14 ENEMIES OF PROGRESS

a revenge manual

“Hell is other people”

“Hell is other people” is often misquoted. When I first used it as a caption under one of my high school Facebook photos, I thought it expressed teenage superiority: “You are all pathetic, and I can’t believe I have to associate with you.”

*stomps feet, pushes Walkman earbuds further into ears*

Idiot child, I found out, it means the opposite.

We love, need and care for other people so desperately that we lock ourselves in the cage of their gaze. Being seen means being judged - flippantly, harshly, unfairly. Helpless before this knowledge, we contort ourselves to match whatever image we want reflected back. We become performers of our own identities, trapped by the desperate need for approval from an audience we claim to despise.

In the last decade, I have been building a practice of propaganda to promote my political agenda, which can be summarised as thus: save the world. During this intolerably earnest pursuit, I have watched in horror as people dismiss their ‘hell is other people’ affliction as an inherent part of human nature and allow it to lead them to decisions that lead to collective harm.

In democratic politics, this produces perverse contradictions. Self-proclaimed libertarians cheer corporate welfare for monopolies. Progressives tolerate medieval attitudes when expressed by favoured groups. Democrats demand the curtailment of free speech. Conservatives preside over the gutting of the very institutions their ideology claims to revere. Nationalists export jobs and hide wealth in foreign tax havens while wrapping themselves in the flag. Tech libertarians build monopolies, demand government contracts, and practice corporate censorship. Socialists justify plutocracies when they chant the right slogans. Anti-racists are encouraging racial essentialism and building careers on the very hierarchies they claim they want to dismantle. Climate change activists are promoting policies that hinder carbon reduction by pushing carbon emissions to countries that don’t care about the climate and blocking plentiful energy sources like nuclear back home. What’s going on?

Ra-ra-ra commentators will tell you this is because policy is complicated and people are ignorant and lazy. Nonsense. I think a lot of people know exactly what they are doing: prioritising their own short-term self-interest over the collective interest that gave them the freedom and options to be where they are. It is not just the social cost of breaking ranks; cancel culture was real, but its importance in political dialogue was exaggerated. The bigger factor is that people receive tangible benefits from being politically immoral.

Turkeys have always voted for Christmas in the human kingdom. Marx’s theory of false consciousness has coddled us long enough - the notion that people simply don’t understand their own interests, that they’ve been duped by ideology or propaganda. But what if the problem isn’t confusion? What if people know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it anyway because the social cost of breaking ranks feels worse than the material cost of voting against their own future?

It’s time we stopped making excuses.

It’s time we started pointing fingers.

I volunteer. Tar and feather me if it makes you feel better, but before you burn me at the stake, name any selfish enemies of progress I miss out in the list below in the comment section.

PART I: THE OBVIOUS ENEMIES

1. Boomers

2. Tax Dodgers

3. Sociopathic Capitalists

4. Private Equity Vandals

5. Corporate Welfare Kings

6. Lazy Wealth

7. Media Slop Merchants

PART II: FRENEMIES

8. Bad Immigrants

9. Welfare Scroungers

10. Identity Politics Ethnonationalists

11. The Charity Industrial Complex

12. Green Saboteurs

13. Overeducated Bureaucrats

14. The Purity Left

These are the people are responsible for why we can’t have nice things. These are our enemies. Let’s go and get them.

I will be posting an essay explaining our traitors under each headline in the next month. Subscribe to get them.