Higher Ground

On Twitter last week, following the death of the Queen, Jeremy Clarkson wrote “One of the things I’ve noticed in these last few hours is that so very many people on Twitter are truly awful human beings.” Shortly afterwards he followed this with “Twitter is a handy and constant reminder that socialists are disgusting people.” As most of you will be aware I have been permanently suspended from that platform for expressing opinions and airing quips which did not go down well with the righteous minds of the brave new world.

It has long been known that left-wingers, who get to set the agenda, tend to be more highly educated than right-wingers, who merely win the spoils. In a typically lazy, left-wing manner, education is equated to intelligence, whilst success, often earned by sheer hard work, is seen as somehow linked to being less well intellectually equipped. And it is true that many wealthy winners in life practically gloat about their lack of education not holding them back.

Clarkson himself reminds school leavers annually that he was not a high achiever. This year it took the form of a tweet from a luxury yacht: “Don’t worry if your A level results are disappointing. I got a C and 2 Us and I’m currently holidaying on this boat.” And in this example pithily puts down the notion that education is the pinnacle of human achievement; you can’t feed your family with degrees and diplomas.

Educational success, in many ways, is just a measure of how readily one is able to absorb a particular narrative and follow it to a conclusion, regardless of its value outside the classroom. Whereas your normal, everyday entrepreneur tends to get easily bored and forever seek new ideas to exploit. A lesson not quickly grasped may benefit from greater application and more diligent studying, but may also be not worth learning in the end.

Perhaps this is why academics, in the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge can also be susceptible to inhaling the heady vapours of ideology; in the past religious, in the present political. And while the duffers, the also-rans in the A* stakes, are busy taking any job that pays the rent, their learned contemporaries pursue avenues which lead to long decades in disciplines of little real value to the world.

Once, universities thrived on offering valuable sciences and engineering, medicine and management, but in recent decades the humanities have become the academic vehicles of choice for those who probably ought never to have gone on to higher education. This recent Spectator article suggests it might be time to turn the tide. 

For my part I have seen the declaration time and time again that those on the left are more intelligent than those on the right. But this claim, it seems to me, relies on a particular definition of intelligence and one characterised by an occasional inability to be mentally agile, to think outside the box, to adapt and thrive. Instead it relies on the dogmatic clinging to tired old tropes, reinforcing groupthink and trotting out long-established arguments.

Much like religion, if you need an origin story and enforcers, with scholars forever justifying the improbable; if you need to keep on developing your themes and reminding people of why they joined your movement; if you need threats of excommunication – or as we now call it ‘de-platforming’ – maybe this is less a sign of intelligence than indoctrination.

Meanwhile those you despise, those lower orders of the right, own the houses you rent, the businesses you work for, and run the country you so regularly disparage. They get up in the morning and go to productive work to create the world you live in. The left may think they occupy the intellectual high ground. The right are happy to let them believe that. Does ‘educated’ really mean ‘intelligent’ in this universe?

Chill Pill

Are you a Useful Idiot? Are you unwittingly doing the bidding of an unseen master, banging the drum and flying the banner for an ideology that despises you even while it uses you as a foot soldier? For that matter, am I a useful idiot also? Am I swallowing a sinister, worldwide Zionist plot to rid the planet of islam by deliberately and cynically sacrificing thousands of its own innocent civilians in order to incite people to unite against Hamas while claiming to be the victim? Are they playing me? Then well played, I say… well fucking played.

It may be possible that, Matrix-like, the world I experience is just the world that some sinister conspiracy wants me to see but you know what, I’m more than happy with that; it’s a world that works for me. Why would I want to take the red pill and wake from the dream? Why would I want to even know about the pills at all if, as the likes of Owen Jones and Co like to insist, reality is that a cold hard puppet-master is twisting my mind to despise the little people? In the world of my experience most people – and I include myself - are enormous bell-ends anyway.

But wait. If those on the left, as they constantly tell us, believe the world is in the thrall of a massive capitalist conspiracy to enslave the masses to corporate ends, why do many not on the left see socialism as a massive plot to subjugate and enslave the masses to statist ends? Surely, if I was bound to the Matrix, I would see neither argument. And if I was in thrall to the Zionist master plan, why would I take a middle view that would happily see both sides expunged from existence… anything for a bit of peace and quiet?

Or is this all a clever – too clever by half – double bluff, whereby William of Ockham was induced, almost seven centuries ago, to develop a hypothesis of simplicity simply to persuade me, little old me, here today, that the more complicated things look, the less likely that explanation may be? In this way I can scoff at Owen’s People’s Assembly and their fervent belief in foul intent and dastardly doings, while remaining blinded by my partisan prejudices to the complexity of the other argument; believing instead that shit happens and it’s every man for himself. If that is how the supposed right-wing controls the affairs of man it is sheer genius.

Think about it – I do – to adopt a leftist stance I need to believe first of all that a species capable of the gross stupidity, recklessness and tribal loyalty that causes millions to be senselessly exterminated is also capable of a system of benign public stewardship of the planet’s resources. That such a system can fairly distribute to each according to his needs without favour or prejudice. If I believed THAT maybe I could also be persuaded to believe that the nasty people who make things and grow food and build factories and hospitals and schools and houses are all engaged in a bid to herd the rest of humanity into cruel servitude.

To me, that way of thinking is way too complicated and takes up far too much processing power that could be used for getting on with your life, but it turns out that there may be a natural explanation for socialism after all. There appear to be evolutionary origins for the morals we adopt and we may in fact be powerless after all; not to resist some big plot to gain our endorsement but powerless to engage in thinking beyond our biological imperatives. Left or right, it seems, we are at least partly victims of our genes. Given that nature tends towards greater efficiency it looks very much like those on the left are just not as highly evolved as the rest of us.

Right or Wrong?

We’ve been here before – the old left-wing/right-wing conundrum. The origins of the terminology go back to the French Revolution apparently, but whatever they originally meant the shorthand is now generally perceived to mean this:

Left Wing

Caring, sharing, ‘progressive’, happy people of light and love and happiness bringing you a better world and yes it might cost a bit but you can’t put a price on equality, can you?

Right Wing

Vicious, cruel, privileged establishment bully boys, craving only power and control over the poor people they see as nothing more than labour and war fodder.

Put that way it all seems so easy, but surely everybody knows it’s far more complicated than that? How about the work ethic of the right mixed with the morals of the left? We’re all intelligent enough to be able to find a combination that works, aren’t we? And why does it matter what labels politicians want to put on things anyway?

It matters because that simple divide is what Labour is relying on in the absence of any credible, costed policies or frankly, the first hint of the beginnings of the genesis of a single, solitary economic clue. The seesaw of the next election will teeter-totter between a simple choice of left or right. And lest you naïvely believe the electorate to be cleverer, or somehow more sophisticated than they have proved themselves over and over again to actually be, consider that even in the height of our resurgence as a modern, functioning nation, it wasn’t on policy that the Conservatives lost; that nice Mr Blair just smiled and said, "Be excellent to each other and party on, dudes!". And we all know how that ended.

So forget about the incisive commentary of experienced political thinkers like Douglas Carswell or Dan Hodges. The average voter doesn’t read analysis, doesn’t watch The Daily Politics or Newsnight; the average ‘customer’ will cast his vote depending on how he is told to feel, not on what he thinks. Which is why Labour’s frankly disgraceful attempt to once again fall back on blaming “Fatchaa!” will resonate with left-wing voters, even those who weren’t even born when she left power.

To my way of thinking, the simpler it is to tell a story, the greater its veracity and I’ve always marvelled at the left’s propensity to construct complex narratives based on deep and interwoven historical conspiracies and pseudo-intellectual fictions of human nature, instead of just telling it straight. Maybe the right are just far too busy working to have the appetite for the bullshit.

To help I hereby present my handy, cut-out-and-keep guide to the two main sides in this battle for the hearts and minds (votes) of the British people.

Left: It’s all about fairness. How can it be right that some people earn so much more than others and can buy nicer things? And then 'they' want to pass those things onto their own families. We will pursue ways to prevent that happening by taking from the rich and not so rich to give to the poor and not so poor. That’s fair.

Right: The harder and smarter you work, the more you get.

Left: Everybody is different, but everybody is also equal. But don’t worry because we have drawn up a comprehensive scale of privilege depending on your race, colour, creeds, proclivities and gender self-identification and by plotting your position on this crystal-clear chart we can find your intersectionality quotient and compensate you appropriately for your birth-bestowed life chances, thus achieving equal outcomes, going forward...

Right: Everybody is different. Get used to it.

Left: No child must be left behind, so to be certain we do not inadvertently advance those born with inherent academic abilities, from households that care about such things, we must make sure that everybody is educated at a pace that suits the slowest and divert the bulk of resources to those least able to benefit from them. This way, all school leavers will finish their time in education at the same level.

Right: Stream them, keep order and stop spending so much money on the thick kids.

Left: We must define Human Rights. To that end we will devote billions of pounds of resources to fund hundreds of studies, recruit thousands of lawyers and create from scratch an entire industry devoted to arguing over this fundamental concept. In the process we will invert the usual criminal/victim relationship and create daily headlines of outrage as we remind the public of the good work we are doing on their behalf.

Right: Play nice, or else.

Left: Democracy is too difficult and too subtle to be left to the proletariat who, after all, don’t really know as we do, what is right for them. To ensure correct voting outcomes we will pursue an aggressive policy of border adjustments and import as many new voters as possible, whether or not they can directly benefit our economy. The right, after all, must have their evil noses rubbed in diversity. This will, of course, cost billions and people will feel disenfranchised but we think it’s a small cost to create the appearance of effective suffrage.

Right: Quite correct. Democracy is too difficult to be left to the people. But at least we’ll try and let you keep most of what you earn.

The political contortions the left seem to thrive on all seem so bloody exhausting. One minute we’re all equal, the next some are more equal than others and despite the daily evidence of your own ears and eyes, you have to keep telling your mind that success is failure and failure is achievement and up is down and the next minute you’re apologising to the world for something you didn’t do. We, the sheeple, are always going to lose, so as a simple soul, I’d far rather be beaten with a stick I can actually see.