Serious people
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Office anthropology™
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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.
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 those insufficiently serious people that grift their way to the upper echelons of international finance.
Feeding the clowns
The public intellectuals and commentariat seems to have no idea how to deal with the clowns and trolls who litter the public marketplace of ideas. This is a component of seriousness: a capacity for sobriety, tolerance and, frankly, respect, when presented with ideas and people not to ones taste.
This new righteousness which affects the Metropolitan liberal elite (paid-up member, fear not) comes with its own blind spot. People cannot help themselves reacting to and trying to suppress the Hutt bursts of those who they find deplorable comma as if a final righteous blow from the trusty liberal sword can forever put away these deplorable utterings, rather than,as surely they do, give them power.
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 trump be without John Oliver, or Hillary Clinton, or the feeble attempts to bring him to formal book? Where would Nigel Farage be without the preposterous grandstanding of bank executives?