Presentation

I was quite surprised by an advert on the tube the other day that claimed First Group were taking the 'unprecedented' step for a UK company of removing their name from the Great Western livery (or logo). Of course this is only truly unprecedented if you don't take into account the thousands of companies with wholly owned subsidiaries that do not bare their parent conpany's name, such as (for a few small examples) Cadbury not being called Kraft Cadbury, Jaguar Landrover not being called Tata Jaguar Landrover, or, if you want a train example, Southern and Great Northern not being called Govia Thameslink Railway Southern and Govia Thameslink Railway Great Northern. So it is only unprecedented if you completely ignore precedent. First Great Western is changing its name to Great Western Railway because the former is associated with an utterly miserable travelling experience whereas the latter is associated with the golden age of train travel. This is nothing more than a marketing exercise and claiming that it is 'unprecedented' is simply an attempt to make this rebranding exercise something special. Even if it was unprecedented (which, just in case you're not sure, it isn't), what is the merit of this act? We are clearly supposed to be astounded by the commercial bravery of this move, but apart from its (nonexistent) unprecedentedness I cannot see what is brave about it. Is the act of drawing attention to your actions (however banal) supposed to make it greater? Didn't we get over this sort of 'look at me' behaviour in childhood? 

I know it's only an advert, but this is not just advertising doublespeak anymore, this is how our world works. It is entirely possible to make entirely baseless claims and expect them to go entirely unchallenged, because no one actually thinks about what they're being told any more; we're all too busy being credulous or outraged by some other baseless assertion. This allows those fluent in the language of this new propaganda to create the empty 'realities' in which much of our world is placed. These 'realities', continually reinforced by a credulous media, rely on our relentlessly unquestioning credulity, they are credualities if you will. The modern creduality will make no secret of the duality of its created reality and the other reality based on facts because it will not need to. This was not the case with perhaps one of the earlier political credualities: Tony Blair's infamous 45 minute claim. In those early days, he had to make up nonexistent security operatives to back up his horseshit excuse for an illegal war. These days, the Tory party don't need to find any makebelieve experts to back up their fantasy that the Labour Party caused the financial crisis by borrowing too much; despite Nobel prize winning economists and the facts categorically refuting it, this has become an unquestioned orthodoxy. This has resulted in the unopposed destruction of of many of the means of wealth creation and redistribution over the last five years in the name of fiscal prudence, whilst nothing meaningful has been done to address the cycle of consumer debt led bubbles that will come back and bite 

us all again*. 

Our society and many of our institutions are founded on created realities. In many ways the legal framework is a codified created reality that has entire professions devoted to resolving the issues that arise when someone steps outside the bounds of that reality. Of course the law is an agreed reality that we arrive at through a combination of collective agreement and rigorous testing of the bounds of that reality. In a strange way the law is a reality that relies on criminals to make it whole: without a testing of the boundaries, we cannot arrive at a complete understanding of what they are. However, this does mean that it is very much a reality created by an understanding of its alternatives, of what lies outside it. It is a reality constantly under scrutiny, constantly being verified; by contrast, the modern credualities ignore even readily available evidence that significantly undermines their fundamental premise. What is the reason for this ostrich-like behaviour? Real life can be a complicated and distressing place and, as we are given the option outsourcing an increasing amount of our concerns to technology, we appear to have less concern about how those problems are dealt with. That's not surprising; technology is both increasingly complex and increasingly sophisticated, meaning that we are both less inclined to understand it and encouraged not to need to understand it. We become trained to believe that the complexities of the world will be navigated for us and we need not concern ourselves with how that happens. Some of us convince ourselves that we are still actively engaged with the 'real' world, but usually this is simply responding to fairly reductive sound bites that are spoon-fed to us in the most limited way (with the technology we use giving it the appearance of sophistication). 

It is likely that I am (as usual) being too pessimistic. It is likely that most of the people who read this will be insulted by the idea that they simply swallow any old crap as fact, but then so would the tens of millions of people who if stopped on the street and asked who caused the 2008 financial crisis would earnestly reply "Gordon Brown" and they clearly swallow a lot of old crap as fact. This is the problem: democracy is the rule of the majority, but if the majority simply believe whatever they are told by their rulers, is it really a democracy any more? It is not apathy that is the problem, it is credulity; people think they're engaged because they get angry about the stories they are fed, but their rage is misplaced. And perhaps sadder than impotent rage is misplaced rage. 

* indeed Gideon Osborne's recovery plan has been based on a property bubble in the south east and flogging our assets to the Chinese.