Two-minute Hate

After a week in which a long fought-for dream was reduced to rubble in just eighty minutes you would imagine England rugby followers would hate the Irish team for their outstanding performance. But that’s not how rugby fans roll. The Irish were roundly applauded and the losing side – for so long seemingly unbeatable, despite some very beatable starts – picked up their Calcutta Cup, their second Six Nations trophy in a row, their world-record-equalling eighteen straight wins – and went off for their bollocking from Eddie Jones. It may be more than a game, but in the end it really is just a game; no place for hate.

Hatred is such an extreme reaction to events, don’t you think? It’s an immature, teenage lashing-out, often against those who have only their best interests at heart. ‘Oh, I hate that!’ they say, when they really mean ‘that’s inconvenient’. True hate is a slow-cooked build-up of repressed animus, marinated for years and slowly brought to the simmer by repeated slights and prolonged ill-treatment. Hate is also personal, visceral. Countries don’t hate each other; one may fear the other nation, or even despise it, but hate is a tricky thing to control and has no place in civilised discourse.

Also, if your first recourse to show your disaffection is to use the word hate, where do you go after that? Don’t you hate exaggeration? Just as with all the ‘literally shaking right now’ tweets following the most insignificant of slights, it’s akin to putting all your cards on the table immediately following the deal. I ‘literally’ hate you, so there is literally no point in trying to discuss things with me; I am so far beyond reason and I hate you for putting me in that position. Hate is like slamming the door and stomping out... you look so much more foolish when you then have to go back and ask nicely for your car keys.

But I suppose hate does allow you to quickly segue into accusations of Nazism and thereby identify with the legions of brainwashed adolescents who believe anybody in a position of authority over them is, literally, Hitler. I find the best way to deal with being called a fascist is to smile sweetly and suggest I have to rush off to barbecue some babies, or gas some Jews. What’s sauce for the goose; at least it saves me getting into complex arguments where you have to find some bizarre middle ground before ‘agreeing to disagree’, which is, of course, mealy-mouthed code for ‘you are still wrong and I will go on believing I have won’.

A ready cleaving to the notion of hate also opens the door to the acceptance of more hyped-up hyperbole to further your incisive discourse. Instead of accepting that Trump and Brexit and Le Pen and Wilders are natural reactions to years and years of concerted left-wing attempts to browbeat people into behaving against their conservative instincts, idiots like Tim Farron have to leap to wild conspiracy theories about some New World Order to explain to themselves how they lost.

Bad losers, whose ‘progressive’ world view has been shown to fail, instead of accepting this and getting on with it are fomenting unrest. People like Farron, possibly in the sincere belief that they are right – which makes them dumb as well as dangerous – are going about, stirring up antipathy, encouraging others to believe themselves victims and take up cudgels against those who genuinely want a world for the many, not for the few. Don’t you just hate that?

The truth is in here...

As ever, Twitter has been alight with left and right arguing the toss over immigration. Depending on your perspective it is variously: a human right, an unmitigated disaster, essential for our survival, pivotal to our overthrow and all stations in between. Whatever the merits, or demerits of net immigration exceeding 300,000 per annum into the UK it surely cannot be denied that it is a strain on every aspect of our nationhood: housing, health education, transport and welfare are negatively impacted beyond our ability to deal with it rationally. And our identity as a nation is threatened as a result. It has been and will continue to be at the heart of our politics, when it really ought to be a near non-issue.

Despite the Blair government’s desire to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity’ I don’t have enough faith in human cooperation to believe it is part of some sort of global conspiracy. I realise, however, that my often repeating that “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but...” makes me sound like I do believe... or worse, makes me a ‘conspiracy denier’, denier being the pejorative word of choice to silence common sense.

So what is going on in the civilised world? What about the Frankfurt school, Agenda 21, Common Purpose, Cultural Marxism and New World Government? What about Davos and the Bilderberg Group and the well-known inner circle of bankers who, ‘as everybody knows’, work with the Zionists to keep everybody poor? All these theories about shadowy movements, cliques and cabals have traction with malleable minds, especially those of the young and the disadvantaged and the mentally feeble, as the driving force behind every bad thing in the world.

But think about it for a moment. Oxfam’s annual wealth report is intended to feed the anger at apparent inequality when a simple examination of everybody you, personally, know should tell you that we are far from equal. The very diversity that so many worship as a new faith is directly contrary to the fanciful ideal of equality. It is not in the interests of anybody to keep those they control poor; poor people have a nasty historical habit of actually conspiring to bring down their governments. Where rulers have amassed great wealth at the expense of their citizens it has usually been through simple, crude greed and they have often met with sticky ends.

In sorting the truth from the chaff, I usually look to the mighty razor of Occam to solve the ‘mystery’ and I think the explanation is at once both simpler and more complex than the idea of an elite setting out to control the world. Oh, for sure, I have no doubt that such things have been discussed, but such plots soon unravel. For the current crop of theories to bear examination, literally thousands of world leaders, parliamentarians, influencers, advisors and financiers would have to be ‘in on it’. And I just don’t believe that people greedy enough to want it are capable of the levels of agreement and secrecy that would be required, especially given the huge timescales involved. This whole inequality ‘conspiracy’ goes back generations.

No, our willingness to see connivance everywhere is down to the fundamental flaw of democracy. In the absence of the mythical ‘benign dictator’ representative democracy is the least-worst system yet devised. Its most democratic aspect is the fact that it cannot please the majority who vote for it; to a greater or lesser degree almost all people are tasked by the societies it creates. Those least disadvantaged don’t see what the fuss is all about and the rest insist that this group pays a penalty for that lesser disadvantage by way of tax, thus increasing their level of discontent. It’s the closest thing to equality we are ever likely to get – equality of disenchantment.

We all want fairness, I believe that, but we don’t want to be responsible for it, so we elect governments to impose fairness on our behalf and hand to them the instruments of control. What do we expect? And as each successive generation wants ever more nuanced fairness we get ever more fractured thinking and legislation intended to make us be nicer turns us all into potential thought criminals. Locking down imagined ‘hate speech’ is quickly portrayed as police-statery. Those with wealth try to hang on to it, avoiding tax via the very loopholes designed to encourage wealth creation for the good of all. We end up with the inevitable ‘them and us’ scenario as the demands on welfare grow and those who fund it try to avoid doing so.

It’s not a conspiracy inflicted on the many by the few, but a series of uncoordinated strictures imposed by the disjointed, but well-meaning will of the majority on themselves. Mass self-harm, if you will. Yes, some groups practise deception and exclusion, as any ‘club’ will do, but not in concert with any planet-wide communion of evil. This, of course, is a disappointing conclusion and the more dramatic spectre of global domination by dark forces – as inhabits every branch of superstition and folklore and religion and cultish creed – is a far more attractive story to tell around the camp fire. You want a lightbulb moment? The illuminati are in your head*.

(*Or is that just what they want you to think?)

Order, order!

I’ve said over and over again that I don’t, generally, believe in global conspiracy theories. For a start the level of both secrecy and cooperation they require are beyond the ability of most humans to maintain. If you don’t believe me, how often have you heard the words, “Don’t tell anybody, but…” shortly preceding information about to become common knowledge? But at least one of those conspiracy pre-requisites has rapidly been dispensed with since the coming of the Internet. Why be secret, when the world wide gossip board can be used to spread your disinformation openly? Instead of closely guarding your alliances why not do the opposite and exaggerate them to the point of absurdity?

I’ve just been watching the Dimbleby Lecture and Christine Lagarde’s frightening vision of the future. With cool and authoritative and yes, slightly sexy tones she delivered a calm appraisal of how grandiose schemes and globalisation have led to disparity, disaster, poverty, inequality and climate change and how only even more globalisation of effort can get us out of this mess they had gotten us into. You want a conspiracy theory? This was New World Order hiding in plain sight. Clever move; out and proud and look – nothing to be scared of, silly.

And it’s happening all over: Germany’s Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has spoken out against ‘petty nationalism’ or what we used to refer to as ‘democracy’. Across Europe, committed and concerned citizens, bewildered by their being sold out to a project none of them voted for, demand to be heard. “Tut, tut, tut” say the soothing voices, “Hush now. You have nothing to worry about.”  And then they simply continue to ignore the wishes of majorities while massaging the statistics for consent. Realising that if the vox populi can’t be silenced it must be discredited, the EU propaganda machine expends enormous effort to do just that. And it works.

Behind the shadowy organisations who wield undue influence over national governments are generations of back-room deal-making and a nexus of consortia, committees, think tanks and opinion formers whose job is to manipulate the information from which we, the people, are expected to assemble our world view. Thus Lagarde’s lecture was peppered through with plenty of headline ‘truths’ supplied by armies of ‘experts’, presented as simple matters of fact. And what she was telling us was that despite how incredibly difficult and apparently insurmountable our problems were, committed world-savers like the IMF were dedicated to only one thing – our salvation.

But why would they be? I seriously question anybody who does not put their own interests first, followed by their neighbours and then expanding out as far as their largesse and influence allows. And the more life you live the more you see how the greatest schemes often end in disaster and even the smallest pebble causes ripples to spread far from the point of impact. Anybody with true compassion for the world would probably instinctively want to reverse the process of globalisation and actively limit their individual effect on anybody they couldn’t apologise personally to.  

But no, Madame Lagarde likes to think much bigger and in her big thinking out loud she let slip that in her view there was nothing more deeply satisfying than to be able to influence world events and effect change. Simple power, then. And in the case of her new world vision, power to change even the way people think and feel. Because as all governments know, the little people really don’t understand what is good for them, do they? How dare you petty-minded Little Englanders worry about jobs when gender dysphoria and intersectionality are problems affecting dozens? Smoke and mirrors and misdirection.

I only speak for myself, but I want a government to defend our basic freedoms, protect us from harm, keep order and fight for our national interests in the wider world. So far as I can tell even these relatively simple ambitions have proved beyond the ability of any government in the history of the known world. I was always warned about trying to run before learning to walk. In my view the only thing the world needs saving from is government barely able to stand its own two feet.