The devil’s workshop

The title is a popular description of an idle brain. That stands to reason: when one’s brain is untutored and indolent, it becomes a tabula rasa, on which wicked mountebanks can scribble any message, no matter how mendacious or evil.

Yesterday I had some fun mocking the totalitarian propaganda zombifying Russians and turning them into eager recipients of insane ideas.

However, Russians aren’t the only people ready to fling the doors of their minds wide open for the brainwashers to barge in with their hoses. Nazi Germany and Mao’s China are irrefutable arguments against any such claim to exclusivity.

However, today’s Britain proves that even brains living in a supposedly free country can fall victim to indoctrinating cant as divorced from reality as are the Russian threats to occupy every Nato country and claim Stonehenge as their own playground.

The proof of this self-lacerating observation came in the post. Directly I pushed the PUBLISH button to send my yesterday’s piece urbi et orbi, I opened the letter from my insurance company.

It contained two promotional brochures with lurid four-colour covers showing ecstatic people whose lives have been transformed by their proper choice of insurance policy. One colour dominated: black. For every happy person depicted was a proud member of the Negroid race.

Now, having spent much of my working life in advertising, I know that any images of people are supposed to reflect the demographic cross-section of the target customer base. Hence the message conveyed by the brochures is that most, or perhaps even all, of the company’s policy-holders are black. But that can’t be true.

About 40 per cent of their customers are over 65, most of them born before the influx of black people in the 1960s. Hence the proportion of black people among them is probably lower, and certainly can’t be higher, than the nation-wide three per cent.

Thus the company is ignoring its commercial interests for the sake of… what exactly?

This isn’t an isolated event. About 37 per cent of British ads feature black people, over 10 times their proportion in the population. Nor is it just advertising.

Most TV programmes systematically, if subliminally, peddle a distorted demographic picture by showing a piebald Britain whereas in fact the country is 87 per cent white. Theatre is even worse: it has gone completely transracial and transsexual. Black actresses routinely play Shakespearean roles written for white actors, leaving pedants like me aghast at the sight of, say, Agrippa being played by a black actress in high heels.

No wonder respondents in a recent survey believed that 20 per cent of Britons were black, overestimating by a factor of seven. This should dispel any doubts about the efficacy of propaganda. It works in Britain just as well as in Russia.

The goal of Russian propaganda is clear: to zombify the people, a third of whom aren’t blessed with indoor plumbing, into enthusiastic support of their fascist government. The purpose of British (or generally Western) propaganda is harder to discern, but that doesn’t mean there is no purpose.

There is, but it hasn’t been set by a cabal of conspirators seeking to undermine the country. Similarly, a pack of wolves don’t need to make a conscious decision to kill lambs. This activity is coded into their DNA. They see a lamb, they tear it apart. That’s what they do.

By the same token, all post-Enlightenment states have a totalitarian impulse programmed into their psychological makeup. They, regardless of what they call themselves or what party is nominally in government, maintain power by a sustained effort to replace thinking minds with jerking knees, thoughts with instincts, meaningful words with signals, denotation with connotation, semantics with semiotics.

A modern (quasi-)totalitarian government is different from a traditional Western one in that it seeks to change human nature, rather than accepting it as a given. A traditional man wouldn’t keep a modern state extant – he would be appalled by its vacuity, bossiness, immorality and transparently self-serving powerlust.

A new man, an Igor, must be concocted by our political Frankensteins, one in whom every old certitude is expunged and replaced with a new orthodoxy. Regardless of the sub-type of a modern state, the new orthodoxy is always forged out of identity politics.

The identities differ from one sub-type to another. They could be the Soviet man, the Fascist man, the Arian man, the Maoist man – but never just man, whose strengths are encouraged and foibles mitigated. All organic, traditional strengths and foibles become hopelessly obsolete. They contribute nothing to the new, desired identity.

The identity promoted by the liberal democratic state is polymorphous, made up of many different sub-identities. All of them are supposed to be equally laudable. All are to be inculcated, asserted and enforced by every means available.

Polymorphous means amorphous in this context. People’s minds are to be scoured of every critical and analytical faculty required to observe reality and form an accurate judgement of it. Yet the human mind resists mindlessness – it is after all one of the traits that make us human.

That resistance has to be suppressed, and here the government converges in its desiderata with our cultural and intellectual elites, which are indeed elites but no longer really have much to do with either culture or intellect.

Such elites pool their resources with the government. Together they are in control of two brainwashing conduits: media and education. Neither sticks to its remit: the media don’t inform, the education doesn’t educate. Both indoctrinate, and they are as good, if not so crude, at it as Stalin’s, Hitler’s or Putin’s propaganda.

That’s why I disagree with laments about the failure of our public education. If we define success as the ability to produce exactly the desired result, then Western education is a resounding success.

Our school leavers may not be able to read, write and add up properly, but they go into the new world as new men, weaned on the new orthodoxies – and especially on the destructive impulse behind all of them.

They are ready to accept make-believe as real, virtual reality as actual fact. Their education, the training of the mind, is nonexistent. It has been replaced by indoctrination, the training of the reflexes. The process is Pavlovian, not Aristotelian, Thomist or even Cartesian.

They see the preponderance of blacks in advertising and on TV, their knee jerks, and they accept racial tolerance as the highest virtue of all. If they are told that Britain has always been a country of immigrants (and rest assured, that’s exactly what they are told), they see no reason to demur – historical reality doesn’t apply. They are told that no sexual perversions or aberrations exist, and they are prepared to tar and feather anyone who suggests that some practices are more normal than others.

The same survey shows that respondents are as likely to overestimate the proportion of transsexuals (an assumed 5 per cent against the actual 0.3 to 0.6) and homosexuals (15 and 1.8 per cent respectively).

As with race, this has nothing to do with empirical observations of reality, and everything to do with propaganda at work. The people’s minds have been rendered idle and turned into the devil’s workshop. Emerging out of his lathe are human beings ready to abandon their humanity and vindicate Darwin – but with one minor proviso.

The ape isn’t our past, but it may well be our future. It’s a grotesque caricature of a human being with the formative human characteristics systematically bred out.

After all, Augustine defined the devil as the ape of God. And you can count on our mass propaganda to provide all the intellectual and cultural bananas this ape needs to thrive.