First we take Manhattan . . .

We are all designed to a greater or lesser extent to be conformists.  One imagines, as with other things, that some sort of continuum exists, stretching from those who are little affected to those who are excessively affected.

[With regard to individuality, Gurdjieff—and those who don’t know of him can google him—always claimed that his Armenian grandmother educated him to go against the crowd and never to do the same as others.  A lesson he included in his own later teachings.]

Now there is nothing wrong in principle with conformism—at least, with normal levels of it.  Without it social life would be impossible, and what you would have instead with be a never-ending conflict of the egos—something like the current UKIP, except on speed.

Another thing about conformism is that it is automatically functioning.  It represents an eternally watchful instinct to stay on-side of the prevailing social consensus.  Like a species of chameleon, we are unconsciously sensitive to any alteration in the social backdrop and are subject to an inner pressure to change colour in sympathy with it.

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you can gain control of the backdrop projector then you can turn people any colour you want.

And this, effectively, is the situation we find ourselves in.  The means of influencing social opinion nowadays is via the media and the media is irretrievably in liberal hands.  To adapt from Leonard Cohen: ‘The liberals have got their channels in the bedrooms of the proles . . .’

And more than the proles, the self-defining middle class is worse.

Political or philosophical argument is no longer necessary, all you need do is present the fashion conscious with the merest hint of being out of step with ‘sophisticated’ opinion and they will do the rest for themselves.

And ‘hinting’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.  In the softening-up period leading to the gay marriage, TV shows, such as The Good Wife, began to filter in gay characters, generally charming and inoffensive, and totally unlike the search-and-destroy mobs of maenads patrolling the media in search of any counter-opinion.

Indeed, the most prominent anti-marriage voices in the Irish media leading up to the referendum often appeared to be those of homosexuals horrified by the idea.  Most other people, it would seem, had been frightened into a cautious silence.  Scarcely surprising, since the same media seemed to be involved in imposing a full-body-press in favour of the proposal.  I can remember one edition of the Sunday Business Post in which I counted five separate mentions of gay marriage, all inherently positive.

Nor, as I say, was there any great debate of principle involved.  Rather it was along the pathetic lines of ‘everyone should be free to express their love’.  Now what that had to do with marriage, I don’t know.  There are thousands of people in love, who have never been married, and thousands married who’ve never been in love.  Love, at best, is something ancillary to marriage; not some necessary precondition.

What we got instead was a sentimentalised and trivialised pap, designed to be fed like sugar water to the masses, and intent on disguising the fact that what was involved was not simply some natural extension of marriage, like a concrete screed finding level within the shuttering of the existing institution, but rather a complete recasting of it, with little discussion at all as to logical consequence.

The reward that was being offered for voting yes was the temporary satisfaction of seeming to belong to some wider constituency involving the ‘great and good’ of Hollywood and the entertainment industry etc. etc. which of course never really was the case.