Psychotherapists have this idea that sometimes a thing “clicks”—it’s connected to the way you can say a true thing that is not real. I’ve just knocked off two articles about a young Mark Collett, a nationalist politician in Britain, and his encounter with an equally young Russell Brand. In these encounters, Brand suggested to Collett that he was “just a scared young man”; it’s a cliché people put forward about young men involved in nationalist or neo-fascist politics—perhaps it owes something to the then-current and highly didactic film American History X (1998). It finds an echo in 2010s popular music, as when Lily Allen chastises a notional boyfriend with the lyrics “you’re just some racist, who can’t tie my laces—it’s approval you’re after” (from your dad, she goes on to add).
Actually, Collett does look like a “scared young man”; and that’s because, as with many clichés, there’s some truth to the assertion. At one moment in the film, in a pub garden, a skinhead likens the plight of the white race to “saving the whale” (being a mid-80s trope that resonated into the early 2000s)—“There might be quite a few of them about now, but if we don’t start now there’ll be none left,” he implores.
However, when Brand said Collett was scared it was unreal. Brand had heard people, high-status people, say that—perhaps he had watched American History X. Being a narcissist, he had glommed on to that being the “correct” response—so he said it; he would have said it whether Collett was scared or not, it was “accidentally” true. It didn’t click—and many people are like that. You say to them, “You get it, right?” and they say, “Oh yes,” and you think, “No you don’t.”. Then, sometime later, they come back and say, “Oh now I get it,” and you can tell from their tone it “clicked”—whereas with men like Brand it’s pure “NPC”; it never clicks, it’s just a recording.