Ho, Ho, Ho.

Ben Wildsmith

Now, see, when I was youngster if flying objects ‘the size of cars’ started appearing above military bases it would definitely have been cause for concern.

In those days, before belief in anything at all was viewed as a childish retreat from reality, we used to get quite worked up over existential threats to the continuance of human life on earth.

Hope, though, is for losers: an exhausted marketing device that has had its day.

As we enter the mid-21st century, the entire gamut of human depravity has been packaged and sold to us with such efficiency that even annihilation is too boring to discuss.

Some woman has slept with a hundred blokes in a day on the internet, a pint costs six quid, nuclear war edged closer to reality, whatever, it’s all just stuff.

Deterioration

It keeps unfolding and deterioration is its only predictable feature. However ghastly last week was, you can rely on the next to be worse because novelty and shock sell. Well, they have until now, at any rate, but that feeling we all have, the creeping realisation that something is about to tip over irrevocably, has us paralysed.

For society to function, it has to have a shared investment in the future. However illusory, we need a sense of better times to come if we are to heave ourselves out of bed and pad down the stairs on dark mornings to enslave ourselves.

It’s not much to ask, people willingly sign over their whole lives on the promise of easier times for their children.

Lefties like me have always claimed that deal was a confidence trick, but it was, at the very least, enough to keep most of us occupied, fed, and sane.

Carrot

You may not have ended up with an actual carrot, but belief in its existence cohered us enough to share our lives together, however hard they were.

All that’s left of that paradigm is the stick. Your wages are worth less every week, you can’t change anything by voting, the natural environment is collapsing into dysfunction, and psychopathic despots are running every corner of the world.

The sweetest, most enviable aspect of human life is youth: the promise of a blank slate on which to write your destiny.

Tell the truth, do you envy kids now? Would you fancy climbing the mountain we have left for them? We have reduced ourselves from Shakespeare’s angels in apprehension to data points in Elon Musk’s dull fantasies.

Hemmed in, surveilled, and monitored as we are, our opportunities to cause real trouble are limited and shrinking.

Rage

The inchoate rage of Tommy Robinson’s band of cretins cannot be all the resistance on offer to this state of affairs.

If we are to survive at all we need to develop radical kindness as a political force. We must insist on the decency most of us project in our private spheres.

Cruelty in public spaces, whether it be rhetorical or economic, should be treated as shame on us all, rather than normalised and eventually rewarded.

After all, a species isn’t just for Christmas.