#48.20 - Last night

Lennart Helje 🇸🇪 (b. 1940)

It has been a turbulent week. A week of change and a week of settling. Everything, always changes.

I am now so bored with outrage. People getting upset over everything. The levels of hysteria which we have been operating now for the last three years, since Cambridge Analytica changed everything with Trump, has been exhausting. The liberal elite, who let's face it, have deserved what they have gotten, and the populist voters, who are having a resurgence, finding their voices after years of being ignored by the elites - all types of elites - are now attacking the migrants - who let's face it, are also going to have their own fight back soon. It is a poisonous broth and it can't end well.

The best case scenario is that society slowly falls apart and we see sense and end up in communes that co-operate with each other. The worst case - unending war which ends up destroying everything on the planet. That is no longer a fantasy, a Holywood film.

I have written about feeling very amused by this. I literally am not panicked, worried, upset. I am not even frustrated about anything. People have long warned about this and they have told governments over and over again for AGES - absolutely AGES - that if they continued and pursued this policy the result will be the eventual breakdown of society. You need to redistribute the wealth and set about having a sustainable economic policy that places the Earth front and centre of everything. But did they do this? No, no they did not.

They did the exact opposite. They decided that this was just leftist liberal whinging instead of righting the wheel. So they just ignored this. The few idiots, capable as they were, tried to jump on the bandwagon and everyone else trailed behind. And... now here we are.

What really annoys me as well as how fanatical people have become. For instance, Ghin said that someone accidentally gave them gelatin sweets to eat. He was quite annoyed about this. I said to him, Ghin it was an honest mistake. This intolerance is now almost religious. I cannot bear it.

The wokeness in our culture is driving me mad. Why can't people ever be in the middle? Am I in the last generation who is happy to be straight and omnivorous. I have no dietary requirements. I am not gluten intolerant, I don't really have any allergies (the shellfish allergy is now mysterious gone), I can have sugar, lactose, diary, whatever. I have no political ideologies which are crippling. It is weird you know.

So Identity Politics and the Politics of the Body - what I call the You Are What You Don't Eat diet - has become a substitute for effective political action. Because the change which we need in real life can't be delivered by the political system, so what has happened is people have started to focus on what they can control - and that is what goes into their bodies. It is a form of anorexia and bulimia - which is what happens with people who have no agency over their lives do in order to protest against the system. Like teenage girls.

So I see it as this kind of refusal to eat anything as a form of controlling the world around them. What enters them while the then are able to participate in the things which they really want to change.

Around twenty years ago I was considered radical. Now I'm a sell out amongst the activist world. I am kinda tired of being in the middle and being caught in the cross fire.

I also think that this obsession with diversity is also a red herring. It is only skin deep. Diversity is about people who look different, but think the same as I do. Should they be of the same colour but think differently, then woe betide the person. I am not at all for the return to the rule of Straight White Men, but they too have their place in the world and we cannot go around marginalising them just because we were marginalised. We are all human beings in the end and the human project will not succeed if we don't do this together. To do this slowly together.

God last night I had such a strange dream... So strange...

Right, I'm gonna get started now.