Wagatha Christie and the ‘fake world’

I’m not someone who spends a lot of time on modern celebrities (i.e those with no discernable talent). I’m even less interested in the celebrity-adjacent, like the WAGs of this world.

This Wagatha Christie libel case though, as well as having an amusing nickname, does tell us something about the society we currently live in.

Rebekah Vardy is a fascinating character. Willing to stab friends and acquaintances in the back for a few grand from The Sun, she then compounds her situation by deciding to brazen out Colleen Rooney’s accusation of leaking Instagram stories. She didn’t think: “Bugger: she caught me. I’ll keep my head down and everyone will forget about it in a few months.” No, she doubled down and decided to sue Rooney for libel.

Now, as anyone with any sense knows, the libel courts are to be avoided, as far as possible. Being in the right doesn’t guarantee you a win: ask those who took on Jeffrey Archer.

However Vardy thought she could win a libel action - despite the appearance of destroying evidence and having a long history of doing what she said she hadn’t done - just because her husband kicks a ball for a living, which makes her ‘famous’..

Looking at the bigger picture though, it’s hard to blame her for thinking that she can come out on top.

We live in a culture where the truth is what you say it is. Convincing people that black really is white has become commonplace over the last 20-30 years. Climate change deniers, politicians telling us one porky after another and people believing in wild conspiracies that run counter to what’s in front of our eyes. Somehow, despite the famous warnings contained in 1984, we’re now living in some kind of Orwellian world where people believe obvious lies. What the hell is going on?

To understand how we’ve got here, it’s worth watching Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalization (still available for free on the BBC iPlayer), to learn how governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on a complex ‘real world’ in the 1970s and built a simpler ‘fake world’ run by corporations and their political puppets. This brazen fakery is a massive Fuck You to The Enlightenment’s core pillars of reason and scepticism. It’s made ideals such as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity and constitutional government seem as dated as Immanuel Kant’s knee breeches.

It’s easy to see why this has happened. The complex real world requires educated, informed populations, who are also armed with the ability to think critically, in order for us all to progress. The problem is, such populations can’t then be manipulated, fobbed off with lies and obfuscations, and exploited by the corporations running things. The result is education systems that don’t teach our kids what they need to know about the world, to become critical-thinking workers, consumers and voters.

Another conspiracy? A fair question, but consider this: since 1979, incomes for the top 1% of households have risen over 160%, compared to just 26% for those in the bottom 90%. One of the reasons for this leap in inequality of income and capital, is that the same 1% owns more than 50% of the equity in both private and public companies. They’re the people who have benefited from the swathes of financial deregulation since the 1970s, which have led to corporations now having just one reason to exist: create shareholder value. It doesn’t matter what they make or serve, corporations are just cash machines, dispensing shareholder dividends. (Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is excellent on how we’ve got to where we are now.)

How better to get richer by stealth than to hoodwink the 99%, with slogans like “we’re all in it together”, while funding for things millionaires don’t use - state schools, for example - suffer deaths by a thousand cuts. After all, we can’t have proles with a vote learning to think critically, can we?

So I don’t blame Rebekah Vardy for believing she can create her own reality, simply because she has money. I don’t imagine that she’s much of a critical thinker, so she might see millionaire Conservative cabinet ministers doing the same thing on a daily basis and believe that the same rules apply to her. And she has a bigger Insta following that any of them, eh babes?

She might end up confused and disappointed when she loses her libel case and has to fork out more than a million quid in legal fees. Never mind: she can always pay it off by selling stories to The Sun - a paper that is itself not known for critical thinking, beyond whether A$AP Rocky is a loser for cheating on Rihanna.

And, of course, The Sun just happens to be owned by one of the 1%. What a coincidence.