Have you ever been to a car showroom and expressed interest in a car?
Did the salesman take you back to his desk and offer you a coffee?
And did he return with a cup of something scaldingly hot?
So you were trapped for twenty minutes, listening to his spiel, unable to escape because it would be rude to leave with your drink unfinished?
A few years ago I worked for an advertising agency and, assigned to a big car manufacturer’s account, I found myself shadowing a car salesman to learn the nuts and bolts of the motor business.
I especially enjoyed learning about the sales person’s tricks of the trade. Like where he or she seeks to befriend the potential buyer over coffee. They are specifically taught how to create a cup so hot, you will be a captive audience for as long as it takes to deliver their sales pitch. Genius.
What I absolutely loved about this was not just the sheer skulduggery (though as a deep cynic around everything capitalist, I did enjoy this) but rather the fabulous insight about Britishness. Surely no other nationality would feel so obliged to sit tight, enduring who knows what, while they wait for their drink to cool down – for fear of causing offence.
It reminded me of the wonderful passage in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur describes the true nature of Britishness by the medium of motorway services and biscuits.
Do schools still study ‘Lord of the Flies’? I hope so. Every time I look at the modern world, it seems more relevant.
William Golding’s morality tale (is that what it is?) describes how humans, in this case a shipwreck of schoolboys, separated from the civilising influence of society, descend into a brutal barbarism. It has been described as a ‘Hobbesian’ state of nature where the strongest survive and the weakest are preyed upon.
Hobbes, writing in the 17th century famously described a state of nature, meaning a state prior to social or political organisation. It’s a state of war of all against all where the life of a man was ‘solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short’
Looking around at the current state of the world, it very much seems like we’re heading in that direction.
At an individual level, trends and events are becoming commonplace, which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago – or so it seems to me, from my, admittedly rather privileged middle class, first world vantage point.
How can there be such a thing as white supremacism? People literally living their lives and writing down their opinion that white people are better than black people. How is that even possible?
Toxic masculinity – what on earth is that about? I read the accounts of women trying to do their jobs as journalists and being trolled by online thugs. Who on earth believes this is an acceptable way to behave? Yet they have thousands of followers on Twitter and they inspire support, retweets, likes and all the rest. People like Jordan B Peterson have legions of followers. And the whole grizzly spectre of Donald Trump – where to start?
The so-called ‘War on woke’ – how can someone be actively anti-woke, when the very idea of what they call woke is simply about avoiding offence to others – perhaps to a fault?
Social media seems to fuel the very worst in hate-speech and vitriol (though, to be fair there are also some nice landscapes, how-to videos and cute baby animals).
It’s all very grim.
Unfortunately our leaders have set the worst possible example.
There are wars in Europe and in the Middle East. Noticeably these are driven or fuelled by leaders who are by any standards, pretty despotic.
Politics has become characterised by a machiavellian backstabbing and blame. Truth or honesty have become an irrelevance.
Populist leaders are openly undermining democratic systems.
Even the UK government, once bastions of best practice are openly flouting international law when it seems convenient.
I’m particularly interested in the demise of the ‘good chap’ school of British government. The “good chaps” theory was coined by political historian Peter Hennessy, and describes how people in positions of power will abide by an understanding of good behaviour in public life — rather than needing clear rules to police them. It’s a peculiarly British thing, wouldn’t you agree?
A recent report by ACOBA (The UK government’sAdvisory Committee on Business Appointments – they supposedly set the rules for parliamentarians’ outside interests) pointed the finger for its demise clearly at Boris Johnson and his Conservative administration.
ACOBA Chair Eric Pickles — a former Conservative Cabinet minister — said Johnson’s own behaviour “marked an illustration of how out of date the government’s rules were” – “they had been designed to offer guidance when ‘good chaps’ could be relied on to observe the letter and the spirit of the rules,” Pickles added. “If it ever existed, that time has long passed and the contemporary world has outgrown the rules.”
In the 1980s and 90s there was much written about the demise of traditional institutions – the diminishing influence, currency and relevance of the Church, marriage, The BBC, the Monarchy and even Parliament. In the noughties, we talked of how the Internet was heralding a shift “from the age of deference to a new age of reference”. This was going to usher in a more egalitarian world, where the little people had influence, where we could all have our fifteen minutes of fame and the world would become a better place. Sadly, it has brought us a world of ever greater inequality, where the bullies are unchecked in the playground.
It’s survival of the fittest. Three centuries apart, Hobbes and Golding both saw it in their different ways. But it was meant to be a parable. It wasn’t meant to be a documentary.
The Aspidistra 