The onset of the financial crisis brought with it unemployment and the tightening of wallets across the whole class spectrum. One interesting side effect has been the work of certain enterprising profiteers, who seem to have found controversial success in digging up war time slogans and making brands out of them (Wainwright, 2013).
The British war time adage, 'Keep Calm and Carry On', has popped up everywhere - particularly in the last year, as the Queen's jubilee has seen the UK covered in Union flags and the symbols of the monarchy. It was originally designed as a motivational poster but went unused. In fact, the motivational campaign launched by the British government, of which the poster had originally been part, was largely considered to have been a failure - either being ignored or causing offence amongst the people for being the patronising work of the upper classes (Walker, 2012).
When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition came into office in Britain they tried to adopt a similar slogan, 'we are all in this together'. However that attempt has faced the same sort of response, and has become more of a joke than an inspiring phrase due to the concentration of millionaires in the government's ranks (Doble, 2010).
The attempts to remove the slogan from that original context are entirely problematic. But what is interesting about those attempts is that organisations continue to try and adopt this large and recognisable brand, despite both the failure of the slogan's original campaign, and the failure of the government to co-opt the spirit of it for their own uses.
One organisation that has tried to compete for control of the sentiment is the UK Labour Party. They have responded by offering similar, though often watered down, versions of the Conservative approach (Seymour, 2012). Starting with Blue Labour, and now through One Labour, the party has been trying to convince the public that they are the representatives of the people, all struggling equally in the name of a common cause.
However, arguments about creating 'mutual responsibility' disguise the inherent corporatism of the vision - where personal independence is diminished and subsumed by the community in the name of solidarity - which can only diminish self-determination and self-discipline beneath the oppressive weight of 'traditional' institutions; in other words, under systems of authority and control.
The danger of corporatist visions - those that order the world by traditions, families or religions with the authority and control of an establishment - is that they do not seek to free people to share in those things. They bind people to them. Trap them. And that is where the success of a brand like 'Keep Calm And Carry On' makes its appearance. It is a declaration of mutual solidarity between people, co-opted by an authority for the reinforcement of its version of the social order onto those under its authority.
At this point, when those in elite and privileged positions use the phrase towards others, who invariably include those less privileged, the phrase potentially becomes something quite repulsive. Oscar Wilde, in his The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), stressed how 'grotesque and insulting' this approach is:
'Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.'
Wilde's work warned us against the dangerous aim of catchphrases like 'Keep Calm And Carry On', to control people and bind them into rigid and predefined communities. Our aim instead aught to be the liberation of people; to enable them choose for themselves - to work
together with communities cooperatively because they rationally see
worth in it, rather than because they have been forced.
We must be careful that, in our wish to belong, we remain wary of the dangers of allowing individual identity be consumed by the group. Losing ourselves when we merge with the identities of communities, or nationalities, threatens freedom, difference, and diversity of perspective, and risks the possibility of their subjugation. That path only leads us down a dark alley where it is difficult to see, or escape from, the inequalities and iniquities of the social order; or to imagine those things that might lead us out again.
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References:
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+ Martin Wainwright's 'Keep Calm and Carry On trademark battle enters new year'; in The Guardian; 2 January 2013.
+ Susannah Walker's 'Home Front Posters: Of the Second World War'; Shire; 2012.
+ Anna Doble's 'Who Knows Who: the coalition cabinet'; on Channel 4 News; 13 May 2010.
+ Richard Seymour's 'Miliband's "one nation", Cameron's "all in this together" – spot the difference'; in The Guardian; 5 October 2012.
+ Oscar Wilde's 'The Soul of Man under Socialism'; London, 1891.
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