A Godfather Theory of Everything

The Enlightenment dies, replaced by The Entitlement

Chris Johns

We know that anyone who reads Substack or similar sites these days is assailed with requests to subscribe and/or share the author’s work. It can be a pain to read and is understandably and easily skipped over. But mainstream media is dying. Please support us in our small-scale efforts to make sure that what replaces it is not oligarch-controlled Daily Mail-style opinion & *news*. Resource starved newspapers and TV stations are being replaced. We can all help to slow the descent into an Orwellian media landscape. It is up to us to shape what it looks like.

The enduring popularity of gangster movies in general, and Mafia stories in particular, are, for some, a mystery. The Godfather, The Sopranos (“best TV series ever”), Goodfellas, Casino and Boardwalk Empire - to name but a few - have achieved iconic cultural status, all attracting new fans years after their creation. What’s with the fascination? Here’s one answer from Perplexity, normally a better AI chatbot that ChatGPT:

Crime stories, Godfather movies, and Mafia TV shows are widely popular due to their captivating portrayal of the criminal underworld, power struggles, and intricate family dynamics. These narratives offer viewers a glimpse into the ruthless world of organized crime, exploring themes of loyalty, betrayal, and the quest for power. The seductive allure of these stories lies in their ability to immerse audiences in a world filled with complex characters, intense drama, and moral ambiguity. The authenticity, compelling storytelling, and the exploration of human nature within these narratives resonate with audiences, making them enduringly popular across various mediums like movies and TV shows.

That, I guess, is a fairly orthodox set of reasons, consistent with most movie/book/TV-show reviewers’ beliefs. But it seems to me to be only a partial explanation: there is a dirty secret hiding behind a lot of admiration for Godfather schtick. Those words “seductive allure” are doing a lot of work here.

I don’t want to incite another gender war here, but it seems to me that a lot of men (in particular, but not exclusively) look enviously at Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro et al.

Key mobster characteristics:

1. The ability in be in total control (well, the appearance of control, for a time, at least).

2. Absolute power. Particularly, the means to crush rivals.

3. Wealth.

4. Unlimited sex.

5. Unconstrained by rules and laws.

In summary, the freedom to do what you like, when you like, particularly to whoever you like.

That dirty secret? Too many men would love to be the Godfather. Amoral and unconstrained. That veneer of civilisation does indeed run thin.

Contempt for conventional laws is more complicated than it looks. The Mafia have their own internal codes of behaviour, with grave punishments for transgressors, something that reveals a more general point: logic and consistency are often noticeable by their absence. This from Wikipedia’s description. of a strongman politician:

Strongmen generally express contempt for the rule of law, however, they also utilise the law as a weapon against their political opponents

All gangs, secret societies, political parties, tribes, guilds and social classes have their own codes of behaviour, their own laws. Often unwritten and known only to insiders. Omerta is the obvious Mafia example. It’s not just about not telling the cops anything. A memorable quote from The Don, Vito Corleone:

Never Tell Anyone Outside the Family What You’re Thinking

Elites of any stripe, legal or otherwise, dig moats and erect walls to keep others out. Transgressors can be killed, expelled or just laughed at. Or all three.

One of the biggest crimes that can be committed in the company of the English upper classes is to be a bore. Try getting a definition of what that means - you will instantly be told that asking the question reveals you to be a bore. And then you are toast. Socially speaking. It’s the tribal code - break it at your peril.

Is there any difference between mobster behaviour and ‘the strongman theory of politics’? Why do many of our current crop of leaders, not to mention Genghis Khan, Alexander, Emperors, Kings, Presidents and Prime Ministers simply resemble the archetypal mafia don? What is it about certain types of men (again, mostly) who end up convinced that invading other countries is a really good idea?

Jack Wolz famously said in the first Godfather movie, ‘a man in my position can’t be made to look ridiculous’. Some of us men are able to laugh at ourselves, but many cannot. Image is everything. Wolz got a horse’s head in his bed for his troubles.

Comparing Donald Trump to a mob boss is almost a cliché. It’s also claimed, with much justification, that he is the ultimate narcissist. Perhaps the two things always go together. Image, the opinion of others and not looking ridiculous are everything. Here is a great piece that does the mobster comparison.

Maybe all of this is about different ways of looking at the end result: via different routes, one branch of humanity has ended up displaying one dominant characteristic: unlimited entitlement. Are we all, to some extent, like this? I think (hope?) not. Could evolution have taken sub-groups of our single species along very different paths? That will be too speculative for the tastes of some, but looking at people like Trump I have to wonder. Maybe it has always been like this: perhaps it is the old biblical story about temptation and/or the modern retelling of the fable via the attractions of the Dark Side of the Force. It is clearly very attractive to a lot of people right now - not just the usual suspects, but also those who vote for them.

That point about entitlement is important. One leader who displayed total belief in his unlimited entitlement to power, money and sex was, of course, Boris Johnson. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever compared Johnson to a mob boss. But that entitlement is there, common to both the mafia and the ex-Prime Minister. What mobsters want and how they behave bear uncanny resemblances to the blond buffoon. Except that British genius means that our mobsters don’t have to garrot each other for their wealth, power, control, sex and disregard for laws. They are just born that way. It helps that we have a longer history than the Americans

The British elite take a short cut to entitlement: they just have always had it. The aristocracy, the inequality, the education system, Eton and Oxford - everyone knows the story. Three families still own much of London and one of them derives their wealth from 1667 when a 12-year old heiress was married off to one of their ancestors. A lot of British entitlement is derived from centuries-old Mafia-style behaviour.

Civilised societies are supposed to have developed rules, laws, beliefs and institutions that recognise the wickedness of all this. That we are so obviously going backwards in America, Russia, China, Turkey, bits of Asia, all of the Middle East, much of Africa, some Latin America countries and the UK’s Tory party tells us something. And I don’t think that represents human progress.

There are simply too many men - and one or two women - who want to be Don Corleone. Too many world ‘leaders’ who have reached, via gangsterism or the filter of inheritance, the stage of entitlement that always has the same answer to the question, ‘how much is enough?’. The answer? More.

Another obvious question is, ‘why so many of them?’. A historian might say it was ever thus. Caligula and Alexander once ruled, at different times, most of the known world. By my reckoning, currently well over half the world’s population is either ruled by a gangster or is likely to vote one in very soon.

My own profession has developed - borrowing from other social scientists - all sorts of behavioural theories that try to explain why we do what we do. When i read that literature I’m reminded of a phrase often used by my friend Shane O’Mara, Professor of Brain Research at Trinity College Dublin: “We are all cognitive misers”. In my world, that translates into the mental shortcuts we take when making financial decisions. In the wider world, that’s all about the rules-of-thumb we adopt when thinking about pretty much anything.

'Watch what people do, not what they say’

No two people are exactly alike, least of all mobsters. But they do have enough things in common to make them alike. Even if the routes they take to unlimited entitlement are different, the end results are similar enough to make them a ‘type’. I’ll finish by describing one type and assert that many of his behaviours are common to all of today’s gangster politicians.

Boris Johnson has had countless documentaries, articles, books and biographies written about him. Johnson himself has written many words, ones that reveal much. But any student of the man ends up struggling to define him, such are the mass of contradictions. A good shortish study is to be found here, from which some of the following quotes are taken.

the least deserving and least qualified foreign secretary of modern times, who has successfully lived down to all expectations

That quote, from a former British Ambassador, suggests breathtaking naivety on the part of its author - the belief that people like Johnson get what they deserve.

Strip away the bluster and bonhomie, and you are left with a chaotic, mendacious, philandering, egotistical, disloyal and thoroughly untrustworthy charlatan driven by ambition and self-interest

Now e are getting somewhere. Behavioural characteristics shared - almost identically so - with Tony Soprano and so many others. Real and fictional.

In an Eton leaving book, Johnson wrote of his determination to secure “more notches on my phallocratic phallus” – a goal that he amply fulfilled in later life

Max Hastings advising Johnson on how to be electorally popular:

Lock up your willy

Johnson on Johnson’s success:

I haven’t had to have a wank for 20 years,

See my point about ‘unlimited sex, above.

I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.

That’s Johnson, speaking to a journalist, about his newspaper columns that were wholly made up stories about the EU. It was his route to power.

Here’s Tory elder statesman on Johnson’s journalistic skills:

As a journalist in Brussels, he was one of the greatest exponents of fake journalism

One obvious irony is the way all the gangster politicians, especially Trump, now complain about fake news.

One leading journalist, Times and BBC employed, channelled Belloc to describe his fellow hack:

Boris told such dreadful lies/It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes…

Conrad Black, media baron, late of one or two scandals himself, on Johnson:

Ineffably duplicitous

I focus on Johnson merely to point out the behaviours common to all these types. Eton and Oxford got him to the pinnacle of entitlement rather than working his way up from button man to caporegime to Godfather - but they all end up in the same place. See my list of the five key characteristics, above.

Why do they do it? That’s beyond my pay grade. My own theory, admittedly half-baked, is that Johnson’s personal philosophy, informed by his Classical studies of philosophy, is that nothing really matters. As Freddy Mercury put it at the end of Bohemian Rhapsody:

Nothing really matters, anyone can see
Nothing really matters
Nothing really matters to me

When nothing matters, some men see no alternative but to strive for the list of five objectives with which I began this piece. At least, they reason, there will be some fun along the way. They are as good a rule-of-thumb for life as any other.

The one hope is the observation the Johnson is (hopefully) yesterday’s man. Maybe that will, one day, be true of some or all of the others. Over to you, the American electorate.