The man of purpose

The man of purpose does not understand, and goes on, full of contempt. He never loses his way. He knows where he is going and what he wants. Travelling on, he achieves great length without any breadth, and battered, besmirched, and weary, he touches the goal at last; he grasps the reward of his perseverance, of his virtue, of his healthy optimism: an untruthful tombstone over a dark and soon forgotten grave.

Joseph Conrad – An Outcast of the Islands (1896)


Who is the man of purpose today, the one destined to achieve little more than an untruthful tombstone over a dark and soon forgotten grave? Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey or one of a thousand others? The men of purpose perhaps we should say, and women. A multitude.

It’s a reminder of what the Nudge Unit does for political men and women of purpose. It diverts the desire to understand what they are up to by promoting paths of least resistance for ordinary folk. Not a new political strategy of course, this game has been going on since the death of Socrates and probably long before that.

There is always, throughout history, a persistent official campaign against ordinary folk freely understanding whatever they wish to understand. A campaign which is especially virulent today when it comes to understanding what went wrong with our culture. Especially virulent when it comes to officially suppressed matters of fact. Virulently absurd when it comes to the free expression of common sense such as...

…well it’s quite a list.

Infamous and irremediable

It was one of the tolerated scandals of Sambir, disapproved and accepted, a manifestation of that base acquiescence in success, of that inexpressed and cowardly toleration of strength, that exists, infamous and irremediable, at the bottom of all hearts, in all societies; whenever men congregate.

Joseph Conrad - An Outcast of the Islands (1896)

There is no doubt that the UK establishment is powerful - as they are in all functioning nations. It has the money, power and narrative controls to do as it chooses. The only constraints are broad constraints such as economic reality, the outer limits of believability and the remarkably broad and forgiving limits of internal incompetence. Because of course, establishments usually forgive themselves for their incompetence.

The coronavirus debacle highlights this as nothing else has within my lifetime. We voters are less than pawns in a partly covert game and are likely to remain so. To my mind the dispiriting aspect of the whole sorry mess is that far too many people are not disposed to analyse political issues. They dislike and ignore  conclusions which vary significantly from interlinked establishment narratives.

This crucial weakness is made worse by establishment narratives which include threads of misdirected criticism parody and even satire. Or a façade of challenging opposition which may be challenging but rarely represents significant opposition.

If establishments begin to rot from the inside then nothing much can be done. We have lies, corruption and incompetence in any establishment, but if they become too prominent, where is the way back apart from a resurgence of honesty and integrity? Where would that come from here in the UK?

As things stand we appear to be doomed.