Righteous and conspiracy.

In the comments to a previous post of mine, Anonymous said this:

On the one hand you give us this little theory, and yet on the other you confidently predict that the righteous don’t have the brain power to come up with something like Common Purpose, that seeks to look after their own damned graduates afore any other.

Make up your mind!

He has a point.

So, here’s the way I see things. It’s just my opinion, it’s what I interpret from years of far-too-close encounters with the Righteous but I’m no authoritative guru. This is just how it looks to me.

I’ve been wary of conspiracy theories because, as I’ve said before, I don’t believe our government could conspire their way out of a paper bag. The Brown Gorgon, Jacq the Ripper, Bouncy Balls, Hideous Harman, the Ginger Midget and the rest are clearly flailing around with absolutely no idea what they’re doing. They make up legislation based on what’s happened today with no consideration of what happened yesterday and no concern about what might happen tomorrow. The idea of any of them being a ‘mastermind’ is laughable.

That does not mean there isn’t a man behind the curtain. I haven’t seen him but I can’t prove he’s not there.

The Righteous act without thought. Each of them believes that what they say today is reality, what they said yesterday has been forgotten by everyone and what they say tomorrow will be a new reality. They demand that we perform risk assessments before crossing the street yet they have never considered the consequences of their actions. Further, they will never, ever, admit they were wrong.

So we have a smoking ban to exert a smug Righteous control and pubs close in droves. That’s blamed on everything but the smoking ban. We have demands for wheelchair access to dancing venues, which is rubbing serious salt in those wounds for the disabled and inconveniences everyone else. The rule performs no function other than to be today’s Righteous proclamation. We have demands that every illegal immigrant be allowed to stay, that anyone who objects is racist and then they can’t understand why so many vote BNP. Lately, Johnny Porridge stated to the nation that half of us have to die in order to save the other half.

These are not the thoughts and actions of intelligent people. Each Righteous works for themselves and themselves alone. Each Righteous knows the Only True Way. Each one of them is The One. They have never, will never and cannot possibly work together. They are in competition with each other for control.

The Righteous are not intelligent. They have had free reign under a government too busy feathering their own nests to care what’s happening in the country. Each idiotic pronouncement is grasped by a gullible government devoid of ideas of their own. Each step makes a Righteous move up a notch. Every time that happens, more of them try to take the pole position with a new pronouncement of their own. Each individual Righteous agenda is separate but the overall result is chaos and despair.

The Righteous are dangerous but only when allowed out to play. They are the curtain-twitchers, the purse-lipped tight-bunned librarians in those Elton John glasses and tired cardigans. They are the traffic wardens who hide around corners, the park-keepers who roar at anyone who so much as bends a blade of grass. They are the personnel officers who think they own the company. They are the shop stewards of the sixties and seventies, who would bring down a factory and put all their members out of work because the canteen ran out of tea. They are the guy who comes up to you when you’re trying to fix your car and tells you the screenwash must be empty. They are the meddlers, the pickers of detail, the annoying know-alls we used to brush aside.

Now they have joined fake charities and they have become Government Advisors. The only reason they get those positions is that nobody with any sense cares to tell the government anything. Might as well tell the garden gnomes. They won’t listen either but at least they won’t use the information to balls something up. In my line of work, the appropriate Government Advisor is Prof. Hugh Pennington, known in these parts as ‘Saucy HP’ (yes, my fault). He routinely advises outside his range of expertise. The rest of us sigh and set about fixing it.

The government don’t care about us at all. Neither do the Righteous. The government just make shit up as they go along. So do the Righteous. Both are interested only in their own advancement and in increasing their own perceived importance. They are dangerous, they represent a threat to us all that makes Alky Ada and the Hiya Ray look like no more than a bit of a nuisance, but their actions are random. That’s been the problem. It’s hard to fight them because they operate as independent random elements, a sort of political Brownian motion (strangely apposite!) so it’s impossible to say what lunacy will appear next. The only solution is common sense in government and there’s little hope of that.

However.

They can be manipulated. Their own arrogance and self-importance makes them vulnerable to intelligent persuasion but only if they think it’s in their own interests.

I don’t believe the Righteous started out as a conspiracy. I don’t believe they could run one now. But I don’t rule out the possibility that someone has seen the potential in their random actions and has taken the opportunity to guide them here and there, to bring together their random control-freakery into a coherent whole. With a little malicious intent and some persuasive words, it wouldn’t really be very difficult. It would have to be someone already in a position of power and authority, someone the Righteous would see as important.

I don’t think there was originally a man behind the curtain.

There might well be one now.