BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
One notices, if one pays attention at all, that we have entered an era where the superlative has murdered the substantive. Where once we measured statements by their truth, we now appraise them by their capacity to startle. A headline declaring ‘Tax Policy Revised’ gathers dust; ‘Minister Claims Eating Cold Beans ‘Worse Than Welfare Cuts’ in Tone-Deaf LBC Interview’ goes viral. It is against this backdrop of competitive absurdity that I wish to announce, with all appropriate solemnity, my intention to sever my own penis with a breadknife.
Naturally, I shall do no such thing. The breadknife remains in its drawer, my penis (such as it is) remains attached, and the sun will rise tomorrow much as it did today. But the very fact that you momentarily entertained the possibility – that somewhere in the reptilian cortex of your brain a synapse fired to whisper ‘perhaps he means it’ – proves everything that needs proving about our degraded intellectual climate.
In 1729, Swift suggested we eat Irish children; in 2025, I need only imply genital self-mutilation to achieve the same satirical effect. Progress, of a sort, has been made.
Consider the mechanics: a journalist at a respectable outlet – let us call it The Daily Obelisk – crafts a piece about declining sperm counts. The sober version languishes in the science section with seven readers. But retitle it ‘Soy Milk Turning Men Into Eunuchs, Warn Scientists’, add a stock photo from Getty Images of a weeping bodybuilder, and suddenly it’s trending between a Spectator columnist’s views on warm beer and footage of Gary Lineker eating a crisp. The words ‘some studies suggest’ are worked harder than a junior doctor on New Year’s Eve. The truth becomes not just stretched but racked, drawn and quartered, until what remains is pure narrative spasm – divorced from fact, yet throbbing with viral potential.
The BBC, that once-august institution, now runs segments asking, ‘Is It Racist to Have a Picnic?’ (2020). The Guardian publishes earnest explainers on ‘The Racist History of the Office Christmas Party’ (2021). Meanwhile, the Telegraph counters with (later deleted) ‘Oxford University Says ‘Maths’ Is Too ‘Ableist,’ Suggests ‘Mathing’ (2021).
All compete in the same grotesque pantomime, where the only sin is being forgettable, and the only crime is failing to provoke.
A man could saw off his own genitals in broad daylight on the steps of the Westminster War Memorial, and by the evening news cycle the discourse would have already pivoted—first to whether the implement was a ‘heritage knife’ requiring stricter controls, before climaxing into a 47-tweet symposium on whether the assailant’s rejected backup weapon—a common hacksaw—might have constituted toxic masculinity had he chosen to use it. The ‘victim’ (always a victim), by this point, had been entirely forgotten—a mere rhetorical prop in our grand theatre of performative concern. The stump, still twitching in the gutter, would go unremarked— not from any lack of interest, but because outrage has a half-life shorter than a TikTok trend— until a passing dachshund, with more appetite than decorum, would gobble it down as a pre-tea bonus.
A controlled experiment suggests itself. If one were to systematically reconstruct all personal communication in the hyperbolic vernacular of engagement-optimised media—transforming ‘rain is forecast’ into ‘UK Weather Apocalypse: Why Your Umbrella Could Be Killing You’, or rebranding a delayed 17:15 from Paddington as ‘The Secret War on Commuters: What GWR Doesn’t Want You to Know’—one would, within weeks, possess quantitative evidence of a profound societal inversion. The metrics would demonstrate, with algorithmic certainty, that a Cambridge professor’s peer-reviewed paper on quantum decoherence generates less traction than a 280-character speculation about the Prime Minister’s choice of breakfast cereal. This is not hypothesis; it is the established mechanics of attention economies, wherein epistemic value and viral potential exhibit a near-perfect inverse correlation (cf. Vosoughi et al., 2018, Science).
The marketplace of ideas has been superseded by the amusement arcade of reactions, where truth is not falsified so much as rendered irrelevant by superior competitors in the memetic ecosystem.
There exists, of course, an alternative. One might simply stop – cease sharing, cease reacting, treat every screaming headline with the contempt it deserves. But this requires recognising that our outrage has been commodified, that our attention has been weaponised, and that we have become unpaid actors in someone else’s profitability model. It is easier, far easier, to keep clicking (as you did, and thanks very much, on this Country Squire Magazine article) .
So no, the breadknife stays in the drawer. But the larger amputation – of reason, of dignity, of our collective ability to distinguish between news and neurological hijacking – continues apace. The operation is performed daily, without anaesthetic, and we are all both surgeon and patient.
The terminus of this progression is calculable. When every truth must compete in an arena where algorithmic selection favours spectacle over substance, where the once factual Financial Times must ask ‘Will AI Eat Your Pension?’ to be read alongside ‘10 Celebs Who Aged Badly’, we have not merely degraded discourse—we have engineered a system that makes enlightenment impossible by design.
The attention economy does not distort truth accidentally; it does so necessarily, as a function of its operational parameters.
Like a universe where entropy always increases, our information ecology now tends irrevocably towards noise. No one simple trick can redeem a system where the very mechanisms of discovery have been weaponised against understanding. The only remaining uncertainty is how much longer we will pretend otherwise.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).