This is one of the biggest things that's wrong with British society, as a whole, today. The others are the career politician, and the culture of low expectations, but that's a whole other node.

Though it cannot be denied that the three are very much linked, but that too is also a whole other node.

Emotional fascism is the end result of a process in the last thirty to forty years or so whereby people with dubious political, commercial, or moral agendas seek to reframe everything in the aspect of feelings and empathising at the expense of cold, hard logic and actually thinking about things. It is the triumph of hand-wringing over common sense and it's partly, in my view, to blame for why life sucks so hard right now. And it is dangerous. If you don't believe this, there have been two high profile criminal cases which just go to demonstrate this.

The essence of emotional fascism is basically closing down the debate. What one does is, on any issue, one ignores all the facts and evidence and so forth and simply focuses on someone or something that is photogenic and clearly a victim. One then pushes one's point on the issue, claiming that this argument is really about that victim, and that your side is the only one that can truly achieve justice for that victim, and anyone else is clearly heartless or a sexist death merchant or similar. Anyone who opposes you can then be safely ignored or smeared as an apologist for the people who did this terrible, terrible, thing to your victim.

Another form of emotional fascism is where one makes a huge song and dance about something bad that's just happened in lieu of actually doing something about it. The end result of this orgy of phony heart-rupturing grief is that you can validate yourself as being a Good Person and therefore worthy of other peoples' time. This is the sort of emotional fascism that causes greasy warmongering British prime ministers to learn the art of the strategic lip-wobble and sniffing about "the People's Princess" at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, Our Lady of the Landmines. The funeral of Diana, incidentally, seemed to be the tipping point at which emotional fascism really took off in today's society. Never before had there been such a mawkish outpouring of nonsensical wailing just to prove one's own humanity - which no doubt served Blair down to the ground, as it enabled him to scavenge some additional popularity points as being "empathetic" and "in touch with society." He wasn't, but that's beside the point.

Since then, emotional fascism, which in 2007 my fellow noder Fondue very aptly described as "the politics of the grieving mother," has been on the up. When Sarah Payne was kidnapped and murdered in 2000, the resulting nationwide hysteria was hijacked (or possibly fomented for commercial reasons) by the News of the World in pushing for Sarah's Law, a UK corollary to the controversial Megan's Law from the US, and onto this piggybacked in turn a tranche of children's charities who, once again, saw the opportunity to gain power and influence for themselves (as well as additional donations - it is no coincidence that the salary of the chief executive of the NSPCC was £120,000 in 2009, and that chief executive no doubt had other salaried directorships atop that, all of which had to be paid for somehow). Anyone who proceeded to oppose the promulgation of an equivalent of Megan's Law was confronted with the (very public) weeping and grieving of Sara Payne, mother of the deceased, and all but accused of dancing on Sarah Payne's grave or of secretly being in league with the paedophiles in order to shout down opposition.

Sara Payne has since been wheeled out to justify other seriously illiberal and questionably effective measures, such as the ContactPoint database of every child in the land, the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which would require anyone even tangentially working with children such as authors visiting schools for the day or even parental volunteers in those same schools, to go through an invasive background check that goes even beyond the enhanced CRB check and which would not only track convictions and cautions for offences involving children, but also arrests, and even unsubstantiated reports and even questionable patterns of behaviour. Considering that most children who are abused are abused by family members, it is pretty clear that the ISA would have been an extremely expensive white elephant database that would have saved the life of less than one child per year and which would have probably been accidentally left on a train by civil servants. As such, one can see the clear link between overreliance on emoting, constantly, about things only tangentially relevant to the issue and the perilous pathway it leads us down.

Then in 2005, when Jane Longhurst's killer Graham Coutts was convicted of her murder and BDSM porno was found at his home, Jane Longhurst's mother tried - and succeeded with then MP for Reading West, Martin Salter - in having so-called "extreme pornography" banned in the UK. I am informed that since then several people have been convicted for possession of this material and received prison sentences even though in all such material all the performers were consenting and over 18 in every case and to the best of my knowledge, such a law would not prevent one lust murder per century simply because the profile of such a person is that they would rape or murder somebody regardless of whether they'd seen dirty videos on the internets or not. And yes, the driving force behind the ban on this "extreme pornography" was to get justice for Jane Longhurst.

Similarly, in 2004-5, we in Britain were subjected to the bore that was Band Aid 20 and Live 8, where Bob Geldof and that Irish tax-dodger Bono persuaded the millions of ordinary, hard-working folks in Britain to give their money to them so they could redistribute it in foreign aid to the Third World, upon where it would be embezzled by various kleptocrats and warlords therein. The fact that foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries is a whole other node in and of itself, but suffice it to say for now that upon leaving office, Mobutu Sese Seko's personal fortune almost exactly matched Zaire's national debt. I was at university during the Make Poverty History nonsense and remember being looked at with deep suspicion and accused of "being right wing" as if it were kissing cousin to "raping genocide survivors for fun" because I had exercised my critical faculties and actually thought about whether I wanted any part of this. I was told that I couldn't criticise these people because their hearts were in the right place. The subtext of all this was because I was thinking about it and not feeling enough, I was wrong.

A curious side effect of all this emphasis on emoting is that people are now expected to collapse into floods of salt-laden tears at the slightest provocation and to cockwave about how hurt they are. (Hence misery memoirs). Now I like to think I have a fairly accurate bullshit detector and if ever I have children, I would attempt to teach them to have same as I consider it a life skill. And to me, enormous outpourings of grief are the one thing that come over as phony simply because one is making such a song and dance about things that just aren't normal. As such, I immediately suspect that this is little more than a canard to deflect attention away from something else. However, with this becoming the norm, one is now expected to do this on any tragedy, even if it doesn't concern one.

You may think this is harmless. However it is not. Those of you who have been paying attention may have been aware of the trial of Casey Anthony for allegedly murdering her small daughter Caylee. Here, the gutter press (and that evil cunt Nancy Grace) and even the Floridian prosecutors were more than happy to use emotional fascistic tactics to paper over the fact that there were serious holes in their evidence. They attempted to reframe the whole affair as about being a quest for "justice for Caylee" in a similar way to that outlined above, but also they attempted to point to the fact that she wasn't visibly grieving in a suitably incontinent way as some sort of defect in her character. Thankfully the Judge and jury saw through this and returned a verdict of not guilty to show that there was reasonable doubt that she murdered her daughter, and equally thankfully saw through the fact that failure to be emotionally correct did not have any bearing on whether she did it or not. But reading over the comments following the verdict of not guilty I for one was flabbergasted at how many of them thought she must be guilty because she was unemotional and "cold" as many commentators put it. So somebody was almost executed because they weren't emotional enough.

And then there is Amanda "Foxy Knoxy" Knox. She was actually convicted of murder because in that case, people were taken in by the lie that she should have been more emotional and her conviction has only just this year been overturned on appeal. Because she was stoical and was doing cartwheels in the Police cells, she must have done it because innocent people are all crying like a baby, aren't they.

I would go on, but I'd only get worked up.

The fact is, though, that sooner or later, given emotional fascism's already disgraceful track record, someone is going to come to actual and irrevocable harm as a result of people being swept up in a tide of this incontinence. Actually, scratch that. People already have come to actual and irrevocable harm as a result of people being swept up in a tide of this incontinence. Amanda Knox. The people convicted under Megan's Law in the US because they were 17 and received a blowjob off their 15 year old girl friend. People convicted for "extreme pornography" possession. And I dare say in the next few years it wouldn't surprise me if Casey Anthony was lynched.

As such, when Martin Walkyier of Skyclad sang, "I'm just thinking allowed, isn't thinking allowed, WHY IS NOBODY THINKING?!" the answer is because of this emotional fascism, at least in part. And the reason, in my view, that people get swept up in emotional fascism is because it's easier than thinking for oneself.

And that's a shame and a disgrace, not to mention a judgement on modern society.

(IRON NODER 2011, 1/30)

A phrase to be careful with. To start, as always, with myself, I grew up in the Socialist Party and other such groups. I've spent a fair amount of my youth hanging around left-wing activists, agitating for one cause or another. But coming from a nice fluffy middle-class upbringing, there were always a few things that made me dubious, and one of those was a propensity amongst certain socialists to use 'fascist' as a general term for 'person who disagrees with me, is in my way, or happens to be wearing a police uniform or a suit'. To call the current government 'Tory scum', or the intellectual heirs of Margaret Thatcher, is perfectly acceptable to me. Calling them fascists always struck me as being insensitive, unregarding of history, and factually inaccurate. It's a tool to shut down debate, not to start it. But for a handful of NF nutcases, no-one wants to be identified as a fascist; even the BNP*.

To call someone a fascist is a fire-and-forget sort of insult. You don't have to explain why, because it's a word that stains. It's not used to disagree with someone, it's used to discredit them. So to brand a certain phenomenon 'emotional fascism', and then to say that it is both hysterical and closing down the debate, strikes me as a double standard somewhat. More than that, there's a quality to Hazelnut's node that troubles me. I don't mean to do a hatchet job on it; there are parts of it I agree with, and parts I don't. Views are nuanced, and I'll get into that. But there's a curious sort of tilting at windmills going on here, in particular with the business about the debate being closed down. It reminds me of nothing so much as people who rant about 'political correctness gone mad', in fact. People who say things like 'you can't even talk about immigration without being called a racist'. Well, no. The last I checked, freedom of speech was still something enjoyed in the United Kingdom, and no-one is stopping anyone from talking about it. The problem here, to my mind, is that freedom of speech is not the same as freedom from criticism. If you say something about immigration that someone thinks is a bit racist, and they say so, that's not abridging your freedom of speech, that's disagreement. Even if it's a lot of people. There is no right not to be ostracised. So assuming for the moment that the phenomenon Hazelnut's describing exists to the extent he claims, and holding views contrary to 'emotional fascism' will make you unpopular... why does it merit being described as fascism, please? As I recall, historically fascists have relied less upon making their enemies unpopular and more upon making them dead. This, to me, shows a certain lack of perspective, especially when invoking the name of an ideology arguably responsible for the deaths of millions of people to describe a social tendency to which you want to feel superior.

This leaves me with three questions. Does this authoritarian tendency exist? To what extent? And most importantly; is it new? On the first, I'm dubious. Hazelnut does an excellent job of identifying some examples to tackle, however, so that seems a reasonable place to begin. The business about Diana, and the mass outpouring of public emotion at her death, is important, certainly. I won't argue that that kind of vicarious grief does seem to be more common now (and indeed then; 1997 makes it only comparatively recent), than it had been in the past. Certainly it was unsettling to see people in tears and leaving flowers over the death of someone they'd never known, who they'd only been familiar with because of who she'd happened to marry, and it seems like an easy line to draw from there to people tying flowers to lamp-posts at the scene of car accidents and other such displays of public sorrow. But I have two problems with this narrative. I don't think it was new, and I don't think it was spontaneous. Like it or not, Diana was a celebrity, and there will always be people who try to interpose themselves into the lives (and for that matter the deaths) of celebrities they identify with, or fixate upon. But a key part of how Diana became a celebrity was the media, in particular the tabloids. Functionally, this was one society lady who married a crunbling irrelevance of a British institution, and became rich and not at all powerful into the bargain. But she was young, attractive, and glamorous, and no-one wants to read newspaper articles about Princess Anne. So the media hounded her, ultimately to her death, and after that they picked over the bones like carrion birds. The Daily Express still gives her a front page headline every now and again. So when Diana died, a few people left flowers, and then it grew with the reporting of it. As a rule, I don't think people just decided to leave flowers. They saw the handful who did, repeated and repeated by media that clung onto it, and decided they should join in, and that's how it became acceptable. A small group of people, whose voices were bounced around the echo chamber just long enough and loudly enough for their ideas to catch on.

So what we have here, at least to my mind, isn't fascism but the media acting as a very specific sort of amplifier. Has that changed the way most people act? I'm more dubious. It's possible we've become less repressed about emotion, for better or for worse. Casting it as some sort of tyranny in which it's rebellious not to engage in these displays of public emotion, however, strikes me as unhelpful. As far as it goes, the rest of the examples Hazelnut cites are, well, yes, reprehensible. But also not new, I think. Legislating in response to individual tragedies or mass hysteria (witness the Mann Act in the United States, introduced after a panic about 'white slavery', or a lot of drug laws) is something that's been going on since Hammurabi, I suspect. To a certain extent, I think that has a lot to do with how poorly we as human beings evaluate risk, and our bias towards finding named, specific, exotic threats scarier than vague, everyday ones. Perhaps it's louder now, more obnoxious, but appreciably worse?

Even the misery memoirs aren't a modern invention. Obviously there is a demand, hence why WH Smith have a book section called 'tragic life stories'. It's perhaps become more acceptable to write about topics that used to be taboo, such as child abuse, but the fixation on other peoples' tragedies always struck me as human nature. In the 19th century US, there were more than a few poets cranking out verses for obituaries, accidents, disasters, and so forth, with some success. Certainly it was prominent enough for Mark Twain to parody it in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in the form of the poetaster Emmeline Grangerford, who writes thusly:

O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly
By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.

Likewise, trials that are fought as much in the court of public opinion are scarcely a modern development. The mention of lynching there is another choice of words that strikes me as unfortunate, too. Given that lynching was a thing that happened, and in some parts of the world continues to, and represents sentiment winning out over the rule of law, it seems important to bear in mind that Casey Anthony was found not guilty on the basis of the evidence and arguments presented, in a fair trial where she had access to competent representation. Public outcry notwithstanding, I don't think she'll be lynched herself. And given that in 1931 Alabama, black men were being convicted and executed irrespective of the evidence, I think it's unsound to say that emotion driving court cases is a development we can link to the last thirty or forty years, or that it's in any real way worse now.

Perhaps I'm being uncharitable. There is much in Hazelnut's writeup that I agree with. Media-fueled public hysteria should be fought with facts and logic. Illiberal legislation should not be passed because of emotion. NGOs can be corrupt, as can politicians, and it behooves us to take a skeptical view of all sorts of things. I don't begrudge a good rant, either, because one of mine is in the first set of softlinks. But the central statement here, to my view, is this one:

'Emotional fascism is the end result of a process in the last thirty to forty years or so whereby people with dubious political, commercial, or moral agendas seek to reframe everything in the aspect of feelings and empathising at the expense of cold, hard logic and actually thinking about things'

I feel it's important to note that rationalism - the emphasis on logic, evidence and well-reasoned argument, whether it be in politics, in law, or wherever else, is a comparatively recent thing in human history in many ways. Granted, Aristotle didn't empathise his way to his theories about physics, but he also didn't experiment, which is why it took Newton to come up with a theory of how gravity works**. Not to suggest that everything prior to the scientific method was done on guesswork, but emotion and instinct playing key roles in how we perceive the world, and how we make decisions on how to act on it, have been the norm for millenia. Hence tilting at windmills. And reason has a tyranny all its own; witness Robert MacNamara, running the Vietnam War by calculus. It's not that we should stop trying to advocate for the use of reason, quite the opposite - if anything, what we need more of is science - but characterising sentiment and illogical actions as a kind of fascism that was never so bad fifty years before, well... it's unhelpful. More than that, it's a rather superior way to look at the world. It's very easy to ask why people aren't thinking, but they are, just in ways we may dislike. And if that's the case, the duty is to educate and to advocate for our positions, rather than dismissing people who believe differently out of hand. Because ultimately, if that's the course we take, reason is something that will lose out, in large part, because I don't think of it as 'emotional fascism'. I think of it as human nature, or failing that, society. And the thing about society is that it's big, and messy, and more than occasionally stupid. And you can change it, or retreat from it, or fight it, but the one thing you can never really do with society is to ignore it.

* I'm perfectly fine with calling the BNP fascists, because they are. But it helps nothing if you don't engage with the substance (or rather, the lack thereof) of what they're saying.
** That is still woefully inaccurate, but it's testable.