Phobos earlier today, understandably upset about not getting justice, prudence or pulchritude, but fear
Here at British Intelligence GCHQ, as we survey a wounded landscape and troops engaging in a war they neither properly understand nor are trained and equipped to fight, we note that this could be a fertile time for phobias.
That’s right. If you are, say, Islamophobic, in that you think there are a couple of bits in the Koran about slaughtering Jews and whatnot that are a bit ripe, then after two months of quarantine you are more than likely to turn into a Gothic berserker and slay Muslims to the left and to the right. This we will not allow.
Now, let’s suppose that you are transphobic. Yes, I know, but there are people like that out there, people who have a nagging suspicion that won’t stop pulling at their coats telling them that there are only two genders, and they are biological, so can we please stop the carnival? Two months left to your own black-hearted devices, and you will be down the local drag club with a cricket bat studded with nails. These things are very real.
Then, let’s take the other type of phobia, cunning and mischievous Phobos at work, seeking whom he may devour. This is the type of fear that the state foists on you, perhaps as part of some obscure tax credit system or what have you. You know, we’re the government, you give us money, we give you back some low-quality public sector lazybones along with fear and apprehension about your future.
The many and wise sayings of St. Greta of Tinseltown may make you afraid. That much was certainly the idea, the guiding principle of her flagellant crusade. Various health ‘experts’ – we are in a time of experts – will have put the wind up you in a bit with their COVID projections. When the virus is over, if the ‘it’s really just ‘flu’ camp have won a victory, the doom-mongers should be debarred along with the horse they rode in on, that being the media.
You see, in the end, fear will find you out. The more government can make you, not too afraid, but afraid, the more you are, existentially speaking, an indentured servant. Because the bigger government gets the more it supports you, and thus the more support there is to take away. What the government can’t achieve by the squandering of tax money, it will do with fear and shame. We think we are modern. So did the Romans, but the two societies run along similar lines in terms of the dark undercurrents of human nature.
And you don’t just have to be afraid of your government now. They’ve added an ornamental feature. Your neighbours can grass you up now, for not wearing spiked under-garments in support of the NHS. That’s the first step. Then your neighbours get online because of the mouthful you gave them in the garden, and what’s this? These are some interesting websites to be commenting on. I think I might just give my man at the hate-crime hub a little tinkle.
About your job. There are two broad types of job now. The first is one in which you can voice your opinions freely either inside or outside the workplace, and it will have absolutely no effect on your job security or opportunity for promotion. Then there is the other type of job, the type where you can’t do that. Which type do you have?
This has, of course, set the training agenda for a new type of meritocracy, the meritocracy of the snide, the league of oily little chancers, both in the office and out of it. Ooo, I’d like that promotion. But Salim is going to get it! Unless I have a peek at some of those Al-Jazeera sites he goes to, and where they might lead…
So you can be afraid of your colleagues and neighbours now, as well as gangs both street and grooming, the police who are no longer on your side, and a government which seems to be trying out a police state in the way a Parisian ingénue tries out a new scent.
Phobiaphobia is, of course, a fear of phobias, which opens up Bertrand Russell’s famous problem in set theory all over again. Is phobiaphobia part of the set (phobias)? But that is for another time and, here, would be as superfluous as the study of Roman victories over the Sarmatians which, as Gibbon tells us in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ‘…would not be rewarded with either amusement or education’. (Could we stick to something like the point? Ed.)
So, be not too afraid. Samuel T. Francis, of course, told us about anarcho-tyranny, in which government licences just enough of the anarchy to apply the tyranny. It’s just a question of where it is applied. Chin up.
Photo credit - Bigstock