How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

by James O'Brien

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And, having no respect, he ceases to love. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Whether it is the immigrant family with an enormous council house or a horribly misguided decision to take the Union Flag down from a council building, these instances are news precisely because they are as rare as hen’s teeth. In the hands of an editor like Gallagher, however, they are served up as though commonplace, as proof that ‘we’ are somehow being overwhelmed by ‘them’. It’s heady stuff and leads to people like Bob not even realising that they have developed pungent opinions while possessed of precisely no proof to support them.

I don’t know why he wanted, perhaps even needed, the narrative of being overwhelmed and under threat to be true. So much so that he made stuff up to prove it. But I know that he embarrassed himself only because he was asked, politely and calmly, to provide some proof of what he claimed and, apparently, believed.

A thought occured to me. Maybe because it gave him a purpose in life. He could stand up to something, proof his worth.

I was never exposed to much more than playground ribbing, but I do remember thinking, even then, that the people who sought to conflate people like me and my dad with the men and women who detonated bombs in two Birmingham pubs in 1974, killing 21 people, were in many ways doing the work of the terrorists for them. The more fractured and divided a society becomes, the more fertile the ground is for terrorists to plant their views and ideologies.

The reason why conversations like this are simultaneously so frustrating and revealing is that people like him have lost the desire to question what they are being told. Their bespoke, unchallenged diet of ‘news’, augmented we now know by Facebook algorithms and deliberately fake stories, is so unvaried that the possibility that it might be largely bogus is never entertained.

Ray: I was just listening to what you said about the internet melting our brains and I wanted to tell you what happened to me. James: Go on. Ray: I don’t really know any Muslims, but I started reading stuff online a few months ago, the EDL and that, and the more I read the angrier I got. James: Angry about what? Ray: Angry about these people poncing off us while plotting to kill us. James: Wow. Ray: I know, but they’d back it up by quoting from the Koran or the Hadiths and kind of prove all their points about Muslims without ever actually talking to any. James: So what happened? Ray: My wife told me to stop. James: What do you mean? Ray: I was getting angry with her, with the family, with everyone really. I’d start trying to convince everyone that we were under siege and they just couldn’t see it. The wife said I was making myself ill and making her unhappy and she told me to leave the laptop under the sofa for a month. James: What happened? Ray: I was sorted in less than a week. Never look at that stuff anymore. Couldn’t be happier.

Andy is not stupid. He’s a bright, entrepreneurial professional with his own young company and an eye on the future. He hasn’t mentioned immigration (yet) and doesn’t subscribe to some bogus nineteenth-century notion of English exceptionalism. He has – and this is crucial to understand – simply existed for years in a media-defined environment where the depiction of the overarching and negative influence of ‘EU laws’ went so unchallenged it became, for him and millions like him, a simple truth. Citing bendy bananas didn’t prove a lack of substantive evidence for his position, rather it proved how deeply ingrained it had become in much of the national psyche that bananas were somehow the tip of some malevolent iceberg.

Despite the title of this book, it is refreshing, in an age of increasingly reductionist and binary debate, to recognise the importance of sometimes saying the three most undervalued words in the English language: I don’t know.