I’m involved in setting up an Adam Curtis Party Conference.
Adam Curtis is a famous BBC television documentary maker. He creates quirky programmes about geopolitics and social change.
One of Curtis’s interests is political language. Ten years ago he made a film called Hypernormalisation. It’s about how the language of politics became corrupted in the old Soviet Union.
Nothing made any sense, but there was nothing you could do to change anything, so people just accepted the fake world and acted accordingly.
Politicians lied, and everyone knew they lied, but what could you do?
What Curtis has said at other times is that the revolutions of 1848 that took place across Europe witnessed the emergence of the new vocabulary that we use today to describe political ideas.
Concepts like ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘left’. ‘right’, ‘Socialist’ and ‘Conservative’.
This language continues to prevail.
But by the C21st when Americans promised to bring ‘democracy’ to Iraq or Afghanistan, it really had no meaning.
It’s just a sound that signals ‘virtue’ and ‘legitimacy’. Who is against ‘democracy’?
The reason for this vacuous language is that politicians are not seeking to lead collective action by making rousing speeches.
The problem for Sir Keir Starmer is not that he doesn’t have power.
He doesn’t have a clue what to do with it.
Global capitalism is now where Soviet Communism was in the late 1980s.
Starmer is not firing us up to take any action ourselves.
And he’s not proposing anything that will change the social order: closing failing universities, lowering the school leaving age, offering benefits to small businesses lost to AI.
He just wants to keep the system going at any cost.
Meanwhile our lives are being drained of collective meaning and purpose.
We’ve already had a totalitarian interlude (lockdowns).
What’s next? War? Rationing? Social chaos?
The system doesn’t work for anyone, but what else can we do?
As a speechwriter, it’s my job to compose speeches (although I’ve never worked in politics).
To prepare for the Curtis conference, I’ve started to collect examples of ‘hypernormal’ language: language that politicians use to signal an idea, but when we reflect, it has no correspondence in reality.
Let’s take ‘growth’. I heard Michael Gove talk about ‘growth’ on BBC Question Time last week.
Also Andy Burnham claimed he had created ‘economic growth’ in Manchester.
The media is obsessed with ‘growth’ in the economy. There is a terror of it stalling. Nobody wants to be ‘in recession’.
But ‘delivering growth’ isn’t always positive: cancerous growth is growth, but it leads to death.
I would suggest that ever since 2008, we’ve had cancerous growth in the economy.
Mergers and acquisitions are not growth.
I’ve noticed that among the services I use, two mergers have recently taken place: Virgin and O2 and TSB bank and Santander.
Are these developments creating positive ‘growth’?
I don’t think so. They’re signs of failure.
The solutions offered in the market place will be more uniform. And if we want to go elsewhere, there are fewer options.
What is our experience when we go out of the front door?
Look at the High Street. Not ‘growth’ but ‘economic disintegration’.
I’ve written speeches for a tech entrepreneur. He talks about ‘disruptive technologies’.
And that’s precisely it. Britain had a number of department stores at the beginning of the century. These provided stable jobs, social interactions and footfall in town centres.
Online retailers ‘disrupted’ these businesses until they disappeared.
Lower prices, and maybe bigger profits. But traders now operate in isolation in the virtual world, not as a community of traders in real shared space.
And the byproducts of trading in the real world: social connection, human selling, shop windows, business rates, exercise, new experiences, random encounters, have been lost.
Amazon, for example, is a sarcoma. Look at the growth! Behold the damage!
Amazon gradually increases prices as it eliminates competition. It claims to allow traders to use its system but it’s always creating new rules and taking more commission on sales.
I’m creating a vocabulary book with similar examples of debased language. I’ll publish them as a glossary on this blog when I’ve got a big enough collection.
The Adam Curtis Party Conference is taking place in Bournemouth from 11-13 September. Tickets are available here.
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