Cassandra Voices

Tag: Depression

  • Lessons from the Great Depression III

    Don’t you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’ ‘Well, I’m blowed!’ I was astounded at my keenness of perception. The moment I had set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself ‘What Ho! A Dictator!’ and a Dictator he had proved to be. I could not have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham. ‘Well, I’m dashed! I thought he was something of that sort. That chin…Those eyes…And, for the matter of that, that moustache. When you say “shorts,” you mean “shirts,” of course.’ ‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’ ‘Footer bags, you mean?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How perfectly foul.
    P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (1938).

    The above quote may offer a certain hope for those of us who see in each crisis a foretaste of worse to come; that hope is that Fascism can be undermined by ridicule – even while it is gaining traction – as long as a Dworkinian right to freedom of speech abides.

    But I next turn to a writer not noted for his sense of humour, George Orwell, who is central to our understanding the Great Depression, at least from a British vantage. His 1946 essay ‘How the Poor Die’ is a also crucial text for this austerity period, when social supports are being steadily withdrawn and a public health crisis looms large. Such are the consequences, unintended or otherwise, of an awful ideology that has put the NHS into freefall, and the Irish health service into near collapse.

    Animal Farm and 1984, with their simplification of language and distortion of truth from 2 =2 =5 to Newspeak – or in present parlance News International – are curiously prescient for our age. The Communist dystopia Orwell envisaged is not what we have now. Our own is of a different character altogether.

    Lowry, Laurence Stephen; Coming from the Mill; The L. S. Lowry Collection; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/coming-from-the-mill-162324

    Army of Managers

    The great painter of the Depression-era L.S. Lowry once remarked:

    A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

    This is the kind of Stockholm Syndrome that we have witnessed throughout the pandemic, when even left wing parties previously noted for their resistance to corporate authority, rolled over to have their bellies tickled, as the one percent almost doubled their wealth.

    Lowry, as much as Grosz and Dix, chronicled working-class existences in painting, but as a prose artist he also captured the era beautifully in Coming From the Mill (1930). ‘As I left [Pendlebury] station I saw the Acme Spinning Company’s mill,’ Lowry would later recall. Describing:

    The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out hundreds of little pinched, black figures, heads bent down. I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture.

    His matchstick men and women are best seen in the Lowry Gallery in Salford near Manchester, an area much gentrified now but still recognisably working class. And if you turn away from the main paintings, one still finds the bitter fruits of economic depressions: drunken brawls and young children in virtual rags.

    Brave New World!

    Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a core text of our time. The soma-induced compliance replicates our non-critical consensus of disinformation. Bernard the anti-hero wishes to leave for Iceland, a psychological state many of us wish to flee to now. Like Wittgenstein, I have a preference for a good Fjord.

    In mainland Europe the contradictions of the European Depression are well etched by the greatest of all American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was an incurable alcoholic by the time he penned his second masterpiece Tender Is the Night, to mixed reviews, in 1934. The lead character Diver is redolent of a lost parvenu generation, a parable for how many of a certain class lose their way on the French Riviera.

    It is cautionary tale of a loss of relevance, context and credibility. In a way, we all must resist a decadent urge to act like Tory grandees on the fiddle amidst the booze at Number 10.

    And what about other European literature for those who want us to “stay safe by staying apart”? Well, the antisemitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline is responsible for at least two prose masterpieces of the Great Depression that lay bay his own hypocrisy.

    His 1932 Journey to The End of Night is a phantasmatic horror story chronicling the Great Depression. It contains a piquant quote that goes some way towards explaining his own moral descent: ‘I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.’ We ought to be wary of artists that achieve great success in their own time, or journalists for that matter.

    He also refers to the “necessary” distance the rich must develop from the sufferings of the poor:

    I hadn’t found out, yet that humankind consists of two quite different races, the rich and the poor. It took me … and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

    Jean Renoir

    More than Céline, along with Albert Camus, the greatest French intellectual artist of that period was the film director Jean Renoir. His most significant film ‘La Règle du jeu’ is situated at the precipice of collapse.

    Set in an aristocratic milieu just before the outbreak of the Second World War, it is decidedly jittery, with a real sense of fin de siècle. We find attractive though silly people on the brink of a calamity. It seems now quite relevant as we face unprecedented times, where chaos and uncertainty rule.

    Renoir views the characters sympathetically with Octavia – the voice of moderation – central to the film. Renoir was acutely conscious of being on the brink of disaster, and expressed  an objective humanism with the famous line ‘that everyone has his reasons.’

    In the subjectivity of our time that quote remains a clarion call for a heightened perception of danger, especially as moral relativism gains traction.

    Renoir elaborated in commentary on the film that all cultures are cliquish and have their own rules and protocols of dealing with those who do not observe the rules of the game, or the rule of law. But that is prior to seismic change where brute force supersedes civility.

    Renoir touched a raw nerve. When it opened a right-wing French audience went berserk, in a way similar to the reception in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of The Western World in 1907.

    Renoir’s acid comment was in effect that these people were doomed, and that the audience reaction showed that ‘people who commit suicide do not do so in front of witnesses.’

    The film has an astute sense that class or poverty more than race or ethnicity is the ultimate determinant of social division. That idea remains vitally important in these absurd politically correct times, and indeed victimhood or assumed victimhood as it is now. Our priorities should be to maintain access to housing, health care and legal representation.

    Welles and Buñuel

    Another of the greatest creative artist of the twentieth century toured around Ireland at the end of the Depression, before taking a job at The Gate Theatre. Later, in ‘The Third Man’ (1949) he made a guest appearance as Harry Lime. One, less celebrated speech. captures the existential dilemma of our time

    If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.

    This is a logic that appears to have been adopted by pharmaceutical companies in recent times.

     

    The great surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel was another of the great anti-fascist artist of the Depression-era.  He attacked the prevailing mores of clerics, sexual repression and state authoritarianism with utter clarity and savage wit. This led, unsurprisingly, to periods of exile from Spain and a final hideaway for eighteen years in Mexico.

    The stunning and very brave 1950 film about poverty and child criminality in Mexico ‘Los Olvidados’ (the Forgotten Ones) caused a sensation at the time. Its theme reflects a drift into criminality among the youth in many parts of London and Dublin. Today’s child poverty, exploitation, crime and even slavery were also a feature of the Great Depression era.

    Tell Me Why?

    How does Fascism come about? Well it’s a product of inequality and poverty. You could say: “It’s the economy dummy!” In the period we can find evidence of this emerging among the workers in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, or the disenfranchised on the streets of Weimar, or the representations of Orwell and Céline who suffer most due to the naked expropriation “adults in the room.”

    Economic depressions create conditions for fascism, or even the new-fangled corporate fascism of our age which represents a triumph of demagoguery and disinformation. So be wary of manipulation and stay flexible, if not unsafe. Facebook and the mass media augment Orwellian tendencies and a campaign of compliance and of induced consent is creating serf capitalism and a potential Malthusian population cull.

    Alas, there is no New Deal or Marshall Plan on the horizon. World leadership is lacking and often far from benign and corporate-led. Apart from resisting manipulation, what all of us at the sharp end of the stick can do is protest to avoid obliteration and not be participants in our own self-abnegation.

    Resist decadence if you can. Survive the new depression: this Great Reset Depression. It will require optimum coping skills not to be culled. And if all else fails, poke fun at the fascists and observe how uncomfortable they become.

  • Lessons from the Great Depression (II)

    Ger-mania…

    Extraordinarily, Germany appears on the brink of following the lead of Austria in mandating a vaccination against COVID-19, as segregation of the unvaccinated continues. We seem to have entered what Gore Vidal described as the United States of Amnesia, as all history is forgotten. So let us cast our mind back.

    I maintain the German Weimar Republic (1919-1933), more than even the U.S. Great Depression, remains the emblem of our age. The comparison is not exact of course, as all analogies break down through the shifting sands of time, but it is useful to review the literature of that period and draw parallels.

    After World War I, when misguided reparations, and a war guilt clause, were inflicted by the victors – with the French and Clemenceau in particular in the driving seat – Germany was crippled with war debts, but crept along until the banking collapse. The period up to 1929 and shortly afterwards was a triumph against great odds of a fledgling social democracy: the Weimar Republic.

    The period is associated with great creativity, and indeed became a synonym for decadence and sexual libertarianism, which made it a soft target for Nazi thuggery. The bonfire of the vanities and the burning of the books was the fascist exhalation of degenerate art.

    Likewise our own Age of Austerity in the wake of the Financial Crisis of 08 has destablised the social and economic structures. We also have had a period of relative freedom, despite the economic pain, but now operate in most countries under a grinding authoritarianism in the face of collapsing health care systems corroded by decades of neoliberalism.

    A begging disabled WW I veteran (Berlin, 1923).

    Tomorrow Belongs to Me

    The Bob Fosse film ‘Cabaret’ (1972) has the fictionally represented Christopher Isherwood in Weimar times represented as leaving Berlin after he hears the Nazi youth sing ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, one of the most chilling songs in a popular film ever recorded; an even more sinister version of the Horst Wessel Song.

    In fact, in the book Goodbye to Berlin (1939) nothing quite as dramatic as that epiphany occurs, just the sense of the persecution of the Jewish community, Communists, dissidents and degenerate races in a sedulous and incremental fashion. This was a fascist authoritarian creep as economic destruction creates victims, but also the externalisation of hatred. The demonisation and demonetisation of the other, crucial also in our own age of unfettered rage and lack of moderation.

    Bertolt Brecht

    The Aesthetics of Resistance

    Peter Weiss made a similar point in his after the event masterpiece, The Aesthetics of Resistance, where in cold retrospect he saw how those with idealism were destroyed.  His masterpiece of memory ends with the execution of his comrades in the Frankfurt Trials; executed and left to hang on fishhooks.

    Bertolt Brecht also saw in genesis and with mystical precision the bloodletting to come in The Threepenny Opera:

    When the shark bites with his teeth dear
    Scarlet billows start to spread
    Fancy gloves though wears Macbeth dear
    So there is not a trace of red

    Now again many want no trace of red. Just bright blue colours. No shades of grey just sanctimonious conservatism.

    The sense of unfolding chaos at the effects of the Great Depression in Germany is well documented in Victor Klemperer’s diary Let Us Bear Witness dating from 1933. He was peculiarly well placed with a protected Christian wife and a Jewish convert to Christianity. Dismissed from his job; furloughed but not sent to a Concentration Camp.

    The rise of fascism was a consequence, then and now, of economic collapse and that is the difference between the American Depression and the German equivalent, but it was a narrow escape for America.

    Roosevelt as a social democrat saved America. but as Philip Roth’s excursus in counter-factual history amply demonstrates there was no shortage of fascist demagogues who could have unseated him, including the folk hero Charles Lindberg. Such is The Plot Against America, where a fascist becomes President. Not then of course, but now?

    But that is getting ahead of ourselves to the endgame. Let us at least anticipate and make plans in the light of a project endgame called The Great Reset, a phrase unerring close to the great leap forward as we enter Chinese corporate feudal times.

    The sense of impending chaos in the Weimar Republic is also well documented by caricaturists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and others, many of whose greatest paintings hang as a reminder in Berlin.

    If you look at Grosz’s inelegantly titled Pillars of Society (1926), with the subtitle Shit for Brains, you will see one of the paragons of virtue. It anticipates disaster as the economy collapsed, and the Nazi judges and commissars who would work hand in glove with their jackboot associates.

    Ripe for Collapse

    On its current trajectory, the EU, as Varoufakis recently indicated, is likely to collapse, sooner rather than later, with a pan-Germanic latter day Hanseatic League altready taking its place. Few should mourn it in Ireland and Greece where the social structure has been destroyed through the impoverishment of large cohorts of the population who have falled into homelessness. Ireland is now controlled by hedge funds as a kind of sub-Indonesian corporate client state.

    And what do corporate judges, bankers, lawyers, and politicians do? Well, enforce further austerity in the shape of lockdowns on a docile and far too accepting population. Socially distanced and self-isolated for the near future without a prospect of stability, a sustainable living structure, or affordable rent or housing.

    And what does Weimar art reveal about intellectuals? That they are useless panderers. The paintings of Otto Dix perfectly captures bohemian delirium and ineffectiveness.

    In effect our contemporary consensus neoliberal spouters are spectators on a society falling apart; the collective fiddling as Rome burns. McWilliams in his wine bar.

    So, hand in glove with economic collapse we witness the destruction of the very concept of human rights. The seepage of emergency powers and executive action, documented in the eariler period by the great jurist Carl Schmidt, with disproportionate and excessive measures. Just as the Reichstag fire was used to end democracy in Germany.

    As far as social and economic rights and Weimar was a disaster. Banknote were printed in billion increments with which you could barely buy a loaf of bread.

    Berlin Alexanderplatz

    Perhaps the greatest German novel of the Depression era is Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, although his neglected earlier novel Mountains Oceans Giants also presages our times, with its harbingers of environmental collapse.

    Döblin also utilises other 1920s anxieties — Malthus, Suffragettes, miscegenation, decolonization — onto the 27th century where Europe is under siege from “hordes” of migrants “flooding” from the Global South. “India-China-Japan” rises as a rival bloc to the New York-London “Anglo-Saxon Imperium,” while fierce clans of women find success in an “unending struggle against patriarchy,” even preferring “taboo” relationships with the alien migrants.

    Science fiction then but becoming recognisable today. The demonisation and demonetisation of others and the migrant. Not one of us.

    Berlin Alexanderplatz was dramatized by Werner Fassbinder in the peritectic chronicle of its everyman German Franz Bide Kopf, convict, pimp, worker; through the swathes of the Weimar republic.

    It is at one level a chronicle of our own time. Dubious associations, flirting with fascism and in passages most relevant and redolent, a panegyric against erstwhile Communist friends, which shows how the everyman is seduced by Utopian ideals:

    We’ve got to have order, order, I’m telling you, order—and put that in your pipes and smoke it, order and nothing else . . . and if anybody comes and starts a revolution now and don’t leave us in peace, they ought to be strung up all along the street . . . then they’ll get theirs, when they swing, yes, sir. You might remember that whatever you do, you criminals.

    Law and Order the totalitarian clarion call. The most important passages are the slaughterhouse and abattoir scenes, which are most unsettling and relevant to our times. Equating the costing of microscopic slaughter of the animals with human slaughter. The expiration of man and beast, or cost-benefit analysis of life. Compulsory vaccination for the herd.

    The Weimar Republic echoes through the ages. and Germany is reverting primitively and Gothically. Atavistic tendencies can be seen with the arrival of compulsory vaccination and vaccine segregation. Austerity unleased dark forces, and there is no genuine social democratic corrective in sight. The Weimar republic ripples through the ages.

    Feature Image: Joseph Goebbels views the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

  • Lessons From the Great Depression (I)

    This is the first instalment of a three part essay on the legacy of the Great Depression..

    The Great Depression began in 1929, leading Wall Street bankers literally to throw themselves from windows. I was shown one such exit site on 45th Street 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Lives were destroyed as a favourable market collapsed. The fundamental point then, and now, about a favourable or unfavourable market is it is always an illusion. Smoke and mirrors.

    Bull leads to Bear and back, and that cycle since 2008 is certainly where we are again, as confidence is lost in markets and neo-liberal non-interventionism. The effect in 1929 emphasised how when America catches a cold Europe contracts pneumonia. In the 1930s, the fragile, well-intentioned experiment in Wilsonian democracy collapsed virtually overnight. Now the effect is global.

    We are now seeing unmistakable signs of stagflation and even hyperinflation, accentuated by the additional disease burden of the virus on health systems subjected to decades of sneaking privatisation; while health inequalities widen, as transnational organisations and Big Pharma – using so-called philanthro-capitalism as a front – collude at the expense of the population at large.

    The prospect looms of fuel and food shortages, decreased life expectancies – already evident before the pandemic – repossessions, and evictions, with limited support in countries without social democratic support structures.

    In terms of civil liberties, we are entering dangerous territory too, with compulsory vaccination and quarantines. A long winter is coming. And what are we to make of most non-essential court cases in the UK being adjourned until September of next year?

    The New Deal

    In 1932 at the height of its destitution, America elected its greatest ever leader the aristocratic bon vivant socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who brought in the New Deal to save the country from ruin.

    In contemporary America, no such leadership exists. Biden is no Roosevelt. He is unwilling to develop a true social market. All too many in America are ‘Bowling Alone’ as communities fall apart in a digitally mediated age of social atomisation.

    The Great Depression represented a failure of the American idea of government. Apart from a few dissenters, such as the legendary Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, the business of America has always been business, until it goes bust.

    In a tremendous refutation of free market economics in Lochner v. New York (1903) Holmes said: ‘The third amendment does not enact Mr Herbert spencer’s social statics’

    Holmes was at least a quasi-socialist, who corresponded with Harold Laski. But neither an intellect like him or a proper social democratic deal maker and integrator like Roosevelt is evident in American politics today.

    Obama received money and recruited Goldman Sachs alumni to his cabinet which is a bit like inviting a cuckoo into the nest.

    Studs Terkel

    Hard Times

    Another Chicago native and reporter of the last century, Studs Terkel chronicled American life in his book Hard Times, which is an oral history of the Depression era. Terkel argued that ‘the worst day-to-day operators of businesses are bankers,’ and quotes one source who has fallen on hard times:

    We thought of the poor, at that time, as quite divorced from us, who were not poor. By the exercise of one’s charity, life could be made all right. You would always have the poor with you, they were the unfortunate, and you made donations. You could handle them. It was mildly unpleasant, but not fundamentally upsetting. Now, for the first time, we face the dreadful reality that we are not separated. They are us.

    And another describes a scene of acute desperation:

    They would just walk all over and kill each other. They got more than they ever need that they would just step on anybody to keep it. They got cars, they got houses, they got this and that. It is more than they need, but they think they need it, so they want to keep it. Human life isn’t as important as what they got.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Worse Still?

    I fear that this collapse will be on a greater scale. Indeed, despite deprivation, life expectancies actually increased in America over the course of the 1930s, but since the turn of this century epidemiologists have been predicing a decline.

    The successful application of the ideas of the master J. M. Keynes generated a worldwide social democratic model in the wake of the Great Depression, which became the consensus before the resurgence of neo-liberalism. This has undermined humanity since the late 1970s, and its effect now appear irreversible, given the absence of an alternative Communist model that compelled even governments devoted to capitalism to maintain a basic standard of living and healthcare.

    In contrast, the neo-liberal model of marketisation of human activity has intruded into all sectors of life. This has denuded and in some cases destroyed what Habermas describes as the public sphere.

    A set of unworkable ideas have spiralled out of control, and are generating a disaster. Liberal democracy is failing and becoming unworkable. In effect, the End Of History is the acceptance of discredited ideas, which have led us to this impasse.

    Capitalism is not working because capitalism is not allowing people to work. Joseph Stieglitz, a former economist for the World Bank remarked: ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor.’ And increasingly basic liberties are being sacrificed at the altar of security.

    Artistic Response

    More than statisticians or economists, artists convey the individual effects of world historical events such as the Great Depression.

    Although written in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is one of the core texts of the Depression, demonstrating the appalling work conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry. Many of his works including Oil, which became the film with Daniel Day Lewis ‘There Will be Blood’ attack unbridled capitalism and its depressing effects on the human spirit.

    Two crucial quotes from The Jungle are as follows:

    The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.

    And

    Into this wild beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.

    Sinclair paints a familiar scene, now throw in the disinformation of our post-truth universe and you have a neo-liberal Molotov cocktail. At least at that time there was vibrant social commentary, and a less captured media.

    All little lives need protecting as Sinclair and above all John Steinbeck in his portrayals of the Okies in dustbowl America clearly recognised. His great novel The Grapes Of Wrath depicts a migration from the dustbowls of Oklahoma to California, which turns out to be no Promised Land, as any unionization or collective action is supressed, just as has been the case over the last thirty years.

     

    More relevant than even Sinclair or Steinbeck as an evocation of the Depression-era in America is a book by James Agee, and photographer Walker Evans called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941. The phrase originates in the Jewish religion. The complete sentence is: ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the fathers that beget them.’

    The book, partially governmentally funded, chronicles dustbowl America. Evans adds the pictorial record of the devastation wreaked by the great economic depression in the dustbowl.

    From the pictures of Walker Evans it is noticeable how grim the faces are. The anguished expressions on children is particularly harrowing. Lives lost by neglect and the degradation of poverty.

    It’s A Wonderful Life

    Austerity

    It is well documented how austerity in our present age has killed people by stealth through the gradual removal of social supports. Lawyers and NHS workers might share the same fate. Whatever ramparts of social protection that previously existed are being whittled away by Covid. And

    Any yet we cannot give up. Produced and directed by Frank Capra in the wake of World War II, ‘It’s a Wonderful life’ is about a good banker memorably played by Jimmy Stewart, who helps people to build new homes.

    Capra, made many great films, but ‘It Happened One Night,’ which came out at the height of the Depression captures a spirit a popular spirit of defiance. So there is cause for optimism in poor folk.

    Featured Image: Lunch atop a Skyscraper, Charlie C. Ebbets, 1932.

  • Funk

    Yeah, been in a funk. These last few weeks. Couple of things contributed to it. But an overarching feeling is one of restlessness. My worst fears were realized when I moved back to the suburbs. Always associated my youth with a debilitating depression. Growing up here. Feeling so different.

    For much of my life I dealt with depression. Finding things that interested me, with which I then filled my days. Found a job I loved and overworked. Took pride in my resilience. Stamina. Charting how productive I was. Seemed to stave off the sadness. Both from the business itself, and seeing myself get so much done.

    I’ve infinite time on my hands now. Had hoped the Spanish tutorials and woodworking would pique my interest. Maybe take over. Didn’t realize how much of my identity is comprised of being like this. Type-A personality. Working myself to death. Raised by people who honored above all, the work ethic. Bootstrap economics. Wasn’t prepared for the fact that I’d struggle with a sense of worthiness. When unemployed. And underpaid. The rational me knows better. But at my core I wonder. What will develop. From this radical new chapter.

    Integrating shadow work on family issues is deceptive. And exhausting. Feeling a bit stuck at times. So, all apologies for not showing up. At least not in the ways I usually do. Trust some good will come from this. But man, does it suck.

    On the plus side, at Christmas I was reminded just how much I enjoy wrapping presents. So, there’s that. And also this amazing autumnal light. To help me hang in there. With grace. And patience. In solidarity.

    Feature Image: Marina Azzaro

  • Psychedelic Therapy – “Love is the Glue”

    Editor’s Note: Previously Frank Armstrong reviewed Michael Pollan’s journey through the use of psychedelics. Here ‘Desmond O’Brien’ recalls a recent psilocybin treatment at a clinic in the Netherlands, which he found ‘a hugely emotional and profoundly beautiful experience, interspersed with frequent moments of absolute hilarity.’

    ‘my life had come to an end’

    I recently went on a psilocybin (so-called magic mushroom) retreat in the Netherlands – a form of psychedelic therapy for anxiety and depression. To the uninitiated this may sound like quackery, but there’s a good deal of solid scientific evidence pointing to its potential for treatment of mental illness, especially long-term depression.

    Prior to going through with it, I had concluded that I was doomed to an endless cycle of frustrated unease and pessimism. What I went through has made me more optimistic that I have a lot more time left, and that chapters remain to be written. But it is still early days, and I am not saying it will be easy.

    The retreat was quite a journey. Three days, with a trip in the middle day, bookended by powerful group therapy conducted by trained professionals, all in a tranquil setting with access to a garden.

    I found it a hugely emotional and profoundly beautiful experience, interspersed with frequent moments of absolute hilarity. At no point was I scared by what was a wild ride that brought tremendous catharsis, and involved deep bonding with fellow participants.

    For a long time beforehand I was at the bottom of a dark, deepening well, clawing helplessly at the walls. I am still in that pit in practical and material terms, but the light at the top doesn’t seem quite so far away. It’s as if a rope has been dropped down for me to climb towards the opening.

    By the end of the experience I felt more relaxed than I have done in years. Only time will tell how capable I am of integrating what I have learnt into my day-to-day life.

    I must persevere with therapy, meditation, writing, communicating, yoga and just breathing. Contending with horrific, insidious and relentless anxiety, as I have done, I need constant reminders to slow down so as to avoid those terrible spirals.

    “Cosmic Pocahontas”

    The ‘trip’ began with geometric patterns emerging from the darkness, creating quite a pleasant show. It brought neither anxiety nor nausea, as affected a few other participants.

    Indeed, one poor fella’s vomiting cut through the air in Dolby Surround Sound reminiscent of The Exorcist! But he was gently taken care of by the facilitators, and emerged after a while into the bliss we all felt, and was utterly untroubled by that phase in retrospect.

    Slowly, the doors of the library of memory opened and I was brought on a tour, over which I had considerable control. This featured many moments of my past, such as running out to play in my grandparents’ garden, and being tucked into bed by an au pair.

    It was all from a first-person perspective. I never saw myself. There was an overwhelming feeling of love as I observed these scenes, and many friends and family appeared – or perhaps it is more accurate to say I had chosen to bring them to mind – all enveloped in this infinite affection.

    “Love is the glue”, I said to myself after discovering a wonderful sense of oneness with the universe. I had the sense of us all, young and old, alive and dead, as helpless babies in the eyes of an omniscient presence, tumbling in eternal clumsiness through space, bouncing off each other while she, and it did seem a nurturing, reassuring maternal figure (the “Cosmic Pocahontas”, as the other Irish fella there referred to her in his Cork accent), observing us all with a benign smile, having seen it all before.

    Most of the time, rather than looking around and getting my jollies with visuals – and especially during the first few hours – I wore eye covers to heighten the inward therapeutic journey. This deepened the tour of the unconscious.

    I experienced tears of joy, sadness and laughter that ran down my face for a great part of the journey. Emotional inhibition was lost and at one point with the prompting and hug from a facilitator, I sobbed uncontrolably and breathlessly like a child.

    Returning to a pleasant normality

    At a certain point I removed the eye covers. After that, at all times, I knew exactly where I was, and who I was with. I experienced no auditory or visual hallucinations, but amplified senses, a curious fuzziness to everything, changes in texture and a mildly swirling fractalization of surfaces and objects; no pink elephants!

    Looking around, we resembled infants in a crèche, smiling warmly at each other, in mutual knowing. Towards the end we sat up, ate the sliced fruit and pieces of chocolate provided for us, and began to reflect in pairs and small groups on our experiences.

    Finally, we took off our jackets and shoes, creating another amusing kindergarten-scene-of-chaos, and then strolled and chatted in the garden. Returning to a pleasant normality, we endeavoured to articulate our individual experiences.

    The analogy that came to my mind is this: that we are, as adults, swimming in lanes defined over time by the influences of our environments. The psychedelic experience lifts up those lane dividers, allowing us to roam freely in the pool. By the end of the experience, we had developed an awareness of how we are stuck in those lanes, but that they are not as fixed as we had perceived. And that is freedom.

    The experience brings us back to our younger, more joyous and playful selves, peeling away, at least for a while, the rigid constraints of our adult selves, to reveal the child that we were, and still are.

    And little kids, as I’m sure you are aware, trip up all the time.

    To contact the author of this piece email: admin@cassandravoices.com

  • Cancer – A Distorted Version of Our Normal Selves

    We have not slain our enemy, the cancer cell, or figuratively torn the limbs from his body … In our adventures we have only seen our monster more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways – ways that reveal a cancer cell to be, like Grendel, a distorted version of our normal selves.
    Harold E. Varmus, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (Stockholm, 1989).

    Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm – substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.
    Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York, 1962)

    Over a decade ago my mother was diagnosed with skin cancer, in the form of a melanoma on her face. At the time this did not seem a big deal, at least once a surgeon had removed the offending growth and performed a successful skin graft. It had been caught early enough to prevent metastasis, or so we thought.

    The ‘scare’ probably shook her more than we recognised. The diagnosis must have realised her worst nightmare after the loss of her own mother, to what seems to have been breast cancer at the age of just fifty.

    Most obviously she became fretful at being exposed to the sun, though by then this would probably have made no difference.

    In hindsight, perhaps she never fully recovered her poise. I suspect an accumulation of worries affected her health, contributing to the later metastasis of the cancer. Revealingly, a recent survey of seventy thousand women, aged seventy or over, showed that an optimistic frame of mind correlated with a reduced risk of cancer, and other fatal diseases. This bolsters Iain McGilchrist’s suggestion that all medicine should be seen as ‘a branch of psychiatry, and psychiatry as a branch of philosophy’.

    Genetic determinism portrays physical bodies as distinct from minds. But this neo-Cartesian view ignores the bewildering complexity of our brains, within which McGilchrist estimates there are more connections ‘than there are particles in the known universe’.

    It should offer solace to those with a genetic history of the disease that minds are exceedingly complex, and malleable, instruments.

    According to Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), ‘the Ancient Roman doctor Galen reserved the most malevolent and disquieting of the four humours for cancer: black bile’. He attributed just one other disease to an excess of this ‘oily, viscuous humour: depression’. Indeed melancholia, the medieval name for ‘depressions’ draws its name from the Greek melan, meaning ‘black’, and khole, meaning ‘bile’; Mukherjee describes how ‘Depression and cancer, the psychic and physical diseases of black bile, were thus intrinsically intertwined.’ Moreover, Andrew Soloman quotes an expert to the effect that anxiety, ‘a response to future lost’, should be regarded as  ‘fraternal twins’ with depression, ‘a response to past lost (quoted in Pollan, 2018, p.389)’.

    Although during the Renaissance Andreas Vesalius (1514-64) established that black bile does not exist, the coupling of the two ailments by Galen, who informed Western medicine for over a millennium, is noteworthy. Contemporary approaches may profitably look backwards, as Mukherjee puts it: ‘Scientists often study the past as obsessively as historians because few other professions depend as acutely on it’.

    That is not to say, of course, that cancer is somehow ‘all in the mind’, but increasing focus on the role of depression or stress, and ways of counteracting these, from spirituality to artistic expression or enjoying the great outdoors, would surely be beneficial.

    II – The Human Genome Project

    Mukherjee argues that cancer ‘is stitched into our genome’: somatic cells, along with the bacteria in our body with which we generally co-exist symbiotically, are in a constant flux of death and renewal, such that most of our cells survive no longer than seven years, before being replaced by new ones.

    As we grow older glitches – entropy – enters into this process of renewal. Mukherjee writes: ‘Oncogenes arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells’. It is usually as if we become jaded by a lifetime’s effort, and errors creep in.

    Predicting the behaviour of these mutations has, however, defied understanding since the ‘War on Cancer’ began in the early 1950s. The outbreak of certain rare forms can be traced to genetic inheritance, but the onset of the vast majority is not preordained.

    Mukherjee argues that ‘the Human Genome Project will profile the normal genome against which cancer’s abnormal genomes can be juxtaposed and contrasted’. However the number of genetic mutations involved in most types runs into three figures.

    At best scientists have been able to glean from genomic evidence that certain individuals do not benefit from particular therapies. But this is not the same as understanding at a cellular level why most cancers appear, and pinpointing the preventative measures which ought to be taken.

    Inescapably, the claims of genomic research arrive through the prism of justifying hefty research grants.

    The author of The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry (2012), Rupert Sheldrake has sought to puncture the optimism of those who believe the Human Genome Project will yield infallible algorithms predicting our future life and health: ‘The optimism that life would be understood if molecular biologists knew the ‘programs’ of an organism gave way to the realisation that there is a huge gap between gene sequences and actual human beings’.

    Mukherjee also acknowledges the great variety of environmental factors, which switch on and on off the genetic mutations which give rise to cancers:

    Our bodies, our cells, our genes are being immersed and re-immersed in a changing flux of molecules – pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses such as radiation and magnetism. Some of these, inevitably, will be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away; our task then is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders.

    Revealingly, in a recent U.S. case a jury awarded DeWayne Johnson €289 million in damages against Monsanto, the manufacturers of Roundup a glyphosate weed killer in compensation for the onset of his cancer.

    Other confounding factors include the emerging field epigenetics, our co-habitation with bacteria – itself in constant evolution – and even altered states of consciousness.

    III – Metastatic Melanoma

    Exposure to the sun’s UV-A and UV-B rays is considered the leading cause of melanomas. The incidence is particularly high among Australians, most of whose ancestors evolved in cool and cloudy Northern European conditions, and, surprisingly, Switzerland, where a fondness for the sunny piste seems to be to blame.

    My mother was not particularly pale-skinned, and nor was she ever a sun-worshipper. I recall her scrupulously applying sunscreen on herself, and her children, on beach holidays. The best guess is the damage stemmed from sunburn as a child or young adult. That her life coincided with a depletion in the ozone layer, which filters UV rays high up in the atmosphere, could also have been a factor. It has even been hypothesised that sunscreen itself contains carcinogenic properties.

    When my mother’s cancer returned three years ago, in the form of tumours on the lung it did not seem such devastating news. The first battle had been won, and why not this? If I had known that a metastatic melanoma is usually considered a death sentence, and that treatments only tend to extend life by a few months, I would have reacted differently.

    I remained bullish in my assessment as, a short time beforehand, she had embraced a wholefood plant-based diet. From the start I was skeptical about the treatment, fearing this could do more harm than good; as the sixteenth century physician Paracelsus put it, ‘every medicine is a poison in disguise’.

    Probably wisely however – though I will never know – I kept my counsel, at least to her, and most of my family. I cannot imagine how I would feel if I had persuaded her to get off the treatment, and she had died soon afterwards.

    However, I recently revisited a passage from Professor T. Colin Campbell’ 2013 book Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition, in which he describes the response of his wife Karen to a metastasised (Stage 3-Advanced) melanoma on her lymph gland. She refused any of the treatment alternatives her oncologist recommended, much to his annoyance.

    Campbell writes perceptively: ‘Cancer patients intensely want to believe in their oncologist, whom they see as holding the key to their recovery’. Despite refusing treatment, including surgery, Karen Campbell, maintaining a wholefood plant-based diet had lived a further eight years by 2013 without ill-effects, and appears to be still alive today. Obviously we cannot extrapolate too much on the basis of one case, but I cannot help asking myself: ‘what if?’.

    My mother was put on one trial treatment, and later a different one, of a form of immuno-therapy, which harnesses the immune system to attack cancer cells. It came as a shock to her system. Some months into it she developed a sore throat and high fever, which eventually required hospitalisation, and an antibiotic drip.

    Living with my parents through much of the long treatment period I was on hand for many of the oncology treatment days, and the debilitating nausea that followed. Her vitality declined precipitously: from being a committed walker, she found it increasingly difficult to go any distance; whether the cancer played a part in this I do not know.

    She managed, nonetheless, to take the odd foreign trip, overcoming her nerves, and became a grandmother to two further grandchildren in that period.

    She lasted almost three years on the treatment, maintaining the plant-based diet throughout – although she did occasionally eat fish after being encouraged to increase her protein intake. According to the consultant she was top of the class on the basis of her scans. He always professed satisfaction at how well she was doing, which did not exactly chime with the increasing levels of nausea she was experiencing. This also required her to take more and more medications, which lowered further her vitality.

    IV – Plant-Based Prevention?

    Disconcertingly, Mukherjee characterises the history of cancer research as, ‘intensely competitive’, and featuring, ‘a grim, nearly athletic, determination’. It seems patient welfare, as opposed to survival, has not always been to the fore, as experts compete for the next breakthrough in extending life, or finding an ever-elusive cure. The same commitment has not, alas, been shown to prevention strategies, which would bring no reward to the pharmaceutical sector that generally funds the research.

    In 2014 a retired Dublin G.P. John Kelly published a book entitled Stop Feeding Your Cancer in which he argued that ‘The minds of cancer specialists were so cluttered with their pharmaceutical and surgical obligations that they were unable to accommodate critical revisionary thinking.’

    Kelly’s account, which has been criticised for cherry-picking data, was inspired by his reading of the same T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study (2005). Campbell, no ethical vegan, conducted experiments on two groups of laboratory rats infected with cancer. The first group were given a diet comprising twenty percent animal protein. They all promptly died, but the second group were given a diet of only five percent animal protein, and all survived.

    Campbell performed these experiments in the Philippines after observing a lower survival rate among affluent cancer patients with diets high in animal products, compared to their impoverished peers on diets low in meat and dairy. In the laboratory Campbell also found vegetable proteins did not promote cancer, even when consumed in large quantities.

    IV Cure or Cause?

    The heartening news at the beginning of this year was that my mother’s tumours had all but disappeared from her lung, but she nevertheless continued to get sicker and sicker.

    Over time her face took on a disturbingly yellowish hue, which was eventually diagnosed as jaundice – in Galenic terms an excess of yellow bile. A good friend who is a G.P. confided to me that the overwhelming likelihood was that this was linked to her cancer.

    Still it was a great shock when the news came through of another tumour blocking her bile duct.

    It required a painful operation, on an already weakened patient, inserting a tube to stanch the flow of bile into the bloodstream. It never worked properly, and she declined painfully from that point, despite my father’s best efforts to master the appendage.

    I cannot help wondering whether, considering the prolonged bouts of nausea, the treatment itself had caused the inflammation which produced the tumour; the history of cancer is replete with examples of ‘cures’ doing more harm than good. For example, many chemotherapy agents are known carcinogens, and listed on the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Group 1 list as such.

    Mukherjee also describes chemotherapists as acting like ‘lunatic cartographers’ who ‘frantically drew and redrew their strategies to annihilate cancer’. My mother went through immuno-therapy, but the basic approach of poisoning the body in order to kill the cancer appears to be the same.

    It also begs the wider question as to whether a prolonged period on a debilitating cancer treatment is a life worth living.

    The absence of preventative cancer programmes in our systems of public health is nothing short of scandalous. The Chicago Tribune acknowledged in 1975 that the idea of ‘preventive medicine is faintly un-American. It means, first, recognizing that the enemy is us’. Where America leads other nations appear to follow.

    In Plato’s idealised Republic, Socrates castigates doctors that prolong the life of patients without curing them. He pays tribute to the carpenter who, after being prescribed a lengthy treatment regimen, replies:

    that he had no leisure time to be ill and that life is no use to him if he has to neglect his work and always be concerned with his illness. After that he’d bid good-bye to his doctor, resume his usual way of life, and either recover his health or, if his body couldn’t withstand the illness, he’d die and escape his troubles.

    There are of course now many procedures that are relatively simple – such as removing skin cancer – but I cannot help feeling, notwithstanding medical advances, that I too would prefer to die on the job rather than go through a debilitating, long-term course of cancer treatment. I prefer the preventative measure of a plant-based diet to reduce my own risk of developing cancer

    V – Depression

    Like many patients after a terminal diagnosis my mother developed symptoms of depression for which she was prescribed medication. She also benefitted greatly from spiritual counselling in the Catholic tradition from a devoted friend.

    She cast away doubts and annoyances with the Church, realising great benefit from simple prayer, during what the philosopher John Moriarty has described as a universal Golgotha experience. This may give Christianity an enduring relevance, despite historic failings.

    Those resistant to religion might consider the effect of psychedelic drugs on terminal cancer sufferers who experience depression. In How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (2018) Michael Pollan reveals how in NYU and Hopkins trials 85% of cancer patients showed ‘clinically significant reductions in standard measures of anxiety and depression that endured for at least six months after the psylocybin sessions’. Fascinatingly, in both trials ‘the intensity of the mystical experience volunteers reported closely correlated with the degree to which their symptoms [of depression] subsided’.

    *******

    There are no simple answers to the questions I have raised in this article, but based on my experience of losing a close relative to cancer, and reading up on the subject, I would argue that we need to alter the paradigm of research, to explore more fully preventative strategies rather than simply addressing the disease after it has emerged.

    Cancer is not all in the mind, and nor does it ever seem likely to be eradicated fully, but that correlation between good health and a sunny disposition is notable. Can general practitioners, in particular, develop ways of lifting our moods – without recourse to medication – while retaining a focus on physical signs of illness? Perhaps we need to train a new kind of physician, with mindfulness at the core of their study.

    Finally, why is it that public health authorities do not display the same commitment to dietary change as is shown towards curbing tobacco smoking? One conclusion that might be drawn is that pharmaceutical companies, and other vested interests, are an obstacle to this coming about.

     

    Jacqueline Armstrong RIP