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One wonders about the subtext; whether it's a sort of style, introducing a bawdy fascism – the glamour of the jackboot, the thrill of the psychopathic, the forbidden – or whether it's a kind of personal theatre in which one sees a preview of pathological virtual reality fantasies
We’ve seen this process at work in the political field. You could say that fascism and Nazism during their reign over Europe were an example of the way in which a political system, under Hitler, motivated people by appealing to psychopathic or violent strains in their make-up.
I think fascism does need a leader. But the leader may take an unexpected form. In Kingdom Come, I suggest that our equivalent of the ranting führer is the cable channel chat show host.
My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader with few moral scruples, that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom.
A vicious and genuinely mindless neo-fascism, a skilfully aestheticised racism, might be the first consequence of globalisation, when Classic Coke and California Merlot are the only drinks on the menu.
People still think that Hitler and his henchmen imposed Nazi Germany on the German people. I don’t believe they did for a moment. Once they’d got into the saddle they were able to manipulate radio and the mass media, film and the like.
There was no serious attempt, as far as I can make out, to reject the regime. And the same thing was true in Stalin’s Russia. I think it may be that in the future we’ll be dominated by huge masochistic systems.
The future is a system of huge competing psychopathologies. I’m not talking about an individual impetus that will drive the engine. This engine has been assembled, and will be started by everyone probably working unconsciously.
We can probably expect more of these apparently wrong-headed political decisions as part of the breakdown of the rational.
We’re nowhere near being a totally sane society – we’re expected to behave in a totally sane way, and there is a danger that we could veer off into some kind of socialised madness. It seems very volatile. Politics is so totally discredited.
I think we’ve now gone beyond politics into a new and potentially much more dangerous realm where non-political factors will pull the levers of power...
...these may be vast consumer trends, strange surges in the entertainment culture that dominates the planet, quasi-religious eruptions of the kind we saw at Diana’s death, mass paranoia about new diseases, aberrant movements in popularised mysticism, dominance of the aesthetic...
...the only ballot box common to all these is the cash register, an extremely accurate gauge of consumer preference in the very short term but useless beyond the next five minutes. All this leaves the human race extremely vulnerable to any master manipulator.
In the USA we have something to do not with opposed political ideologies, but at best a power struggle between men neither of whom is any better than the other, who are at most perhaps more power-hungry. Look at how mediocre American politicians are!
