What’s going on
I awoke in a cold sweat last night after having a nightmare. Or possibly it was after realising that I hadn’t been having a nightmare at all but that in fact everything I had been ‘experiencing’ was actually true. It had to be one or the other.
‘Alternative facts’ and ‘Fake news’ weren’t Donald Trump inventions as such – they’ve been around since the beginning of human history – but at least we can thank the current President of the United States for bringing them starkly to the attention of the world in a manner that forces us to confront their implications.
Because sometimes it takes a far-out deranged semi-madman or woman to do that. Where is David Icke when you need him?
I’ve blogged before on the irony that intelligence and rational or ‘decent’ thought don’t necessarily go hand in hand – at the time I was extemporising upon the theme that (I’m talking logically here) you would think that, the more intelligent people were – and the more they understood about the world – the more they’d come to the same conclusions.
But then you get highly intelligent people with directly opposing views (e.g. those of strong religious faith versus those who are atheists, those who fret constantly about climate change versus those who don’t believe it is even happening, and so on, ad infinitum).
So – when you get down to Labour Party grandees and left-wing activists who are convinced that the British media is hopelessly right-wing biased and/or then those others who lap up the outpourings of said ‘right-wing British media’ as being just straightforward common sense – which of them is deluded, and/or worse perhaps, deliberately or inadvertently deluding themselves?
And anyway, how deluded do you have to be to believe that everything you think, and/or every conclusion you come to, is ‘correct’ … and that – simultaneously – anyone who holds a different opinion from yours is themselves deluded whilst you are not?
Not being in the ‘intelligence elite’ myself, I’ve often taken refuge in the thought that being intelligent tends to make life more complicated and difficult because presumably – instead of just accepting things (if only someone would kindly identify for us what is ‘the actual truth’ of everything) – you keep seeing both sides of any argument and suffer from that old theme that ‘the more you learn, the more you realise how much still you don’t know …’.
Nearly thirty years ago, as an experiment, I attended a course of Church of England-run discussion evenings on the meaning of religion (if any) in which, in a semi-‘lightbulb/eureka’ moment, the underlying benefits of being thick suddenly came home to me.
How so? Well – as someone who has only ever craved a simple, straightforward, undemanding and unchallenging life – I suddenly came to the realisation that the ‘thicker’ I was, the easier life could be.
Here I was, one of a group of eight or ten earnest but complex-ridden well-to-do middle class professonals, all agonising in that gap between intellectually/rationally being unable to accept the existence of a Supreme Being and just ‘letting go’ (or as the priest hosting the course put it “taking that leap of faith”) and quite the opposite.
How much simpler and easier would life be if – irrespective of IQ – one just accepted/believed that God existed, and that everything in life was pre-determined [but within the bounds of what was intellectually-acceptable, of course, given the degree of ‘free will’ that even God would/does allow human beings to have, else how would He know whether or not they’d genuinely submitted themselves to His omnipotence?].
Or to put it another way, how much luckier is the street cleaner or tradesman or sewerage worker who just believes in God – and/or who has never even considered that there might not be one – than any individual of notionally greater intelligence, whose unerring ability to identify the problems/issues and contradictions that all these concepts and ideas bring forward for consideration causes him (or her) to spend their life unable to make their bloody mind up?
When it comes to politics, whether that be on the grand scale, in local council elections or just a group of book club members deciding which of them will hold the office of chairman for the next twelve months, how deluded does anyone have to be in order to believe that any party, statesman or candidate has all – or indeed any – of the answers? Or indeed be better at ‘carrying the burden of governing’ than any other alternative?
I could be kidding myself here, but has not the UK General Election not got suddenly three notches minimum more interesting now that the main Party manifestos have all been published?
Suddenly – instead of being a juggernaut dictator sweeping all before her on the way to a foregone conclusion of a record landslide victory – Saint Theresa seems somewhat vulnerable and … er … as ordinary, fallible and prone to gaffes as anyone else.
I’m clinging to the view that this may be a good thing, in the sense that it may make the contest all the more interesting.
There are about three weeks of campaigning to go until 8th June. It’s never over until the fat lady sings, or so they (not least the expensive, hired-in, political campaign strategists) would have you believe. Maybe they’re right – but then again, maybe I’m just deluded.
