How to Crack an Egg
A thing which cannot withstand laughter is not a good thing.
Rather than deepen the malaise that is Great Britain by joining the ranks of bores ‘doing Dry January,’ I’ve decided to embrace other, more demented aspects of modern culture.
My new year’s resolution, reader, is to manifest everything my heart so desires.
I’ve bought a copy of The Secret, a hemp sack bursting triumphantly with magic shiny rocks, some incense, a pack of tarot cards, and a reiki attunement.
The Secret is a magical book that promises to gift me everything I so wish. All I have to do is ask The Universe nicely.
It’s very modern too. This book comes with an immutable loophole. If you, one of the thirty million people who’ve bought this book, don’t get everything you desire, it doesn’t mean you’ve been bilked into believing stuff that would embarrass a paleolithic teenager, it means you didn’t want it enough. Remarkable, isn’t it? By the way, reader, which is the best way to crack an egg—from the bottom or from the top?
I discovered this magical tome whilst browsing Facebook. The Secret is popular with that cadre of folks who believe in the magic of essential oils, tarot cards, crystal healing, and the like.
Apparently, my chakras are misaligned. And my energies are rather negative. Curiously, the mystagogue selling this schlock says my wallet is begging The Universe to relieve it of the burden of money.
(Though, there is something to say about the magic of prayer. Recently, after half a bottle of wine, and three coffin-varnish whiskey sours, I prayed half-drunkenly for Lionel Messi, the Beethoven of the beautiful game, to win the World Cup.
It turns out that all the other religions are off-kilter. The god of Agnosticism granted my wish. But only after erasing Argentina’s two-goal lead, erasing Messi’s game-winning goal, and erasing much of my hairline. Not only is the god of studied fence-sitting true, but he has sardonic humour. What about all those millions who asked The Universe for Messi not to win the World Cup? Evidently, they didn’t pray hard enough.)
I surrendered to the woo-woo side of modern witchcraft after witnessing the less savoury side of modern witchcraft.
Modern culture is schizophrenic. One half is all about the nice side of witchcraft—crystals, incense, essential oils, ‘The Secret,’ and other civilised nonsenses. The other half is rather grim.
Anyway, someone whom I’m forbidden to mention wrote a column about an actress who, after marrying a prince, scuttled off to Los Angeles—that remote island magnetic to the publicity-shy and well-adjusted—in a desperate bid to avoid all publicity. That column no longer exists.
This column which no longer exists confessed some rather starchy stuff.
He said he ‘loathes’ the recluse on a ‘cellular level,’ and lies awake at night witched by his ‘hatred’ for her.
In reference to a TV show about thrones, dragons, incest, and fairies, the columnist revealed his fantasy that she, the recluse, will be paraded naked through the streets whilst pelted with excrement from crowds chanting ‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’
The usual people with their usual opinions offered their usual thoughts. The column, which no longer exists, ‘glorified violence against women.’ Not only was the column distasteful but ‘misogynistic.’ Not just unpleasant or grimly humoured but an unjust cause of trauma and harm.
The column didn’t harm just one person, or mildly upset them, but was tantamount to ‘violence against millions of women everywhere.’
Ironically, the reaction to the column which no longer exists was, like the Game of Thrones show it referenced, rather medieval.
The columnist, who cannot be named, had not simply pushed his right to free speech toward the extremity but had endorsed a how-to-guide for every boneheaded misogynist to crack his knuckles. His motivation was not a dark joke, but ‘racism and misogyny.’
A very important person on Twitter, who works for a national broadcaster, said the column was ‘a hate crime, pure and simple.’
“If there were any sort of justice there would be laws that would jail him. And shut down the publisher,” he said.
Reader, as Christopher Hitchens warned, always beware of those employing the word ‘justice’ in a sentence frothing with barely concealed bloodlust. They’re trying to smuggle primitive lustiness through the cloaks of modern righteousness.
Others were not so coy. British lawmakers published a letter condemning the column which no longer exists.
‘This kind of behaviour,’ it read, ‘must not go unchallenged.’ Horrified, the signatories demanded, ‘definitive action… to ensure no article like this is ever published again.’
The columnist then apologised for writing the column. The publisher apologised for publishing the column. Then they erased from existence the column.
Doubtless, the detractors graduated from the half-pregnant school of free speech. That is, they ‘support free speech, but…’ which is like saying one is half pregnant. Free speech is either free or unfree. One is either pregnant or not pregnant. (Unless, like your humble narrator, you grew up in public housing where phantom pregnancies are rife.)
The saga dripped with irony. You see, we on the free speech side believe that the antidote to bad and faulty ideas, and to faulty and bad speech, is more speech, more sunlight, and more disinfectant.
Not only do we accept that controlling ‘only the bad speech’ is like controlling only the bad weather, but that control is not only pointless but dangerous. To wish away the bad is to wash away the good.
Those who claimed the column incited violence against women thought the column so dangerous they shared said column millions of times, quoted verbatim the dangerous column which they said should be, along with the author of the column, banished from the earth, with both it and his ashes, to be buried beneath Pripyat.
For his violent rhetoric, they said the author should lose his entire livelihood. Some nutters on Twitter even suggested the columnist’s death would perhaps pay the first monthly instalment of his one-thousand-year social debt.
The irony: those who for days spewed that nobody should be allowed to write such words did exactly what we free speech absolutists insist is the only antidote to bad speech: they spread the ‘bad’ speech far and wide, engendering a discussion amongst millions of people who, believe it or not, can think for themselves.
Perhaps the author offended some sensibilities. What I found most offensive, reader, was his glib assumption that everyone has watched Game of Thrones.
Perhaps he should have referenced Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible.
Set during the Salem witch trials, Miller’s work illustrates the prevailing irrationalities of small-town life and the lustiness with which humans retribute against their fellow creatures.
Like Salem, social media has squeezed millions into an incestuous small town governed by a perverse and perverting culture of resentment and shame.
Such places too employ an ancient form of cancel culture. Anyone with thoughts or ideas or ambitions outside of that cloistered charter of the expected is shamed and shunned and shoved either down or out.
In his work, Envy, Helmut Schoeck keenly illustrates how such cultures stagnate because of their suspicious, retributive social policing of those they suspect are ‘getting above their station.’ Often, the townspeople of such places choose a slow and comforting suffocation over accepting that one of their own has something or knows something they do not. Such places aren’t so much dead as they are unliving.
In Salem, many of the witches either hanged or drowned were simply townspeople toward whom their neighbours held a minor, trivial grudge. Much of modern cancel culture stems from minor, trivial grudges.
After all, the author of the column which no longer exists may have offended some sentiments. But if he had said the very same thing about, say, Boris Johnson, those calling for his cancellation would have knighted his efforts. His guttural jokes would no longer constitute a hate crime but a sardonic jape.
So, the selective stoning which is cancel culture is not rooted in morality or accountability. It’s not rooted in a desire for justice but a desire for retribution. Some of our most ingenious advancements stem from our desire to maim, destroy, and erase other people. Reader, this is humanity perhaps at its worst but also at its most comfortable. Often accused of misanthropy, Jonathan Swift observed that humans could be rational, but often chose not to be rational.
Those same people who claim words are violence dredge up violent fantasies of their own. And their bloodlust only thickens once the offender has apologised. Without context, without nuance, and without trial, the mob ruins the offender’s life. There’s often little chance of penance. It might be bloodless, but what is more ruinous? What is more vengeful? What is more primitive?
Like medieval stoning, the crowd each pelts a pebble until the condemned, buried to their chin, flops dead. Few would nominate themselves to finish the poor chap by dropping one boulder upon his head. The attraction is that nobody knows who launched the fatal pebble. The mob can privatise its righteousness and socialise its murderousness.
James Thurber said that a thing that cannot withstand laughter is not a good thing.
Ours is a culture obsessed with progress but terrified of the lifeblood upon which all progress—true progress—rests: criticism, and often, ridicule. Ridicule, the sharp-elbowed sister of truth, is an elixir of progress.
You’d assume we would welcome regular infusions of that which makes all progress possible. Instead, we police language, arrest thought, and jail the truth.
Nothing good ever came of censorship. A symptom of an insecure, moribund state, censorship is a culture in survival mode. When we feel we are losing what we have, we grasp desperately at what remains. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, nations that muzzle their citizens are darker and deeper in suffering than those without. In no country in which people can say what they like has there ever been a substantial famine.
Indeed, much of our progress owes itself to the eccentric and the unorthodox. The arguments against free speech, then, are anti-human ones. The arguments to temper only the ‘bad’ speech are delusional ones.
Lamentably, what we say is so often second or third cousin to what we think. We borrow our opinions, wear them once, and return them with the tags still attached.
Another incredible piece. So good. 👏
Nicely done, pity those who might learn the most from the article will never read it, nothing new. That said, you'll be spared being drawn and quartered for your insolence.