In the process of kicking drugs and becoming disillusioned with fame and wealth, Brand also got the world sussed: all the evil in it, Brand is certain, has washed up on our shores owing to the mighty tide of Western Corporate Imperialism. Muslims from the West who joined ISIS think it’s good to enslave women and execute people for not having the correct religious belief because Western consumer capitalism didn’t hug them enough when they were little. Ever-increasing wealth inequality and soulless consumerism made them feel ‘alienated’ and ‘disenfranchised’, Brand says, so what choice did they have but to go raping and murdering innocent people?
There’s literally no limit to the bad shit Brand’s theory can explain. Every time someone behaves like a dick who’s not a politician, banker or businessman, Capitalism is the ‘root cause’. If you think I’m exaggerating, you should read his article in today’s Guardian in which he draws a link between the appalling racist behaviour of some Chelsea fans and the profiteering of their favourite club:
Perhaps the Chelsea spokesman was right. Perhaps these actions took place outside society. Perhaps these men are outside society, discarded and redundant, bonded only by shared hate.
Perhaps the Premier League similarly exists outside society, garnering huge wealth and hogging it for itself, not sharing the bounty with fans growing bitter on the fringes. Or perhaps under capitalist extremism there is no society at all.
The destination of the hooligans on the train is inextricably linked to the journey of the modern game. If you treat fans like they don’t matter, like they’re not worthy of grace, then it isn’t surprising some behave disgracefully.
When fans take back the clubs that are theirs and run them collectively, aberrant acts such as the Métro racism can be communally condemned from a just position, not from the altar of cold profiteering and cunning hypocrisy.
If you can stomach it, the rest is here:
The problem with these sometimes impressively complex ‘root-cause’ explanations is that they’re so at odds with the way we give an account of our own actions. Presumably you, reader, don’t explain any of your actions in terms of ‘well, I’m the product of culture X, and politico-social-economic factors Q, Y and Z, and so of course necessarily I’m going to do this’. No. For every one of your decisions and intellectual positions you have an argument that’s morally intelligible to as many of the other members of your species as possible. The reason you do is so you can, through discourse with your peers, expose yourself to potentially new information that might make you modify your course of action or the justification for it accordingly. This is fundamental to what it is to be human: living and behaving according to principles that are morally intelligible to those around you so you’re best placed to modify that behaviour on receipt of new information from said peers. And of course this implies a reciprocal commitment from them, otherwise it wouldn’t work. If you don’t, if you live by principles that are intelligible and persuasive to you alone, that is the definition of malignant narcissism, or evil.
The people who join ISIS are obviously aware of the above because they can’t, as human beings, not be aware of it. But regardless, they choose to live by deliberately obscure principles that are only intelligible to a tiny minority of Muslims (read for ‘intelligible’: ‘not actively repellent’). And by having an immutable interpretation of a divine doctrine as the locus of their justification, they’re perfectly placed to ignore the rest of humanity’s claim to a morally intelligible argument from them. This, too, is the definition of evil, except in place of individual narcissism, you have collective or group narcissism. I’m sure I don’t need to change the necessary variables to show how this applies to the racist Chelsea fans as well.
So what are people like Brand doing when they relegate this fundamentally human framework to a bit part in a grand, historical narrative where the main players are the big institutions of business and politics? Why, they’re being fucking hypocrites. They’re saying that whilst they themselves are capable of rendering morally intelligible justifications for their behaviour, certain other people, from different cultures, economic climates, or social classes, lack this capacity; they are pawns that the enlightened, liberal-minded elect understand better than they understand themselves. Ironically this amounts to dehumanizing the people they would try to defend and make sympathetic.
bretfrag 