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.
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