The New Opium Of The People

Let’s all feel good and inclusive, shall we?

The ongoing, useless massacre of Ukrainian soldiers (and the connected, useless suffering of Ukrainian civilians) has, if you ask me, four main drivers.

1. The geopolitical one. The United States have decided to fight Putin to the last Ukrainian. This was stated officially by Lloyd Austin, the Raytheon-sent Defence Minister. As I have written in the past, as long as the Ukrainians are happy to do the dying, US and EU are happy to do the paying.
2. The local political level. Your average XXI Century politician is, very often, nothing more than a common prostitute, happy to do whatever his/her johns at Twitter and Facebook clamor. There is this utterly idiotic idea that Twitter and Facebook actually reflect what the population thinks. A dumb politician will find it very difficult to refuse to sing with the choir and risk online boycott.
3. The press. They have (as I have explained in the past) a huge social media problem: a huge percentage of their traffic comes from the social media. If they go against the prevalent narrative, they will be brutally cut off from the retweets and the sharing and, immediately thereafter, their clicks will plummet. They can’t afford it. Whatever the mob is screaming, they will be screaming, too.
4. The new religion. The new religion is nothing to do with Christianity. The new religion is virtue-signalling. An army of people spend their day trying to show how virtuous they are. It’s no surprise this extends to all aspects of social life. No Russian classical music, or tennis players, or football teams anymore. Tchaikovsky is clearly beyond redemption; the others need to sacrifice at the altar of the new religion in order to get some slack.

What this engenders is a sort of competition to see who is the wokest defender of the Nazi Troops, and the most zealous follower of the New Religion. It’s getting so horrible that, at this point, I doubt even the weather forecast can be taken seriously. It’s quite amazing how the new Opium of the People has become all-pervasive.

On Saturday morning, yours truly woke up with the radio alarm clock, set on Classic FM; this is the biggest classical music sender in the UK, with more than 4 million daily listeners. I set the time so that I have a good chance of waking up with music rather than with ads or news, but it does not always work. On Saturday, it did not really work.

To my astonishment, the opening news (that I, at that point, awaited to see whether they would open with the Ukraine) was the rumour of an ongoing Coup against Putin in Russia. The “source” was (another astonishing development) an MI6 officer who, in an extremely posh English, informed us that their info is that Putin is gravely ill, but they don’t know of what.

I almost needed to pinch myself to be sure I was awake. Firstly, the “news” was a total absurdity unworthy of any media outlet. Secondly, the guy called to lend credibility to the tale was, actually, not confirming anything of it. Thirdly, MI6 has become a purveyor of cheap, and extremely stupid at that, war propaganda.

And then the penny dropped, and everything became clear.

Classic FM was not trying to state the truth. They were, in fact, not even trying to persuade their listeners of some falsehood!

It was all about virtue signalling (for the sender) and feel-good feelings (for the listeners) on a sunny Saturday morning. At this point, it’s not even about informing people. It’s about eliciting those emotions that will make the listeners tune in to the radio channel again.

It’s like that Eurovision contest stuff, ostensibly a song contest where song don’t count anymore, and which is now all about virtue-signalling and emoting like sixteen years old girls when the – alcoholic and drug addict – pop star is visiting their town.

Don’t get me wrong: I think that stupid people have always been present in great abundance. But when religion and decency had a strong grip on people, there were more antidotes to publicly displayed stupid behaviour. Nowadays, stupid behaviour is so appreciated, that a radio sender does not care about the absurdity of what it broadcasts, provided it complies with the commandments of the New Religion.

I always wondered how Goebbels could keep his people fighting and dying for him to the very end.

Now I know.