Boredom and Democracy Part 2

Is everything just 'vibes' now?

‘Are you not entertained?’ were the words roared by Russell Crowe. Angry and bitter about his fate and the fate of his family, he believed his job was merely to survive and kill all those in front of him. A reasonable assumption for a General turned Gladiator, one would assume. But, as Proximo, played by the brilliant Oliver Reed, would remind him, it is not merely about being good at your job, which is important. Rather, you must do so with pizzazz; you must be elegant, merciful, brutal, and most of all, you must continue to entertain. If you entertain the crowd, you’ll win their hearts, you win their hearts, and then you’ll win your freedom.

Watching Gladiator last week prompted me to reflect on where we stand as a democracy. Of course, we do not watch people kill each other for sport, even if it was recently supposed that we may well watch people fight for their citizenship. But we do regularly watch shows where the stakes are no less stark. As a collective, we binge on shows which feature love and sex in some form, oftentimes together. Whether it's Married at First Sight, Love Island, Love is Blind, Open House, or Temptation Island (yes, I didn’t make that last one up; it really is called that), we are enthralled by shows depicting people’s quest for love and sexual satisfaction in their relationships.

These shows’ popularity reflects a deep need in the populace for something with real stakes, which does not require intellectual effort. We form attachments to the participants predicated largely upon our feelings towards them, whipping up sentiments of love and hate directed at the contestants. The contestants, for their part, clearly have a multitude of attitudes and reasoning for participation, but an obvious one is self-promotion. It must be tempting if you have washboard abs and a strong jawline to think, ‘If I am happy to be gawked at then maybe this can be a lucrative career’. Destination influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers on your social media is one that increasing numbers of young people are clamouring for.

Such shows remind me of Proximo’s words about entertaining the crowd. You must merely be entertaining —not good, not bad, not thoughtful, not complicated; instead, you must stand out. You must do funny, bad, and most importantly, crazy things to stand out. Whether that is participating in a three-some in front of hundreds of thousands of people in all its details or proposing to someone you’ve never met, you must simply do the things others won’t to entertain.

You may wonder why I'm discussing these topics. However, if politics is downstream of culture, then this matters greatly. If our culture is slowly but surely devolving into a mere stream of entertainment then this is naturally reflected in our political choices. Indeed, given the role of politicians and political parties is to get elected, to some degree, albeit a contested one, our parties must follow what we think and feel. This is especially true in format as much as any concrete policies.

Logically, policies should be how we elect our representatives and governments. If we were all thinking about what we want and why we want it, we should merely look to the manifestos of our candidates and political parties. These are surely the best judge of what we really want. Or are they?

This assumes politics is merely a technocratic exercise. It is a mistake many of my students make in my class- why did all those idiots vote for Brexit? Why don’t people see the Conservatives as money-grubbing dicks? Why doesn’t everyone shower themselves with love for Jeremy Corbyn? They assume electoral politics is a fight over how productive a choice is. In essence, if Brexit is shown to weaken our economy, it is illogical to vote for it.

But politics is not a fight over mere maximisation of productivity and wealth. If it were, politics would be a boring, banal, and obvious exercise. Politics is also a fight over values and ideas. Who gets to share in that wealth and productivity, who belongs to the nation, and what should we do to people who have wronged us? Those value differences do not become resolved like a bill which needs to be shared out evenly. Instead, it is reminiscent of the argument over which pub we should go to. Do we go to the traditional one with a fire? The cheap one? the expensive bar with fancy cocktails? Everyone wants something different, and it isn’t easy to ascertain who has the best choice.

This is not merely an intellectual exercise; it is largely a temperamental one. Most of us do not spend hours of our days soaked in dense prose about rights, nor look at think tank reports on the benefits of migration. This is not a new phenomenon. Studies in the US, dating back to the 1950s, have consistently shown voter knowledge to be poor, rendering appeals to knowledge-based politics as unrealistic and unhelpful for the vast majority. So what do people go off instead?

Increasingly, it appears that ‘vibes’ are the order of the day. I admit to you it is a word I have grown to detest. Vibes lacks any substance and is a poor substitute for the word feelings. Indeed, its use has led to bastardisations such as "bougie," intimating posh or luxurious surroundings, rather than clearer and more pronounced articulations of how we are feeling and the background atmosphere of our surroundings. This may be nothing new in itself, even if we are witnessing a new articulation of it. Indeed, as Max Weber argued in Politics as a Vocation

For the heart of the problem is how to forge a unity between hot passion and a cool sense of proportion in one and the same person. Politics is made with the mind, not with other parts of the body or the soul. And yet if politics is to be an authentic human activity and not just a frivolous intellectual game, commitment to it must be born of passion and be nourished by it.

But there is a significant division between vibes and passion. Passion necessarily arrives from a deep place within us. Vibes are simultaneously less profound but perhaps even more important to politics today. We rarely speak of value and instead adopt aesthetic critiques. Passion has been replaced by posing. As the fictional writer Hank Moody argued people have stopped communicating in traditional ways. Today, going viral is what is important, and despite genuine fears over the safety of constantly being online, we cannot get enough of the ‘vibes’ it provides. If vibes are the primary cultural construction of our times, then our politics will inevitably mirror that sea change. We will be rewarded with ‘vibe’ politicians.

Politics is not entirely a matter of the mind; it is also a matter of the heart. This is why Project Fear, led by Osborne and Cameron, was such a catastrophic misreading of the room. Amongst the ‘fruitcakes, loons, and racists’ making up UKIP, of which there were many, there were people who felt they had been let down by twenty years of the same politics. They had seen their lives change around them, and instinctively, they did not like it.

For these people, Farage was the perfect foil to the Remain campaign. Not because he articulated a clear and realistic vision for post-Brexit Britain, but because he portrayed himself as a ‘true Englishman’. He drank beer comfortably, his reddened face reminding us of our uncles who visited the pub just a little too often. He spoke in uncomplicated formulas —of national sovereignty, annoying busybodies in Brussels and unnecessary rules that interfered with what would be our perfect lives. It was a fairy tale, something found only in a storybook and on Farage’s teleprompter, but it was pitched perfectly at the time to those who were listening.

Vote Leave was incoherent, unrealistic, and leveraged heavily against simple political reality. If previous elections were won on the basis of sounding reasonable, Brexit was won on precisely the opposite. It was a gamble, but one which many were more than happy to take. They were pissed- pissed at Cameron, at Corbyn, and at the other one of the yellow party they couldn’t quite remember. But they knew voting for Brexit would tell these people that they were pissed, and they would know it.

This is nothing new. In 1960, it was Nixon’s sweaty brow which cost him the Presidency but he came roaring back with a focus on the ‘little man’. The man he believed he represented- the cast out, neglected, and uncomfortable man. In 1980 the solution was switched. It was Reagan’s happy, hopeful reflection on what America could be if only Carter and the Democrats would get out of the way. Today, it is Donald Trump and his ability to sway in the wind of public opinion without suffering much damage to his hard-line support.

Of course, we can find a difference between these examples. Nixon and Reagan were both accomplished in their own right as political actors. Nixon possessed a formidable intellect and steely determination that few others can lay claim to. Reagan was able to weave together a story- a story which lied about his past and sold a dream to America based on Thomas Paine’s belief that America was the shining city on a hill. It was and remains exceptional; it was a dream that still inspires many today in the face of Trump’s vision of American Carnage.

Today, there is no such value to be had. Instead, we are ruled by the vibe- the need to be entertained and to go viral outpaces all our other desires. This is perhaps why a former apprentice contestant is able to attend and speak at a leading Conservative conference off the back of eating large plates of food and being jolly. Why Starmer is unable to attract anyone with a semi-regularly used TikTok account; those glasses and that stare do not a viral presence make.

This is why Robert Jenrick is desperately stopping people outside of Tube Stations, following them, and asking why they did not pay the fare. It is not out of a duty to see the rules followed. It is because chasing nerdowells is precisely the kind of clickbait that is too good to resist. Of course, the video went viral, gaining traction among those who detested it and those who loved it. Everyone was entertained!

When Zizek speaks of fantasy as teaching us how to desire, we must consider that going viral reveals what we truly want in our lives. Virality projects the ridiculous, enraging, and intoxicating sadness that protrudes at the edges of our otherwise mundane and ever-so-normal lives. It tells us what our lives could be like, just as that IG account with 1.2 million followers does. It simultaneously entertains and makes us long for something more than we have.

The quote, by Lawrence Meyers, appeared in a 2011 article headlined “Politics is Really Downstream from Culture.” It was an elaboration of Andrew Breitbart’s mantra, “politics is downstream from culture.” The slogan—a nice inverse of James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid!”—means what it says: Change the culture, change the government.

Now, six years later, national politics, we might say, is culture, and maybe even only culture.

Before you leave the page, please leave a comment if you have any thoughts. Also, I’m just wondering what you'd like to read; would you prefer shorter essays? more long-form work? The odd podcast, which I used to do? Please do let me know!