The way things are now . . .

Back about the mid-1980s, someone I knew rang me one night to ask me if I had heard something about a member of his family.  In any event, I hadn’t.  And even if I had I was unlikely to say it to him.

But what I did do was offer him some advice, based purely on logic.  In such a situation of malicious faceless gossip—for that is clearly what it was—the thing to do, I said, was to ignore it and pretend absolute indifference to it; indeed, to try even to exacerbate it, if you could, until the whole thing collapsed under its own weight into absurdity.

At that stage, I still believed in the basic rationality of people.

But, of course, I was wrong; or, at best, only half right.  Such things can equally build to the point where, rather than collapse into absurdity, they suddenly take off instead, through some sort of spontaneous combustion, and become viral, creating a situation where anyone can come and throw their shit on the bonfire and watch it blaze away.

The truth is that people in the main do not work by reason; certainly, in such situations as the one described.  Instead they tend to believe what they want to believe; or what they are primed to believe.

But then that is the way it has always been and will always be.

It is just that there are some historical periods when it tends to get even more hysterical, especially under impact of changes in the means of communication and media etc.

‘But of course there is worse, there is always worse,

and never the hope of better.’