Unreality, Madness and the Ideological Hugbox

Or: The Setting of the Big Mac Sun

Mar 04, 2022

As the Empire of Lies tries to deplatform Russia and all information coming out of Ukraine that does not conform to its narrative, three things have become even more starkly apparent than they already were to many of us: the extent of the unreality of that narrative, the madness of our elites, and the increasingly totalitarian nature of the ideological hugbox. I will take the rest of this article to outline them.

1. Robert De Niro and Unreality

First, the narrative in question at no point touches even the semblance of reality. It doesn’t need to. Some days I ask myself how the 1997 film Wag the Dog was ever made.[1] But of course, that was then: merely the Ashes of Civilization. Those people born in the late 1990s and the early 2000s don’t even remember the ashes, they live only in the memory of them. Back in the late 1990s, both filmmakers and their audiences had the mental capacity to comprehend narratives that were not straightforward tales of good versus evil set in a Marvel universe. Back then, audiences were allowed to contemplate the fact that their leaders might lie to them. But that was then. Now, Robert De Niro – who had already become a parody of himself by the year culture stopped (2000) just three years after he’d starred in Wag the Dog –has, naturaly, just given a talk at another shadow of a shadow, Cambridge University, about how the madman Putin must be stopped.[2]

The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd
The shadow or your face.[3]

If only Shakespeare could see England now, he was wise enough never to attend university of course.

A brittle glory shineth in this face.
As brittle as the glory is the face,
(He breaks the mirror.)
For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers.[4]

It’s worth ruminating on how Robert De Niro described the problem in Ukraine. He said,

You see what’s happening in Ukraine now, you have to stand up and say ‘you can't do that, it's wrong’. It’s that simple. It's not even about democracy, it’s about right and wrong – the truth.

It’s that simple, it’s about right and wrong. And this simple story is what everything must be reduced to like a giant vapid pulsating pussy-hat-shaped blackhole. 10,000 years of human history must be crushed between the thighs of some tosspot graduate who has read some Judith Butler but only has the capacity to understand Harry Potter – though not the notorious bigot JK Rowling herself of course.

2. The Madness of Decadent Elites

Second, our elites are stark raving mad. We suspected a certain degree of Bioleninsim, but the stereotypical white-pantsuit, Kentucky-Fried-string-tie-wearing, Miss-Prissy-out-of-Foghorn-Leghorn-looking closeted homosexual, Senator Lindsay Graham, is openly calling for Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, to be assassinated.[5] This scarcely a week after the moronic British foreign secretary Liz Truss almost provoked a nuclear war because she’s a stupid woman, who read half a book by Friedrich von Hayek once,[6] and not a person who is in any way fit to hold High Office.[7] Douglas Murray once wrote that many people in The West have lost ‘the “tragic sense of life.” They have forgotten what the World War II generation so painfully learnt: that everything you love, even the greatest and most cultured civilizations in history, can be swept away by people who are unworthy of them.’[8] When he said, ‘people who are unworthy of them’, Murray was thinking Muslims, but make no mistake: neither Graham nor Truss are worthy of their ancestors. This lunacy is a direct reflection of the people over whom they lord: ‘Every nation gets the government it deserves.’[9] Rather than blanket condemnation, Graham found many cretinous plebians cheering him on – especially those with blue waves in their profiles on twitter, who proudly declared that this was the first time in their lives they have ever agreed with Graham on anything. It’s that simple, it’s about right and wrong.

3. The Total Ideological Hugbox

Third, it has become ever more apparent that the totalitarian narrative hugbox will brook no dissent, as in None. At. All. And it is starting to resemble those walls closing in when they’re down the trash chute in Star Wars or maybe that white circle in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. Insane Western leaders declare Russia isolated from the world as people in Brazil, India, China and the Muslim world look on in total bemusement. Somewhere a 90-year-old Indian fellow is telling his great grandchildren, ‘the British were not always like this but thank Shiva and Vishnu that we’re independent now.’ Forgive me for quoting the seemingly tautological and obstruse rantings of a Marxist, but beneath the obfuscation Louis Althusser understood the true workings of The Matrix better than Curtis Yarvin does:

I might add: what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific
knowledge to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).[10]

This insight lies at the heart of why they must control and police the boundaries of the hugbox so tightly. The narrative simply cannot admit an outside because ideology has no outside. The monopoly on truth is within the narrative. It’s that simple, it’s about right and wrong. Anything within the narrative is good, it is true, it is science, it is information. Anything outside the narrative is wrong, it is false, it is anti-science, it is misinformation. When an ideology metastasizes to this point it becomes, in fact, profoundly brittle. Reality will keep knocking at its gates and it must keep on pushing out more and more people to bolster the barricades. At its apparent peak of power, we see the total ideological system start to shrink. Once Western leaders dreamed of bringing Russia, China, India and so on ‘online’ into the End of History, with a McDonald’s on every corner. But now the circle gets smaller as it gets more oppressive; American hegemony recedes. Europe, its vassal, becomes shrill and feminine as its former colonies look on with a mixture of horror and amusement. Now the workaday lyrics of The Beautiful South (dubbed ‘everyone’s second-favourite band’ in 1996 but now almost completely forgotten) look more like the wishful thinking of the elites than the safe and bland Michael Moore left-wingery of the pop charts:

A plastic world and we're all plastic too
Just a couple of different faces in a dead man’s queue
The world is turning Disney and there's nothing you can do
You’re trying to walk like giants
but you're wearing Pluto’s shoes
And the answers fall easier from the barrel of a gun
Than it does from the lips of the beautiful and the dumb
The world won’t end in darkness, it’ll end in family fun
With Coca Cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun[11]

Sorry to break it to you mid-90s, but Vladimir Putin still has the barrel of a gun and the Big Mac sun is setting.[12] Now in fairness to Paul Heaton, I could find no evidence of him virtue signalling or talking about anything political whatsoever (usually a good sign) beyond complaining that ‘illegal downloading has made him skint.’[13] One suspects that many people who were ostensibly and passively ‘on the left’ in the 1990s, have long since become horrified by what we are witnessing. And this is good, because every person who finds themselves ‘outside’ the total ideology, as per Althusser, can say ‘I was in ideology’. Their power lies in the mind virus – you being free of that gives you extraordinary power. You are an exceptional individual by that virtue alone: a titan among cattle. They can take everything material from you, friends, but the fact you are outside their web means that you’ve already defeated them in spirit. The darkest part of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the fact that the totalitarian dystopian regime exists as such, it is that after his failed rebellion, Winston is reduced to saying ‘I love you Big Brother.’ That was fiction. In reality, I have yet to see a single hardened dissident go back to loving Big Brother. Not one. High-voiced Scottish students who drink lemon tea don’t count. We must steel ourselves never to give in – in any case don’t worry our elites are too effete to use genuine Room 101 torture tactics and as soon as that stops being the case they’ll have become lions rather than foxes in any case, so win-win in a sense. You must carry in your heart a total defiance of the narrative, even as it appears that you are surrounded by lunatics. The narrative is their only power and – despite the appearance to the contrary – it is fading fast.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog.

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-60557249.

[3] William Shakespeare, Richard II (1595), 4.1.303-4.

[4] Ibid., 4.1.298-300.

[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60621796.

[6] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-liz-truss-s-lse-lecture-i-want-to-take-a-zero-tolerance-approach-to-wasteful-spend-.

[7] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/liz-truss-sparked-putins-nuclear-threat-kremlin-claims-314034/.

[8] Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 3.

[9] Joseph de Maistre, Lettres et Opuscles (Paris: A. Vaton, 1851), p. 215.

[10] Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans Ben Brewster (1971; London: Verso, 2001), p. 175.

[11] https://genius.com/The-beautiful-south-one-god-lyrics.

[12] https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/mcdonalds-under-fire-failing-boycott-26384122.

[13]