Begging the state to fix the symptoms of societal dysfunction is the politics of losers
A friend of mine was telling me, over dinner at White’s, about his new campaign to “tag” the cars of serial flytippers with stickers bearing the picture of a new mascot: “the Anti-Futurist Litterbug”, a garish sort of wasp holding an insidious bottle of diet pepsi, which will shame the owners of the vehicles to which it is appended. My friend was going places. He had actually persuaded a member of the cabinet, unnamed, to film himself impeding the get-aways of flytippers in a hired minivan, whereupon he would leap from the doors and accost the miscreants in their cars like that most popular figure of the road, Jeremy Vine. Provided they stuck to Plan A and filmed the whole thing in the general neighbourhood of Kew Gardens instead of Peckham, it would no doubt be pulled off without a hitch.
“That’s really lovely.” I told him “But I just don’t care about fly-tipping. Euthanasia. Music on the Tube. I just don’t care.”
“That’s because you are high status,” My friend gestured lazily, as if he’d won, by this remark, both the battle and the war.
“Yes, I am high status.”
“You are high status.”
“Yes, I am high status. I don’t know the Christian names of the Gogglebox dogs. I went to university. I don’t care about this stuff because it is beneath me.”
What makes something high-status? In an ideal world, humanity would perceive as good only things which are good by nature. This is not the case. An excellent authority on this matter is George Bataille, the French writer. Bataille described how, in the earliest human societies, anyone who accumulated more resources than the tribe would be summarily lynched by the superior numbers of the impoverished. To get around this quandary, we invented the concept of sacrifice, where part of the tribe’s wealth would be deliberately squandered in fantastic rituals designed to allay the constantly boiling mimetic envy which underlines all of human civilisation. In some societies this took the form of human sacrifice, in others it took the form of building giant pyramids; in our own society, it takes the form of something called “Human Rights Law”. The ossified forms of past sacrificial orders form a general catalogue of “the Sacred”.
Regardless, status, we shall conclude, consists of giving the appearance that one is free to squander resources possessed in such plentitude that the squandering withal is ceremonious. High status is unimpeachably good. Everyone wants to be High Status. If you call someone High Status it is like accusing him of owning a private jet in which he flies beautiful women around the world. In politics, the High Status don’t just beat the Low Status, they beat the materially powerful. Why did so many aristocrats support the French Revolution? Because being rich and powerful is one thing but supporting the redistribution of that wealth, and overthrow of that power, shows that you must have truly inexhaustible reserves of both. Let us finish this introduction with a proviso: the ultimate law of status is that the highest-status thing will always be breaking the dominant code of status and getting away with it. This is the one article in which the concept may escape its materialist roots.
Before we go further, let us make clear that campaigns, such as that brainstormed by my (former) friend, are unambiguously well-intentioned. We shall, for convenience, brand them under one heading of “lifestylism”. Lifestylism eschews projects of structural change in favour of tackling the plethora of little outrages which dog (pardon the pun) the lives of “ordinary people”. These issues are uncontroversial, easy to fix and, if all goes according to plan, the gratitude of the masses will reward those who fix these issues with power to accomplish more ambitious tasks. Any adult understands that the issue here is not with the complaints themselves — graffiti, public racket and dangerous dogs are all inimical to polite society. Everyone wants a clean, safe, orderly place to live in which it is possible to bring up children. It is because we sympathise so much with their goals, that so many of us append a gently critical note to the Lifestylists. There is a danger, as more and more people jump on the Lifestyle Politics bandwagon, of the Right-Wing becoming associated with a sort of Jackie Weaver officiousness, the “mate” of the community enforcement officer, the surveillance state and the gopro cyclist snitching on motorists.
Back to Bataille — in politics, the resource with which we play the sacrificial game is power. So we see that the problem with Lifestylism is not with the destination but the methods of getting there. When you complain about something, or try to scold others for doing it, you
put yourself in a position which is inherently coded as weak by the human subconscious. On the one hand you are making it obvious that you do not have power, on the other hand, you
are asking power to fulfill your political goals for you. The two wellsprings of political charisma, the charisma of the rebel and the charisma of the dictator, are thus closed off to you. This general aesthetic failing is compounded by a more mundane result of political calculus. Many on the Right now like to opine about the looming danger of civil war and about how they “no longer trust” the government. In that case, a wise man would be leery of associating himself with the visible symbols of that, widely hated, social order. If I were perhaps less mature, much of this article would adopt the more bestial argument that I don’t want to pay higher rail fares, or scrap useful schemes for defrauding the state, because I don’t have a lot of money.
It is hard not to compare the right-wing form of “direct action” with Palestine Action, proscribed as a terrorist group a few months ago. While indifferent to their cause, I could not help thinking, looking at photos of the activists in question, that Palestine Action is what “Weaponising Autism for Regime change” actually looks like. If you are an ambitious and moderately intelligent young person — the sort of people the right-wing correctly identifies as the losers in the social contract — which way of life seems more appealing? The people breaking into military bases to stop millions being wasted on wars nobody voted for, or the people demanding that you pay more for TFL to spend it on “see it, say it, sorted” adverts? My friend, one of the depressing breed who still refer to themselves as “zoomers” in their mid-20s, seemed almost jealous of the fact Palestine Action is led by actual young people rather than what a (different) friend calls “Mutton posing as lamb.”
To improve the lives of the vast majority, it is not only aesthetically superior but necessary to deal in Big Ideas and structural problems. The successful revival of Britain will not victimise the poorest but offer abundance to all. Until it can effectively provide that surfeit of opportunity, it should be entirely pessimistic and ally itself with anyone and anything which causes problems for the state. Things can only get better, once they have gotten worse and things will be so much better in the future that they can only get worse at present.
