The Big Pretend

What happened to all the grown-ups?

I only ask because it seems like we've reached a point in history where mature adults are in desperately short supply.

Whether it's tech billionaires trashing their own companies with lurches to the right so severe even the most advanced self-driving vehicles would struggle to compensate, world leaders carpet-bombing their neighbours into the stone age while claiming eternal victimhood or, closer to home, parliamentarians alienating their core support to chase radicalised punters who'll never vote for them no matter how well they master the art of goose-stepping, everyone's gone a bit ... funny.

It's like one half of the world is playing a big game of pretend and the rest of us are left playing the part of the little boy in 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. 'Hold on!' we cry, 'that guy's not a political titan!, He's a creepy sex-pest in dangerous cognitive decline!'

Joining in with the mad whims of leaders is better left to fairy stories...

'Oh, no,' say the people playing the Big Pretend. 'He's great. He's going to make everything great again!'

'But he told you that last time and everything's still shit!' we say.

'Well, you're a woke communist lefty, lalalalala,' they say, sticking their fingers in their ears and carrying on with the game.

Meanwhile, in Britain: 'I'm so very, very sorry for that thing I said last week,' declares the Prime Minister. 'So very, very sorry. It was wrong and I shouldn't have said it.'

Sorry about that thing you said, that was written down for you in a speech that you carried in your pocket to the press conference, then read out in public? The thing that's part of a long-term policy of chasing right-wing votes? You're sorry about that now? You weren't sorry about it when you read it out, or when people said, beforehand, 'Hang on, PM, maybe you shouldn't be playing with this kind of rhetoric?'

Don't get me wrong – I'm all for grown-ups acknowledging and correcting their mistakes. I love it when that happens. It's the way forward for all of us. What I'm not so keen on is watching grown-ups plough ahead with ridiculous, damaging behaviour or policy that they don't believe in, that we know they don't believe in, and that they know we know they don't believe in.

Which brings us, naturally, to Brexit. Is that where all this public pretending started? Possibly, along with, across the Atlantic, the rise of Trump. By some weird telepathic connection, millions of grown-ups silently agreed to play a game. They'd play a game of pretending not to have heard the warnings. They'd pretend to believe obvious chancers and liars, because the chancers and liars were telling them what they wanted to hear.

Since 2016 at the very least, no one's gone broke telling people it's absolutely fine to give in to their worst instincts. A whole economy has sprung up around it, in fact, with once-reputable media and entertainment figures diving in for a share of the ever-growing mountain of cash to be made from being as much of a shit as possible to the smallest and least-deserving demographics.

They can't admit that's what they're doing, though. That's against the rules of The Big Pretend. Instead, they all pretend their bile and bigotry is a glorious battle against the real enemy (generally kept vague, but the bad guys in this story always turn out to be people telling them that maybe they could try being a bit nicer to anyone who doesn't need any extra hassle in their lives).

The game is, of course, much easier to play when you can wrap it all up in a bit of righteousness. I mean, who wants to be a bully or a bigot when they can be a defender or a crusader?

Trouble is, once you've joined in with The Big Pretend, it's hard to back out, because it means you have to acknowledge supporting or participating in something that's caused harm: You voted for tyrants, incompetents, shysters and warmongers. You helped make life worse for vulnerable people. Or you acted like a flying monkey for someone with too much money and too much time on their hands, desperately seeking their approval by scouring the internet for chances to be a performatively vile to the people they don't like.

Nobody thinks of themselves as the villain of their own story. That's why The Big Pretend has become so necessary to so many people. The alternative is to act like a grown-up, admit mistakes and failings and commit to doing better, and where's the fun in that?

I don't mind a bit of imaginative play. I make things up for a living, but there's a big difference between a fantasy that frees the imagination or brightens the world and one which keeps the truth at bay and puts us at risk. I'd just like it if the adults who decide how we all live knew the difference.