Cranks 2

• 02 October 2025
• notions

To continue, sort-of, from yesterday: I think perhaps another reason I have an admiration for (or perhaps just a fascination with) cranks is their ability to resist the lure of socially-enforced external and popular narratives. Where their analysis is correct, this resistance allows them to avoid these mendacious narratives—to avoid, as the lads would say, false consciousness^[1].

The world is very complicated, but while we must of necessity rely on preexisting societal mechanisms to determine facts, it is very difficult—often impossible—to find those separated from narratives. Facts with which one is presented—by others or in the media—are generally presented selectively to support narratives, whether intentionally or otherwise.

Print newspapers have the factual bit—which creates a tacit narrative by virtue of the subtleties of what's left in and left out and how it's shaded and what gets reported on at all and all that good consent manufacturing stuff—and opinion columnists, who create the explicit narratives around those—they're the bit of the paper that really draws the crowds, at least to heard the journalists tell it.

They concretise the arguments implicit in the factual stuff: there will be a factual story about rates of benefit fraud, and then there will be a columnist saying that benefit fraudsters should be put in the pillory or hanged or something. Certain narratives are reiterated and accepted as tacit truth by larger or smaller sections of the media and thus the populace, and this serves to reinforce said narrative. It can be remarkably difficult to avoid being worn down, particularly by less "extreme-seeming" beliefs.

Consider the media narrative that predominated shortly after the 2024 general election: “Keir Starmer has detoxified the Labour Party and won a stunning victory”. I'd certainly like to quibble with their definition of "detoxify" there, but despite the obvious direction of my personal sympathies, I’m not going to claim that Jezza would’ve won this election. However, it is possibly instructive to contrast the treatment that the Conservatives got at the 2019 and 2024 elections.

In 2019 Boris Johnson was able to get away with hiding in fridges and snatching phones from reporters without it becoming The Big Thing. Robert Peston uncritically reported a false story that one of Matt Hancock's aides was assaulted by a Labour activist and then walked it back without, iirc, much in the way of significant criticism. This was, to an extent, reported by the media at large, but in general treated as a mild diversion and very much as beside the point.

Columnists, meanwhile, spent most of their time saying how you had to vote Boris—either reluctantly or enthusiastically, depending on the paper—or the world would end. Some of the more excitable ones felt empowered to write lengthy screeds detailing entirely fictitious scenarios about the purges Corbyn would enact were he elected.

In 2024, meanwhile, Rishi Sunak left a D-Day event early and it was everywhere, for days. Columnists were knives out for the Tories and, somehow, openly thirsty for Keir Starmer. Ministers were asked serious critical questions in interviews! British politics doesn't have a mandate of heaven, but the consensus of the media class might be a close equivalent, and it was pretty transparent that it had been, in this case, withdrawn ^[2].

In a way, the media are the biggest cranks of all—able to maintain an absolutely rigid belief in whatever their thing is at the time—it's just that unlike normal cranks, it can change on a dime.

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