A century of fakers

Or: Let’s pretend

Or: Lies, damned lies! 

We live in age of falsity. We pretend things aren’t so because to confront the reality of them would be too upsetting for our delicate, pampered, silly selves. Philip Larkin called religion “that vast moth-eaten musical brocade designed to pretend that we never die”, and although we are more secular now, the denial of death is stronger than ever.

Women used to wear black for months or years following the death of a family member, with the custom dying out around a hundred years ago. My late grandpa, who was the manager of collieries in the north east, would sometimes have to inform wives of his workers that their husband had been killed in an accident in the pit. The harsh realities of life and death were considerably more visible in days gone by.

We couldn’t pretend as much then. These days, with our needs taken care of by consumer capitalism, with virtually no one in the West wanting for things that those throughout the entirety of human history longed for, we’ve put ourselves into a position where we can avoid inconvenient truths or just tell lies.

After death, sex is the next thing we make up rubbish about. We even pretend that men can become women by saying that they are women and ‘acting’ like women, and there are severe penalties for disputing this, as the likes of JK Rowling have found out.

In recent years we’ve come to believe that there is no such thing as the predatory female, or the female who willingly uses her sexual wiles to advance herself, something the peerless Douglas Murray has written about. The chatterati will not counter the idea that some women like posing naked or in sexually alluring ways, despite the mountain-load of evidence just a few clicks away on any internet browser. Women who post nude selfies are not being forced to do so, they do it because they want to. The feminists’ argument about the ‘exploitation’ of women on Page 3 or in top shelf magazines crumbles. 

Polite society denigrates glamour models and talks of ‘sexism’ and ‘objectification’ while the data shows that porn websites are among the most popular in the world. Xvideos and Pornhub apparently receive an average of 3.14 and 2.85 trillion monthly visitors respectively (not unique visitors, of course!). The hypocrisy is astounding.

Yes, the following is trivial (though that’s kind of the point), but official naturist organisations, and the main magazine in the field, H&E, pretend that there is no sexual element to being naked, and that nothing sexual happens in places where nudism is practised. While it is true that many nudists are not inclined towards this, many are, as the classified pages of H&E, and of numerous websites on the internet, will demonstrate.

Sex’s enemy of the past is religion and remains so, to a degree. The world’s fastest growing religion is Islam, which our politicians and media dub a ‘religion of peace’, despite stunning evidence to the contrary. As the incisive thereligionofpeace.com documents, Islamic terrorists have carried out more than 37,947 deadly terror attacks since 9/11 (as of 20 October, 2020). Incidentally, this website used to come out top of the Google search results - now it is in the middle of the second page of results. Google, like other tech giants Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit, are in on the pretence game, and boy, have they got the power to deceive the whole world. Our game of ‘let’s pretend’ will not go away, it’ll only grow, as the problems we seek to ignore or play down only get worse and worse.

Our government pretends that maintaining the triple-lock on pensions is sustainable in the long run, when in a few years time there will be more pensioners than working people. It pretends that social security can be maintained at current levels despite the shrinking tax base (which is now shrinking a lot faster thanks to its obliteration of the economy).

In our ‘all must have prizes’ culture, we pretend that each person has the same potential, and it is only their environment or prejudice that is holding them back, as opposed to their innate biological make-up or other factors like simple bad luck.

We pretend that happiness is a permanently achievable state and that if you are not happy at work, for instance, then this is an awful and strange thing which must be countered with therapy and drugs (I am not for one moment saying there is no such thing as genuine depression, only that we have probably tipped too far in the direction of encouraging people, particularly young people, to believe that they are in a bad way). Our forebears knew that we are rarely happy at work!

We pretend that we can solve incredibly complex problems with simple solutions. We pretend that we can solve climate change with a few tweaks to our behaviour. We pretend that some books aren’t bad, that some people aren’t ugly or useless, that even the most barbaric cultures have worth, that a pile of tyres passes for art, that being obese isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We talk up the advantages of mass immigration while never daring mention the downsides. We’re so damned nice our society is collapsing around our ears. 

How have we come to be so detached from reality? Academia in thrall to neo Marxism and post modernism, probably. By pushing out plain wrong - incontrovertibly wrong - arguments such as we are all blank slates at birth, the poison has seeped into wider society, slowly but surely. A lot of television and movies are so in thrall to a 'progressive' doctrine that the stories they tell are divorced from the ancient truths and biological facts that our societies have been built on, and therefore have nothing wise or enriching to say. 

  

In the light of all this pretending, is it any wonder that governments pretend they can control a virus with lockdowns? Or that a vaccine will come along soon and magically make everything all right? Or that this so-called ‘second wave’ is anywhere near as bad as the first? Or that the NHS is still fully operational? Or that these lockdowns aren’t wrecking our children’s education? Or that masks are effective at stopping the ingestion of pathogens? Or that the collateral damage caused by the lockdowns is somehow a) not that important b) may have happened anyway and c) is a price worth paying. 

The mendacity of our leaders would be astonishing were it not for the fact that it comes from a ship afloat on a sea of lies and delusion.