The Great Capitulation
Why We Keep Choosing the Same Old Straitjackets
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
— George Santayana
They like to quote this, those people don’t they. A solemn little aphorism wanked around like an exhausted… I cannot think of an adequate analogy so, like an exhausted… penis. George Santayana, the source, would probably have had a good, dry choke at how his observation has had its teeth ripped out and been turned into a teatime smirk. Something you might say to your mum in a theatrically serious tone when she buys the wrong flea treatment… again, rather than a searing indictment, a pitifully obvious call to immediately stop and take some kind of stock for the love of all that is holy.
Because here we are, not repeating, but jumping with gurning, grinning, compliant surrender into the familiar, the disastrous, the blood-stagnatingly predictable. We saw Nixon, then Blair, and a piss parade of charlatans and architects of ruin which never seems to end. And yet, we keep voting. We keep choosing. It's not a failure of memory; it's something far more fundamental, a genetic kink in the human design.
“People died to give you the vote”
And were considered mad, stupid, reactionary, ungrateful. Wouldn’t those same people, given their personality types, be questioning the very reductive and insectoid nature of leadership itself by now?
"We’re not seeking freedom; we're seeking a shepherd, even if that shepherd leads us straight to the slaughterhouse."
Centuries ago, the English anarchist Matthew Arnold, in his searing critique Culture and Anarchy, dissecting the spiritual malaise of his own time, classified society into its fundamental flaws: the landed aristocracy, the "Barbarians," driven by their will and pleasure; the middle classes, the "Philistines," obsessed with industry, comfort, and material progress; and everyone else, the "Populace," raw and unformed. Each, in their own way, contributed to a collective blindness, an inability to see beyond their narrow self-interest to a higher, more cultured common good.
Let’s be brutally honest: this isn't some complex political science conundrum. It’s an ape thing. A primal urge to find the alpha, to defer to the loudest monkey in the troop or the one with the most colourful hat. Yuval Noah Harari (who is a perfect example of “um, AI, isn’t it interesting, I really hope it doesn’t all go wrong”) hinted at it in Sapiens, this pervasive, lingering impostor syndrome that humanity carries like a broken pencil. We got here late, stumbled into success because our thumbs were a bit bendy, and now, deep down, we suspect we don't really deserve it. This inferiority complex, this subtle, gnawing doubt, is the terrible putrid, fertile ground for tyrants and demagogues. We cling to the strong hand, the comforting lie, the illusion of order that comes from identifying with a side, a banner, a political ideology, no matter how threadbare or blood-soaked. We’re not seeking freedom; we're seeking a shepherd, even if that shepherd leads us straight to the slaughterhouse. Again. And again. And…
Consider the painful pantomime of our very much arrived at dystopia. Is it everything you thought it would be by the way? They promised you grey overalls and gin and you got screaming technicolor mental health and a high definition grin. George Orwell’s 1984, once a terrifying clarion call, is an apathetic sigh, a resigned shrug. "Potatoes have gone up, AI’s taken over, Rain tomorrow." The digital ghetto, the surveillance state, the erosion of liberty – it's background noise, an eye-roll in the post office queue. We’re not in urgent revolt; we’re in love with the victim-hood of it all, performing our subjugation like it’s reality television. We saw this coming. We had the blueprints, the warnings etched in history and literature. Yet, here we are, either gazing at our reflections in our smart devices, or intoxicated by the feeling of belonging, of being on the 'right' side. Or more often, both of these simultaneously.
This civilization, this grand, self-proclaimed triumph, is a stark raving mad society. It is genocidal, ecocidal, omnicidal. We are ruled by psychopaths, while those who say ‘we are ruled by psychopaths’ – like I just did – are relegated to the fringes of the fringes of the fringes, dismissed as weirdos, not even enterprising or commercially-minded enough to be conspiracy theorists or alternatives, even as yesterday's conspiracy theory becomes today's news, over and over again. We don’t hurtle into totalitarianism and Armageddon, we shrug and limp or gossip and gasp, our attention aggressively pulled towards the vapid and the inane – another celebrity scandal, another rage farmed crisis, another masturbatory new gadget that promises to fill the void while tightening the digital leash. There’s even a tiredness to saying this, along with the arrogance of assumed irony. I’m watching Love Island IRONICALLY. I’m too clever to really be interested in this viral OnlyFans story. I’m observing it, a detached intellectual with my tongue stuck in my cheek. You’re not really. It’s a lie. And you can’t pull your sticky eyes away any more than you can stop using emojis in case people think you’re being aggressive, or weird, or ‘performatively intellectual’ or some new expression created as a balm to soothe the anxiety of the cerebrally insecure.
We are trained viciously and thoroughly to believe that "success" is accumulating trinkets and accolades, impressing people whose approval we should recoil from, not seek. A certain body type, a certain kind of house, the 'right' partner, a fat bank account – these are the straitjackets we happily wriggle into, mistaking them for warm blankets. And if we fail to achieve these most ugly of goals, we're taught to feel worthless, to sedate ourselves with alcohol and entertainment, to wait for a mobility scooter and an end-of-life visit from a stranger in a lanyard and a navy blue fleece and a tattoo of a Disney character on her forearm. Is that how you want your light to go out?
The Comfort Cult: Assisted Dying as a Middle-Class Death Wish
This grim surrender to comfort extends even to our very end. The modern assisted dying debate, now an entrenched middle-class obsession with comfort, epitomises this capitulation. Its proponents, overwhelmingly privileged and accustomed to unprecedented personal agency, demand a death cleansed of all suffering, a sterile, managed exit from existence. They parrot phrases about "dignity and bodily autonomy," as if these concepts apply equally to everyone, dismissing secular reservations as "undeclared religious beliefs" and ignoring the terrifying reality for society's most vulnerable.
"Morante lamented a profound 'love for death without any spiritual baggage' – no resurrection myth, no reincarnation, no enlightenment."
This aligns chillingly with Elsa Morante's observation in "For or Against the Atom Bomb," where she lamented a modern, particularly middle-class, "desire for disintegration," a profound "love for death without any spiritual baggage" – no resurrection myth, no reincarnation, no enlightenment. It's a pragmatic, clean, and utterly empty nihilism, devoid of the messy, painful, but ultimately vital spiritual confrontation with mortality that earlier eras understood. This comfortable acceptance of ultimate oblivion, stripped of meaning, paves the way for the bureaucratization of death itself.
This is where the chasm yawns wide. For the elderly, the disadvantaged, the disabled, the mentally ill – the "low-agency" people – this isn't about choice, but the insidious, institutional momentum towards an "efficient remedy" for costly, complex lives. Consider the victim of child sexual abuse, bed-bound by morbid obesity; the gang-raped intravenous drug user struggling with HIV; the blind man with learning difficulties; the woman sacrificing her youth to care for dying relatives. These aren't isolated cases. They are millions. For them, an assisted death might not be a sovereign act, but the final societal judgment: "the rotting cherry on the maggot-filled cake" of neglect, abuse, and loneliness.
This is the chilling heart of Hannah Arendt's warning about the banality of evil: how the pursuit of convenience, the bureaucratic normalisation of the unthinkable, can lead us to complicity. This is a collective death wish, born from privilege's allergy to discomfort, risking a future where a "family history of assisted death" could be inherited like a modern "gallows complexion." Our society, which hides death away in hospitals and nursing homes, has cultivated a profound, almost hysterical fear of suffering. We champion "quality of debate" while remaining oblivious to the undramatic reality of most deaths, and blind to cultures where death is a communal, natural process, not a medical emergency to be expedited at all costs. Our desperation for a painless end speaks not to compassion, but to a profound Western refusal to accept life’s filthy, stinging, messy totality.
Morante knew this, her spirit blazing with an anarchic clarity that cost her friendships (including Pasolini’s) and challenged the very air she breathed. To truly live an alchemically inspired life, you must unlearn everything this diseased civilisation has drip-fed you, like a broken baby bird, about what a 'properly lived life' looks like. Define your own truth, your own values, your own sanity. Please.
“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
William Blake, another whose obscure obstinance is neutered by those who turn his work into tattoos and key-rings but would recommend medication if they knew him now. If you’re honest, you know it would go:
“He’s talented but he’s his own worst enemy and clearly on the neurodivergent scale”
What inspired works would a medicated Blake be producing with the knowledge of his on-the-spectrum status? Perhaps endless self portraits/self-ies exploring the journey of identifying his disorder and finding the right support within the community.
“Me when I realised there wasn’t an angel in a tree after all”
Do you remember at school, someone who wasn’t very clever but who went along with everything? Someone who was very frightened of not belonging or of having the wrong bag or facial expression or sandwiches? They are the worst, worse than the real bullies because they create the conditions for tyranny. They are the mud it grows in and they are the VAST. The trauma of discovering that it does not change when one leaves school. Everyone remains the same. Frightened, watching for teacher, watching the clock, watching each other, wrapping their heads in some stuffing filled armor.
There is now an alternative/free speech/real news HR department/think tank turning out content every second. Entire industries growing into empires built upon “This is the Real Story!” “The Story Behind The Story!” but they need a new “Story Behind The Story!” every day to keep the clicks. Subversion has been given an AI chosen name, a bespoke podcast studio, and algorithmically optimised content, crafted with broadcast-quality audio and slick motion graphics, designed not to challenge the system but to dominate the digital airwaves. It can’t lead anywhere because it depends upon the sickness. It’s munchausen’s by proxy with a twist, the twist is that the story about our sick predicament is an intoxicating distraction from our sick predicament.
Jimi Hendrix waved his freak flag high, but you are going to have to make that freak flag into a laser pen and burn eyeballs out with it. The stakes are high, highest. Do everything the 'wrong' way because to do it the right way now is simply immoral and not even in a sexy way. Not even in an interesting way. Even our villains are dull and plastic and pampered and stupid. Not a stylish trilby or clever one-liner among them.
Anger whatever gods are not arriving on time. Because nothing anyone has done has worked. All movements splinter into the same patterns of fraud and maniacal abuse because they’re looking outward at the same eternal problem and never at the kernel at the core of the crux of the cause.
“God, catch sight of me, come down here and fight with me. Keeping yourself so well-hidden, disown me when I’m demon-ridden"
It is therefore necessary to tell the beaten path to fuck off.
While England, for example, is ground zero for this peculiar subservience to the state – a subservience assumed to be made up for in dry sarcasm and eccentric absurdity – "this can't be a totalitarian state, look at this hand-painted teacup I'm wearing on my head, and I just sang a song down a pipe made out of melted down chess boards from the House of Carrion-Wangerton-PikeFish because it’s the centenary of the introduction of otters to the family moat. This weary self-delusion is precisely the problem. It's the performance of freedom that masks the straitjackets, the theatricality of rebellion that prevents the real thing. It can be lovely… but now is not the time. You must please hear me. NOW IS NOT THE TIME. Those who think it is the time think it is 1967. It needs repeating. The stakes are high. Highest.
The Prisoner's Warning: A Scream Against Progress
And this insidious performance of freedom, this comfortable surrender, is a phenomenon perfectly distilled in Patrick McGoohan’s surrealist spy show, The Prisoner. This "classic," "iconic" piece of television, now a sanitised artefact for critics and re-watchers, was never meant to be harmless entertainment. McGoohan wasn't playing; he was screaming. The series, for all its cryptic symbolism, delivers a blunt, chilling truth: an army of functionaries, bureaucrats, and villains do the legwork to keep us in straitjackets, but the ultimate enemy, the true "Number 1," is ourselves. Its profound messages are now too often reduced to "cool iconic top 100 most..." clips, de-fanging its original rage into digestible, commodified nostalgia.
The Prisoner wasn't just about freedom versus slavery; it was a furious indictment of unbridled progress, dehumanizing technology, endless war and its profiteers, and mindless consumerism. McGoohan, a devout Catholic, shared a worldview with figures like Tolkien, seeing technological advancement as ultimately destructive to our essential humanity and inherent freedom. The seemingly idyllic Village, with its quaint English façade, was a deliberate lure, meant to lull its captives into a false sense of security. Yet, beneath its surface hummed a sinister, high-tech system of surveillance and control. Classical statues concealed cameras; doors operated themselves. It was a totalitarian apparatus designed to dehumanize and bend every individual to its will.
Consider the show's main symbol: the anachronistic penny-farthing bicycle. Strange, beautiful, and absurdly out of place, it became a defiant symbol of resistance to progress, a desperate longing to cling to a simpler past. Even Number 6’s Lotus 7 was a deliberate throwback, valuing classical simplicity over modern fads. These weren't mere aesthetic choices; they were warnings. As McGoohan himself conveyed in rare interviews, his core message was urgent: we are progressing too fast, creating tools that will inevitably be used against us unless we "pull back and consolidate."
He warned that "progress is the biggest enemy on Earth, apart from oneself." He saw us trapped, run by institutions like "the Pentagon, Madison Avenue, television," accepting our lot because we refuse to revolt, rushing towards an "eventual avalanche." Our freedom erodes with every unnecessary purchase. McGoohan’s Village wasn't just an external prison; it was a state of mind, a "surrealist aspect" within us all. "We all live in a little Village," he insisted. "Your village may be different from other people’s villages, but we are all prisoners." His ultimate Number 1 was his own self.
Every piece of modern technology in The Prisoner betrays Number 6. From surveillance that recorded his entire life, to a high-tech watch that leads him into a trap. His attempts to use the enemy's tools for escape fail; his only true weapons are his God-given will and intellect. The show's "progress" is a trap, a technological snare that consumes humanity, echoing Michael Crichton's later warning: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should."
We are not condemned by fate. We are condemned by our profound, self-inflicted Stockholm syndrome, our desperate need for a leader, a party, a 'side' to tell us who we are and what to do. The human condition, stripped bare, isn’t some noble struggle. It’s a terrifyingly eager capitulation to power, a willingness to trade genuine freedom for the fleeting comfort of belonging, even if that belonging means marching straight off the cliff. Until we truly stare that unsettling truth in the face, until we rescue ourselves from living by the rules of lunatics, we will continue to repeat, not because we forget, but because, deep down, we just can’t seem to stop choosing the straitjackets.
Superb. Articulating and eviscerating the ineffable, as ever. Those who can remember the past are also condemned to repeat it.
Urgent reading!