John Moynes :: Stupidity Made Simple

Never mind the weather. It may be cold, it may be dark, but at least we know that Christmas is approaching. And let’s face it, nothing warms the heart like sinking even further into debt just to fulfil our patriotic duty of supporting the retail sector in these troubled economic times.

The downside of all this is the virus of stupidity that infects almost everybody in mid November. Most people assume that yuletide stupidity is something that happens a few weeks later, when people start thinking that ridiculous woolly jumpers are attractive, or that getting blind drunk with your boss is a good idea. That’s not really stupidity though. That’s just a symptom of light deprivation.

This virus infects the parietal lobes at the front of the brain and causes people to say in a loud voice “Christmas gets earlier every year.” It also infects the neck muscles, so a sufferer who hears this moronic catchphrase will start to spasm, causing their head to nod as if in agreement. As if “Christmas gets earlier every year” could possibly be true in any meaningful way.

Now I’m well aware that the phrase doesn’t refer to the Christmas festival itself, which has stuck to the same date since early Christian times. The infectees are babbling about the pre Christmas season, the time of celebration and consumerism we must endure before we get our hands on the turkey.

I’m 32 years old. So my memories go back to the early nineteen eighties, and every single year, the virus struck. People who were absolutely not keeping a close eye on the precise date when shops started putting up ludicrous decorations would announce that it was happening earlier than last year. And everybody would agree.

Now if you aren’t taking note of the date that festive season begins it is clear that the beginning must move significantly before you’ll notice a real change. It would probably have to move by a week or so. So if the idiots are to be believed Christmas now begins approximately twenty eight weeks earlier than it used to. In other words, people used to do their present shopping the following March. This is impossible, as only ministers of finance can engage in that kind of economic time travel.

Even assuming people are capable of instinctively noticing a single day’s change in commercial timing, that means that when I was a child the eagerest Christmas shops only began to hang up the tinsel on the second week of December. That’s also nonsense, as even in the eighties retailers went straight from skeletons to Santa, and began flogging festive crap as soon as the Hallowe’en bonfires went out.

And that’s based on the assumption that the virus only began in my early childhood. But a straw poll of some of my older friends showed clearly that Christmas was beginning earlier in the year since the late sixties. That simply can’t be the case.

Unfortunately, there’s no point trying to reason with people who say this. The virus will not allow them to listen, and they will continue to repeat the assertion loudly and angrily. So instead give them your pity, and simply nod in sympathy. After all, Christmas is a time for tolerating simpletons.

Are you sitting comfortably? If so, we can’t begin. Because this is no time for comfort, this is a time for anger. And not just any old anger. Oh no. At a time like this, with the country bankrupt and the same old thieves fleecing us at every turn, we need a different type of anger. A pointless, self-destructive, attention seeking anger.

Because normal anger doesn’t change anything. It takes a special brand of rage to turn a minister responsible for ruining the health service and turn her into a victim deserving our sympathy. For this you need Eirígí anger.

For the benefit of those outside Ireland, I’ll give a quick recap of the story. Mary Harney, our minister for Health, was turning the sod on a new mental healthcare facility in Ballyfermot. Louise Minihan, an Eirígí councillor, decided to protest by throwing red paint at her. Now I know some of you will be thinking that this makes sense, that increased mental health services would undermine Eirígí’s vote base. But you should be ashamed of yourself for making such a crass joke.

The first thing to point out here is that there’s a terrifying lack of services in Ireland for the mentally ill. So when a new service is provided then that is absolutely the wrong time to protest. Giving out about politicians is not a game of whack-a-mole. You don’t hit them every time their heads appear. You hit them when, and only when, they do something stupid.

Minihan claims she was protesting against the cuts in services to dementia patients in Cherry Orchard. Nothing wrong with that. But protesting at the creation of a new service muddles the message completely.

This isn’t the dumbest example of throwing things at politicians in Irish history. That happened in in 2002 during the general election campaign. A woman threw a pie at the then Fine Gael leader Michael Noonan, and then ran away. Later she claimed that she was  doing this in order to find out what Noonan was planning to do about unemployment. Leaving aside the fact that we had more or less full employment at that time, it takes a rare breed of fool to think that the way to find out a politicians plans during an election campaign is to cover them in custard and run away without asking any questions.

So if that’s the baseline of stupidity when it comes to flinging things, why is Minihan’s act worthy of mention? Because there’s no way anybody could be daft enough to think that paint has some kind of magic mind-changing effect on ministers. The only reason you do it is to get attention. And yet Councillor Minihan seems to think that it was ok for her to give Harney a new coat because the sod-turning event was “a publicity stunt.”

Look, I’m not sure how to put this politely, so I’ll just say it bluntly. You’re an idiot.

It’s not just you. It’s everyone on the planet apart from me. So there’s no need to take it personally.

Though you should all be ashamed of yourselves. How could anyone honestly believe this nonsense about Chilean miners being rescued? It’s patently ridiculous.

I know you may have been fooled by the constant news reports, the footage of people walking around above the mine with fancy digging equipment, the crying wives, the letters supposedly sent up from under the ground. And I’ll admit the mistress was a good touch. It added a little romantic drama to distract the suckers (that’s all of you people) from the central flaw in the prank’s logic.

And the flaw is a whopper. We’re actually supposed to believe that people care about miners.

Let’s be clear about this. Nobody on this planet has ever given a damn about people who work in mines.

In China there is a death in the mines every thirty minutes. These deaths are caused by shoddy equipment, a complete absence of safety procedures, forcing children to work seventy hour weeks, and every imaginable shortcut taken by mine owners to make money.

But nobody cares. Nobody stops buying goods from China. And the reason for this is simple. They’re only miners.

It’s not just China, of course. All around the world miners get treated like cheap disposable tools, and when they try to organise to get a better deal, the standard response of governments is to send in soldiers to shoot them. And why not? Sure they’re only miners.

Of course, it isn’t only miners that get abused like this. Their families are fair game. After the Tories were finished battering the British miners in the eighties it was perfectly acceptable to leave the miners and their families in devastated towns with no industry, no jobs and no future. It was perfectly fine to look the other way and think that the profits in the City of London meant that thousands of people weren’t consigned to lives of pointless crime filled misery. And why not? They’re only the descendants of miners.

Those men who were pulled from the ground this week are no different from rabbits pulled from a magicians hat. And just as we all know that Paul Daniels doesn’t actually use a zoo to keep his head warm, you should have known that the whole rescue was a sham.

That was stupid of you.

Last month I attended the latest Breathing Spaces conference, part of a series organised by the Irish Peace Centres. Here is the text of a speech I gave at the end of the event.

I would like to begin by thanking the Irish Peace Centres for organising this conference. Not only were the four main speeches both fascinating and entertaining, the round table discussions after each speech left me with a lot to think about in the coming weeks.

Most of the speakers discussed the concept of leadership in Ireland, and what leaders should do to help society cope with the challenges ahead. I feel that this is the wrong way to approach the situation. Ireland has never been short of leaders, the problems we face have been caused, to a large extent, by how people react to leaders. In short, rather than having leaders who respond to, and facilitate, the ideas and wishes of her people, Ireland has instead been burdened by command structures. We have, for too long, been accustomed to the idea that authority figures could, and even worse; should be trusted at all times.

For example, at school I was taught that when considering taking a loan from a bank the correct thing to do was to make an appointment with a local bank manager and follow his or her advice. After all, bank managers are respectable people who understand finance and protect their customers’ best interests. In the aftermath of the collapse of our financial system it is obvious how damaging such advice was. Most Irish people borrowed far too much over the past couple of decades, to support both their lifestyles and their businesses. And rather than bankers trying to put a stop to this carry on, they were in fact encouraging it. Their entire business model was based on overheating the economy dangerously.

Similarly, the problem of sexual abuse in the churches was not, in my opinion, the cause of the collapse in church attendance and religious participation, rather it was a symptom of the same problems that caused the collapse. People were told, for generations, that the place to go for moral leadership was a church, and that Churchmen could, by definition, be trusted at all times. This infantile approach to religion not only allowed the abusers within the churches to go about their evil deeds unchallenged, and not only encouraged church leaders to hide the problem in the first place and deny it afterwards, but was the very cause of the fall-off in religious participation. As long as the communication went in only one direction, from the pulpit to the pew, the churches could learn nothing about society, and were doomed to irrelevance with or without the revelations of the sins of some individuals within the institutions

Furthermore, for churches to reconnect with the people, and for Ireland to avoid losing what Dr Norman Hamilton rightly called the “rich spiritual and intellectual heritage of the churches” the faith communities must avoid falling into the trap of blaming the problem on the people who have left the fold. Calls for a return to traditional moral values can too often sound, to those outside the church like a return to the days of the flock obeying their pastor uncritically. I accept that most of the faithful do not mean to call for such a return, but unless they adapt their style of communication, their message will not be understood.

It was heartening, if surprising for me as a left wing atheist to find myself agreeing so often with Dr Martin and Dr Hamilton. This brought home to me the importance of speaking without using loaded terminology. Both men spoke of the need for people to work deliberately to build a sense of community, and overcome the excessive atomisation of society in the last two decades. I would call this “socialism”, a term which I accept will turn a lot of people off. Yet both men referred to this call in terms of “Christian values” a phrase equally distasteful to many. But all of us can achieve our shared aims if we speak in practical terms, rather than in clichéd soundbites.

And finally I would like to address the question of practicality at conferences like this. I feel there is a risk of the participants attending such events, hearing interesting ideas, and then returning to our communities with nothing more than some pleasant memories. I believe passionately that if intelligent people meet to discuss a problem then they should not part without a plan of action. For example Eleanor Gill spoke of the problem of the fuel subsidy in the Northern Ireland, which is given to all pensioners regardless of their wealth, but fails to pay for the winter heating needs of the poor. Her point seemed to resonate with the room, yet no action was taken. I would suggest that at a meeting such as Breathing Spaces people could agree to return to their communities, whether they be faith communities or otherwise, and organise to pool the fuel subsidies of the richer pensioners and share it with the poorer.

However it would be wrong of me to end with criticism. The conference was excellently organised, and all participants to whom I spoke were intelligent and active people who care deeply about improving Ireland. I salute them all.

The idea of dividing politics into a left wing and right wing is often criticised. And rightly so, as it fails to accurately describe the spectrum of political opinions. However I believe that the real problem with thinking in terms of “left” and “right” is that it causes stupidity, and damages politics.

Over the years many Irish commentators have bemoaned our lack of a traditional European left/right divide in our social cleavage. Right up to this year’s British elections people who consider themselves intelligent used to say that the Brits had it better because they had a choice between “the” left and “the” right. As if there is at all times, and to all questions, one left wing and one right wing answer.

As an example, consider a rural community that lacks a school bus. One left wing solution would be a state funded bus. Another would be a community cooperative service. The right wing could suggest home schooling, or a private company stepping in to provide the transport. Other solutions, such as devolved schooling through distance learning could be offered by either side. And yet many people still worship at the altar of the two party, left/right system.

And it gets worse inside political movements.

I’ve long ago lost track of the number of speeches I’ve heard where the phrase “left wing” is used as if it has a precise meaning. The speaker will insist that we (and this could mean the party, the country, Europe, or whatever you’re having yourself) need to move to the left. A demand will be made for more left wing policies. A table will get thumped. We’ll be reminded that the left has a long and noble history. Opponents will be dismissed as being right wing. The word left will get aired another few times. Left. Then there will be applause.

The converse occurs on the other side too. While they don’t tend to praise themselves for being “right” too many of them seem to think that dismissing us as “lefties” constitutes an argument. And that throwing in a quick reference to Stalin scores a home run.

The problem with all this of course is that it ignores both policy and the electorate. You’d think that these would be important, but they seem to be too complicated for some folk.

For a start the left/right illusion masks the nature of parties. For years I’ve heard people describe the Liberal Democrats as being on the left. This seems to be largely because they don’t hate minorites, or believe that the poor need to be punished. Hopefully this error will be among the many victims of the British budget.

It also creates a false expectation of what can practically be achieved. Some parties on the left believe that the market is fundamentally evil and needs to be abolished. Some believe that the wealth creating power of the market should be harnessed, but controlled by responsible legislation, and that the fruits of this market should be redistributed fairly. These two positions cannot be reconciled. There can be no compromise between two parties on either side of this split. And yet people on both sides still call for “left unity” as if an absence of Thatcherism is enough to sustain a program for government.

And finally, banging on about “the left” damages some of our campaigns. Many of us have pushed, over the years, for progress on issues like gay rights, equality of the sexes, and anti-racist campaigns.  We may have reached our position on these issues from our egalitarian “left wing” beliefs. But that doesn’t mean that these questions belong to the left. It doesn’t mean that we should complain about other parties “stealing our clothes”. If right wing parties want to grow up and treat adults as adults then we should welcome them as allies, and not sulk.

And we must remember that every time we publicly equate equality with the left we give some people an excuse to dismiss the idea entirely, rather than engage with the issue. All this does is delay victory.

We must remember that we are in politics because we want to change society for the better. We’re not here to see one team beat another, we have sports for that. And in sport I support one team in orange, and one in blue. I keep my politics as far from those colours as possible.

Many years ago I was involved in student politics. It’s not something I’m proud of, but at least it gave me an early and prolonged exposure to high levels of stupidity, and sparked an interest in me that still lives.

Student politicians radiate an intense aura of imbecility. It’s not that they aren’t intelligent, more than a few clearly are, it’s just that they lack experience. I blame the parents. They spend too much time teaching kids how to be balanced, happy, well-rounded people, and nowhere near enough time raising them as bitter, manipulative, cynical self-serving politicians.

This lack of experience on the part of students means that their politics tends to go around in circles. As activists graduate or drop out, and get replaced by a new generation the same issues get debated, the same feuds are fought and the same mistake are made.

There’s a lesson here. If an idea is so stupid that even student politicians can see its flaws, then that idea needs to be locked in a room with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver. And if successive generations of student politicians come to the same conclusion, they’ve got to be right.

Back in my own days in the students’ union I had such an idea. it was a brilliantly original method to promote one of our campaigns. I quite smugly proposed it to some of the other officers, who tore it to pieces in seconds. As I really should have realised myself, the plan was self defeating, expensive, pointless and would have exposed us to even more ridicule than we were used to. The only reason it was original ws that nobody else was stupid enough to try.

Recently I had dinner with some former SU activists, from before my time and after it, and as the wine flowed we entertained each other with the stupidity of our early years. I mentioned my plan. They laughed. Then, one by one, other people admitted having had the same idea, and having seen it trashed for the same reasons.

It was stupid. So it died. But I should have realised that there are in this country organisations dedicated to ensuring that some ideas will never die, no matter how stupid they are.

According to breakingnews.ie “Sinn Féin tonight revealed it has devised a novel way to get young football fans to read its proposals on job creation. The party will unveil a new beer mat calling for voters to support the party’s plans to get 40,000 young unemployed back to work.”

It is stupid. But it lives.

Nothing wrong a party having a plan to deal with unemployment. Nothing wrong with canvassing Croke Park on the day of a match. It’s the beer mat, stupid.

it’s not just that people scribble on, and tear up, beer mats even more than they will any other form of election material, it’s just that it is, and there’s no way of avoiding this, a beer mat.

it’s the kind of thing that people remember. So it no longer matters what the Sinn Féin plan is. Come the next election voters will think about the parties. Fianna Fáil will be the people who broke the country. Fine Gael will be the people who think it’s their turn to break the country. Labour, well I’m hopelessly biased, so I’ll let you answer this yourself. The Greens will be a joke. But Sinn Féin will be the party who thought they could fix the biggest economic crisis we ever faced with a plan they scribbled on the back of a beer mat.

A few years ago I noticed something odd about myself. I had, for no apparent reason become fond of large civil engineering projects. A little too fond. I just love bridges, new roads, rail projects, anything like that.

Not, I must but shouldn’t have to add, in a sexual way.

And so it pains me that an event that I would normally celebrate has become an excuse for outbreaks of stupidity that excel even the normal silly season nonsense that fills the media.

And this idiocy comes from Russia, where they’re very very good at stupidity.

They’ve opened a new metro station in Moscow. Nothing stupid there, you say. That’s because because you’re stupid.

The station in question is called Dostoevskaya, after that cheery chap Fyodor Dostoevsky. He may seem like an odd choice for honouring by the public transport system, but it’s not as bad as Dublin’s Beckett-themed bus stops.

Of course the Russians, being a very thorough people, haven’t just named the station after him. Oh no, they’ve also gone and decorated the whole building with murals depicting scenes from his work. Which isn’t a particularly bright thing to do.

We get the axe murder scene from Crime and Punishment. We get shadowy characters flitting through murky scenes. There’s probably a mural depicting angst. And in case anyone doesn’t get the message there’s a giant portrait of the great man himself looking as miserable as only an existential Russian can.

So all things considered, Dostoevskaya Station is not a pleasant place to be. But you have to put these things in context. And the context here is Putin’s Russia, so by comparison the station may as well be Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

The only problem with the whole thing is that the metro station seems to be making people stupid. Even people who haven’t gone there. The very idea of the place is turning brains across the world to mush.

The telegraph reports unnamed psychologists warning of Dostoevskaya’s “negative energy”. Now you can see why any scientist resorting to that kind of nonsense would want to remain anonymous, but the Telegraph seem happy to ignore decades of progress by suicidologists and have a good old fashioned worry about people killing themselves because of the murals.

Apparently the drama in these scenes will attract unbalanced people who will flock to Dostoevskaya to throw themselves under trains. If I were an unnamed psychologist right now I’d be more worried about “negative intelligence.”

Underground stations in any city are a magnet to suicides, with or without the existentialism. But the name of a station, or its murals, will attract nobody. People genuinely seeking death will go to the nearest station, not the most apposite one. The only suicides tempted by Dostoevskaya will be cloak wearing undergraduate authors of dubious poetry who will, at the last moment, pull themselves back from the brink. They aren’t really looking to die, they’re looking to impress some pale girl in their university dramatic society.

As part of my occasional attempts to understand how normal people live their lives I have decided to indulge in what is commonly referred to as a “holiday.”

Despite the etymology of this word it has, you will be glad to hear, no longer got anything to do with holiness. Instead the idea is that you just go somewhere for an extended period of time. A simple enough prospect, but like many other areas of life, it has been ruined by both stupidity and capitalism.

When my girlfriend first suggested that we take a holiday I immediately leapt into action and ignored the idea for several years. When the suggestion evolved into insistence I boldly attempted to pass the suggestion onto a parliamentary committee for consideration. Unfortunately I am not a cabinet-based government, and this evasion failed.

Hence this trip. To be honest, I can’t see the point in coming to London, as I was here in the 1980s. It seemed to me highly unlikely that much could have changed, and the fact that I would no longer be viewing the city with the wide eyed innocence of a child means that I’d fail to be impressed.

My predictions were, as usual, correct.

Last time I was here London was large, smelly and ruled by Tories. This time, ditto. In fact the only change seems to be that there is no longer  great aunt and great uncle showering me with sweets. No wonder there has been so much talk about “Broken Britain” lately.

London, and in fact England as a whole, still lags far behind the civilised world when it comes to simple matters like currency. I’d managed to avoid visiting a Bureau de Change for several years, as the Euro works in proper countries, and I had a big stack of Sterling left over from my trips to Scotland and the occupied territories.

However it seems that not only are the English refusing to accept normal money, they also have difficulty accepting sterling. I had to get mine changed as it was originally issued by banks in remote places like Belfast or Edinburgh. Napoleon, it seems, was both short and stupid. He described the Saxons as a nation of shopkeepers, but what shopkeeper would turn down legal tender?

Apart from such eccentricities, which must be endured by cosmopolitan travelers such as myself, the English are actually quite a pleasant people when they aren’t invading places. While I have been on the receiving end of many a sullen stare, and six stabbings since arriving here, it’s quite clear from my time travelling about the town that this has been in no way racist. The Londoners spend their time glaring at, and attacking with knives, each other. They’ve clearly moved on from the anti-Irish racism of yesteryear, and are now prepared to abuse us as equals.

Later today I shall be testing some of the pubs in the area to see if they are acceptable. I am not optimistic.

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Fear makes people stupid. It shuts down the brain, reducing your options to fight or flight. This can be good for a hunter-gatherer facing a large predator in North Africa half a million years ago. But it’s confusing for a right wing Irish politician looking at an opinion poll one month ago.

Flight isn’t really an option in politics. Just ask George Lee. But fighting isn’t always a good idea either. Attacking other parties, rather than attacking their ideas, doesn’t win you votes. All it does is persuade undecided voters that the whole business is a waste of time, that politicians are fundamentally uncivilised, and not worth bothering with.

This has been shown repeatedly in the USA, where election campaigns often, but not always, go off the rails as candidates start insulting each other, and turnout at the polling stations collapses.

Here in Ireland the government parties would probably benefit from a low turnout at the next election, so it’s not surprising that John Gormley, the most desperate man in Leinster House, has been lashing out at Labour lately. What’s more surprising is that Fine Gael have been joining in, and with gusto.

Now if you are going to play the dirty game, it would help to do it right. Keep your attacks vague. Stick to insinuation. If I keep claiming that you can’t be trusted, then eventually some people will believe me, and it’s up to you to prove that you aren’t dishonest. But if I say something specific about you, and I’m lying, then it’s very easy for you to prove that I’m a liar.

And that’s precisely what Labour’s opponents are doing wrong. They keep repeating the tired old mantra of “Labour haven’t got any policies.”  This is a ridiculous claim to be making, for two simple reasons.

The first of these is that Labour do, as a matter of fact, have policies. Barrels of them. 45 policy documents since the last general election. 28 private members’ bills in the same period of time. This isn’t because Labour are particularly hard working, it’s because opposition parties always have lots of policy. They have time to devote to policy formation that simply isn’t available to government parties.

But it’s the second reason that shows precisely how stupid these attacks are. A decade ago looking up the policies of different parties was a very time consuming business. Most people simply didn’t have the time to do it, so they relied on the media to keep them informed. These days any voter with access to the internet can hop on to Google and find the answers they need in seconds. In the world of cheap point scoring, the referees are no longer in the dark.

The time has come for Labour to respond to these attacks, but to do so intelligently. Not by calling other parties liars and cowards, even if they having been frightened into telling lies, but by launching a campaign to sell our policies as aggressively as we’ve been selling some of our personalities.

We need a billboard campaign, backed with advertisements in the print media and online, under the slogan “Terms and Conditions Apply.” We’ll set out a group of five or six policies that Labour will insist on in any negotiations for a new government.

Not only will this help us address our ideas directly to the electorate, and bypass the filter of the media, but it will keep us left wing. The Spring Tide went out the moment we were seen to U-Turn on coalition with FF. The Lib Dems are currently, and quite rightly, getting hammered for flip flopping on VAT. If we’re going to run a campaign like this, and we should, we cannot afford to break our promises.