Bad News.
You might want to sit down.
Boris Johnson has won the Conservative Leadership Contest.
Boris Johnson is now, effectively, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (whether he cares at all about the latter or not).
I want to call him all sorts of names at this points: names like Idiot in Chief; Prime Muppet; Brainless Johnson; and That Brexit Twat, but it's worse than any of that.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is not stupid.
I'm not saying that an idiot in power is a good thing; you only have to look at post-2016 America to see how destructive the Dunning-Kruger effect can be when combined with actual power and influence.
Comparing America and Britain has never been quite so salient a point, either; both the brash idiot in the White-House and the callous toff poised to enter number 10 are demagogues - and in a way, the differences between these two moral vacuums are the clearest reflection of the underlying cultural differences between these two countries that my lifetime has yet offered; I think Hillary's ill-advised but spot-on turn of phrase "basket of deplorables" applies well to a large portion of both of their most ardent supporters, but while their supporters may fall broadly into the same demographic in both countries (below-average income and education, english-speaking, white, rural) they still look for different things when deciding who is the boss.
Trump and Johnson both won their positions in a manner that doesn't really belong in a democracy (Trump through the much-more-easily-repaired-than-you-think weirdness of the electoral college, and Johnson through the oh-so-British tradition of the elected leader of the people not actually being elected by the people), and both essentially won on platforms of... I want to say "fear of the other" but there's a perfectly good word for that and the word is racism.
Trump's was entirely open, and his position (for all that he might claim that he did not like the anti-Ihlan Omar chant of "Send Her Back") has never been open to any real interpretation. He doesn't like brown people. He just stops short of actually specifying that, but he's clearly quite happy for both his opponents and his supporters to fully understand that that is what he wants. He is also American in a way that very few Americans are; he is brash, unapologetic and utterly convinced of American Exceptionalism; there is no explanation of why America can fund terrorism and America can topple democratically elected governments and America can have nucleur weapons when any other nation is not allowed to do those things; the only explanation necessary is that America says so. We're not even given the explanation of "because communism" so popular with American politicians, because America says so is all that we need to know.
Johnson is... a little bit different.
For a start, he is very open to interpretation. His many - many many many many - public gaffes may make him seem like another politically incorrect buffoon stumbling from one scandal to the next, but they are always presented very much as a "whoopsie" - unlike Trump, Johnson is happy to say "Golly gosh, look how I messed up, I am so terribly sorry", which placates his detractors ("well, at least he doesn't think that that's acceptable behaviour") without convincing the racist core of his supporters that he didn't actually mean it. But even to them, this "Whoospydaisy!" approach to offensiveness is likely important: despite the rush of racist and xenophobic attacks in the wake of the Brexit referendum, the idea of Britishness still creates some notion that there must be at least a veneer of respectability (which, if you look at history, is really all that there ever was to it); it's important for Boris to know that it's not alright to say those things, but so deliciously humanising for him to "accidentally" say them anyway.
And while Trump is, in his own words, a "very stable genius" and will fight anyone who says differently, Boris seems to go to lengths to convince everyone around him that he is a bit of an idiot, really, and then laugh with those who see through it about how effective it is.
He is a bullying buffoon, and a charming academic, whichever the moment requires. He could be the most objectionable weirdo, compellingly tragic backstory included, on Big Brother and then a witty academic on Have I Got News For You the next day (I'm not going to look up if he's ever been on Big Brother. I don't want to know).
Really, Boris Johnson's position is very straightforward: publicity pays, and it should pay him the most, please.
This is very like Trump - and, incidentally, very like Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Like Trump, and like Rees-Mogg, Johnson has lived a live of rare privilege, pretty much from birth.
Unlike them, he is not a completely coddled moron with no concept of how the world beyond their adult-size diapers and gold-plated playroom actually operates.
Perhaps he was a little less coddled, or perhaps a little more intelligent, that he can quite readily understand most people and their plight.
This is what makes him worse than either of them - he just doesn't care.
This is where I digress quite briefly on the nature of good and bad.
I don't normally like the idea of "bad people" and "good people".
I don't even like the idea that people exist on a spectrum between "good" and "bad", with or without an arbitrary cutoff where people can be fundamentally lumped as more one than the other.
Although it's my usual counterpoint, I don't even particularly agree with the sentiment that people do good things and people do bad things.
I do believe that under intense scrutiny, most actions can be considered to have a "good" or a "bad" net effect, but if we're going to moralize about them, the context is essential.
For example: British government sending money to alleviate suffering in disaster-stricken nations in the developing world.
Looks like a good thing, right?
But what if that money goes through expensive institutions staffed almost entirely through cronyism, and at the same time the government props up dictators and refuses to impose restrictions on business that would prevent the rampant profiteering that forces those developing nations to base their economy entirely on exploitation of labourers at wages that are nothing more than a bad joke, so that neither nations nor individuals can buffer their lives against the disasters exacerbated by environmental exploitation - also often for western profit, rendering the donations of British taxes nothing more than a hollow publicity stunt.
Sound like a bad thing?
But what if the people deciding to give have no way of knowing or even suspecting the corruption that their giving supports? Are they paving their own road to hell? Or are they doing a good thing?
It's all a bit messy, really.
I do not think good intentions alone are enough to redeem an action; a good intention turned into action without even considering the consequences does indeed seem like it would nicely fill the pothole on mile 42 of the road to hell: if you're intending to help someone but not interested enough to even contemplate how effective your help will be, you're not interested in them so much as making yourself feel better for one reason or another. Such thoughtless giving can - and does - often help the recipient, but don't pretend that you're not doing it for selfish reasons, such as feeling better about seeing homeless people or making those Oxfam Chugger-Muggers go away. We've all done it (well, not the chugger muggers... I considered giving to one, once, and we spent a long while going through the literature she had with her before we agreed - or at least, I felt we agreed - that it was not a financially effective way for me to make the world a better place), so I say this without judgement, but thoughtless giving is not your ticket to heaven but a rather selfish act.
I want to distinguish this from mindless giving - which is to say, thoughtless giving by those who do not have the wherewithal to actually put thought into their giving. This is where giving is not even a conscious response, but a reflex action - essentially the monetary version of a mother lactating at the sound of her baby's cry.
These people take me back to my assertion that there are no good and bad people, and now I narrowly avoid contradicting myself by saying that I do think that many people seem instinctively driven to do good or bad things.
I do not think that a fundamentally kind, generous act carried out without thought or intention qualifies as specifically good in the broader, moral-philosophy context; to take it to the extremes, it would be to say that trees producing oxygen as a by-product of their metabolism are morally upstanding, when - despite the obviously (to us) beneficial effects of this action, the complete lack of intention means that it is morally neutral.
At this point, mostly for fun, I'm going to bring consciousness (and thereafter the concept of the soul) into the discussion.
It seems to be getting popular to define consciousness as having a sense of self, which is itself a tricky enough thing to define: if you push two sponges through a sieve together, they will famously display their sense of self when all the little bits of sponge regroup into the original two sponges - or at least, into multiple sponges that do not combine components of the original two. Is the sponge conscious?
Higher consciousness - the whole "soul" thing - is even more ambiguous: some would say that a human zygote has a soul, but an adult chimpanzee does not, despite the latter clearly having much better cognitive abilities. One promising option would be to suggest a sort of external concept of self and other, and the relationship between those: if a chimpanzee sees another chimpanzee perform an action for a reward, and then copies that action to gain the same reward, the chimpanzee's basic internal process can be interpreted as this:
Chimpanzee B wants Thing.
Chimpanzee A did Action and gained Thing.
Chimpanzee B is alike to Chimpanzee A.
The outcome for any behaviour by Chimpanzee B is the same as the outcome of the same behaviour by Chimpanzee A.
Therefore, if Chimpanzee B also perfoms Action, Chimpanzee B will also gain Thing.
(One can interpret B as Johnson and A as Trump, if one wishes)
This is Social Learning, and it's a very useful tool for people, animals and psychologists, but is it the peak of consciousness? It indicates at least some level of empathy, but that empathy is still used in a fundamentally selfish manner - to gain stuff. So what about giving?
So let's move on to a different example, with a different cast of characters:
Cat has caught Mouse.
Cat likes Mouse. Mouse is both entertaining and tasty.
Human is like Cat.
Human probably likes the same things as Cat.
Cat gives Mouse to Human.
This apparent act of altruism, however misguided, is probably better seen as a form of currency use, which although it's certainly most entertaining when monkeys use it to watch porn and develop a prostitution industry, is actually something that many invertebrates can grasp - flies presenting perfectly good prey to a potential mate rather than eating it themselves are really just trading food for sex.
Cat is (hopefully) not trying to get sex from Human, but rather trying to purchase the various and sundry other things that cats desire, from more food and a comfortable place to snooze, all the way through to being kicked less frequently.
Cat's misplaced empathy here - assuming that Human will want the same things that Cat wants - is almost a reverse anthropomorphism: just as you and I readily assign human-like motivations to animals, Cat is assigning cat-like motivations to Human.
This type of projected (if sometimes displaced) empathy is often common in animals with any sort of social structure, and some of the examples of behaviour based on projected desires in birds are truly stunning.
Of course, in animals, the motivation for doing "kind" things is difficult to pin down precisely: the cat may intend to please the human simply because it unselfishly wants the human to be happy, not because it sees itself gaining from the experience. Its decision between eating the mouse itself and giving it to the person may be based on some calculation that the human needs the meal of the mouse more than it does, but we simply can't know that.
So when it comes to moral consciousness, the easiest example to go with is humans:
Human A, let's call it Rupert, has a big red Button.
IF RUPERT PRESSES THE BUTTON, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL BE REDUCED TO SUBHUMAN IN THE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS, TENS OF THOUSANDS WILL BE SUBJECTED TO DEGRADING TREATMENT AND THOUSANDS WILL DIE.
As a result, Rupert will gain "Stuff" - including but not limited to Money and Influence, Rupert's favourite things.
Pressing the Button is Bad.
Rupert knows this.
RUPERT PRESSES THE BUTTON.
This is more complicated than the example implies - not only because Rupert's button is actually an entire media misinformation machine involving thousands of individuals, both consciously and unconsciously participating in the dehumanisation of entire ethnic groups for personal gain, but also because of what it assumes:
First, that Rupert has a concept of Good and Bad beyond his own wants: Freud's Superego. This is probably Learned rather than Instinctive - so it's more or less on the same level as a beagle wagging its tail to be called "good dog" and cringing when it heard the word "bad"; Rupert's concept, like the beagles, be based on conditioning associating "good" acts with rewards and "bad" with punishment, until the ideas themselves are the reward and punishment, respectively.
Second, though, Rupert is able to consciously decide to do Bad things, which might be a bit beyond the average beagle. Rupert may well expect punishment for his actions, even if he decides that those punishments - public condemnations or thinly veiled jabs on internet blogs - are less than his personal reward, his capacity to do wrong despite knowing its wrongness makes his capacity to choose to do good all the more valuable.
I'm not saying that Chimpanzee and Cat do not have a soul, but that it makes a soul so much more interesting if it can sin, and if Rupert's instinct is to press the button, then his ability to prevent himself from doing so becomes a far greater sign of virtue.
And now we're back to why Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is worse than Trump.
Trump's behaviour is astonishingly childlike at times. He wants things, and he's never had any real check on his wants, so he takes them; he grabs life by the - sorry - pussy, because that's what life is to him: Want thing, take thing.
It's difficult to hate a child for such behaviour, no matter how destructive it might be, because they simply don't know better.
The average republican in the senate is rather worse: They want stuff, and they Gerrymander and Filibuster to ensure that they get it. Within their own, Ayn Rand-warped worldview, I'm not convinced that many of them would think of this behaviour as wrong - at most, they might admit that it was disingenuous, but if they've really internalized Atlas Shrugged, they may well see acting in their own self-interest as their moral responsibility. Not exactly charming, but then we have...
Boris.
Unless I am giving him far more credit than he is due, Boris knows that what he is doing is wrong. Unlike the bubble-bound Rees-Moggs and Trumps of the world, he can see what it does to other people, and yet he is knowingly and willingly pushing Ireland back towards civil war, throwing Britain's economy into a tar-pit and encouraging the public to conflate "other" with "lesser" and see the desperate flight of refugees from countries Britain profits from the plight of as subhuman.
And when one of my co-workers, trying to understand why I was quite so distressed that Jeremy (H)unt had lost the conservative leadership election, asked me whether Mr. Johnson was a good person, I surprised myself by answering quite definitively.
No.
Even in the context of our discussion of characters such as Michael Sata, who did plenty of Bad things as a minister before becoming President and trying his best to do Good things (while not giving back his ill-gotten gains, admittedly), Boris Johnson stands out as a spectacularly Bad Person.
And I don't even believe in bad people.
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