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A career which can make you unpopular for
ever more is running a major industry in the middle of a cost-cutting
era. You are required to cut at least a third of the industry
out, which means massive job cuts but you don't know what the
real savings will be until afterwards. It rarely goes according
to plan, very often the wrong bits get chopped off, and, whatever
improvements you recommend on the savings, if the Government
has to help put them through they won't happen. What's more,
however much you think you did it in the only way that was possible,
people still won't have forgotten you 40 years later for tearing
the industry apart. Dr. Richard Beeching, Chairman of British
Railways from 1960 to 1964, refurbished British Rail in this
way in 1963. When the process finished in about 1970, one third
of the rail network had gone, only four of the London terminuses
were yet to be electrified (King's Cross, Marylebone, Paddington
and St Pancras), the bottom line was about the same as that in
1963, and Beeching was hated by many people forever, for the
"crime" of closing their lightly-used railway line.
He was posthumously found guilty of wilful destruction of the
rail network and sentenced to wait on Riccarton Junction for
the next train - Riccarton is a remote abandoned platform on
the former Carlisle to Edinburgh Waverley route with no public
access.
This man, by example, has shown how to be
very unpopular.
Becoming unpopular is very easy, even for
saying what may appear to be nice things. A man, believed to
have been born in Bethlehem, Israel, in 1 AD, said so many nice
things that he became very unpopular with pretty much anyone
with any power, especially for turning them and their market
stands, banks etc. out of the temple and insisting that it should
be used for worship. He was subsequently "nailed to a tree
for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change"
(Douglas Adams). He is so popular with the Jews that to this
day they refuse to believe that he was a good person and have
bricked up the gate through which he is allegedly due to eventually
return to Jerusalem. So much for goodness and piety promoting
popularity.
Going out of the way to be unpopular is not
always a brilliant move. Certain people who attempt to be obnoxious
and difficult find themselves laden down with friends. Other
people who act vaguely grumpy, make sarcastic statements and
rotten puns to annoy people, and refuse various reasonable and
unreasonable requests find that half the people they walk past
at work greet them with a cheery smile and the word "hi".
You should aim to become unpopular gradually.
If you go to someone's funeral in bright clothing and tell jokes
to the deceased's nearest relative they will, not unnaturally,
come to dislike you. Going to a wedding and proclaiming loudly
that it will all end in tears will probably bring down your popularity
ratings quite a bit, particularly when it is followed by going
to the divorce settlement six months later and proclaming in
a louder voice "Told you it would all end in tears didn't
I".
If you are really unpopular you can get cut
off from the rest of humanity which means that stupid people
don't want to talk to you. In order to get rid of stupid people
you offer things which will not appeal to them. Things like fewer
streetlamps (lower council tax, but stupid people won't know
that) will make you unpopular if you are a councillor. You will
become unpopular for suggesting blowing up the planet, despite
the fact that it should guarantee World Peace. In actual fact
even that drastic measure will somehow fail to solve the problem
- to start with there will probably be a world war over who should
survive when you were planning to kill everyone, and that will
be followed by another war over how to go about blowing a planet
up. You will become popular for committing a major robbery, so
if you must rob a train and be unpopular you should beat up the
driver - people won't like you for it. If you manage to become
a major empire ruler who is subsequently beaten up by a former
British colony (independent since 1783) after causing the deaths
of millions of people you will be eternally unpopular with most
people, except a few pseudo-historians, who will say that you
never did anything wrong, that your actions can be justified,
that you were actually good all along, and who will be locked
up for publishing popular books putting across their point of
view. Such people should be taken in your stride - not everyone
will disagree with you.
Handing unpopular people over to the Government
also can make you unpopular. The Bethlehem-born man mentioned
above who got nailed to a tree was handed over to to authorities
of Israel by a subordinate by the name of Judas Iscariot. Mr.
Iscariot has subsequently not gone down very well in the popularity
stakes - people are called "Judas" rather than "traitor"
as it is taken to mean about the same thing. So many rude things
have been said about him over the years that it is a wonder that
the Estate of Judas Iscariot (who did what many would see as
a decent thing for a good reward) is not constantly fighting
several lawsuits for libel.
Between 1997 and 2007 the UK had a Prime Minister
who did what he believed to be the Right Thing (British leaders
have always done this and it never makes them popular. Ever.
There are no exceptions). This unfortunate person who was only
able to become Prime Minister because the previous leader of
his party suddenly died subsequently declared war on one country,
supported the invasion of two more, and fell below the popularity
ratings of the Opposition. This took a very long time to occur
because the Opposition had fallen off the bottom of the popularity
charts. So if you do the Right Thing for the Good of the People
you will become unpopular. You have been Warned. |
