Frank Grimes Syndrome

There is a dark and memorable old episodes of the Simpsons called Homer's Enemy. A new employee called Frank Grimes arrives at the nuclear plant where Homer works; he's conscientious, a bit sensitive, and carries a briefcase. Frank is shocked at Homer's laziness and flagrant indifference to plant safety, and decides to blow the whistle on him, but colleagues prefer to indulge Homer, and tell Frank to stop making a fuss. Frank protests further, but to no avail, and his expressions of injustice and frustration makes those around him see him as a troublesome crank. Eventually, Frank blows his top, and by trying to demonstrate Homer's dangerous working practice, is electrocuted and dies.

The episode is a cautionary tale which has grown in poignancy for me over the years. I can't help but sympathise with Frank’s naive trust in simple verities, combined with his lack of persuasiveness and ability to "just get along". I know what it feels like to get upset when people don’t share my idea of fair and sensible. 

Online there is a tendency for some of us to suppose that all that’s required to correct some great and obvious error is to point it out in a few tweets or Facebook posts and let the plain and self-evident truth do its job. With reasoned words the scales will fall from their eyes, we imagine, the wrong shall be righted, and we can all move on to deal with the world's more serious and complicated problems. When this expectation is thwarted, and the light of simple reason is greeted only with indifference or outright resistance by those you would like to persuade, it is easy to respond with greater persistence, vehemence and then anger. This can then be interpreted as obsessiveness and trolling, and if you take the bait, swiftly, you become the unreasonable one; Mr Sensible becomes Mr Crazy, and begins to teeter on the edge of destruction. I call this Frank Grimes Syndrome (FGS). 

FGS arises from the despair felt when the values, perceptions, priorities and meanings that one assumes are widely held are no longer acknowledged, met with blank stares, expressions of horror or disgust, and counter-accusations of unreason. It may arise as a consequence of what we call “gaslighting”, but not necessarily, as no intentional manipulation or malign intent needs to be presupposed as a cause. 

It’s not just a case of thinking “the world’s gone mad”; everyone thinks that now. How commonplace are social media posts along the lines of: “This country, the government, and the people in it are insane, except for you, of course, my lovely dear friends”? It's comforting, I'm sure, to denounce *other people* whilst affirming the ties that bind you to your familiars, but that's not what I'm talking about. No, it’s when you start to think that your own people are losing the plot, and you more than suspect that they have formed a similar opinion of you, that the syndrome kicks in and things start to get really serious. It's born of a conviction that woeful thinking is widespread, not confined only to the right, left, or centre.

I'll get to my FGS pathology in a bit, but first, I'll risk insulting a couple of people I really rather respect, by holding them up as examples of this unfortunate contemporary malady.

The first who comes to mind is James Lindsay, who, along with his colleagues Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, did a splendid job of showing how critical thinking among the champions of Critical Theory has been corroded, by getting a number of intentionally silly theses passed for publication in in US peer reviewed journals. Having made a fair case that much was rotten in the state of US academia, Lindsay became increasingly exercised on Twitter, but things have not all gone his way in his war on all things woke.

 
Lindsay recently, for instance, issued a Twitter challenge to see who would defend the Orwellian proposition that 2+2=5. Some academics duly obliged, and some even claimed that 2+2=4 is an example of white supremacism and cultural imperialism. Lindsay jumped up and down and claimed one of his "life's greater achievements", but his opponents mocked him for his intellectual naivete, accused him of harassment, and when real racists waded in, the debate disintegrated into ugly acrimony, the waters thoroughly muddied.

Lindsay's tweets have become increasingly eyebrow raising. When the pandemic shock hit in March last year, and we were all locked in the grip of apocalyptic dread, Lindsay ploughed on with his Twitter war against postmodern thought as if nothing else was happening. Later, when the election came, his preference for Trump to anything the American left had to offer didn't help his credibility. Trump lost, of course, and the forward march of Critical Theory and wokeness through US institutions is now all but complete, in spite of Lindsay's cries in the wilderness.

Radical feminist ally Graham Linehan is one whose rage against unreason has resulted in public demotion and considerable personal cost. As he explains in a recent statement to the House of Lords, challenging the beliefs and consequences of the "fashionable American orthodoxy of gender identity ideology" has not proven as straightforward and easy as he thought it would be. "I presumed that when others saw what was happening that they too would speak up and we would be able to force the debate our opponents were so desperate to avoid. I now realise that I was up against a much bigger beast than I thought."

Like Linehan, I too thought that once you make it well known that males are now claiming the right to identify as lesbians, or to compete as women against women in women's sports, that people will realise that this is absurd and that gender identity, as a way of deciding who is a man and who is a woman, must obviously be wrong. But, somehow, this expected effect has not come to pass.

That novel and inchoate narratives have popped into existence in a short space of years to redefine our "identities" in terms of “gender”, and that these ideas have been imposed on us top-down by the unelected administrators of our public institutions and corporations, is undoubtedly cause for resistance and some anger. But Linehan, above all others, has shown the hazards of giving his ire full vent. It is as if the cumulation of every solid argument, every shocking example, and every irresistible rhetorical point he has made has only served as evidence of a growing and poisonous obsession. By pointing the spotlight at grifters like Jessica Yaniv and Karen White, for example,  who have exploited "gender identity" to create opportunities to sexually abuse women, Linehan has been accused of suggesting "all trans people are like that". The ugliness of the examples he's highlighted are somehow reflected back onto him; as if their very mention is evidence of some terrible unkindness, on his part.

On Twitter, Linehan crossed the line a few times: “tweeting at” people and demanding they justify themselves is bad Twitter etiquette, at best. In the end, he knew he was becoming too much the story, and tried to step back out of the debate, but his righteous rage could never hold him back for long. It was wrong for Twitter to ban him, but it felt like a bit of a relief, all round, when they did. Assiduous legal challenges by the likes of Fair Play for Women and the Keira Bell case are examples of more effective push-backs against gender identity orthodoxy.

As for me...? At the beginning of the year I permanently deleted my personal Twitter account and my Facebook is deactivated. In part this is to "cancel" myself as a social media participant, in the hope that I might avoid pointless spats and direct my time in more productive ways. The other part of it, to be honest, is to cancel everyone else. I came to find the daily doses of stuff I can't agree with on Facebook disheartening to read and fruitless to challenge.

I don’t want to argue with my friends, to be reminded of or widen our differences. Let’s wait for the pubs to open, and maybe we can talk about it there, or preferably, talk about something else.  I recognise it is generally prudent to go along with the prevailing views of one’s epoch and class, so why should I wish to persuade anyone to question them, and bring them down to where I am? In the end, this advanced FGS sufferer has become paralysed by the following paradox:

If I explain what I think is wrong and you don’t see it, I’ll get madder; 
if I say what is wrong and you DO see it, you might end up as mad as I am. 

And so I am left to penning things like this, that perhaps no-one will ever read, and shouting at BBC TV news while I serve my elderly mum her dinner. 
 
Yes, I am prone to dystopian despair and the conviction that "reality is gaslighting us", as US podcaster Bret Weinstein recently put it. Am I right? Well obviously I think so, though I recognise my response to the world is different from other people's and that my personality has something to do with that. Am I a contrarian? Yes, but not wilfully so or for the sake of it, I hope. Can I be wrong? Absolutely, but if the human species has advanced to a point where we cannot even agree what a woman is, or that 2+2=4, then that strikes me as a rather dreadful kind of progress.

So who gets to be right, and who gets to be wrong? Well, let's not overthink this, it's power that matters. By definition, the dissenter must usually be the loser, on the day. Truth equates with power, and in this sense, Lindsay and co. should relent on postmodernism a bit and give Foucault his due. He said:

"Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value"

The dominant administrative, educational and cultural classes, who exercise power through the institutions and organisations they are privileged to occupy, have their talking points, their stories, their priorities, and they have the wit, education and position to employ whatever sophistries are required to maintain and defend them. Which is not to relativize truth in an absolute sense but only to observe how language and  "regimes of truth" are employed and maintained, all the time.

 Up against this the dissenting voice must learn to embrace his or her fate and rise above - amor fati, as Nietszche insisted. If the gods indeed are pranking us, do not rage and shake a fist, do not give them that satisfaction.

All will not ever be thus. Idealistic and ideological thinking usually hits the buffers of reality, sometimes more quickly than we expect. Has not Covid called into question the dream of a world of open borders and free movement? Can the Remainers' love affair with the unelected EU survive the European vaccines meltdown? In the US, will the 30% rise in homicides in 2020 show the downside of defunding and demonising the police? And, if we ever see another Olympic Games, will the spectacle of trans women winning medals over natural born females make it much more difficult to maintain that this is really what everyone wants?

Maybe.

Fighting a lost cause may not be a whole lot of fun, but it needs doing, if not on social media, then somehow, somewhere. Better ideas, more grounded in reality, need to be maintained; there may be more kindling for them to catch on in the future than in the present. Things will change, and in darker times brave words may provide comfort and reassurance to others like minded, who might otherwise begin to doubt their own sanity. 

So please, don’t end up like Frank. Don't get mad, and think twice before you think you can get even.