The Rites of Wrongs
Revenge of the Millennials - My English Traits - Chapter 49
Buig die boompie terwyl hy nog jonk is.
Afrikaans adage
At some point in that passage of our lives we refer to somewhat optimistically as adulthood, we arrive at a fixed and more or less stable set of views, beliefs and opinions regarding the way the world should be. Now studies by the University of Chicago have confirmed what we always suspected — the older you get the more likely those views, beliefs and opinions will tend to migrate and settle at the conservative end of the political spectrum:
…when political attitudes do shift across the lifespan, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/706889
Yes, your opinions stiffen like your knees.
It’s understandable. You’ve worked long and hard for your wealth, security and privilege, and you want to keep it that way. You’re fully invested, philosophically and probably monetarily, in the status of the quo that got you here. Why would you want to change it?
The bad news, if you’re hoping or planning to live beyond the average expiry date of a Baby-Boomer, is that you’re going to be spending your dying days surrounded by loving, caring millennials who, in the nicest possible ways, will be wondering — sometimes out loud — how a formerly loving and caring daddy, granny, uncle or great aunt like you could have turned into such a crusty old fart with such pig-blind contempt and scorn for the fundamental tenets of basic human dignity, who never gave a flying fuck about what you were doing to the planet, and who turned the blind eye of entitlement on the corporate, nationalist, racist and ideological crimes that served to protect the thin film of your unabashedly self-obsessed bubble from being burst into a thousand and one droplets of crying shame.
As much as they still love you. As much as you once professed to love your neighbour.
Unlike us, the millennials are not getting more conservative with age. They’re getting more radical, more frustrated, and more outspokenly contemptuous of the Baby Boomer mentality that took everything, not excluding their power, their privilege, their prejudices and their patrimonies, merrily for granted.
According to John Burn-Murdoch’s fascinating study in the Financial Times of 30th December 2022, “Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics…”
Here’s the gist of it. Instead of following the familiar pattern of migrating from their naive hopes and dreams for a fairer world to the kind of cynical complacency that votes for whatever status quo ennobles them with the most status, these pinko young libtards insist on maintaining that the world could be a kinder, fairer planet for all who inhabit it. Including for the wild animals and the cuddlier creatures on Instagram; and including even for those less sentient creations such as trees and rivers, and the seas where the fish swim and the sky where the birds fly. If only we made a little effort in that direction.
Burn-Murdoch concludes with a prediction that will send shivers down the spine of those proto-fascists in the West who are yearning to turn the clock back to the years before Hitler gave fascism such a bad rap:
Western conservatives are at risk from generations of voters who are no longer moving to the right as they age.
https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4
What he doesn’t or can’t explain is why? So I’ll take a wildly uneducated guess. But first:
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterised by a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
The dictionary definition brings to mind the familiar images of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Oswald Mosely, a former Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster no less. Of Díaz, Cabrera, Vargas, Pinochet, Stroessner and Noriega. Of John Vorster, P.W. Botha and Idi Amin.
I won’t rehearse the rest for fear of stepping on sensitive toes. You know who they are. And not all of them belong to history. Several among them are getting cheered to the rafters of the new Reichstags popping up around the globe from Myanmar to Manchester as we speak.
What is notable about this is that we tend spontaneously to anthropomorphise the inhumanity of fascism into the human faces of the individual perpetrators. As though they and they alone were responsible for the black and white horrors recorded on the reels of history. As though to deny that we or anyone we ever knew ever actually supported them, overtly or secretly, shamefully or shamelessly. And we tend not to dwell on the social structures and institutions that gave them succour, that bred them, enabled them and allowed them to happen. That would make us all complicit.
So I’m going to take this home to Natal, to Estcourt High School, to Services School in Voortrekkerhoogte, to Ward 11 and to a secret military base on the Limpopo. Then on to the SABC, and to the scores of global corporates I worked on behalf of in South Africa, the UK, in Europe and in the USA.
But only to make one simple point:
Our experiences inside or at the hands of the institutions we were obliged to attend or pay attention to in our formative years between the ages of, let’s say, five and twenty-five, will shape, define and engrave in the deepest flesh of our mortal beings those moral, social and ethical principles that inform our political opinions for the rest of our miserly mortal days.
We like to believe we arrived at them by the care and consideration of common sense. The desperate truth of it is that they are mere translations of the accidental injuries and insults to our mute young bodies; of our somatic responses to the entirely arbitrary rewards and punishments, the equally arbitrary afflictions and affections, the recollected collections of comforts and cruelties, and to the trials, the tribulations and the treacheries that were visited upon them by these institutions before our minds were old enough to say no.
Bad things happen to good people. They say it’s how you deal with them that shapes your character. That’s horseshit — a cynically propagated lie designed to shift the blame from the abuser to the abused. And it’s oh-so British.
No. It’s your character that determines how you respond to bullying, sexual harassment, thoughtless brutalities, casual abuses, deliberate humiliations, random depravities of the body and the spirit, and to the heartless pretence that it’s all being done for some greater good. Worse still, for your greater good.
It’s your character that will endure it long enough to call it out. That will name it and shame it. That will speak the unspeakable when there’s no one to speak it for you.
I could just about deal with the arbitrary lashings, the prefects and fags, and the secret and not so secret predations and perversions of the famously English model of the institution that was Estcourt High School. My English character decided to grin and bear it. I was a good boy, a model student at a model school. I survived. I was liked and respected. I played rugby. Some friends remember me as the Siya Kolisi of the First XV. I’ll take it.
But it was there that I became aware for the first time of an egregious glitch in what I had assumed to be the god-ordained perfection of human nature. Some kids liked being punished, liked being beaten, liked being humiliated, liked being abused, maltreated, insulted, demeaned, disgraced and degraded. I assumed without understanding the meaning of it that they would have to be the masochists among us.
I’d heard of them, those bizarre aberrants who derived their pleasure from pain. Or overheard of them, rather, spoken in whispers in a booth in the ablution block where Wessels had contrived to coat the only functioning door handle in a slimy concoction of shit and semen. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.
They liked it, endured it and relished it not because they enjoyed it or desired it. They embraced it in all its callous variations because they knew that it wouldn’t be long before they would have free rein to abuse, humiliate, insult, demean and disgrace the fresh-faced innocents being led like my father’s young baconers into the factory that turned hope into fear and gentle hearts into cynical heart-breakers. Soon they would get their turn to do the same and worse.
My character responded to it with disgust. That was the flaw in it.
And there was a lot more disgust to come.
In 1971, Greefswald would confirm it. Aubrey Levin embodied it. The Jew who aspired to be the Mengele of apartheid.
Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this is repeated over and over; eventually it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony.
Franz Kafka
The ritual of hazing is precisely that. In sororities and wider societies it’s the elevation of suffering into a rite of passage. It’s callousness codified and brutality blessed. It’s a crime dressed up as a sacrament. It’s the perversion of the cross, the goodness of evil, a catechism of cruelty, the consecration of cuntiness, a cynical celebration of disgust for the flesh. And it’s redeemed by repetition until it’s a wrong made into a rite. Greefswald was one of its temples. With actual leopards.
I would get to witness it again and again. The oppressed who wanted to oppress. The brutalized who longed to be brutal. The transgressed who craved to transgress. The heart-weary desperate to be heartless. The lied-to who aspired to perfect the art of lying. The outsiders who dreamed of being the insiders who could make outsiders of others. The shamed who wanted to be shameless. The victims who needed to victimized. The corporate lackey who would abjure the cowardice of empathy to climb the ladder to those giddy sociopathic heights of success.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley
All of these and more are the ones now throwing their shoulders against the cold wheel of fascism to return the order of the world to nature red in tooth and claw.
I don’t know if there’s a name or a word for this paradoxical perversion. Revenge suggests retribution for a specific act of injustice. It’s a retaliation, a reprisal, a getting even. This goes deeper and significantly darker. They are bodies inspired to the brink of orgasm not by love or desire but by the bloody rush of a hatred that can be consummated only when the suffering of others is more extreme than their own.
How do people get to be like this? That Afrikaans expression says it all. “Buig die boompie terwyl hy nog jonk is.”
Bend the tree while it’s still a sapling. I’ve yet to hear a dictum for the generational continuity of fascism quite as chilling as that.
We didn’t want to bend our little saplings into anything. We kept them out of formal institutions, away from churches and religions, outside of the grasp of political predators and social perverts. There were some narrow escapes at some very reputable schools. They grew up blissfully unaware of Victorian sententiousness and Edwardian cant. They got bored with Harry Potter long before I made a braai of all his books.
The schools in London were bad enough. We did everything we could to get them to unlearn the shit they taught them. So did many of the parents of their friends.
Millennials are a different generation entirely: the youngest on the planet, the oldest in evolution’s long and frustrating attempts to produce a variation to be proud of. They developed their own preferences, explored their own imaginations, and found the paths that led them to their own versions of millennial mindfulness and kindfulness. And they won’t easily be bent.
Be nice ye ageing Boomer. Or that millennial waitress will spit in your pizza. I know. She’s my daughter.