On the anti-cult

In my last post, I mentioned that people in the thrall of the bizarre cult of Boris Johnson care only about who he is, not what he says or does. To the fascist cronies of such men, the person is above all : the law, convention, democracy, due process, all of it. There is no ideology at work in the conventional sense, no determination to enact some great social reform except as a side-effect of bringing them to power. For the fascist, the important point is who is in charge, not what they do when they get there. They may well cloak this in promises of what such despots will do to improve the lives of the common folk, but that's not what fundamentally matters to them, not really.

For such a person, there is little problem in believing in contradictory ideas. If their Dear Leader one day declares death to pigeons, they will loudly devote themselves to enacting feathery death at every opportunity. If the same leader declares the very next day that pigeons are now sacred, they will immediately set about constructing great temples and statues to honour their beloved birds. It's not that they aren't aware of the stark contradiction, it's that they don't care. Self-consistency isn't what matters to them. The only thing they respect is their precious master.

The leaders themselves provide excellent evidence of this. Johnson once wrote two letters, one in support of and one attacking Brexit. Trump frequently contradicts himself in the space of a single sentence. You only have to listen to the verbal effluence spilling forth from the bowels of Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg for a few minutes to realise that these people don't have any agenda of their own whatsoever.

Not every cult is necessarily an example of fascism, but every sort of fascism is a type of cult. It enthrones the leader and discards everything else as irrelevant. 

In an earlier post, I mentioned that people can define themselves by being against things as well as in support of them. You can be against abortion rather than trying to have as many babies as possible; against veganism rather than wanting to be being purely carnivorous.

Recently I was reminded of this by seeing some of the rather distasteful reaction on reddit to the missing submersible visiting the Titanic. None of the people on board have ever had much if any media presence before, but certain segments of the internet are reacting in a very personal way. It's not the (rather obscene) wealth of the people they have a problem with, it's the people themselves they object to simply because they're wealthy.

I suggest that this is an anti-cult. Not the opposite of a cult, but cult-like behaviour applied in the opposite way to usual. Just as you can idolise someone because of who they are rather than what they do, so you can demonise them by exactly the same token. It is, of course, a form of discrimination : this person is wealthy, so I must hate them now; regardless of all other considerations I must hate them and them personally. And this is manifestly different from being opposed to wealth inequality itself; hating the person who has the money (irrespective of how they got it or what they do with it) rather than hating the fact they have the money (or hating the system that allowed this) is quite a different state of affairs.

An anti-cult is personal in the same way a regular cult is. It's all personal, not ideological. It's just that it's against specific individuals in and of themselves, regardless of context and circumstance. A regular person might say, "huh, well I don't agree with Donald Trump on most things, but when he said the time was 1:30pm, he was basically right", whereas a Trump anti-cultist would say the time simply must be something else.

We can generalise this to broader issues as well, beyond the exclusively personal. A normal person might have concerns about nuclear power but admit that its low CO2 emissions are an advantage, whereas an anti-cultist will insist that either the low emissions are a lie or even somehow a problem. A reasonable person might not like the monarchy but concede that some of their charitable activities are okay, while an anti-cultist will maintain that these must be damaging or that all charity is therefore bad. To an anti-believer, anything associated with the target of the ire must also fall victim to their displeasure. Anti-cultists like these dedicate themselves to being against certain things not because of the consequences that such things cause, but because they are against those things by their very nature.

This way of thinking may be somewhat more common than it might appear. We are all of us tribal to some degree and we shift our opinions depending on what are tribal leaders determine. If our preferred party changes its stance, we do as well, at least a little bit. Of course, most of the time we're probably not too deep in the grips of true cultism or anti-cultism : we can bring ourselves to sometimes agree with those we overall despise, and disagree on specific points with those we generally find favourable. And if we're pushed too far, we switch allegiances - if we didn't, there'd be no point in having elections. But we're none of us wholly immune to bias, tribalism and anti-tribalism alike.

Acutely aware that "everyone" must necessarily include myself, I nevertheless wonder if I've misread my social media feeds. I've been thinking that they're rife with cynicism, seeing everything and everyone as having an ulterior, malevolent motive. Things that I find inspiring (space travel, virtual reality, new technology more generally) are viewed with a strange, perverted disdain, through a warped ideological lens in which only the complete overthrow of capitalism is ever the acceptable answer to any question no matter the relevance of the financial system to the issue at hand. Any manifestly promising development is at once rejected if it comes from a disapproved source. The technology itself must be bad, the thinking goes, because the developers are inherently bad people. Any level of wealth more than half a sigma above the median is bad, so anyone not having financial difficulties is clearly in need of a guillotine.

It's all a bit mad. Perhaps I just need better social media feeds.

No Mo Mojo, BoJo

Professional arseling and three times Olympic champion in the "hairstyle so bad we're blaming it on ghosts" category Boris Johnson is, it seems, finally gone. Properly gone, or good as, relegated to a column in the Daily Fail, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing except the insignificance of weight loss pills.

Having invested so much in following the fortunes of this political personification of buffoonery so realistic that clowns were once scared he'd render their entire sector obsolete, I feel obligated to at least say something at this point. But I will keep this short, because (1) I've already said all I need to say about BoJo by now anyway and (2) if I were to be any more honest about Boris and his cronies, and certain other rather larger segments of the Tory party, I cannot think of any way I would express that properly in a way that wouldn't be classed as hate speech*.

* Though Andrew Marr's beautiful poem, "I'm so bored of Boris Johnson I could vomit" is a worthy attempt - alas that I lack his wordsmithing.

I watched last week's revelations on the Partygate report with abject glee. Ironically, since it seems to so clearly and totally vindicate everything I've said, there seems little point in me actually reading it in full. What was even more heartening was the news coverage, especially that from ordinary people on Radio 5 : "Isn't there a danger that this will make Boris Johnson into a kind of martyr ?" asked Nicky Campbell. "Only by a few people," responded a listener, "who will be considered to be mad".

Marvellous. Likewise, I'm not sure I'm going to agree with former Telegraph editor Max Hastings on many things, but what he said about Boris was bang-on : "You can say that this stuff doesn't matter," he said about the lockdown parties, "but what you can't say is that it didn't happen." Which nails it. Boris' cult followers (for those are the only real supporters he has left) are, predictably, still claiming it's all about the parties themselves, that it was only some cake, that everyone broke the lockdown rules a little bit, that it's all hypocrisy because Keir Starmer once had a beer or Bernard Jenkins talked to his own wife... it's all nonsense, all of it. Even if, just for the sake it, hypocrisy was a factor, the parties themselves were not the issue. The issue was the lying.

Boris lied. He lied again and then lied about lying. He does it perpetually and probably quite literally cannot stop himself, not just about partygate but about pretty much everything. As one of his cultists said, "It's not that he deliberately tells lies, it's that he's bored by the truth". 

Blink. 

Err... righty-hoo, and you're... not seeing how this makes him unsuitable for office ? No ? Off you fuck then.

Does every politician lie ? Likely yes, because every human being lies from time to time. But not every politician routinely tells lies to get what they want. Not every politician is so enthralled by their own gargantuan sense of entitlement that they don't feel the need to apologise or correct the record when they're told to, steps normal people take because they at least feel ashamed when they're caught. In truth, Boris is different from normal people, not in the "it doesn't matter because it's me" way that he thinks he is, but in that he literally feels no embarrassment about what he's done. Ordinary people feel ashamed when caught, but at least part of that is about what it is that they've done. For Boris, if it's anything at all, it's only about being found out, and nothing else.

Frank Herbert said, "respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality". Boris doesn't have any of that. While their are many differences between him and Trump, there are also similarities, and his routine attacks on proper procedure and democratic institutions are chief among those. It's hard to tell if this is because he does actually realise that what he's done is wrong but doesn't care, or genuinely doesn't believe himself capable of committing any wrongdoing whatsoever. Either way, it's kind of a tragedy.

What I really wish would happen is that firstly Boris would just sod off completely and we'd never hear from him again, and that secondly he'd have an epiphany. He'd wake up one morning realising the full magnitude of what he'd done, to find himself with a modicum of self-awareness. Now at one point I would have wished this as a means of reform, but I'm long past that. Instead, I only wish this upon him now purely out of a punitive desire for spite, because I want him to suffer.

While, in the light of the vote overwhelmingly in favour of the official Partygate report, Boris' fawning acolytes are sadly not going to instigate a full-blown civil war within the party, it's pretty much assured that that won't shut up about him anytime soon. And there are some seriously impressive mental gymnastics being done here. Michael Gove, the only man who rivals Nigel Farage for his uncanny resemblance to a toad, and who famously stabbed Boris in the back by running against him in a leadership contest, admits that the lockdown party videos are "indefensible", but then says that those present who received honours shouldn't have them rescinded. No, we must follow proper procedure, it was Boris Johnson's right as Prime Minister to grant those honours.

Excuse me ? We must follow the proper procedure and allow a lawbreaking lawmaker to give honours to people themselves found to have violated the laws ? Breaking the COVID laws and lying about it carries next to no consequence, but forbidding peerages to those breaking the rules and lying about it - that's where we draw the line ? Well, that doesn't make sense, unless you're a cultist. 

To give the Tories their due : this sort of egregious cultism isn't their normal practise. This sort of personality-based politics isn't usual. No-one accused May of even being liked, nobody saw Cameron as beyond reproach, nobody put Major on a pedestal. Thatcher, maybe, was different, but even then the party knew when to quit. This is how the party survives, and while Boris was once popular, fortunately that was nowhere near the extent he'd have needed to remake the party in his own image, a la Trump and the Republicans*. It was never more than a marriage of convenience, except for a few diehards. For them it's all about who Boris is, not what he says or does or thinks, regardless even of how he treats them personally. The Nadine Dorries** of the world simply don't care about stuff like that.

* So far as I can tell, the groundwork for that sort of transformation had been steadily laid down for many years before Trump even took office : the Republican party was already a cult in search of a leader, and that's just not really the case with the Tories - however vehemently I might oppose their ideologies.

** A remarkable lady, graced with all the culture war antics of J. K. Rowling but none of the redeeming features. Refusing to resign until she discovers the "sinister forces" at work that blocked her peerage ? Dear or dear. Peers become entitled, you don't get them merely by having a sense of entitlement. 

The Tory party is now essentially having their own Corbyn moment. Labour belatedly realised when the cause was hopeless and implemented sweeping (but gradual and incremental), highly disciplined reforms to oust the unelectable hard left. Unfortunately for the Tories, a similar process looks unlikely to begin anytime soon. They already tried replacing BoJo with the even madder, stupider, and more genuinely ideological Liz Truss, because that's the kind of crazed loons that form the party faithful. Sunak was then appointed really only by default, and he appears to be largely both rudderless and spineless. Rudderless, because he has no clear idea of where he wants the party to go, how it will get there, or why it needs to move. Spineless, because he lacks the conviction to enforce any sort of ideology even if he ever found one, or even stand up to the remaining loonies. In short, a complete non-entity.

How bad the damage will be is not yet known. Damage there shall surely be, but don't count the Tories out completely just yet. It's unlikely they'll truly collapse; their base support still exists, their core ideologies are not overthrown. Fortune's wheel is, however, ever turning, and while it might not grind them into dust, it has every chance of flinging them into the wilderness for a good long while.