Two Minutes of Hate

The Nudge Unit was established by David Cameron’s government in 2010 with the intention of applying ‘Behavioural Science’ to public policy. It came into its own during the Covid epidemic, which with full blown media support generated sufficient fear to allow an almost totalitarian government. It also encouraged a degree of well meant but lunatic hysteria.

The Thursday evening ritual of banging pots and pans for ‘our NHS’ was started by a Dutch lady, Annemarie Plas, living in London. The speed with which it was taken up not only reflects a generalised hysteria, but the power of the establishment and a compliant media. What the country experienced was less a nudge more a nuclear-powered elbow, involving ministers, politicians, and celebrities of every kind and encouraged by news bulletins with their selective interviews.

It was perhaps a straw in the wind.

It used to be said that ‘money makes the world go round,’ but when the money runs out, hate takes its place, and hate is now the fastest growing currency. Capitalism has always appreciated pitting one section of the exploited against the other: in the C19th, Irish immigrants sometimes scabbing for striking Welsh miners, undercutting wages in general; West Indians stepped up to the mark in the C20th. 

There is now, though, an added complication: the internet and social media. Hate has become democratised, whether it is foreign actors stirring up mischief or home-grown individual grievance-mongers with chips on their shoulders. We live in supermarkets of hate, trundling our trolleys through aisles of the stuff, Muslims, Jews, Trans-activists, Terfs, incels, Brexiteers, Remainers, Tory scum, Labour troughers, Trumpers, anti-Trumpers, all of them screaming their wares. 

On the one hand, it’s doing the establishment’s job for them, distracting and dividing, preventing any coherent opposition to the status quo. It is also anarchic and potentially dangerous and perhaps accounts for a new determination by the establishment to control the internet so that orthodoxy and only orthodoxy prevails. In other words, there should be only one ‘nudge unit’ — especially at a time when the western world for the first time feels threatened by external forces.

It was easier in the past, when hostile powers popped up one a time. England vs Spain. England vs France, the Dutch, later the Germans, and more recently Communism. You knew where you were, a common enemy, one you were encouraged to hate and fear—an art perfected in the C20th. 

Misinformation and propaganda reached new heights during the First World War, continued during the Vietnam war with ‘the domino theory’ that made the war necessary. The domino theory has been resurrected with the present Russo-Ukrainian conflict, ie should Russia prevail other European states will topple like dominoes. Hence the line must be drawn in Ukraine, marked with bodies over there and manufactured hatred for Russia over here. 

But it’s not just Russia. We now face the ‘Axis of Evil’ —the West is surrounded— Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, along with their proxies in the so called Third World. Which way do we turn? Will war make or break the economy? Is it the only way to burn our way through the coming recession?

When the ice-floe shrinks, the velvet glove becomes threadbare and the iron shows beneath. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984 and his famous ‘Two Minutes of Hate.’

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through wthe whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”

Orwell’s Oceana faces a never-ending war with Eastasia and Eurasia, and all that Oceana’s citizens know about the world is what the Party want them to know.