It’s the day of our big game, and my inbox is overflowing with anger from Sevconia. I probably should ignore it, because I have more important things to worry about tonight – I already feel positively jittery, and my nails are bitten almost down to the roots – but I feel the need to respond to some of the stupider stuff before I focus on our game.
Last night, I was out for dinner and I got talking about the ability some people have to deny objective fact and convince themselves that even the craziest action is, in fact, sane. I was reminded of an article I wrote for Fields on the phenomenal power of belief; it was called Queueing Up For The Kool Aid, and it was a comparison between the behaviour of those who followed Jim Jones and his People’s Temple with those who follow Sevco and its Peepil’s Temple.
Delusion is a powerful force. Convince people that they are special and they will continue to believe it all the way to the bitter end.
As I said in that article, those who blindly follow and become True Believers will do anything to sustain that belief.
At Jonestown they lined up to collect their plastic cups of poison. At Sevco they queued up to buy season tickets and shares and invested in the fictions spun by Green and now King because those people told them they were the centre of the football universe and would soon be back on top.
The end result was the same in both cases; a lot of people who realised only when it was way too late that they had been played for fools. If you listen to the recordings from Jonestown you can hear sobbing, screaming, and see in your mind’s eye people sitting there with the stuff of their demise clasped in their hands but who didn’t want to take it.
In the foreground, over all of it, the hectoring, demanding, voice of their saviour urging them to get it down them quickly before the enemy arrived.
All I did yesterday, all Phil did, all some of us have been doing for the past six or seven years, was present to them the facts as we knew them to be. I like to poke them with a stick on Twitter and tell them that our job is destabilising them; we have a curious way of doing it. We tell them the truth, the truth their own club won’t, the truth the media would rather ignore. And for that they hate us, but they’d hate us anyway so it doesn’t bother me much.
But everything we’ve told them is verifiable and they’d know it themselves if their South African Jim Jones wasn’t telling them that the Promised Land is only one lightening of the wallets away, that there was suddenly light at the end of the tunnel, that the future belonged to them. King certainly has a way with words; that’s why they call these people demagogues.
The techniques they use are widely recognised and include;
Fearmongering, scapegoating, lying, personalising disputes, making unrealistic promises, simplifying complex issues, appeals to emotion and intimidation.
Sounds familiar, right?
It’s not our fault that Sevco fans cannot recognise King for what he is or their club for what it has become. It is now almost the mirror image of Rangers, but in a distorted reflection sort of way. Because Sevco, of course, is smaller, less capable, less influential and even once you strip Rangers of all the financial dope, Sevco has less money.
But the principle ingredient which killed Rangers – hubris, courting disaster – is there in spades now. It has grown, in layers, like a pearl. It is poisonous, like what was in those plastic cups the Jonestown followers walked up to collect with their hero exhorting them to hurry and die with some dignity – a word that they recognise all too well at Ibrox although the club playing there shows not even the slightest trace of it these days, or if we’re being truthful, ever did.
Nor did Rangers, who were the most undignified club imaginable, lording it over the rest of Scottish football with Other People’s Money.
Yesterday the bloggers presented proof that Sevco’s board of directors had lied to their supporters, and to the media. I didn’t expect the media to respond to it, just as I knew a large section of the Sevco support would entirely refuse to accept it.
And my inbox and social media timelines contain the proof of their denial.
But shooting the messenger – or trying to – doesn’t, unfortunately, kill the message or make things suddenly right in their world.
They are in trouble and that must now be obvious to those of them who can pull their heads out of their backsides long enough to survey the landscape.
With directors no longer willing to foot the bill, this is their future, deals with Devil, with companies who will not hesitate to go to court for winding up orders, knowing they’ll get the lot, knowing they can raise Rangers III from the ground and that these mugs will follow it perhaps not even realising that it sets up Rangers IV and V and God knows what else.
This is a pantomime that just goes on and on, and these Peepil either never knew or forgot the most important poker maxim of all, but that which lies at the centre of every great con job; if you can’t spot the sucker in your first hour at the card table … then you are the sucker.
They can’t say they haven’t been warned.
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