Getting the Fear

In which The Author can see the fnords

Yesterday’s Daily Express (a mid-market UK tabloid ‘news’paper) had the banner headline NEW FEARS OVER UK BABY BOOM.

I happen to know this because the Ancient Mariner (one of Aberdare Library’s cast of unfunny comedy characters) was engrossed in it when I walked in. Unlike me, who reads the paper on his lap (or on the desk), he holds it up in front of him to parade his prejudices to all comers. He’s clearly one of those people who likes to hide behind his daily diet of health scares and racism, rather than face the Real World head-on.

I don’t know the full details, but given that rag’s editorial ideology, it’s almost certain that the baby boom in question isn’t being caused by native-born, English-speaking, white, middle-class Anglicans.

[A digression: There’s a very good reason why I don’t know the full details. I wouldn’t touch the Express, or its nearest rival the Daily Mail, unless I was wearing full biohazard kit. I find their poisonous outpourings to be dangerous enough at thirty yards. I won’t even go near their websites. I know I’m running Linux, but those are two viruses which I don’t want anywhere near my computer.]

Therefore, I could be entirely wrong about the content behind yesterday’s screamer.

I doubt it, though.

In fact, thinking about it again last night, I couldn’t remember the last time the Express or the Mail ran a front page which didn’t include the word ‘fear’. (In the former case, it was probably a headline about Diana, Princess of Wales.)

Four days out of seven, the cause of general panic in Northcliffe House and the Northern & Shell Building will be a deadly disease or other medical condition: cancer, HIV/Aids, diabetes, obesity, Ebola, or (the current front-runner) the Zika virus.

The last time Mother mentioned something she’d ‘read in the paper’ about anti-depressants, I had to interrupt her mid-sentence.

‘What ‘paper’ was that, then?’ I asked. ‘Was it in Nature, PLoS, The Lancet, the BMJ, or JAMA? Or that world-renowned, peer-reviewed scientific journal The Mail on Sunday?’

Call me cynical, but I’ve only ever met two journalists with degrees in science. Neither of them work in what used to be called Fleet Street.

If there’s not a naturally occurring threat presently facing the UK population, there are plenty of man-made ways to make Middle England shit its collective pants: pollution, climate change, GM food, nuclear meltdown, same-sex marriage, designer babies, computer terrorism, the oil running out, suicide bombings …

Alok Jha, the former Guardian science correspondent who’s now with ITV, has written a book called 50 Ways the World Could End (Quercus, 2014). It should provide Hugh Whittow and Paul Dacre with enough front page horror stories to last the rest of my lifetime: solar flares, strangelets, black holes, information decay, DNA degradation, asteroid strikes, ice age, pole shift, nanobots, the Artificial Intelligence takeover … (See ‘It’s Not the End of the World‘ for a wry look at the last apocalypse we were looking forward to.)

The runaway 2016 Top of the Poops (not a typo), and every saloon bar philosopher’s current obsession, is the movement of refugees from civil or cross-border conflicts. We in the ‘civilised’ West are directly or indirectly responsible for starting probably two-thirds of these, remember. (Directly through our membership of NATO, and/or our slavish devotion to US foreign policy since the 1950s. Indirectly, as a legacy of our imperial ambitions, or our belief that we had the right to impose arbitrary boundaries on nomadic peoples after the end of the Great War.)

We’re constantly being told that these poor displaced buggers will ‘engulf’ us, and that we’ll become a minority in ‘our own country’. (Always assuming they haven’t blown us all up first, of course.) That’s the message which pumps out of our televisions and radio sets, and gets splashed over column acres of newsprint every month.

Is it any wonder that, according to a substantial proportion of people in Aberdare, anyone with a non-white face must be either an ‘asylum seeker’ or a ‘potential terrorist’ (or both). That’s the received wisdom of just about every ‘Red Tory’ (i.e. right-wing Labour voter) in the Cynon Valley these days, in fact.

What must they must make of Fatima in my local chippy? She wears a hijab, but looks and sounds eastern European. It must be cognitive dissonance a-go-go for the knuckle-draggers of Trecynon. Maybe they just go for a curry or a kebab instead. After all, it’s obvious they’re not local, isn’t it?

It’s hardly surprising they believe this. Most of them lack the basic skills required to read a quality newspaper like The Times, the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian – all of which are available in the reference library debating chamber in Aberdare six days a week – or even i. This handy little paper costs justs 40p a day, and offers much better value than the comics it rubs shoulders with in my local Spar. The crossword isn’t too bad, either.

Instead they fall back on the mid-market tabloids (not too many long words or much in the way of informed analysis), or slide even further back down the Reading Tree to The Sun and the Daily Star. Failing that, they just parrot the rolling headlines on BBC News when they’re pontificating in the pub.

A recent opinion poll found that only 16% of UK voters thought they knew enough about the debate to be able to make a choice in June’s In/Out EU referendum. They’re obviously not getting much in the way of information from the media then, are they? Yet this is arguably the single biggest issue facing our country today.

Instead, pretty much all they read or hear are variants on ‘asylum’, ‘refugees’, ‘migrants’, ‘crisis’, ‘swamping’, and other provocative language designed to appeal to the Little Englander mentality of Nigel Farage and his pals.

In Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s cult SF Illuminatus! trilogy, they explain one of the ways in which the secret rulers of the world keep the population in a constant state of low-level anxiety. It’s an extension of the theory explored by Vance Packard in his controversial examination of the advertising industry The Hidden Persuaders. Mr Packard claimed to know the secrets of ‘subliminal messages’ which were concealed in ads (mainly in the cinema) to boost sales of certain products.

Although his work has been roundly criticised since, the two Roberts picked his idea up and ran with it for quite some distance.

In Illuminatus!, the fantasy goes (roughly) like this:

At a very early age, schoolkids are shown the word fnord on the board.

At the same time, their teachers tell them, ‘Don’t see the fnord. If you can’t see it, it won’t eat you.’

Naturally, all newspapers, books, television programmes, advertisements, billboards, radio broadcasts – just about every work in every medium – include the word fnord. Although the grown adults can’t consciously see it because of their early conditioning, their mind still triggers those childhood fears of being eaten by the fnord. Their systems are therefore in a low ‘activation state’ (as the behaviourists called it), and their brains are more amenable to reprogramming.

When the anarchist crew of the Leif Erikson rescue New York cop Saul Goodman from his kidnappers, they set about breaking down his mental conditioning. They know they’ve succeeded when Saul looks up from his newspaper and says happily, ‘I can see the fnords!’

I know it’s SF, and I know it’s a satire, but in essence that’s the sort of thing the papers and broadcasters are doing every day. The papers I’ve singled out surround their particular brand of fascism with populist articles about soap operas, actors and pop singers, and other ‘celebrities’ which largely appeal to a female readership. This guarantees that they make their way into respectable households across the country, and the ideas spread by stealth instead of by overt means. It’s hard to imagine any terrorist group managing to get that sort of ad-supported mass exposure, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

Northern & Shell (the owners of the Express and Star, plus their Sunday counterparts, seem to have a particular relationship with Lidl, the German supermarket chain. They sell a limited range of papers and magazines at the checkout; a cursory glance suggests that most of them are published by N&S. I’ll have to make a note of them all one day, when it’s quiet enough that I’m not blocking the aisle, and then look them up in Willings Press Guide to see who the proprietors are.

I’ve certainly never seen a copy of The Guardian or i on sale in Lidl in Aberdare. Maybe they fly off the shelves first thing in the morning, before I have a chance to get there. I don’t know.

But it means that the customers get to choose from a very limited palette of opinion and ideology. They probably aren’t even aware that this narrowcasting is taking place. Less than fifty metres up the road, the old Gadlys Co-op sells the whole range of daily papers. The Pakistani family who run it have had the business for years. But the people behind the checkouts in Lidl are white and British (except Mei, who’s Chinese, and a young Irish lad who recently started there). The people of the Gadlys and Trecynon can get their daily dose of ideology from someone who looks vaguely similar to them. So that’s all right then, isn’t it?

Instead of embracing the global village, as I’ve been doing since before I was consciously aware of it, it seems that the inhabitants of Little Britain (which is even less funny than the BBC’s alleged comedy show of the same title) have retreated into one corner of their wattle-and-daub hut.

Cowering in the darkness, they tell each other stories about the strange people outside the hut. Most of these have been handed down through the generations, or passed on by Chinese Whispers. Very few of the inhabitants have ever been outside the hut, except in organised hunting parties or during raids on neighbouring huts.

A tiny handful have ever spent long enough outside the hut to meet someone who didn’t speak the same language, or who didn’t believe in the same folktales, or who didn’t know the same tribal songs. They keep their experiences to themselves, because they’ll be called ‘mad’, or ‘possessed’, or thrown out of the hut entirely.

And someone, long ago, once met somebody from outside the hut who was so totally fucking amazing that they decided to get married and start a family. Nobody from the hut ever spoke to them again.

Cautionary tales, you know.

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1993) defines terrorism thus:

Terrorist principles and practices; the systematic employment of violence and intimidation to coerce a government or community, esp. into acceding to specific political demands; the fact of terrorizing or being terrorized.

Maybe it’s not terrorism we should be worried about, but Fearism. I’ll have a stab at defining it here:

Fearist principles and practices; the systematic and low-key indoctrination of a population into following a pernicious and hate-filled ideology; the control of mass news media by governments in order to perpetuate their ideology; the fact of fearizing or being fearized.

Don’t have nightmares.

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The Revolution of Lowered Expectations

In which The Author discovers another security leak from the future

A few weeks ago I came across Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, in the 1998 Orbit paperback edition. It was in Barbara’s proto-Black Hole of second-hand books opposite Aberdare Bus Station. I call it a proto-Black Hole because if it gathers much more mass, it’s likely to collapse under its own gravitational field. In fact, the incipient Singularity event might explain why all the buses leaving Aberdare have started running late over the past couple of months. It’s totally in accordance with Einstein’s predictions.

I first read the trilogy some years ago, having borrowed it from Dino. I was glad that I’d previously read the Illuminatus! books, as well as Cosmic Trigger and some of Dr Wilson’s other books, as I wouldn’t have known what the fuck to make of it otherwise. Vicki F. was a big fan as well, as it turned out. As a result, his prose style and crazy humour became a big influence on Dodge This, the bizarre online Western-by-Committee which was a long-running of Aberdare Online back in the day.

I started re-reading it the night before last, and finished the first chunk of it yesterday. For a book originally published in 1979, it seems remarkably prescient in parts. I was especially struck by the idea of the Revolution of Lowered Expectations.

The whole neurosociology of the twentieth century could be understood as a function of two variables—the upward-rising curve of the Revolution of Rising Expectations, and the downward-plunging trajectory of the Revolution of Lowered Expectations.

The Revolution of Rising Expectations, which had drawn more and more people into its Up-thrust during the first half of the century, had led many to believe that poverty and starvation and disease were all being phased out by advances in pure and applied science, growing stockpiles of surplus food in the advanced nations, accelerated medical progress, the spread of literacy and electronics, and the mounting sense that people had a right to demand a decent life for themselves and their children.

The Revolution of Lowered Expectations was based on the idea that there wasn’t enough energy to provide for the rising expectations of the masses. Year after year the message was broadcast: There Isn’t Enough. The masses were taught that Terra is a closed system, that entropy was increasing, that life was a losing proposition all round, and that majority were doomed to poverty, starvation, disease, misery and stupidity.

I read that passage again last night, and it struck me that these words, written 35 years ago, could have been written yesterday. In fact, they (or something pretty similar) could equally well have been written yesterday, by Mail on Sunday op-ed columnists and Conservative Party speech-writers.

About a week ago, I heard a brief report on the BBC Radio 4 news about a fire at a coal-fired power station somewhere in England. Production had been shut down while the blaze was tackled. Two other power stations were already offline at the time, and an ‘expert’ told the BBC that a sudden cold snap this winter would put the entire generating network under severe strain.

Now, read between the lines: what the expert was really telling us was that the UK needed to press ahead with fracking, to alleviate the danger of the lights going out.

Meanwhile, the Ebola virus is raging through West Africa, leaving thousands dead and causing major transport hubs to introduce screening measures on people travelling from that part of the world. Luckily for us in the prosperous West, the likely victims are colour-coded (as Kurt Vonnegut would have put it) and easy to identify. Naturally, the far-right have already seized on this as the perfect excuse to ‘pull up the drawbridge’ to this set of islands.

The repercussions of the banking crisis of 2008, and the shortage of housing in our major cities, has made home ownership an impossible dream for a lot the young people I know. Even when they come out of university, qualified to enter the world of work, many will find themselves in low-paid menial jobs, or on zero-hour contracts, unable to plan further ahead than a couple of weeks. Similarly, for most of my friends, the middle-England obsession of ‘saving for a pension’ ranks up there with ‘playing for Wales’ and ‘walking on the Moon.’

The first part of Dr Wilson’s satire of human foibles ends with a global nuclear war. Only a handful of survivors go on to rebuild human civilisation, which in due course goes the same way as its predecessor. Meanwhile, the majority of animals on this planet – the insects – carry on going, untouched by the catastrophe going on around them.

I thought I’d share the idea of the Revolution of Lowered Expectations with you, because it’s the future nearly all of us can look forward to. I say ‘nearly all’, because there’s a small minority who will continue to grow rich by exploiting the planet and its people. I don’t foresee a sudden lurch to the Left, either, in spite of the growth of the Green movement and the Occupy movement. If anything, this country is more likely to lurch to the Right over the next few years. We’re already seeing the formative stages of the scenario which led to the rise of the Third Reich, eighty years ago. The Sheeple, rendered brain-dead by football, soaps, the lottery, and celebrity bullshit, will walk quite placidly into the abattoir.

Enjoy it while it lasts.