False Gods

A bankrupt ideology.

There are a certain kind of people who believe in equality, provided they get to tell you what equality is. They arrive at protests and events in chauffeured cars and leave them, owning the barricades. They tell us that they are progressives, the allies of the oppressed, the friends of the dispossessed—then hand the eviction orders to the bank, their signatures gleaming like a sneer in biro. The left in our time has turned into a kind of aesthetic, a taste: the colour red worn like an expensive perfume; revolution as a lifestyle choice for people who don’t know what modern hunger is like. They speak in the old European tongues of Marx and Engels, the liturgies of solidarity and justice, but their mouths are full of ash and coins. Watch them as they move through the ruined, the dispossessed, the fragile: they pose for photographs with their lessers, their faces arranged in masks of profound concern, while in their pockets, their fingers are crossed, clutching the cold keys to the eviction notice and their hefty salaries. This is the true face of the politics of feeling: not a revolution, but a pathetic pantomime where the ghosts of dead idealists are summoned only to be sold for the scraps of political connivance. A theology of betrayal so refined it passes for piety.

They have their compassion down to a science, a publicly funded algorithm. They mouth slogans about housing as a human right while partnering with the corporations that unhouse the souls they claim to care about. All their words are haunted by the ghosts of a meaning, exorcised long ago. You call yourself left-wing, and by that you mean: I have a Spotify playlist of songs about the struggle and follow all the right people on social media. You don’t stand with the exploited; you simply don’t want to be mistaken for the exploiter. You are a moral tourist.