Behind the door we don’t open

Starmer announces national summit on challenges facing men and boys

Sir Keir Starmer has announced that his Government will hold a national summit on the challenges facing men and boys next year.

Starmeresque Landscape via AI

Do you ever have moments of political indifference where you know political games are simpler, more sordid and much bleaker than we usually admit? I do and I suspect many others do too.

I don’t mean another bout of angst, disillusion or cynical disgust. I’m rather fond of a spot of cynical disgust every now and then. Instead we could be better off making a clean breast of things – in a socially honest kind of way. The political arena is a cold, grey and inhospitable landscape, much bleaker than we care to admit – that kind of honesty.

Suppose we take political rhetoric as an obvious example. Let’s apply a bit of bleak simplicity to it.

Political rhetoric is a loose grouping of language games affecting enough people emotionally to congeal into a few political parties. Social class, taxation, health, welfare and education are enrolled to provide emotional stimuli and induce certain emotional responses. The language games cannot be rational, analytical or investigative or they would lose the emotional crudity they need to congeal and survive.

It is not necessarily productive to pursue this argument as an argument, but as an example of how we could easily and consistently analyse political rhetoric into nothing but language games designed to persuade by inducing emotional responses. The details of how language games gain political traction may be complex, diffuse and fragmented, but once they are established, the analysis is simple. Bleakly uninvolved but simple.

This kind of bleakly uninvolved approach isn’t new and I suspect substantial numbers of people have always teetered on the edge of it from time to time. But most of us don’t quite take the plunge, because to do so would deprive us of interesting, if frustrating political discourse.

Maybe the bleak political landscape lies behind the door we don’t open, the one we are aware of but prefer to leave closed and in many cases locked. Behind the door there are no comfort zones, only bleak reality.