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Against ‘karma’

Seeing disasters as a form of celestial retribution is irrational and reactionary.

Julie Burchill

Julie Burchill
Columnist

Topics UK USA World

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In my experience, one of the most helpful ways a person can identify themselves as an ocean-going moron is by their habit of hissy-simpering ‘That’s karma!’ whenever something horrible happens to someone, or whole groups of people, they dislike. We’ve seen a recent example of the latter in the deranged comments on social media concerning the Californian wildfires, best summed up by some dingbat on X posting: ‘The world is saying: LA IS KARMA FOR GAZA.’

But taunts of ‘karma’ generally happen one-to-one, often when a bitter, bored person has seen someone else having a better life than them, and makes ‘the best’ of a moment when the envied one is laid low. There’s a prissy, self-righteous sound to it, better suited to a tattletale school child than a supposedly sentient adult. It’s right up there with ‘I’m telling on you!’ in the panoply of intellectual cut-and-thrust.

There is a lot of this about nowadays. So how did Karma’s Barmy Army get to be having such a moment?

Of course, there have been idiots who have beclowned themselves by dabbling in the concept before. In 1999, the England football coach, Glenn Hoddle, ventured that disabilities might have something to do with ‘mistakes’ we have made ‘down here’ on Earth in previous lives and ‘our spirit has to come back and learn’. Oddly, he claimed to be a born-again Christian, but there was the k-word:

You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and half-decent brains. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime. What you sow, you have to reap.

I’d probably query the ‘half-decent brain’ bit in his case.

Karma especially suits our times when, usually having identified as good and urged others to #BeKind, people are fine with being as vile online as they wish. They do it because it feels good, though they will invariably justify it by identifying their adversary as ‘evil’. There is an Aldous Huxley quote that seems to sum up these morally threadbare times more than any other:

The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. Men must be bribed to build up and do good by the offer of an opportunity to hurt and pull down. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour “righteous indignation” – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Of course, the idiots never think through their convenient love of selective celestial retribution. When something awful befalls them or their loved ones, do they still simper ‘karma’? No, then it’s always: ‘Why MEEE?’

I was waiting for the bottom feeders of X to get stuck in over my recent bit of trouble – I probably won’t walk again – and I wasn’t disappointed. Most were the same addlepates who only live to stick their tongues so far up Meghan Markle’s fundament that they can French kiss her at the same time. Someone posted recently on X:

‘Can everyone please report these sugars who are celebrating injury to Julie Burchill and wishing harm on anyone who doesn’t like Meghan Markle? The whole thread is full of violent hate.’

Though I was thankful to her, I asked her to please not report the semi-human halfwits, as I was keen to see whether they had used the k-word. And there it was! @DreamsEbon58263 opined: ‘She deserves EVERYTHING and more coming to her… karma.’ Meanwhile, @mary_ndlela reckoned that ‘Karma is beautiful’. @angiejojo3 was a particularly bright and breezy one: ‘Hey Julie Burchill. Welcome to the Karma Café. We serve what you deserve. YOUR ORDER IS READY!’

These sad losses to the brain trust demonstrate how degraded ideas of karma can be. While I admire much about India, there can be no doubt that the caste system is easily as evil as systemic racism or sexism. And as The Shade, an Indian writer, notes on Medium: ‘There is a vital link between karma theory and the caste system.’ Acts or deeds in past lives are said to accompany the soul into the next, determining one’s position in the caste hierarchy. For Western adherants of karma theory, such as my loony brood on X, there can be no rationale or excuse for adopting this most reactionary of ideas, as they didn’t even grow up with it.

Like those dippy actresses who are sure that they were Cleopatra in a former life (never a slave!), I wonder how these dimwits who keep telling me about karma think they’d fare under the caste system? I doubt they’d be brahmins. They might well be untouchables. But this easy-to-grasp bit of logic can’t fight its way through the swamplands of their spite.

Following the logic of karma, was John Lennon, who banged on about it a lot, getting his karma when he was assassinated? Perhaps for keeping a whole apartment, just below the one he lived in, for the exclusive occupation of fur coats to keep them at the right temperature? (Imagine… no possessions.) Or for dabbling in cattle trading to the extent that Yoko Ono once sold a single cow for a quarter of a million dollars? (That’s quite a bit of sinning against the Hindus’ holy cow.)

So, Karma’s Barmy Army, when disaster befalls you or someone you love, and rest assured that it will, you should remember all the times you chucked ‘karma’ around so freely and accept yours bravely. Namaste!

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.

Picture by: Getty.

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