When Aris met John Mappin
It’s impossible, when observing the strange disorders of our current politics, not to feel we are trapped in an intervening period — between an old, discredited order and whatever follows it, for better or worse. It’s a crisis, as Gramsci famously wrote, which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” There is no popular faith still adhering to the old institutions — the political system, journalism, the church. And yet the alternatives rising up to succeed them — the political religions of the internet, the grifting hot-take economy — seem in many ways worse. Now, indeed, is the time of monsters.
In Edgelands, a new series of videos for UnHerd, I’ll explore the strange and unsettling manifestations of our new political era. Travelling across the country, and further afield, I’ll meet people on the edge of politics — conspiracy theorists, idealists, visionaries and eccentrics — who each in their own way encapsulate this political moment. Much of what we consider offbeat or kooky may have a wider appeal to ordinary people than the London media consensus realises. Perhaps, on the margins and in the hidden recesses of the internet, new political realities are being born which will come to shape all our lives.
For the first episode, I travel to the wild cliffs of Tintagel, on England’s mist-shrouded Atlantic fringe, to meet John Mappin, a scion of the Mappin & Webb jewellery dynasty whose engagement with the kookier fringes of American conservatism has raised eyebrows. A cloud of overwhelmingly negative headlines surrounds Mappin, mostly derived from his flying the flag of the QAnon conspiracy theory from the roof of his Cornish hotel, Camelot Castle.
QAnon adherents, followers of an American political religion birthed from the internet, believe that the world is run by a Deep State cabal of bloodthirsty paedophiles, against whom the saviour Donald Trump was locked in a secretly successful campaign. Representing American politics at its most alien and outlandish, through its overlap with anti-vaccine sentiment and Covid conspiracy theories, QAnon may have more reach in Europe than anyone at first expected.
But is Mappin really, as the headlines claim, the leader of Britain’s QAnon movement? Have the wilder reaches of American conservative politics taken root in Deep England? Or is Mappin a classic eccentric of a traditionally English type, the sort of utopian idealist that has always been drawn to the Celtic fringes, and to the blurry borderlands between myth and reality? Is he dangerous, as the headlines warn, or is he, in his own way, sincerely trying to build a better world?
With more Twitter followers than the vast majority of journalists, and his own successful YouTube channel devoted to his worldview, Mappin is simultaneously a fringe figure and a genuine cultural phenomenon worthy of study. A product of the British establishment who has taken up the cause of anti-establishment populism, and whose beliefs are now shared by a discomforting number of people in Britain as well as America, Mappin is creating his own political reality from his clifftop castle.
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SubscribeEdgelands is a really interesting development at Unherd. I suspect Aris Roussinos is right when he suggests one way to understand the current strange political moment is to explore the periphery. I’m looking forward to more installments.
I’d never heard of Mappin. From a US perspective, he strikes me as a classic English eccentric; scion of a wealthy family who has the time, money, and connections to indulge his obsessions.
Two things stood out for me in this interview. One is the sense that current political and social reality is so odd and dystopian, it normalizes fringe beliefs. When we are constantly subjected, for example, to the intellectually bankrupt woke ideology, and that ideology is apparently endorsed by leaders in business, politics, and education, the beliefs espoused by QAnon no longer seem quite so weird.
The other idea that stood out for me is Mappin’s focus on mythology. People are now so adrift. Traditional beliefs are undermined by society’s institutions at every opportunity. Yet human beings still have a great desire to belong and they have a strong sense of the numinous even if they no longer identify with traditional religion. I think instinctively people are drawn to mythic systems of belief and of making sense of the world.
Aris Roussinos mentioned that Mappin has already been cancelled by the social media companies (predictably enough). Nonetheless, I hope he still manages to disseminate his ideas. People follow him not because he makes logical sense, but because he speaks to the profound disruption in our lives and our strong desire to identify with a historically-rooted culture.
With regard to mythology, I am increasingly attached to Julian Cope’s view that the ancient Britons with their druids and stone circles were doing very nicely until the Romans and then Christianity came along to ruin it all.
Certainly there is little or nothing to believe in right now, so perhaps people will increasingly look to the distant past.
This again is media disinformation, and it shows that this author doesn’t have a clue what the Q movement really is. Qanon doesn’t hold any “beliefs”. It has no “ideology” except investigating the truth. All the Q movement is doing, is presenting a series of questions in code form, and asks the followers of the board to investigate the validity and authenticity of the information given. What it did was get people to investigate the truth for themselves. That isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a way of waking up a sleeping public.
And will Aris be interviewing anyone from BlueAnon, those who still believe that Trump won in 2016 thanks to ‘Russia collusion’, or that Russia put a bounty on US casualties in Afghanistan etc etc? Probably not.
That aside, most of Mappin’s views and claims are perfectly rational and/or common knowledge. Everyone knows that Trump would have won had it not been for Covid. The MSM in the US has admitted that the 2020 election was ‘fortified’ through postal voting etc. The Democrats do seem to enable or tolerate child trafficking through open borders. The military-industrial-political complex does gorge on war, and Trump’s desire to end the wars was one of the many reasons they took him down.
..perhaps not down, let’s just say, he/they are still working to the plan. Watch Arizona carefully.
Why is everyone condoning the killing of Ms Ashli Babbitt by a black Capitol Cop Lieutenant?
It seems like a clear case of “blue murder “ from here (UK)?
“…I’ll meet people on the edge of politics — conspiracy theorists, idealists, visionaries and eccentrics…”
Edgelands will be a kind of vox-unpop you mean? I like it!
The assumption is that ‘we’ will eventually emerge from this interregnum into another societal concensus. I’m less than convinced this will happen – because I don’t believe there is a ‘we’ anymore, in fact there never was, just a mirage that melts away under the searchlight of technology. What there is instead, is a million silent revolutions in the mind, each of them different. So what we get next is an ever evolving kelidoscope of multiple ‘norms’ all superimposed over each other. Lots of tales, told by lots of idiots, full of nothing but themselves, signifying nothing. Just like my comment here.
You may be right. The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, writing over thirty years ago, argued that humanity will never again share a common myth. He likened our modern mythic world to a ‘terminal moraine’ of broken images we’re left to piece together as best we can.
And he put in a good word for artists of all sorts (writers, painters, musicians, etc). It is their job to construct new myths that will resonate with the modern world, to the extent that’s still possible.
Thank you for pointing me to Joseph Campbell! I am not familiar with his work, but did a quick recce, and his ideas sound right up my street! I will check him out.
“the cause of anti-establishment populism, and whose beliefs are now shared by a discomforting number of people in Britain as well as America,”
Hmmm, discomforting? I find it comforting. Us conspiracy loons love hearing such a reasonable man confirming our understanding. All the great horrors of the past were once ignored as they built, and only conspiracy loons saw them coming. The reason they end up happening, and millions of lives destroyed is people who should have known better, such as journalists, refused to believe them, the MSM buried them behind celebrities affairs, the Politicos refused to risk votes by acting preemptively, and so the world sleep walked into disaster.
Anyway, WWG!WGA, and keep us loons in the box, and let the world continue on its march to disaster. (MMT mean anything to you guys at all?, is it not playing with fire in the explosives shed? Why does Unherd not over this BIGGEST story in the world today? The Post-Covid Lockdown Reckoning.), When hyperinflation, or deflation depression happens, when the West falls into civil war as the masses can no longer be paid their ‘entitlements’ as the money has run out and all citizens have been pitted against the other citizens, when China takes the Reserve Currency and The PIIGS cant pay the pensions, and a statue to Epstein is placed in front of Parliament, and the Democrats make laws giving them the rule of USA for ever, and the world goes mad, we told you it was coming.
Let’s not go to Camelot. It’s a very silly place!
Bravo to Unherd for taking on this ambitious project.
But so many crackpots and so little time!
Mappin lost me with the “mathematics” of Scientology. An evil, evil cult that. Mappin does not strike me as an evil man, but an extraordinary ability to filter out the truth if he subscribes to that twisted ideology.
“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” *
(*Apologies to Sophocles.).
True dat.
This program is a very good idea but QAnon is a joke. I’m more interested in actual thinkers on the right.
More relevant to the show (as a symptom that Aris refers to) but I’m interested in left-wing as well.
Thanks
This fascinated me because I never, ever meet people like Mappin.
There are millions of us, and growing by the day. The current events world wide should start waking up the sleeping masses.
i didn’t mean his beliefs; I know conspiracy theorists. I was referring more to the combination of his conspiracy theories and his background.
When you say ‘millions of us’, who do you mean by ‘us’?
Personally, I think our incumbent leader in Westminster is more of a quintessential English eccentric than Mappin will ever be. And whilst I recognise some utility in preserving a degree of historic, cultural authenticity in post-Brexit England – President Macron take note! – I don’t think we should concern ourselves too much with the banter down at Tintagel, do you? However, I am aghast at the scurrilous suggestion we might have done better had we been left alone to evolve from cannibalistic Druids. Now that would make an interesting dystopian novel, wouldn’t it?
I would stick with Rosemary Sutcliff’s “Eagle of the Ninth”.
I recommend Pavane by Keith Roberts, a brilliant though relatively unknown ‘alternative history’ novel, whose departure point is not Rome coming to the British Isles but Elizabeth and the armada. Not dystopian in the traditional sense, but with elements of the pagan world left over. Of particular interest in the novel is the Church imposing a ban on technology.
The hidden third party theory is interesting. If you have two parties who previously get along, then don’t, and normal methods of communication don’t resolve it, then he [Mappin] says there is normally a hidden third party whispering into the ears of one (or both). He credits L Ron Hubbard. Not sure if it’s so much an overarching theory as a possible explanation.
I wonder if this could be applied to the UK and the EU, which seemed to be getting on pretty well for a few decades, and recently not so much?
There’s no secret that the third party in war is normally those people who will profit from manufacturing arms, and so on.
“I wonder if this could be applied to the UK and the EU, which seemed to be getting on pretty well for a few decades, and recently not so much?”
I think it rather more the case that self designated “Elites” who believed that they knew better than the ignorant underclasses (i.e. everyone who weren’t them or kowtowed to them) should be ignored and force fed the propaganda that the UK and The EU were getting on pretty well. Unless by “getting on pretty well” you mean the chosen few being able to enrich themselves at the trough.
I do not believe this idea that every conflict happens because of some obscure third party facilitating it. People frequently fall out with each other without requiring any outside help. I believe people are also naturally prone to tribalism, to falling into an ‘us and them’ mentality. The comments sections on many websites seems to support this. So I don’t buy this kind of conspiracy theory.
Anyone who is not a “conspiracy theorist” simply isn’t paying attention. And I am surprised at how universally this readership has drunk the cool-aid.
A nomination for an interviewee — the computer scientist Jacques Vallee, who has spent a long life investigating “alien abduction” and related phenomena. His late life conclusion, it seems, is that the veil between this world and others is coming undone. On the other side are the Celtic fairies of old and countless other phenomena. If he is right then perhaps our horribly polarized politics will fade into the background. See Joe Rogan’s interview with him from late 2020 I think.
Aris, can you interview Jovan Pulitzer next? That would be interesting.