The word 'truth' is unusually around in our cyber- and other spaces. The word 'post-truth' has been declared word of the year by those who write dictionaries. A Times correspondent described 'post-truth' as lying - it's that simple. My generation can call a spade a spade, he declares. There is much generalised anxiety around about the idea that perhaps we are increasingly being fooled into misperceptions, to the extent that we are no longer in touch with reality. Do we all live in a Matrix, or a Truman Show kind of world in which we are 'normalised' into believing that what is real is not in fact real at all?
This idea is not new - what is? I recall a great sci-fi writer of another generation (E F Russell) who wrote about our planet as in fact a scientific experimental laboratory, run by aliens of far greater advancement than us in knowledge. Little did we know that they might call a halt to the experiment at any time . . . .
All such perspectives seem to be grounded in huge anxieties, which we don't care to admit to often, that we are in fact unimportant little creatures, dots upon dots upon dots, frequently way off beam, who take ourselves fantastically seriously without just cause. Are we Hamlet's 'the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals,' or are we 'this quintessence of dust?'
We could engage with this argument at great length - possibly arriving at very little useful conclusion. It's narcissistic in its essence - born of the need to feel like 'the Great I Am' and the fear of not being. Equally, we could say, 'why does it matter?' The why question is what often comes up in psychotherapy. I find that people want to know whether they are important or not - whether they are valuable, whether they are valued. And the reason they want to know is because nobody has given them much to go on in the past. The parental job, among other things, is to help your children find their own worth and feel confident in it. But often parents have too little sense of self-worth themselves, and cannot transmit to their children what they never had themselves. They themselves are confused and uncertain in this difficult world. Do they matter? Do their children matter?
The ultimate cop-out is to say, 'What is truth anyway?' as Pilate did. I can't really blame him, in the difficult world of Judean and Roman politics of the first century. But it is a cop-out in the sense that shoving aside the existence of truth is meant to relieve you of responsibility. I didn't actually lie to you - I just told you the version that suited us both at the time! It's an attempt to escape from that responsibility by shelling the very idea of truth. Deny truth and you are free to say whatever you like.
The fact is, though, that we have always been free to say whatever we like. Haven't we? What curtails our freedom, or appears to, is the world of consequences. Patients who struggle with a powerful sense of being in chains - being denied the right to their point of view, being controlled, being shut in, shut down, shut up - are sometimes demanding the impossible, namely the right to say and be whatever they want without any consequences. Yet, provided you are prepared to accept the consequences you can do and be and say anything you like. But consequences there will often be! It takes courage to accept the consequences of your behaviour, because you feel that what you have to do or say is that important. It is the essence of the struggle to be a self in a world that is over-peopled with other selves also struggling in the same way. If you want to be free to commit crimes, don't expect them not to put you in jail! If you want to stay in bed mornings, don't expect them to forgive you for being late for school! What these struggles are about, it seems to me, is the immensely difficult task of finding your place in the world, where you are not a lone wolf but one of a community. You can have your share, but you cannot have it all. Not without consequences.
But are there always consequences you may wonder? It can be a desperately unfair world where some people seem to get away with no consequences at all for their behaviour. I think the word 'seem' is important here. You may lie and cheat and not get found out, it is true - but you yourself will find you out. The idea that life is a breeze if you play by no rules and collar all the bonuses is wrong, or at least a partial truth. There is always the overhanging fear that one day . . . . someone will find you out. Justice has a long arm in a world where records are always left somewhere of everything we do. Abused children grow up and get courage to spill the beans. Investigative journalists expose fraudulent behaviour that goes back decades. You are always having to cover your tracks. Always having to make excuses, think up fresh lies and deceptions. The quality of relationships is tarnished by lying and deception. You imagine that nobody knows - that it is your dark secret. And then you find out that everybody knows! Has been treating you differently from way back as a person who cannot be trusted. All hope of real closeness, of intimacy, goes out of the window. You inhabit a phoney world where nobody is expected to be real, to be in the now. You have put yourself in the Matrix, in the Truman Show, willingly! And this is a fate worse than death.
A particular issue for a lot of people, I find, is struggling for the right to say things - find a voice and use it in people-to-people situations. If they could do that, they probably wouldn't need psychotherapy! But their fear is too great. Won't people be angry with them for disagreeing? Won't they lose their closest relationships and be abandoned? Won't they be unpopular? (This is a particularly powerful fear in teenagers - a fate they can only gasp with horror at!) I don't dismiss such fears as trivial. Not at all. But you tend to find with experience that being disliked in one quarter gets you rather liked better in another. Also, being abandoned is actually not the worst thing that can happen to you (I exclude childhood of course in this). It may be that, having got rid of some deadwood in your life, you may have cleared the first space in your life to do something for yourself alone. Imagined consequences may turn out quite differently from what you thought. Imagination plays tricks, enables our internal worlds to speak many varieties of untruth to us - to whisper in our ears all sorts of negative stuff.
So I want to speak up on the side of truth as being psychologically healthy, if nothing else. However, there are caveats worth thinking about also. It pays to be thoughtful about what truth actually is. Very few truths are sacred and inviolable. Truth is not perception. We are creatures of perception - we tend to think that what we perceive to be happening is the only truth there is. Keep an open mind to the possibility that your perception may differ from that of other people - and that neither may be wholly wrong. Check out the facts. Do the work of a good journalist and make sure you know the event history. Social media don't seem to mind whether you have checked anything or not. Everything that is said is presumed to be the case. And a lot of people seem to be be extremely gullible. "It was in the papers" was once a common self-defense against being challenged. Not now. But 'it was on Twitter' has become an easy substitute. Time we became harder to fool. Time we came to value truth more highly. The alternative is to join the world of The Truman Show and not even know you're doing it.
Monday 21 November 2016
Friday 11 November 2016
Post-election reflections
Well, it's all over, and we can breath a collective sigh of relief.
The outcome of the Presidential election has obviously been a major shock and to some people has been a source of dismay and indeed profound despair. It feels all too much like what prevailed on the morning after the EU Referendum was declared. A nasty chasm opens up, in which we find that we are capable of thinking about each other quite differently from what we ever imagined. When I was a school kid, we were taught that the great virtue of the United Kingdom was its homogeneity! From one end of the islands to the other, we were all pretty much the same! Yes, honestly! We've come a long way since then, but even so we did not quite understand how utterly different we were from each other until the ground began to quiver beneath us. Difference, and how we come to terms with it, seems to me to be the great issue of our time.
I'm left with a myriad of impressions of the whole vast stretch of the election, which is so long and laborious for the Americans that I have always wondered how they can bear it. And even now, the handover process will take up unconscionable quantities of press and TV and social media discussion and analysis, and it won't be until a cold January day in Washington that the lid is finally sealed on the whole episode. American friends say, "You don't understand. It works for us." Ok, I believe them, but I also think we understand only too well! Actually the people of these islands are in many cases better informed about American politics than the Americans are. I was astounded to hear one highly acclaimed US pollster remarking in an interview that the polls got it wrong because they had not really drilled down to the backyards of the rust belt and deepest south properly, to the ordinary folk going about their lives. Frankly, I have seen dozens, if not hundreds, of such interviews over the period of the campaign. Maybe they didn't, but we certainly did!
One response from such ordinary folk that stays in my mind is the frequent remark, "He (meaning Trump) knows how to get things done." Competence, it seems, is part of what Sir Harold Evans strikingly called 'the deep ache' in the American psyche - a longing for change that is real and not just cosmetic, and a conviction that nobody in their system knows how to achieve competence in political terms. This is a particularly startling perspective, coming from the nation we have always thought of as the 'can-do's' of the world. Aren't Americans famous for their competence? They get on with solving problems, with dealing with things, not vacillating in the backwoods of denial and polite indifference. If an earthquake tears down their bridges, they build them again practically overnight - don't they? The highly educated, thoughtful, rational US liberal intelligentsia, on the other hand - people whose minds we can only admire for their ability to scope, evaluate and analyse - seemed relatively unconcerned about this same question. There was an assumption that nothing was really broken in the system - yes, it might be unwieldy and gridlocked at times, but essentially the vision of the founding fathers had got it right, and success, justice and truth would be delivered down the line somewhere.
It is obvious that US society is working for some people and not others. Like our own society, it appears that if it seems a bit wacky but basically competent and sound to you, you belong to a different class from those to whom it appears to be messed up big-time. I was rather struck by Mr Trump's acceptance speech at the end of a long night of results pouring in, in which he spoke about the immediate need to 'rebuild the infrastructure' of the nation - roads, bridges, hospitals, airports, and so forth. 'Infrastructure' chimed with me psychologically - raising, as it does, images of the deep psychological underpinnings of the human mind. We sometimes speak of analysis as the means by which we 'restructure the personality.' It implies that a few cosmetic behavioural changes will not do it - there is more wrong than this, which will need more than the cosmetic to put right. Things inside us have got into the wrong places or are too powerful for our good, or are too weak to sustain us and need to be rebuilt. Patients often dream about infrastructure, I notice - about buildings, houses, rooms, old homes, new homes, missing furniture, roads they are travelling on or parked on or lost on - or of being 'off the beaten track', in a dark wood or on a foggy hillside, out in the wild, travelling down a winding river. The possibilities are endless, but these images seem to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche, representing very different archetypal worlds. The Paleolithic - the Stone Age - was characterised by being always 'off track.' Infrastructure was not unknown, that would be wrong to suggest, but it was limited by our standards. Our current world is mostly infrastructure, on the other hand, even if you happen to live out in the wilds of Montana or the far north of Scotland. You will still take a road to get there, and more probably an aeroplane, and you will not be cut off in any important sense from the rest of the world around you - linked by a thousand overhead wires and invisible underground pipelines, or by cyberspace itself, that strange no-land which so many of us now seem to inhabit a lot of the time. These three different worlds - 'off track', 'on track' and 'nowhere land' seem to represent levels of human psychological development, which it is apparent do not go away. New experience does not override old experience, so far as we can tell - it is simply added to the sum total of humanity's extraordinary experience of marching through the planet and carving a route through it as it goes, until 'the world' as we know it is unrecognisable as the world we started out from, in some deep valley in Africa. And each of us can still access those worlds through our own internal experience, through dreams and art and culture and the many varieties of imagining that we espouse.
So the urge to rebuild the infrastructure, which is talked about well beyond America, resonates with me symbolically - it brings with it the flavour of 'putting ourselves right' - reframing ourselves in a cleaner, clearer, less cluttered place, so that we can think to some greater purpose where we have got to as humanity, and where we would like to go from here. I found this hopeful to a degree. When you are coming out of depression, some of the first things you want to do is to tidy the front room, repaint the kitchen ceiling, put the broken catches back on the cupboards. It's often a declaration, that you now see yourself as having a future living here! Not just existing, and putting up with whatever you find around you, but actually 'doing it up' a bit. It also involves some investment in ourselves, however little we may have to begin the process. It doesn't matter that the new rug came from a garage sale, or the colourful vase from a charity shop. What matters is that you have invested a small portion of your energy and resource in it. It matters to you.
And there is a community and a commonality about this process, I think, which might be better at helping us to deal with difference than we think. I doubt, myself, whether difference can be argued away, protested over, or otherwise somehow neatly erased. I don't believe in the wall. 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' said Robert Frost, one of America's greatest poets. Perhaps so. The question is not whether the wall can be built - walls have been built around the entire planet, remarkable feats of engineering, from the Great Wall of China to the Iron Curtain, and we can build them for sure. The question is: do walls do what they are expected to do?
'Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offence.'
The wall sneakily manages to undermine and get undermined, Frost points out. There is an interminable process of rebuilding this particular infrastructure that goes on forever. It is never final, never completed, always needing attention. And do he and his neighbour really need a wall? His neighbour replies,
'Good fences make good neighbours.'
But Frost thinks this mantra is one that his neighbour learned from his father, and might do well to question.
The outcome of the Presidential election has obviously been a major shock and to some people has been a source of dismay and indeed profound despair. It feels all too much like what prevailed on the morning after the EU Referendum was declared. A nasty chasm opens up, in which we find that we are capable of thinking about each other quite differently from what we ever imagined. When I was a school kid, we were taught that the great virtue of the United Kingdom was its homogeneity! From one end of the islands to the other, we were all pretty much the same! Yes, honestly! We've come a long way since then, but even so we did not quite understand how utterly different we were from each other until the ground began to quiver beneath us. Difference, and how we come to terms with it, seems to me to be the great issue of our time.
I'm left with a myriad of impressions of the whole vast stretch of the election, which is so long and laborious for the Americans that I have always wondered how they can bear it. And even now, the handover process will take up unconscionable quantities of press and TV and social media discussion and analysis, and it won't be until a cold January day in Washington that the lid is finally sealed on the whole episode. American friends say, "You don't understand. It works for us." Ok, I believe them, but I also think we understand only too well! Actually the people of these islands are in many cases better informed about American politics than the Americans are. I was astounded to hear one highly acclaimed US pollster remarking in an interview that the polls got it wrong because they had not really drilled down to the backyards of the rust belt and deepest south properly, to the ordinary folk going about their lives. Frankly, I have seen dozens, if not hundreds, of such interviews over the period of the campaign. Maybe they didn't, but we certainly did!
One response from such ordinary folk that stays in my mind is the frequent remark, "He (meaning Trump) knows how to get things done." Competence, it seems, is part of what Sir Harold Evans strikingly called 'the deep ache' in the American psyche - a longing for change that is real and not just cosmetic, and a conviction that nobody in their system knows how to achieve competence in political terms. This is a particularly startling perspective, coming from the nation we have always thought of as the 'can-do's' of the world. Aren't Americans famous for their competence? They get on with solving problems, with dealing with things, not vacillating in the backwoods of denial and polite indifference. If an earthquake tears down their bridges, they build them again practically overnight - don't they? The highly educated, thoughtful, rational US liberal intelligentsia, on the other hand - people whose minds we can only admire for their ability to scope, evaluate and analyse - seemed relatively unconcerned about this same question. There was an assumption that nothing was really broken in the system - yes, it might be unwieldy and gridlocked at times, but essentially the vision of the founding fathers had got it right, and success, justice and truth would be delivered down the line somewhere.
It is obvious that US society is working for some people and not others. Like our own society, it appears that if it seems a bit wacky but basically competent and sound to you, you belong to a different class from those to whom it appears to be messed up big-time. I was rather struck by Mr Trump's acceptance speech at the end of a long night of results pouring in, in which he spoke about the immediate need to 'rebuild the infrastructure' of the nation - roads, bridges, hospitals, airports, and so forth. 'Infrastructure' chimed with me psychologically - raising, as it does, images of the deep psychological underpinnings of the human mind. We sometimes speak of analysis as the means by which we 'restructure the personality.' It implies that a few cosmetic behavioural changes will not do it - there is more wrong than this, which will need more than the cosmetic to put right. Things inside us have got into the wrong places or are too powerful for our good, or are too weak to sustain us and need to be rebuilt. Patients often dream about infrastructure, I notice - about buildings, houses, rooms, old homes, new homes, missing furniture, roads they are travelling on or parked on or lost on - or of being 'off the beaten track', in a dark wood or on a foggy hillside, out in the wild, travelling down a winding river. The possibilities are endless, but these images seem to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche, representing very different archetypal worlds. The Paleolithic - the Stone Age - was characterised by being always 'off track.' Infrastructure was not unknown, that would be wrong to suggest, but it was limited by our standards. Our current world is mostly infrastructure, on the other hand, even if you happen to live out in the wilds of Montana or the far north of Scotland. You will still take a road to get there, and more probably an aeroplane, and you will not be cut off in any important sense from the rest of the world around you - linked by a thousand overhead wires and invisible underground pipelines, or by cyberspace itself, that strange no-land which so many of us now seem to inhabit a lot of the time. These three different worlds - 'off track', 'on track' and 'nowhere land' seem to represent levels of human psychological development, which it is apparent do not go away. New experience does not override old experience, so far as we can tell - it is simply added to the sum total of humanity's extraordinary experience of marching through the planet and carving a route through it as it goes, until 'the world' as we know it is unrecognisable as the world we started out from, in some deep valley in Africa. And each of us can still access those worlds through our own internal experience, through dreams and art and culture and the many varieties of imagining that we espouse.
So the urge to rebuild the infrastructure, which is talked about well beyond America, resonates with me symbolically - it brings with it the flavour of 'putting ourselves right' - reframing ourselves in a cleaner, clearer, less cluttered place, so that we can think to some greater purpose where we have got to as humanity, and where we would like to go from here. I found this hopeful to a degree. When you are coming out of depression, some of the first things you want to do is to tidy the front room, repaint the kitchen ceiling, put the broken catches back on the cupboards. It's often a declaration, that you now see yourself as having a future living here! Not just existing, and putting up with whatever you find around you, but actually 'doing it up' a bit. It also involves some investment in ourselves, however little we may have to begin the process. It doesn't matter that the new rug came from a garage sale, or the colourful vase from a charity shop. What matters is that you have invested a small portion of your energy and resource in it. It matters to you.
And there is a community and a commonality about this process, I think, which might be better at helping us to deal with difference than we think. I doubt, myself, whether difference can be argued away, protested over, or otherwise somehow neatly erased. I don't believe in the wall. 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' said Robert Frost, one of America's greatest poets. Perhaps so. The question is not whether the wall can be built - walls have been built around the entire planet, remarkable feats of engineering, from the Great Wall of China to the Iron Curtain, and we can build them for sure. The question is: do walls do what they are expected to do?
'Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offence.'
The wall sneakily manages to undermine and get undermined, Frost points out. There is an interminable process of rebuilding this particular infrastructure that goes on forever. It is never final, never completed, always needing attention. And do he and his neighbour really need a wall? His neighbour replies,
'Good fences make good neighbours.'
But Frost thinks this mantra is one that his neighbour learned from his father, and might do well to question.
Tuesday 8 November 2016
Reading the American election runes: reflections of a psychotherapist
The American election has probably overwhelmed you as well as me. The sheer amount of coverage is wearing, and I imagine we're all relieved it's over, as well as the Americans who have had to make the hard choice today. I don't envy them. I found the insistent voice of Donald Trump particularly wearing - though Hillary can be pretty hard on the ear too. Partly, I know, it's the difference of accent and tone, and nobody is to blame for that, but it feels sometimes as though they are drilling into my ears with a corkscrew. Sometimes I would like to say, 'Please speak to me a little more softly, a little more kindly. Speak to me a little more reflectively, instead of repeating the same old slogans as though they had any real nourishment left in them!' It's as though politicians - and ours are as mistaken as theirs - have forgotten that if you want people to listen, you need to lower your voice a bit, rather than wind it up into a hysterical shriek. And the drilling of their monotones teaches the crowd how to respond, with wild shrieks and hysteria and flag and slogan waving. "This is how Americans do their elections, " say the sage correspondents. But is it a tradition that is rapidly wearing thin, I wonder? Does it have an emptiness at the core of it, which all that noise and yelling is trying so desperately hard to suppress?
The election has raised so many important issues for democracy that now, of all times, we need a lot less yelling, stridency, posturing and sloganising, and a lot more calm and thoughtful reflection, it seems to me. The fact is, we have lost a lot of faith in our institutions and ways of doing things, which seemed to work at one time but seem to be losing their savour a bit more every day. I don't want to repeat what has already been said in thousands of words on this theme, but to add this: we need to worry the most about our lack of trust in institutions, in other people, in the intentions of the world towards us. The dominant anxiety in our western cultures seems to be paranoia. Nobody can be trusted any longer. Everyone is out for him or herself. They have all got their snouts in the trough (notice the animal level of the imagery - other people are less human than us!) Everybody lies - it's foolish not to know that. They will get you if you let them. And so on . . . . It's not that presidential elections have not been bitter and personal before - they have. But this time, there has been an open refusal to grant the most basic honour and decency to the other side. Things have been said, as commentators remark, which may be hard to make good, whoever wins.
Well, for sure, some people are dishonest. Some politicians are not to be trusted. Some people lie routinely. Most of us do this on occasion, for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily bad ones. Parents, in my experience, routinely lie to their children, with the fixed belief that it is better for them not to know the truth. As though we could protect them from the genuine pain and suffering of the business of being a live human being. My attitude is that it's not what you say, but the way you say it, that makes all the difference. If the motive behind the words is the desire to punish, to hurt, to control, to repress, they will be damaging, because though you may deny it later, the truth of what you really meant will be heard and felt at a deep level. The denial simply adds to the pain of it.
So we all get it wrong pretty regularly. But now we seem to live in an age where mistrust, suspicion, paranoid anxiety, are regarded as the only sensible way to be. Anyone who believes in anything is a fool and gullibly naive. I want to challenge that attitude, because it seems to me to be the most pathological of all positions. Ok, we had an MP's expenses scandal. But only quite a small number of our representatives were found to be guilty, and they were severely punished. Ok, the Iraq War was not our finest moment as a civilisation. But the massive, exhaustive Chilcot enquiry found that no one actually had the overt intention of deceiving the nation. The government made many mistakes, did a lot wrong, but they did not do that. Ok, the encyclopaedic case of Hillary's emails will haunt us to our graves, probably without ever knowing what the heck the emails were all about, or whether they mattered. Ok, the judges decided that royal prerogative was not enough for the government to act in invoking the immortal article 50. They did not say: so that meant we could not leave the EU!
But if the FBI says there is no case to answer regarding the emails, why do we keep on believing that there is no smoke without fire? The answer of course is, why trust the FBI? Aren't they all in the Washington plot too? Similarly, if the Chilcot enquiry did not meet your expectation, why not dismiss it as a white wash? Weren't they manipulated by the 'powers that be' as well? There is no limit to what can be thus discounted, once paranoia sets in. Evidence, unfortunately, means nothing to a paranoid state of mind, as you will learn if you've ever tried to argue a paranoid person out of their conviction. Evidence is simply evidence that the suspect is even more tricky than you thought! If you don't believe, you don't believe believe believe, no matter what. You don't believe in belief. I have the sense that paranoia involves a desperate need to drill down into the deepest, ugliest depths of human depravity, and to expose it once and for all. No revelation is therefore dark enough to suit the enquirer. All must be exposed. There is worse under the surface of the surface, if only we can pinpoint it. We must find out how deeply and irrevocably bad people are!
I always wonder why this is so, and if we can succeed in exposing it, what's supposed to happen then? Suppose we found out that the whole Western establishment was beyond any kind of human decency to a man and woman. Would we really feel better for this knowledge? I suspect not. Could we mend the situation in that way? It's a bit like God saying to Noah, 'I'm about to destroy the human race, so get prepared!' And Noah saying, "You cannot be serious?"
Of course there are classic psychoanalytic interpretations of this search for badness. The one who is really being sought for her badness is the mother who failed to meet your needs in infancy. She was a bad breast, and no possible good could come of her! There may be deeper explanations even than this one, surrounding our difficulty in trusting. In a real sense, we were all deprived infants once, whose needs were not perfectly met. Perhaps the beginning of hope comes when we realise this, with all the pain there is, but without any longer the desire to retaliate. Retaliation, it seems, does not do it. It does not hit the spot. It doesn't heal, because it does not do anything to face up to the real pain we ourselves have suffered. Neither exposing Hillary, nor the FBI, nor Chilcot, nor the judges can heal that pain. Knowing the terrible badness of the world around us does not make us feel better. To hit that terribly painful, deprived spot, it seems we have to be prepared to change our attitude towards ourselves. At bottom, our worst fear is that we are the worst of the lot! We are surely the worst we can possibly imagine. So naturally Donald and Hillary are capable of the same, and cannot possibly be trusted!
Some modern expressions are useful, I tend to think, if pretty crude. Like: 'Get over it!' for example. If we can get over the feared badness of the world, by getting over the horror of our own badness, we can begin to look forward with a smidgeon of hope. If I am capable - well, nearly - of being loved and trusted, perhaps others are too? This change of attitude toward ourselves will have profound consequences for our relationships. It will not make other people, whether aspiring leaders, or prospective mates, or just friends, into ideal mothers, who will never let us down. Now we know better - that everyone is a flawed person who will be frequently mistaken and sometimes occasionally do wrong, just like us. But the wrong - the bad bits - does not cancel out the good bits in ourselves or others. Both exist - both the good and the not so good exist in human life, side by side, with an equal capacity to be influential, and to change lives. Knowing just how powerful these aspects of human nature can be, we may possibly tread a bit more carefully in future, in making easy assumptions about just how bad other people are.
The election has raised so many important issues for democracy that now, of all times, we need a lot less yelling, stridency, posturing and sloganising, and a lot more calm and thoughtful reflection, it seems to me. The fact is, we have lost a lot of faith in our institutions and ways of doing things, which seemed to work at one time but seem to be losing their savour a bit more every day. I don't want to repeat what has already been said in thousands of words on this theme, but to add this: we need to worry the most about our lack of trust in institutions, in other people, in the intentions of the world towards us. The dominant anxiety in our western cultures seems to be paranoia. Nobody can be trusted any longer. Everyone is out for him or herself. They have all got their snouts in the trough (notice the animal level of the imagery - other people are less human than us!) Everybody lies - it's foolish not to know that. They will get you if you let them. And so on . . . . It's not that presidential elections have not been bitter and personal before - they have. But this time, there has been an open refusal to grant the most basic honour and decency to the other side. Things have been said, as commentators remark, which may be hard to make good, whoever wins.
Well, for sure, some people are dishonest. Some politicians are not to be trusted. Some people lie routinely. Most of us do this on occasion, for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily bad ones. Parents, in my experience, routinely lie to their children, with the fixed belief that it is better for them not to know the truth. As though we could protect them from the genuine pain and suffering of the business of being a live human being. My attitude is that it's not what you say, but the way you say it, that makes all the difference. If the motive behind the words is the desire to punish, to hurt, to control, to repress, they will be damaging, because though you may deny it later, the truth of what you really meant will be heard and felt at a deep level. The denial simply adds to the pain of it.
So we all get it wrong pretty regularly. But now we seem to live in an age where mistrust, suspicion, paranoid anxiety, are regarded as the only sensible way to be. Anyone who believes in anything is a fool and gullibly naive. I want to challenge that attitude, because it seems to me to be the most pathological of all positions. Ok, we had an MP's expenses scandal. But only quite a small number of our representatives were found to be guilty, and they were severely punished. Ok, the Iraq War was not our finest moment as a civilisation. But the massive, exhaustive Chilcot enquiry found that no one actually had the overt intention of deceiving the nation. The government made many mistakes, did a lot wrong, but they did not do that. Ok, the encyclopaedic case of Hillary's emails will haunt us to our graves, probably without ever knowing what the heck the emails were all about, or whether they mattered. Ok, the judges decided that royal prerogative was not enough for the government to act in invoking the immortal article 50. They did not say: so that meant we could not leave the EU!
But if the FBI says there is no case to answer regarding the emails, why do we keep on believing that there is no smoke without fire? The answer of course is, why trust the FBI? Aren't they all in the Washington plot too? Similarly, if the Chilcot enquiry did not meet your expectation, why not dismiss it as a white wash? Weren't they manipulated by the 'powers that be' as well? There is no limit to what can be thus discounted, once paranoia sets in. Evidence, unfortunately, means nothing to a paranoid state of mind, as you will learn if you've ever tried to argue a paranoid person out of their conviction. Evidence is simply evidence that the suspect is even more tricky than you thought! If you don't believe, you don't believe believe believe, no matter what. You don't believe in belief. I have the sense that paranoia involves a desperate need to drill down into the deepest, ugliest depths of human depravity, and to expose it once and for all. No revelation is therefore dark enough to suit the enquirer. All must be exposed. There is worse under the surface of the surface, if only we can pinpoint it. We must find out how deeply and irrevocably bad people are!
I always wonder why this is so, and if we can succeed in exposing it, what's supposed to happen then? Suppose we found out that the whole Western establishment was beyond any kind of human decency to a man and woman. Would we really feel better for this knowledge? I suspect not. Could we mend the situation in that way? It's a bit like God saying to Noah, 'I'm about to destroy the human race, so get prepared!' And Noah saying, "You cannot be serious?"
Of course there are classic psychoanalytic interpretations of this search for badness. The one who is really being sought for her badness is the mother who failed to meet your needs in infancy. She was a bad breast, and no possible good could come of her! There may be deeper explanations even than this one, surrounding our difficulty in trusting. In a real sense, we were all deprived infants once, whose needs were not perfectly met. Perhaps the beginning of hope comes when we realise this, with all the pain there is, but without any longer the desire to retaliate. Retaliation, it seems, does not do it. It does not hit the spot. It doesn't heal, because it does not do anything to face up to the real pain we ourselves have suffered. Neither exposing Hillary, nor the FBI, nor Chilcot, nor the judges can heal that pain. Knowing the terrible badness of the world around us does not make us feel better. To hit that terribly painful, deprived spot, it seems we have to be prepared to change our attitude towards ourselves. At bottom, our worst fear is that we are the worst of the lot! We are surely the worst we can possibly imagine. So naturally Donald and Hillary are capable of the same, and cannot possibly be trusted!
Some modern expressions are useful, I tend to think, if pretty crude. Like: 'Get over it!' for example. If we can get over the feared badness of the world, by getting over the horror of our own badness, we can begin to look forward with a smidgeon of hope. If I am capable - well, nearly - of being loved and trusted, perhaps others are too? This change of attitude toward ourselves will have profound consequences for our relationships. It will not make other people, whether aspiring leaders, or prospective mates, or just friends, into ideal mothers, who will never let us down. Now we know better - that everyone is a flawed person who will be frequently mistaken and sometimes occasionally do wrong, just like us. But the wrong - the bad bits - does not cancel out the good bits in ourselves or others. Both exist - both the good and the not so good exist in human life, side by side, with an equal capacity to be influential, and to change lives. Knowing just how powerful these aspects of human nature can be, we may possibly tread a bit more carefully in future, in making easy assumptions about just how bad other people are.
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