Via the ever-excellent Brainpickings, this nice quote from cyberpunk author William Gibson popped into my inbox:
We [are] shaped as writers, I believe, not much by who our favorite writers are as by our general experience of fiction. Learning to write fiction, we learn to listen for our own acquired sense of what feels right, based on the totality of the pleasure (or its lack) that fiction has provided us. Not direct emulation, but rather a matter of a personal micro-culture.”
I think if you replaced ‘writers’ with ‘politicians’ and ‘fiction’ with ‘politics’, it would be equally true.
If you did then, you’d then have to apologise for butchering a lovely quote, and ignoring the extensive literature on psychology of political belief.
But cultural vandalism aside, political ‘personal micro-culture’ is a handy concept.
*Ps – The great Cameron punk picture was first created for the Economist, and attached to their article “Radical Britain”. First published in April 2010 its worth a re-read.
