I’ll begin audaciously by saying that nobody destroying communities up and down England over the past week likes themselves.
To be even more audacious, I’d say that every one of them secretly hates themselves.
I know the signs. I know the politics of self-hate: a reality of hopelessness where only vengeance and bullying bring joy.
You hate yourself so much that the politics and cultures of hope appear to be laughing in your face.
Even if you’ve been disenfranchised by an economic and political system that has reduced your quality of life, nothing makes you as bitter and resentful as seeing groups of people who seem to get joy and pride from their lives.
And pride is an important word here.
Provoked by the horror in Southport, the current shambolic scenes may be directly racist, but this is also indirectly a rage against communities such as the LBTQ.
This is because what we are seeing is a protest of shame versus pride. And by extension death-drive versus life-drive.
All these peoples’ proclamations of ‘national pride’, of being ‘true England’ are wishful thinking: they feel part of nothing. What permeates their lives is a lonely shame.
On one level they act out the shame caused by a brutally binary meritocracy of neoliberalism that produces an atmosphere of humiliation for those who don’t fit on the ‘guest list’ , on the other hand they blindly invert a collective shame over our nation’s colonial history into a zombie-ish celebration of it.
We laugh at them, us ‘woke’ folk. We mock the ‘pathetic’ existence of those fat bald thick cunts, with beer bellies sticking out of stereotypically low-brow clothing. The endemically self-conscious Left performs the highly problematic shift from understanding social reality through environmental causality to the finger pointing of individualist condemnation, and spits in the face of these ‘deplorables’.
BUT….
What if you think like a Leftist, see reality like a Leftist, yet at the same time know that you feel the same shitty feelings about your life as the far right ‘morons’?
That’s my issue….
I have spent my 30s onwards battling to remain on the same pitch as the Left, and it’s entirely down to how I have felt about my life.
Perhaps it’s all due my early adult life mental health and confidence problems that meant I struggled to leave the environment I grew up in?
Even wording it like this sounds terribly judgemental. But it’s what’s expected, right?: to move on and out? And ever since then I have felt increasingly caught between two increasingly distinctive cultures who increasingly despise one another. At best I feel alienated from the communities I once thought I should belong to, and at worst judged by them.
But in-between this, I do feel like I have been afforded an insight I believe is rare now: an ability to understand the ‘why’ on both polarities – as deranged as the ‘whys’ may have now become.
I am seeing people from the nearest thing I can now call ‘my home environment’ who are by and large decent and intelligent people being pushed down a self-pathologising worm hole, where their identities are sieved down to leave only the most jingoistic and reactionary nuggets.
Maybe this has been happening for a long time, but it is only clear to me in the wake of the 2010s.
I saw myself as vaguely part of a ‘Millennial left’. We were ‘post-historical’ children. We were promised a world free of struggle and upheaval. However, after the disillusioning experience of New Labour, and the despair of Cameron’s Britain, 2010s’ Corbyn’s Labour promised to resuscitate the ‘another 21st century’ that we all still mournfully carried like an undead child inside of us.
But between 2019 and 2020 we saw the demolition and exhaustion of what, to many of us, felt like such a necessity that the concept of losing felt impossible.
Bereft of this, I have battled to feel part of anything. I have felt increasingly like a pensioner-before-their-time, watching a world that no longer looks back at me.
It’s been so hard to feel any sense of connection to the current progressive movements, and increasingly easier to feel alienated from them.
I trust my conscience. I trust myself never to get sucked into the ‘other camp’ in this increasingly binary way of identifying. But I still believe my own pain, of feeling decreased life expectations, and increasing loneliness, under a ‘structure of feeling’ that suggests that I no longer matter, is the same pain that is producing the people I have seen acting like ‘bell ends’ on cell phone videos this week.
The images are very similar to the footage of angry middle aged drivers jumping out of their immobile vehicles to tear Just Stop Oil protestors from the ground. We mock these ‘bigoted’ people, but what an active Left fails to often understand that these people, systematically bought-off with 1st world pharmacons, cannot but know what is happening to the world, but also know that due to the fact that they are part of nothing bigger than themselves, and thus have no pride, that they can never be in a position to do anything.
Hopelessness hits us all differently, and we all perceive our fortunes from the vantage afforded us in our formative years. Alas, people born in the UK to culturally assimilated family still have a formative vantage defined by privilege based in future-gain. It is an extremely painful experience to watch it slowly erode before your eyes, and ultimately before a world that justifiably has no sympathy, no matter how much you protest that your family were working class and weren’t part of ‘the empire’.
Let me be clear, the folk at these protests terrify me. I saw a group of middle-aged white blokes yelling ‘England, England’ in the face of a man of seemingly Asian-descent a few months back, and it sent the shivers down my back that emanate from memories of playground bullies: “get out of sight, before they get you!”.
But I also believe that I identify with their pain, even if they (most likely) don’t even recognise their suffering. It is obvious from the footage on display that the majority of the people we can see are living piss-shit lives.
Whether they are the consequence of what we have valued in our society for the last 40 years, or just because every society must, by some mathematical equation, have to produce a certain number of angry fascists, I still feel that in my worst moments of shame and self-hate I wake up with the same residual despair and disgust as people who, on the street, are my enemy – more than with people who are factually on my side.
John B Ledger 