26.04.2020 Horror Vacui: Virtue signalling, the rise of right-wing populism and why your boss is an arsehole

Not a huge amount has happened the last few days, so I’m doing another one of my Theories About the Nature of Things™, but before I attempt to wrestle that out of the ether, let me briefly update you about what’s been happening down here in the trenches.

Bare with me though because I’m taking a day off my methylphenidate (Ritalin), I think it’s good to take a break every so often, but it means my hands can’t keep up with my mind and my mind can’t keep up with itself. It’s slightly harder to find the words to match the thoughts, and I keep drifting off.

I also noticed, despite the suspension of reality, and time losing its grip, there is still a rhythm to the week. Today is Sunday, it’s much quieter, so it feels like a good day to allow myself to zone out a bit.

Skip down to the bottom if you just want to go to the theory.

Magic square

I am becoming more and more convinced about that magic square, it’s significance and magnetism. It feels like that little corner of what remains of Wapping Woods, has some pull, like an opening to a secret ley line. I’m sure these things are everywhere, but it’s almost like a sonar beacon is going off there attracting people whose ears are open.

According to someone called David Furlong, a healer, therapist and researcher, there are actually ley lines going through this area. The Tower of London apparently is a corner stone of a triangle that sits over London, and another line between Hampstead Tumulus (according to legend Boudicca’s burial place, but no one is really sure, but evidence suggests it’s an iron age burial mound), and Greenwhich, which I presume is significant because the entire planet’s time, another magical construct, is measured from there, seems to pass right over the spot the square of twigs sits.

So it is possible, in the way anything is possible, something about that spot draws people who imagine other energies and planes of existence to it. Yesterday walking the dog there I met a bloke called Sam, who was reading by it. I wondered if he built the square because he sort of looked the type and I wanted to ask him about it. Turned out he hadn’t even noticed it, but he had followed his nose from the estate he lives in across the river in Bermondsey till he found somewhere nice and quiet to read, and he ended up right next to the square.

The square itself has had a portal, or doorway, an opening at least in one side, that seems to be intentional because it’s exactly halfway through the side facing the clump of trees. The other thing I’ve noticed is the perimeter itself seems to have been disturbed, the sticks are no longer straight, but in angles perpendicular to each other, that seems to make the square porous in some way. Me and Sam had a chat and decided the square builder was maybe welcoming the trees in somehow, and as I walked off, he said he liked being in the square and was going to sit there and read his book. The I Ching.

So I don’t know, it seems like the area has attracted at least three space cadets recently, the first who built some kind of pagan nature ritual, me who found it, and maybe even invented magic associations (the original builder maybe just did it out of boredom, I don’t think it makes a difference). Then our wanderer Sam, who lead himself there to read a book of ancient Chinese magic divination.

It reminds me of the Carlos Casteneda book about the Yaqui shaman in Mexico, when he tells Carlos he’ll teach him his secrets if he can find the right spot to sit in on the floor of his porch without fatigue, but doesn’t give him any clue about what that means. He spends the whole night rolling around the floor, trying to check every spot. Eventually he falls asleep, Don Juan comes out in the morning and says he found the spot, but he’s never sure if he did, or the Don would have said that about wherever he fell asleep, or if it made a difference.

It does feel like certain areas attract people and events, like there are reasons for things that are beyond our comprehension. Either that or people like me maybe just have over active imaginations, but I sort of think that’s the same thing.

Ingesting bleach

Donald Trump has backtracked on his advice to covid patients to inject themselves with disinfectant, he said he was being sarcastic. To me that actually seems worse. Imagine in a country where millions of people don’t have access to health care sarcastically suggesting people inject themselves with bleach. “You’re getting sick? Why don’t you inject yourself with disinfectant?” I don’t care. It’s incredibly callous, I would be more reassured if the president was just stupid rather than malicious.

I’m sure a few people will actually take his advice, and I don’t say that in a mocking way, I myself have attempted to cut corners with my health. I had a tooth problem and didn’t want to spend money on the dentist when I knew I just needed antibiotics, so I looked into getting dog antibiotics on the internet. Turns out you need a prescription for them too. Imagine you were really desperate, a family member is dangerously sick, maybe your kid, you don’t have the money to go to a doctor, you would try anything. And I don’t say this in a cruel way, but some people are stupid, which, combined desperation and people die or give their life savings to faith healers who tell them to stop their medicinal cancer treatment.

Back to school

I had a zoom lesson with my course, we have to do some practical sessions to pass the course, so we’re attempting to do it online. It is a bit harder, but this is our brave new world. Gotta get used to it.

New job

Soon as I get off this, I’m doing my online training for my hospital porter job. Then hopefully they will assign me my first shifts. The training takes a couple of hours and they pay you for it. I’ve sent my DBS certificate number (to prove I’m not a crook), I think they need to double check all that before they let me near the patients. It’s a Sunday, so probably won’t happen till tomorrow.

Polling

An Opinium poll came out this morning, which puts the Tories up at 5 points at 50% and Labour unchanged at 33%. I guess Jeremy wasn’t the problem after all. Depressing, eh?

I think that’s pretty much everything caught up with, although I’m finding it hard to remember what I did yesterday. My ADHD now seems worse than before I was on the meth, but I probably just go used to being a go getting high achiever on the drugs.

So, the theory…

Horror Vacui: Virtue signalling, the rise of right-wing populism and why your boss is an arsehole

Lenin’s famous line “fascism is capitalism in decay” is remarkably prescient. I won’t look at the Nazis or other 20^th century fascist movements here because I’m not well informed enough, but neoliberalism, our current form of capitalism, stripped of any moderation, balance or accountability, commoditises the human soul and leads inexorably towards fascism.

What’s worse, is it looks like the kind of fascism we’re heading towards is one lead by utter incompetents, partly because the kind of anti-intellectualism they employ is impossible to argue against and leads them to power. They are proud of their stupidity, and you can’t reason with idiots. So we end up with people for whom overseeing the running of a country is like a dog watching someone juggle. Reason, expertise, knowledge even intelligence is derided because it is of the ‘establishment’ which they pit themselves up against even though that’s exactly what they are. Off the top of my head, the most egregious example of this is Michael Gove during the Brexit referendum campaign saying the British people were “fed up up of experts.” Their utter lack of ability is evident in the way the US and the UK have handled coronavirus, we’ll have to see how Brazil, another country run by a raving fascist will turn out, unfortunately I can’t see it going well.

Note, this doesn’t just happen with politicians. See Noel Gallagher boasting about how he doesn’t read fiction, “I only read factual books… I mean novels are just a waste of fucking time… I can’t suspend belief in reality, I just end up thinking, ‘this isn’t fucking true’.” He also complains about books with figurative titles, he doesn’t understand how books like, for example, off the top of my head, Trout Fishing in America can be allowed to be called that when they’re not actually about trout fishing in America. His own book, Any Road Will Get Us There (If We Don’t Know Where We’re Going), is no surprises, a clumsy derivative with out the wit, charm, skill or care, like Noel’s entire career, of a George Harrison song.  Any Road chorus goes “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Might explain something about his abilities as a lyricist, and the fact that, despite constantly complaining about the dull state of modern music, Noel has only ever released one song over and over again for 25 years.

The other thing about our form of capitalism is it rewards nepotism and privilege much more than before. Social mobility isn’t just nice because people from poorer backgrounds get a go once in a while, it’s essential in order to put the most competent people, rather than the most privileged in the most important jobs. There’s a book called The Peter Principle, which is about the way people are promoted to their level of incompetence. In short, you get promoted if you’re good at your job, if you’re not, you don’t. That means you move up the ranks till you’re out of your depth, at which point you’ll stay wherever you are. I’m sure you’ve all seen this at work or in government. If you’ve ever worked in a ‘trendy’ job like an ad agency, this phenomenon is terrible. In my experience, the more laid back and cool people pretend to be, the more backstabbing and Machiavellian they need to be behind the scenes in order to hang on to their position which is more often than not is out of the remit of their competence. This is compounded by the lack of diversity in these places. Toxic.

Joseph Heller’s book Catch 22 is a great example of this. People often say it’s an anti-war novel, but to me it’s about how incompetent leaders ruin everything, even war. Colonel Cathcart, keeps twisting logic and raising the amount of missions the pilots are required to fly, in order to please his bosses who are themselves incompetent. He only ever flies two missions himself, one of which was by accident. He also sees fit to promote Maj. Major Major Major, a man whose name is literally just a rank, it means nothing apart from ‘authority’, who was “born too late and too mediocre”. He is the person Cathcart puts in charge. Yossarian and the other pilots have to keep flying these dangerous, strategically pointless missions just to keep these morons safe and happy in their jobs.

It’s a truism, that the people who most want to lead are the last people who should be allowed to. It requires a love of power for its own sake, an unflinching, almost delusional regard for your own prowess and a psychotic disregard for other people. That’s why your boss is an arsehole, why nasty people usually get power, and why wars happen in the first place.

I came across one theory about why fascism is on the rise across the world in the Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran’s excellent book How To Lose a Country: 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. It’s a warning from our future, about how authoritarians consolidate power, illustrated by the rise of Erdogan and the coups that happened in 1971 and 1980 in Turkey. I have to admit I had no idea how awful what happened in Turkey is.

She talks about horror vacui, which I think is usually used in terms of art, horror of the blank space which leads artists to fill every corner with detail, and in physics in terms of Aristotle’s idea that nature abhors an empty space. Temelkuran talks about it in terms of an almost spiritual implication of neoliberalism.

She says, “The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless of shallowest ones.” Once again, see Noel Gallagher and Britpop.

And it’s true, neoliberalism’s defining characteristic is it’s lack of values, it’s reduction of democracy to tinkering round the edges, and moving things like monetary policy out of the hands of politicians into those of technocrats, because economics, in their view, is purely a technical issue. Nothing means anything, no one cares. That’s why people turn away from politics because it doesn’t matter who gets in power, nothing really changes.

This feeling percolates down every level of life until walking down the street feels like the time I swallowed some washing up liquid as an experiment. Dry retching, painful rawness, your oesophagus stripped bare of the warm mucous of humanity and belonging it requires.

So along comes right-wing populism, and socialism offering to fill that void, the horror vacui, both become more popular, but only right-wing populism, or fascism can be tolerated by the corporations that actually have power, because it won’t change any of the systems of power or make much difference to how wealth is distributed (apart from increasing its flow in their direction). So everything is thrown at destroying the socialist, and the fascist is accepted as ‘it do be like that sometimes.’ So we end up with Trumps, Johnsons, Bolsenaros, Putins, who in most cases (maybe not Putin), were made inevitable by the sensible, centrist soulless husks of the politicians that came before them.

So causes are invoked, 'legitimate concerns', things like Britishness, America first (racism), men’s rights (sexism), or traditional values, things that are nebulous enough to shift the goal posts of whenever it suits the leader, because the real cause is only power for its own sake.

In another post, I argued the rise of purpose driven advertising represents the bargaining stage of grief advertising is going through about the death of its own relevance (I’ll put a link). But Temelkuran argues it’s the same thing as fascism, it comes from the human fear of the void. The ectoplasm that makes brands is getting thin, they need a reason, so they invent one. It’s the same with virtue signalling, the reason people put little stickers on their Facebook profiles to show they don’t like terrorism, or do the ice bucket challenge, things that ‘raise awareness’ and show people care, but actually make very little difference to the problems they are supposed to be addressing. She says in fact, that adverting’s and comms’ failure to fill the void, was taken advantage of by fascists who offered great and serious sounding causes instead.

- here's the link - https://apocalypsepizza.blogspot.com/2020/04/02042020.html

“When I see Mark Zuckerberg with his T-shirts and jeans and trainers, I always think of Umberto Eco saying fascism doesn’t always show up in uniform. Now we know it can also appear in casual wear.”

The one thing that I want to add to this theory is something I came across a while ago in a John Higgs book. I’m not sure if it’s his idea or not, but he talks about fascism’s appeal being so strong because it appeals to both the id and the ego as defined by Freud. The id is the unconscious hedonistic bit of you, that says things you regret, that gets pissed and is maybe a racist. Whereas the ego is conscious, it loves rules, authority, order, logic, and spends most of its time rationalising whatever the id decides to do. The id loves fascism because it is angry, it’s racist and blames others, while the ego also loves fascism because it’s about following the rules, being an upstanding citizen, respecting authority. That’s a dangerous combination, which maybe makes it more appealing than socialism.

Socialists always say the only choice is between socialism and barbarism, they are the two inevitable end points to capitalism. That seems truer than ever at the moment, and unfortunately barbarism seems to have the upper hand. All these things, the worst kind of people rising to the top, the unquestionable nature of the doctrine, the old powers preferring fascism to socialism, and the appeal of fascism itself make things look hopeless and dark. But what can be done? Is that hope?

Temelkuran says she doesn’t like the word hope, it’s too fragile, too passive. She uses the word determination instead. If we’re determined things can be done. What those things are might need to wait for another day though, I’ve written enough for one day, and I need to think about what those things might be. At the moment I only have a vague idea.

Thanks for reading. Stay determined.