Quentin Letts believes in hate and nothing else. It’s perhaps why he, and anyone else who writes for the Daily Mail, seem so bizarre to anyone who understands the concept of objectivity. They do point, however, to how the concept of “objectivity” itself is a very difficult and bold claim for any human being to make. It assumes the ability to act without the impetus of emotion from a place of pure reason that has somehow severed any traces of identity from itself. Such a transcendental aesthetic is questionable at the best of times, so saith Quentin…

But the most interesting thing about Daily Mail culture (and the newspaper is only one aspect of an immense collage of arbitrary hate) is how obviously it is entirely driven by sexual repression. Thrust that finger at the shamed ones and shoot your white-hot blame all over them! Paedophiles, Muslims, immigrants, the youth… just say the word in front of a Daily Mailer and watch the hysterical bloodbath ensue. These tags eventually become so detached from actual language that they start sounding like trigger-words for activating sleeper agents... and maybe they are!

It’s nothing new either, there’s a long tradition of cultural hysteria that runs beneath Western civilization. Patriotism and war are good examples of the madness in effect. Reading Homer, Virgil and especially Xenophon, one is shocked by their inhumanity; an inhumanity driven on by sexuality and violence. Then, under Christianity, the hysteria becomes localized and books like The Malleus Maleficarum project their terror of sex onto the defenseless of society, thus giving everyone a chance to slowly torture these vessels of sexuality to death… ‘cos hangins to gud 4 em!’

Indeed, the mindset of the Daily Mailer seems to emerge deep from the primal mud, shaking its hoary locks and foaming at the mouth. Why there are these strange processes by which libido channels through the unconscious and fills certain symbols with projected malignity is unknown, even after Freud has given us handy labels to attach to the symptoms. Perhaps it’s at the root of culture? It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine Aristotle’s Poetics as a development of this phenomenon under the title of “Katharsis”. Tracing its influence through fairy tales, the most psychically entrenched narratives, would be almost self-explanatory.

To come to some sort of logical conclusion, it’s also worth considering here the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days at Sodom. It starts, on the first day, with the kind of sex Angela Carter describes as “available in any old brothel”, and finishes with the “Hell Game” on the 120th day where the libertine reaches an apotheosis into Satan himself. That the unbridled expression of sexuality eventually leads to a state of anti-humanity is an interesting satire on the role of sexuality in society and vice versa. The sex is with prostitutes, those who embody the link between sex and economics at its most blatant, and takes place within the structures of pornography, where sensuality and feeling is replaced by geometrical constructions giving infinite variation on the meetings of penis-vagina-anus-mouth. We are left with human architecture, without occupancy. Desire is lost within rationality and rationality is then driven mad by desire.

So when Quentin Letts attempts objectivity, yet writes only from internal intuition, he loses himself within a solipsistic cycle of self-perpetuation. His sexual fears and desires are irretrievably lost within mental mazes of immigration statistics and EU legislation. Eventually nothing is left in his mind but arbitrary associations connected entirely by the force of gut-feeling, repressed libido, and what Wilhelm Reich described as “the terror of reaction”. Essentially, Quentin Letts believes in hate and nothing else…