BY DANIEL JUPP
Back around 2015, when madness was not yet openly declared policy, the punk icon John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) released a searing biography called Anger Is An Energy. It was actually his second biography, but significantly more important than the first one. Both books, and the life they refer to, are about rebellion, about being that awkward person that goes against the crowd.
Anger Is an Energy doesn’t allow comfortable middle and upper class lies to persist. It doesn’t accept that who is oppressed and who is the oppressor remains forever fixed by simple innate characteristics. It doesn’t give you an easy answer that fits neatly into the prejudices of the average Guardian reader. Rather, it presents you with a far broader point about rebelliousness itself, about the eternal attraction of the stance of the rebel, but also about whether that stance is real, justified, or valuable.
Rebellion is not always good or always evil, and the sides can change depending on who is actually committing injustices. Lydon understood this in a way that most actors and musicians never have, and in a way that the strange bastard hybrid of pop psychology, Marxist rhetoric, corporate hypocrisy, elite deflection and hippy degeneracy that is modern mainstream ‘progressivism’ never will.
Here is Lydon speaking about the modern world and showing that awareness of change that the pampered class of successful entertainers generally never equal:
“I never thought I’d live to see the day when the right wing would become the cool ones giving the middle finger to the Establishment, and the left wing became the snivelling self-righteous twatty ones going around shaming everyone.”
It’s a quote which I’m sure most of you have already heard, but the reason it spread so far and so fast was because of how beautifully and accurately it captured (in typically English working class tones) the reality of the world that exists when what was ‘the Left’ has been the Establishment for 70 or more years (especially across arts and culture).
There was no corporate billionaire campaign behind the spread of that message. It went viral solely because it was true.
The progressive Establishment, who can be described by a range of equally accurate but different labels, now dominates the universities, the art world, the entertainment industry, Hollywood, Netflix, and several huge tech companies.
It’s their version of politics, and their worldview. It’s progressive Establishment funding that props up dying legacy media in a sort of MacBeth marriage that pushes many of them to lie ever more blatantly because they need the ad funding, while the lies they tell are killing their businesses. Go woke go broke (on steroids for much of legacy media) has never been so true.
Lydon saw the cultural switch that occurs when the old rebels become the new establishment. When the guitar-playing, long-haired university student (who wants to be a rock star) singing ‘we’ll keep the red flag flying here’ becomes a lawyer, then an MP, then a three term winning British Prime Minister most famous for lying about weapons of mass destruction and playing a leading role in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Or in the US, when the ‘fight against racism’ shifts from removing segregation laws to imposing racial safe spaces, or from supporting civil rights and colour blindness, to forcing white students to write guilt essays on their skin colour or to chasing Jews across campus with the intent to murder them.
One of the most glaring ways a thing can be an injustice is by denying equality of justice, and yet this is precisely what progressive policy now insists on in the pursuit of the equality of group outcomes. Judges are told to go soft on black criminals. Premiums are put on harm to favoured, non-white groups, where the same attack on a white person results according to official guidelines and law in lower sentences.
The people who protested against apartheid in South Africa insist on it in South Dakota, or in the South-East of England. They insist on it in employment law, and in sentencing guidelines, and in stop and search policy, and in drugs laws, and even when it comes to whether we imprison a rapist or a murderer.
The modern western injustices under progressive bent are not expressed by boarding house signs reading No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs. They are defined by advertising campaigns and hate crime laws and censorship of free speech.
Lydon says with brutal poetry that he “came from the dustbin”. His family background was both incredibly poor and pretty dysfunctional. He lost the power of speech for a long period as a child after being infected with meningitis by rat bites at the age of 7. He was hospitalised, fell into a long coma, and lost large portions of his memory:
“I hadn’t forgotten how to read, yet I couldn’t talk – language was gone.”
When he came out of the coma, he couldn’t remember his parents and had to accept that the people presented to him as such were his mum and dad. He says that nurses and doctors ‘told me that they were my mum and dad, and I had to believe them’.
These are experiences of real suffering and real poverty. They are what make John Lydon’s white working class rebelliousness one focused on real things and actual experience.
Everything depends on whether the injustice you are angry about is real or imaginary, but equally on whether what you do about it is worse or better than the thing itself. Fixed definitions by race of who occupies the just and unjust position, of who is actually being harmed, leads to people being so robbed of true moral judgement that terrorists become their freedom fighters and concerned parents become their domestic terrorists.
Lydon has always been defined by his refusal to submit to establishment instruction, his insistence on truth, and his grounding in the kind of firm reality that knows what a rat bite feels like. His anger is not only creative it is positive and discerning. It burns like a flame, but the flame offers heat and light, not mere destruction. Like the anger of the Founding Fathers against the intolerable injustices of their time, which didn’t keep burning everything down and which didn’t have a version of the Terror of the French Revolution or the 100 million deaths that followed the Russian Revolution.
It’s not feeling the anger that is a crime, its whether your anger burns the innocent.
The evil of wokeness does not derive from young people wanting something better or feeling strong emotions. It derives from those strong emotions being directed at false targets and having no rational grounding in reality. It derives from their rebellion serving the Establishment, from them being angry about imaginary or ancient crimes, and from them demanding payment and punishment from the innocent whilst ignoring those who are really guilty today. It’s the direction, not the intensity, of the anger that is the greatest problem.
Lydon then reminds us that anger is an energy that we need. That we should keep feeling. That we, who like him know where the real injustices are falling today, should feel as intensely as we can, and even more intensely than the other side feel their synthetic, fake and manufactured outrages.
Our enemy is not just those doing evil today. It’s apathy, the apathy of millions who either don’t see or don’t care and thereby enable the continuance of evil and the persistence of evil freed from consequence, accountability and punishment. By God if people can be outraged by a Ricky Gervais joke or a raised eyebrow or a glance or a statue, we can and should be outraged by our kids being genitally mutilated, our borders being flooded with invaders, and our own rights being taken away. We should feel anger at those things and we shouldn’t let it flare and die as if a statute of limitations exists on what is right and what is wrong.
We are too rational to do what the other side do and punish innocent descendants for alleged ancient grievances. We aren’t going to be saying that the children of current billionaires and politicians and journalists and doctors who did evil are guilty by birth. We aren’t going to be defining it by innate characteristics like race and gender.
But we can’t let the energy of anger go until we have the balm of justice in our hands. Anger is a necessary energy.
The choice is not between angry emotion and calm facts. It’s not between hysteria and simply not sharing that hysteria. It’s between being angry at imaginary things that serve elite interests, being pathetically apathetic in ways that don’t challenge elite crimes, and being genuinely and justifiably and righteously angry about the real crimes you aren’t supposed to notice.
Rebellion with discernment is the highest form of wisdom and the greatest defence of freedom. Apathy is the best accomplice of tyranny.
Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex. Daniel’s SubStack is available here.