Tim Doesn’t Give.

Today a little cartoon with message, “Most people want to be liked and accepted…. but Tim doesn’t give a shit”, with Tim drifting up and away under a bunch of red balloons giving the finger to a cluster of onlookers. It’s a glorious example of an unconscious, un-said meaning. The impression is of Tim, floating above the crowd, off to some great adventure, free and bold as his own person. Where he is active (with the finger) the group is earth bound, mute, passive and co-dependant. This little snapshot in Tim’s life shows the wonderful feeling of liberation from ‘not giving a shit.’ It sells the virtues of not giving a shit, but linguistically it deletes any negatives that might get in the way. One doesn’t imagine the onlookers saying, “OK if that’s how you feel, fuck off” because they’re passive. One doesn’t consider that Tim’s great adventure might come unstuck and he’d need some help, or him drifting down to new groups and giving them the finger to or them as an active group giving it to him. No, in this one precise moment everything will be great for Tim; and it’s such a nice name. I’m sure we all contort our own life to suite others and that contortion is best resisted, not by not giving a shit but the reverse, by engagement, not by insularity or arrogance but being with. OK it’s funny but a great example of the deletions and equivalences created to make us think in a certain way, make the obvious conclusion. It’s how we’re sold Coke, fast foods etc etc, and it works. On a therapy course a guy was asked to draw a picture of his special relationship with God. He drew a circle of light from above with him in it and everyone else outside. He had a profound realisation that his ‘special relationship’ was the source of his feelings of isolation. Tim, with is special relationship with himself, reminded me of this moment, a moment that changed the guy’s life for the better. 

R U a Happy Meal?

I’ve heard a lot about 2012 being the end of the Mayan calendar and it heralding the start of a new phase in humanity, mostly from people dealing with it on an introspective level. But I’m also aware of people out there working for this change. Just this morning a report from a Catholic conference about business: a strange mix, Catholics, business and Mayan culture, but I guess that’s how progress swirls. Their question, does business serve those it touches? Take McDonalds for example. It doesn’t serve its employees by paying them poorly or its customers by feeding them poorly. It provides millions with poverty and obesity in equal measure. How can that company be so profitable when one that pays reasonably and provides good food struggles to survive? The knee-jerk answer is supposedly efficiency; the efficiency of scale provides good value, but how can something that serves everyone so poorly be considered good value? Can it really be considered ‘good business’? In Nazi Germany Gerbils, sorry Goebbels (thank you internet, pics of little fury animals saved me from a terrible mistake there) used propaganda to great effect in wartime and Edward Bernaise, nephew of Sigmund Freud, realised its peacetime uses but called it Public (read proletariat) Relations, and with the help of his uncle’s theories made good use of it. By almost single-handedly setting up the corporate/proletariat divided he put capitalism on a war footing, and with the help of our own unconscious taught us to love our enemy. We now see profitability and growth as inviolable even though it serves a mere one percent and impoverishes the other ninety-nine. So go for it Mr Bishop, good on yer. And then there’s Russel Brand bewitching Jeremy Paxman with a similar message. And finally a Youtube video of a polar bear playing with dogs has had 12 million views. We are instinctively yearning to be able to play together, even with a predator. Well when it’s not hungry. But when it’s insatiable every living thing will give it a wide berth and it will die. Unfortunately in our case PR has over-written this natural sense. Anyone for a Happy Meal?

Paxman v Brand. The Newsnight Interview.

I have huge respect for both but I’ve rarely seen Paxman reduced to fallacious arguments to berate an opponent. Then again Brand needs flesh on the bones of his own. Here’s some. Back in the seventies I painstakingly counted constituencies won by the non-voters. They would have had a healthy majority in parliament, a fact that went totally unnoticed. We’d had a successful bi-polar democratic election and A out of A and B won. Or maybe it was B I can’t remember. So then as now non-voters, as Paxman suggests, made themselves irrelevant. But there must come a point where non-voting become relevant, where the remaining few percent of voters look like the paltry unrepresentative efforts of a bunch of family and friends. Only then will it be seen as an undeniable landslide for change. Brand scores an equaliser. He runs up-field attacking the failures of the existing system to address all our major problems and delivers a weak socialist cross into the box. Like voting, Brand continues to maintain the positivity of zero action, which for every good protestant seems an anathematic contradiction. 2:1 to Paxman. We know far more about human reactions than in socialisms day. We are a cooperative species where each individual, for purely personal reasons wishes to be the best they can be. Behind every individual who apparently disproves this axiom you’ll find an externally inflicted frustration that they can’t be so. It’s the system’s failure to provide its population with the facilities necessary to overcome these personal frustrations that will reduce socialism and capitalism to history’s failed attempts. Crime, finance, domestic violence, obscene wealth, power and wars all stem from some form of personal frustration. Brand failed to score this vital goal by not forming the substance of this new paradigm; that his positivity of zero action is not laziness nor dreamery but the positive actions required to allow things to happen, to allow, stimulate and support each individual to become what they want to be, the best they can be as an individual and a member of our cooperative species, irrespective of wealth, position, power and influence. Today I facilitated a mixed ability team of adults with social difficulties. Should have been there, they scored the second equaliser. 

Great British Bakeoff.

To all those people arguing for non-competitive sports; fuck you, losers! There’s a unique camaraderie amongst competitors because only those attempting the same thing can truly appreciate the virtues of each other. From first to last there’s a bonding of personal achievement, provided it’s judged on true excellence. Whether I came first in school or last in a moto-cross race I was pleased to be challenging myself to do my best. The GBBoff proves this in spades. From the big white tent, the grassland surroundings, the gingham table, the piecing blue eyes of the baking gods and their twin bitch puppies to the motley crew of time-stressed competitors the scene is set for a celebration of what’s wonderfully British. It somehow resurrects niceness to its true standing as a powerful virtue. There are no losers in the GBBoff, it’s totally loser free. The condescension, masquerading as sympathy for the last-in-class, from the non-competitive losers comes from their own need to non-compete. They perceive individuality is best served by insularity, that a person can raise themselves by their own introspective bootstraps. Tell that to a loaf! It needs an oven to avoid the ignominy of a dreaded soggy bottom. But one glace into Paul and Mary’s eyes, one teasing from the puppies will convince you we’re all in this together. Where the other Hollywood will convince you you’re a million miles below star status this one will critically convince you it is all possible, if you keep at it. So thank you everybody concerned, you’ve convinced me. Baking, maybe not but other things.

PS. Apparently the show has provoked a vitriolic response in the twittersphere from some. A timely reminder that how we see the world is our own interpretation of it and should be rightly owned as such.

Next Time Freud Keep Quiet.

Freud is famous for making the world aware of the unconscious and that irrational behaviour stems from deeper drives that we’re mostly unaware of. For sure wholly rational behaviour can be boring, but back then, if you happen to find an ancient newspaper lining your grandma’s drawer, you’ll find the news was dry and the adverts were depictions of what you might practically want; a lawnmower, syrup for a cold, carpets etc. Their claims may be a little exaggerated but they centre on informing your rational decisions. The lawnmower, simple graphic, price £5/10/6 from Wilkinson’s on Sheep Street: all the information you need if you happen to need a lawnmower. All rationally well and good. With the wide spread awareness of Freud’s theories adverts have moved to appeal to our irrational selves. The lawnmower has become a lifestyle choice, our self-worth has become dependant on the quality of it and we have an irrational desire to buy a new one long before the old one becomes unserviceable. Our grandparents would find the panoply of things we think we need absurd. Even our election choices stem from sound bites carefully chosen to appeal to our facile feelings. In short Freud’s discovery of our unconscious and its irrational behaviour has contributed to our behaviour becoming ever more irrational. But this isn’t limited to purchases it permeates our whole thinking. The basic logical thinking of a hundred years ago would find our personal and professional cognitive contortions bizarre. Our constant mantra of anti-discrimination moves our focus from practical awareness to a myriad of moot feelings. The colleague of my friend is lazy, deceitful and belligerent but these tangibles can’t be voiced because he’s black and that would be racial prejudice. It’s as if anti-discrimination focuses our minds on the surface of things and demeans the skill to discriminate and make perceptive and constructive decisions. Educational inflation where every youngster must go to university may make us feel good but it has little to do with preparation for their likely future. We focus on health and safety rules and not on the rational need to be safe as a way of being. In these and many other ways our decision-making has moved from the practical to inconsequential whimmery. So all aboard the Costa Concordia. The brochure looks great and my inner voices say it’ll be fine. 

American Avatar.

I remember some time ago reading of a Japanese guy dying while playing a computer game. Not a heart attack or electric shock, simply by being so engrossed as his avatar he lost sight of his real life needs. There seemed some sense of a brain meeting something so like itself it becoming mesmerised by its own reflection. There may have been more but they were just individual tragedies insignificant in the greater scheme of things. But reading items coming out of America today has made me wonder if something of the same could be happening to a nation. The body of America, its blue and increasingly white-collar workers, is being neglected, disenfranchised and left unfed as the top 5%, which conveniently describes both the earners and the bodily position of their brains, become increasingly besotted by their reflection in their computerised game of economic worth. There is something of the avatar about a billionaire intent on making more money. Why should the stalwart corporations of America be concerned with workers well being so long as they’re increasingly profitable? Why should its politicians be concerned with the people when they can manage their pole ratings by ad campaigns? The migration of ‘worth’ to the top 5% and the neglect of the rest is a direct parallel of those poor Japanese individuals. It’s scary to imagine a society dying in the same way. The possible national default centred on the rejection of the universal health provisions of Obamacare couldn’t delineate between body and brain, person or avatar, more clearly. One can be sacrificed for the intellectual pleasure of pursuing the other. That Japanese guy didn’t realise the obvious result. Perhaps he died happy, perhaps he died fearful and frail on the way to the fridge, we’ll never know, but so long as adding a zero to the balance sheet’s bottom line is more important than eating an apple America will be heading in that same direction. And don’t think God will save what is beholden to Caesar. 

Wealth Made Easy.

OK there’s a tsunami of wealth landing on the shores of the top 1%. We boggle at the stupidity of it. A billionaire would need to spend £70,000 every day or half a million a week for the rest of his life to use it up. He’d need an army of shoppers and what they bought he’d never have the time use, he’d just be able to walk round a gigantic warehouse of stuff muttering ‘it’s all mine.’ But wealthy people aren’t so stupid, they just happen to be in the black hole centre of some scheme that money disappears into. They like the idea of being able to afford anything they want but it just keeps pouring in, what can they do? Spending it would be a huge task, using what they bought an even bigger one and giving it away bigger still. I mean you wouldn’t want to just throw dollar bills out of your private jet window, you’d want to give it to good causes and that would become life long work. No the laziest thing you could do would be just stash it and forget about it till you actually needed something. So accumulated wealth comes out of laziness, it being harder to spend it, use it or give it away. And anyway being a billionaire has cachet to it even if 80%, £800,000,000 of it is absolutely no use to you. That’s why billionaires spend huge amounts on single items like a house, a wedding, jewellery etc, They don’t really need to or get much benefit from doing it, it just gets rid of money. Basically that sort of extreme wealth is just a pain in the arse. It takes up your time, your thoughts and directs your life. But these poor people have no way out of the situation they’ve gotten into. Accountants will tell you where to live, financial advisors will tell you how to make even more and acolytes will use you but there’s no where to turn to to get help with doing anything useful with it. It may be a gap in the market but whose going to believe someone who ‘will help you spend your money usefully.’ I mean that sounds like a scam if ever there was one. I guess all this is happening because markets etc are all about money going upwards into the financial cloud when there’s absolutely no mechanism for bringing it back down again. So here’s what we’ll do. Set up a lending-spending bank that guarantees you all the money you can to use for the rest of your life and the rest the bank will spend usefully on your behalf. Just invest £5m or more and we’ll do the rest. Total financial security, no money worries, no accountants, tax lawyers, finance and investment advisors, just free to live the life you desire. And you’ll be lauded for all the great work and good causes the bank has funded from your contribution. Take the lazy way out, you’ve worked hard you deserve it.