An apocryphal quote from Uncle Joe Stalin was that artists in the Soviet Union should be the ‘engineers of human souls’. Hence the ubiquitous unreality of Soviet art and why Shostakovich cleverly sculpted his hidden messages into his symphonies.
Imagine making a drama about a vicious dog called Killer. During casting you select a French Pink Poodle. Now you would be expected to choose an American Pitbull Terrier. That would reflect the real world. Even back in Britain in the world of the 1950s Angry Young Men we saw realist gritty working-class cinema. But in the society of the simulacrum (Guy Debord’s term for a society of appearance rather than reality) social engineering, through the corruption of the ‘arts’ has become dominant. It is visible in a lot of the Netflix output. The white working-class are largely being airbrushed from history. TV and Cinema has to tick a few boxes these days.
In the real world, according to the Mayor of London’s office, black Londoners make up 13 per cent of London’s population but account for 61 per cent of knife murder perpetrators. The obvious example, which led to widespread riots around Britain, was the Southport killer who attacked kindergarten children. If you were making a drama (or more accurately, commissioning one) you would, in the visceral world, select Axel Rudakubana as the model.
This is not about artistic licence. An artist must be free to write on any topic. So, the Director of Adolescence has every right to choose a white boy for the macabre tale of a schoolgirl being knifed. Yet it is my view that this has been done in the tradition of social engineering which has ran amok in Britain for many many years. It is in the ‘message’ behind the commissioning.
What was previously called ‘use value’ (during the industrial epoch) has been replaced in the post-capitalist realm by ‘sign value’. Whilst commodities (or arts) previously functioned for useful purposes, as necessities or cultural consumption, the liberal era has spawned ‘sign value’. Something is valued not for its intrinsic use- but for what it signifies. In modernity, people can be unemployed, never buy a property or car, yet the sign value of a phone or training shoes becomes the signifier for large parts of society.
The state and media are so instrumental in constructing people’s lives until Descartes’ ‘subject’ just … vanishes. All that is left are ephemeral tokens. The smartphone, the contrived Netflix drama. The signifier is not about knife crime; it is about lowering male working-class expectations. The incoming legislation. The hate laws. The riots around the Southport killer being demonised as ‘racist’.
Adolescence is not a magical apparition. It is part of a pattern and social structure. This is how Structuralists and post-Structuralists would classify modernity. The simulacrum is manufactured through media and TV forms until reality is replaced by its opposite. It also signals the profound weakness of Britain in the 21st Century. Unable to face uncomfortable truths. It is like being forced to read The Guardian with your eyelids pinned open. Great art is always about ‘truth’ (admittedly a relative construction). It is Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz going down the Congo River facing the realities of colonialism. Or Trainspotting. It is not about another period drama in Regency England. The Bridgerton escape… It is facing off to the societal demons, the real ones, not casting blame elsewhere. That is what Britain has become. A pantomime of reality.
A famous study shows that white working-class males are the least likely to go to university. Figures from the Department of Education study show the scale of the tragedy:
‘Data released by the Department of Education last year showed less than 0.5 per cent of state school students on free school meals gained a place at Oxbridge in 2013-14, and only 5 per cent of those students gained a place at a Russell Group University.’
Dr Lee Elliot Major, of the Sutton Trust, designed to improving social mobility through education, outlines the core problem ignored by the new woke suffragettes:
‘The poor academic performance of disadvantaged boys, especially those from white working class backgrounds, is a tragic waste of talent with a significant economic cost.’
There’s the rub. For it shouldn’t be about a Netflix soap opera but based on the hard facts of the deculturisation and deindustrialisation of the UK. By this I mean a conscious attempt to belittle and remove the group they fear most on the crusade to the social liberal state: white working-class males. It removes the real reasons behind working-class exclusion and they have nothing to do with race. Or women. The real reasons behind social exclusion are well documented. They are economic and cultural. On the economic level the exporting of industry to China etc is the structural cause. The ill-fated deindustrialisation of Britain: the West handing over ownership to developing nations at the expense of the indigenous white working-class. The free trade EU model exacerbated this, allowing immigration to lower wages and supplanting the ‘telos’ of existence from the working-class male: ‘Boomers have all the wealth’ and ‘Gen Z can’t buy a house’ is the way a broken society apportions blame. It divides by race, by sex, and by class.
The real dramas that should be made do not tick the boxes. Two-tier schooling, what the Economist Piketty argues is the construction of inequality or the inheritance of wealth and its corrosive influence on society. There is a culpable lack of accountability in the higher echelons of government and a disturbing ignorance. Hence Lammy’s geographical blunders as Foreign Secretary (Libya is next to Syria).
Hence the turn to protectionism in Trump’s US. For there appears to be an attempt to solve this inefficiency; hence the popularity of Trump. An attempt to claw back ownership; to give jobs back to the rust belt. Europe, on the other hand, has hung its workers out to dry. Sourcing industry and goods from China and spending the windfall on the public-private/extractive state. The Leviathan of the state grows at no return on efficiency, no solving of recurrent problems. Hiding behind a Netflix miasma enables the bureaucratic state to push agendas into other areas.
Starmer and the Politburo need a scapegoat. White working-class people have no stake in this society. The scapegoat is now MRA’s (Mens Rights Activists). We are told online influencers can turn boys into killers, yet victims of homicide, according to government data, are 71 per cent white working-class. This TV drama ‘has the power to change things’ says The Guardian. Men’s Rights Activists are called MRAs. Does that include men who have lost any contact with their children? Or those campaigning for a level playing field in the courts. The UK Prime Minister has been watching the Adolescence program – so the problem needs to be tackled. Imagine how shallow a government is that bases its legislation on Netflix. A government that constructs an enemy. The Engineer of human souls.
Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in universities across Europe. His new book, ‘Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century’ is published now by Ethics International Press. He is an adviser to several Think Tanks and Corporates on Geopolitical Issues.
