Making Sense of the Rotherham Child Sex Abuse Scandal

“British cultural and political life is governed, accordingly, largely by emotion and instinct.”

Part One

“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” So begins Franz Kafka’s posthumously published dystopic novel, written in 1914 and 1915, The Trial. “Someone must have been telling lies about migrants, or, more frequently, Muslims, for without having done anything wrong they were arrested one fine morning.” So might begin a similarly dystopic contemporary novel set in near-future Britain or almost any of the current European Union member states.

It would, however, be a crude heuristic to deploy if the intention of this hypothetical book was to instruct its audience about the dangers of the “regression of our public sphere,” as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek described the state of our present intellectual and political culture, in 2016, aptly arguing that “[a]ccusations and ideas that were until now confined to the obscure underworld of racist obscenity” have gained “a foothold in official discourse.”

Falsehoods, to be sure, abound in the new era of post-truth politics we entered in circa 2016. As I have noted elsewhere, the current Vice President of the United States of America, J. D. Vance, has openly admitted to being willing to lie (in a nominally trivial way) for his own political benefit. In this, among Machiavellians, he is exceptional only in his readiness to say so. Yet often, or indeed typically, the most prominent authors of conspiracies, myths, and untruths in Western politics and media are not lying. Which is to say, they believe the things they write and say are true.