Confessional

All politics is kayfabe. I've nothing to add to the babble

The moment when I realised what this post would be about

"Kayfabe is a term used to denote theatrical spectacle dressed up as the sport of wrestling. Kayfabe is the presentation of a scripted sequence of actions as if it were spontaneous. It involves the maintenance of characters and storylines, rather than real people and naturally unfolding events and the distinction between reality and fiction is intentionally blurred.

That's the politics of these times."

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Maybe it's the end of a road for Rarely Certain. Not necessarily the road. Just a road.

The journey toward a post-ideological life seems to be nearing an end.

Many people took the same journey. We started out as committed 'progressives' with ideals of 'fairness' and clear visions of what makes a 'good' society.

Then we saw how that theoretical utopian sausage was made and we lost intellectual and moral respect for it.

We began to think, when previously we had merely gone with the flow; being products of our time, believing that we had arrived at our ever more liberal principles through a process of reflection, rather than merely having been infused with them by ambient conditions.

'This is Water' remains my personal seminal account of that dynamic.

Gradually, then all of a sudden, we found ourselves balking at the tropes of academic leftishism and its shrewd rhetoric.

[En passant, this was thanks to social media revealing so much. It's one of many reasons why I don't go along with all the claims that social media is catastrophically destructive or corrosive to the fabric of 'society'. I'm happy to know more about many types of person, thanks to the swathes of time I once spent on Twitter, becoming the kind of person I came to disdain. Life tip: when people tell you that something is terrible and dangerous it probably isn't, really]

We saw that the student politics of our youth had failed to evolve beyond starry-eyed quixotic naivety, even though the world had dramatically improved since we all first moaned about 'Capitalism' and all the other Bad Things we learned that we shouldn't like as callow youngsters.

Then we felt a strong distaste for the bullying that flows from the relentless moral calibration of every act and utterance. We saw that the proselytising leftish were identical to the religious Right that we had long held in contempt.

We saw and felt the power of memetic influence and how status-preservation lay at the heart of an anxious middlebrow managerial knowledge-working middle class, keen to signal its superiority over those uncouth ordinary people who don't like the dilution of their culture, still enjoy buying things to enhance their material wellbeing and want their views to be respected and represented in the corridors of power.

Confident that we weren't, some of us then stopped caring about whether other people thought we were racist, sexist, 'transphobic', 'islamophobic' and all the other words invented to make us conform to ideals in which we saw little real merit, let alone objective reality.

Rarely Certain did well from the early days of this tide turning. Being an early-ish adopter of a particular cultural current turns out to be good for business.

It's often a relief to discover that someone else shares your intuitions. It represents a kind of 'permission' to dissent from a status quo that has calcified through custom and practice rather than genuine reflection.

Sometimes people would write in to say 'thank you' for saying things that went against the cultural grain.

It felt like I had things to say that needed saying, then.

Then the 'vibe shift' happened and it immediately became clear that the whole process we're witnessing is just a cycle. A spectacle. A show. Kayfabe.