THE NS ESSAY

From Simon Cowell to Jos Mourinho, our culture is in thrall to the figure of the Evil Genius the cold, brilliant and seemingly

amoral minence grise. So how did they take over the world?

Allure of the dark arts

By Charles Leadbeater

34 | NEW STATESMAN | 21 MAY 2012

Simon Cowell, creator of The X Factor andBritains Got Talent, is perhaps the best-knownand most powerful of the lot. In the name of democratising culture, he has created a mono -poly that stretches across television, the pressand the music industry. By giving us what wewant, he has created vast power for himself andwe happily go along with it. Cowell is brilliantbut twisted an evil genius.

Michael OLeary, the force behind Ryanair, isanother. Ryanair takes pleasure in humiliatingus and yet still we come back for more, in theprocess making it the most profitable airline in Europe. Peter Mandelson represents anothervariant: the modern minence grise, an irresis -tibly charming dark power, pulling the strings,the power behind the throne. Jos Mourinho,the Real Madrid coach, exemplifies yet anothercommon trait of the Evil Genius by offering his fans a Faustian bargain the football may bemethodical and at times dour, but eventuallyhe grinds out victory.

Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, is a rarefemale candidate for the title, at least as she wasportrayed by Meryl Streep in the role of MirandaPriestly for the film The Devil Wears Prada. Im-possibly demanding, cruel and bullying, Mir -anda nevertheless had people falling at her feet,wanting to impress her even as she made themgrovel. Gordon Ramsay does something simi-lar; his awful behaviour appears to be part of hischarm. Welcome to the Age of the Evil Genius.

Why is the Evil Genius such a troubling figure?Because the EG disturbs our cosy assumptions

about the relationship between being morallygood and being technically good at something.We like to associate the idea of genius withhaving a high moral purpose. Yet these daystalent can also reside in people who appear tobe cold, calculating and apparently amoral, evento the point of being devoid of social conscienceand a capacity for empathy.

However, the most troubling aspect of the EGis what it says about us. The point about OLearyand Cowell, Wintour and Ramsay, Mourinhoand Mandelson is that they do not force us to do anything. We choose to be enthralled andensnared in a latter-day form of voluntaryservitude. As Simon Glendinning, reader inEuropean philosophy at the London School ofEconomics, puts it, their power is to make usgive in to our desire for something corrupted.Gilbert and George, EGs of the contemporaryart world, say that they know things are goingright when what they are doing feels wrong.

Where have all these EGs come from and whyhave they appeared in such numbers lately?

All-seeing IThe original idea of the EG comes fromDescartes, who caused uproar by positing thepossibility of an evil God who was all-seeing,all-knowing and all-powerful, and yet also de-ceiving. The Leveson inquiry is an explorationinto how the entire political establishment cameto be in thrall to an evil genius of this kind, inthe form of Rupert Murdoch. But Murdochsreach and power pale in comparison to the likes

of Amazon, Google, Facebook or Apple. Theyare Descartess EG made real: all-seeing, all-knowing, possibly untrustworthy. Apple hasour credit card numbers; Google knows whatwe are searching for; Facebook knows what wesay to our friends; Amazon is turning fulfil-ment into something that can be deliveredthrough our door. No newspaper magnate hadsuch scope to insert himself into our lives, toshape our opinions and interests.

On the surface, Facebook seems to be de-signed for us, to allow us to connect and share.In reality, we increasingly conduct our lives forit; we choose to channel our lives through itstemplates and protocols, thus making it evenmore commercially successful. The power ofFacebook and its peers does not prove that theyare sinister, but the more we embrace them, the more of our lives, tastes, worries and hopeswe hand over to them and the more vulnerablewe make ourselves to the possibility they willabuse that intimacy.

There is another kind of EG even older thanDes cartes the evil tempter, Mephistophelesin Doctor Faustus or the devilishly attractiveSatan in Paradise Lost. This kind of EG makesthe perfectly pitched offer to tempt us into do-ing things we know we should not. In a societythat is highly consumerist and yet increasinglyconcerned to appear moral, much of the mod-ern marketing industry could be grouped un-der this banner.

Temptation is the field of operations for bar-barian populists such as Simon Cowell and t

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Faustian bargain: Jos Mourinho might offer methodical, sometimes dour, football but he also promises victory

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THE NS ESSAY

Michael OLeary. The barbarian populists arecreative and honest but rather unpleasant. Theyhave little time for niceties but they are at leaststraight with us. They have huge energy but arealso destructive. The nature of their genius is tosee what we want even if we are not prepared toadmit it to ourselves.

OLeary saw that people neither really wantednor needed what the older airlines called ser-vice. Instead, he called it as it was: people justwanted safe, cheap, reliable flights. The price of that is the hostility with which Ryanairtreats its customers, but then the popularity ofRyanair seems to testify to how widespread isour appetite for masochism. Similarly, Cowellwill be honest with you even if its painful. Re-alising that the music industry was in trouble,he devised a way to give us what we wanted watching television on family nights in, havinga say in who gets to become famous which delivers to him enormous power over an in-dustry that is collapsing around him, in part because his production line of predictable, for-gettable, middle-of-the-road and mediocre actsis hastening its demise. The one sure winner,every time, is the person we have all come toknow as Simon.

The barbarian populists gather us behindthem because they present themselves as de-mocrats confronting an old-fashioned, out-moded and self-interested elite. That is howthey persuade us to overlook their seedier side.Tom Bower, in his biography of Cowell, SweetRevenge, suggests that he was driven to createBritains Got Talent and The X Factor to get hisown back on snobs in the music industry whosneered at him when he was starting out, and inparticular his one-time business partner SimonFuller, creator of the rival Pop Idol franchise. At a party in the US, Cowell was heard tellingFuller: All Ive done, Britains Got Talent, TheX Factor and much more is revenge for whatyou did to me. And theres much more to come.

The EGs trick is to paint himself as a misun-derstood outsider and victim, a man on the sideof the little people, even as we will him on toaccumulate power.

Prince and the revolutionMachiavellis The Prince is the inspirationalsource for another variety of EG: the power be-hind the throne. One of the best examples inliterature is Shakespeares Richard III, a morallyappalling, disfigured cripple, for whom there is no depth to which he will not sink and yetdisarmingly honest and self-knowing, depravedand seductive. Mainly these figures do not be-come king. They continue to operate in theshadows, from Karl Rove to Peter Mandelsonand their fictional counterparts Malcolm Tuckerin In the Loop; Kasper Juul, the troubled spindoctor in the Danish political thriller Borgen; or Stephen Meyers, the media expert in GeorgeClooneys The Ides of March who blackmails theDemocratic presidential candidate into makinghim his chief spokesman.

Alastair Campbell does not count as an EGbecause he so evidently lacks the icy coldnessrequired. But if Mandelson had become a foot-ball coach he would have been Jos Mourinho:both have made a virtue of not being liked. Per-haps one reason Hilary Mantels Wolf Hall wasso successful was that its central protagonist,the scheming Thomas Cromwell, was so recog-nisably an evil genius.

The final type of EG is the mad scientist, theVictor Frankenstein who pursues his ideas sofar that he loses touch with his humanity andmoral purpose and creates a monster technol-ogy that is both awe-inspiring and appalling. In a society drenched in technology, in whichscience is inserting itself ever deeper into thehuman mind and body, through genetics andnanotechnology, more scientists will be accused

of being perverted geniuses like Frankenstein,their science diverted to mistaken ends. This isparticularly fertile ground in a society that isboth gripped by the desire to extend and pro-long life by investing in its deep faith in scienceand clings to a small c conservatism of thekind you find in the Daily Mail.

The result is that we are likely to get moretechnologies that excite and appal us in equalmeasure. The purveyors of those technologieswill often find themselves cast as EGs.

Heroes and villainsOur lives are ruled by evil geniuses because theconditions that breed them in science, technol-ogy, consumer culture and politics are so fer-tile. If we want a society that hums with inno-vation and ideas, we need people who breakconvention rather than abide by it. That meansthey could be slightly odd, transgressive, or evenimmoral. Yet that in turn is why some peopleregard Gilbert and George as talented buttwisted, making art out of old chewing gum andfaeces. They would regard it as a compliment.

Talent counts for nothing, however, unless itoffers people something that they find attractive.Evil geniuses tempt their way into our lives.They are seducers and brutes. They tap into ourdesires, spot our vanities and play on our weak-nesses. Even as we are being robbed, we cannothelp admiring the way they reel us in and hu-miliate us once more.

Yet the evil geniuses of history, in literatureand philosophy, were freakish figures, createdto reinforce and remind us of our need to stayon the straight and narrow, to resist tempta-tion. The main change in our times is that themodern Evil Genius helps us to get away onholiday and cook our food, entertains us on aSaturday night, writes our bestselling news -papers, guides our fashion choices, connects us

to our friends and advises our Prime Minister.The EG has become a dominant force in ourlives only by becoming domesticated literallybrought home.

Sadly, the reason there are so many of them is as much to do with us as them. We willinglyhand over the details of our private lives to dis-tant technology companies. We secretly wantto be persuaded to do what is wrong for us. Weadmire people who can be rude and direct in away that would embarrass most of us.

The modern Evil Genius revels in loweringand reducing us, rather than lifting us up andexpanding our horizons. Cowell has maintainedan extraordinary grip over public taste for adecade by never overestimating the public. EGsdo not pretend to be inspiring and idealistic;they cut to the chase, strike a bargain, offer adeal and, above all, they want to win. For them,everything should be judged as a means to anend. They despise people whom they regard asself-righteous and who believe their work is ahigher calling. That is why Mourinho savourshis triumphs over Barcelona, which believes it ismore than just a football club. Mourinho is in-terested only in winning and in his self-image;Barcelona believes its football stands for a betterway to live. Mourinhos mission is to exposethat high-minded aspiration as a pretension,just as Cowell reduces music to a productionline and OLearys recipe is to turn everythinginto a transaction.

Of course heroes need villains. Harry Potterwould be very dull without Voldemort. Data,the sentient android in Star Trek, is made all themore appealing by having an evil brother, Lore.Moriarty, played with such psychotic sparkle byAndrew Scott in the BBC television series Sher-lock, is a perfect example of genius made evil.Moriarty has to exist in order to make Holmesseem less odd.

These alter egos remind us how thin is theline between good and evil. Yet Nietzsche was a century ahead of us in seeing a different possi-bility that modern society would unleash hugeenergies that would be both creative and de-structive as they were untethered from notionsof God and religion, operating beyond goodand evil. That is the netherworld into which theEGs are taking us. The danger in our time is thatthe evil geniuses are not the contrast, the minorkey, but dominant players who set the tone.

Unless we support figures who representsomething more uplifting Jamie Oliver overGordon Ramsay, Pep Guardiola over JosMourinho, Jimmy Wales over Mark Zucker-berg we will leave the field open for the evilgeniuses to take over, and we will have onlyourselves to blame, because we fall into theirgrasp all too willingly.lSophie Elmhirst, Books, page 44Charles Leadbeater is the author most recently of Its Co-operation, Stupid (IPPR/Co-operatives UK). charlesleadbeater.netnewstatesman.com/writers/charles_leadbeater

Evil geniuses paintthemselves as outsiders,on the side of the people

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