Serious people

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“I love you, but you are not serious people.”

—Logan Roy, Succession.

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the great delamination, it seems, quietly, that the epic shortage of “serious people” that characterised its first decade seems — somewhat? — to be fading out.

The appearance of endemic unseriousness may have just been the process of the JC aging, reaching age-parity with the sorts of people who get to run the world, and realising they were — well, jerks, mainly — but it feels a bit more significant than that.

Are the adults coming back?

Great coming from you

I know, I know: a smartarse who makes up cod Shakespeare and bellyaches about the I.S.D.A. is hardly one to be throwing stones about a lack of gravitas — but nor does he ostend to be serious. There is a role for someone to be the clown: it just isn’t the same as Prime Minister.

You need someone, after all, to blow raspberries and debag the insufficiently serious people who grift their way to the upper echelons of international finance and parade around like serious people.

Seriousness criteria

You know it when you see it. By reverse engineering from people we deem to be serious we might draw out some criteria and see if they work prospectively. Serious people don’t have to be likeable, you don’t have to agree with them. Serious people can represent a position you cannot abide.

Consider who, of your bête noire, is a serious person. For we of liberal metropolitan North London elite, take Brexit. Boris Johnson is not serious. Nor is Jacob Rees-Mogg, nor Nadine Dorries. But Nigel Farage is a serious person. So is Dominic Cummings.

Interestingly, it is hard to remember who led the remain campaign. This, in itself, suggests a lack of seriousness. (For the record, the chair was Sir Stuart Rose, a retired city grandee.)

Tolerance

But they will comprehend that a fully functioning marketplace for ideas contains ones they don’t respect or like, that those with different standpoints are still entitled to contribute them, and the fairest judge of those ideas is that marketplace.

Serious people don’t burn books or de-platform people. Certainly not in the name of “inclusivity”. I mean, Jesus.

Builders

Serious people build, unserious people inherit. Logan Roy versus his kids. Building from scratch educates you in the school of life. Inheritance bestows a sense of entitlement. Inheritors can become serious people —noblesse oblige — but despite their status, not because of it: wealth, power, and prestige come with responsibilities.

Strength

Serious people are strong, not merely powerful.

“A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome, settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues is capable of resolution. Power is concerned with what has already happened; strength with what has yet to happen. Power is finite in amount, strength cannot be measured because it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedoms persons have with limits.

Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong.”

— James P Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Skin in the game

Serious people have a stake. They make things, they act, they incur personal expense for their convictions.

Awkward

Serious people can be awkward. They can goad us; push us out of our comfort-zones, shake us out of our dogmatic slumber. They might start out as heretics, destroyers of consensus, cultural revolutionaries, but they often end up as “national treasures”, despite never losing that edge. Sinead O’Connor, John Lydon, Greta Thunberg.

Feeding the clowns

The public intellectuals and commentariat seems to have no idea how to deal with the clowns and trolls, serious or not, who litter the public square. This, too, feels like a lack of seriousness. Serious people display a natural sobriety, tolerance and, frankly, respect — even though gritted teeth — for ideas and people not to their taste. Serious people rise above it. Serious people don’t feed the trolls.

This new righteousness which has infected we of the Metropolitan liberal elite (paid-up member, fear not) comes with a blind spot: we cannot help ourselves reacting to and trying to correct those who we find problematic, as if a final righteous blow from our trusty liberal sword will forever put them straight about their deplorable utterings. But — irony, right? — this moral certitude presents as a kind of mansplaining.

Liberals disproportionately struggle to understand conservatives. If you can’t understand something, you can’t respect it.

[W]e tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. [...]

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.”

—Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

We should attribute the implausible continued presence of trolls like Trump, Johnson and farage in parts to their uncanny neck for media but in equal parts for our own inability to stop ourselves rising to their bait.

Where would Donald Trump (himself not serious) be without the unserious John Oliver, or Hillary Clinton, or the feeble attempts to bring him to formal book? Where would Nigel Farage be, now, without the preposterous grandstanding of bank executives?

See also

• Large language model
• Strength
• Maxims for a happy life