THE FANNISH CULT

I seldom feel the desire to want to “join” things. I don’t know whether that’s antisocial or inhuman or what, but I do seem to be deeply suspicious of anything that might even loosely described as a “movement” of some kind.

You see, this modern cyberworld can be a very marvellous thing if you happen to be the sort of person who rarely ventures out of your room to engage with the “real” world but it does allow for the enabling of what can only really be described as “the nutter…”

“What do I mean by this…?”, you might very well be asking, whilst simultaneously wondering no doubt whether you have stumbled upon the very lair of one of those very “nutters” of which I speak. Meanwhile, Godwin’s Law probably makes the next couple of paragraphs irrelevant, but I’m going to persevere with them anyway, because it kind of makes my point.

I have this idea that in this modern world, if a certain, let’s call him “Mr Hitler” was living in, let’s pick a remotish place like Cornwall, his extremist views might be rightly derided and ridiculed by anyone and everyone he meets when he’s out and about in public, and, after any kind of public dressing down, he might just scuttle away back to his lair, unchanged in his opinion but unlikely to vocalise it any more in public.

However, if he goes online and happens to find a “Mr Hess” who lives in the Shetland Islands, or a “Mr Goering” who lives on the Scilly Isles, and both of these remote and isolated individuals happen to agree with his ridiculous ideas of world domination, then quite suddenly, his extremist opinions now don’t seem quite so extreme to him as they once did. Now he has some kind of confirmation that his nonsense is somehow valid. Now be believes that he has affirmation that he can go ahead with his plans and people will believe in him, and, before you know it, he’s got some kind of a “movement” going on.

That’s why the idea of “joining things” rather terrifies me.

“People”, despite being amazing creatures, can be quite dreadful ones too, when they want to be, and sometimes even when they don’t…

I understand why people want to join things, of course I do. At the very least it gives people with an interest that they might otherwise only believe that they alone enjoy a sense of affirmation and belonging when they discover that there are like-minded individuals out there who are just as mad about whatever it is as they are.

The difficulty for me is that for every one person in the world who genuinely and innocently enjoys their “thing” there are a load of others who take the simple pleasures and enjoyment of that thing to levels so extreme that they can end up spoiling it for the rest of the group as their own levels of enjoyment border upon the “cultish…”

As with any other thing that risks becoming “trendy” or just a bit of a fad, even if only on the “underground” or “less-than-mainstream” circuits, there will be people who join in with these things just because they are trendy or fashionable, just as there are people who will “grow up” and find that those very same former passions seem “childish” to them now, in some way. Equally, there are those who are “hardcore” fans who have always been there and probably always will, and who will be “fans forever!”, but who bubble along quite happily through life without ever taking it all “far too seriously”. Then there are also those to whom being part of a group will give them a sense of feeling “important” or give them a “sense of belonging” which they might never have in their “real” lives...

But then there are the “nutters…” Those who believe that only “their” way though the world of organised fandom is the “right” way. Those who denigrate and berate anyone who claims to have another point of view on one element or other of the “whatever it is” that they’re all claiming to love unconditionally.

Sometimes these beliefs come from over-intellectualising something they secretly think to be a bit childish, and is a way of hiding their embarrassment at loving it so much that they get over- defensive to the point where the best form of defence is attack: “I only really like it because it unconsciously says a lot about the neo-communist movements of the late 1920s… I’m not like you childish people who just like dressing up and all that…”

And sometimes it’s just because they enjoy being bullies…

I think what most annoys me is when people like to imply that they somehow “own” the “whatever it is” and that this somehow invalidates other people’s enjoyment of it. It’s as if they genuinely believe that their own enjoyment is the “one pure and true way” to enjoy the thing, and that everyone else’s enjoyment is somehow phoney in some way and therefore totally invalid.

Of course, very movement has its extremists, and sometimes they only become extremists because the rest of us let them. After all, as “people”, we’re very good at giving other people responsibilities because we don’t want to have to do things ourselves, just as we’re very good at then complaining about them when they turn into dictators because of all the responsibilities we’ve given them... but then, that’s just people and organisations for you, and is why I believe that you simply can’t trust ’em and that you should never really “join” anything…

Not if you want to keep your sanity intact anyway…

(In the interests of both honesty and slight hypocrisy - which I’m sure the cleverest amongst you will have already noticed - of a blinkered rant about other people’s blinkered rantings and ravings, and, perhaps, just for the record: Non-attending DWAS member since 1977, non-functioning member of a political party since 1997, lapsed trade union member, lapsed theatre group member, signed up to far more online networking sites than I’d really like to be, and a general disappointment to any other members of pretty much anything I’ve ever joined ever…)