Cynicism and the Cult of Crisis

‘I believe in the current thing’

   At her last cabinet meeting on 27th November 1990 Margaret Thatcher famously said ‘it’s a funny old world.’ Heaven knows what she would think of a world in which a few sleepy frustrated words, typed whilst chomping on one’s Wheetabix, can within minutes be seen, shared and commented on by hundreds, even thousands of strangers. I was so tired that I even mistyped, meaning that ‘Am I’ became ‘I am’, although it still reads as a question.

‘I am selfish for being angry and hurt that my Government is giving 25 million for the wages of the Ukraine army, and heaven knows how much on weapons, whilst people like me struggle to pay bills and must spend our savings on private healthcare due to NHS failure/waiting lists?’

I’m what one might call a ‘nobody’ on social media. In fact erstwhile comedian Dom Joly literally called me that in a tweet! I’m also not one of the glamorous blond commentators, darlings of the political right, whose every tweet gets hundreds of likes. Yet I could watch the likes and retweets of that ‘sleepy breakfast tweet’ click upwards with increasing speed. The final total was 4,987 likes, 1,149 retweets and 405 comments. Not a viral tweet by any means but my most popular ever and one of only a couple to ever reach nearly 5000. Of course I had to ask myself why.

    It is obviously relatively inconsequential compared with a war but that was the morning our washing machine broke, heaping another expense onto an already smothering pile. In June I must have an operation in a private hospital, self funded because of NHS failings. My situation is echoed in households across the UK. The fallout from 2 years of on/off lockdowns, an obsession with Net Zero targets and the emergence of a National Covid Health Service have descended like proverbial chickens coming home to roost. It is understandable therefore that people would be sensitive about any large Government spending. Yet there is far more to the current unease.

   For many people in our country the crisis they fear is undoubtedly not geo political but that within their own everyday lives, rising expenses and untreated health problems being the obvious ones. Of course the impact of this hardship is unevenly distributed and those who already had little fear that even that will be reduced. Ukraine Flags line the high street of my local quaint rural Buckinghamshire market town and windows are plastered with handmade yellow and blue offerings. Yet my sister in Leeds reports hardly seeing a Ukraine Flag anywhere that she goes. This is surely more a reflection of priority than a lack of compassion. It’s an oft used analogy but when you’re on a plane that gets into trouble you must put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others.

  The role of compassion fatigue must also not be overlooked. The Oxford English Dictionary describes this ‘apathy’ towards the suffering of others or charitable causes as ‘typically attributed to numbingly frequent appeals for assistance . . .’ The Merriam Webster Dictionary cites ‘overexposure to tragic news stories,’ as the cause of this clinical level of indifference. If the past two years have been anything they have surely been an ‘overexposure’ to suffering, anxiety and indeed fear in all its forms. Hardly surprising then that a certain level of numbness might creep upon many, especially those most battered by the lockdowns. It doesn’t mean they don’t care but the mind as well as the body has an instinct for self preservation.

    There is also an ever growing alienation from those who are tasked with fixing the world’s problems, the politicians and leaders. To make things even worse the alienation from those tasked with reporting on the world’s problems, the media class, has also perhaps never been greater. There was the unedifying spectacle of the daily press conferences at which not one of our ‘top journalists’ saw fit to challenge either the Covid narrative or Covid policy. Heaven forbid any of these enquiring minds should have asked for actual evidence to support the unprecedented assault on our civil liberties and policies that damaged health and economy. Even after ‘dodgy graph-gate’, the infamous projection of 4,000 deaths a day, (based on already out of date data), wheeled out by Chris Whitty to bounce us into lockdown two, the media shrugged and moved on. Less easy to move on when you lose your business, a relative to late diagnosed cancer or your child to suicide. It’s also less easy thereafter to trust both politicians and media with any new crisis narratives that require renewed personal sacrifice.

   The flags and children’s pictures supporting Ukraine that I pass daily, as well as see on so many social media profiles, echo the NHS rainbows and blue hearts of the pandemic. ‘I stand with Ukraine’ has replaced ‘Clap for the NHS’. We had our NHS heroes and now the entire population of Ukraine has become idolised in a similar way, The language of war was deployed in Covid to galvanise the public into action. Now there is an actual war that is again evoking WW2, a historical period etched into our national psyche as a time of great unity in divine purpose. We have Boris playing at being Churchill just as he’s always wanted. But he is not the stand out hero of this crisis. When I saw a journalist on a GB News discussion panel wearing a Zelenskyy t-shirt I knew we had strayed into boy band hysteria territory. But it’s more profound than that. Zelenskyy reminds me of the Old Testament ‘golden calf’, that famous bovine idol created by the Israelites. In the book of Exodus the Israelites were dissatisfied with a God they couldn’t see and craved a more tangible deity. The cult like religiosity that has seamlessly shifted from Covid to Ukraine appears to be an attempt at filling an existential void. The following tweet by US tech entrepreneur Marc Andreesen sums it up.

‘The feeling of being adrift between current things, forced to live within oneself, staring into the void. Come on, come on…’

   There is a popular meme being shared on social media that declares, ‘I believe in the current thing.’ It has become clear that a certain section of society needs to be in a cult of ‘the current thing’, which is also a cult of crisis. Emergencies give one immediate purpose and justification of one’s existence. A life that might otherwise feel trivial when examined too deeply becomes full of meaning when it is acting to fight off a threat. However, as any psychologist will tell you, living in a constant state of crisis is poison for the mind. Furthermore it’s the religious fervour with which ‘the current thing’ is being approached that should worry us all. Every religion has its heretics as well as its saints. As with Covid we see debate and dissent over the ‘accepted view’ on Ukraine being demonised. ‘Putin apologist’ has become the new ‘anti vaxer, I.e. a slur to shut down views diverging from a simplistic pure good versus pure evil narrative. It’s not enough to condemn terrible actions such as war crimes as evil. It’s whole nations, peoples or ‘sides’ who must be either sanctified or demonised. Nuance has become a trigger word.

  ‘But Putin invaded a sovereign nation!’ ‘But Covid can kill!’ One of the basic hallmarks of a cult is blinkered vision. Just as our public health policy became a ‘Covid spread limitation policy’ our international outlook is now simply ‘Help Ukraine fight Russia.’ Multitasking has been jettisoned in favour of mono focus. In 1918 US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson is purported to have said: ‘The first casualty when war comes is truth’. There is the same casualty with this mono focused cult of crisis. Reason also leaves the building. I discovered that on a Daily Telegraph comments feed when my defence of Germany not switching off all their Russian gas lead to angry replies saying I would have taken Germany’s side in WW2. Talking of Nazis, I didn’t think I would ever wake up in the UK and hear an esteemed radio broadcaster comment on the Ukraine Nazi Azov battalion by saying ‘I don’t care about their politics.’ I am sure that in any other context Julia Hartley Brewer would be horrified by her own words. However the mono focus cult has made all other concerns not only take a back seat but often be ejected altogether. We now apparently don’t care about Nazis, as long as they are on ‘our side.’ Facebook concurs and removed the ban on praising the Nazi Azov fighters as long it was in the context of their role in the war. Tunnel vision par excellence.

Cynicism and the cult of crisis have a certain alliteration, not just in sound but as they play out in life. They are part of the same repeated pattern of humanity’s reaction to threats and hardships. We must break free from this doom loop by using cynicism to temper the tendency for narrative cults. This will hopefully help us regain our compassionate common sense.