The Responsible Thing

"The other goat, the scapegoat chosen by lot to be sent away, will be kept alive, standing before the Lord. When it is sent away to Azazel in the wilderness, the people will be purified and made right with the Lord."

                                                    Leviticus 16:10

It seems to me that many of the obstacles we human beings face vis-a-vis work, family, relationships, politics, religion etc., are really the result of our failure to accept responsibility for our own actions. After all, why admit and own your mistakes, experiencing personal growth as a result, when it is much easier to blame your failures on the actions of others? Yet if we never take responsibility for our actions, then there is little, realistically, that we can ever do to affect their consequences for the future. Like the man said, those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed forever to repeat them.

Ironically, this is not entirely our fault, but learned behaviour that we been taught since year dot: Woman brought sin into the world, the Jews killed Jesus, immigrants are stealing your jobs. Society's scapegoats are all around us. Then, society shirks its responsibilities like no-one else. Scapegoats provide an endpoint under which all unpleasant truths can be buried. Drug users causes crime, but few dare ask what causes drug use, because then the answer generally comes back as poverty. Drugs are the individual's problem, but poverty is societal, so society takes drug use as its terminus, rather than be in anyway implicated in the inequalities that its poverty perpetuates.

We each trace our problems back until we find a comforting version of reality and then rest on our laurels. By which I mean that we stagnate. When we nominate something as the avatar of all our personal misfortune, we give that avatar immense power over us. For instance, if you consider certain words or images to be blasphemous or profane, then all that anyone else has to do to exert influence over is you is to use those words or images in your presence. No wonder so many people around the world burn the American flag, when it is the only form of retaliation that they have against the ubiquity of US invasion and airstrikes. Why bother with a Predator drone, when you can wound millions of patriotic Americans with little more high-tech equipment than a 50 cent lighter?

The problem with blaming anything on any class of people (women, men, Jews, Muslims, the poor, the young etc.) is that there will always be more of them than there are of you. It's a simple physics problem: a large mass exerts a greater force upon a smaller object than the smaller object does on the larger, proportional to the difference in their two masses. If you're one person seeing a particular demographic of a million or more as preventing you from finding work, then you're never going to find work. Not because of those million others, but from that single malfunctioning thought in your head that has you beat before you even try.

Even worse is what our prejudices tell others about our inner-lives. Most blame and scapegoating is the externalisation of personal faults. If you want to know about a person's personal fears and anxieties, take a look at what they blame on others. Politicians demonise those on benefits, while crying poor and claiming expenses (politicians should be means tested the same as everyone else). Homophobic men are scared that gay men will objectify them in the same way that they objectify women. The guy that tells you certain ethnicities smell is usually the one who could himself do with forming a closer relationship to soap and water.

Moreover, the scapgoater will always be more afraid of the scapegoat than the scapegoat is of their persecutor. Hence, American cops are more afraid of unarmed black men than the other way around, presumably because African-Americans have been subjected to the worst indignities that white America has to offer for 240 years in a row, and they have endured. Like the homophobic man, the racist is ultimately afraid that they will be in treated in the same way that they have treated their victims. For the same reason, heavily armed Israeli settlers, with the full financial and military backing of the government of the United States of America behind them, lose their minds at the sight of a few Palestinian kids throwing rocks. The downside to loading all of your fears onto the shoulders of others is that you tend to become mortally afraid of them out of all proportion to their actual dangerousness. "When you stare into the abyss," as Nietzsche reminds us, "the abyss also stares into you."

Inversely, lack of personal responsibility also leads people to take credit for things in which they had little or no involvement. Look at the British attitude to the Second World War. To listen to people in this country, you'd think Britain defeated Nazi Germany all on its own. Yet 80% of Hitler's forces were defeated by the Red Army, at the cost of twenty million Russian lives. More Soviet troops died at Stalingrad than Britain and America lost during the entire war combined, and it was still only the second biggest loss of life that the Russians suffered (750,000 at Stalingrad, 850,000 at Leningrad). Most of us alive today would not be here without them.

Indeed, if western society was half as civilised as it likes to think it is, you'd think we'd spend as much time commemorating the lives of people that we have killed as we do our own sacrifices. We hold silent vigils to remember the Somme, D-Day, 9/11, but when do we ever fall silent for the victims of Fallujah, Dresden, or the Irish and Indian famines of the nineteenth century that left millions dead thanks to British governmental indifference? The need to shirk our responsibility leads us to dismiss these fallen as enemies that deserve no respect or remembrance, even when they have become our enemy through no fault of their own. We celebrate Olympic victories, Shakespeare's birth, and great British inventions like the world wide web, but when do we ever bear responsibility for Britain's part in the eradication of the hundred million people that lived in the Americas, before Europeans arrived with their guns and their disease? This is not an attitude worthy of a civilised society. A shirker treats other people as they have treated others. The responsible person treats others as they would like to be treated themselves. This is why I could never believe in the death penalty. Isn't one murderer enough? Why should the rest of us become implicated in the crime?

For Britain, Hitler is the ultimate endpoint to negate all else. Hitler killed eight million people, but he's dead now, so you don't need to worry about people like him anymore. That way you can forget that it took thousands of ordinary people to perpetrate the horrors of the Holocaust (and definitely forget about any assistance the Nazis may have received from the IBM corporation). It allows us to sweep all other colonial atrocities under the tiger skin rug, as well as deferring, indefinitely, any discussion about how Stalin virtually defeated Hitler single-handedly, having already killed twenty million of his own people, and what this tells us about the convenient view of the Second World War as a battle of good versus evil. Hitler is also a convenient endpoint because he is just about the only one of the various genocidal maniacs to besmirch the 20th century that Britain didn't support at any point.

I am bound to say at this point, because there are many sensitive and fragile souls that shatter into a thousand pieces whenever anyone expresses an opinion in any way divergent from their own (see Polyphemus and the Myths of Monomania), that of course I am not belittling anything that happened back then. Both my grandfathers fought with distinction in the war. What I am saying is that they had pretty much wrapped it all up 28 years before I was even born. I therefore find it hard to claim any credit for the result, any more than I can claim to be a Petty Officer, just because my dad served in the navy. These are events that occurred independent of my existence. A football crowd may conceivably alter the course of a football match. Claiming credit for something that you didn't bear witness to, and over which you exerted no influence, is tantamount to theft. Or hypocrisy. Either way, the result is unpleasant.

Which only leaves the individual, struggling to make sense of the world. One way is to make others bear the burden for one's mistakes, which only leads to increased feelings of nausea and impotence. Another approach is to recognise that most of what happens in the human sphere of existence is an admixture of judgement and luck. There is little to be done about bad luck. Ill-judgement, on the other hand, can be mitigated against, but it requires the honest assessment of past liability in order to be successful. The most futile lie is the one that we tell to ourselves. A fault can only be corrected if it has been traced back to its proper source. If the source is misidentified, the item will continue to malfunction.

 

Polyphemus & the Myths of Monomania

"Every clearing was called a grove, lucus, which meant that it admitted light, lux, like an eye... The heroic sentence, 'Every giant had a grove (lucus)' was originally true, but later it was misunderstood, altered, and corrupted. By the age of Homer, it was falsely interpreted as meaning that every giant had an eye in the middle of his forehead."

                                                                   Giambattista Vico, The New Science

One of the many problems facing humanity today is the prevailing belief in a single, objective reality. That is to say, the belief that one's own ideas and ideals are the only possible reality, and anyone deviating from this subjective ground state is a threat to civilised society. To witness this behaviour in action, simply go to the internet, anywhere there is a comments section, and start reading. Yet like Polyphemus, the Cyclops in Homer's Odyssey, if one views the world only through a single eye, it is all too easy for some other bugger to put it out with a well aimed stick. Monomania will only lead to darkness in the end.

Our monomania is largely the hangover from centuries of State imposed monotheism. Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity in the 4th century in order to do away with elected successors and replace them with his own hereditary heirs. At one point, six men had claimed the right to be crowned Emperor, leading to years of civil war. Constantine emerged as the eventual victor and he set about replacing the various factions aligned around the various gods and religions with a single, all seeing, all powerful, God. One all powerful, all seeing God equals one all powerful, all seeing Emperor with one line of equally omnipotent successors. Constantine himself only converted to Christianity on his deathbed.

The Roman Empire split in two, then fell, but monotheism prevailed. The western half of the Empire became the Roman Catholic Church, the world's first international bank. As well as lending money to half of European royalty, Rome exported the idea that one God equals one Ruler, a model imposed throughout the Middle Ages to horrific effect, especially if you were Jewish, or a woman. In the 20th century, God is replaced by the State itself, so that even atheist Marxists can get in on the act, but this rarely works out as well. God is external, remote, unknowable. Tell someone God is perfect and there is little they can do to confirm or deny it. Tell someone that the State is perfect and all they really have to do is stick their head out of the window for a look see.

From the equality, One God = One Ruler, all else follows. One God equals one ruler and once line of succession, equals one nation, one religion, one race, one gender, one sexuality, one culture, one personality, one trade or profession, one place where you will be born and die. You shall be one thing, and one thing alone. Any deviation from the norm will be severely punished. This form of monomania comes from the belief in a static universe that is immutable and perfect for all time. It is the natural order of things. It is the way things have always been. Thanks to Hubble and Einstein, we ought to know better by now.

The idea that one should be one thing, and one thing alone, is pervasive.  Monomania is really an exercise in dualism and false dichotomy. There is me and mine, and there is everyone else. Everyone else is wrong and must be made to see the error of their ways, or be removed (see years 1914 - 2003 inclusive).

The extension to this is the delusion that "I" represents the archetype example of its demographic group. Again, refer to the internet. The one that bears their nations flag as an avatar is usually the least community minded of all. They promote patriotism, denouncing socialism in the process, failing to appreciate that the one is just a more diffuse form of the other (How can you have a country without first having a community? You commit socialism every time you step out the door.). They say things like, "I'm proud to be British." when what they really mean is, "I'm proud to be me." They equate the quality of being themselves with the quality of being British, disallowing anyone that doesn't think and act the same, disqualifying the rest of Britain in the process. They should revert to using a selfie as an avatar like everyone else. It would be a more honest expression of national identity.

Those on the left are arguably worse. They say things like, "What we've got to realise is that we're all one." Through the filter of monomania, this roughly translates as, "Why can't everyone just be reasonable, like me?" They treat things like unity and equality as absolutes, rather than approximations towards which we crawl, incrementally, with many setbacks along the way. I love liberally minded people (I am one), but too often we complain about the way things should be, rather confronting the way things actually are. It is a yarn spun by politician and preacher alike, about how wonderful Utopia will be when we finally get there with a little self-sacrifice; meantime, Utopia still lies somewhere over the horizon and the ship is springing leaks all over the gaff.

I suggest a modification to this monomania. An inversion, if you like, away from a single, objective reality, towards embracing one's own subjective reality, but seen as one bubble in an infinite foam of possible ideas, ideals, and interests. There are times when it is useful to have a single, objective reality. The fast lane of the motorway, for instance. Objectivity is essential for carrying out scientific research, but even Special Relativity tells us that there are many inertial frames of reference, but that no one frame of reference is more objective than any other. Most of the time, what a person does or does not believe is irrelevant. Everyone operates on varying levels of reality as measured against some agreed social norm, but the measure of where that average is raises over time. It was once acceptable to leave the bodies of executed criminals to rot on public display, for instance. Our idea of what represents acceptable society, or what constitutes acceptable reality, improves with each passing age.

The internet and social media have altered the world out of all recognition. Where once emigrating families would hold mock wakes before departure, because they knew they would never again see those they were leaving behind, today we can chat with people on the other side of the world as a matter of course via Skype. The smart phone in our hand has allowed us to broadcast our thoughts the instant that they occur, whether or not anyone is awake to hear them at the time. The dramatic reduction in the amount of time that a modern human needs to spend securing enough calories to survive means the replacement of such binary choices as friend or foe, food or mate, with more arbitrary decision trees like cats or dogs, City or United, Blur or Oasis, left or right, Leave or Remain, but with the same injection of fear as friend or foe. Which is precisely why you get the internet. A billion limbic systems bashing against each other, each with its own idea of reality and each hostile to any deviation from its self-reflecting state of equilibrium.

Racially we can look at ourselves only one of two ways. Either we are all one race, in that any human can mate with any other human of the opposite sex and produce offspring that is itself capable of producing offspring. Either that, or we take the neurological view that the human brain has become so sophisticated and discerning, immersed in a society now offering so much choice and diversity, that we have each, essentially, become our own unique race. And as technology evolves, and the boundaries widen of what society can provide, and deems acceptable, the process of speciation will only accelerate.

You can demonstrate this to yourself by thinking of a close friend. What's their favourite food? Favourite restaurant? Favourite film? Favourite book? TV show? Artist? Sport? Team? Designer? Label? Car? Colour? Pet? Peeve? It doesn't take many data points to start to show considerable divergence between the choices of close friends, family members, even twins.

The behaviour witnessed hour by hour on the internet is evidence of a prevailing belief that everyone should be one thing and the same. Except that where once everyone was expected to believe in the one, true Christian God, now we are all expected to think that 9/11 was an inside job, or coconut milk is the universal panacea of immortal life, or that this week's female celebrity hate figure is a bitch, cunt, whore for [insert spurious, inadequate, self-pitying reason here].

Some gay people view bisexuals in much the same way as some heterosexuals see the gay community, further evidence of our latent monomania. This is one of the reasons why I think that if we are going to define someone's sexual status, we also need to define their social status. For instance, someone can be heterosexual, but homosocial, in that they spend the majority of their time in groups of their own gender, only seeking out members of the opposite sex for sexual gratification. Sexuality is like skin tone. Monomaniacs over the centuries have tried to reduce humanity to a series of binary moral judgements like, gay and straight, black and white, wrong and right, rather than the 8 billion shades of grey that we truly are. No one is one thing all the time (I am left-handed, but play guitar and use a mouse right-handed). Everyone has off days, and even the most cautious of person will occasionally do something that is unexpected, outside of their comfort zone, even dangerous. To be human is be in a constant state of flux.

We are analogue creatures living in a digital world and we need to learn how to digitise. We've tried the "we're all one" approach time and time again and all it really leads to is Belsen, Siberia, or Guantanamo Bay. The ultimate failure of all monomaniacal ideologies is the failure to realise that there is no one Venn diagram that encompasses all of humanity. We live in a universe that expands and creates. The yearning to fragment and diversify is encoded in our DNA. Constantine embraced Christianity to do away with sectarianism in the Empire, but within a few centuries the sects of Zeus, Mithras, and Apollo had been replaced with the Franciscan, Jesuit, and Benedictine orders of monks. Then, first Martin Luther broke with Rome, then Henry VIII, and sectarianism reasserted itself in Europe with a vengeance. Monomania seeks only to enforce convergence upon a divergent species. It is always doomed to fail.

Individuality is an indication of intellect. They are also proportional. Where one rises, the other is sure to follow. A monomaniacal order allows for little or no social mobility. Apart from anything else, if one outsources the decision making process to an external like God,  Immigrants, or the State, then the power to positively affect one's direction in life is severely impaired. The individual becomes tethered to one station in life. Only by accepting responsibility for one's actions can an honest assessment of one's strengths and shortcomings be performed. Only then can we be sure of our true course. Only then can we break free of our moorings and explore.

It is also incredibly freeing. I am an atheist. Once, I would have described myself as a militant atheist, but not since I started to enjoy floating in my own little bubble of reality. All that I can now say for certain is that God does not exist in my universe, as I have no need of any being more supreme than myself. If I were to find out that there were such things as gods, my only real question would be, "Where do I apply?" However, I can offer no opinion on who does or does not exist in your reality. I have no empirical experience of being you. I am happy to discuss and compare our varying perspectives, but I have no wish to convert you.

Moreover, if our beliefs are so at odds that we can really find no common ground, well, we live in an infinity of cyberspace, where we need never lay sight on each other unless we really want to. There is more than enough room to accommodate the realities of all the world's Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Beliebers, Trekies, Mets Fans, Geordies, Dungeon Masters, Chefs, Vegans, Transsexuals, Pansexuals, Bikers, Ballet Dancers, Belly Dancers, Writers, Actors, Gamers, and a billion other demographics besides. Yes, there are real world problems like climate change to be dealt with, but this is exactly the kind of thing that monomania perpetuates. In the monomaniac's world, there are only two opposing views and they should each be given equal time. In the pan-dimensional order of things, there are 8 billion opposing sides and most of them are firmly for believing in anthropomorphic climate change.

Paganism has returned to the world. Actually, it never really went away, but it's been keeping a low profile for the last thousand years or so, what with all the persecution, ducking stools, and pyres of burning bodies. Today we have the potential to build a world that is a broad, continuous spectrum of happy mediums. There will still be those at the margins that we will have to take care of for their own sakes, or for the sake of others, but this is so much easier to achieve when you view people as a standard distribution of possible personality types, rather than as a flatline.

Obsession and monomania can be a good thing when it's something that one is passionate about for the thing itself. Without obsessives we wouldn't have medicine, technology, transport, or most of the rest of the modern world. Me, I'm in to books: buying books, and reading books, and thinking about books, and talking about books, and rereading books, and writing about books. I like society. Society is a fine thing, and I am happy to contribute to its continued existence. However, what I really want for us to do is to figure this shit out, so that I might finally get around to reading The Count of Monte Cristo. At the moment it seems that my only hope is to follow it on Twitter.

Having opened with Polyphemus, I can only conclude, once again, with words taken from the Cyclops chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses:

But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

8/6/02

As often happens, when I think about writing something about the state of the modern world I find that I already wrote it a decade ago.

8/6/02

To take a step forward, I must first retreat. Retreat into the shadows, oblivious to all except my own thoughts, my own mind. To confront this pressure cooker frustration full in the face, see it for what it is, examine and understand and from there to toleration and acceptance.

This has been allowed to fester far too long. Who the hell have I become? This stalking consciousness. This foster child of hope. An apologist for disappointment. Secure with every inch of my fibre of who I am and what I was meant to be and yet impotent in the light of possibility. So I lock away knowledge inside myself. Engorged upon future I am too lazy to bring to inception. And the tension grows.

Yet who knows? Who sees? If you find me crying, that doesn’t mean I’m unhappy, nor does laughter denote joy. The turmoil deep inside is a constant ache. Uninterrupted nights are rare. The thought process, once a point of pride, has long ceased to hold pleasure. It becomes more and more a torture day by day. Yes, I appreciate your help and concern, but only one person can confront this hell, ‘fore only one us is living through it. Be grateful for that. Where it comes from, I fail to understand, yet it has been in here as long as I can remember. Maybe I was born this way or I was dropped on my head or perhaps I just had humanity sussed from a very early age.

Yes, you see you are all part of the problem too. Your cruelties, your petty hatreds of those you don’t understand or worse still, have never met. What’s wrong with you all? Chill the fuck out. Yes, in this oh so conscious stream, I see you for what you are. Afraid. Afraid of death, afraid to die forgotten. And in your impotence, you accept mediocrity and fall further into the dustbin of history than if you’d just let it all go and say in a proud, clear voice, ‘I’m terrified of my own mortality.’ Stop aligning yourselves to people of the same race or nationality or sex and sexuality and the other assorted accidents of birth. There is nothing to be proud of here. Be you own person, be with people who understand you, accept you and not simply tolerate you because you look like them. And examine yourselves. Look in the mirror and ask, ‘Who am I,’ and maybe, just maybe you might begin to approximate the person you where meant to be and not the monster social engineering has forced upon you. Again, mutilation is nothing to be proud of. Neither is clinging to flags and anthems and primary colours, as if you’re hanging off the edge of cliff, grabbing at handfuls of turf, trying to save yourself from the void. Let it go. Let it all go.

But don’t worry. I’m not angry with you. You’re unlucky enough to have been born in the flatulent west. Hypocrites and murders in residence. I mean the Bushes and Blairs of the world. The ones who promote democracy and freedom with empty statements and curtail and destroy them with the next. Words and actions. Emotive, motivational speeches. Abstract nouns. Abyssal chasms of morality. You see, they are really no different to Hussains and Bin Ladens of the world. The ideology may be different, yet the methodology is identical. If there really is a war on terrorism, why isn’t NATO bombing Washington? How many times will the good ole’ U S of A see their trained nutters come back to haunt them before they realise that those abstract nouns could be so much better if they had some basis in reality? Why did either of my grandfathers bother fighting in the second world war, when the fascists have obviously won through in the end. While our faces were turned towards the Channel, the real coup was taking place behind our backs.

So you see my problem here! I have so much to give you all. Passion, joy, knowledge, hope and understanding. Yet you fit into your tight little ethnic groups and start kicking out at each other. And THEM, the rulers, the dictators of this solar, island plantation, that’s exactly what they want. They want you impotent and afraid. They want you to look out of your rose tinted, double glazed windows and focus all your hatred upon the first face that doesn’t resemble your own. Yet as long as you remain fragmented and isolated, this little blue, green planet will sink further into the mire. You will work for their companies and spend their wages on their products. Meanwhile, your taxes will be spent on subsidising them, while they contribute nothing to your well being. Yet they will still control what you see, read and watch. Paranoid? People, it has already gone on for decades.

In 1984, Orwell invented a language called Newspeak. The purpose of this new language was to slowly reduce the vocabulary of the public, until there were so few words left, the human race could no longer communicate emotion successfully. Humanity would be reduced to the level of savages. Orwell was too limited in his appraisal and probably too decent a person to fully appreciate the full malevolence of the world. Political correctness, which to begin with was a perfectly valid idea, has now reached the point where we can no longer have an intelligent debate on social ills and inequality, without being accused of ‘political incorrectness’, further exacerbating racial tension among communities. Hey! Racism is not something that simply disappears because you don’t discuss it. See Burnley and weep. If you ignore cancer, it doesn’t go into remission. It festers and eventually it claims you as its own.

Further, popular culture seems to have no other mandate than to lower people’s expectations, until anything of a vaguely higher standard is hailed as artist genius. Pop music has now become so anodyne and homogenised that often even the teenagers, who almost exclusively listen to this trash, can not differentiate been one boy band or another. TV is slowly rotting into the same swamp as across the pond. On the small screen we are sold fantasy in the guise of reality. Meanwhile Hollywood sells us historical rape as incontrovertible fact. Popular culture hasn’t lost the plot, it just feeds us the same one over and over again.

So, how long ‘fore you’ve had enough? When the population of Africa no longer exists and the continent has become one enormous free trade zone, where the poor of the world have been shipped to, to serve double breasted slave masters? This, in my most cynical moments, is the future I envisage. ‘Slavery’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming.’ Europe, the ultimate theme park (already happened ). The irony of all this of course, is that humanity spread like a virus out of Africa and now we sit back and do nothing as it slowly implodes. If an entire continent is on the endangered species list and we choose not to act, is that not genocide?

All of which bring us, by a commodius vicus of recirculation (to quote Joyce), to me and my unfulfilled life. I need to look at this in more depth. Why am I unhappy? Lack of confidence? Definitely. Laziness? Guilty as charged. Environment, unemployment, disappointment, insufficient outlets of emotional and intellectual feelings. All true. What the hell am I waiting for? Why so many questions (humour, good)? No one else is going to do this but me. I have all the potential in the world. I could achieve relative immortality (an oxymoron, but never mind). I have intelligence and passion and ability and strength and originality (a rare commodity in these dark times). I also have a moral and ethical code which I have been guilty of disrespecting too often recently. I have been petty and I need too focus all that anger (an indispensable form of passion) into more productive areas. My evolutionary path these last five years has been so steep, that I have become so swamped in information, it has clouded my judgement. Weighted me down, basically because I have had no outlet to channel it all through (hence this digresstionary tale). I am out of practice and out of touch with my form, my art.

So maybe this is what I should be doing! Sitting down, day after day at this machine and writing ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, until I reach such a point as the fog has lifted and I can communicate properly with the world once more. An artist cannot survive in a totalitarian state ( to paraphrase Orwell) and I cannot survive in any state recognisable to myself, so long as I continue to live hostage to my own confused mind, heart and soul. This has gone too far. Enough is enough. When the tangents subside and sustained, literary creation begin to flow, then I’ll be myself once more. No, I have never truly exhibited my true form, my true persona, not even to myself. This will be its embryonic awakening. And once it arrives, it will be here to stay.

So, let’s get the fuck on with it, eh! This shall be my daily testament to my inception into a creature of light, of radiance, of apple-white purity. Whether you cheer or groan when you lay eyes upon me is not my concern. As long as you see me, that is all I ask. I will hide in the shadows no longer. Nor will I let any of you off the hook as easily as I have done. Already I feel freer, less tense. This is my medium and I reclaim it as my own. Through words I exist. Through words I share my insanity, my wisdom, my passion, and all anger, hatred and prejudice dissolves on contact with this keyboard. You can not infect me. I will achieve peace and not allow the time between now and my demise to become a void, nor filled with resentment and bitterness. Your world is full of shadowy figures and duplicity. Mine is filled with glorious creatures and truth. The only truly impervious beings are the honest. So that is who I shall be. Cool! So, come and have a go if you think you’re smart enough. The Truth! You can’t handle the truth. And things generally of that ilk.

Why not just do your best. ‘Cause the way things stand, it all pointless anyway. We all die, we all rot away. I am as convinced as I can be that there is no God. I’ve yet to hear an argument in His favour that wasn’t clever wordplay or mere intellectualising, leading to profound confusion. Descartes believed that since he was imperfect, he must have been created by a perfect being. Or alternatively, Rene, perhaps you were created by a process less imperfect than yourself. Christians argue that evolution could not have created something as perfect as the eye. What they fail to either mention or comprehend is that the human eye is far from perfect. It is riddled with flaws. If God did such a good job, why did humans need to invent glasses? Which throws up another question. Why would a perfect being, create an imperfect one? What’s up with that?

Neither do I by into this argument that procreation is a form of immortality. Most of us have little knowledge of own lineage beyond four or five generations previous (not an especially successful attempt). However, a larger percentage of the population know that Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Hmm, can’t name our own great-great-grandfather, yet we remember the name of a gay Irishman. I’m not gay, but I think I prefer Oscar’s method. Maybe I’ll never get anywhere or my portfolio be lost to civilisation, but since I’ll be forgotten within eighty years after my death anyway, I may as well have a shot at it. Beats watching Big Brother (being flayed alive and anally fucked by an elephant beats watching Big Brother however).

Get it done.

 

Catharsis

 What does you conscience say? You shall become the person you are.

Catharsis

This is still my catharsis. The routine I need to stick to day in day out, to gain a sense of perspective and practice the basics of my art so that I may excel in it. During the last

peak, when I was addicted to sitting here, I churned out some not bad stuff. Here can I write what I want, when I want, so that I may go on and write what I need to write. Without this I soon sink into lethargy and lack of confidence. It does matter what I write here, whether it is inane and shit. This is the foundation from which I can build a career. Nothing is disallowed (double negative, I hate it when that happens).

Was talking to a friend about positive role models, and the lack of, last night. I told her that I wanted to be my own role model. This is true. Whereas I find many writers and musicians appealing, none of them attract me wholeheartedly. Back to the Eponymist ideal again. The idea of individuality (Christ being the only Christian). I can take pointers from people, but ultimately I stand alone. I don’t believe in nationality or religion or race. At best, any social group is a loose conglomeration. At best, unified through one or two ideals. Which is fine. Society could not operate without community spirit. However, one of the reasons for the breakdown of society in the west is a realisation that these ideals have become transparent. Immigration and the global ideal are partly to blame. The world has moved forward so fast that our narrow perceptions have not been able to shift with it. Acclimatise to it. Our perceptions need to be refocused. Religion and the family unit used to provide the bedrock, but they have slowly been eroded. The downfall of at least one these is due to it being based on erroneous assumptions, dressed up as truth. Can you guess which one?

We have to become fluid. To be able to shift our allegiances according to the situation. There are times when I am affected by national boundaries. Football, I mean. In fact, sport is almost the only time when most of us feel a strong pull from nationality (or it should be). I envisage a future where there are no longer any nations. A persons country will be made up only of the places that they have been to. Not an phoney affinity with people they have never met or place they have never seen. My nation is Liverpool and Cardiff. Madrid and Paris. Amsterdam and Bruges. I want to live in a world where in one regard a person maybe my opponent, yet in another they will be my contemporary. As a writer, I consider Hemmingway fascinating, but as a man I doubt we would have much in common. He writes with a passion for his subject, but I have little desire to experience bull fighting or fishing. This is what we should all be moving towards.

I believe that the purpose of the universe is to achieve infinity. The best way for it to do that is by generating as many possibilities as possible, thereby increasing the chances of it happening. Infinity is the point at which all possibilities have been played out. Now, if this is true, then life on this planet should be diversifying in as many ways as it can. Originality is the key. Certain well meaning types will tell you that there is nothing original. That may be true. But there is always a new spin to an old idea. A unique rendering of prevalent influences. This is the code to which I hope to stay true. A fresh form injected writing machine. All artistic disciplines should be in a continued state of growth. That is why I hate popular culture so much. The continued re-rendering and re-hashing of the same ideas over and over again. The law of diminishing returns. These are possibilities being played out it is true, but when so much time seems to be spent on producing works of dubious artistic value, it is hard to see where our next evolutionary step is to come from. Stagnation abounds and I think this is its one objective. I am a big admirer of the Bard, but the comedy in his plays is simply not very funny. Comedy has moved on in leaps and bounds in the last four hundred years (Python, Bill Hicks, Spaced), just as it should.

Anarchy. The more and more I think about anarchy, the more I read, the more I come to the conclusion that we are all of us, for the most part, anarchists. The basic tenet of anarchism is this: Do whatever you want to do, so long as it does not interfere with anyone else. This is one of the principles I try to abide by: Do what you want but do no harm. Something I’ve not always followed as closely as I should. Now, is this not what we do every day of our lives. We may go to work, but no one forces is us. We do it through our own volition. Okay, so we do it to get paid, but it may be said that there is a contract between employee and employer. A symbiotic relationship. One cannot survive without the other. We get married, have children, but then there is merely a refocusing of our anarchic principles. Our family becomes us and the family may do what it wants, as long as it does no harm (including to itself).

The problem with a large part of the anarchist movement, as I see it, is that they only hear the first part. “What, do what I want? Cool! See ya.” “Hang on, there’s more…Oh fuck it.” But isn’t that always the way with ideologies? They get distorted and perverted for personal gain, until they bear little relation to the original idea (cf. the major religions of the world)! The problem with the anarchist movement is that it seeks to politicise what is in essence a personal philosophy. Anarchism is a lifestyle choice. As soon as you try to mould it into a movement it ceases to be anarchy. Buddhism is very close to anarchism. It is essentially about meditation. When you pervert it into religion it ceases to be Buddhism. There’s a great line in the film ‘Dogma’. All about how humans have missed the essential point of religion. It isn’t about religion, its about ideas. “Ideas can be changed. Religion is what gets people killed.”

I do not seek to enforce any idea upon my fellow man, except one. Be yourself. Be the person that you are. What does you conscience say? asks Nietzsche. You shall become the person you are. Be your own religion. Your own ideal. Your own political party; your own role model. Be your own trail blazing its way toward the horizon. And if any other line happens to intersect yours, well then that’s just a happy coincidence. A bonus. I think Henry Miller put it best:

…you won’t be dead, you won’t be indifferent, you won’t be insensitive, you won’t be alarmed and panicky, you won’t be jittery, you won’t throw rotten eggs because you don’t understand. You will want to understand everything, even the disagreeable things. You will want to accept more and more – even what seems hostile, evil, threatening. Yes, you will become more and more like God. You won’t have to answer and advertisement in the newspaper in order to find out how to talk with God, God will be with you all the time. And if I know what I’m talking about, you will listen more and talk less.

Okay, that’s enough cultural referencing for the moment. I am your sheep herder, kneel before me. Quiet!

Get it done.