PHILOSOPHY/NOT BORN YESTERDAY

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Insight Radar

 

23nd March 2009

9th March 2009

 

4th March 2009

IN A BRAVE NEW WORLD, ALL ASSUMPTIONS ARE OFF

20th February 2009

PERHAPS THERE IS A VERY SIMPLE REASON WHY NO ALIEN SPECIES HAS YET MADE CONTACT WITH US

'The Universe' Carl Sagan once wrote, 'is literally teeming with life'. The maths certainly support this view: with over 5000 stars already detected with orbiting planets, the Earth is almost certainly not a one-off. And as the billions of stars available in turn stretch into huge galaxies beyond which there are billions more galaxies, one would have to be some sort of probability flat-earther to deny the certainty of other intelligent life forms out there.

Yet to the best of my knowledge, we haven't been visited yet. Yes of course there are unexplained UFO sightings and Roswell incidents and allegedly secret US bases where little people with big heads are being dissected on a daily basis, but actually - there aren't. Every last one of these myths turns out under close examination (and I should know, because they've fascinated me for years) to be complete tosh.

With one exception in the late 1960s - when some very reliable witnesses chased a target across the skies of middle America for several hours, watched on an airport radar screen by equally level-headed witnesses - a viable explanation sooner or later comes to light. I think the only difference with this last one is that the reason hasn't been declassified yet; and if I had to put money on it, I'd say it was probably an early test of a stealth bomber. Not only does this explanation fit the circumstances, the case is also unusual in that the US military enthusiastically joined in the ET speculation - suggesting to an old cynic like me that they were delighted to have the 'alien visit' thing as a security distraction.

But the fact is, we should have been visited by now. The standard excuse - that the distances are too great - simply doesn't hold water. Having predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves before his death, as with most things Einstein turned out to be right: they're there, but at a frequency we can't see....or as yet, understand. But at some time during the next century, we will understand them - at which point interstellar travel ought to be a matter of hopping onto a wave and seeing for ourselves what really is circling round Alpha Centauri.

Now as only a hundred years ago we hadn't even got off the ground when it comes to travel, it's not too outrageous at this point to suggest that human knowledge is approaching a tipping-point: we've learnt more in the last ten years than the thousand before that, and so during the next few decades it's likely we'll know one hell of a lot more.

The big question is, will we get there? Rumours of Homo sapiens' demise have of course been greatly exaggerated over the years, but this is certainly one of only two periods in my lifetime when the outlook has seemed decidedly bleak.

The last one was from about 1957 to 1968 - from Sputnik I via the Cuban crisis to the Russian invasion of Czechoslavkia. I think for much of that decade, many young people saw Armageddon as almost inevitable - in fact I've always felt that the hedonistic anarchism of the Hippy era was a 'live for today, for tomorrow we'll be irradiated' response. Two seminal movies of the period - Dr Strangelove and On the Beach - portrayed the cause and aftermath respectively of a future nuclear war. Looking back at them now, I can still feel the hairs on my head prickle as the bomb leaves the US warplane with Slim Pickens riding it like a rodeo cowboy - or the streets fall empty in Australia after the last person has died of radiation sickness. These are still powerful films.

Well, we got through that one, and I'm wise enough now to realise that only mutually assured destruction ('MAD') enabled us to do it. The instinct to survive is stronger than the instinct for lebensraum, and so perhaps a peaceful outcome was always on the cards. But compared to the current period, the Cold War looks like a minor skirmish - because this time, there's a lot more to it than simply two competing ideologies.

The facts have been presented by many far more eminent folks than myself over many years, but in summary it looks like this. There's a hole in the ozone layer half the size of Canada (irradiation), so much CO2 being belted out by the human being and all his works that probably nothing at this point can stop a five-degree temperature change by 2030 (disastrous climate/sea level changes/food shortages), there are 3300% more of us than there were 20,000 years ago, and precisely the same amount of water (mass dehydration), religious fanaticism and the New Imperialism suggest increasing conflicts over resources and merciful Gods (more irradiation, perhaps), AIDS will almost certainly wipe out a good 60% of Black Africa by the time it's either burnt out or been cured (more conflicts about who takes over), and an apocalyptic economic breakdown which is only just beginning to unfold - coupled with energy shortages - will make our species more desperate than perhaps ever before in our history (yet more conflicts and more pollution, further outside chance of irradiation).

Now of course, the thing about futurology is that it's always wrong: in an almost Dickensian sense 'something will turn up'. It could be an enormous human pandemic (you might think this a bad thing, but it is something the Earth needs more than anything at this point), or a major breakthrough in solar energy, a spectacular and cheap cure for AIDS, the Israelis nuking Iran's reactors, the dawn of a new more enlightened era of commerce, the sudden mass production of efficiently desalinated water and the emergence of somekind of benign world hero who gives the banks a slap, writes off all the debts, shoots Harriet Harman and sends us merrily on our way.

The difference between those last two paragraphs is that the former contains probabilities, and the latter pure speculation. And this suggests a further possibility to me: could it be that life-forms who achieve a certain level of reproductive success (largely as a result of aggressive intelligence) are doomed to destroy either or both themselves and their environment? That is, all highly intelligent and ruthless species must inevitably wind up as victims of their own 'success' - if one could call it that?

If so, it would make the point of existence in a three-D universe even harder to fathom. But it would explain why fleets of large spacecraft in the sky have never arrived in Earth's atmosphere.

 

12th February 2009

IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHO'S DOING THE RESEARCH

 

AN ALTERNATIVE LIFE WITH ZERO GRUBBY HAIR, SANDALS AND SCRUFFY COMMUNES

We had to move some money around last week, and because all my current account banking is done with Nationwide these days, it hasn't taken place at the lightning speed we've all rather foolishly come to expect. Jan was a bit grumpy about it - whereas for once, I wasn't.

Our culture has become obsessed with speed and efficiency, but with wisdom comes the realisation that beyond a certain level, efficiency is not only a chimera: it's also capable of having seriously negative consequences.

I'm not with the Nationwide by accident. They are the biggest of the mutual former building societies, and remain a mutual (ie, unquoted on the stock exchange) outfit. When others chose greed and bizarrely globalist aspirations in the mid to late 1990s, the Nationwide saw the opportunity simply to dominate a niche by being Britain's biggest mutual.

Some niche. The company has enormous reserves, millions of satisfied customers - and above all, no net debt, toxic or otherwise. Like all those concerns with goodwill, ambition, brains and common sense, it knows that investors are infinitely more important than the unlucky people choosing to saddle themselves with a repayment system costing something like 3.5 times the capital borrowed. To date, therefore, this success story hasn't cost the taxpayer a brass farthing or a plugged nickel - depending on which is the nearest ocean as you read this.

Several other mutuals - dozens of them in fact - decided on the same route of remaining loyal to their routes and their members. We don't hear a lot about them in the Daily Doom that is our newspaper set at the moment....but that's because there is little or no gloom among the mutuals. They're all there moving at around 70 mph - and because that isn't 140 mph, so far there hasn't been a pile-up.

So that's the main reason I bank with Nationwide. The other one is to do with having had indifferent service from Barclays for over a quarter of a century. Toujours la politesse, that's me: over that time they bounced cheques because of their own errors (three times), cocked up a house deposit transfer, shifted my centre of service seven times, and gave me advice (just the once, that was enough) which - had I taken it - would literally have left me a pauper. Just like the bank itself today, when you think about it.

I shop at the Coop. There are several reasons for this: the stores are well-designed, with an amazing balance between quick shop and big shop; the produce is very good these days; they don't have Asda price, but then they don't have Asda staff either. But above all, the Coop too is a mutual organisation. Small compared to the omnivore Tesco, and lacking in that company's determination to rip the heart out of every community it touches. And probably too dependent on food lines - as a result of which it has just ever so quietly completed a merger with the Britannia....also a mutual society.

If we get bored with the Coop, Lady Yesterday and I go to Waitrose. Silly to shop there for the basics, but a smashing treat once a month: you pass a delightful hour spent among quiet, well-mannered people dressed in stylish uniforms (and that's just the customers), easily the best produce in the sector, superb cheese and fish counters, excellent value wines, and genuinely exotic (rather than just celeb-chef fancy) ingredients from around the world. The staff are....well, beyond personable: genuine. They have learned a script like everyone else these days, but the delivery is more Corner Shop than Stepford Android.

Waitrose is of course part of the John Lewis Group, also a completely mutual company. All of these concerns are having their problems at the moment (we are after all in the fastest house-price collapse and consumer demand fall-off in history) but none of the problems were of their making, and none of them have mad Bourse traders short-selling their shares or panicking about their profits. They are all very profitable (during the worst Christmas period ever, Waitrose sales were up 20% year-on-year last December) but they aren't on a profit treadmill - and all the money goes back into business investment or member bonuses.

We have ignored this lesson on our doorstep for far too long.

Although Baroness Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, her revolution did not really become a fact until General Galtieri scored perhaps the most spectacular foreign policy own-goal the world has yet witnessed in 1983. Buoyed up by what Andrew Marr memorably called 'her luck in choosing enemies', Mrs T went on to enjoy an orgy of utility privatisation and financial deregulation. As the seeming antidote for the annihilation of British manufacturing industry that had preceded it, the change was so spectactular, it had the effect of blinding almost everyone to the truth of what was really happening.

The process that began then (and has accelerated under Labour's more cynical but rather less commercial fellow-travellers) was one of life imbalance, familial fracture, overweening hubris, grubby practices, euphemised debt, material and celebrity obsession, overstated wealth, degrading ethical standards, silly corporate targets applied to education, and a belief in almost every sector of society that one could survive (probably even prosper) without doing anything useful - 0r thinking very hard about consequences.

The useful - nay, vital - thing we have stopped doing as a nation is making and exporting things. And the ways in which we have stopped thinking about consequences cover a ghastly spectrum from big cars and mountainous debt to unloved children and hopelessly puerile observation of glaringly obvious facts.

I am often criticised for being too dark with Not Born Yesterday's content, a view which until recently I'd regarded as harsh but reasonable. Readers who still feel this are now, I would contend, being misguided and unfair. Since 2003 (with some refinement during 2005-6) a consistent argument has been advanced: that globalist bourse-driven and debt-fuelled economics must surely end in tears, and that more local, community-based green manufacture is the way out of it. Further, at a cultural level nby has consistently questioned the dogma of endless output growth, remote shareholders and neo-liberalism in favour of more mutuality, sensible life-balance and the revitalisation of community and family life.

Eighteen months ago I wrote a piece observing that 'because I don't want to be a Yuppie doesn't automatically make me a Swampy'. For me, this is the one insight entirely missing fom the cavalcade of insane ideas now being 'applied' as medicine to an ailing economic system. The fundamental premise of high-debt, high-output capitalism is, in the context of a choking planet and crumbling communities, incurably sick. And until a world leader has the bravery to recognise this and change course, the pain will go on.

Stimuli and kick-starts and refinancing packages are fine for your common or garden recession; they may even do some good in the end for this crisis - albeit by bankrupting all of us in the process. But to reiterate the point so often made in these columns, ours is a cultural crisis about whether relying solely upon human greed to finance and run business is either wise or possible.

There is another, better way to run the world. The Nationwide, the Coop and John Lewis prove it. 'There Is No Alternative' simply won't wash any more.

 

23rd January 2009

 

8th January 2009

WHY WE SHOULD ALL FEAR POLICY WONKS WHO BECOME LEADERS

I've been blogging recently on a few politico sites - most notably Libdemvoice. The great thing about the Liberal Democrats is the faultless tolerance of anything said by anyone at any time - there is no censorship at all - anything said about anything gets published.

The responses, however, are instructive. Any and all forms of straight-talking lateral thinking are greeted by response blogs of upraised arms, screams of Oh my God, and accusations meant to suggest that you wish only to be a Supreme Dictator. But what they really mean, of course, is 'stop disturbing my critical path analysis'.

A Vision - above all - is the ultimate in suspicious behaviour. 'Ah, so you have strong convictions, eh? Well - you don't belong here'. So much better, after all, to examine small policies closely for evidence of flaws. Thus, pieces arguing the toss on whether Nick Clegg's reshuffle represents a five-degree turn to left or right evoke dozens of argumentative answers, insults, counter-insults, statistical analyses, quotes, claims and every other imaginable interpretation.

It would be too easy to dump this observation of on-message policy obsession on the Libdems alone, but the truth is that all the main Party policy keenies engage in such pinhead-angel wonkism. For me, this begs the question whether the ultimate problem really is power corrupting people - or the desire in the first place to be a politician (in the sense of a policy realiser).

This was the view of a man who was in the 1960s something of a hero of mine (above). He is rather obscure these days (although you can find him in Wikipedia) probably because he's been dead for some thirty years - and most of his interesting stuff was written in the 1930s. His name was Harold D. Lasswell, and his most famous thought was that anyone who wanted to be a politician was very likely insane, and thus ought to put him or herself up for rigorous psychoanalysis. While this sounds a fraction extreme, one has to bear in mind that Lasswell lived in the era of Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler - so there was an abundance of evidence around to support his thesis. Further, at that time Freudian supremacy was beginning to take hold. After 1940 (and Hitchcock's Spellbound is the best evidence you'll ever see of this) the general feeling was that men in tweed jackets with leather elbows asking piercing elliptical questions could put anyone on the right track in the end, given enough therapy sessions.

All this sounds just a bit daft nowadays, but Lasswell's fundamental point intrigues and impresses me still. Sure, there is an element of Catch 22 in the whole concept - one winds up by definition in an anarchist world with no politicians - but he added other bits to his thesis as time went on. A notable one was this:

'men are often poor judges of their own interests, flitting from one alternative to the next without solid reason'

While not an original observation, the conclusions Lasswell drew from it are. He believed (as do I) that most people have a healthy lack of interest in politics, and are fickle. They therefore rarely notice when obsessive wonks of one form or another have gained the top job.

Applying his ideas to, for instance, Gordon Brown is not that difficult. For all that much of Freud's mumbo-jumbo is now rejected by those of open mind, he nevertheless gave the world wonderful insights about what sort of behaviour one might expect from the progeny of this or that type of father, mother, abuse, traumatic experience and so on. In March 2007 I called upon much of this cod psychology to write a lengthy prediction of what a Brown Premiership might be like. And though I say so myself, almost all of it has come true. Had Lasswell been given Gordon Brown to psycho-analyse, there can be no doubt that he would have declared the man unfit for purpose.

Before dismissing him as a dated idealist, we should remember that Harold Lasswell's practical war work was notably useful. Both the OSS and MI5 used his analyses of senior Nazis and Hitler himself to judge what events might trigger what actions. Lasswell's observations proved almost always to be right on the money.

He became, in the end, a behaviouralist (the 'al' is important) in that he thought previous actions and mental influences far more important than statements of intent. I agree with him wholeheartedly on that point. So does a huge sector of the market research industry these days: 'study not just what the respondent says, but more importantly what he or she bought in the end'. Applying this simple rule to Gordon Brown made wise heads in the Labour Party form a coalition to try and stop him becoming leader. It bore the simple name Anyone But Gordon. In everyday life, Americans have a generic phrase to sum this common-sense behaviouralist view up: 'If it waddles, quacks and swims like a duck, chances are it's a duck'.

Ironically, it is the purist wonks who first expect too much of their leaders, and suspect them of revisionism at every turn. (Brown did this with Kinnock). But in analysing every last nuance of policy syntax - and applauding when those in charge stick anally to the letter of that policy - the wonkies come to know only process. They always mistrusted ideas, but now they positively frown on them. To them, a vision is 'flakey', an insight 'unsubstantiated', an initiative 'off message'. Blinkered to the possibilities of thought from outside the road map, they not only fail to notice that the road leads over a cliff, they retreat into their specialism...blithely accepting graft, wars, odd alliances, and even lunacy perpetrated by others. This, too, was Brown under Blair.

More crucially, when the policy fails - and once vehement denials are overtaken by reality - they are completely rudderless. As Lasswell suggested, what they often wind up doing in such circumstances is a complete U-turn. He cited Stalin after 1941 as the classic example (as indeed he was) - but Brown since last September has exhibited precisely the same behaviour. As the Communist tyrant became a shameless Russian nationalist, so too has Brown ditched everything he has preached (even if not practised) since 1997.

Contemporary politics and multinational company management is full of these grey, narrow technocrats. They have no antennae for when their utterances are anything from naive to obviously contrived. The other most obvious example is David Miliband, a man who so obviously needs a script, a career path, a neutral answer and a position, what we see is what we get: a robot. He is a former wonk - tried, tested, and now found wanting in the face of capricious world events. Jacqui Smith is another. Andy Burnham, Adam Crozier, Ruth Kelly....the list goes on and on: former researchers all, ultimately working for the great former researcher himself, Gordon Brown. And not a real, live original creative thinker among them.

Some might think it odd after a decade of principle-free Blairism to be arguing now for the removal of a process freak, but I don't think so. Between slippy-slidey smugness and obsessive attention to policy detail, there is surely a happy medium. Churchill changed Parties twice and then formed a coalition with a third: but he remained that most productive of politicians: a realist in pursuit of beliefs - and a man who preferred 'Action this Day' to endless spin on the one hand or frozen debate on the other.

This then is the insight: those who know only policies - and never assess or question the objectives - are to be avoided. Those who know only that they want to be 'career' policy enacters - are the most likely to be suspicious of all those people and institutions in their way. As Harold D. Lasswell believed, they are going nowhere of any constructive purpose - only towards their own destruction, and that of liberty.

His Freudian screening ideas remain -perhaps thankfully - impractical. But his observations about controlling personalities and distracted electors were and are spot on.

 

14th December 2008

ON UNBEING A SOMEBODY IN NOWHERE

 

8th December 2008

FORGET MONEY AND ECONOMIC SYSTEMS: FOCUS ON HUMANS

 

Over the last fourteen months or so since an irrational global commerce 'system' began to unravel, one of the most frustrating things for me has been watching an endless stream of captains, experts, politicians and pundits in the media talking about nothing beyond cold technicalities. Cold they may be, but their purpose is straightforward: to provide a smokescreen for inflammatory human error on a grand scale.

If I read of one more banker blaming Federal money-printing, hear one more Finance Minister talk of kick-starting an economy, or watch one more Mekon-faced investment twit on TV talking about credit default swaps and toxic debt, I may feel genuinely inclined to fill my shoes with bombs and go into the nearest Bourse I can find, stopping only to take Robert Peston hostage along the way.

To err is human, as the saying goes - and to forgive is divine. But even the Catholic principle of absolution calls for the sinner to try and not do it again. The trouble with the human race is that it remembers every slight, but learns no wisdom.

As a species, we make mistakes for three reaons alone: incompetence, hubris and denial. The first I really can forgive, but as for the other two, age has not so much mellowed me as rendered me closer every year to those who wish for the big pit with plenty of quicklime on tap. Not for nothing has the joke endured in my lifetime: 'What do you call 10,000 bankers on a bonfire? A good start'.

Hubris has led us, since the mid 1990s, to believe that living under a millstone of debt is healthy for both the individual and society - and that a capitalist model based on production targets is the only answer on a planet whose atmosphere is already choking to death. Denial presents itself in every possible way: that globally aligned banks will never succumb to domino theory, that wealth will trickle down, that deregulating the greedy is good for everyone, that there is no such thing as an obscene profit, that playing Russian roulette with packaged debt products is driving business forward - and that Elmer and Rose Flugg of The Big Redwood, Kentucky can pay back a $400,000 mortgage on the tree-den extension to their trailer.

As the only species on earth with consciousness and introspection, we are the only living beings around who know death is inevitable. Thus, with brains wired to forget this 99.9% of the time, we are designed and fully equipped to deny anything and everything. It keeps us sort of balanced, but this (plus immortality hubris) has produced everything from the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust to Walmart and the War of Jenkins Ear.

So when designing systems for the making, taxing and distribution of wealth, there is only one consideration that matters: human nature, and how to deal with it. Our current disaster (and it is going to be a disaster of First World War proportions) has nothing whatever to do with banks, money, multinational business, deregulation, interest rates, hedge funds or any other of the mechanisms we have come to know so well, such that as always familiarity breeds contempt. No - the one and only focus that matters is the complex mish-mash of cerebral matter and synapse electronics that is Us.

Only a superfluity of denial genes can explain political correctness, debt-fuelled economic growth, and naive social policies in that context; and only our hubris DNA could possibly produce the Tower of Babel, the Titanic, Hollywood, Speer's designs for a new Berlin Reichstag, the Soviet system, The American Way, and New Labour fiscal policies.

Since the Greek City States, a few men and women have recognised Us as the core of the problem. But their denial and hubris has often gotten in the way. Hobbes thought capital punishment for weeing in an alleyway might be the answer, Kropotkin that a free-for-all was the best approach. Mill got as close as anyone to a concept of achieving widespread happiness, but had a naive faith in Man's capacity for improvement. Marx (and Lenin) felt that once one got rid of one lot of greedy folks, there'd be no more coming along to take their place - so they too showed a similar naivety.

Baroness Thatcher mixed a few of these together: the Narrow Lady truly believed that left to their own devices, appetitive moguls would reach a certain point and then give it all away to the Cats' Protection League - whereas Union officials were all grasping servants of Moscow. But both she and Reagan (and both Bushes) believed that what most turned Homo sapiens on was capital - but neuroscience has since proved them comprehensively wrong: man does not live by bread alone, and there is such a thing as society after all. And families, fun, Crispy Duck and community spirit.

My suggestion from here on is not to go with the flow, but rather with the flaws. Not excuse them, but understand them. Don't expect a Good Samaritan inside every arsehole just gagging to get out: and don't label anti-social citizens as suitable only for Short Sharp Shocks followed by the Scrap Heap - aka jail.

As ever, what we need is more humility (the opposite of hubris) towards the needs of others; and more empiricism (the opposite of denial) in relation to our opportunities and problems. But at this particular point in the faltering rise from primeval mud to something approaching divinity, the most urgent requirement of the human race is to eschew baseless wish fulfilment in favour of harsh reality: by all means aim for the stars - but let's not persuade ourselves and others we can do it on a 3-Speed Sturmey Archer bike powered by March Hares.

 

22nd November 2008

ANY ELITE MAY BE BETTER THAN NONE

 

An assumption of pretty much everyone in the West during my lifetime has been that the democratisation of society and experience could only be a good thing. Given that in many ways it very clearly hasn't been, the issue deserves some interrogation.

Some of the causes of such dashed hopes are - to me anyway - obvious. Rounded and tolerant education has been abandoned in favour of idiotic targets; the media explosion has not been effected with much sense of social responsibility; and famous potential role models in everything from politics via music to soccer have failed to give any kind of moral lead.

But there's an element of decline in social behaviour that is less easily explicable. And worryingly, I find that antidiluvian ideas about why that might be are gaining ground in my mind as every year passes.

I have to be one of the luckiest individuals ever born: a schoolboy under the beneficent Grammar School regime ushered in by Butler's 1944 Education Act, a teenager in the mid Sixties, a student during the sit-in-and-power-to-the-people era, an adman during the golden 1970s of JWT and CDP, a major gainer from the 1980s madness, and retired early with no debt at the age of 52. No wars, but plenty of social mobility - and Free Love before it became dangerous. Yet somehow, I've begun to feel that this very luck was given to me in stages - and thus, I learned how to handle it. That's the thing with license: it can very easily get far too hot to handle.

I suspect that too much too soon may be history's verdict our culture since the late 1960s. Behaviour forms and mores have been awarded widely, whereas previously these were available only to the few: the people, as my Aunt Lizzie used to say, who know how to behave.

I suspect a major catalyst in my change of mindset was watching a film, The Duchess of Devonshire. Despite its flaws as a piece of history, the movie was saved by the quite astonishing performance of Ralph Fiennes as the Duke. Handed a role he could've played as a cardboard shit, Fiennes took inspiration from some great scriptwriting and managed to make Devonshire a man in and of his time - but above all, a man with serious responsibilities.

As a young man, I thought aristocratic behaviour from the seventeenth to the twentieth century as beyond the pale: riddled with cruelty, bigotry and double standards. But mid eighteenth century behaviour watched from the perspective of 1968 teaches the observer nothing. A philanderer, boozer and selfish hunter with dogs, the Duke was nevertheless portrayed by Fiennes as probably what he was: a highly intelligent man brought up among a boorish class with a genuine sense of duty. Towards the end of the film, as some form of rapprochement occurs between the Duke and his wife, great direction, sensitive acting and brilliant writing combine to offer a clear view of what Devonshire thinks he is about: 'my values may seem unthinking to you, but without them, an anarchic rabble is likely to be the only result'.

My Dad held this view - and this of course instantly made it anathema to me. Worse, he was of the opinion that regal and aristocratic licentiousness wasn't decadent, because in the end hearth and home and family would always come first with such people: they might stray, but when scandal raised its ugly head, they had discipline: appearances had to be preserved. At the time (a period during which I pronounced the word 'petit bourgeois' with spitting venom) I thought this a repulsively hypocritical idea. Now, I'm not so sure.

If nothing else, the ruling elite's behaviour in Britain for the two hundred years before 1963 - when as Philip Larkin hilariously wrote, sex began - recognised two vital things: stable societies will always be, for all their faults, more civilised; and all human beings are frail mechanisms constantly prey to temptation. As a means of dealing with society's contemporary problems, this strikes me as a far more thoughtful, empathetic and empirical philosophy than the puritanical cant of our politically correct cadres.

Two things above all separate us from the Duke's time - the long-overdue recognition by our culture that women are not and should never be chattels, and the existence of a prurient, invasive media set. Some would choose to reverse both of these. My own conclusion would be that each woman needs to find her own best expression of individuality, and invasive media demand higher standards of those in public life. But this still leaves me with a dilemma: given access to that which Devonshire and his peers would have denied them, the mass of society has been unable to handle it.

So the old sod may have been right. And if so,what are we to make of that uncomfortable thought?

 

9th November 2008

A WINTER'S TALE

I love this last bit of the year. I get all hunter-gatherer about it, for - while the short nights become tedious by mid January - the first bout of them is oddly exciting. Two of my favourite songs are Autumn Almanac by the Kinks and Good King Wenceslas, not only because I love the melodies, but also because I find myself moved by the lyrics - sweeping up leaves of a mustard-coloured yellow and gathering winter fuuuoooel. This November bridge between bonfire night and Epiphany is when my genes return to the middle ages, and I feel an affinity with Bruegel paintings. As the clocks go back and all the light after four pm is living on borrowed time, the hibernatory instincts from which we all come get the upper hand: I'm out in the woodshed collecting logs, bunging huge casseroles in the oven and opening bottles of strong Italian wine.

It's the one time of the year when darkness takes on another quality. It has a ruddiness at the edges, something to embrace rather than resist. One is in and warm, rather than out and cold. And the obligatory fire adds other kinds of comfort.

I was once in northern Spain at this time of year, at a time when much of life lay ahead and I had never before shared time with a relaxed, cosmopolitan and slightly hippy bourgeoisie. The walls of our billet were a stark white, and there was talk in the evenings: of goals and ambitions and ideals. Later there was a small, wonderfully pine-flavoured fire over which local fish were roasted with late tomatoes and sprigs of rosemary. Dark and unfamiliar vinegar was sprinkled over the result, producing a yielding ambrosia which blew me away. Spicey red wine was poured from jugs, and hopes poured forth from everyone.

This is the thing as old years draw towards an end: while there is always an optimism about what might be achieved in the one that follows, above all it's that short period when one can somehow feel 'look, forget all the stuff that went wrong - we're all here together now, and little else matters.' Although New Year is for resolution, Old Year is for affiliation.

 

6th November 2008

LET'S KEEP BUSINESS AND PLEASURE SEPARATE

 

The depth and farcical nature of 'Lord' Mandelson's degenerate unwillingness to accept normal principles of behaviour is once more in the news - as this and many other organs predicted the moment his appointment as business secretary shocked the Nation and delighted those in the New Labour Fuhrerbunker. In senior business and public service positions, it simply will not do for executives and officials to pretend that pleasure (or 'entertaining' as it is always euphemistically called) has no influence on their decisions to award or not to award, to cut or to raise, to allow or to ban. People with ethics avoid any such situations like the plague.

But the principle is equally important at all levels of social interaction. I'm not concerned with Mandelson here: he gives the consistent appearance of being a starstruck, crooked rentboy, he is a proven liar and dissembler, and he is an unusually unpleasant human being. Thankfully, he's a tiny and almost completely irrelevant minority. My anxiety revolves around the normalisation in our culture of using social networks to further one's business interests.

One of my pet dislikes is the concept of 'networking' as it is interpreted and used today. In the context of business-to-business, it is on the whole perfectly acceptable: one meets and cultivates acquaintances among customers and clients, and if the standard of product or service provided is of a high (hopefully distinctive) quality, then they will introduce us to further business opportunities....and so the network broadens. This is entirely healthy, for through such a system superiority flourishes.

It isn't of course healthy in an environment where backhanders, bribes and freebies are accepted as normal - for example in British local government these days. Corruption does exactly what it says on the tin: it corrupts the natural order and defends the ordinary.

But as with most things to do with Mammon, applying networking principles outside the business context is almost always a mistake. So much so that - among my circle - calling someone a networker is an insult. The reason is that I've deliberately chosen to keep my privy counsel strictly to those who agree with me on this point: and I did so not from wanting yes-men, but from bitter previous experience.

"I'm just mixing a bit of business with pleasure" is a common excuse, but it doesn't bear examination. With a person who is partly or chiefly a provider of income, one is always on guard to some extent. Using social networks to move on in commercial life is for me a betrayal of what one wants from and gives to a friendship: the truth, however unwelcome; stimulation; reliability; and loyalty. A business relationship will always corrupt those values in the end - unless of course both participants were corrupt in the first place.

I worked in advertising, research and market strategy for thirty-four years, and while a reasonable proportion of my friends used to be office colleagues, none are former clients of mine. To be honest, there were very few clients I genuinely liked and, while I was at ease entertaining them, it usually required an unwise amount of alcohol in order to make the experience bearable. As a rule, I kept business and friends strictly separate.

On occasion, events blurred the line. They always ended in an abrupt rupture of the relationship, and always by me. Some may find this obsessive, but people 'using' me to get on always felt dirty, and always evoked my rage.

As with all things in a broken culture, the requirement is not to pass all sorts of proscriptive and censorious legislation in order to root out corruption. Rather, the answer is to gradually change the mores associated with commerce. Thirty-five years ago, for example, every client lunch took place on a sea of alcohol. Today that would be unthinkable in most circumstances. I would like to see offers of entertainment outside working hours become vaguely vulgar and naff - almost an invasion of privacy.

But there is a broader principle here which I feel to be even more important for social health. That is, the need to draw a line where, in almost all circumstances, the business life ends and the community/family life begins. Peter Mandelson doesn't care about the latter, but the rest of us need to. It was entirely predictable that this myopic queen would try to relax employment deregulation in order to show the business community he has cojones, and utterly daft. Not only will it make no difference at all to our economic problems, it continues to foster the entirely bankrupt idea of 'putting in the hours' at the office. Again, the change in social acceptability needs to be shifted towards a place where, for the overwhelming majority, only incompetence or a Billy Nomates lifestyle justifies working late and at weekends....and thus one doesn't want to be seen doing it.

All work and no play does indeed make Jack a dull boy - and a bad citizen. But all networking and no play makes Jack nothing better than a grubby manipulator.

 

4th October 2008

 

ECUMENICAL WITH THE TRUTH

Welcome to Episode 41 of Global Financial Crisis - It wont me sir, 'onest. This latest example of altered reality comes from The Spectator.

I don't take the Speccie any more. I used to have a subscription, but then the ghastly people bought it and Boris went off in search of dragons to slay - following which it's become rather more vulgar and less cerebral in its reactionariness. These days I read it just to see what's going on at the fringe meetings. (I read Pilger's stuff and Tribune for the same sort of reason).

Readers who've been with us since the start of this series must forgive me if I bring new recruits up to speed. As Lehman Brothers was showing its navel to the world two weeks ago, nby predicted that The Search for the Guilty would now begin - the Admiration of the Everlasting Deregulated Boom having lost rather too much of its credibility for those of sound mind.

Since that time, various culprits have been identified by those of the Right, the media, the Left, the pessimists, the banking community, the optimists and various government figures. The culprits thus identified have been various government figures, the optimists, the banking community, the pessimists, the Left, the media, and the Right. Oddly enough, to date, nobody has actually said "I'm to blame", and very few observers are holding their breath in anticipation of this outcome.

The latest speaker in this blamestorming session is Dennis Sewell in the aforementioned Spectator. I'd say 'none other than' in classic William Hickey style, but the truth is that he's a Beeb jiournalist and author of a tedious tome The Catholics. His new bid for fame, however, is an economic conspiracy theory that's a Fawkes short of a plot.

Dirty Den's hypothesis goes like this: 'No bankers anywhere in America were doing anything remotely illegal, stupid or reckless until Clinton came into office trailed by a motley collection of appalling lesbians and pc nutters. This nasty set of Fifth Columnists then set about their work of destroying a perfectly tuned and 100% functional banking system, and of course the rest is history'. The absolute corker in his piece is in one midway paragraph when - with no hint of irony - Sewell asks of those bankers engaged in lending to Kentucky inbreeds complete with banjos and near-cyclops vision:

'What could possibly have induced them to act so recklessly, and so out of character?'

Well stripe me pink Mr Sewell, how long have you got?

There are so many holes in Dennis Sewell's rather silly rewrite of history, it's like a region of the sub-atomic zone: the gaps between real bits are unimaginably enormous, such that even to the careful observer, there seems to be nothing there at all. But for the sake of my ire - and for the information of future generations who just might give credence to The Sewell Memorandum - the Black Hole count follows in short shrift.

First, research shows there are no Clintons or pc Democrats in the UK, but our sub-prime and mad middle class debt structures are even worse than America's. Two, there are clues to be found among words like Hoover, 1929, Gordon Gecko, m&a manipulators and the 1973 Secondary Bank fiasco in the UK. For much of this fun, Clinton wasn't even a Governor, and pc hadn't been born. Three, Hedge Funds (who now control 50% of trades on behalf of 0.2% of investors) have systematically attacked one bank target after another. Four, to my certain knowledge, HSBC, Barclays, Natwest, B&B, Northern Rock and RBS drove credit salespeople to hit targets regardless of normal banking criteria from 2004 onwards. (A close friend of mine gaveup his job because of it). Fifth, as not many senior Wall St bankers are Kennedy Democrats, why pray were they so willing to do Slick Willy's bidding? And last but not least, Sewell presents not a shred of hard evidence to support any of his argument. It is all 'there was', 'and so thus', 'everyone knew' and so forth.

There are few greater critics of the mad Achtenbergs and Harmans than me, but asking them to carry the can for our present predicament is a tad like blaming jumpy Polish border guards for the Second World War.

Regular devotees of this column (and your patience in the face of persistent repetition and deviation is much appreciated) will know that even I must bring such madness to an end, however amusingly cruel the monitor of madness might be. So - for one last farewell performance never-to-be-repeated time:

Greedy banks, lax and corrupt politicians and anti-customer IT hypocrites are largely responsible for exploiting the gullibility of those ordinary folks who bought into The Sting after 1985. For any scam to succeed, greed and impatience for wealth must be present - and so the plastic card and bling generation must also line up for the headmaster's cane. And of course, the 1960s if-it-feels-good-do-it and Thatcherite there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-obscene-profit should be somewhere near the head of that very same queue.

In short, it's the culture stupid. It's Homo sapiens. It's every last bloody one of us.

 

30th September 2008

 

IS THERE REALLY A STATE CALLED 'MAD'?

Despite the man's global infamy and many recorded speeches, there is but one remaining tape of Adolf Hitler having a private conversation. The conversation was less private than he realised, because the Norwegian security services bugged Hitler and Quisling in 1942 during the Fuhrer's brief visit to the country. Its purpose was to steel the Scandinavian SS to their task of holding back the hordes of Communist Untermenschen on the Russian Front. The audio clip is about ten minutes long, but for all that brevity is absolutely remarkable - and for a history anorak like me, fascinating.

The surprise lies in that we are supposed to be listening to a psychopath - a megalomaniac whose hugely engorged ego resulted in the death of millions, and whose powers of messianic, hate-filled persuasion are alleged to have made a large and cultured nation go mad for some twelve years. In fact what we hear is the calm, measured voice of a military commander discussing the War, its progress and overall strategy, with great frankness and erudition.

Also clear (or at the very least, strongly suggested) is that while he might have said all sorts of apparently potty things in public, Hitler didn't believe all of it. The Russians for instance - dismissed by him on numerous occasions as decadent, genetically weak Slavs - are described in this surviving fragment as brave, well-organised and more than a match for the Wehrmacht. He also speaks openly of mistakes made, of underestimating the Russian winter, and of admiring some of the speeches Stalin has made to his people.

The clip wasn't available when I was doing my University thesis on 'The psychopathology of Adolf Hitler', because (I assume) the Norwegian security authorities kept it secret until everyone involved was dead. Had it been so, I would have written a very different dissertation - probably rather more in line with the minority view of A J P Taylor, whose line was that Hitler was no more than a cynical chancer who made things up as he went along. Taylor always insisted that the Nazi leader merely used anti-semitism and daft racial theories generally as a means of (a) whipping up popular support, and (b) justifying his Lebensraum programme of conquest. The clip has also been used by the creepy David Irving as further evidence that, far from being a fanatic, not only did Hitler not order the Final Solution, he knew nothing about it.

Irving's 'theory' holds that the Fuhrer inadvertantly suffered the consequences of the 'will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?' syndrome, an idea so completely at variance with the facts that a two-hour tape of Hitler reciting Hebrew scriptures would not support it. As with the conquest of the East and the elimination of democracy, Adolf Hitler made brutally clear what he had in mind for the Jews in his rambling and tedious tome Mein Kampf. It would be odd indeed if this - the central plank of his political credo - was the one thing in the book he decided not to carry out.

For me, a far more interesting and realistic hypothesisis generated by the tape is that Hitler ordered the Holocaust to go ahead when he was sane; in fact, ordered it to go ahead when he may have thought Himmler's eugenics nonsense was just that. On one occasion noted by Hitler's architect Speer, the German leader casually remarked to Goering about Himmler, "Little Heini is a chicken farmer with some crazy ideas, but he is a believer, and such people are important." This soundstome rather more like a cynic than a madman.

Anyone who's ever dealt with mad folks will tell you that seriously mentally ill people can act normally for very long periods of time - and they can be extremely adept at hiding their affliction. This is particularly true of psychopaths, and a good enough reason on its own over the years to ignore Lord Longford's pleas for Myra Hyndley's release.

However, both this tape of Hitler and the more recent neuroscience findings are altering many of our views about what madness is - if anything. More and more it seems to be a congenital condition that can be exacerbated by life experiences - not something solely created by trauma, as the Freudians would have us believe. Equally, it seems to be sensitive to genetic, chemical or even surgical treatment in some cases. (This has been true of schizophrenia for twenty years, an illness that baffled medics for centuries)

I'm coming increasingly to believe that 'madness' as a term will seem as ignorant as words like 'demons' and 'blood imbalance' in the near future. And yet paradoxically, what the evidence now suggests is that the insanity plea itself needs to be looked at very closely. "He can't help it, he's mad" is a rationale given for many acts of foul inhumanity. When it suits him or her, the psychopath can be either extremely mad or entirely well-balanced. Sociopaths (and I've worked with one or two over the decades) are just as manipulative and cunning: they may be tragically screwed up and destined to be unhappy throughout their lives, but over time boy do they hit a lot of innocent folks with the cross they bear.

The reason why Die Untergang is far and away the best movie ever made about Hitler lies in the characterisation of the man. Rather than depict him as a cardboard monster, the film's makers showed him as a polite, petit-bourgeois Austrian who took tea and liked cakes. As well as developing disturbingly bulging eyes while watching Wagnerian opera, the Fuhrer also liked musicals, and was charmed by the escapist Hollywood movies of the 1930s.

The simple point is this: unable to tell good from bad is fine - it's the defining characteristic of the seriously disturbed,psychopathic personality. But cognition of the values around them is always present: and the irrefutable evidence for this is the way in which very sick killers sneer murderously at the harmless majority. The Boston strangler, Hitler, Stalin, Ian Brady, Mugabe and countless others have all described those who oppose them as naive, feeble, worms, weak, sentimental and gullible. So while they are disturbed, they can see what other people feel and they can see that what they wish to achieve is against the law. Whether they find that law risible or not is irrelevant.

I have been a lifelong opponent of the concept of evil. But it doesn't make those who behave in an evil manner entirely without blame: for they too have the free will to either indulge or simply fantasize about their desires. In choosing the latter, they may not feel their actions to be wrong, but they know what the consequences are likely to be if and when they're brought to book.

 

21st September 2008

BY ALL MEANS WANT TO KNOW, BUT DON'T ASSUME YOU THEN KNOW

 

"Frankly squire, I don't want to know" is a response nby gets most of the time. Like so many basic words in English, 'know' and its variations have come to mean a bewildering spectrum of things; even the expression 'not wanting to know' has several interpretations. Bear with me, this isn't simply etymological onanism.

The literal meaning - of not wanting to learn a new piece of information - is a widespread feature of our time-starved, want-it-now, flash-fry culture. Encouraged by an educational system short of a plot, it creates ignorance. More to the point, it first breaks and then obliterates the habit of learning from mistakes.

The common meaning is that of walking on the other side so as to avoid the emaciated bodies, splattered bankers and so forth. This too is commonplace in Cool Britannia - a quite extraordinarily cruel irony given all the professional 'carers' there are about these days. We are become a culture with all the cares of the world on our shoulders, and thus no care-time left for anyone else. What used to be called 'community spirit' and even 'society' was abolished by the Mad Handbag in favour of greed, so now we have government agencies to do sympathy for us. Having met her in the last eighteen months, I am well aware that Baroness Thatcher's marbles spilled out onto various red carpets years ago. This is a shame, as if she was at all aware of the nasty, thoughtless and thus do-gooder ridden society she'd helped create, it might even ignite in her a spark of doubt.

The point here, to summarise, is that caring (like learning) has been taken out of our hands.

The final common meaning is that of denial. The wages of this particular sin have been visited upon us of late, but it will I suspect be many aeons before politicians catch on. Perhaps above any other feature, our era - and history will see that as roughly 1982-2008 - has been one of the unreal, the unprepared, the unthinking and the unacknowledged. While some might argue this is just another dissembled way of saying 'lies', there's a lot more to the syndrome than spin. Our age has reflected every facet of the the blind eye and blind faith: creationism, globalism, financial deregulation, Islamism, huge debt levels, poor pension provision, £5 million a year footballers, management consultancy, guru mumbo-jumbo, insider trading, hedge funds and - probably the worst of the lot - Friedmanite economics.

Here too we have effectively handed over a core skill to others: that of the empirically observed and tested physical phenomenon. Models, laboratory tests, the primary senses in general and common sense in particular have been eschewed in favour of not wanting to know - unless others tell us about it, at which point we feel the need to believe.

And here is the truly painful sting in the tail - for those who believe rapidly persuade their disordered heads that they know. God help us from those who know - especially those who know God.

Thus the world I have known for much of my adult life has been one beset by folks who don't want to know, and those who don't know anything very much, but that's OK because they know. And as usual with deluded thinking, it all pretty well adds up to the same thing: don't you worry about that dearie, I'll do the thinking for you. Welcome to the Moonies.

It is time for the ignorant, uncaring, I-see-no-signal Ruperts, Waynes and Gordons to disappear under the waves of change. And it's time for the rest of us to think for ourselves rather more. That way, we'll know what's right for us. We'll know what we think, rather than parroting what we ought to think.

 

14th September 2008

WE DON'T WANT TO BE ALONE

No wonder Greta Garbo told fans she wanted to be alone: she knew that, just by saying this, they'd recoil and leave her be. The defining nature of humans is that they cannot bear to be alone. For this reason above all others, solitary confinement is the one punishment most likely to break the interrogated spy.

An enormous amount of modern technology is designed to ensure that Homo sapiens is never isolated. That company for which we used to have to wait now accompanies us everywhere: music, news, the Web, and our friends' voices. All this and more is with us 24/7 - in pockets, on trains, in meetings, up mountains, in restaurants, by rivers and in lavatories. The most common things said into mobile phones begin "I'm". That's why we like all this stuff: it just keeps on reminding us that we exist, and that others crave our voices, our company, our bodies.

As a species, we can't wait. Perhaps this explains why we tend to do everything too soon. We have premature birth, premature ejaculation and premature ageing. When we see something we like, we say "Too much!" (Or at least, we did in my day). Only too much will suffice - be that clothes, money or food.

None of this is especially surprising: we were and are pack animals, raised to expect feast and famine. The problem is that - having largely banished famine in the West - we still feel the need to gorge. And like it or not, this means starvation for others.

If we don't want to be alone, we should be careful to control our selfishness. Otherwise we might wake up one day to find that which we most fear is become fact.

 

9th September 2008

ENTHUSIASTIC AMATEURS

The arrival of a digital world of seemingly infinite television lifestyle programming and forty billion websites has had any number of effects, but the one that goes most unnoticed is the ability to make bluffers out of people who aren't actually the sharpest cards in the pack. If you're not in a profession, then perhaps you won't have spotted this unfortunate trend yet. But for the average GP, the words he or she dreads nowadays are "I was on this website, and it said how...."

A little knowledge was always a dangerous thing, and never more so than in 2008. The operative word here, I think, is 'virtual' - because whereas today one says something has been done virtually, it means something entirely different to when one used to say a task was virtually done. In the old days, virtually done homework was something you were definitely going to start that night. It's the same with knowledge that's been gained virtually.

I'm not just talking about a few buzz-words gleaned from thelancet.com. A classic example is cooking, where endless culinary programmes (started really by the original Masterchef) have persuaded those with no sense of balance and proportion that they can cook. Astonishingly, someof them are even running restaurants.

Over the last thirty years, the use of marketing techniques in political and public life has placed a number of terms which used to be commercially specialist into the everyday lingo - upmarket, target audience, niche customers, relationship marketing.....all these can be heard quite commonly in every pub now. The problem is that the people using such terminology are the same barrack-room lawyers who were always talking bollocks, except that they now sound very convincing to the layman.

Mass media coverage of specialist interests (and the instant knowledge available on the Net's search engines) have turned an irritating minority into a half-baked mob. I have two close chums who caught me among the mob's number last year - for any smartarse, being there at times is irresistible - and after two days staying with us in France they began to refer to my bits of knowledge as Johngles. Google does indeed have a lot to answer for.

Digital photography, for instance, no longer allows the pro to own his or her expertise. Pixcels, megabytes, compression and editing are available for any holiday snapper, the result being that everyone thinks they're Lord Lichfield. Add to this the technology for multi-angles, power-shutters, cropping or colour balance, and once again down at the Health & Safety you can hear the braindead wittering on about composition and depth of field. What they don't understand is that somebody who has an eye for an interesting moment - and has been honing it for years - will always stand out from Fred Nerk with his N73 megapixcel camera-phone.

Does any of this matter? Well actually - yes, it does. The tendency of Joe Public armed with a percentage of the necessary knowledge to sound off for England doesn't need any encouragement, and in recent years (not just because of the syndrome I'm highlighting) the mouth Almighties out there have made some very serious mistakes through over-confidence. They also annoy the crap out of people who do know what they're talking about: anyone sensible and sensitive - whatever their view of the Windsors - felt for Prince Charles three years ago when some uppity secretary told him she was 'titled ter promotion innit. "Everyone's a brain surgeon after five minutes" he remarked - for once, with great precision.

But the mistakes that half-baked knowledge can bring about are very important indeed. When I worked in advertising, we always said that clients approached the subject with an open mouth. Over the last decade, A House in the Sun, Grand Designs, Changing Rooms, Location, Location, Location and many other slots have persuaded people to do daft things - buy houses abroad at silly prices, go bankrupt converting Martello towers, spend fortunes on kitchens they can never get back, and even start buying and selling antiques. Wikipedia is on paper a great idea, but some of the entries are just plain wrong. A good 90% of financial websites are simply peddling the same drivel put out by the idiots who landed us in a credit crunch - although thisismoney.co.uk is a notable exception. And property sites have persistently argued for eternally rising house prices which could never be sustained.

I am forever the one advising people to approach 'expert' advice with caution, but that's entirely different: self-styled experts are two a penny, and their untrained cowboy advice may cost one a lot more than that. Equally, if exams have been dumbed down, professional standards relaxed and much of former regulation removed, there is no guarantee any more that somebody who seems to have expertise actually knows which way is up. (This would apply to pretty much every banker I've ever met.)

But choosing to acquire some of the vital knowledge required is just as dangerous as soaking up all the advice out there with no common-sense filter applied. For reasons too boring to recount, I once did a research project which involved interviewing prostitutes. When asked what the greatest threat was to their livelihood, one very astute young lady answered "the Pill". It had, she argued, encouraged "all the enthusiastic amateurs" that contraception was the only thing to know about in order to enjoy a life of casual sex. It isn't of course - and I think this makes my point perfectly.

 

7th September 2008

THE RULES

Long-standing nby readers may have heard some of this before, but I'm a great admirer of David Hockney. Not just his mind and how it expands his art, but also his wonderfully grounded and unaffected way of separating the useless shit of life from the vital putty.

One of his favourite observations is 'Only when you know and understand the rules will you know if it's wise to break them". He can be very funny on this subject, and a welcome breath of fresh air after yet another day of contemporary dissimulation by those who think excretia in all its forms to be the stuff of life.

He speaks plainly and without the invented vocabulary of lesser thinkers - but it is the insight about rules and breaking them that concerns me here. My own take on this is that we all have two states making up our personality - the natural and the learned. Getting the external and 'intra' balance of these wrong is the continuing problem we face as the most intelligent (although nowhere near the best) social animal on Earth.

The manic globalists and inattentively correct in our midst push away the massive body of evidence describing not just what is natural, but also what is dangerous for civilisation about that state. This is because they have never bothered to learn The Rules as Hockney calls them, or Page One as I tend to dub these sort of fundamental principles. Bright people (myself included) often skip page one as being for the lesser mortals. It explains why I've had so much trouble with machines, gadgets and people over the years. It also explains why legislators get the strategy so very badly wrong over and over again.

Hockney often says "many young artists today simply can't draw, and are vague about the history of art". One could transpose this and observe how many disordered minds at the top in 2008 completely fail to predict or see the ramifications of their reforms. It's probably the single most infuriating thing about 'modern' life for me: not just the superficial education and woeful ignorance, but the enthusiastic arrogance with which those so afflicted warm to their task of destroying conventions which are there for a reason. They lack technical skill, they lack a knowledge of socio-economic history; they skip page one - and thus lack what most people call 'common sense'.

Perhaps the most common expostulation one hears among those over forty nowadays is "What planet do these people live on?" Of late, various observers have said 'Planet Westminster', but there is more to it than this. That would not explain, for example, why educationalists blithely bring Latin teaching to an end in our schools. They haven't considered why, in a multi-lingual EU, Latin is one of the strongest weapons for comprehension one can own. Equally, however, they haven't really thought enough about what education is for. And for this reason too, they lack creative ideas about what education could be. Ultimately, educational achievement can support self-esteem, the socialisation process, the joy of knowledge, the power of literacy, the acceptance of good personal medical practice and the basic tools with which to carve a niche in life. This is the very raw material of contentment.

I do not mean this to suggest that only a traditionally conservative attitude to life will do. On the contrary, a conservative, shareholder-driven view of financial risk explains the tediously repetitive, formulaic nature of expression in the arts and media at the moment. But to grasp why creativity is the best form of safety (it is the only way we truly progress) one comes back full circle to the Yorkshire gay with the Californian twang: "Only when you know and understand the rules will you know if it's a good idea to break them".

 

4th September 2008

 

WE ONLY FEAR WHAT IS UNREAL

As humans, we have two of most things that are important, and lots of spares in case they break down. It's estimated that we probably have something like twelve times more brain capacity than we need - plus the ability to boost sensory perception when one sense is severely damaged or removed.

This back-up approach to life ('if it can go wrong, it will do') does not however explain why we have two minds, although without doubt we do. You could call it two forms of thinking - even two forms of processing - but the significant thing to realise is that one is based on physical reality, and the other isn't.

The metaphysics of this could fill a book, and often do. But in a nutshell, we have a more rational conscious mind, and a more emotional unconcscious one. In normal 'everyday' life, practically everything we fear emerges from the latter - the one where nothing is real. Or to be more precise, the one that can't tell real from unreal.

When faced with 'real' physical danger, then of course we get scared. But on the whole, most people display at least some level of courage in those situations; and despite the contemporary neurotic obsession with 'post traumatic stress', the fear when analysed is always of what might have happened. Given the natural healing process and time, humans forget live-action trauma successfully. The irony is that the majority of us never forget the imagined trauma.

Because I seem to be one of life's accident-prone types, I have in turn survived a house fire, a head-on car crash, and a train disaster. All have been forgotten - in the sense that I never suffer flashbacks, don't dream about the incidents, and have no residual fears of the situations involved.

By contrast, I can still recall (and feel threatened by) rejections, unpleasant remarks, criticisms and humiliations that go back five decades. They continue to fuel anger, produce an aversion to certain situations and lower my self-esteem. They also colour my expectations of the future: in general, I am a pessimist. Yet when analysed, no physical injury or material setback resulted from any of these. When reviewed in the cool of today, I would guess that 90% of them were imagined slights, and the rejections lucky escapes. The pessimism that remains is illogical: I've led a lucky life, done well, and have nothing of any substance on the radar of which to be fearful.

Such is the natural condition among our contemporary peers and leaders. It explains almost all social dysfunctionality, and the vast majority of economic and political history. In a contemporary sense, it is demonstrated by the apparent Russian fear of being encircled - a paranoia that goes back over two hundred years, but is made risible by the reality of owning a fifth of the Earth's land area and having northern coastlines where survival itself is difficult, let alone invasion. In the last thousand years, the Russians have been invaded twice, and defeated the invaders on both occasions. They have weaponry that precludes any possibility of invasion in the classic sense. But the fear remains.

Greed is almost universal, and utterly illogical: it is nothing more than fear of starvation. Homo sapiens is an appetitive hoarder with more than enough to go round, but still unwilling to give to those who are genuinely short of life's necessities. Again, the latter on the whole tend (except in obviously dire situations) to have fewer anxieties and be more content.

A huge proportion of habitual criminals (while being very much the product of their environment) continue to hold grudges against society that do not bear examination. Their fears of rejection based on childhood abuse, literacy difficulties and the ridicule of brighter, richer people continue even when they sit damaging the liver in Spanish villas, with a copious collection of gold Purdeys and untold Swiss wealth.

We often observe that truly determined people 'have something to prove', and that this explains their success. I have found almost without exception that they think they have something to prove, but the belief is entirely erroneous. Equally, I have found that those who enjoy long-term material success are merely doing what they enjoy: they could go back to having nothing the next day, and really enjoy starting all over again. It's not that making money can't buy happiness: rather, having money beyond a certain necessity is nothing to do with happiness. Piling up money is about the fear of having no money - a fear that is totally unrealistic in 99% of cases.

I doubt if any culture or government has ever grasped this fundamental difference between the real, conscious anxieties of life and the unconsciously imagined fantasy fears. And I would be categorical in my observation that no society has ever based social policy and objectives upon it.

During real crises (war, famine, economic poverty, deep recession, dictatorial regimes, family tragedy and so forth) the vast majority are resilient and supportive of those around them: there is talk of 'all being in the same boat'. It is only when delusional fears - of Jews, Communists, worldwide terrorist groups, God's wrath and plotters - are perceived that the wheels come off. The Georgian invasion, the New Labour disarray, the Middle East's problems and the banker's fear of regulation: none of them are based on what truly exists.

Philosophers like Echkardt Tolle and the Buddhists insist that fears based on what was or might be are always the result of the unconscious, emotional ego-state - and always behind the planet's ills. There's a lot in what they say - and much of great social worth in the cognitive behaviour therapies that aim to keep citizens focused on what is real, rather than morbid dread of what isn't.

 

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