Mad enough?

Greed is good? That’s so eighties. Now it seems fear is fantastic, terror is terrific and horror is... well it’s simply huge, darling. Every day another little drip, drip, drip of malevolent poison is trickled into the nation’s ears. Unemployment up a tick? That’s entirely the result of even discussing the referendum out loud. Value of the pound, the FTSE, the deficit? Up or down, either direction is bad and all of it is caused by evil Brexiteers saying they don’t believe that leaving the EU would end world trade. They have no comprehension of the damage they do to society.

You see them in the park, hanging about outside schools, waving their – and I can scarcely say this without feeling a little sick – Union Flags - about. Do they not see how it might affect the children? Spreading their reprehensible lies about how that nice Mr Osborne was economical with the truth, or how the lovable Dave C just wants us all to be friends. And even now when that honourable man (Oh, don’t you just want to hug him?) Mr Juncker has said how sorry he is for not listening all they want to do is spread their nasty nationalistic fascistic hate.

Don’t they understand the age we are living in? You can do and say whatever you like, so long as you don’t hurt the superior yet delicate feelings of others. You can hold any belief as long as it is on the approved list. And you may identify as any race, age, sexual proclivity, gender or faith, just so long as you avoid the proscribed combination of middle-aged, straight white man with Christian values. If you do so identify, you’d have to be mad, although if you were actually insane you may well be treated better than if you were rational about reality.

Insanity is not just a modern malaise but it is enjoying a resurgence in popularity in a world where personal responsibility may be abrogated at the drop of a hat. Addiction is another favourite affliction; an addict is a poor sufferer of an uncontrollable urge. The jury has recently been out on whether Anders Breivik is A) Evil, B) Insane, or C) a helpless victim of the urge to kill – addicted to rage. Madness and addiction; maddiction.

In our bright new brave new world of course, the charge that you should be held to account for your sins is largely confined to normal, well-adjusted white people. In a way it is not their fault that they suffer from capability and mental stability, but relief is on its way. Under the EU scheme of things, everybody understands that the cure for what ails you is more of what ails you. As Juncker has explained, the cure for EU incompetence is always more EU incompetence. The cure for fear then, must be more fear and so they are piling it on in large daily doses.

Vote for aaaaaargh!

Of course, every action has unequal and mostly opposite reaction before you get your satisfaction. What happens when we all go a bit mad and become addicted to fear; how will we live without our fix of fright? As we get closer to Midsummer Madness day, June 24^th 2016, will we fear losing our new religion of dread and dismay? If fear becomes the new normal and the threat of disaster should we cancel our membership is the biggest provider of that fear, maybe voting to leave the EU will be an urge we cannot fight? Wouldn’t it be delicious if the reason we eventually left was because we were too scared not to?