Sneer Pressure
The monkey business of middle-class Britain.
The last time I succumbed to peer pressure, I saw God. Well, I felt a semblance of some undefined higher power.
Perhaps I was merely hallucinating. MDMA, the favoured reality-bender of many literary heroes, has that effect.
On MDMA, I realised that all consciousness is entwined, that we are mere vibrations experiencing ourselves as one, that we chose for spiritual profit the pain of this existence, and that death is an illusion. Or some such piffle.
And then the drugs wore off. Reality and the comforts of atheism returned. The nameless, new best friends I’d acquired and with whom I’d planned to travel the world became the strangers I’d met in the pub hours previous. Forgive me for my chemical trespasses; I was only 19.
Of course, my research into Class A drugs was purely academic. A sociological investigation into something or other. These days, scientists pin great hopes on MDMA to treat severe PTSD. Perhaps we were selfless pioneers. Obviously not. People do what they do because they like doing it. We’re not that complex.
Peer pressure is a slavish hallmark of youth. But some never entirely break free from the plantation. Britain’s ancestral middle classes read The Daily Telegraph.
Every week, that newspaper conjures a new trend to horsewhip its more precarious, petit bourgeoise readers into unedifying bouts of status-seeking and submission. I read these articles as if an anthropologist encountering an uncontacted tribe daubed head-to-toe in the fiery sap of a tree that they believe divine.
With just forty-odd days to Christmas, the Telegraph asks whether you are a ‘two-tree household.’ The talk is purposively war-like. Apparently, there’s a ‘dividing line’. On one side are those who put a star atop their tree. Across the trenches in Lilliput are those who place an angel. Nobody I’ve ever spoken to is aware of this proxy civil war.
Reader, a despatch from the front: “For a rising number, the annual argument is now over, as more households choose to buy an extra tree to show off to their neighbours.”
Peace breaks out across Europe! We must applaud the United Nations for working dawn-to-dusk to engineer a ceasefire in one of history’s most intractable conflicts.
According to John Lewis, a retailer whose business model is to exploit middle-class insecurities and who just so happens to sell Christmas trees, nearly one-third are putting up more than one tree.
‘House-proud consumers are increasingly choosing to have a show tree,’ says the peddler of show trees to house-proud consumers.
“The rising trend involves a more elegantly and carefully decorated tree taking pride of place in the home, such as in a hallway, where it will typically be on display to visitors. Elsewhere in the house, they will have a more informal tree adorned with decorations made by children and other long-held ornaments.”
Notice the Freudian slip? Children and other long-held ornaments.
In the 1950s, psychologists performed interesting studies which revealed something about human nature. Some of these studies were so revealing that they and their type were corralled into a sack and drowned in the lake of ethical considerations. They cut too close to the marrow.
Participants in the Asch conformity experiments were asked which of the three straws was the longest. When alone, virtually everyone picked the obviously longest straw.
But when surrounded by a team of paid actors, all of whom insisted a shorter straw was the longest straw, over one-third changed their minds to fit in with the actors.
The Telegraph plays the same trick. A poll stuffed into the article’s guts asks: “How many trees will you put up this year?”
As a flaccid homage to teenaged anarchic sympathies, I answer surveys, the census, questionnaires, and reviews with a seriousness akin to Scooby Doo. I clicked ‘three or more trees.’ The fourteen percent of the population who harbour emotional issues agreed with me. Most of my fellow Brits (43%) stick with one tree. Crucially, the article achieved its goal. Just under one-third opted for two trees.
That’s how middle-class anxiety farming works. If ‘Two Trees’ won a majority, its exclusionary appeal would wane amongst people whose sole occupation is to demarcate themselves from people who look, talk, walk and act exactly like they do.
The comment section beneath the article all but dissolved the theory of Free Will. Esme chimes in: “We’ve been a two-tree family for a decade.” Donald says, “Nothing new here. Been doing this for years.” John scythes the pair to waist height: “Had three trees for years. One in the entrance hall and one in each living room.”
In Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay says his 600-page book covers just a slither of the follies of man. A decisive collection would fill fifty volumes.
We could dedicate an entire volume to the folly of class in Great Britain. Unlike in America, middle-class status here is not tied to merit but to mores and manners. Your station in life used to be defined by the testicles around which you swam. Not so much anymore. To correct this unwholesome development, the ancestral middle classes devise booby traps with which to kneecap interlopers.
For example, middle-class Cheska is an art ambassador scraping £30,000 a year. She pays half her salary on rent for a home she’ll never own and still prides herself above Deano, who makes three times that installing wood burners in leafy neighbourhoods. Cheska sniggers at Deano’s ‘new build’ suburban home, of which he owns every brick.
Cheska has what money cannot buy. Membership in a decaying social club whose influence gets ever pettier and more pointless.
Those are the subjects whom the Telegraph whips each week into a frenzy. The trends get stranger. Apparently, foraging mushrooms is the ultimate new middle-class trend. They’ll soon run out of inane activities to claim as their own.
As most people do, Deano calls a toilet a toilet. Cheska says ‘loo’ or, if she’s genuinely posh, ‘lavatory.’
If the Telegraph claimed the middle classes were lacing their cocktails with bleach, hospitals up and down this land would spill over with status-seeking parvenus, who’ve melted their intestines in Toilet Duck.
And that would be quite the psychological study.
As a former Telegraph reader, I still get its endless sales emails with snippets of articles. Thus am I constantly reminded of the sheer vacuity of its 'conservatism' - a rag-tag mixture of things like: whinging about 'the attack on landlords' (meaning: their £100k+ earner readership looking to park their surpluses in property only now get 20% tax relief instead of 40%); a have-it-both-ways mixture of whinging about celebrities and playing at celebrity fandom; and, of course, running for cover when any politician says anything too conservative. (I exempt Allister Heath and Allison Pearson from this assessment as both still turn out decent journalism).
But on a more serious note: the real Peer-Pressure Elephant in Liberalism's Room is the vast academia 'higher education' sheep-dip through which tens of millions of our future professional, mangerial and administrative classes have passed, emerging with its Social Justice catechism literally dripping off them. End of rant.
Is there anything more ripe for satire than the status-seeking activities of those who aren't poor but aren't as rich and respected as they feel they should be? Well done, Sir!