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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

about the relationship between being morally

good and being technically good at something.
We like to associate the idea of genius with
having a high moral purpose. Yet these days
talent can also reside in people who appear to
be cold, calculating and apparently amoral, even
to the point of being devoid of social conscience
and a capacity for empathy.
However, the most troubling aspect of the EG
is what it says about us. The point about OLeary
and Cowell, Wintour and Ramsay, Mourinho
and Mandelson is that they do not force us to
do anything. We choose to be enthralled and
ensnared in a latter-day form of voluntary
servitude. As Simon Glendinning, reader in
European philosophy at the London School of
Economics, puts it, their power is to make us
give in to our desire for something corrupted.
Gilbert and George, EGs of the contemporary
art world, say that they know things are going
right when what they are doing feels wrong.
Where have all these EGs come from and why
have they appeared in such numbers lately?

All-seeing I
The original idea of the EG comes from
Descartes, who caused uproar by positing the
possibility of an evil God who was all-seeing,
all-knowing and all-powerful, and yet also deceiving. The Leveson inquiry is an exploration
into how the entire political establishment came
to be in thrall to an evil genius of this kind, in
the form of Rupert Murdoch. But Murdochs
reach and power pale in comparison to the likes

of Amazon, Google, Facebook or Apple. They

are Descartess EG made real: all-seeing, allknowing, possibly untrustworthy. Apple has
our credit card numbers; Google knows what
we are searching for; Facebook knows what we
say to our friends; Amazon is turning fulfilment into something that can be delivered
through our door. No newspaper magnate had
such scope to insert himself into our lives, to
shape our opinions and interests.
On the surface, Facebook seems to be designed for us, to allow us to connect and share.
In reality, we increasingly conduct our lives for
it; we choose to channel our lives through its
templates and protocols, thus making it even
more commercially successful. The power of
Facebook and its peers does not prove that they
are sinister, but the more we embrace them,
the more of our lives, tastes, worries and hopes
we hand over to them and the more vulnerable
we make ourselves to the possibility they will
abuse that intimacy.
There is another kind of EG even older than
Descartes the evil tempter, Mephistopheles
in Doctor Faustus or the devilishly attractive
Satan in Paradise Lost. This kind of EG makes
the perfectly pitched offer to tempt us into doing things we know we should not. In a society
that is highly consumerist and yet increasingly
concerned to appear moral, much of the modern marketing industry could be grouped under this banner.
Temptation is the field of operations for barbarian populists such as Simon Cowell and

Simon Cowell, creator of The X Factor and

Britains Got Talent, is perhaps the best-known
and most powerful of the lot. In the name of
democratising culture, he has created a monopoly that stretches across television, the press
and the music industry. By giving us what we
want, he has created vast power for himself and
we happily go along with it. Cowell is brilliant
but twisted an evil genius.
Michael OLeary, the force behind Ryanair, is
another. Ryanair takes pleasure in humiliating
us and yet still we come back for more, in the
process making it the most profitable airline
in Europe. Peter Mandelson represents another
variant: the modern minence grise, an irresistibly charming dark power, pulling the strings,
the power behind the throne. Jos Mourinho,
the Real Madrid coach, exemplifies yet another
common trait of the Evil Genius by offering
his fans a Faustian bargain the football may be
methodical and at times dour, but eventually
he grinds out victory.
Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, is a rare
female candidate for the title, at least as she was
portrayed by Meryl Streep in the role of Miranda
Priestly for the film The Devil Wears Prada. Impossibly demanding, cruel and bullying, Miranda nevertheless had people falling at her feet,
wanting to impress her even as she made them
grovel. Gordon Ramsay does something similar; his awful behaviour appears to be part of his
charm. Welcome to the Age of the Evil Genius.
Why is the Evil Genius such a troubling figure?
Because the EG disturbs our cosy assumptions

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THE NS ESSAY
t

Michael OLeary. The barbarian populists are

creative and honest but rather unpleasant. They
have little time for niceties but they are at least
straight with us. They have huge energy but are
also destructive. The nature of their genius is to
see what we want even if we are not prepared to
admit it to ourselves.
OLeary saw that people neither really wanted
nor needed what the older airlines called service. Instead, he called it as it was: people just
wanted safe, cheap, reliable flights. The price
of that is the hostility with which Ryanair
treats its customers, but then the popularity of
Ryanair seems to testify to how widespread is
our appetite for masochism. Similarly, Cowell
will be honest with you even if its painful. Realising that the music industry was in trouble,
he devised a way to give us what we wanted
watching television on family nights in, having
a say in who gets to become famous which
delivers to him enormous power over an industry that is collapsing around him, in part
because his production line of predictable, forgettable, middle-of-the-road and mediocre acts
is hastening its demise. The one sure winner,
every time, is the person we have all come to
know as Simon.
The barbarian populists gather us behind
them because they present themselves as democrats confronting an old-fashioned, outmoded and self-interested elite. That is how
they persuade us to overlook their seedier side.
Tom Bower, in his biography of Cowell, Sweet
Revenge, suggests that he was driven to create
Britains Got Talent and The X Factor to get his
own back on snobs in the music industry who
sneered at him when he was starting out, and in
particular his one-time business partner Simon
Fuller, creator of the rival Pop Idol franchise.
At a party in the US, Cowell was heard telling
Fuller: All Ive done, Britains Got Talent, The
X Factor and much more is revenge for what
you did to me. And theres much more to come.
The EGs trick is to paint himself as a misunderstood outsider and victim, a man on the side
of the little people, even as we will him on to
accumulate power.

Prince and the revolution

Machiavellis The Prince is the inspirational
source for another variety of EG: the power behind the throne. One of the best examples in
literature is Shakespeares Richard III, a morally
appalling, disfigured cripple, for whom there
is no depth to which he will not sink and yet
disarmingly honest and self-knowing, depraved
and seductive. Mainly these figures do not become king. They continue to operate in the
shadows, from Karl Rove to Peter Mandelson
and their fictional counterparts Malcolm Tucker
in In the Loop; Kasper Juul, the troubled spin
doctor in the Danish political thriller Borgen;
or Stephen Meyers, the media expert in George
Clooneys The Ides of March who blackmails the
Democratic presidential candidate into making
him his chief spokesman.
36 | NEW STATESMAN | 21 MAY 2012

Alastair Campbell does not count as an EG

because he so evidently lacks the icy coldness
required. But if Mandelson had become a football coach he would have been Jos Mourinho:
both have made a virtue of not being liked. Perhaps one reason Hilary Mantels Wolf Hall was
so successful was that its central protagonist,
the scheming Thomas Cromwell, was so recognisably an evil genius.
The final type of EG is the mad scientist, the
Victor Frankenstein who pursues his ideas so
far that he loses touch with his humanity and
moral purpose and creates a monster technology that is both awe-inspiring and appalling.
In a society drenched in technology, in which
science is inserting itself ever deeper into the
human mind and body, through genetics and
nanotechnology, more scientists will be accused

Evil geniuses paint

themselves as outsiders,
on the side of the people
of being perverted geniuses like Frankenstein,
their science diverted to mistaken ends. This is
particularly fertile ground in a society that is
both gripped by the desire to extend and prolong life by investing in its deep faith in science
and clings to a small c conservatism of the
kind you find in the Daily Mail.
The result is that we are likely to get more
technologies that excite and appal us in equal
measure. The purveyors of those technologies
will often find themselves cast as EGs.

Heroes and villains

Our lives are ruled by evil geniuses because the
conditions that breed them in science, technology, consumer culture and politics are so fertile. If we want a society that hums with innovation and ideas, we need people who break
convention rather than abide by it. That means
they could be slightly odd, transgressive, or even
immoral. Yet that in turn is why some people
regard Gilbert and George as talented but
twisted, making art out of old chewing gum and
faeces. They would regard it as a compliment.
Talent counts for nothing, however, unless it
offers people something that they find attractive.
Evil geniuses tempt their way into our lives.
They are seducers and brutes. They tap into our
desires, spot our vanities and play on our weaknesses. Even as we are being robbed, we cannot
help admiring the way they reel us in and humiliate us once more.
Yet the evil geniuses of history, in literature
and philosophy, were freakish figures, created
to reinforce and remind us of our need to stay
on the straight and narrow, to resist temptation. The main change in our times is that the
modern Evil Genius helps us to get away on
holiday and cook our food, entertains us on a
Saturday night, writes our bestselling newspapers, guides our fashion choices, connects us

to our friends and advises our Prime Minister.

The EG has become a dominant force in our
lives only by becoming domesticated literally
brought home.
Sadly, the reason there are so many of them
is as much to do with us as them. We willingly
hand over the details of our private lives to distant technology companies. We secretly want
to be persuaded to do what is wrong for us. We
admire people who can be rude and direct in a
way that would embarrass most of us.
The modern Evil Genius revels in lowering
and reducing us, rather than lifting us up and
expanding our horizons. Cowell has maintained
an extraordinary grip over public taste for a
decade by never overestimating the public. EGs
do not pretend to be inspiring and idealistic;
they cut to the chase, strike a bargain, offer a
deal and, above all, they want to win. For them,
everything should be judged as a means to an
end. They despise people whom they regard as
self-righteous and who believe their work is a
higher calling. That is why Mourinho savours
his triumphs over Barcelona, which believes it is
more than just a football club. Mourinho is interested only in winning and in his self-image;
Barcelona believes its football stands for a better
way to live. Mourinhos mission is to expose
that high-minded aspiration as a pretension,
just as Cowell reduces music to a production
line and OLearys recipe is to turn everything
into a transaction.
Of course heroes need villains. Harry Potter
would be very dull without Voldemort. Data,
the sentient android in Star Trek, is made all the
more appealing by having an evil brother, Lore.
Moriarty, played with such psychotic sparkle by
Andrew Scott in the BBC television series Sherlock, is a perfect example of genius made evil.
Moriarty has to exist in order to make Holmes
seem less odd.
These alter egos remind us how thin is the
line between good and evil. Yet Nietzsche was
a century ahead of us in seeing a different possibility that modern society would unleash huge
energies that would be both creative and destructive as they were untethered from notions
of God and religion, operating beyond good
and evil. That is the netherworld into which the
EGs are taking us. The danger in our time is that
the evil geniuses are not the contrast, the minor
key, but dominant players who set the tone.
Unless we support figures who represent
something more uplifting Jamie Oliver over
Gordon Ramsay, Pep Guardiola over Jos
Mourinho, Jimmy Wales over Mark Zuckerberg we will leave the field open for the evil
geniuses to take over, and we will have only
ourselves to blame, because we fall into their
grasp all too willingly. l
Sophie Elmhirst, Books, page 44
Charles Leadbeater is the author most
recently of Its Co-operation, Stupid (IPPR/
Co-operatives UK). charlesleadbeater.net
newstatesman.com/writers/
charles_leadbeater

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