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The importance of distinguishing between people who tell lies for personal gain and people who believe them for personal reasons will be a recurring theme throughout this book.
When people like him, and there are plenty who employ altogether more sophisticated language and sophistry to make similar points, demand that their right to free speech be respected, what they are really demanding is that their speech be free from scrutiny.
it has always been easier and more lucrative to sell tickets for the ghost train than for the speak-your-weight machine.
When the former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, elected to compare these human beings to ‘bank robbers’ and ‘letterboxes’ in August 2018fn2 , he was feeding the anger and confusion of people like Martin. It’s hard to imagine what good he thought might come of it.
I don’t know what’s worse, doing it for money while not believing in it or doing it because you really do believe that ethnicity and geography deliver some sort of innate value to a human being.
The conflation of ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘freedom to say silly things without being challenged’ and, more, ‘freedom to insist that people have to listen to me even if they think I’m ridiculous and/or dangerous’
Theresa May took this aversion to thinking to its apotheosis when she declared that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ shortly after becoming prime minister in July 2016. Even by the standards of modern British politics, this is a slogan of such sweeping vacuity that it beggars belief that she could utter the words with a straight face.
Charged with defending an obviously flawed organisation against claims that leaving it would deliver utopia, they had nothing in their arsenal save a status quo that many found profoundly unsatisfactory.
Short for ‘involuntary celibates’, it describes a self-styled group of male supremacists who believe in what the psychology professor and author Jordan Peterson – who, whether by accident or design, is something of a hero to both the so-called ‘men’s rights’ and ‘alt-right’ movements – has called ‘enforced monogamy’. Peterson, who famously believes that the natural state of human hierarchies and relationships would mirror those of lobsters, contends that Minassian ‘was angry at God because women were rejecting him. The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.
‘tramp angst’. It bears little or no relation to one’s actual financial situation, but instead describes an often irrational fear of penury. Hitchens did not suffer from it, but the considerably wealthier Amis apparently does. My dad didn’t suffer from it, but I do. For most of my early twenties, when I was trying and mostly failing to get a foot in the door of Fleet Street, I could lie awake at night for hours terrified of unspecified failure. My ambition was considerable but it was built more, I realise now, on dreams of security rather than status.
Take an angry person, tell them you feel their pain, give them a target for their anger and help them to switch off their brain.
When the liars have the loudest voices, the tellers of truth need to find new ways to be heard.
