We Must Rebuild Jerusalem
Look, guys, it's gone on long enough. By it, I mean, well, England. I mean, just look at this shit. There's something in our spines, like a chemical1, that just forces us to be deferential to someone with a degree from Oxbridge no matter how farcical their actual beliefs and statements are. People are utterly credulous as to the need of cruelty, utterly polarised from birth against the idea that better things are possible. Half of us think we would have been better off without the Norman invasion: what the hell does that even mean?
English politics is all about in group and out group. Graham Linehan is in the in-group, because he wrote those TV shows that made you laugh that one time, so he gets the press of a superhero despite the utter ridiculousness of claiming that an underage child was, at time of being an underage child, themselves a paedophile. Piers Morgan is respected as an intense and serious interviewer every time he accidentally discovers an ideological talking point conflicts with a core value. Kemi Badenoch is a hero of common sense for insisting the British Empire never profited from slavery: presumably in her view, we just did the Triangle Trade for the love of the game.
Common sense, that's the phrase they love. You don't need to justify anything you believe when you can just calmly assert that everyone rational should believe it already. Men can't become women: that's just common sense. You can't tax someone's ancestral manor from them, that's just common sense. Brown people aren't really the same as White people, that's just common sense. Raising taxes on the rich would just mean they leave, that's just common sense.
Common sense, of course, just means "whatever I already believed." No one has ever said something, been corrected, and then immediately gone, "of course, the exact opposite of what I believed 10 seconds ago, well, that's just common sense, isn't it?" In this way, England is a country full of common sense: a pure belief that nothing can exist that does not already exist, that nothing you are not already aware of can ever matter, that nothing requiring technicality or detail or a changing of the mind can ever really be how the world really works.
This sense of agreeability and common sense pervades the British elite. I've always found the debate around Winston Churchill quite funny: a lot of people equivocate, say his views were fair for his day, but if you actually read The Second World War, the man wears his biological essentialism proudly on his big, big chin. But you can't possibly call him a racist: he beat Hitler, he's naturally a hero, that's just common sense. Even if people see the passages, and agree the passages are bad, the implications of the facts they agree with are able to swim entirely around any neuron which would change anyone's view of the world, no matter how minutely.
The front pages of any newspaper, of the Telegraph or the Daily Mail, are grown from the soil of this common sense. I read them and, uncommon in my sense as I am, am utterly baffled as to how these conclusions could be arrived at. In these pages, Nigel Farage and Elon Musk are worthy political prognosticators, not the thin-skinned losers, nerds, and neo-Nazis they repeatedly show themselves to be in public for everyone to see. Immigrants are a sweeping and raping tide, not the industrious and intelligent people that my experience (and every survey) repeatedly shows them to be. Transgender people are the hapless victims of ideology, NPCs in a cosmic battle, not real people with real needs and a real perspective on a real, but different, world.
These forces are all driven by the hope that you recognise their logic innately without needing to ever actually arrive at it yourself, are hapless and aimless. They don't seek to convince you that immigration is bad—but if you are so inclined as to be afraid of people you don't know, they will happily reassure you that that is the common sense thing to do nevertheless. Feel icky at the idea of wearing a women's dress? Don't worry, so does everyone else with common sense. Think it's unlikely that someone could become a trillionaire without a lick of talent or sense? Common sense dictates that he's actually a genius eccentric, not a petty Hitlerite. Government repeatedly slow to fill in your potholes? Luckily, no one of any rationality believes the government can actually do anything anyway. It does feel unfair that we give away money to people who don't work, doesn't it? Luckily, the common sense view is that it doesn't work anyway.
Despite it's irony-pilled nature, averse to any positive statement on the world, I struggle to call it fascism: to me, that implies a conscious ordering of the world, arrived at after much thought, and a real will and drive and belief that the violent power of the state is both the most effective and the most moral way to bring about this order. I don't think the bearers of common sense in England could point to any graphs except their family tree, think about anything except their past life, or believe anything except that which they already accidentally believe.
In other words, it is the politics of absolutely aversion. It is the belief that you should never be made to believe. Anything which would require you to think twice about a gut reaction is wrong for doing so. A belief which implies the government could fix a problem is childish, because real adults know problems cannot be fixed because nothing should ever change. It is not taking a stand, it's a whole bunch of angry ink spilled over the fact that anyone asked you to take a stand at all. It's the NIMBYism of the mind.
Anyone who believes in a common sense approach to government cannot achieve anything new. They can only tinker at the margins of the taxes and structures and Stamp Duty that came before them. Ideologies are hollow shells bereft of belief, used where convenient by the utterly faithless and abandoned at the first changing of the wind. You really believe that the millions in gifts to Nigel Farage are as liberal and democratic as trade unions donating to the Labour party? You fucking imbecilic twits. They cannot come up with anything that works because they cannot come up with anything at all. All they can do is amplify their ugly human instinct, and feel justified never having to think about why their instinct is what it is, and believe that they can never go beyond whatever their instinct is.
If you believe anything, this country is a machine designed to drive you absolutely insane.
The culture this creates around the elites in England is one of utter conformity, one that means our nation is failing to capture the dynamism that a liberal democracy should be capable of harnessing. There's no point having a democratic system of elections when you've convinced everyone that they should basically be believing the same nothing anyway. There is no room for negotiation within the mainstream ideological coalition because the only thing any member of it has in common is that what is, should, and it is deviation that should be abhorred. No one can discuss how to fix problems when doing anything is seen as horrid in the first place.
Namely, there is no elite viewpoint, platformed anywhere close to mainstream in the UK, that believes: transgender people are owed equal dignity in society and under the law; immigration is a net good and we can handle it; it is worth building houses, even in places where people might see them; not only would it be nice to rejoin the EU, we should actively be trying to; stripping citizenship from people is immoral; AI might not be "all that"; most famous people in our history were still Bad People; extractive rent doesn't serve a purpose; increasing the availability of working from home unlocks economic potential; Oxbridge is, in many ways, merely a fine university within a reality distortion field; it's actually fine to pay lots of people welfare if they need it.
Even when the elites are themselves in these boxes, themselves immigrants or Hull graduates or creatives or disabled or with transgender family, the English capacity for self delusion ensures that common sense is never strayed from. The fact that one's own child could be, or is, transgender lives in one half of the brain: the fact that we must determine male and female by shifting, uncertain biological markers and force these new pieces into society's old slots lives quite happily in another half. There is no ideology, and the exceptions quite happily flow into the vacuum inside the container without it ever changing its shape.
The English largely let this corrosion of the ability to think happen to them. George Orwell wrote that the English were immune to ideas, and oh brother. While any effort to promote alternative views (or any damn view at all) is likely to start with the elites, the booming middle class of decades past was more than happy to take their own capacity for unique thought and subsume it to the wills of the supraculture. People who have struggled against landlords and bosses and racists want to become themselves rich, read the Telegraph, join the Gentlemen’s' Clubs, and think the same common sense that everyone else does. There's a common saying in the UK: that "people hate successful people in this country". I hate your idea of success! I hate that your goal, your aspirational end point, the greatest life you can conceive of for yourself, is the same pointless and incurious thing that everyone else does. Flat in London, House in Country, Second house in France, don't you dare make me ever look at a homeless person.
I do not want that! I do not want that incuriosity for myself, I do not want that inflexibility for my state, I do not want that suicidal idiocy for the desecrated parcel of mud I call my country. Anyone who does want it2 should be abhorred, mocked, not given newspaper columns and ministries in government. I think it is misaligned with every value it publicly claims to instil, and can only lead to its own cannibalisation. It should not be viewed as a placid, dying beast. Hospitals are shutting, people are turning against foreigners and refugees, home ownership is rapidly becoming an unaffordable dream for people like me. This Terminal English State is more like a forest fire, setting alight any suitable fuel nearby it while turning its own original logs into ash. The foolish and unnecessary English elite have coasted by on momentum and history alone, but history has changed course, and momentum won't cut it.
Like a forest fire, it's damage must first be contained, and it starved of fuel. The Terminal English State sustains itself on people willing to sell themselves to join it: while it produces these people at a slower and slower rate nowadays, I have no reason to think that for the first time in modern history it has slowed to extinction rate.
And, frankly, I don't know how to starve it except for trying to get people to see beyond the illusion of common sense. We need to see beyond the "rules" of what we can and can't do, see beyond this tiny island's quaint self-perception. Sometimes the bastions of common sense overplay their hand3, but rarely are they internally self-contradictory: there's no profit in that, and they're ideologically homogenous and unadventurous by necessity of their position.
Instead, common sense is revealed to be insane obsession where it clashes irrevocably with expressed values. You cannot accept something as "common sense" if it clashes with a deeply held, core belief; a red line you will not move for anything. Too much of this clashing common sense, especially all from the same groups and kinds of people, and people will hopefully wonder why its proponents are worth taking credulously in the first place. That doubt is key: if they don't know what they're doing, then perhaps we can conceive of doing it better.
"People won't accept things that contradict their beliefs, yeah no shit." It's obvious, sorry. But, there's that English dimension, that immunity to belief, that ability to split the world into "right next to me (relevant)" and "everything else (irrelevant)". Our red lines are extremely mutable. We have sold out, are selling out, and presumably will sell out our allies, our neighbours, our friends, all to maintain that one core red line: that I shall not be impinged on, or inconvenienced in any way, or made to believe. That is the one belief that is insufficient to produce change or success: that is the only belief of the Terminal English State.
Instead, we have to believe the opposite, to stand any chance of mounting an alternative to this managed decline. We have to have red lines that we will not budge on, even when it would be personally advantageous to do so. We have to subscribe to beliefs and ideologies, even when they may inconvenience us (or worse, the elite). We have to have some idea of what government should look like, beyond what it already does. We must believe the state can be an instrument of our ambitions and best, lest it become just a mirror of our neuroses and worse.
Dawg, the English have got to start beliving something.