This is partly an opportunity to share a chance photo I took of a broken sign in a supermarket car park which seems to tell an unintentional story.The complete advertisement is completely uninteresting - just a bland, brightly-coloured inducement to buy a phone contract, so you can chatter to your friends about stuff you've just bought, the fact that you're on a train, and other episodes from the incredibly fascinating story of your life and every day to day event in all it's minute and tedious attention to detail... And was it a Thursday or a Wednesday? Or, oh, no, it wasn't though. Oh, who cares anyway because I do not or whatever.
The broken version is much darker and more compelling. It makes me think of Cherie Blair on the phone to a journalist, gagging to blurt out some embarrassing revelation about Gordon Brown which she's been dying to shout from the rooftops. Or the office gossip, sitting at the centre of a web of petty intrigues, working tirelessly to make your daily grind just that little bit more futile and depressing.
It's an example of nastiness being just a bit more wicked and intriguing than the bland and inoffensive. You can call it the cuckoo clock theory, after the Orson Wells quote from The Third Man:
In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
The cuckoo clock theory is based on a notoriously dodgy "fact" - as any Internet fact-checking wonk would love to tell you, the first contemporary description of a cuckoo clock comes not from Switzerland, but from Bavaria. So far, so what, you may say, but what annoys me about the cuckoo clock theory isn't the factual error, but the way so many people have picked it up and run with it, their thought processes presumably running something like this:
Being nice to people is like so ... lame and BORING!
So, that must mean that if I bully people a bit and I'm rude to them all the time, I must be, y'know, REALLY INTERESTING!
No. Wrong. An example. I was flicking though the channels a wee while back, when I was unfortunate enough to come across Gordon Ramsay being a complete gobshite to some poor American restaurant owner who'd been desperate enough to ask for the Great Man's advice about how to run his business.
Now I've no doubt that GR is a better cook than this guy. He may well know more about how to run a business. But there he was, sat at his table like Lord Muck, the waitress bringing him his meal, being perfectly polite and asking him if he wanted anything else. His response? "A sick bag." Now call me a skeptic, but I very much doubt whether the food was actually so foul that it would make any normal person vomit. The dish might have been bland, the flavour combinations ill thought out, the ingredients not the best, who knows. But unlikely to be actually inedible. What we had there was just an all too common example of a celeb throwing all his toys out of the pram because he could, like a toddler in a strop.
Toddlers do this stuff because they crave attention and don't know any better. Adults still like attention, but ought to know better. Unfortunately, in out increasingly infantilised culture, they often don't. And in that infantilised culture, a lot of people seem willing to spend their free time watching these emotional retards bullying, shouting and swearing at people lower down the pecking order. I believe it's called reality TV.
At this point, (assuming anyone else ever reads this, which is not a foregone conclusion), somebody's probably thinking something along these lines:
For God's sake, stop being so namby-pamby. I'm sick of not being able to say anything in case I upset someone's precious little feelings. We'd be in a right mess if the people who actually knew what they were talking about kept their traps shut because they're too frightened of offending somebody. And heaven knows what a mess the world would be if every stupid idea and hare-brained plan thought up by an idiot went right ahead, because nobody had the guts to tell it like it is.
To which I would say, excellent point, well made. What I'm criticising here isn't the right of every human being to speak out when they have good reason to think that something is wrong, factually incorrect, a bad idea, badly thought out or executed. That seems to me to be a fundamental right - once we've lost the freedom to point out that the Emperor hasn't got any new clothes, we know we're in a seriously bad place.
Where I think reality TV and the culture of bullying have got it seriously wrong is in making a category mistake. The right to criticise and argue is important, because examining the ideas and information we have might actually help us to make better decisions and understand the world we live in. But programme makers also know that we are attracted to the dark side - that a bit of malice, spite and bullying raises the emotional temperature and adds a bit of excitement. What we end up with is two things going on at once, namely:
1. expert tells amateurs where they're going wrong, people try with varying degrees of success to do better, sometimes even proving the experts wrong
2. important, unpleasant, powerful person rants and raves at lesser mortals, shouting, swearing and bullying them for the benefit of their own obscenely bloated ego / the TV cameras / both
To me, 1. seems OK, if limited - if you're doing something wrong, or reality isn't the way you fondly think it is, you probably need to be told, possibly forcibly. But remember, it's only TV - if your critical thinking is limited to passively imagining you could have done better than that idiot on a reality TV show, then it probably isn't doing you much good, other than making you feel better about yourself. Despite the name, "Reality TV" isn't reality. It's artificial. Philosophers may argue about what reality is - I'm not going into that debate, but I'd suggest your own life is a good place to start looking for it.
2. might be a bit exciting - a bit of anger, conflict and all that. But do so many people really have to get their jollies from watching other people being humiliated? And would it really seem so amusing if your real-world boss started treating you like that? Or if the other kids in the playground started treating your child that way? Or if some tin-pot official with a bit of authority in this or any other country started making people's lives a misery just because he or she could get away with it?
I don't have a problem with people speaking their minds, criticising others, telling the truth as they see it, no matter who might get offended. I do have a problem with bullies who owe their position to putting others down, throwing temper tantrums and rule by fear. Not to mention TV companies encouraging this behaviour and packaging it as "entertainment". And what I have most of a problem with is one posing as the other - humiliating someone "for their own good" in the guise of providing useful advice. That's just despicable.
If you still feel the urge, feel free to watch Gordon Ramsay, Alan Sugar, et al parading their famously swollen senses of self-importance and unsightly lack of adult temper control for your televisual delectation. I'll just continue to make free with the "off" switch and assert my right to think of them as a bunch of sociopathic arses and go off and do something a little more interesting with my free time.
There - I feel better already. Splendid!
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