt, May, Cameron and Osborne and wonder what on earth these depraved hobgoblins are doing in positions of power.
Two sets of idiots wedded to two ideologies so obviously flawed, and yet so terrifyingly similar in their desire for total control. There seems no longer to be a sense of proportion, discernment or even reason to it all.
I have met older Germans in the past who described the period 1926-36 in their country in the same way. As a historian, I find this preference for the systemic over the human horribly familiar. As a species, we are further than ever from having the faintest idea what we are about. I don’t see this as a good point in our existence to be heading into probably the biggest econo-fiscal reset in human history.
Probably, the only way to deal with it all now is via laughter…..and to hell with pc and neurotically oversensitive young people cosseted in self-pity for far too long. For the sixth time in a millenium, unachievable Utopia is hard at work, creating Dystopia.’
OK, I did have toothache at the time; but having had the offending molar extracted (that makes 16 in three years) I hold the key observations in my heart still:
I don’t recognise anything of my nationality in them. I’d spent the day before looking across Left Remaindeer sites. It wasn’t the obscenity of the language that shocked me, but the memememe screaming, winding each other up, Lord of the Flies feeling of infants who’d never been taught the civics of liberal democracy. Curiously, I had the same feeling watching gladioli being thrown onto Princess Diana’s funeral cortège: it was counterfeit, not British, and based on emotional incontinence.
Who are these people, and how have they reached maturity with such ill-based certainties? Braindead educational values sprung to mind – but I sensed there must be more to it than that.
wonder what on earth these depraved hobgoblins are doing in positions of power. The one thing I agree 100% with the liberal-Left about is the uniformity of criminal mentalities now at work in the Conservative Party élite. Everyone Cameron has promoted – and almost all his friends – are spivs with clouds in their past, serial liars, and too easily corruptible. They aspire to the magnetically confused moral compass of Blair, Campbell, Mandelson and Brown.
It’s not that they were never socialised, it’s that they consciously chose to reject it.
seems no longer to be a sense of proportion, discernment or even reason to it all. The referendum ‘lies’ issue is the best example of what drove me to make this observation. A huge number of Remain campaigners were still this week referring only to ‘Leave campaign’ lies, when – as a Brexit supporter myself – I was perfectly able to recognise that there had been hyperbole and untruth on both sides. The Left Remaindeers, however, wouldn’t have it. As a tweeter, presenting each mindless assertion with examples of Remain scare-mongering was like shooting ducks in a barrel: how could anyone with normal levels of self-respect keep walking onto rakes like that? (Chuku Umuna – where is your common sense?)
The ‘Nigel Farage was responsible for Jo Cox’s death’ leap – and it was a leap far greater than anything Evil Knievel ever envisaged – was used cynically by the Right….but literally by the Left. This too baffled me – as did the Guardian cartoons of that period: they were like something out of Der Stürmer in 1931. The next day, two separate UKIP canvassers (without collusion) told me they had been threateningly abused, one of them recording the words “murderers….you should be hanged”. I wonder now if these went into Mr Plod’s notebook as “evidence of abuse on the increase”.
Finally – and for me, most sadly – two very old left-wing friends asked me to “stay away from” them for a few months, as ‘at the moment we feel antagonism towards everyone who voted Leave’ and – get this – ‘while some good people voted to leave, all the bad people voted to Leave’. Between them, this couple have an aggregate IQ at around 290; but they were able – albeit perhaps temporarily – to include Blair, Mandelson, Cameron, Osborne, Hunt, Crabb and Harman as ‘good’.
After 1938 in Germany, a great many former neutrals in the German intelligentsia, media and military exhibited the same sort of curious ability to be “taken over” by persistently repeated propaganda. Everyone, it seems, is prone to mobthink.
this preference for the systemic over the human is horribly familiar. I have many friends (and less frequent visitors to The Slog) who seem confused as to my “position”. This is because I will at one moment lay into Hilary Benn, and the next condemn Boris Johnson. There is no confusion here: they are both arseholes.
My position couldn’t be simpler to explain: I am interested in citizen individuals and their pro-social fulfilment, not systemic ideologies. I believe philosophy opens the mind, and ideology and religion tend to close it. I’m a utilitarian mutualist inspired by (but not slavishly devoted to) Jeremy Bentham.
Neoliberalism and socialism are rigid and flawed systemic ideologies under which, in the vast majority of cases, the majority suffers and a greedy élite thrives. As the old Soviet joke had it, “Under capitalism man exploits man….and under socialism, it’s the other way round”.
People-based politics recognise the need to regulate the élite. Systemic politics aim to shut up the masses.
we are further than ever from having the faintest idea what we are about. People-based social philosophy is empirical; it aims to use new knowledge in neuroscience, behaviourism, social anthropology, genetics, autonomic wiring and many other relevant disciplines to understand people, and how they can best be served and fulfilled.
Contemporary politicians are almost completely ignorant about all these disciplines: they’re far more interested in how they can get bigger helpings and fill their pockets.
Harriet Harman’s feminist narrative is outdated, and at times absent, science. The Tory attachment to prisons directly contradicts every field-tested theory of alienation, redemption, reform and social cost. Multiculturalism is accepted without debate by over 90% of legislators, and condemned by both history and social studies. Both the electoral system we use and the donation model of Party politics are conclusively obvious barriers to The Social Good and direct democracy using an informed electorate. Exactly the same applies to the deregulation of media ownership and education.
This is amateurism applied to a rapidly changing British society – and if it continues, Britain will indeed be a 3rd World country within twenty years. Frankly, in such a context the effect of Brexit is that of a baby shark piddling in the Pacific.
unachievable Utopia is hard at work, creating Dystopia.
I apologise for repeating a frequent mantra here, but until those who aspire to rule over us (and overrule us) grasp it, we will get nowhere: the raw material being proposed for the achievement of their mad ideological objectives is Homo sapiens, not Mr Spock.
Ideologies tend to have one thing in common: their authors are all dead. Their inanimate rules and systems have little or nothing to offer a contemporary, and rapidly changing, world. Marxist dialectics, Friedmanite monetarism, Mohammedan misogyny, Levitt’s globalism, Kenyesian stimulation and Old Labour economic models are irrelevant bunk.
Philosophy too consists of dead thinkers on the whole: but their ideas are timeless because they start from observations about people. Bentham was wrong in his definition of happiness, but his majority focus was right. Hobbes was wrong about ineradicable brutishness, but he was right about the need to regulate misbehaviour. Plato’s theory of shapes was wrong, but his emphasis on an informed electorate being central to democracy was spot-on. And John Locke was totally wrong about human ‘nature’ (not nurture) driving everything, but his distinction between self and other-regarding social actions is a truism far too often ignored by 21st century nannies and the politically ‘correct’.
Let’s take that cliché ‘politically correct’. It’s not simply oxymoronic, it’s intrinsically fascist. It says, “We know what settled science is, and there is no alternative to our version”. The whole point of politics should be to compare and choose between observed philosophy helped by the human sciences. There is no such thing as ‘correct’ unless you seek sanctuary in the lunatic asylums of Pol Pot, Josef Stalin and contemporary North Korea.
PC is the formation of asserted wishful thinking into a bible of blind faith and draconian censorship.
If your thinking is as narrow and insistent as liberal-Left socialist political correctness, then you will find it very hard to live up to liberal multi-philosophy democracy.
And equally, if all you care about is money, globalist power and economic colonialism, then you will increasingly see entrepreneurial liberal democracy as ‘in the way’.
I think both these censorious outlooks have achieved dominance in the West; but in few places more so than Britain. I think too that all of it was there for any discerning observer to see clearly and daily during the EU Referendum campaign.
A particularly compelling demonstration of totalitarian thought is the pc tribe described above awarding itself ‘Progressives’ as a collective noun, and using ‘progressive politics’ as a reference solely to its own assertive, unsubstantiated and often thoroughly disproven tenets. The obvious imputation is that the rest of use are reactionary dinosaurs. Or, to use the hate-free British Left syntax, scum, bigots, morons, fascists, and repellent Little Englander racist xenophobes.
And again in the Brexit aftermath of contrived excuses for a rerun, I was especially brought up with a jolt by the sleazy secret networking of Saint Richard Branson, and his attempts to persuade the UK political class to keep on having EU referendums until the right answer was achieved.
But here’s the truly disturbing bit for me as a man who once saw enormous good in the Labour Party: while even the Tory leadership candidates gave Branson the bum’s rush publicly, I didn’t see a single condemnation of his grubby lobbying from the Left Remains. It leaves one wondering just how long today’s Labour Party spoon is when it comes to supping with the Devil.
It doesn’t do to get overly pessimistic about our species. I am prone to this, but usually pulled back from brink by remembering that, as the now largely retired blogger Old Holborn was fond of saying, “There are 67 million of us and only 8,000 of them”.
Nevertheless, recent events suggest that OH was being optimistic about the numbers consciously or unconsciously at work on the destruction of free speech. The problem is that the 8,000 psychotics seem to have an inordinate ability to get the fanatics working hard for them, and the passives to go quietly along with it.
Bronowski posited that Man is ascending…..that is, evolving in a way that will improve the world. I reached the stage years ago of thinking that dear old Jake was flying a kite: I do not see any evidence at all to support his proposition. Quite the opposite: I see all sorts of evidence to suggest that our big brains were a mistaken by-product – rather than the point of – the arrival of Homo sapiens. Further still, it is becoming clear that aimless medical advance and ubiquitous travel to everywhere on the planet are turning us into an evolutionary dead end….at least, in any natural sense.
Communications technology and non-civic educational values are what is driving humanity today, not evolution. The death-throes of modern Western imperial civilisation are leading inevitably to the rise of the Barbarians….almost exactly as they did in the ancient world. Stephen Fry a few years back complained of “barbarians at the gate”. I have to opine that they stormed the gates long ago: today, they’re in the Forum…..and choosing who’s going to be top of the bill at the Colisseum.
It’s a contentious conclusion, but I proffer it anyway because I think the evidence is strongly supportive of it. What the recent ‘Britain and the European Union’ debate showed was just how easy it is for narrow ideologists to wind up working for the psychos without even realising it. It is the beeleeever’s very blinkered eyes that make him or her the perfect carthorse….obliviously heading down the road to the glue factory, while unable to see the alternative options for grazing in the surrounding fields.
The Slog 