Cassandra Voices

Tag: culture

  • On (the) Money

    If you follow me baby I’ll turn your money green
    I show you more money Rockerfeller ever seen
    Furry Lewis, ‘I Will Turn Your Money Green’ (1928)

    First of all, it is good to have some of it. Second of all, it is good to have enough of it – which means not too much. I define ‘enough’ as that which allows you to avoid having to have any dealings with bank managers or landlords, or debts or debtors in general.

    No one should have to live in constant fear of the spectre of homelessness. No one should have to tie themselves to a twenty-five year mortgage, simply in order to avoid the precarity of the private rental sector (by entering the equal precarity of perhaps not being able to keep up their mortgage repayments to a bank or other lending institution – which are here acting as de facto landlords). No one should have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.

    Is an elephant big? Is a mouse small? They are only big or small relative to each other (or to some other object or objects, bigger or smaller than they are). Enough is sufficient. But, given the cost of living where I live (including the cost of somewhere to live where I live, whether renting or buying), ‘enough’ has come to mean ‘a lot’.

    Ostensibly, this is a problem of human greed, but its real roots are meretriciousness. Does it really matter whether you live in a multi-bedroom mansion in Killiney or in a two-up, two-down in Stonybatter or Ballybough (from the Gaelic, ‘Poor Town’); in a four-story Georgian house on Fitzwilliam Square or in a two-bedroom apartment anywhere? Is it necessary or desirable to own multiple properties?

    The only reason for dwelling in one of the former over one of the latter – outside of having many dependents to shelter, or lots of ‘stuff’ to store – is simple showing off. It is the flaunting of conspicuous wealth and consumption, an ostentatious one-upmanship which betrays an underlying insecurity.

    Is it the safety of living in a ‘good neighbourhood’ that you seek, or the status? I suspect that most instances of greed stem from snobbery, which then becomes a vicious circle feedback loop, with snobbery engendering more greed. Which is all the more risible when one considers that most snobbery – social or intellectual – is merely tuppence ha’penny looking down on tuppence.

    Image: © Daniele Idini

    Hard Working

    ‘But I have worked hard for it’, say those who have it, sometimes aggressively and other times defensively, and maybe they have. But, under the present dispensation, most people work at something, unless a) they are independently wealthy enough not to have to work, or b) they cannot find or make work. How hard they work is difficult to determine, given the variety of walks of life, and the disparity in their relative financial rewards. Are we talking about physical or mental work? And what about ‘labours of love’?

    Many people work less and earn more than others who work more and earn less – mostly because the latter are exploited by the former. Also, implicit in the argument of those who claim to be worthy of their earnings is the idea that they should therefore be allowed to keep most if not all of what they have accumulated to themselves. (One thinks of a former President of the United States boasting that dodging his taxes ‘makes me smart’. It is also worth remembering that we live in a country where Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney think they are deserving of their more than generous state pensions.)

    They prize their individual wellbeing, and that of their charges, over the common good, with the masses of ‘other people’ invariably dismissed as too stupid or too lazy to make something of themselves and do well for themselves (and thus, in their terms, they are contributing to society by not taking anything out of it). The premise of ‘When you’re not doing so well, vote for a better life for yourself. If you are doing quite nicely, vote for a better life for others’ would be alien to them, as they believe a better life for others would dimmish a better life for themselves.

    So don’t even try quoting the familiar Marxist motto, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ to them, unless you expect short shrift.

    But, as David Foster Wallace hypothesised in his last, unfinished novel The Pale King (2011), tax payment and collection is an excellent index of civic virtue. As unlikely hero Mr. DeWitt Glendenning Jr., the Director of the Midwest Regional Examination Center, puts it: ‘If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine [his] whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.’

    Musk

    Juxtapose this attitude with Elon Musk’s warning that President Joe Biden’s proposed ‘billionaire tax’ would eventually increase taxes on everyone else, quoting the hoary monetarist mantra, ‘eventually they run out of other people’s money and come for you.’

    FYI, it would take someone on the average industrial wage 800,000 years to earn what Mr. Musk made on a single day in October 2021, a cool $36.2 billion. But, in the eyes of the right, I am ‘just envious’. No, I’m not. Really, I don’t need that much – even if I would quite like to try ‘Life On Mars’ someday – and, given the extent to which our home planet has been run into the ground, may well have to do so. Although, clearly, as a faint-hearted socialist trying to survive in an aggressively late-capitalist world, I would never be able to afford the ticket – not even one-way, let alone return.

    Besides which, the glorification of the Protestant work ethic is just a neat trick to get some people to slave their guts out for other people’s profit (cue easy signifiers such as ‘wealth creators’, ‘employment opportunities’, ‘increased productivity’, ‘trickle down’, etc.). Everyone actually, if secretly, knows that – unless you are doing something you like – ‘work’ is vastly overrated.

    As Les Murray has it, in his gloss on The Book of Common Prayer, ‘In the midst of life we are in employment.’ Or, as Dennis O’Driscoll recast it, ‘We are wasting our lives, earning a living.’

    The whole dream of winning the lottery is that of never having to work for a living again. This is the real meaning of ‘hitting the jackpot’: being able to tell the boss what you think of him or, if you are self-employed, not even having to be your own boss anymore.

    As David Graeber contends in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates employment with self-worth. He credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labour of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity (or technology) as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they have been indoctrinated to believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless.

    Graeber describes this cycle as ‘profound psychological violence’ and ‘a scar across our collective soul.’ Yet, as he notes, people are not inherently lazy: we work not just to pay the bills, but because we want to contribute something meaningful to society. The psychological effect of spending our days on tasks we secretly know do not need to be performed, or could be performed by anyone, or by a machine, is deeply damaging.

    LinkedIn

    This abuse is internalised at the level of language itself. Have you ever read people’s job descriptions of their own career summaries on LinkedIN? An example, taken at random:

    – – is the M.D. of the European branch of the Australian boutique consultancy – -, where she leads the delivery of impactful and sustainable organisational diversity models, promoting inclusive leadership, collective intelligence, and creative innovation. – – has over 15 years of programme delivery experience and success in the development of cross-sectoral, scaled innovations for learning, informed by evidence-based research. She has a keen interest in interdisciplinary team approaches that promote diversity and inclusion, creative problem solving, leadership development, and change expertise. A former Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, – – is an expert on social impact and has a proven track record in the strategic development of pioneering creative innovation models and has presented her research internationally, including at the European Parliament. She is part of Trinity College Dublin’s Women Who Wow mentorship scheme which promotes an ideal collaborative environment to launch new start-up ventures.

    What does any of this mean? Lest you conclude that this type of balderdash is the product of Civil or Public Service speak, be assured that it more than extends to the Private Sector too:

    I am a Dublin-based Customer Success Manager, with experience across Mid-Market, Enterprise and Global accounts in both Corporate and Search & Staffing industries. I am a trusted partner to my clients and cross-functional internal stakeholders. I use data and insights to mitigate churn, demonstrate ROI and encourage utilisation of the product suite in which they have invested. I am proactive, customer-centric and thrive in fast-paced environments.

    This is the worst kind of gobbledegook going. Naturally, it is de rigueur to be ‘passionate about the industry’, rather than stating you have a major concern about putting food on the table and keeping a roof over your head. If you are not a grafter you are surely a grifter.

    Time Millionaires

    Add to Graeber’s analysis the concept of ‘time millionaires’. First named by Nilanjana Roy in a 2016 column in the Financial Times, time millionaires measure their worth not in terms of financial capital but according to the seconds, minutes and hours they claw back from employment for leisure and recreation. ‘Wealth can bring comfort and security in its wake,’ writes Roy, ‘but I wish we were taught to place as high a value on our time as we do on our bank accounts – because how you spend your hours and your days is how you spend your life.’ Here she is near-plagiarising Annie Dillard’s brilliant aperçu from The Writing Life (1989), but this idea has a long and noble historical tradition.

    In ‘Of Idleness’ (1574), Michel de Montaigne cautions against the dangers of idleness, yet his essays are the product of someone who retired to his country estate at the age of thirty-eight, ‘to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live’ in order to meditate and write, yet it is the ‘thousand extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of the imagination’, of which he is so fearful, which are the fuel for the depth and variety of the essays he wrote.

    Samuel Johnson founded a magazine called The Idler (1758-60) and told his readers: ‘Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler.’

    Kierkegaard, in Either/Or (1843), wrote:

    Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is a truly divine life, if one is not bored… Idleness, then, is so far from being the root of evil that it is rather the true good. Boredom is the root of evil; it is that which must be held off. Idleness is not the evil; indeed, it may be said that everyone who lacks a sense for it thereby shows that he has not raised himself to the human level.

    Learning how to use one’s free time well is the problem, not the leisure itself.

    Perhaps the most famous refusenik of them all is the central character in Herman Melville’s short story, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ (1853). Bartleby is hired as a copyist, and initially is diligent and hard-working, doing all that is asked of him. Then, shortly afterwards, he presents the narrator, his new boss, with what is to become his catchphrase: ‘I would prefer not to’.

    There are several takeaways from this wonderful piece of fiction, but for my purposes let’s emphasise its focus on the dehumanisation of the copyist, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a photocopying machine.

    In classic Marxist terms, the story is an exposition of the working man’s existence: oppression under the system of capitalism, in which he is alienated from his labour, offered only subsistence level wages, and is ultimately destroyed by that system if he cannot either conform to it, or change it.

    Wilde reclining with Poems, by Napoleon Sarony in New York in 1882.

    The Soul of Man Under Socialism

    In his great essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891), incidentally a pre-twentieth century masterpiece in its reconciliation of aesthetics and politics, dandyism and left-wing thinking, Oscar Wilde argues that:

    And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation.

    To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.

    Walter Benjamin’s vast, and sadly unfinished, Arcades Project (1939) is predicated on his wanderings of Parisian streets, and according to him, ‘Basic to flânerie, among other things, is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labour.’ He also notes, ‘Idleness has in view an unlimited duration, which fundamentally distinguishes it from simple sensuous pleasure of whatever variety.’

    Bertrand Russell in 1954

    In Praise of Idleness

    Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, in his extended consideration ‘In Praise of Idleness’ (1932), Bertrand Russell has much to offer on the topic:

    Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organised bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e., of advertising.

    Russell’s most compelling point is the most counterintuitive – the idea that reclaiming leisure is not a reinforcement of elitism but the antidote to elitism itself and a form of resistance to oppression, for it would require dismantling the power structures of modern society and undoing the spell they have cast on us to keep the poor, poor and the rich, rich.

    To correctly calibrate modern life around a sense of enough – that is, around meeting the need for comfort rather than satisfying the endless want for consumerist acquisitiveness – would be to lay the groundwork for social justice.

    Derek Mahon echoes this theory in his essay ‘Montaigne Redivivus’, from Red Sails (2014), a eulogy to the kindred spirit he finds in his predecessor Cyril Connolly, whom he is anxious to rescue from undeserved obscurity. Mahon fulminates against ‘dumbing down’ (‘done to protect the market economy from criticism and to sell more junk’) and, if leisure is still regarded as a luxury, proposes in place of the lowest common denominator, a concept he calls ‘élitism for all’.

    Jenni Odell has expressed similar ideas in her anti-productivity tract How to Do Nothing (2019): ‘In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living,’ she writes, ‘and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook . . . time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’. It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.’ Odell exhorts readers to recognise that ‘the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are . . . enough.’

    Related themes have been explored, and comparable conclusions reached, in contemporary essays and creative non-fictions such as A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) by Rebecca Solnit, and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (2016) by Lauren Elkin; and in fictions like Pond (2015) by Claire-Louise Bennett and My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh. But the most pleasing up-to-date reiteration of this viewpoint comes in Ms. Bennett’s Checkout 19 (2021):

    There’s a fine art to being idle in fact. That’s right, there is an art to it, and very few people are naturally in possession of the gumption and fortitude necessary to pull it off.

    Russell accounts for the difference between boredom and idleness in leisure by acknowledging:

    The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilisation and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no long exists.

    However, it is regrettable that both Wilde and Russell were unfortunately overoptimistic in their belief that mechanisation would free us all to lead more fulfilling lives. Wilde elaborates his vision of a technological utopia:

    All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

    Russell simply states: ‘Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all (but) we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.’

    Hi-tech Nightmare

    Such late 19th century/early 20th century sanguine sunniness now seems woefully wide of the mark, from the standpoint of our early 21st century hi-tech nightmare. Computers were supposed to make all our lives easier. Instead, because of the co-option of these means of production by the forces of Capitalism, they have made our lives immeasurably harder, or at a minimum our working lives – which now don’t stop when we knock off, but continue 24/7. If computers save us time at work, we must do some other work during that time saved. Otherwise, we are shirking.

    Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that entrepreneurship is a specific talent, and those who choose to spend their time engaged in it should be rewarded appropriately. But some people have this gift, and some people don’t, just as artistic or scientific inclination and aptitude is not equally distributed to everyone – even if, arguably, a certain level of functionality can be acquired.

    So why should entrepreneurship as a calling be recompensed more generously than others? Why, for that matter, should tech workers earn colossal salaries, while writers, artists and musicians are driven out of the cities they grew up in, because they can’t afford the rent? For the businessperson, Time is Money; for the artist, Money is Time.

    But there are more business people exploiting artists than there are artists exploiting business people. As William Burroughs has it in The Job (1969): ‘And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and above all it eats creativity.’ Incidentally, upon graduating from Harvard in 1936, the privileged Mr. Burroughs was in receipt of a monthly parental allowance of $200 – a considerable sum in those days – which he used to underwrite his corporeal and psychic travels. Arriving with welcome regularity, it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, and was a ticket to freedom which allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forego employment, and to pursue his psychotropic investigations and reports. As J. G. Ballard has commented, ‘Never has a research grant been put to better use.’

    Of course, art – especially of the less commercial variety – has always depended on patronage, whether private or public. No Medici or Borgia families, including the Popes they produced = no Italian Renaissance.

    Harriet Shaw Weaver funded James Joyce to the extent of over €1 million in today’s money. Samuel Johnson’s ‘Letter To Lord Chesterfield’ (1755) signalled a shift in relations between artists and private patronage, with Johnson chaffing against what he considered ill-treatment by someone who claimed to be his patron, but did nothing to help him during the years spent working on his Dictionary, but instead tried to steal the glory when it was published. These days, we may thank the Gods for state-sponsored Arts Councils, and place our trust in their judgements.

    So, where is all this free money, to finance all the pleasure of all this (un)productive leisure, going to come from, I hear you ask? In my book, Universal Basic Income is a great idea. Food and shelter are basic humanitarian and constitutional rights. In proclaiming ‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food’, the Old Testament was wrong, as it was wrong about so many things. To have to work for most of your life, simply in order to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, will in two hundred years’ time be regarded as a mode of social organisation as ludicrous as the divine right of kings, sponsoring a feudal system. As Ursula Le Guin has written:

    Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

    Indeed, what is most depressing about the plight of the current under-30s (or is it under-40s?) generation (or ‘millennials’, as they are (un)affectionately known), is their hopelessness in the face of the impossibility of home ownership and an independent adult life, as though they have internalised and are thoroughly resigned to what the late Mark Fisher termed ‘Capitalist Realism’, and have no sense of any possible alternative.

    After all, they could rebel, stage a revolution – or even just vote, for all the good it will do, if only just to register a protest – instead of stagnating in frustration and self-pity. In any case, people should be free to do nothing if they wish to, and still have at least a minimum level of security as regards the animal needs for food and shelter. If we can arrange things thus during a pandemic, why can’t we do it all the time? Because it is not sustainable in the long term? I beg to differ. Going to university is essentially doing nothing for three or four or five or six or seven years – except read books – and getting a piece of paper or two or three at the end of it, for your trouble.

    Universal Basic Income

    But what would happen if everyone relied on this Universal Basic Income? Well, they won’t. ‘Communism doesn’t work because people like owning stuff’ Frank Zappa told us. I don’t know about ‘owning’ stuff, but I like having stuff, or rather, having access to stuff. But there are many avenues of access to stuff.

    Mostly, what is in dispute is how long you have to wait your turn. However, if there was enough stuff to go around, waiting would not be an issue, and neither would ‘owning’, per se. Do you have a mortgage on your home? Then you don’t ‘own’ it: a lending institution merely lets you have access to it, until your make your final payment. But if you really must call stuff your own, then work for the money for your consumer durables, and satisfy your commodity fetishism, when you want to, not when you need to; and don’t when you don’t want to, not when you don’t need to.

    But even if everybody did rely on such a subsidy (just as many businesspeople and industrialists already do), it would be no bad – or undoable – thing. For if we institute Universal Basic Income as a minimum at one end, surely we should also implement a Universal Maximum Income at the other, thus having reasonable limits at either end of the scale. The excesses of one will pay for the deficiencies of the other. This is only the next logical step in our current conception of the redistribution of wealth through taxation – or, more plainly, how we move money around to help each other.

    Who wants to be a billionaire? I really can’t imagine every filthy rich plutocrat in the world suddenly giving up their extravagant earnings and lifestyle, and settling instead for a modest stipend, simply because they are debarred from infinitely growing their millions.

    To be fair, after hitting maybe the 1 billion mark, or 10 billion, or whatever astronomical sum you care to nominate, the monied magnate should simply be taken aside and, like a contestant on a game show, given a prize – a big gold cup, say, or a fancy watch – and told, “Congratulations, you’ve just won Capitalism. Now, we hope you enjoy your retirement. You know, spending more time with your family.” Although, given that there will be more than one winner, and so no outright Number One, the competitive streak in such people may go ungratified, and so atrophy into seething frustration. But, we can throw in the necessary course of therapy – or ‘re-education’ – for free too. I can just see the headlines: ‘Billionaires’ Rights Infringed.’; ‘Freedom For Poor Billionaires.’

    Furthermore, so much of the defence of, and endorsement of, mega-wealth is predicated on spurious notions of progress, or planning for the future – but isn’t really any kind of growth at all, except for the advancement of various small groups of vested interests, to the detriment or even outright ruination of the majority of people, and the environment.

    At the same time, people in receipt of social welfare payments are frequently characterised as stupid or lazy or both, and dubbed the ‘undeserving poor’ – as though there is suddenly a class of ‘deserving poor’ at whom charity should be directed.

    As Wilde has it, in the aforementioned landmark essay, ‘As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage.’

    The most egregious local example of this kind of poverty porn was RTE Radio 1’s documentary series Queueing for a Living, which ran from 1986 to 1997, and featured presenter Paddy O’Gorman interviewing people in dole queues and outside prisons. (From poverty porn to property porn – and good, old fashioned porn porn – one has almost run the entire gamut of the western mediascape.)

    It is rivalled only by the memory of the farcically counterproductive fiasco that was 1986’s Self Aid, both telethon concert and theme song. Meanwhile, as conservative politicians the world over rail against ‘state-sponsored idleness’, landlords produce absolutely nothing for the income they receive. They don’t even have to do very much to provide the temporary and insecure service they render.

    My last landlord – when I was having a break from domestic bliss/strife – was one such specimen. When the bathroom sink in the cottage I was renting from him broke, through no fault of my own, he refused to repair it unless I paid for it. I took the case to the Residential Tenancies Board, and it turned out he was not even registered with them. He then had the gall to upbraid me with the taunt, “You cost me my pension”, and promptly issued me with an eviction notice, under the pretence of selling the property. Of course, in public, this fly-by-night presented himself as a socially-concerned community worker. My nomination for the ugliest word in the English language: ‘rent’ – it tears me apart.

    Was Alcohol Involved?

    Or consider the presentation of drug and alcohol addiction in the media: it’s all ‘inner city deprivation’, ‘youth unemployment’, ‘gangster drug lords’, etc. (for example, one of the aforementioned Paddy O’Gorman’s most frequent inquiries of his marks was, ‘Was alcohol involved?’), when the majority of the regular cliental for Class A drugs are the white collar professionals who can afford them.

    The same wilful blindness applies to the investigation and prosecution of white collar, as opposed to blue collar, crime. The same double-standard runs through the arts and its practitioners: the only difference between the consciousness-altering psychic experimentation and stress relief practiced by William Burroughs, Keith Richards, and other master addicts, and the guys burgling your house for drug money, is relative income – that is, money. Oh, and talent. Or rather, different kinds of talents.

    What is perhaps most interesting about money is how people behave around it, and what lengths they will go to in order to get it. ‘Put money in thy purse’ counsels the villainous Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. What makes banker/industrialist Mr. Bounderby such a bounder in Dickens’ Hard Times? Why is John Self so messed up in Martin Amis’ Money? Attitudes to money and its pursuit are perhaps the greatest litmus test of a character’s propensity to virtue or vice, in life as in literature. It is the chief barometer of the capacity for Evil. Most people are ‘funny about money’, in some way or another. (Where there’s a will, there’s lots of relatives.) ‘Money is the root of all evil’ is a cliché more commonplace than most, but if we return to Samuel Johnson, he fulfils Alexander Pope’s definition of wit as ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’, in his great poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) – itself an ‘imitation’ of Juvenal’s Satire X – particularly, for our purposes, in the passage on money:

    But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold
    Fall in the gen’ral massacre of gold;
    Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfin’d,
    And crowds with crimes the records of mankind
    For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
    For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
    Wealth heap’d on wealth, nor truth, nor safety buys,
    The dangers gather as the treasures rise.

    Watch what people do to make a (dis)honest buck. Or what they’ll do in order to avoid, in due course, having to toil to make a buck. Or if they’ll continue wanting to make even more big bucks, by fair means or foul, long after they have more than any one person, or their dependents, could possibly need. In which case, they are most likely much more interested in power than they are in money, money being merely a means to an end. And the wielding of power is just another way of showing off, or protecting what you have.

    Of course, I cannot get through an essay (or piece of ‘creative non-fiction’, or whatever term you care to employ for these ramblings and rants) without making it personal, so I will now refer to my own family background. My father had a strong work ethic, and worked hard all his life in the state transport company ‘to support my family’ – even if his earnings were relatively meagre and his eventual non-contributary pension derisorily small.

    But, in those days, so did everyone, since as the old Italian adage has it ‘Chi non lavora non mangia’ (Who does not work does not eat.) Nevertheless, watching him retire, when I was nineteen, I couldn’t help but find it both outrageous and disheartening that he had put in a lifetime’s worth of hard slog for such a paltry payoff. He had missed out on a lot of familial activity (including seeing me), due to doing the overtime he thought was necessary to ‘keep the show on the road’.

    Again, as Russell has it: ‘The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.’ This perception was accompanied by my late mother – having spotted my burgeoning creativity during my adolescence – inculcating in me the notion that, ‘Art is for rich people.’ Of course, she was wrong. But, in another sense, and certainly from her perspective, she was right. Nor would she have been alone in having such an attitude, which was widespread at the time – one thinks of John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi telling him: ‘The guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it’ – not that she actively hindered his pursuit of his dream of doing so.

    After all, artistic production, and its attendant activities and industries – academia, media, publishing, curating etc. – are still predominantly middle-class occupations, filled by middle-class personnel, who become the gatekeepers to acceptance or rejection. Some will raise the cavil that this perception depends on one’s definition of what constitutes middle class and working class, and if one even allows for the reality of the class system at all.

    Typically, these people hold that merely by achieving a college education (however easy or difficult that may be, depending on the personal circumstances you hail from), you automatically enter the hallowed mansions of middle-class heaven. But, apart from being a self-fulfilling prophecy, this is simply untrue, because it takes no account of what has happened before college and what will happen afterwards: your social and cultural capital (what networks and contacts your immediate and extended family have and the milieu it inhabits – i.e ‘who Daddy and/or Mommy know’); and certainly not of your economic capital (how rich your parents – if you have them – are).

    For who can finance the ubiquitous internships (free labour for successful companies), without independent economic support, usually from family, without incurring huge debt, on top of student debt? At least rock’n’roll used to be egalitarian, and along with football, recognised as a ‘working-class escape’.

    Nowadays, you can go to college to learn how to be a rock star, or go through an academy to develop the necessary footballing skills – which makes either endeavour seem rather more anodyne. Everyone may now be entitled to a degree – but only because you can pay through the nose at a private college in the event that you did not achieve the necessary academic requirements for entry to a ‘proper’ university.

    Seventy percent of the world’s population may live three pay cheques away from financial disaster – but life is definitely easier when you have a safety net. If worse comes to worst, some people can always ‘move back in with the folks’.

    Others have no folks to move back in with – or the prospect or the reality would be just too difficult, for either or both parties. All of the foregoing makes it hugely problematic for people of working class origin to establish themselves in any profession, but it is especially and acutely true for writers, artists and musicians, particularly if they are producing challengingly avant garde work. Racism, sexism and homophobia are all terrible prejudices, but can they exceed the obstacles created by the structural inequality of being working class – the poor, often elided, back-of-the-bus section of intersectionality?

    Launching a career in literature was and is a more onerous undertaking for university educated women writers like Jeanette Winterson forty years ago, or Claire-Louise Bennett more recently, in contrast with their middle-class counterparts, because familial understanding and support may be minimal or unforthcoming or non-existent. Then, if you do happen to gain some recognition, you have to deal with the condescension of being made a token example of: if they can do it, anyone can. When I think of the undeveloped or underdeveloped potential of so many exceptional people, juxtaposed against the developed or overdeveloped potential of so many average people, it can fair make my blood boil.

    Bye the bye, even further back, during my prepubescent boyhood, my maternal unit also gave me the lowdown on the evils of Russian Communism. Russia was this dreadful place where everyone was forced to believe the same thing and behave in the same way (so unlike Ireland, where we had freedom!), and they didn’t believe in God, and they were just waiting for a chance to invade Ireland, and make the whole world Communist, and they would surely martyr me for trying to defend my Catholic faith and preserve my immortal soul. I can see now that she was just another victim of the paranoid Yankie Cold War propaganda that was rife at that time, since Ireland was a vassal state of the U.S.. Still, it was quite a heavy and fearsome burden to lay on a small, impressionable lad with an active imagination. Thanks Mom.

    Read history, any history. It is essentially the repeated story of the stronger exploiting the weaker, so that they can become richer while the others become poorer. You can dress it up with any fine justifying notion you like – crusades against the infidel, the white man’s burden, survival of the fittest, bringing the benefits of ‘progress’ to backward, uncivilised people, protecting ‘the gentle sex’ – but it doesn’t say very much for human nature. In fact, when I consider the outlandishness of the excuses usually trotted out, I prefer those with an eye to the main chance who are honest enough to admit that they are just self-seeking, self-serving, land-grabbing and fucking everyone else over for the money, without bothering to proffer any fancy reasons for their rapacious cruelty. The capitalist is at base a common or garden playground bully; the rest is just PR to cover up the fact.

    Yes, Communism doesn’t work, because people like owning stuff. But Capitalism doesn’t work either, because it means too many people cannot own stuff, because other people own lots of stuff, at their expense. Mostly, neither of them work because of human frailty and venality – but Capitalism grants much more free reign for these traits and their spawn – aggression, callousness, selfishness, deviousness – to run rampant. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that it could function as designed without encouraging them, however covertly. Flaubert, as Julian Barnes tells us in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984):

    thought democracy merely a stage in the history of government, and he thought it a typical vanity on our part to assume that it represented the finest, proudest way for men to rule one another. He believed in – or rather, he did not fail to notice – the perpetual evolution of humanity, and therefore the evolution of its social forms: ‘Democracy isn’t mankind’s last word, any more than slavery was, or feudalism was, or monarchy was.’ The best form of government, he maintained, is one that is dying, because this means it’s giving way to something else.

    Wilde, again in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, presciently agrees: ‘High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out.’

    But of all the governmental systems humanity has already devised and tried, European-style social democracy would still seem to be the best bet yet. (Ireland, alas, in spite of E.U. membership, remains part of the Anglosphere, having thoroughly embraced the neoliberalism of the U.K. and the U.S..) Not that it couldn’t be improved upon – in ways I am ill-qualified enough to know I should not expostulate on here.

    For it is certain that the first economic strategist who comes along will undoubtedly point to the fact that I am suspiciously short on detail in my surely flawed and embarrassingly naïve socio-economic analysis. I freely admit that I am no dismal scientist – in Carlyle’s sense of advocating for slavery, but rather a gay scientist – in Nietzsche’s sense of the art of poetry; or at least or at best, a sceptical artist. In the classical humanist tradition, I am basing my report on my lived experience, and that of those around me.

    I have never flown first-class. I have never even purchased a first-class train ticket. I have no idea or experience of what it must be like to live as one of the super-rich, although fictions like the HBO television series Succession, to say nothing of practically every nostalgia-fuelled costume drama that has ever been commissioned, try to give us some inkling. Some people watch to ogle the wealth and lifestyle; I feel dirty after watching all those horrible characters doing terrible things to each other – but I keep coming back for more. To quote from Beckett’s Endgame (1957):

    CLOV: What is there to keep me here?

    HAMM: The dialogue.

    Money Doesn’t Exist…

    Ultimately, money doesn’t exist as a tangible entity. It is merely an abstract medium of exchange for goods or services rendered. A €20 note is not worth more than a €10 note, except by mutual agreement between interested parties as to what is written on them signifies.

    Similarly, the stock market, and all such investment, is a giant, reciprocally arranged, confidence trick: if everybody buys in, regardless of external influencing factors, then values increase, or at least remain steady; if some people get nervous, and pull out, then others will follow suit, and the whole shooting match comes tumbling down. That’s why we have an incessant cycle of booms and busts – not because there is too much oil or not enough oil, or even because we no longer need or want oil.

    The invention of credit (and its consequent debt) is what keeps people in thrall to this system. One thinks of the anecdote about Donald Trump pointing to a homeless man one day when he was $1 billion in debt, and telling daughter Ivanka, ‘See that bum? He has a billion dollars more than me.’ Not that this observation was of much consolation to the tramp – however much it may have been to Trump.

    This is what makes the ending of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) so poignant: of all the things we strive for, money seems the least essential. Gatsby, the self-made ‘new man’ millionaire (and how did he make his money? – everyone has some dark, speculative theory about his past), has sacrificed everything for financial success and status, and achieving the American Dream has destroyed him. To put it simplistically, when it comes to his infatuation with Daisy: ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. ‘And so, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ The vanity of human wishes, indeed.

    Like the Philip Larkin of the eponymous poem, I cannot help rueing the extent to which money controls and limits most people’s lives – those who attach much importance to it and strive, successfully or unsuccessfully – after it, as much as those who, through either ineptitude or lack of interest or a surfeit of basic human kindness, do not make a priority of pursuing it and so rarely have enough. And how it also separates us, where we live, and where we live in where we live, and how we live in where we live, while great impersonal institutions hoard, indifferently, merely dispensing charity occasionally, at their whim – after they have taken care of the shareholders. The business of business – in fact the whole money game – is, indeed, ‘intensely sad’.

    I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
    From long french windows at a provincial town,
    The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
    In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

    N.B. Desmond Traynor gratefully acknowledges the assistance of funding from the Arts Council of Ireland towards the completion of this and other essays.

    Featured Image: © Daniele Idini

  • RTE Kitsch: Room to Improve

    Patrick Freyne’s satirical 2020 Irish Times article ‘It is now late-period Dermot Bannon. He is on the verge of losing it’ was an unusually humorous appraisal of the kitsch that state broadcaster RTÉ tends to dollop out.

    In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech author Milan Kundera explains that kitsch is an aesthetic ideal ‘in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist’. This he argues, ‘is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.’ The Montrose cultural bubble has long served a crucial political purpose: denying shit while everyone acts as though it does not exist.

    Through no fault of his own, the feel good factor of Dermot Bannon’s show obscures the suffering associated with an enduring and arguably preventable housing crisis, and also, more broadly, provides an insight into how the Irish overreaction to Covid-19 occurred; which has done incalculable damage to the lives of children especially.

    It seems that our best, and perhaps only, response in Ireland to these traumas is comedy, but this has clear pitfalls.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    “fronted by classical pillars”

    Patrick Freyne reveals:

    Dermot Bannon is my muse. I would write about him in every column if I could (God knows I try). If I were the arts editor I would make the arts pages of this paper entirely Dermot Bannon-themed. If I were taoiseach, I would declare a Dermot Bannon day …

    He observes that

    On every episode of Room to Improve, Dermot Bannon goes into battle with the plain people of Ireland in the cause of justice and light. Mainly light, to be honest. In his philosophy, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed by turning a wall into a window. He’d build all of his houses from windows if he could. The man is a martyr to big windows.

    Explaining that Bannon:

    is creating a metaphorical window into the heart of the Irish people, who are for the most part entirely unco-operative, ungrateful and obsessed with dark holes fronted by classical pillars and filled with Ikea furniture …

    He also marvels at how:

    Ireland is the only country with a celebrity quantity surveyor. Patricia has no time for any of Dermot’s nonsense, which is why we like her. He wants to double the size of his new house for just €350,000. The nation scoffs at this even before Patricia has a chance to say: “Not a hope.” In fact, we all say it along with her, panto style.

    As one of the jesters permitted to ply his trade in the national media, Freyne exposes RTÉ’s consistent denial of shitness – which perhaps accounts for a prevalent uncooperativeness, ingratitude and obsession with dark holes “fronted by classical pillars.”

    Much of the Irish landscape bears testament to the tragedy of the commons. It is a sad reality that most of what has been built since independence is inferior to what came before it.

    Moreover, a programme such as Room To Improve, and it’s not the only one in this genre, is devoted to the improvement of private dwellings in the possession of a shrinking middle class still transfixed by the ups and downs of the Irish property market. It is instructive that according to the website www.daft.ie at the start of May, 2022 there are just over one thousand properties available to rent in all of Ireland at a point when the Irish government has just committed to welcoming tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine. Is it any wonder so many people are disinclined to have children.

    In essence Room to Improve translates into: how can someone increase the market value of their property. The lurking presence of the celebrity quantity surveyor ensures that any project is seen in terms of adding financial value to the holding.

    It is particularly tone deaf as we reach another high-water mark in an ongoing housing crisis. Missing on RTÉ is serious engagement with the corruption of a planning process, which lies behind enduring inequalities and sprawl, or the financial structures that embed generational inequalities, and permit a creeping dominance of transnational capitalism.

    It is not that housing dysfunction is denied on RTÉ – that we are lied to as such – it is that the issues are almost completely ignored amidst the day-to-day mixture of light entertainment and vox pop nonsense that are their mainstays. Room to Improve is a form of kitsch because it denies the shitstorm going on in the society around it.

    And like the rest of their programming, it appears to rely to an ordinate extent on advertising from a motor car industry that allows for the trail of bungalows that blight our landscapes. After all, living in one of the detached houses that Bannon mostly works on would be very difficult without a motor car.

    It also appears that RTÉ’s longstanding tendency to bury shitness – which is also evident in legacy print media – led to the catastrophic handling of Covid-19 in Ireland.

    Ongoing Kitsch

    It will be many years before we come to terms with what happened during Covid-19 around the world, and confront the traumas, especially to children, of living through lockdowns. It is instructive that despite having the youngest population in the EU, Irish children were subjected to among the longest school closures in the world. Simply blaming teaching unions ignores how teachers were subjected to relentless fear messaging that made them reluctant to do their jobs, despite international data from early on showing that their concerns were generally misguided.

    Yet for RTÉ ‘The deadly virus’ of COVID-19 seemed to arrive as a godsend – and an advertising windfall, or so-called Covid bounce. A slavish devotion allowed the channel to almost completely ignore all other difficult news for the best part of a year-and-a-half. The daily totals of cases and deaths, uncritically conveyed, became the staple of every radio and television news bulletin and headline on their website.

    Then, almost overnight, the issue vanished from sight, without any kind of meaningful post-mortem or reflection on the damage inflicted on the patchwork of communities that make up our society.

    It gives way to relentless coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – thick on spectacle and almost devoid of critical analysis. Images of wasted buildings now bury discussion of other stories.

    A lack of intellectual rigour – albeit their Brainstorm section is a notable exception – that is essential to RTE’s kitsch reaches right to the top it would appear. Thus, RTE’s head of news Jon Williams claims in article ‘For the first time in Europe since the end of World War Two, one country had been invaded by another.’ The mind boggles.

    Comedy appears to be the only response available; it’s just that the consequences are quite serious. Simply because political protestors aren’t subjected to imprisonment or torture as under other regimes doesn’t mean that the Irish state isn’t failing its people, and that the state broadcaster isn’t complicit for failing to interrogate our inadequacies that surely begins with a deficient education system.

    Nietzsche

    In Laughter All Evil is Compacted

    Freyne is one of a number of comedic writers and performers – Oliver Callan is another working for RTÉ itself – operating in legacy media who are permitted ‘to take the piss’ out of our national obsessions. Comedy has its advantages but arrives with a health warning.

    Theodore Zeldin traces its historical trajectory: ‘since truth cannot be easily swallowed whole or raw, jesters were usually also poets, magicians or singers, able to convey unpalatable insights in an epigram, a witty story or a song.’

    But this routinely slips into cynicism, as comedy can reinforce conformity ‘by being its safety valve.’ Zeldin points out that carnivals, such as the medieval festival of fools: ‘have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down,’ but ‘did so only for a few days.’ In a sense, comedy normalises the damaging excesses of a culture by turning it into a humorous spectacle.

    Jokes can be truly sick, as the history of totalitarianism demonstrates. Jonathan Glover notes that ‘In the death camps the Nazis turned the cold joke into an art form, with increasingly imaginative embellishment on the themes of cruelty and humiliation.’

    Friedrich Nietzsche provides a psychological insight into how this occurs when claiming that ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’ The gay release of laughter allows depraved participants to evade consideration of their actions. Thus, humour may confront tyranny, but it may also reinforce it.

    A parade of tanks of the ČSLA in Prague on Victory Day, 9 May 1985.

    Not Dangerous In Itself

    In Kundera’s view political kitsch is not dangerous in itself. Indeed, most democratic politicians cultivate a clean-cut, artificial, image. The real danger lies in totalitarian kitsch such as that encountered by the character of Sabina in the aforementioned novel, who recalls the Communist parades of her youth.

    These projected an idealised vision of the worker removed from the corruption, suspicion and cruelty that had by then infected her society. Indeed, it is recalled in Czechia that under Communism love for one’s family required some of form of theft in the course of one’s professional career.

    Kundera contrasts totalitarian airbrushing with the plurality of voices that he believed still lay in Western democracies.

    Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality. The artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

    Prior to Covid-19 RTÉ’s kitsch could largely be avoided, but when the state followed the example of its European partners in imposing undifferentiated house arrest we entered the dangerous territory, as we were subjected to a form of mass formation.

    Ireland Inc has returned to business as usual. Room to Improve carries on with an architect that looks suspiciously like Ryan Tubridy, as the housing crisis continues to the benefit of a few, and all we have are tears of laughter for consolation.

  • Looking for Scraps

    Rushing down the lane to the beach, I race in the direction of clarity; the compliment of sand and sea. We have all been there, a tractor to our right, sheep to the left and the walk, the walk to a fantasized destination. On occasion, the way is filled with hope. Other times there isn’t an absence of hope, but an emptiness overrides any enthusiasm. Conflicted in the inner space… of a Sunday.

    Often, my mind has already arrived at the beach, tuned out from the hedging hawthorn, resilient nettles, and therapeutic dock leaves. Distant from the morning sunlight, that gurgle of machinery, and waft of sillage. There’s a battle of brambles, and satisfying chop of secateurs. My march renews me at the altar. I’m rushing towards a release only provided by sanctuary.

    Sometimes, on the way down the lane, I think to myself… Walk slower…, and then I don’t. In a hurry, I scale to the top of a dune. Sand, stones, and sticks intermingled, create a perch. My eyes follow a seal slumping into the waves, a limp stillness in the ebb and flow. A carefulness not to exert himself in the grey torrents. Not at all fazed by that unceasing nature found in the mother of all beasts. Blindly following this seal’s faith in his safe return to the shore, I entirely miss the fox scoot up behind me, in arm’s reach from my shoulders. Sensing a shift nearer a natural haven, I then lock eyes with its wildness. Silent footprints, black tips at the ears, and that marvelous tail.

    Looking for scraps, he probably came to the right place.

    Historically speaking, humour wasn’t welcome at a sanctuary, shrine or holy place. The joke might undermine meaning or take away from teachings. In writing, it can be seen as using a security blanket, as always relying on a joke when navigating near feelings, to lessen the seriousness, in case the subject is too raw. To act as an airbag on impact. Humour is a powerful coping mechanism, a tool for thinking and expression. It doesn’t have to take anything away from anything. It can actually provide perspective and contribute to the spirit of the place. There is a time to be serious, and a time to have a laugh. I might misread the appropriate response, so to be safe, I bring both. In truth, sometimes I don’t know which one is which.

    Feature Image: Common Seal (Phoca vitulina vitulina)

  • Fiction Reader’s Block

    We all see things with different eyes and it gets you nowhere hoping that one in a thousand will see things your way.
    J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country (1980).

    In his droll 1999 essay, ‘Reader’s Block’, Geoff Dyer describes suffering from what he calls a creeping condition whereby he finds himself staring blankly at his bookshelves noting all the books he hasn’t read and thinking “there’s nothing left to read”.

    Such was Dyer’s malady that even so-called “quality fiction” seemed a waste of time. He was forty-one. Back in his twenties he had imagined he would spend his middle age reading the books he didn’t have the patience to read when he was young. But it was not to be, and now he found himself resigned to leafing through the pages of the in-flight magazine when traveling abroad rather than reading the books he brought for the journey.

    Being roughly the same age as Dyer, I identified wholly with his piece back then, and in a way still do. But my malady, my “reader’s block”, is more specific: it was fiction that got on my nerves at the onset of middle age, and years later it still does. I don’t suffer from reader’s block, but rather fiction reader’s block, or to be more precise, novel reader’s block.

    Occasionally some fiction does slip through the net. Jennifer Potter and Ferdinand Dennis are on my bedside table alongside the handful of old favourites that I occasionally revisit: Sam Selvon, Chester Himes, Shelagh Delaney, Stuart Dybek, W.G.Sebald and Ann Quin. But it is to non-fiction that I mostly turn and have done for over twenty years.

    Currently I’m engrossed in Patrick Wright’s monumental The Sea View Has Me Again, an extraordinary telling of the German writer Uwe Johnson’s lost decade on the Isle of Sheppey.  Johnson drank himself to death in bleak surrounds of the Sheerness Sea View Hotel in the 1984.

    But what is this affliction? It’s not laziness or distraction, nor the inability to concentrate on anything that doesn’t offer immediate gratification. Patrick Wright’s multi-layered opus is a densely packed seven hundred page micro-history of both Sheppey and Uwe’s self- exile, and is not remotely daunting. Likewise, Speak, Silence, Carole Angier’s detailed study of Sebald’s life and work comes in at over six hundred pages, and is not a page too long in my view.

    In interviews the highly-regarded contemporary writers Kevin Barry and Rob Doyle can be interesting, but the preoccupations they display in their fictions are those of young men and are of no interest to me at all at my stage in life.

    Now to be sure, I’m of the wrong demographic for Sally Rooney or Nicole Flattery, but I can’t hack the imagined worlds of the Colm Toibins or John Banvilles either – in form and content they’re just not my cup of tea. It is of course a question of taste, but I can’t abide the narrative armature of story-driven literary fiction with those wretched character arcs – as Shakespeare fully understood, people do not change.

    My inability to read literary fiction doesn’t bother me, and I don’t need my ideas of the world to be shaped. My view of the world is fully formed and doesn’t need to be textually generated or reinforced.

    But I am a reader, and always have been, even though I grew up in a non-reading household. Even when I was boy, I knew where to look for my reading material. I was a discriminating reader. As an eleven-year old I knew Edgar Allan Poe was good and H.P. Lovecraft was bad. I could see that, unlike Henry James, William Golding wrote in clear, straightforward prose to elucidate complex themes.

    As a young adult in the counter-culture era of the late 60s, I recognized that Mervyn Peake was a singular talent and a great stylist, and that Tolkien was a dull and pedestrian writer. Jean Cocteau, even in translation was great and Burroughs’ debut Junky/Junkie was a fine example of taut, economical writing that surpassed his later experimental fiction.

    Recently I was chatting with an old friend. He’s an exiled Corkonian living in Italy, and an erudite man of letters. We spoke about my aversion to fiction and he echoed my sentiments. Somehow our conversation turned to Flannery O’Connor. I’m an admirer of her short fiction but now find myself confused and a little wary of her after the revelations in 2014 of the racist views expressed in her correspondence.

    My friend had never read O’Connor. Could O’Connor be saved from herself? I don’t have the answer, but her fiction can stand alone. I told my friend how in the 1950s reviewers were constantly vexed by her characters’ lack of interiority. My friend lit up at this: “I like the sound of that! I can’t stand being told what characters think and feel. I just want a description of where they go and what they do.”  Simply and succinctly put.

    In The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor wrote that for some reason he could only guess at, “the novel is bound to be a process of identification between the reader and the character. One character at least in any novel must represent the reader in some aspect of his own conception of himself”.

    It is this process, embedded in the mechanics of fiction, of identification and absorption into a psychological world, that in time becomes for me recognizable and tedious. So maybe it is a case that non-fiction – and certain rare types of fiction that bypass identification in favour of evocation of a world and its details – doesn’t use itself up in the telling. It stays with us. And so, in the meantime and undoubtedly for the rest of my life, I will follow my instincts, knowing that non-fiction will more likely give me what I want.

    Feature Image: Mark Venner

  • Common Concerns: John Clare & Other Ghosts

    There’s a strangeness to singing in a language you don’t understand, akin, perhaps, to the sensation that comes with remembering, vividly, a person who has died. In both cases, you can almost touch the life recalled, even as the shadow glimpsed in that one word, “almost”, clouds your every sense.

    Whenever I hear a song, an eddy of radio-speak, a casual exchange, unfurling in Irish, I go quiet, caught in the webs of a faltering familiarity. Likewise, when I return to them, I find that the recollections I have of my grandparents are locked in a grammar of (often palpable) absences: I’ll not see their like again.

    By choosing Irish placenames as titles for a number of poems in my new collection, Phantom Gang, linking the elegies I had composed for my grandparents with the landscapes I associated with them in north Leitrim, I was trying to register, in outline, the forms of loss under which the poems had been written: the twin river-banks  – an unreachable language, an irretrievable time – between which my memories had flowed since their deaths.

    So in “Achadh Bhuachaill” (meaning, literally, ‘Boy’s Field’, and transliterated to ‘Aghavoghil’ in English), the townland’s emotional cartography begins to shift, as the poem slowly unearths a seldom mentioned incident from the local past, relayed to me by my granduncle: “The land here / dreams in silhouettes // our bodies learn to read”.

    The relationship between land (and its changes) with the memories that mark it, of course, is as old as poetry itself. It recurs as a shaping concern in the work of John Clare (1793-1864), the so-called ‘peasant poet’ of the late Romantic period. “Oh, words are poor receipts for what tie has stole away”, he wrote, remembering the open commons he had known in the Northamptonshire of his youth, one of many areas in rural England directly affected by the 1801 Inclosure Consolidation Act, converting communally tended landscapes into real estate. “There once were days, the woodman knows it well”, he said, “When shades e’en echoed with the singing thrush”:

    There once were lanes in nature’s freedom dropt,
    There once were paths that every valley wound –
    Inclosure came, and every path was stopt[.]

    This truncation, and the subsequent disappearance, of the much-cherished social and ecological terrain of his upbringing, can be sensed in the knotted, quickening language of Clare’s pastoral poems, often scintillating in their natural notations, even as they crackle under the weight of the vexed environmental histories they record. The communal fields and woods, the trilling heaven of the poet’s boyhood, seemed increasingly irrecoverable to Clare, having been carved up, indelibly, “[in] little parcels little minds to please”, leaving “men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease.”

    Phantom Gang attempts to pay tribute to this distant figure, a “loss-eyed wilder-man”, who was also, at different points in his life, a kind of “hierophant // of dirt-in-bloom / and revelry”. Tuning in to the fierce, burnished weathers of his work, the book simultaneously tries to sift through the swarming static of contemporary history to a new zone of clarity, where the spectres (of poverty, displacement, homelessness, environmental corrosion) that so ruled Clare’s world, two centuries ago, might be recognised afresh in our own – “our age / of wilting seas // and homesick, lock-out blues.”

    In all of this, among other things, I discovered that reading poetry is not so very different from the writing of it. We bring what we have – our small store of hopes and memories – to the threshold of another life, trusting in the possibility of recognition or discovery. The words on the page, I now believe, form a living monument to that possibility, creating a space where lost presences might be acknowledged, where the vitality and freedoms of an uprooted world can be sensed anew, pressing through the topsoil of everything left over, no matter how scarce. That, I think, is what the poem, “The Commons” (dedicated to Clare), reaches towards, near the collection’s close:

    To feel at all: an act
    of intimate dissent,

    as gentle-hearted heretics
    have ever felt and known.

    Is this, then, our one inheritance,
    the ache where voices grow?

    My poem’s a lifted echoing,
    as if they might continue.

    Feature Image: Lough Melvin, County Leitrim, Ireland.

  • Cassandra Voices Podcast: Loafing Hero

    In our latest podcast Ben Pantrey interviews former musician of the month Bartholomew Ryan in Lisbon. They discuss his new album ‘Jabuti’ composed while on retreat in Brazil, just prior to the pandemic, as well as the creative process and the importance of loafing.

    We previously published the lyrics to Ryan’s song ‘Iguatu‘.

    Ben also recites an important passage from Milan Kundera‘s 1995 novel Slowness which served as the original inspiration for Ryan’s musical project.

    Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence in a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows’. A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.

    Enjoy!

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  • Operation Mass Formation

    We need to sing again.
    We need to be Irish.
    We need to socialise.
    We need to be ourselves.

    So said Sarah, professional singer and mother from Ballina, County Tipperary, on the Late Late Show, only a few hours after Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin’s address to the nation and his surprise announcement that most of the Irish State’s Covid-19 restrictions were to be lifted with almost immediate effect.

    The Late Late Show, for the uninitiated, is one of the world’s longest-running talk shows, gracing Irish television screens, courtesy of state broadcaster RTE, every Friday evening since the 1960s.

    Sarah’s comments, coming just after she’d performed a rousing showband style rendition of Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, seemed to capture the official (i.e. state-sanctioned) mood of the nation and prompted host Ryan Tubridy to gush “That is good stuff! Congratulations Sarah!”

    Operation Transformation’s Sarah on the Late Late Show.

    So why was Sarah from Tipperary opening the Late Late Show on this particularly momentous occasion? Sarah, as it turns out, is one of the ‘leaders’ of this year’s iteration of RTE’s diet and fitness show Operation Transformation (or OT as it is known to cult members). A staple of Irish TV since 2008, OT has become, much like the Late Late Show itself, something of a national institution.

    Each year, the programme features five contestants. These are ordinary Irish people who want to lose weight, kick unhealthy habits and get fit. The show refers to these participants as ‘leaders’; the idea being that, through inspirational example, the contestants will ‘lead’ the diet-and-exercise-hesitant Irish public into the promised land of health and fitness.

    The leaders are assisted in their endeavours by a panel of four ‘experts’: a dietician, a personal trainer, a clinical psychologist and a GP, who, between them, design individually tailored diet and fitness plans for each leader. The leaders’ homes and fridges are then kitted out with webcams so that we, the audience, gain an intimate view of their struggles.

    Even better, every Wednesday evening we see how much progress our leaders have made – if any – or to enjoy the veritable bollocking they will receive from the panel of experts. We can also download the OT app  and follow the diet and fitness plans of whichever leader we choose to follow. There are national OT fitness event extravaganzas and ‘partnerships’ with most Irish supermarkets.

    2022 Operation Transformation Contestants.

    As I said, an institution. Supported by another institution: the Irish State. The Department of Health has spent €230,000 sponsoring Operation Transformation, and its logo is prominently displayed throughout the show.

    Sarah is also the first leader whose progress we get to see the following Wednesday. As OT host Kathryn Thomas remarks of Sarah’s performance on The Late Late Show, “You just captured that moment that everybody was feeling! It was a moment of celebration!”

    But while four of our leaders are feeling celebratory and enjoying their state-sanctioned return to freedom, things aren’t looking quite so  rosy for the fifth, salon-owner Kathleen, who, along with her farmer husband Tony, lives on a farm in Carrignavar, County Cork. Terrifyingly, Kathleen and Tony had both tested positive for covid the previous week.

    As Kathleen explains, “One of my main symptoms of covid is that I’ve been completely bored”, while Tony is more philosophical about their predicament, remarking that “Well, I’ve kind of been isolating for the past 40 years anyway.”

    Kathleen and Tony are regulars at their local cattle mart but, because of covid restrictions and lockdowns, they have had to make do with virtual visits on their tablets. This is not an entirely satisfactory alternative, however. As Kathleen notes to Tony of one animal they are considering buying, “She’s a much poorer looking cow on your screen than on mine.” The couple also lament that, in the age of virtual cattle-trading, “The human interaction isn’t there.”

    Cattle Mart.

    OT host Kathryn Thomas uses this as a cue to joke, “But at least one thing wasn’t in short supply in the house….” She’s referring to antigen tests. We are then treated to a montage of Kathleen and Tony shoving nylon-tipped plastic swabs up their nostrils while making squirming faces, all to an R&B soundtrack. This seems to be particularly traumatic for poor Tony, who needs to sit down and have his wife perform the procedure for him each time. And who can blame him?  After all, this is no man flu. This is Covid-19.

    Later, Kathleen has a video call with OT fitness expert Karl Henry, who wants to find out how she’s doing. “I feel great. I feel fine,” she says, “the only thing is the boredom of it all and the isolation of it all. The feeling is (as) if I nearly have leprosy for some reason!” Karl has a good chuckle at Kathleen’s analogy (even though she doesn’t seem to be joking) and assures her she is not the only one feeling this way, stating that, “What you’re going through, people around the county are going through. It’s a really normal thing!”

    Nevertheless, Karl and the other OT experts are taking no chances. When it’s Kathleen’s turn to have her weekly check-in, she has to do it remotely, despite having come out of her required isolation period. “Just to be extra cautious”, she is told.

    Remarking again that “This isolation from the outside world hasn’t sat with me very well”, Kathleen is once more reassured by the experts that her feelings of unease and boredom are nothing to be concerned about, with the show’s GP, Sumi Dunne, telling her “that flat effect…is just a reaction to the circumstances.”

    Kathleen and Tony looking at cows.

    This episode of Operation Transformation is a microcosm of what has been going on, regarding Covid-19, in the rest of the country and indeed the world as a whole: the constant and repetitious normalising of behaviour which only two years ago would have been considered at best neurotic and at worst deeply psychologically problematic.

    Remember when we used to joke about somebody having man flu? That curiously culturally acceptable form of sexism which, according to the Harvard Health Blog, describes “a constitutional character flaw of men who, when felled by a cold or flu, embellish the severity of their symptoms.”

    Nowadays, the whole world seems to be suffering from man flu. The only difference is that, with a case of Covid-19, you don’t even need any symptoms to embellish; all you need is a positive antigen or lateral flow test, items which have become as much a staple of our weekly supermarket trips as a sliced pan, two litres of milk and a six-pack of cheese and onion crisps.

    As Kathleen herself said, “I had absolutely none of the symptoms of covid, but at the same time I was aware that I had it because obviously I tested positive. So I was even watching my heart rate increasing, and saying ‘ok, I won’t go too far or even push my body at all’.”

    A man embellishing flu symptoms.

    There are several more occasions in the episode when Kathleen refers to the abnormality of the situation she finds herself in and how uncomfortable she feels being isolated from other people. Yet, every time her concerns are brushed off by the experts (including, as mentioned, a clinical psychologist and a doctor) who tell her that this is “normal” or that the majority of people in the country are also experiencing something very similar.

    When people like me (and by that I simply mean anyone who questions the status quo on covid) talk of the mainstream media, for the most part we are referring to the news media. But of course the flagrant bias and  propaganda doesn’t stop there. It has infiltrated all forms of media: it’s there in the soap operas we follow, the chat shows, televised sporting events, health and lifestyle programmes, children’s television, social media platforms, social media influencers, and so on ad nauseum.

    As others have pointed out, television programmes and social media do not simply provide entertainment, they also greatly influence our ideas about the world and provide a model for our attitudes and behaviour: certain individuals and their actions are presented approvingly and in a positive light, while others are presented negatively, with disapproval. Some behaviours and opinions are shown to be typical, normal and to be emulated, while others are shown to be strange, problematic and to be avoided. As such, TV shows and social media provide a powerful example of what is acceptable in a society and what is not. And far from simply reflecting reality, these forms of media are instrumental in the building and shaping of it.

    If you are somebody who has questioned the mainstream narrative about covid, you’ll no doubt be aware of Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet and his theory of mass formation. This compelling theory is a useful tool for analysing our current situation. If you are  unfamiliar with it, I recommend looking at this video in which Professor Desmet explains the idea himself.

    In a nutshell, mass formation describes the process whereby a large part of the population subconsciously disengages its rational and critical faculties in order to participate in a form of groupthink, the focus of which is usually one small point or issue. Mass formation is a phenomenon that typically occurs in the emergence of totalitarianism. It can occur spontaneously, as in Nazi Germany, or be intentionally created by the state, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Mass formation can only take place when four very specific conditions are met.

    These are as follows: a substantial number of people in the population have to feel socially isolated; a substantial number of people have to feel an essential lack of meaning in their lives; a substantial number of people have to experience what he calls “free-floating anxiety” (in other words, anxiety or stress which is not connected to a mental representation – feeling anxious but not knowing why) and finally, a large percentage of the population has to experience free-floating frustration and aggression.

    Professor Mattias Desmet.

    The four conditions were already in place, in Desmet’s opinion, when the pandemic was first announced by the WHO back in March 2020. According to one study published before the pandemic in The American Sociological Review, 25% of Americans reported they didn’t have a single close friend. A Gallup poll, which included participants from a number of industrialised countries, found that nearly 50% of those questioned stated they didn’t have a single meaningful relationship and that they only connected to other people through the internet or through technology. As Desmet asserts, “A connection through the internet doesn’t make you resonate in the same way with other people.”

    This isolation or lack of social bond leads into the second condition: a feeling that life is generally meaningless or senseless. In his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber states that 50% of people reported that their job was ’not at all meaningful’.” A Gallup poll from 2012, which included people from 142 countries, shows that 63% of respondents, in Desmet’s words, “admitted to being so disengaged at work that they were sleepwalking through their day, putting time but not passion into their work.”

    This combination of social isolation and the impression that life has no  meaning produces a kind of anxiety which is “free floating.” Unlike a phobia, which pinpoints a specific object of fear (for example spiders or confined spaces), free floating anxiety is not connected to anything tangible. Feeling anxiety without understanding its cause produces profound “psychological discontent.” Desmet notes that each year in Belgium 300 million doses of antidepressants are administered to a population of only 11 million people. This doesn’t even take into account antipsychotics, sleeping tablets or anxiety medication. Indeed, the World Health Organisation has reported that one in five people have an actual anxiety disorder.

    The fourth condition, what Desmet calls “free-floating frustration and aggression”, is a result of the isolation, lack of meaning and consequent anxiety. Furthemore, it is extremely problematic because people simply don’t understand what is causing them to feel aggression or frustration.

    When these four conditions are in place, all that is needed for mass formation to occur is for the mainstream media to produce a narrative which highlights “an object of anxiety” (in this case, a virus) and to simultaneously provide a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety (lockdowns, masks, vaccination, etc.).

    For Desmet, identifying the object of anxiety and participating in a strategy to deal with it gives people both a sense of control and, perhaps more significantly, a sense of connection. And it is this feeling of strong solidarity and connection which enables, “an extraordinary willingness…to participate in the strategy…no matter how absurd the measures or the narrative becomes.”

    We now live in a world of absurd contradictions: governments and media assert repeatedly that Covid-19 vaccines are effective, yet many more people have contracted and spread the virus since getting the jab than before the vaccine rollout. We were told that masks and social distancing would curb the spread of Covid-19 but have never been offered unequivocal evidence to that effect. And, of course, the biggest fraud of all: the idea of asymptomatic spread. It is now a commonly held belief that a perfectly healthy individual who feels well and has no symptoms of any illness is a danger to others. Consequently, they must be cordoned off and isolated from the rest of society in order to be approved of or accepted by that same society.

    For me, one of the most fascinating elements of Desmet’s theory is how he describes the nature of the social bond that emerges during mass formation. As he says, “this is never a social bond between individuals. It is always a social bond between an individual and the collective.” Furthermore, the longer the mass formation continues, the more “a radically paranoid atmosphere” is established which “destroys the connection between individuals.”

    So when Kathleen from Operation Transformation talks about being bored and missing social contact with other people, she is talking about the personal relationships she has with other individuals, whether that be family, friends, colleagues or acquaintances. However, a positive antigen test demands that she must sacrifice these personal connections in order to maintain and participate in the much larger (and faceless) relationship she now has with society as a whole. And the thing that most defines that relationship is to virtue signal, in the most public way possible, that you are keeping others safe by adhering to government guidelines, no matter how absurd or illogical those guidelines may be.

    Imagine if, only two years ago, someone you knew told you they had just got a flu shot in order to protect, not just themselves, but you and everyone else from influenza. Or that they were spending 50 to 60 euro a week to test themselves and their family on a daily basis for colds or flu, despite feeling perfectly healthy. Or that, if one of those tests gave a positive result, they would not go into work for 5-10 days and isolate themselves in their home, completely avoiding contact with the outside world. You would have thought your hypochondriac friend had finally lost the plot, and maybe even suggested they get some psychiatric help for that Howard Hughes-style obsessive compulsive disorder.

    Antigen testing.

    In fact, Desmet suggests that many of the Covid-19 measures put in place by governments around the world “are without pragmatic meaning” and function in a ritualistic way, demanding “a sacrifice from the individual; a sacrifice through which the individual shows that the collective is more important” than his or her own interests. Moreover, “people, without knowing it, will continue to buy into the narrative just because, as a social being, there is nothing more painful than to be profoundly and thoroughly socially isolated.”

    And what would the point of a sacrifice be if it were not acknowledged or rewarded in some way? Kathleen’s isolation because of a positive antigen test result is applauded by the experts on the show. Her reward is the public acknowledgment of that sacrifice: she has willingly done everything within her power to keep others safe, despite having absolutely no symptoms of any illness.

    Operation Transformation has a huge following in Ireland and it is very clear from watching only a few episodes that one of its main attractions is the sense of belonging and acceptance that both participants and the audience gain from taking part in or following the show. One woman, who planned to get involved in the Operation Transformation 5k run in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, went as far as to remark, “I don’t feel like Mrs Nobody anymore, and I’d encourage anybody not to feel like that.”

    Unsurprisingly, considering it is sponsored by the Department of Health and broadcast on RTE, there is an implicit acceptance by Operation Transformation that the State’s removal of our fundamental rights was absolutely necessary, that in doing so the State kept us all safe, and that the reestablishment of some of these rights is something for which we should be grateful. Another talking head on the show, Frank Greally of Athletics Ireland, says, of the recent OT 5k (the first OT event of this nature in nearly two years), that “when you join in something (like this) and participate, it’s an outpouring of gratitude” and that “we’re back on freedom road again!”

    So what does being “back on freedom road again” look like in the weeks since Michael Martin’s surprise announcement? When you use public transport or go into a supermarket, most people are still wearing a mask. Many school children continue to be masked up, sitting in freezing classrooms with open windows in the middle of winter. Mentally handicapped adults are still wearing facemasks in their day centres. The elderly in care homes, despite being triple-jabbed, can be locked down at a moment’s notice as soon as any resident or member of staff tests positive for covid. Tens of thousands of people just like Kathleen continue to test themselves on a daily basis.

    More worryingly, the State has doubled down on its campaign to vaccinate children despite acknowledged dangers. Other parents, just like this man, will suffer the horror of their child having a heart attack, and then be told by so-called medical experts that it had nothing to do with the experimental gene therapy that was administered shortly beforehand. Furthermore, unconstitutional and draconian legislation that was put in place back in March 2020 remains on the statute book. Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, could decide (using statutory instruments that do not require legislative oversight) to reinstate all restrictions, or add a few more, just as quickly as he removed them.

    In recent weeks, there’s also been a state and media pivot. The object of anxiety has shifted with breathtaking rapidity from Covid-19 to war in the Ukraine. And the strategy to deal with this new anxiety is to virtue signal your unconditional support for Ukraine and unquestioningly condemn everything Russian.

    The shift in narrative has been seamless. Just as the world’s media, in lockstep, uncritically presented Covid-19 as a simple morality tale, they now do the same with the Ukraine crisis. And the public appears, once more, to be lapping it up.

    The yellow and blue of Covid-19 public health advertising has given way to the yellow and blue of Ukraine’s national colours. Significant buildings in most European cities are now lit up yellow and blue, and you see the Ukrainian flag everywhere. In Dublin, a member of the public, to much applause, deliberately drove his lorry through the gate of the Russian embassy; soon afterwards, local councillors announced their intention to change the name of the street in which the embassy is located from Orwell Road to Free Ukraine Road.

    Protestors outside the Russian embassy in Dubln.

    At the centre of this new object of anxiety is evil incarnate Vladimir Putin and his dastardly plan to destroy Ukraine, and democracy more generally. In less than a week the number of Irish households offering accommodation to Ukrainian refugees has leapt from 5,000 to 14,500, with the State pledging that Ireland will offer sanctuary to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing their country. That’s nearly a 2% increase in population for a country already facing a housing crisis and spiralling homelessness.

    But if you dare question any of this, then just like those that dared to question the covid narrative, you will be roundly condemned and ridiculed. Any form of critical thinking will have you branded, once again, as some kind of far-right, bigoted, conspiracy nutjob.

    All of Ukraine’s well-documented human rights abuses in the Donbas, and the distubing presence of neo-Nazi militia groups in that country’s armed forces, have not just been forgiven, but have, in fact, been whitewashed by the new media narrative. And despite his severely limited political experience, former comedian and current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been hailed as the new Churchill.

    Operation Transformation has become Operation Mass Formation, and this most recent manipulation of public opinion over the Ukraine crisis shows that we are still in the thick of a very problematic and unyielding kind of groupthink.

    So yes, Sarah from Operation Transformation, it may well be the case that Irish people need to sing and dance again, socialise and be themselves, but it was never the business or prerogative of the State to tell us that we couldn’t, and no matter what nonsense the government has come out with about ‘covid bonuses’ and ‘dividends’ for our obedience, it is certainly not their business to tell us that we can now.

    Until all the legislation that underpins the mandates is repealed, and until we make sure that such measures can never be inflicted on the population again, we are deluding ourselves if we think we are free. The current mono-narrative being presented to the public about war in Ukraine should be a red flag to us all that we no longer live in functioning democracies.

  • The Importance of Public Debate

    At a recent debate organised by the English-Speaking Union (ESU) at its HQ, Dartmouth House in London, we considered whether the British government’s response to Covid placed too great a priority on security rather than liberty. Naturally I took the liberty side of the argument.

    I expressed the fear that such a public forum as the ESU had convened could represent an interregnum, or lull in the storm, but hope springs eternal.

    A central hallmark of a democracy is freedom of speech. In terms of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, Anthony Lewis argued free speech should act as a search engine for the truth. Ronald Dworkin argued that free speech is a condition for legitimate government, and a counterweight to hysteria and unreason. Stephen Sedley, an eminent English judge, called it the lifeblood of a democracy. Freedom of speech also opens government and private enterprise to intense scrutiny. Above all, it encourages diversity and tolerance.

    Christopher Hitchens.

    Right to Ridicule

    It is not for the faint of heart. Christopher Hitchens remarked that freedom to speak inoffensively is meaningless, while Dworkin insisted on a right to ridicule.

    The overarching argument for speech rights was expressed beautifully in extremis by Hitchens when he said, ‘if you disagree with me that is your prerogative, so stand in line while I, rhetorically, kick your ass.’

    Conflict is resolved best through argument with the truth sacrosanct, ideally via open-ended public debate.

    This should not merely be rhetoric, but include arguments of substance. And the ESU provides, or can provide, that forum. Perhaps uniquely so. Indeed, it was heartening to encounter a multi-generational debate that included insightful youthful interventions.

    In retrospect, Hitchens represents the tail end of a tradition beginning with his hero Thomas Paine, mediated through his other great hero George Orwell, and culminating in him through a rich tapestry of public intellectuals and journalists, who fundamentally believed the pen to be mightier than the sword: that speech and words matter.

    Alas today speech has degenerated in the popular press into public titillation and gossip. It is also noticeable that the great traditions of investigative journalism, evident during the golden era of the Washington Post under Katherine Graham and The Times under Harold Evans, is in serious decline. Today most investigative journalism is a sham. The intellectual culture of the press has been degraded beyond belief.

    Social media is now a form of speech-driven pornography, where legitimate and illegitimate expressions of speech are proving impossible to disentangle. Character assassination and casual defamation have become the order of the day. The Internet may be a force of liberation in some respects, but also permits public display of ever more bizarre and outlandish commentaries. Mark Zuckerberg has unleashed a Promethean conflagration that remains untamed.

    Today’s emphasis on brevity and soundbites in politics conceals how the truth often requires explanation, as it is often nuanced.

    Aneurin Bevan talking to a patient at Park Hospital, Manchester, the day the NHS came into being in 1948.

    Like paying a visit to Woolworths…

    Aneurin Bevan, as good an orator as Churchill, once remarked that listening to a speech from Labour leader Clement Atlee was like paying a visit to Woolworths: ‘everything was in its place, but nothing was above the value of sixpence.’ To be convincing speech should have the necessary brio to rouse an audience.

    From Jeremy Bentham’s Speech Acts, Jürgen Habermas, develops the crucial idea of Ideal Speech or Communicative Action. This is an idea that speech should be formal, and not tainted by an unthinking recourse to ideology. He also suggests that such dialogue in the tradition of the Enlightenment salon will provide technical outcomes that are also morally purposeful.

    In Communicative Action he wrote: ‘Speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals based on a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit worthy.’

    It succeeds:

    insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behaviour. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilise the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.

    Although not all speech should have to be taken seriously, it is important that a forum such as Dartmouth House is maintained for popular shibboleths to be dismantled in public debate.

    George Orwell.

    Doublespeak

    So, propaganda should not be taken seriously, nor modes of advertising, without close and detailed inspection. The opinions of many putative experts fall under the same category. Certainly, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

    The use of language – however cloaked in notional expertise – to undermine freedoms is a very worrying development. The employment by officialdom of complex legal discourse and manipulation of language may represent the onset of what George Orwell referred to as ‘doublespeak’. This can be exposed in civilised public debate in a neutral forum.

    A certain degree of puff and blow will always be found among business-people. Advertising lubricates the wheels of commerce, but when almost non-existent standards permit multinational corporate entities, including the pharmaceutical sector, to fabricate, falsify and frankly lie, thus precipitating financial and environmental collapse, this may represent a return to the dark ages.

    Sadly, mainstream political debate has disintegrated. Notably, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton engaged in a travesty of a public debate before the US Presidential election of 2016. It was more like a staged reality TV show. Its nearest equivalent was the format of a farcical game show, such as the Jerry Springer Show.

    Thus politics has become part of the entertainment industry. Despite his Classical education, Boris Johnson invokes Peppa Pig before business leaders.

    So, an unconditional respect for freedom of speech should be offset by an understanding that certain speech does not warrant protection. Nonsense is best resolved by forensic debate – cutting through crap in common parlance.

    Surveillance Capitalism

    The criminalisation of unpopular opinion is a worrying feature of our times, and it is ‘subversives’ such as Julian Assange – along with those who dared to hold a referendum in Catalonia – that are accused, prosecuted, and convicted of treason. It is these dissidents that need protection.

    Under the Facebook and Google dispensation people become products to be profiled and mined, a point made brilliantly in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

    Moreover, political correctness has also led to the intensification of extremism. I would argue that this includes attempts by the transgender lobby to ban esteemed academics from the airwaves or campuses. ‘No platforming’ undermines public debate, as do unsubstantiated complaints to academic authorities that lead to the removal of a radical professor.

    So, when in Georgetown University certain radical professors indicated they were far from unhappy at the death of the arch conservative Judge Scalia, their conservative colleagues sought their removal on the basis that the ‘snowflake’ generation of easily upset students would be offended at the disrespect.

    We must maintain a right to protest, engage in civil disobedience and crucially – in an increasingly controlled and technocratic age – the right to offer truth-bearing, fearless and independent criticism.

    KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s.

    The Limits of Freedom of Expression

    Speech has its outer limits, where there is a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action. This tension is explored in Snyder v Phelps, where a fundamentalist Christian group demonstrated outside a gay serviceman’s funeral.

    Upholding speech rights, the Court concluded that:

    Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.

    Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

    Moreover, in Brandenburg v Ohio 359 U.S 44, the Court went so far as to protect even racial abuse at a Ku Klux Klan ‘rally’ held at a farm in Hamilton County.

    One film showed twelve hooded figures, some of whom carried firearms. They were gathered around a large wooden cross, which they burned. No one was present other than the participants and the newsmen who made the film. Most of the words uttered during the scene were incomprehensible when the film was projected, but scattered phrases could be understood that were derogatory of African-Americans and, in one instance of Jews.

    The Supreme Court concluded that this was speech protected under the First Amendment on the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation, except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

    In contrast, the ECHR will not protect either racist speech or Holocaust denial. And even the ESU may feel the Americans went too far.

    But the detailed US decisions show how far the US courts are prepared to travel to protect speech. It is an important point that it is the speech we most dislike and most disagree with that needs the most protection.

    Village stocks in Bramhall, England c. 1900.

    Enemies of the People

    Whistle-blower legislation protects those who want to expose official corruption and protects speech. However, as I have found, the spectre of criminal prosecution under Official Secret’s legislation is always a suspensive and possible threat. Anyone blowing the whistle must evaluate the risk of prosecution, including the almost inevitable consequence of job loss and ostracism.

    Henrik Ibsen’s Enemies of the People – perhaps uniquely in his oeuvre – was overtly political. The premise is simple: a prominent and well-connected local engineer whose brother is the town mayor is asked to conduct a survey of the waters of the town. The town in question has become famous as a spa resort attracting a great deal of tourism, but when he tests the waters, he finds that they are polluted and informs the town and indeed his brother.

    It is the reaction to this that is interesting. Rather than lauding him and complimenting him for his finely attuned sense of ethics and correct analysis, they turn on him with ever-increasing ferocity. A storm of hatred is unleashed.

    He will destroy the local economy. Their livelihoods will be affected. The industry of the town will be negated. He is shunned, ostracised, victimised. His family is torn apart, and he becomes an ‘Enemy of the People’. The mob descend in all their unfettered glory. Sound familiar?

    Thus, we must protect freedom of speech as it vitalises a democracy, but we must also recognise the rules of civic discourse.

    Yet I fear that a great tradition of oracy, public communication, rationalist discourse and generalist interest is in decline: usurped by the purveyors of false information, false speech acts and blandishments.

    If the English-Speaking Union can revitalise the young with a passion for genuine public communication, it will be performing a great service, training a new generation of professionals in the essential and transferable skills of advocacy, public communication and, above all, respect for the truth.

    Feature Image: Presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon for the 1960 election in the United States.

    The English-Speaking Union (ESU) is an international charity and membership organisation underpinned by Royal Charter working to give all young people – regardless of background – the speaking and listening skills and the cross-cultural understanding to enable them to thrive.  

    Our programmes are underpinned by over 100 years’ expertise in the field of debate and public speaking delivery, policy and research. 

    Founded in 1918 by the author and journalist Sir Evelyn Wrench, the ESU brings together and empowers people of all cultures and nationalities by building confidence and shaping communication skills, so that individuals can realise their full potential.  In our 36 branches in England and Wales and 54 international branches, the ESU carries out a variety of activities such as: competitions, debating, public speaking and student exchange programmes, teacher training, classroom outreach, research and scholarships. All of these encourage the effective use of the English language around the world.

    To find out more about our work, please go to: https://www.esu.org/ and so consider joining the ESU: https://www.esu.org/support-our-work/become-a-member/.  Please contact Matthew Christmas, Head of Engagement, if you would like to know more or to volunteer with us: matthew.christmas@esu.org.

    Dartmouth House, in the heart of Mayfair, is our International Headquarters and, as Covid recedes, we are delighted to be re-starting our regular public debates where we encourage civil discussion and informed debate where all ages can get involved. 

    The next Dartmouth House Debate is on Monday 09 May 2022 at 1830 hrs to debate the motion that “This House believes that cryptocurrency and NFTs are a hyped-up fad.” 

    We hope that will want to find out more and get involved with the ESU.

  • What is Freedom?

    Last week, the Russia-Ukraine-NATO tensions reached a crescendo when Russia decided to recognize both Luhansk and Donetsk as independent states. Shortly after that, Putin proceeded to launch a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine.

    The day the news broke I felt great sadness.

    You see, although I’ve never been to either Russia or Ukraine, I have met a great deal of Ukrainians and Russians on my travels and I have a great many friends in that region of the world. Through them, I have been able to learn about both countries’ culture, language, history and incredible natural beauty. It is that personal connection I have to the people that brought me great pain when learning of Russia’s invasion.

    What we often forget is that no matter what geopolitical games are being played at the highest levels, it is the innocent civilians on the ground who are most affected by war. People’s lives are disrupted, families are torn apart and, yes, people die. Whether “enemies”, “allies”, civilians or military personnel, people die. That is the nature of war.

    As I sat down at my desk, struggling to concentrate on the work in front of me, I began to think of my friends in Ukraine who have endured so much over the last few years. I began to think of the young men, guns and ammunition in hand, ready to risk their lives for their country, ready to die at the request of their leaders. And I began to ponder the true significance of this war and how it relates to the overarching globalist agenda.

    This led me to contemplate the nature of freedom and what it means to be free.

    Most people would agree that there is another war being waged on virtually all humanity and that is the war on freedom. The problem is that you could ask ten different people to define “freedom” and receive ten different answers.

    The yogi would say that freedom is not something to be attained, rather, it is our natural state. Freedom, for the yogi, is the very nature of the Self, something that can never be taken away. The problem is that it’s veiled by ignorance. For the yogi, spiritual practice is a way to remove such ignorance, and shatter the illusion that we are not free.

    The monotheist would disagree with the yogi, claiming that freedom comes when evil has been defeated, and that siding with God is the first step to nullifying such evil. This dualistic position sees “evil” as originating from some greater power. Therefore, devotion to God is the only path to complete freedom.

    At this point, the Buddhist might decide to chime in, arguing that, in fact, there is no independent self and therefore there is nothing that can attain “freedom”, and no “god” that can grant it. Rather, he might say, we should focus our efforts on removing suffering and aligning our actions and thoughts with the teachings of the Noble Eightfold Path (the Buddha himself taught that we should identify the nutriments that feed our suffering and make an effort to remove them).

    The lawyer might define freedom as the absence of legal and political restraints; he may see freedom as a right that enables one to be exempt from the arbitrary exercise of authority in the performance of certain actions.

    The philosopher, on the other hand, might see freedom as being synonymous with free will – the ability to make spontaneous choices that are not predetermined or fixed by nature in some way. And he may question whether such a thing even exists at all.

    Do you see the problem?

    Fighting for freedom is difficult when everyone has a different take on what freedom is and what it means for the individual.

    So how should we go about answering the question “What is freedom?”

    It seems to me that when tackling such a philosophical question, we must start by defining what we are talking about. When we speak of being free, are we talking about being free from some unpleasant reality or some inconvenient truth? Or are we talking about total and utter freedom?

    Most of us want to be free from pain, free from unhappy experiences and negative emotions while still clinging to our ideologies, beliefs and identities. But therein lies a problem, for, “freedom” implies the absence of any defining boundaries, including those created by our own psychological sentiments.

    Therefore, we can’t probe the nature of freedom without asking the fundamental question: do we really want to be free? It would appear that being free from something is different to being completely free.

    Freedom, by its very definition, requires no ideology, revelation, stimulus or special knowledge. Perhaps we could describe freedom as an inalienable right, bestowed unto each of us by virtue of being born into this world. Thought about in this way, freedom becomes our source of power.

    Striving to be free from something is a reaction to an unpleasant situation, such as an authoritarian leader, a debilitating illness, a toxic relationship or a war. Dare I say, this desire is built into us. It’s part of our evolutionary makeup, it’s a survival mechanism. Being free from negative influences brings temporary relief, which is good in itself, but it’s not freedom.

    Therefore freedom cannot come from reacting to your environment. That is instinct, that is self-preservation, even desperation. Freedom, it stands to reason, must come from action that is entirely self-initiatory, without deliberation or cerebration.

    Krishnamurti in the early 1920s.

    In a previous essay, I wrote about the conversations between philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and quantum theorist David Bohm, two men who thought an awful lot about the concept of freedom. I will lean on their insights once again here to help us probe deeper into the nature of freedom and how it relates to the mind. Here is a short extract from one of their many enlightening conversations (emphasis added)[1]:

    K: I have been watching for many years people attempting to become free from certain things. This is the root of it, you understand? This psychological accumulation which becomes psychological knowledge. And so it divides, and all kinds of things happen around it and within it. And yet the mind refuses to let go.

    DB: Yes.

    K: Why? Is that because there is safety or security in it?

    DB: That is part of it, but I think in some way that knowledge has taken on the significance of the absolute, instead of being relative.

    K: I understand all that, but you are not answering my question. I am an ordinary man, I realize all this, and the limited significance of knowledge at different levels, but deeper down inside one, this accumulated knowledge is very destructive.

    DB: The knowledge deceives the mind, so that the person is not normally aware that it is destructive. Once this process gets started, the mind is not in a state where it is able to look at it because it is avoiding the question. There is a tremendous defensive mechanism or escape from looking at the whole issue.

    K: Why?

    DB: Because it seems that something extremely precious might be at stake.

    K: One is strangely intelligent, capable or skilled in other directions but here, where the root is of all this trouble, why don’t we comprehend what is happening? What prevents the mind from doing this?

    DB: Once importance has been given to knowledge, there is a mechanical process that resists intelligence.

    At the beginning of their exchange, Krishnamurti makes the observation that knowledge itself can block us from attaining freedom (he goes so far as to call it “destructive”). Why? Because it distracts, it fragments, it fractures.

    Knowledge, which is nothing more than information, can influence our thinking and manipulate our actions. That is the entire premise of psychological warfare.

    Bohm’s next statement is supremely important, “I think that knowledge has taken on the significance of the absolute instead of being relative”. Bohm notes that knowledge is given too much stake in modern society, an incredible statement for a physicist to make. But he is right, knowledge is seen as a vehicle for greater and greater achievement. Knowledge fuels technology, progress, and material gain.

    Looking deeply at our present world, it’s clear that we do not live in a society that is conducive to freedom. Knowledge, which is binding, is put above freedom. Knowledge is “sold” to us as a way of getting a good job, progressing up the corporate ladder, earning a higher salary and effecting lasting change in the world.

    But knowledge does not bring freedom because knowledge can be controlled, twisted, contrived and manipulated.

    Krishnamurti, too, was critical of this quest for knowledge and condemned competitive education systems for engendering fear. He also noted that knowledge was necessary for accumulating memory, which forms the basis for thought.

    While Krishnamurti recognized the necessity of thought (and therefore knowledge) at certain levels, he was very clear that when thought begins to project itself psychologically as the future or the past, this creates fear which in turn dulls the mind, leading to inaction.

    And as we discovered, attaining freedom requires action (even the Yogi would somewhat agree with us on this point, as he would remind us that spiritual practice is necessary for lifting the veil of ignorance).

    Krishnamurti then asks Bohm why people cannot see the tremendous destructive potential of knowledge. According to Bohm, the answer is simple: because knowledge deceives.

    Again, think about psychological warfare, think about how knowledge causes people to do things that undermine their own physical and mental health. Think about how knowledge can compel people to follow bloodthirsty tyrants, how it can compel people to kill their neighbouring brothers and sisters.

    Bohm goes on to state that within the mind is a strong defensive mechanism, which often leads one to neglect the potentially destructive nature of one’s accumulated beliefs. Bohm’s insights ring true, for, as we have seen, all throughout history people have been willing to sacrifice everything in defence of their chosen ideology. The nature of the mind is such that it always wants to be right.

    Perhaps this defensive mechanism is driven by fear – the same fear that causes people to deny unwanted realities (or brand them as “conspiracy theories”).

    When Krishnamurti asks Bohm why this is, he responds, “Because it seems that something extremely precious might be at stake”. Perhaps it is this seemingly “extremely precious” thing that becomes a shackle, preventing one from being completely and utterly free. And perhaps this seemingly “extremely precious” thing is our conditioning, our programming, our political allegiances, our self-identity.

    Krishnamurti then asks why, as human beings, we can be so skilled and capable in so many areas and yet hopelessly clueless when it comes to discerning the destructive potential of our own psychological accumulations.

    Bohm’s answer is thought-provoking. He says the importance we give to knowledge initiates a mechanical process that resists intelligence. Mechanical processes are machine-like, devoid of emotion, devoid of deep insight and most importantly, reactionary.

    But it’s Bohm’s use of the word “intelligence” here that is most interesting. After all, Bohm always chose his words extremely carefully. He was not one to use a word without being absolutely clear about its meaning.

    As it turns out, the origin of the word ‘intelligence’ is the Latin ‘intelligere’ which means ‘to read between’. In other words, intelligence refers to one’s strength of discernment, one’s ability to “read between the lines”.

    Is it the cultivation of intelligence that leads to freedom? Perhaps.

    If we take that to be so, then it stands to reason that freedom is a state of mind – one free from the boundaries of belief, ideology and fear.k

    Freedom is the ability to doubt and question everything without any form of dependence, conformity, authority or tradition.

    Feature Image: Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Lieutenant D.H. Lackey on February 22, 1956, when she was arrested again, along with 73 other people, after a grand jury indicted 113 African Americans for organizing the Montgomery bus boycott.

    References

    [1] Jiddu Krishnamurti & David Bohm. The Ending of Time. Chapter 11: “The Ending of Psychological Knowledge”

  • On the Nature of Evil

    I met Vladimir Putin once. 

    Or, at least, I was in the same room as him, no more than thirty or forty  feet away, for several hours. Not much further than Macron recently in Moscow.

    In August and September 2000, the last time Ireland was lobbying for a seat at the UN Security Council, I was an intern of the Irish diplomatic corps at the United Nations in New York.

    My job was to record the speeches of the Heads of State. I was present for the speeches of the heads of state and government at the Security Council and General Assembly, including Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Fidel Castro.

    I felt, even then, that Putin’s energy was very dark – a psychopath perhaps, devoid of empathy.

    There is no doubt in my mind that this war is morally unjustifiable and wrong, despite the questionable wisdom of expansionist Western foreign policy (from a Russian perspective).

    At the same UN summit in 2000, Tony Blair gave the most incredible speech. I was taken in, hook, line and sinker, by his incredible rhetoric and passion. His forked tongue only became apparent later. How could we be so manipulated?

    A false representative of the light you could say. That which appears to be of the light, but is deceiving.

    Whether by intent, or design, is another question, but nonetheless he is a man with the blood of many on his hands. Of course, he can still argue that the war in Iraq was justified.

    That’s what they alway say, these power-hungry men, as the blood of innocents flows. For the victors, that is how history is written.

    Putin and his long-time confidant Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

    Evil in the World

    There is no doubt in my mind that evil exists. The light exists, the dark exists, and the false light exists. The false light is that which masquerades and deceives: a complex Luciferian archetype.

    We like to believe that we are on the side of good, and the ‘other’ side is evil. The truth is much more complex, and permeable. In a world where we like to define things as black or white, there are many shades of grey.

    Good people can do unspeakable acts of evil, while even evil acts can have positive consequences.

    Anger is sometimes a necessary and appropriate emotion when our boundaries are violated, on a personal or national level. Sometimes, in the face of unprovoked aggression, the only option is to fight back.

    When we are feeling strong emotions, however, we are open to manipulation. Any time I feel a strong emotion of anger or fear due to a situation in my life or through what I see in the media – as I am feeling now – I ask myself, am I being manipulated? If so, by who, and for what end?

    Who will benefit, if due to my anger and dismay at the brutal and morally wrong treatment of Ukrainian civilians, I somehow begin to fear or hate Russia or Russians?

    What if I decide, in my anger, to fan the flames of hatred, anger, and war, rather than douse them? Are we to support the spread of this conflict, rather than hope for peace?

    If there is one thing I have learnt over many years of diving deep into the metaphysics of light and dark it is that there is much that we are unaware of. We are all pawns in a greater game than we are aware of, you could say.

    If it turns out that the game is rigged, and no matter which side seems to come out on top, the house always wins, then the only option is to stop playing the game.

    Hitler’s prophecy speech of 30 January 1939.

    What is the Influence of Evil?

    The genius of evil is that it influences us through our deepest fears and weaknesses. If, for example, your deepest fear is failure, being attacked, overwhelmed or destroyed. Perhaps this is the result of an unsafe and traumatic childhood.

    This could manifest as paranoia, fear, or deepest shame at the loss of personal or national prestige, as is perhaps the case with a ‘strongman’ such as Putin. This is perceived as a threat to your very existence.

    When some external event triggers this terrible internal fear, the very personal and overwhelming nature of this trigger is how evil influences a person. Evil finds our unconscious hidden weaknesses, and exploits them ruthlessly.

    How do we recognise the influence of evil on ourselves? By hating another person, race, or nation, we are acting under the influence of evil.

    This is the genius of evil: it realizes our deepest fears through the prism of our distorted perceptions. It preys on our weaknesses, separates us, divides us, makes us hate instead of love.

    It is rare indeed, for someone to wake up in the morning saying “today I choose to be evil”. There are also those who can be described as pure evil – consciously evil – in the sense of acting with intentional malice, but these people are rare.

    For the most part, evil slides in unseen, unconsciously, through our psychic blind spots. What lengths would you go to, to avoid your deepest fears? To avoid a perceived existential threat to you, your family or nation? This is how ‘normal’ people do the most terrible things. Evil locates our deepest fear and weaknesses, plays on them, magnifies and exploits them.

    Like a computer virus exploiting a line of faulty code, evil exploits the faulty code of the human race. Shame, fear, anger, and trauma are the gateways into the body, poisons, faulty code, through which evil may stem, if allowed.  These are known as the three kleshas or poisons of Mahayana Buddhism: ignorance, attachment and aversion, from which evil arises.

    Projection of the Shadow

    The great psychiatrist Carl Jung elaborated on the projection of the shadow being the greatest moral threat of our age.

    A threat to the very future of humanity, and one the majority of people are utterly unaware of.

    We psychologically project that which is disowned, unbearable and unconscious in ourselves, onto the other, thereby ridding ourselves of the need to make conscious decisions, take responsibility for our actions and integrate our experiences.

    Thus Jung writes in Archaic Man that ‘Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena… Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.’

    He adds in Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934:

    Modern people … are ignorant of what they really are. We have simply forgotten what a human being really is, so we have men like Nietzsche and Freud and Adler, who tell us what we are, quite mercilessly.  We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are.

    If we do not acknowledge and own our shadow, we project our inner darkness onto the unfortunate recipients of our projections, as human beings have been doing for millennia of wars and cycles of destruction.

    Ballads of bravery (1877) part of Arthurian mytholog by Lorenz Frølich.

    Mythology and Psychology

    Invariably, humans fall pretty to some great mythology, whether it is nationalism, tribalism or religious belief, which assures them that their cause is just.

    We are not far removed from the Crusaders in this regard, who believed they were saving Jerusalem from heathens – in the twenty-first century as much as in the twelfth.

    The psychological projection of the shadow is how mostly men are capable of inflicting barbarous acts of evil onto the ‘other’, who has generally already been thoroughly dehumanised and demonised.

    Recently, a former officer of the US Navy Seals Special forces, one of the men who led the hunt for Bin Laden, told me how easy an operation this was to undertake.

    He said that one of his main responsibilities in Afghanistan and Iraq was to keep his men in line, reminding them of the humanity of the enemy. In a warzone, how easy it must be to forget.

    In his book on evil The Lucifer Effect, the psychologist Phillip Zimbardo, who also designed the Stanford Prison experiment, wrote:

    I don’t believe anybody’s inherently evil. I believe we’re inherently good. And until they get put in a bad barrel. And there are a lot of bad barrels. A lot of jobs that we take encourage us to cheat, to lie…. If you’re a prison guard, afraid that prisoners are going to attack you and you have to create a false illusion that you’re domineering, you’re dominating them, you’ll shoot to kill then that’s the image. I believe in the goodness of human nature. And it’s being put into situations that corrupts that.

    Zimbardo defines evil as exercising power to intentionally harm (psychologically), hurt (physically), destroy, or commit crimes against humanity.

    From his psychological analysis of the US soldiers at Abu Ghraib who committed atrocities on the Iraqi POWs, Zimbardo shows that evil is situational.

    Like it or not, we all have the potential to be a Nazi prison camp guard in us, given the right situation and dehumanisation of the enemy.

    The Russian people have perhaps a greater understanding of this than most, given their brutal history and capacity for resilience and suffering. As one of their greatest novelists, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, put it: ‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’

    Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches.

    The Red Peril 2.0

    How easy it is for us in the West to demonize the Russian threat, the hapless Slavic soldier from the steppes, conscripted as they have been for centuries to die as cannon fodder in a war they did not want.

    This appears to be a reawakened Communist threat. Indeed, the idea of invading hordes from the east is a deep fear ingrained in the West, since the time of Genghis Khan and beyond.

    In recent times it has been the threat of militiant Islam, the Muslim horde overrunning Europe, but our collective Western shadow is now projected elsewhere.

    In some bizarre, surreal joke of history, we are apparently witnessing Chechen fighters, suffering from severe historical amnesia, from a land so terribly brutalized by Putin, take part in the invasion of Ukraine.

    Likewise, and in a perfect mirror of a paranoid Putin – a dinosaur whose thinking is conditioned by bipolar geopolitics of the Cold War and Great Game of the nineteenth century – the West with its expansionist foreign policy represents a threat to the very survival of his beloved Russia.

    Apparently, this existential threat is to be countered at the cost of total war.

    Ukraine and the West believes it is protecting itself from the threat of Russia, as has proved to be the case.

    Putin and his acolytes believe they are protecting Russia from military encirclement as a result of the eastward expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War. These have become two disastrous self-fulfilling prophecies. Thus both perspectives have turned out to be valid on their own terms.

    It’s history repeating itself, even so far as Putin making the same strategic mistakes as Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1942 in greatly underestimating the vastness of Ukraine and over-extending supply lines.

    Hitler, of course, committed the same folly in reverse in the 1930s, emphasizing the need for Lebensraum, living space, for the German people, who were apparently threatened by the great Slavic hordes to the east.

    Hidden Forces

    What would you do, if you felt as if your nation or family was under an existential threat, and only you had the vast power to stop it?

    Do you think you would commit acts of evil to ‘protect’ yourself, believing this to be for the highest good in the circumstances?

    There are hidden forces at play here. I use the word hidden intentionally, knowing that some will understand what I am trying to say. Those who have ears to hear will hear.

    How else can we make sense of the ritual of bloodletting that so-called rational actors seem to periodically engage in, most clearly perhaps in the massacres of the First World War, when the most ‘civilized’ of nations sacrificed their best and brightest.

    For what? How could humans behave in such a barbaric and irrational way?

    Human beings often operate like actors on a stage, contending with forces greater than we can imagine. These might be described as the anabolic and catabolic forces of nature, involving endless cycles of growth, death, decay and rebirth.

    My first experience with ayahuasca on Maui, Hawaii many years ago, demonstrated this to me very clearly. For whatever reason, I did not fear looking into the darkness. That night I left the safety of the ceremony and went out alone to stare into the unknown of the dark jungle.

    Instead of fearing the dark, I wanted to understand it.

    Nietzsche warned: ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster … for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you,’ but this was not my experience. I found that looking into the abyss gave me a greater understanding of the world.

    Jung, so well versed in ancient knowledge and metaphysics, brought these themes to a psychological level, writing

    The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail over the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy will defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be (Carl Jung, Approaching the Unconscious).

    The Metaphysics of Light and Dark

    We live in a world characterised by duality – light and dark, good and evil. These are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other.

    Irrespective of anyone’s spiritual beliefs, you may still find useful insights in spiritual traditions on the nature of evil.

    In the ancient Zoroastrian tradition, it was believed that the universe is a battleground between Good (Ahura Mazda) and Evil (Angra Mainyu). Angra Mainyu is not God’s equal opposite, but the destructive energy that opposes God’s creative energy.

    It is essential for us to remember that this battle is not external to us as humans. It is an internal process in everyone.

    Even in the Bible, Isaiah 45:7 says, ‘I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create calamity. I am Yahweh, who does all these things.’ In other words, according to an Old Testament view, Yahweh (God) is the source of all things, light and dark.

    The Taoist yin yang symbol captures the essence of this most beautifully. The seeds of light grow in the dark, the seeds of dark grow in the light.

    Other metaphysical systems were all too aware of this too – that too much of anything becomes its opposite. The Mediaeval Jewish Kabbalists saw evil as a result of unbalanced force. For example, the benevolent dictator, motivated by the seemingly altruistic aim of protecting his people, can easily become a tyrant. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the folk wisdom goes.

    In a tremendously complex world bedevilled by unintended consequences, we are often unaware of the full consequences of our actions, yet we are still responsible for them. A classic example is the arming of the Taliban, formerly the mujahideen, by the U.S. in pursuit of its geopolitical ambitions of bringing about the demise of the USSR in Afghanistan the 1980s.

    In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred texts of Hinduism and a treatise on the ethics of war, we are told that Krishna (God) gave humans free will so they would have the volition to choose love, but ‘impelled by material desires, the souls engage in evil deeds and are subjected to others’ evil actions, as per the inexorable law of karma.’

    Comanche Indians Chasing Buffalo with Lances and Bows, by George Catlin.

    Wetiko

    Jungian analyst Paul Levy, in his seminal work on the origins of evil Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil brilliantly describes how humanity is suffering from:

    a spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness.

    Many traditions speak of a concept similar to that native American idea of wetiko. The Jewish- Christian gnostic mystic tradition, for example, draws on descriptions in the two-thousand-year old writings known as the Dead Sea Scrolls – found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi – of the archons, who have imprisoned the divine spark of human souls in material creation.

    Likewise, the Bible speaks of a ‘counterfeiting spirit’ deceiving humanity. The Tibbetan Buddists speak of humanity trapped in the matrix of samsara, of suffering.

    The essence of evil is that it helps continue the illusion of separation of souls from universal consciousness, from source.

    This is perhaps the deepest symbolic interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. The fall of matter from spirit, the loss of our connected state of original innocence.

    Evil prevents us from recalling who we truly are. It separates us from each other and from whence we came.

    A destroyed Russian BMP-3 near Mariupol, 7 March.

    What can be done?

    First, on a macro level, the consciousness of the human race must evolve to a point where war is no longer acceptable, for any justification, under any circumstances.

    Otherwise, paranoid, wounded, power hungry men, for it is almost always men who start wars, will inevitably find a justification for their actions.

    As the astrophysicist Carl Sagan said:

    Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

    It will be necessary to make war an absolute taboo and to ostracize those who participate in it. It may take many generations and even millennia for this to occur, but happen it must.

    Peace must be a conscious choice for humanity. As Margaret Mead put it: ‘Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a means of solving conflict?’

    There are some encouraging signs that in this first European war of the social media age, this may be happening – via the compassion and condemnation of the international community.

    But this cannot only apply to wars started by the ‘other’ side, it must apply equally to wars started by or supported by the West in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Otherwise, Western hypocrisy and privilege continues.

    For this to happen, a global shift in consciousness is required, if not rogue actors will easily take advantage of a more peaceful world.

    It will also require a much more equitable world, one where justifiable grievances can be addressed and resolved equitably, before violence is resorted to.

    Is it naive to believe such a world is possible? Perhaps, but in a world of nuclear weapons, we surely have no choice but to evolve and ensure our long term survival.

    It will also be necessary to change the current structures of power, so that the concentration of political power no longer allows the egos of weak, wounded men to force wars and mayhem on their people.

    As part of this evolution of human consciousness, some form of collective healing will be required to address the psychological wounds of the human race, the majority of which is traumatized as a result of centuries of war and oppression.

    Otherwise, wounded man-children will continue to play out their traumas and pathologies on a world stage; handing these down to the next generation.

    We would do well to remember the indigenous wisdom that the seven generations to come inherit the traumas of the past seven generations.

    Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).

    Personal Responsibility

    Secondly, on a micro level, as individuals, we must take personal responsibility for the psychological awareness of our shadows. Becoming aware that we are not always as good as we imagine ourselves to be.

    As Jung put it:

    Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.

    We need to educate people on the need to make conscious what is unconscious, unhealed, unprocessed, unowned in them, before they find someone or something else to project their deepest fears and darkest thoughts on to. This is of the utmost importance for the survival of the human race, and not talked about nearly enough.

    How can we expect peace in the world when we are at war with ourselves? If we want to change the world, we must first change ourselves.

    Our outer world reflects the state of our own inner psyche, individually and collectively. That our currently external reality is in such dire shape reflects the inner collective reality.

    If we do not mend our ways the great ritualistic dance, the great cosmic game of growth, death and rebirth, construction and destruction, with human beings as mere unconscious pawns, will begin again, as it has for many of the past millennia, but this time with the threat of nuclear annihilation.

    Feature Image: Mushroom cloud from the explosion of Castle Romeo in 1954.