Anti-fragile and anti-despairing
Is there something beyond the litany of serious problems gently rehearsed in Gently Serious? One of our most loyal readers says she is feeling overburdened with what we write about. What after all is the point of becoming aware of all the ways in which we are sold down the river? We do say periodically that the point of understanding the patterns we are caught in is to be able to escape them, but escape to where and for what?
We have been reading Bob Marshall’s new book on Organisational Psychotherapy which points to the ways in which an organisation can become a much better place to work and a place to do much better work. That is half the answer that we are looking for here, that the daily grind can have some daily joy and less frustration locally. Many people will settle for that if it is available.
Anti-fragile is Nassim Taleb’s book on things that gain from disorder. The borrow the phrase, we want to explore how we can gain from being aware of all the impossibilities that we face: anti-despairing perhaps. And the key to that is something that we have recognised time and again, that the content ostensibly used in the patterns we face, like using abortion as a campaign issue, is almost never the point of the pattern. These elements of supposed content are merely our hot buttons that someone is using to turn us into fodder for their pattern. There is something profoundly liberating[1] in knowing that when someone is denying climate change they are probably not talking about climate change at all.
The key word in building a description of the anti-despairing position is individuation, which we have touched on before. We can now get a better angle on it. Ironically, the cult of individuality is precisely what delivers us into the patterns of control: people tell us we are individuals when they need us to be sheep. They tell us we have choice and control in the act of removing those things from us. They tell us the supermarket stocks those items that we have shown them that we want to buy. If you can’t feel the frisson in that common statement then stay with it a while.
Individuation
I have in front of me Murray Stein’s book, The Principle of Individuation. He describes a client of his still driven to individuate into her mid-eighties. This is a life’s work not because there is somewhere to get to, a landing point, but because that is the nature of our selves, as infinitely questing and complexifying. It is not a happy thought but probably we can write this blog for ever, uncovering the ways in which we are being co-opted into thinking patterns that work against us, that play into evil business ploys. And public sector ploys infected by the same spirit. And charities that are far from charitable.
The structure Murray Stein speaks of, I think we take on fairly easily. There is a two-fold movement. In one arm, we find the ways in which we have already been co-opted and things we think and believe that are not ours and not true for us. In the other arm, there is a new clarity about the things that are vital for us pull together and to operate from. Classically, we pay attention to the stripping out motion first and that is the drift of these blogs, but there is a point at which we need to start building our anti-despairing selves, on a foundation that does not lean on what other people do.
Remember first (h/t to Maz):
What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. D. Lessing
I am not recommending to you that you individuate, continue individuating. I am saying with Stein that we individuate whether we want to or not, and that it is an easy process to get wrong or flunk. The pathologies that we talk of in this blog are pathologies of failed individuation. Of getting caught in patterns we don’t understand and thinking that we are making choices and being in control. For a metaphor, think of any addict in the early stages of their addiction — to alcohol, social media, opiates, the approval of their heroes, organisational religion.
Some false dichotomies
Surely you are for Brexit or against it. The UK is pretty riven it seems. There is passion and despair both sides of the question. But I will not normalise what is happening into being a political debate or there being arguments for and against. That is to do the BBC’s evil work for it. If we look at the pattern as a pattern this is a piece of destabilisation of UK politics. It is a sowing of the dragon’s teeth, often for the pettiest of ends.
Our loyal reader mentioned above is also exercised by Brexit, overburdened also. And that is the point: there will be some issues around which we have not yet individuated sufficiently that remain as gotchas. Hooks that we can be snared by, emotive issues that will give us sleepless nights. But step for a moment into Putin shoes. Does he welcome a paralysing disruption of politics here and the consequent inability of politicians and opinion formers to be clear sighted about the big issues? Do particular hedge fund bets and dodgy deals with international pariahs succeed on the basis of undermining politics too?
I am stopping short of the conspiracy theories here. We only want to borrow Putin’s perspective that if not Brexit then some other issue can be similarly disruptive.
Surely you are either a vegetarian or you are not. I have heard that at certain academic conferences whether you are a vegetarian or not is the surest way to make friends and enemies. No room for measured exchange at all. I am not going to normalise this issue either. In Australia this tendency stems from a Seventh Day Adventist intervention over a century ago. If we look for the pattern again we see a food industry only too happy to sow discord, following the model of the tobacco industry’s misinformation and pseudo-research and false institutes. Pay attention to the means pursued: a much better guide than the propaganda itself.
We are all losers from such disgusting tactics. The shops are full of low fat products that are harmful to health. Old people who desperately need fats in their diet to support mental function are persuaded to lower their cholesterol. I did actually lose a colleague qua colleague because she become obsessed with saving the world via veganism. Everyone loses and that is the point of the pattern so cynically fomented. Even the vegetarians at the WHO managing to put out messages not to eat too much meat.
Finding our way
True friends and colleagues, with whom it is possible to have open conversations about what are real choices on our respective paths and what are mantraps in our culture that can prevent us ever finding our paths are impossibly rare, are gold dust. Those new style politicians, those Facebooks and Googles, those random US billionaires with an axe to grind have learned how to set psychological mantraps for us. They need us to be caught in their false dichotomies, to be exercised by things that are not the issue. They cannot abide conversations where truth gets oxygen, and if those conversations go public will act ruthlessly to suppress them.
I heard an MP state, at the Facebook hearings before parliament this week, that what Facebook are doing in racketeering. And a lot of things fell into place for me. I had the pattern of misuse of data by Facebook as too passive, open to misuse but not prime mover evil. But I think probably they are actively making political threats and their business model depends on people paying protection money.
Lets unpick that into our own complicity. We live our lives on the net. We make and maintain friendships and other relationships on Facebook and other platforms. That tempts all sorts of gangsters into a vampire relationship with our networks. How could it not be so? We have said many times that the world in composed of relationships, not of things: this is corroboration of that view. The set of links that define us in cyberspace are all these gangsters need to prey on our world. All they need.
I deleted my Facebook account as soon as it was clear that they were implicated in manipulating elections.[2] But it seems that people who do not have a Facebook account are called “unregistered users” internally. There is no-one on the planet who is not connected into the web of relationships: you have zero control over being tracked and classified and targeted.[3] There are of course state versions of the same process, prominently in China, certainly in the US.
But this is not about Facebook, it is about friends. We desperately need friends who are awake and can help us make sense of the patterns we are in. If we cannot afford to immediately expose those real networks to vampirism we need to meet face to face and build real alternative structures. And so it is about what is real. A gangster has the ability to turn what we think of as our social lives into something quite other. We can’t see it, but of course that is the point. Traditionally, in Italy if someone is being good to you, buying breakfast and drinks you need to distance in case you owe them a favour that leads to a slippery slope.[4] The world is not short of gangster and mafia entrapment skills. Apparently, every single academic in Germany has LinkedIn friends with Chinese connections.
One of the implications of this state of affairs is that we need to know who people really are. My father, as a historian, had a colleague who was interested in the Stasi records in East Germany. After East Germany collapsed, there was an interregnum of a few days when the place was stateless and there were no rules. This colleague went through the Stasi files with a particular interest in the role of the Church. He was able to establish in four days that more than half the pastors in East Germany were Stasi informers. You can imagine he made himself immensely unpopular.
I am having the same experience with Cambridge biomedical scientists. I am being asked to accept that there are real scientists and other people who just don’t understand why the official position is right. It is a very uncomfortable horse to ride, being told that the people I have followed and who indirectly have turned my health around are regarded as beyond the pale. It seems not to be possible to discuss the issues beyond an initial civil exchange.
Anti-despair
Does any of this help our loyal reader? Is there a state where we are resilient to the caperings of people in power, people who think they are leaders? It seems to me that the main thing is to see through, almost automatically, the promises and marketing speak, the official pronouncements and prognostications, to grand-standing and the general identification of the better and hopeful future.
The future is highly unlikely to be better and much more likely to full of pain and angst. As ever the poor and the powerless will get trashed and ground down, sometimes just exterminated. We will continue to blame them for what we do to them, continue to identify them as idle and ignorant and just not as deserving as we are. We don’t need to be hard and cynical but we do need to disregard the blandishments of those austerity merchants who want us to think that their violence will usher in the new dawn we deserve.
[1] One of my liberating touchstones is Philip Larkin’s insight in This Be The Verse: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.” How freeing, this possibility of not agonizing over the minutiae of parenting when you will inevitably lose control of the result. David Allen’s advice in his Getting Things Done seminar is to recognize that you have the option of lowering your standards: “Kids, your mother and I have decided that from now on, we’re going to be mediocre parents…”
[2] In contrast, I simply haven’t logged in, at least not since May 2018, when the GDPR regulation came into force. I know this because every time that I go to check something, I’m prompted to accept the new terms, which prompts me to think that the thing I was going to look at probably isn’t worth the acquiescence…
[3] This of course is how Linkedin so cunningly suggests connections: it’s your details in other people’s address books that inform the network, not anything that you yourself have deliberately revealed to them.
[4] The modern equivalent is the notion that if you’re not paying for something, then you’re the product.
