If there are any positives to be intuited from the past three months of Trumpian chaos is that they appear to be at least partially inoculating the developed ROW outside America against what was becoming a pronounced populist drift.
This appears to be especially the case in Canada. Keir Starmer too seems to have been a beneficiary, recovering from what had been an appalling first six months in No10. In Germany however, the ‘extreme right’ continues to make gains, at least in terms of background opinion.
One is also led to conclude that the centrists and the otherwise sensible have come up with their own formula for fighting project fear: fabricating somewhat spurious alternative spectres with which to distract the population from their traditional favourites, like immigration.*
The basic option has been “oh no, the 1930s”, but they are starting to craft a whole menu of new-fangled anxieties which might work to take the sting out of traditional conservative fear-mongering, even if they leave everyone feeling stung one way or another.
We have seen how this is going to work in the UK recently where a prestige Netflix series had been deployed as a policy instrument by the sitting government, elevating a diversionary tactic almost up to the level of one of those ‘moral panics’ a certain type of commentator revels in flagging up.
Now, I see absolutely no reason why British school-kids should not watch Adolescence in the classroom, but the government’s apparent determination to refer to this excellent show as a ‘documentary’ reminds me of one particular ‘public information’ film we were shown in our own primary school (below), which promoted the idea that an ordinary farmyard was a place where untold opportunities existed for fairly gruesome ends.
Being in the majority city kids, born and bred, almost none of us had been anywhere near a farm at that stage of our lives, so the relevance of these determinedly grim dramatised warnings was questionable, and the statistics currently available in the UK tend not to support the notion that the country’s young white males are being turned into an army of misogynistic murderers after watching Andrew Tate videos.
Stephen Graham has stated that he was inspired to co-author Adolescence after learning of two incidents in the UK where schoolboys had stabbed schoolgirls, but in neither case had the offender apparently disappeared down the ‘red pill’ rabbit hole.
That part was almost entirely fictional, yet the Labour government appears determined to insist that this narrative reflects and represents a very real threat to the core of British society in its formative phase, and one has to wonder if they are doing this because they would perhaps rather Brits weren't fretting about any of the actual threats to social cohesion which appear almost daily in the inboxes of say, MI5 and Prevent.
Anyway, if there is indeed an underlying, ‘useful’ truth in this superb series, it is that the online world can become a place of overwhelming obsession, sucking both the perspective and restraint out of just about any kind of vulnerable mind, no matter how loved and protected they might otherwise appear to be.
And this does strike me as a useful topic for a conversation with teenagers today, and as a phenomenon with the power to distort and ultimately degenerate just about any worldview, nascent or otherwise.
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