The Fictional Lives of Others

‘All through the summers, into January

I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries

Looking for the necessary body parts

Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

I’ll bring someone to life, it’s what I wanna do

I wanna create my own version of you’

(Bob Dylan)

When the ancient Greek statesman Solon met Thespis, the first actor recorded as speaking on stage, Solon asked Thespis why he could lie on stage. Thespis shrugged and pointed out that people can tell the difference between fiction and reality, Solon banged his staff on the ground and declared that this was wrong for once people saw they could lie on stage then this would give unintentional permission for people to lie in all walks of life. Solon’s wisdom can easily be put down as the ravings of an old man, not ‘down’ with the kids, but during revelations of the W Bush administration’s policy of torturing prisoners the Conservative news pundit Laura Ingraham stated that the TV show ‘24’ in which the same behaviours occurredwas very popular and this popularity was a ‘national referendum for torture’ (indeed, soldiers would watch the show and then emulate it on prisoners) one must be deeply concerned that no only does Laura Ingraham require a brain transplant with a lump of coal (bah, humbug) but that we live in a world in which fiction and reality are interchangeable, indeed, the fiction often being considered more ‘real’ than reality.     

In these pages we have stated oft that our entire existence is subjective and that we cannot really know anything, that we live in ignorance and ignorance is generally fine, yes, the Greek philosopher Plato said that wisdom begins in wonder, but generally ignorance is harmless. But what is not harmless, indeed what could be, to refer back to President George W Bush, a weapon of mass destruction is when one begins to not only not question but to believe the lie to be reality.  

I can give examples of this from politics, to Nazism, to the notion that style is a substitute for storytelling (seriously, Disney, stop ruining Star Wars!) but let us deal with something which we all, unfortunately, encounter on a daily basis and that is gossip.

When asking a friend of mine why people gossip, she replied that it was because they were bored. When I expanded upon her thought and started to analyse those who gossip or those who ‘like to be interested in other people’s lives’ then one can see quite quickly that the lives and minds of these people are not particularly exciting. And thusly they pry and poke into the lives of others to try to make their own boredom less apparent to them as the French philosopher Albert Camus said, ‘people hasten to judge so as not to be judged themselves’, and as the German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche said, the lies we tell others are very rare, the most common lie is that which we tell ourselves.  So, anyway, if this despicable act of gossip was restricted to a child’s news service ‘ooooh, he had his milk AND a banana’, then it would be harmless but what actually happens, consciously or unconsciously, is two-fold:

1. The information reported is often wrong and no one checks the validity of the ‘news’ before passing it on as though it were true, to return to Plato the lack of wonder in the storyteller shows a lack of wisdom
2. To make the story more personal, people insert themselves into it; ‘oh, I couldn’t believe…’; ‘I’m here to support, and here is my story…’ etc.

These only manage to achieve two outcomes:

1. The picture of the person involve becomes distorted and people believe the lie
2. The person telling the story, as the moon, bathes in the reflected light

And so the truth becomes lost as the person who tells the story becomes the star of the story and the person spoken of becomes a fiction which others believe to be truth.

Yes, newspapers and magazines justify their publishing of gossip by saying that circulation increases with gossip, suggesting that is what people want, but this is an abdication of personal responsibility, one of the lies to self Nietzsche spoke of, as they could refuse to print gossip but as they want money they print it and then blame the consumer, (uh…?)  

I might be accused of hyperbole but to me the evidence would suggest that many of the world’s problems could be fixed if people would 1) communicate to get truth before disseminating lies as truth, 2) set aside their own insecurities for a truly greater good but as we see time and time again, those who create cultures and hegemonies are driven by their own insecurities. As Cato the Elder spake, ‘those who treat ridiculous things seriously will treat serious things ridiculously’, people will happily substitute the truth for a lie for a brief respite of their own insecurities and people will be crucified for fictional lives that they do not live, for fictional people who they are not, whilst the real problems of the world pass by unnoticed as they do not raise the glory of the individual who’s only goal in life is to rid themselves of their insecurities, not by acknowledging them and moving onward with their lives  but by spitting on those different (and often greater) then them and calling it rain.

‘till next time   

What Happened Today?

One of more asinine questions that one is asked is about their day- what they did, what happened. There is little interest in the reply, the whole process is (mostly) about social convention and, at times, the person asking is asking so that they will in turn be asked and be able to speak about themselves.  

Moving away from the personal, the best source of information as to what happened today is the aptly named ‘News’. The news gives a list of events which have national and global significance (economics, politics etc.) and things of cultural interest (sporting events, award shows) tucked on at the end of the programme. It is statistically shown that people will watch the first 5-10 minutes of the news and then turn off, and so the bigger stories, the actual stories, are placed up front. However, 20-40 years ago, this changed. With the advent of cable news, news became an ongoing narrative with real time updates, life changing events happening before our eyes from market collapses to regime changes to two planes being flown into the World Trade Centre, New York, an action which changed the world as this led to the wars on, firstly, a country that wasn’t a threat and secondly, a word, ‘Terror’. The War on Drugs had been replaced by The War on Terror, complete with theme tunes and award nominations.

The human brain is fascinating. There are, to simplify things, two aspects to it- the primitive brain from which most instinct flows and the developed brain which enables reasoning. Whilst 24/7 rolling news had the opportunity to educate and challenge its viewers in the art of nuance, news channels had one main objective- find viewers. Viewers = interest, interest = money in the form of advertising, better ‘crowd drawing’ guests etc. and thusly the news, instead of appealing to the higher brain, went for the primitive brain. One of the most powerful instincts is self-preservation, in this instance reproduction and fear. News broadcasters knew that a recitation of events with analysis by unknown experts would not engage the basic instincts of the viewers and thusly not many would be interested and so it went for rolling news narrative (in a way it was the forerunner for the boxset) with 75% of the news hour being dominated by one story. From war to Trump and the Russians to the Pandemic to the OJ Simpsons trial to Tom Cruises’ sexuality to Beyoncé, narrative TV took over. As the problem with the news is that there isn’t much news on any one story- there is a vaccine. This is the vaccine and its properties and experts and the FDA say that it is X% sure to work and here is how it will be rolled out, all of which can be covered in a 15 minute block, with possible specials, now take up the best part of 24 hours. As there is no news to report, the news companies took a leaf out of a different book and started to become astrologers. Instead of dealing with facts and unknown experts, the same faces day in and day out (often listed as ‘(News Channel) Political Expert’ without any listing of the qualifications that they have to speak on each story, will go on TV and say, ‘this may happen, and if it does, this may be the consequences’, which, as you can see is a far cry from ‘bus crashes, killing 6’ as the news now becomes

 ‘if a bus has people on it, it may crash, if it does crash then people may be killed’

 ‘hmm, interesting, I wonder what this other person thinks about this’

 ‘yes, it is possible a bus may crash, and people may die, but you have to remember that there may be three buses which do not crash’

‘I see, so why did this bus crash, if indeed it does crash?’

‘well, possibly it wasn’t serviced properly or maybe the driver was drunk’

‘so you are saying that bus drivers may be drunk and cause crashes?’

‘oh, without doubt’

‘we’ll come back to this story after the news, with more of our inhouse experts on politics to talk about alcoholism and bus drivers, don’t go anywhere.’

We, the public, are more likely to listen to a face and name we already know. The bookshops and libraries are full of famous names and faces. One can look at the, for example, science section and see a book and go,

‘hey, that author on dark matter played a chemist on TV so he must know about physics, more than this Fritz Zwicky (who?) guy’ (note: Zwicky pioneered ‘missing mass’ (dark matter) theory), and increasingly we ignore experts for the familiar and so people who have no qualifications (sorry, being famous is not a qualification for, well, anything) are the ‘experts’ who guide us through our lives from children’s books to psychology and self-help, to fiction and so on and so forth.

Increasingly what we would call the news (i.e. facts) are being buried beneath the cult of celebrity and the desperate need for our attention. News vies with each other by making it flasher and more dramatic than the other channels, likewise publishers will no longer publish an unknown (even before it was a nightmare to get published, just ask J K Rowling (but don’t mention equality to her)) as they know that an audience which is increasingly bored with its life is more desperate for escapism into drama and so even the news has become a drama to feed the 3 second attention span of the average adult.

‘till next time    

Minor Characters

One of the things which irritates me (what a great start!) in dramas is the role of minor characters. In the TV show, The West Wing there is a character named Carol who is the assistant to the Press Secretary. When she is around her boss or other members of the senior staff, Carol is charming, sweet and pleasant. However, when she is not around senior staff, rather when she is one of the senior staff in the room, Carol becomes rude, arrogant and unpleasant. I have written before that if you wish to know the qualities of a manager, one should not ask the manager’s peers or superiors, rather one should ask the ones who serve under the manager. Yes, it is unlikely that, unless anonymity is achieved (and in feedback forms it rarely is) the staff will be willing to speak up. When the Greek King Dionysus was asked why he had exiled the great philosopher Plato, he replied that when you are in command people rarely speak the truth to you so, due to this, he was deprived the pleasure of Plato speaking the truth to him, of him, and so exiled him (umm?), and this case study shows that it is often unwise to ‘speak truth to power’, as the asinine saying goes, as often the aspect which causes the inhibition of the underling is not their lack of faith in their ability to speak ‘truth’, rather in the inability of those to whom they speak being able to accept the truth, even if they do not endorse it, with good cheer and dignity.

So, anyway, what does the actions of Carol show us, and why did it happen? The answer lies in the title of this piece ‘minor characters’. Despite Ian Curtis (Joy Division) writing about watching his life unfurl from the wings, despite Delmore Schwartz writing about going into a cinema to watch a film of his parent’s lives before he was born (wait, our parents were alive before we were born?!), despite Shakespeare calling us poor actors who flutter out like a candle with our lives signifying nothing, we live in the delusion that we are the heroes of our stories, that we are Sir Lancelot riding into battle in shining armour (and stealing the wives of our best friends), that we are the heroes that Homer sang about, conveniently forgetting that many of them were generally unpleasant, flawed, individuals and that we are the slayers of dragons and evil witches.

Although you might be thinking that this is all harmless, after all the great Marcel Proust wrote how we need a little illusion in our lives to make our lives bearable and who am I to question the wisdom of Proust? (the answer is no one, just another minor character), we have to be conscious of why this happens and the possible consequences. It seems that we serve when we have to in order to rule later (the last shall become first- to bastardise the Judeo-Christian Bible), and that the desire to dominate, to crush, lies deep within us, dominating our psyches, after all, are we not taught that the only pleasure can come from advancement in status and economics? And why this might seem petty and, well, boring, in the work place, the same behaviours show their true insidiousness when we realise that our revolt against being only ‘minor characters’ and the desire, need, to become a major character, all behaviours born of fear, weakness and ignorance, is one of the main reasons why dictators can carry out mass genocide on unimaginable levels whilst we wave our flags and ‘tweet’ our support, all under the illusion that one day we will be the ones committing atrocities before a cheering crowd.

‘till next time             

Finding a Tree in the Woods

At the beginning of the Czech writer Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle (note: all of his three novels were unfinished), the protagonist, a land surveyor, arrives in a small village. He states that he has business up at the castle. Finding a bed by the fire to one side of the busy bar, the land surveyor is approached by two men. The men tell him that they are his assistants. He (K) states that he has never seen them before. They assure him that they are his old assistants and have worked with him for many years. K, tired, yields but states, ‘how can I tell you apart, you look the same’ (note: I am not directly quoting verbatim) to which the two strangers, who are now his assistants, reply, ‘that is because we are together’. Later, in the novel, K is leaving the house of another character when an old man approaches him to reprimand him for the inconvenience of being sent to find him. When K replies that the man is a stranger, the man gently reprimands him again to say that he is one of the assistants and the reason why he looks different is because he is alone.

As we have spoken of many times, hegemonies are formed for a society to form. If one is lucky then the society is formed by a proverbial Philosopher King, as spoken about by the Greek philosopher Plato in his Republic. More often than not, those who form the hegemony are people with serious mental health issues- issues such as narcissism, insecurity, lack of emotional intelligence, lack of cognitive intelligence and so on and so forth. Thusly, the hegemony created in their image takes on their form and is inherently sick. How is this allowed to thrive? Well, two quick reasons, 1) those within are desperate to fit and thusly conform and accept the sickness as health and 2) one of the biggest reasons why the United States housing market (sub-prime bonds) could collapse was that those who were supposed to regulate it were too close to it and thusly could not do their job as they were unable to see the decay within the market, a decay which those without, such as Michael Burry, could see and thusly bet against the market (short the market) and win billions as the bet paid off as the bubble burst and the market collapsed.   

It is all well and good to assume that all fit within the model of complicity and decay but, as with all societies, not all those within think the same or act the same. Yet these few trees are hidden amongst the other trees which formulate the wood. As we are making assumptions about nearly everyone we meet, it is very hard to find a true person within the mess. Occasionally one steps forward and stands up against the rot but their words and actions are often accompanied by the strains of Chopin’s Marche Funèbre (Funeral March) as sooner or later they find themselves nailed to a tree (crucifixion), shot or exiled from the hegemony they are trying to save. So, if it takes such a brave public step to identify such people, it makes it impossible to find them, no? Not necessarily. Although we say that we cannot find a tree for the woods, sometimes the formula is inverted. If one person imposes their will on public discourses and culture then one may be tempted to think that they think and speak for all those others but, sometimes, it can be a case of a tree obscuring the woods. The woods may be birch trees but before them, dominating the landscape, is an oak tree, thusly one assumes that all the trees in the woods are oak, not so, in this instance. Thusly are we correct to assume that everyone within the hegemony is of one mind? Often, yes but not always. Yet how to know that a tree is birch, not oak, how do we know that a person is different to the hegemony? Well, it is rather simple really. We make the effort, we walk past the oak tree and observe the other trees, we walk up to a person and start to speak to them. Yes, some of the other trees may be oaks, yes, many in the hegemony may be the same but it is just as wrong to assume that this is the case when, in reality, what we call the ‘truth’, may just be an assumption, and as with most assumptions made by humans, wrong.

‘till next time       

What is Maturity?

Maturity is one of those things, like wisdom or the truth etc. which people often believe that they and they alone are in possession of. We have spoken before of how people criticise President Trump for his lack of nuance in arguments by just shouting ‘Fake news’ and how many of those who do criticise him, now do exactly the same thing (it has been said that what we hate in others we love in ourselves, I guess Trump has just shown us a mirror to who we really are), yet this is not something which has come about in the last four years. The lack of nuance, the lack of intellectual contemplation has been going on longer than I can recall. As with many things, they stay exactly the same, only the veneer changes. Is there any difference between hearing something that you dislike and shouting ‘fake news’, suggesting that you know it is fake news as you alone hold the truth and someone hearing something they dislike and stating, ‘oh, you are so immature’, as though they alone hold the patent on maturity? One colloquialism which is used is, ‘act your age, not your shoe size’, I always found amusing as for a few years, my shoesize was greater than my age!    

We spoke previously how aging is not chronological as wisdom comes from not just the passage of time but also the reflection and understanding of what has happened and the fortitude to not, ‘let it go’, as those who cannot let things go often preach, rather, learn form it and move on with the lessons gleaned. And if aging is not chronological, then would it be fair to suggest that maturity does not stem from the passage of time?

The Czech writer Milan Kundera suggests that maturity is observing without judgement, because,

‘It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favour, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.’

or in other words, the Truth is something beyond us therefore what we call the truth may change as we change, for, if one holds the same opinion throughout their entire life without any questioning of it, or doubt, then there is the danger that that individual will never grow and become what they might be. As we have spoken of before, hegemonies can only survive if they are not questioned and, if so, crush any questioning (‘Whenever one tries to suppress doubt , there is tyranny’ – Simone Weil) to maintain the status quo.

So, to get back on topic, what then is maturity? Maturity is observing without judgement.  ‘Wait!’, you are crying, ‘are you insane?! Is not genocide objectively wrong? Can you see suffering and not judge those who perpetrate it?!’, to which the answer is yes, this is not some holy truth which is beyond nuance and questioning, yes some acts must be judged and should be judged against the highest stature possible- a true moral law, but these events are few and far between (thankfully), what I am referring to is the mundane, the ordinary. As the great French writer Marcel Proust noted, cruelty is not knowing or caring how our actions impact upon others, so the events I am referring to are the daily. We see someone’s actions, we do not like the actions and thusly we condemn them, yet, maybe, if we took a step back and observed without forming an opinion, we might see something different, we might glean an understanding beyond our limited scope and thusly we may see things in a whole new light, and that, I believe, although I could be wrong, is what maturity is, the attempt to understand something before passing judgement, if indeed a judgement (an opinion) is formed.      

‘till next time