I’m a thundering pub bore. I love sitting in my local, spouting off, pontificating, sometimes arguing.
Recently I popped in ‘for a couple’ and had considerably more, during an enjoyable chat with a chap I’d occasionally spoken to, but not hitherto in any depth.
It started with discussing ‘woke’. He’d overheard me talking to the landlady’s boyfriend and chipped in with a 32-year old gay man’s perspective. That’s the joy of the early-evening chats there, the place is not so busy as to stop people just dipping in and out of conversation, without it seeming rude or intrusive. That’s the pleasure of a good pub, in fact – which is why today’s news that the number of pubs in England and Wales has dropped below 40,000 for the first time is such a tragedy.
He was circumspect about younger LGBT activists, well-aware that many had neither the experience nor maturity to be so categorical. He also disliked their need to polarise what were (the term he frequently used) ‘grey areas’. However, he felt obliged to be pretty tolerant of their activism, since he’d faced all sorts of issues himself as a Catholic growing up in Ireland.
We got onto whether – and when – someone of my (or even his) age should shut up and let things go – however easy it seems to refute the absurdities one sees. Shouldn’t one, at some level, always accept that a younger generation will do and see things differently?
He was vaguely on the Left, but entirely reasonable in discussion – not a hint of any demonising for those with other views. He was especially good on how this is the default mode encouraged by social media. We both wondered how likely was it that such pub conversations could occur with people 10 years younger than him, let alone with those now in their teens, when they got older?
I’m very unsure there’s any justification for a ‘quietist’ approach to obvious nonsense, other than for loved ones we spend a huge amount of time with, and who don’t represent those ‘other’ views, however often one disagrees with them.
For the rest, it’s not really to do with how socially appropriate it is to be ‘at war’ with this prevailing orthodoxy. We all refrain from constantly discussing things, based on the situation and how obsessive or annoying you want to appear!
I’m more intrigued with the oft-repeated claim that the woke are ‘on the right side of history’ and reactionaries like me are incapable of seeing this – Schopenhauer’s famous observation that “everyone mistakes the limits of their own understanding for the limits of the world’s”.
When should any individual just give up and accept what his or her reasoning, in terms of logical argument, concludes is wrong?
My inclination is to say ‘never’ – or there’s no point in thinking, full stop. We’re back with poor Winston Smith being tortured by O’Brien, screaming that his obstinate insistence on the freedom to say “two plus two equals four” is mere arrogance, easily crushed by historical forces.
I certainly remember how, studying Quantum Mechanics for my degree and doctorate, I’d just have to accept things which seemed impossible to understand conventionally. It’s famously an area where anti-intuitive reasoning is required – perhaps ‘acceptance’ is the better word.
But that’s physics, where one has total faith in the intellectual integrity – and the eventual empirical testing and possible disproving – of theories. The problem is that for socially constructed ‘theories’ (of which woke ‘critical theories’ are exemplars) there is frequently a refusal to accept any empirical evidence, let alone the exposure of such ‘theories’ to falsification. In truth, these aren’t theories at all, but personal beliefs and prejudices, elevated through force and bullying into demands on others.
Surely the point is that only free discussion can deal with this – and no one should keep quiet, just because he or she is scared to speak out or is told to shut up for some greater good, to ‘be on the right side of history’.
Paul Sutton can be found on Substack. He is the author of two collections of poetry.
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The very idea that historical laws of nature would exists which would cause history to progress from a state of wrongness to a state of rigtness with several decreasingly wrong and increasingly right intermediate steps is one the the Marxist core beliefs (or theories), ie, it’s the abstract idea behind historical materialism. The proponents of present-day progressive (another abstraction of a Marxist concept) ideologies are either identical to the student marxists of the so-called counterculture of the last century or directly influenced by them. They’ve always been on the right side of history since 1968. Just what precisely constitutes this right side keeps changing with the times.
The person who used to post here as MTF had a few amusing laspes in this respect, where he involuntarily revealed that what we believe to be a recent woke phenomenon was, in fact, already a topic of hot campus discussions in the 1970s, just at a much smaller scale. This stuff is so ancient it’ll hopefully end up on the right side of history, namely, dead and buried, soon.
Young snowflakes that want to ban other people’s speech are completely unprepared to face someone who will just not pay attention to them.
For the most part they withdraw and disengage from those they disagree with. Which is absolutely fine. They have absolutely no stamina to engage in a confrontation of any kind.
So there is literally nothing to stop any of us continuing using whatever language we want except the mental prison we chose to put ourselves in.
I don’t pay any attention to anyone who tries to regulate my speech and to be perfectly honest I rarely encounter anyone who tries to.
The whole thing is an overblown distraction for the vast majority of us.
I agree with the sentiments in this piece but we are hampered by two things.
First, the opposition shouts loudly, they seem to have unlimited time off from their paid jobs and the media reflects all they say as fact and without contrary opinion.
Second, those in public life we should be able to look to to back up our bar room argument are nowhere to be seen or heard. Nothing. One can either believe that is becai=use they a=gree with all the left wing wokeryt (probable in my view), they can’t be bothered (very possible) or they have not bothered to find out what is going on or too dumb to understand (also possible despite articles like this explaining it).
In short, it is a difficult task to restrain let alone reverse what has happened. Most of my friends just give up and hope they are not the ones the wokeists will come for next.
I can honestly state that I am committed to a wholly anti-woke, awkward bastard agenda.
(It’s nothing new for me, I’ve always followed this route).
So, you’re not down with this then?
It would be reasonable to conclude that the people in that picture are complete f**kin idiots and as they are doubtless fully perforated deserve what they’ve got coming.
I’ve been reading and listening a lot to Mattias Desmet’s theories about “mass formation” and the idea that essentially the response to the coronavirus has been one huge mass hypnosis event.
Desmet describes how, in a particular population, four conditions have to be met before the population is vulnerable to a mass formation or hypnosis:
Desmet says that when these conditions are satisfied, and a narrative comes along which provides a specific object to fear (like the virus in this instance) and some specific actions people can take to tackle the feared object (like lockdowns, masks, vaccines, quarantining your shopping in the garage, banging pots and pans on a Thursday), this liberates the people from their free-floating anxiety and frustration (they now have an object to focus their frustration and anxiety towards). It also gives people’s lives meaning, and also social bonds, a sense of community (they now belong to the COVIDians, who are all “in it together”.
This gives people new-found security, purpose and, strangely, happiness.
For people who were so anxious before, this is a heady concoction of feelings and they don’t want to lose them and return to their previous, psychologically painful, anxious, lonely state. So they cling on to the narrative and the absurd rituals and their COVIDian chums and are radically opposed to anyone who tries to question them (like “anti-vaxers” or “lockdown sceptics”) who threaten to wake them up from their lovely trance.
Anyway, that was all in preparation for the point related to this article, which is that, if you are a totalitarian and you want to hypnotise your population to make them more controllable, the first thing you would do is to weaken the social bonds between people. How would you do that? By stopping people getting together and communicating. Where do people get together and communicate? In pubs and churches. What did the government shut down? Pubs and churches.
What else did the government persist with, even though the science didn’t justify it? Masks, social distancing, and lockdowns. All having the effect of loosening the social bonds between people.
If the government wanted to set up the perfect conditions to weaken the population and make them more vulnerable to propaganda, control and mass hypnosis, they’d do exactly what they have done to “control the virus”.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
See here for more:
https://thehighwire.com/videos/mattias-desmet-the-psychology-of-totalitarianism/
I am familiar with Desmet’s work on mass formation and you have summarised it very well, however none of the NPI’s worked on me and in fact just made me more and more angry. Obviously I am not the only one but why did I and others see through this more or less immediately?
Aa an example I was wearing a “Bollox to Lockdown” t shirt by April 2020, much to my family’s disgust.
I knew immediately why pubs were being forced to close and for the reasons you mention. I saw through the government propoganda straight away. What baffles me is why I got angry, as did all on here, and the majority simply bought and swallowed the whole bloody lot, including 90% of my whole extended family. Baffled.
Yes, likewise, I looked back in my email and my first lockdown sceptic went to my MP on April 30th 2020.
Desmet says it’s hard to identify why some people never fell under the spell – level of education, occupation, gender, none of those things are a sound predictor. Highly educated people have fallen under the spell while many sceptics are manual workers. In my case I gave up on mainstream television about 4 years ago and had been sceptical about most media content since before Brexit. I also am not on facebook, quit WhatsApp and only recently joined Twitter so I’m probably not exposed to a lot of the propaganda in the first place.
Being numerate and therefore able to see through the statistics the government has been using as justification for all their NPIs also helped.
Desmet says that you see a very similar pattern every time this kind of totalitarianism happens – 30% are fanatical supporters, 30% don’t fall for it and try to oppose it, and the people in the middle just go along with it for a quiet life.
Wrt the sad loss of pubs, I agree, but all is not bleak. Many new like outlets are opeing – the Micropub movement has opened many new small establishments, serving good beer and where discussion is encouraged. (The old village locals are under pressure, often large premises with high overheads. Need a solution for this)
There are more pubs than schools (32,000). Many more than hospitals (1200).
Having said that, there are now fewer pubs than churches (40,000) and we know Christian religion isn’t exactly booming in the UK. Although I suspect the pubs that remain are mostly fully functioning and doing well whereas most of the churches are pretty desolate.
I agree, I think we’re not quite seeing the end of pub life just yet. Perhaps more like a bit of creative destruction.