Edgelord #3: The Hatred Matrix, by Lev Parker

In his third SP column, Lev Parker outlines his theory of the Hatred Matrix; the more they hate, the more some will love

Last summer, I was taking a psilocybin hike along the cliffs near my home on the south coast of England, blasting out Nico’s version of “Deutschland über alles”from a portable speaker. Typical edgelord behavior, right? My companion was a transgressive artist who was struggling to figure out how to make uncompromising art, and support his peers who have offended the cultural gatekeepers, without being cancelled himself. That’s when I told him about my theory of the “Hatred Matrix.” 

I don’t know if I convinced him at the time, but now I’ve had time to mull it over and put it down into the written medium, I hope it will convince him and others like him to not only stop censoring themselves and being careful about their public associations, but to actually embrace disapproval as validation.

The Hatred Matrix was the theory I came up with on our clifftop walk that for every ten people who hate me, there appears to be one person who loves me. So the aim, perhaps, ought to be to make as many people hate me as possible. How about that for a career plan?

“That’s a pretty daring strategy,” my friend remarked, a look of gloom on his face. “Are you sure you’re ready to test it out? I mean, it’s harsh out there. Brutal…”

At the time, I didn’t think I was ready to step into the Hatred Matrix and become a public enemy — at least not deliberately. I didn’t think my nerves could handle being constantly being shouted at by hate mobs, having my publications ripped up and burned in my face, and people who wore my t-shirts getting attacked in pubs. But there seems to be something innate about my Surrealist temperament, my insatiable desire for provocation, that I seem to have inadvertently stepped into the Hatred Matrix. (And no, before you ask, that movie is not what the bent-spoon logo refers to.) 

“One in ten, you say? How about one in twenty? One in fifty?...” 

If you count the number of writers and publishers who recently wet the bed at an  announcement from the Morbid Books account about self-absorbed cretins who declare their personal pronouns, you might wonder if I had vastly underestimated the hatred side of the equation. 

“One to fifty? Might be closer to one in a hundred…”

Similarly, if you took a piss sample—the bedwetting equivalent of a litmus test—from the Night of the Long Noodles, where we were resoundingly cancelled by almost every independent publisher and book fair in the UK after a unanimous Twitter pile-on, you might conclude that being provocative has a much more punishing love-to-hate ratio. 

“More like one to a thousand…?”

Take it from me, however, that as long as you’re doing it with a sense of style, pissing people off en masse earns you way more respect than appears to be the case just from perusing social media. Most of the people who respect artists for saying the supposedly unsayable — especially in the era of social media — don’t tend to wade into these quagmires. All you see are the borelords doing their own borelord thing, conforming to the “consensus opinion” that you’re a jerk, because that makes them feel like, in contrast, they’re a good person.

But as Ian Brady said, “Those subject to mob mentality are usually of low intelligence.” People of high intelligence tend not to stick their head in these sewers, unless they’re gleefully stirring the excrement or defending the honor of one of their comrades. (Thanks, Adam & Adam!) 

No, I’ve done the math, and for roughly every ten or twenty borelords who perform their shaky-head disapproval routine at me in public, I usually acquire a new subscriber, a book order, or a heartfelt message of solidarity. Some extremely brave and intelligent people who I wouldn’t have otherwise known about have come out of obscurity to congratulate me for my uncompromising stance towards the borelords, my refusal to apologize or back down to the demands of the mob. They may not be as loud or visible on the internet, but these individuals are way more valuable to have onside than the fickle masses and their herd mentality. 

In fact, it was Herr Lehrer’s firing from the Quietus, and his excellent retort to the British music website’s borelord-in-chief, that connected him with me and my degenerate friends this side of the pond. For every ten people in that increasingly dusty corner of “alternative culture” who no longer tolerate him, he found a much more solid ally in the swelling ranks of degenerates and provocateurs who don’t subscribe to the new liberal-left consensus of oppression politics.

“One in ten, you say? One in twenty?” 

I can see you’re still skeptical. I’m not saying those fractions are universally applicable. I reckon the love-hate ratio for somebody like Charles Manson, Ian Brady or Ted Kaczynski — not just writers or artists who made the odd naughty remark, but convicted murderers— would be considerably higher. More like one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand. Certainly no more.

Before we go any further, I’m not suggesting we judge an artist purely based on how many units they shift. But since there are plenty of artists out there currently weighing up whether they can afford to be controversial and piss people off, in purely numerical terms, consider this. How many copies has Charles Manson’s autobiography sold, or the Unabomber’s manifesto? Ian Brady’s The Gates of Janus?

In the USA, let’s assume every one of its 300 million inhabitants knows who Charlie Manson or the Unabomber is. I can’t be bothered to check the Nielsen book database, but I imagine they’ve sold more than 30,000 copies of their works each. That’s 30,000 admirers! Enough to fill a football stadium. More than the current president, Joe Biden could manage. Because he’s not loved, remember, he’s just tolerated. 

Do you want to be loved or tolerated? To stand any chance of being loved as an artist —for it to have any impact on people and culture at all —you have to risk being hated. If you’re a certain kind of artist, I would posit that you not only have to risk being hated, you have to accept it as the cost of doing business. Only hatred, in this context, is perhaps a more worthwhile expense than many of your others. Because if you subscribe to the premise of the Hatred Matrix, you actually gain in proportion to how much you spend with hatred. Can you say the same about sponsored Instagram posts or web hosting?

In addition to books and records sold, how many love letters do you think Charlie Manson, Ian Brady and Ted K receive(d)? More than you, I imagine. More than me, that’s for sure! 

So if Charlie Manson, the Moors Murderer and the Unabomber have a hatred ratio of one to 10,000 (maximum), and they’re selling more books and getting more action than you, why are you being such a pussy about releasing your next “controversial” artwork, or hedging your bets about who you associate with? What do you have to lose, besides some fickle “follower” or acquaintance you never needed in the first place?

ILLUSTRATION:
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

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Lev Parker is the editor of Morbid Books and the chairman of the Temple of Surrealism.