TALKING UP is a vast cultural move. Lots of people do it and believe in it. That is understandable because advertising is the biggest cultural force on the planet, apart from Christianity, and it is still growing. We are taught to believe in things – toothpaste, cars, shoes, baths and chairs because they are all talked up and pictured up. The picturing is part of the picture – bright colours, exotic, fast moving, tapping “iconic” (that dreadful word as it is now used. Icon painters mean it) and zooming in and zooming out. So, everything is talked up and pictured up.

But, of course, persons are talked up, or more accurately, “personalities” are. We are talking (up) game show hosts, sportspeople, pundits, business-people, politicians and they become “celebrities”. You may blank celebrities and not know the Cardigans. Celebrities are normally a waste of time listening to, because the focus is on them. The idea that billions are spent promoting these cretins around the world shows how big the problem is.

Third, enterprises are talked up. There is corporate advertising which makes every company the best thing since sliced bread. Companies fly you there, give you the best car, make you a personality, make you a success, make you beautiful (Stay with that and understand the self-contradiction), make you relax, keep your family together and give you a cosmic experience. You are so used to being offered all these ultimates, that you no longer analyse them. But stop. “You give me this toothpaste which gives me the girl/bloke who will make my life ecstatic.” There are a few non-sequiturs in that presentation.  Everything is talked up.

So much so, that it is part of the system, the vast capitalist system. You borrow to make money. Note the phrase “make money”. Now I am an economist. The Government used to print notes. Now banks create electronic money. They lend to people – we are talking trillions, and they do things which they hope will make them more money, and the vast edifice grows. Of course, people still grow, make things and serve one another; that is the real part of the system, but alongside that is the West Ham syndrome. We’re for ever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air. Making money is talked up all over the place. And then West Ham loses. It might as well be East Ham. Not that West Ham is out to make money. They are just trying to score goals. But our economic bubbles are vast and we face four big pins – Covid 19, Global Warming, World Population and World Destabilisation.  

Here, we take time out to consider Boris, or Donald, and politicians talking things up. Boris talks things up all the time. “This great nation of ours, Make Britain Great Again. We will go forward. A New Dawn. We lead the world. Our magnificent this or that. Brexit is the great leap forward and so on.” Now we need to be slightly canny. Boris does not necessarily believe what he says. It is a useful form of self-promotion. It makes people feel good and therefore vote for him.  We talk about a post-truth society, but so far it has worked. Boris will get Brexit done and it is nearly done. We will bounce back from Covid 19, and the ball has nearly left the ground. People in the North have been promised a new economy and are still waiting. So, politicians talking things up works. People like Boris, even when he locks himself in a fridge or wrecks the constitution. People feel good about talking things up, because it is what the culture does.

Trump is the same. He will make America Great Again. What is great? Is it starting wars, having the greatest Government debt ever, policemen killing blacks, shitting on other states and using up the earth’s resources? Nobody cares as long as we feel good. He even goes for the big one. He is chosen by God. All negativity is banished in a universal peon of praise for the great Trump and all the wonderful things he has done for America. So, both Boris and Trump ride the wave of poor performances on the pandemic, killing thousands, talking it up with their arms spread waiting for the promotional photo. We are on top of this. We have this, or that solution – injecting bleach. I will lead you out of this. We Brits or Americans do not need masks.  

So, in the greater scheme of things talking it up has won, while good people are demoted. It governs in the United States and the United Kingdom, and in different forms in Russia, Turkey, Brazil and other parts of the world. The politics of talking it up has won and the self-promoters are in charge, just as they are losing.

Boris is losing. Are we going to have a “great national economy” when a quarter of our business is overseas owned, the financial centre of London is under challenge, we face unaddressed crises in personal credit, government debt, trade and poverty and Brexit will founder? Trade deals will grind. Businesses will close down. Subsidies will dry up and recession will grip. “We will do whatever it takes”, the Chancellor’s talk it up moniker, will go down the plughole of events. Boris will be merely sounding off, empty, talked up.

Trump is worse even than this He is not just losing, but he is losing it. He talks up his handling of Covid while millions are infected, Government debt mounts, the unsustainability of the US economy becomes evident, racial injustice festers and the US loses international friends and allies and while states begin to desert the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. He is standing on the people he has sacked and he might not accept the election result. So, the whole world has to face the end of talking it up. How do we do that.?

Maybe Shakespeare and God can help. Shakespeare does tragedies and this is the normal stuff of Tragedies. Pride, self-belief, delusions of greatness founder because the self-belief is false and because pride produces wrongs and evil. Even Macbeth knows vaulting ambition to kill the King will o’erleap and fall on the other side. Trump saw off Clinton. Johnson saw off May, but then the judgment. So, this is no new problem.

But still we all have to face this vast talking it up culture and system. It inhabits most of us and it is big. Jesus alone charts the way. It is a return to a truth society where your “yes is yes and your no is no. It is Jesus before Pilate explaining that his politics was a politics of truth rather than power, and it is a regrasping of the Beatitude, the source of blessing, found in the promise, “Blessed are the meek for they stall inherit the earth” How so? If we do not grasp, demand, self-promote, talk it up, then we can inherit the earth, all inherit the earth with enough, all be blessed without fighting, calamity and vast disasters. It hangs on the word, meek. But this turnaround, out of expansive demands and talking it up into meekness, humility and truthfulness is a vast spiritual transformation in world culture. The 2.3 billion Christians must see it, and the rest of us too. Some, incorrigible, will be hung out to dry. We all will have to talk it down. The muffled warners and prophets can be heard, and the blusterers may listen. Talking it up is ending, badly or well and, as Jesus insists to all of us, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”