Toxic masculinity

It has taken me a long, long time to get any handle on what makes the sexes different. It's a topic that seems to fascinate us all, male, female and transsexual alike. Shoals have been written on the subject. There are key psychoanalytic theories that were dominant for a few years: Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex attempted to show us how men become men, and women become women, and what particular difficulties of adjustment there are in each case. Jung put it all down to our unconscious bisexuality through the notion of the archetypal (built-in) contrasexual animus and anima. Later cognitive writers have described the differences as they saw in behaviour between one sex and another. The popular geneticist Stephen Pinker remains resolutely convinced of multiple factors leading to our making, both genetic and environmental. One position that seems to be getting lost in these debates and that I adhere to firmly is that 'sex' is the way we are born; 'gender' is whatever we have made of that. They are not the same.

But the current phrase 'toxic' masculinity has caught a lot of people's attention because it has something to it that seems to resonate, at least with women, and with some men, who have courageously written about it. It is an idea that some types, at least, of the ideal of masculinity are extremely negative and unhelpful - and that perhaps we should seek to combat them?

What is being described in the term 'toxic masculinity' is I think a notion of the 'real' man as tough, hard, unsentimental, naturally promiscuous, habitually an abuser of women as his birthright, and one who refuses to comply with the modern idea that men can be 'civilised' into better behaviour. When I first visited the States many years ago, there was a popular book doing the rounds entitled "Real men don't eat pizza.'  This, in its way demonstrates that any concept, including 'toxic masculinity', can mean different things to different people! I don't know whether the toxicity was attached to the pizza or defined by it, but I haven't noticed any diminution in the eating of pizza among both men and women of my acquaintance! The title contains a nugget of an idea, though, however inadequately expressed, which is that anything that could be viewed as 'soft' behaviour is by definition outlawed by real men. Soft is feminine! Women, presumably, can eat pizza though men cannot! Lucky for us!

How do men get to be toxic in this way is my question? I'm rather tired of theories purporting to be feminist that blame it all on women! It's the way we women bring up our sons, goes the notion, that produces the toxically masculine male - one who could not put the washing on or make a cup of coffee to save his life! That's where they get their ideas of paternalism and patriarchy from. Mother gives it to them with her breast milk, providing all that the male child needs, while unconsciously ignoring the needs of the girl child, who soon learns she must fend for herself - that to be a woman is to be in a constant state of disappointment. It is absolutely true, by the way, that many women seem to accept that they will never be first - no matter how many women win gold medals, or carry off Pulitzer prizes. However, that is a different discussion, and one for another day.

Today I am thinking about toxic masculinity, and what goes into the making of it. The most convincing theory I came across is one about the influence of male culture. It seems that many little boys, from an early age, learn to jeer at girls and resent being asked to do 'girly' things. They learn this from other boys - not from mother at all. Why would that be? I wonder whether, for the male psyche, there is already an idea deeply embedded that they will have a struggle to demonstrate their masculinity. It will have to be fought for and treasured, and maintained by constant vigilance and self-discipline. Any small slip-up may expose the male child to the often bitter and deeply penetrative male response, frequently couched in apparently jokey terms, which can never be allowed to be challenged, because if you dare challenge it, you shame yourself into the mistake of not noticing it was a joke! Which is also a transgression against male culture, of course. A real man must have a sense of humour, especially at female expense...

I have always enjoyed male humour, and found that male relationships help to relieve the tension that goes with being a woman - that being who is perpetually seeking to demonstrate her attractiveness and desirability, on which she believes her whole life depends. Thank God for being able to see the funny side of it! Men can sometimes help us to get over ourselves - real men, in my opinion, who are not always the current model of 'real'! A real man is able to say "who cares whether your bum looks bigger or smaller in that dress? I love it anyway!' The toxically masculine response is, "I can't be seen dead with her!'

So males enculture males - they show them how to be, what is acceptable, and 'really' masculine, while women cannot, and cannot be held responsible, I think, for this phenomenon. Yes they can make demands like "pay the mortgage', 'pay attention to the children.' But are these not inevitable needs in a differentiated society like ours, where somebody has to care that the children are fed and clothed and psychologically attended to? (It doesn't have to be the women, I'm simply saying that somebody as to, and probably the ideal is both.) And where, quite often, when both parents work full days, the ones who suffer the most from this 'equal' society are the children?

Men teach other men what attitude to take towards women, what counts as 'male' behaviour, and how to demonstrate it. Gang rape is the extreme manifestation of this - where some men may well want it, but many men go along with it because it is what they are expected to want. Homophobia is to a degree implicated in this teaching. Whatever happens, don't be like a woman! Or a man/woman, a 'homo.' That is a fate worse than death for a man. He enters the world desperate for the soft love and nourishment of mother, and then spends the rest of his life backing away from it in terror.

I think this phenomenon explains a good deal about why it is so difficult to bring about change in the male attitude - why patriarchy seems embedded beyond digging up, like the tombs of those Pharaohs who are so far gone that

 '...neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from [it]...'

To abandon toxic masculinity, the male has to abandon not only the toxicity he was taught from his earliest years, but ultimately his own father, the male model who was the first and most powerful male influence in his life. The father is the one who indoctrinates the law of patriarchy, the toxic masculinity and all that goes with it. And explains how to joke about it, so as to ensure that it can never be challenged without his son being called a witless dullard or a wimp. Not only because father was the first, the original idea of the male, so to speak, but also because father was himself taught it by his own father, whose word has not yet been abandoned in him.

You're kidding, I think I hear you say? 'Dads are most ordinary men turned by love into heroes, adventurers, story-tellers, and singers of song.'  And villains. Yes, of course they are. But it is that 'turning' process which is critical. It is transformational. It is not necessarily what the father was that mattered, but what the eyes of his son made him. Round about ten or eleven, we all begin to suspect that our parents were not quite what we thought they were. But by then, the cake is baked and ready for the future eating! You can't change a single ingredient, it's too late. All you can do is chuck it out, and begin again with a different set of ingredients, and that is a very difficult process to do with a human being.

I don't say the situation is hopeless. Not at all. But I think women may have a more important role in this change than they realise. It is a waste of time complaining about patriarchy. Complaining is the voice of the Other whom the male child sought most ardently to ignore, because it challenged his developing masculinity. If you become a nagging wife, you are in danger of becoming feared, as the dreaded source of that challenge to abandon what he views as his most important quality - his masculine identity. What I think women have to do is to ignore patriarchy, and just get on with living as though it didn't exist. Yes, your man is a problem because he doesn't like you going out to work. So what? Go anyway, and try to remember that he is defending something very precious in his eyes, his masculine identity. Don't argue, just do it! Similarly, if they don't pay you equally, just put the case before the court. Don't whinge about justice and equality. Take them for granted as your birthright.

If women keep demonstrably living well without need of patriarchy, I think even men will start to wonder about it. I was listening to a radio debate about the Arabs and Israelis this morning - apparently Trump is about to announce an earth-shattering new plan for sorting out the Middle East. And all his plans, have you noticed, are amazing and bound to change the world? A very articulate Arab spokesman drove a neat horse and cart through this concept without even having heard it yet! That's how toxic masculinity works - it attracts spoilers and belittlers, and fetches us all up with another headache and a feeling that nothing much is going to change here. I recommend that the Middle East just gets on as though Trump had not spoken! In the belief that eventually he will go away and somebody else will come along with a better idea. Perhaps a female prime minister of either Israel or Palestine, or both, will raise their head, and decide to do things differently. Yes, it takes a long time, but there is alas no shortcut that I know of.

Anxiety - the common cold of mental health

In my training days not a lot was said about anxiety. Which is interesting because I now find it is the commonest of problems, and though not always a presenting problem (what you brought to therapy), exists as a sort of dark shadow background to everything we do.

What is anxiety? We therapists tend to keep the word 'fear' for real feelings in a real situation. If you were facing a tiger on the loose in your backyard, you would feel fear. We can take this pretty much for granted. Anxiety is more the sort of stuff which anticipates a fearful situation. It's a 'what if' kind of thing. What if the boiler breaks down while I am out of the house? What if my partner is having an affair? What if my airplane fails in mid-flight? These are common enough anxieties that most people suffer from, from time to time. They represent fear of the unknown and uncertain - what could be rather than what is certain. The painful truth of human life is that we have to live with uncertainty a great deal. And for some people this is a tall order.

An added complication is that anxiety is likely to be unrelated to the episode, expectation or person we feel it is mostly about. If you are feeling scared about the tiger, this is probably the result of having to face a tiger! It's pretty straightforward. Feeling anxious about the boiler may or may not be realistic, depending on the state of your boiler! If your boiler is functioning and has given no trouble up to now, it is likely that the anxiety has not much to do with the boiler. In that case, you need to look for deeper causes. Is there fundamental uncertainty in your life around your relationships, your job, your housing or employment situation, your financial problems, your future etc.? It is surprising how quickly these basic insecurities will issue forth in attacks of panic over apparently trivial happenings, like cutting your finger or forgetting to take your pills at night (OMG!)

This is genuine anxiety - it is a 'what if' kind of thing. Not taking your pills is unlikely to kill you for one night or even now and again. It may be a deeper problem than that, which you struggle with and don't find easy to face. It could be related to the pills but in a less obvious way. For example, you may be struggling with a fear like 'what if I die alone' which is a more difficult fear to articulate, but which has become attached to the pills. The mind works in a less than rational way. 'If I take my pills then I won't die at night on my own." When actually, the pills will not prevent this from happening. You need to face this as a real insecurity in your life and talk about it to someone who might be understanding. And as I've already suggested, there aren't always easy answers. But getting them out in the open is a help.  

To avoid realistic fears, we take reasonable precautions. We buy insurance against disasters, get our cars regularly serviced, avoid walking alone along dark canal paths after midnight and so on. One of the merits of good insurance is that it may allow you to stop worrying! Though some people have a huge mistrust of insurers, and this may be to do with our modern obsession with getting the cheapest possible bargain for everything, without regard for its quality. But even then, insurance only claims to deal with what has already happened. The fact is there is no way of ensuring that the washing machine will not break down two days before the wedding. There is a sod's law that all too often it does! 

This is where living with uncertainty comes in, and with it the ability to keep calm amid life's ups and downs. First of all, accept that a bit of trouble now and again is part of life. Some people seem to feel that there is a cosmic law which says that they are entitled never to have to face a crisis, a problem, an accident! And therefore, if a crisis occurs, it must be somebody else's fault. I'm afraid this is also a myth. You can spend forever struggling to find out who was to blame, when you might have done yourself a bigger favour by using what energy you had to cope, as well as you could, in all the circumstances, without driving yourself and everyone else nuts about something you cannot now change.

How do we learn to live with uncertainty, and therefore cope better when things turn out worse than we expect? I think it's something about having a solid basis in your existing mental health. Oh, great, you may be thinking!- and how do I achieve that? Well, choosing your parents well is a good start. Mentally healthy parents are likely to breed mentally healthy children. But many of us chose badly, to be candid. For this, you can take a long course of psychotherapy or counselling, to find out how it worked to your disadvantage and advantage. (Trust me - there are advantages in having a bad start in life!) It all helps. But above all, there are a few basic rules of good mental health, which everyone should know, and practising them is not a waste of time. They are beginning to percolate out from among our complicated culture and its often screwed up messages. Here are a few to think about:

1. Be aware of your deeper feelings as much as you can, since these are the foundation of good mental health - and assume that a trivial feeling of, say, anger, is likely to conceal a whole cartload. You were, you say, 'a bit upset' - because this is polite, isn't it? When the truth is you were furious! Get to the truth of it - don't keep avoiding. Try making a list or writing a diary of your current strongest feelings, and when one of them strikes you, you are less likely to avoid or repress it in favour of something that seems easier to cope with - i.e you will be less convinced that the pills are the root of the problem of your night fears.  Ask yourself what people or circumstances most often arouse this feeling, be it anger, sadness, shame, envy and so forth. Bear in mind that we can have two strong feelings at the same time. Yes, really. I told you we are not rational creatures! Those two (or more) feelings could be in direct conflict with each other. I love him but I hate him.This is what Freud called 'ambivalence'. Being in a state of conflict means you often feel frozen, passive, unable to act, and then get angry with yourself for being so, which is your way of holding yourself together. But it solves nothing in the long run.

2. Be willing to express your feelings, in words, when you can. Being aware of feeling angry is good, speaking anger is better, and speaking those words to the person or situation that is making you angry is better still. It isn't always possible, needless to say, but is often more possible than we want to admit. We have the advantage in our species of being able to use to words as a substitute for action. This is the function of the prefrontal cortex. It gives us the option of stopping and thinking. Speaking your anger does not make violence more likely - a common fear. Indeed, we do not have to fight so long as we can say, "I felt furious when you said/did that." Once said, it is out in the open, and can be discussed, maybe dealt with. Anything never said builds up inside like a corked bottle that is being perpetually shaken but never exploded! Until one day, the build-up is too great and emotion shoots all over the place! Don't wait until you are brim full of frustration, fear, sadness, anger. Say it sooner rather than later. If you deal with difficult feelings at the beginning, they are not going to build up into a megastorm later. 

3. The most common strategy employed by those who cannot express feelings is what I call the 'walk away' approach to life. This approach of course can be amply justified on all sorts of apparently rational grounds, like "I'm a good person, a peace-maker,' and "I didn't want to make anything worse than it already was,' and "Talking makes no difference, they just do it anyway.' Be clear that talking may make no difference to them but it makes a hell of a lot of difference to you. What you have done is exercised your own being, your sense of self, your entitlement to have a different point of view. This is the foundation of self-confidence. You will not learn to feel like a worthwhile, confident person, unless you are prepared to speak your mind, at least some of the time. And yes, there are times when it's not appropriate. I wouldn't say, "I wish you would piss off..." to somebody drunk and already in a rage! Here's where the mind comes in. Reason is not a waste of time - it's how you use it that makes it rational!

3.  Don't overdo the 'doing for others' as a way of feeling wanted, loved, secure. It doesn't tend to work, in my experience. The people you are doing for are basically getting away with not having to do it for themselves! It is good to allow others to learn how to do things for themselves! After all, you had to! Don't try too hard to take away other people's feelings, especially their painful ones. You are only encouraging them into bad emotional habits like repression. If they are upset, allow them that time and space to be upset. Being upset is normal and ok if something bad has happened. It passes. If someone is angry, allow them to express their anger, and prepare yourself to accept it - it's a bit like imagining yourself as a sponge, who can absorb it all and not be destroyed! If you are volunteering to be a sponge every day, however, when nothing has been done to deserve it, something is wrong. Get help with that one. Men often fear women's expressions of feelings because they believe they then have to fix the problem! So for problems they can't fix they go away - the garden shed is a testimony to male inability to deal with complaining partners. Please disabuse yourself - what is wanted most of the time is not a fix but a good listening ear.

4. The two most commonly feared and repressed feelings in our culture are anger and sadness. We don't like feeling either and will go a long way to cover them up. Anger is problematic since we fear being out of control, fear the damage to relationships, fear disgracing or shaming ourselves, fear provoking violence. Try to be aware, though, that mostly other people are less horrified than we think about our anger! Anger expressed does not destroy relationships - it helps to build them on a more solid foundation of truth. Sometimes it is the only way to bring about change. People who speak out their anger rarely get out of control - they have not got a backlog of resentments a mile high, and they don't need to offload it all in one go! N.B. (and this is important) If you fear being angry with someone violent, don't be with that person. Ask yourself whether it's time to move on?

Sadness is perpetually avoided for complex reasons, often to do with not wanting to appear like a wimp, to upset others, to look as though you cannot cope. Almost we fear it is impolite! The social equivalent of a fart, perhaps. All these 'reasons' are spurious - norml people expect us to be sad when we have a disappointment, a betrayal, or lose someone or something precious to us. The idea that we somehow have to grit our teeth and soldier on is medieval! We don't have to. When we are sad enough we cry, male and female together, and this is fine and normal behaviour. Why apologise for it? A disappointment is painful, a hurt feeling hurts! You are not a wimp for feeling this way. Quite the reverse. You are a strong, mentally healthy person who knows how she or he feels, and is not about to be talked or bullied out of it by fear of how other people will react. Their reaction is their problem - not yours!

5. Communicate, for God's sake!  Talk to the people around you - those close enough to be interested, as opposed to the woman opposite in the train who was just looked forward to a sleep! If someone asks how you are, tell them! Don't spend a fortnight explaining it, just tell the truth, simply, in plain words. "I'm a bit tired and fed up with this job." "I'm feeling the loss of my wife a lot. It feels lonely without her." And so forth. There is nothing wrong with saying this, and you are not asking for pity, simply telling it like it is. If the other person cannot cope, you will soon find out.

6.  Choose those you are going to be open with carefully. Some people can hear your admission of feeling, and simply be a good listener, which is mainly what you want. Others cannot listen, will use it as an opportunity to tell your their own troubles.  'So you're sad, well I'm far sadder!" etc. We aren't in a feelings competition! Both can be sad without diminishing either, but we need to be able to receive others' feelings as well as expressing our own. This is what it means to have a good relationship. 

All of these pointers may seem to you to have little to do with anxiety, but you are wrong. The 'what ifs' of life seem to diminish when you know who you are. The fact that your parents weren't models of relating no longer seems to matter. You can sometimes even stretch to a bit of compassion for their struggles. After all, they were only human, and probably suffered from worse anxiety than you!

Climate change deniers - the flat earthers of the 21st century?

Met two climate change deniers in one day and felt something was giving me a nudge to try to address this issue.

One was a lovely person with mystical ideas - someone who picked up every conspiracy theory going. She was a full of ideas but she seemed to have no internal yardstick by which to judge any one theory, or which enabled a comparison between one theory and another. It was as though the romanticism of conspiracies galore appealed to her. They made life a lot more interesting. She struggled to live with the real world as a sometimes boring place, in which what most people say they are doing is actually what they are doing! Fact-based evidence was for the birds, to her.  She wanted us all to be more  positive. She had theories about everything from the roots of physical illness to the international conspiracy of people who want to turn the world to their advantage.

I remarked that I'm not against being positive - who could? That there is a lot we don't know about the relationship between body and our emotional state, and about how the world is governed. I was not disagreeing with her, merely trying to point out that they're all complicated questions to which we don't have all the answers yet. Yes, there is a probable correlation between ill health and mental state but this is a long way from suggesting to someone with cancer that if they'd only had a more positive outlook on life, they wouldn't have developed cancer! Apart from anything else, this is cruel and merely tells a suffering person it's all their fault! While at the same time doing nothing to solve the problem of cancer or any other major illness. I don't want to crush creative theorising, but we do need theories that attach to the real world of human activities, where we can do something practical about what we see as wrong. It's not as though thinking positively is a five-minute decision that you can then carry out over the rest of your life. Job done! If only it were that simple!

Equally, international conspiracies seem to be based on the assumption that a whole group of widely different, highly self-referenced people, with different cultural backgrounds, languages and beliefs, can quite easily get together on some mountain top any time they like and sort out the world to suit themselves. Together! Cooperatively I mean! Happily giving up their individual power, status and money to a cooperative human endeavour... Are you getting my drift? Given that our small country cannot decide between leaving and remaining in the European Union, and families of half a dozen cannot agree with each other on this or any other theme, what makes us suppose that this group of the powerful of various countries can get together to decide how the world should run? My yardstick for accepting a conspiracy theory like this is:  how likely does it sound in the context of human nature as I know it only too well through my work? I accept, no question, that people can be selfish, aggressive and controlling, but I find it hard to believe that all at the same time they can be constructive, cooperative, and follow rational plans through to the end to reach some far off and vast global goal! Not that some people haven't had known plans, historically, to make of the world what they wanted. Ghengis Khan, Alexander the Great, Hitler and Stalin all had such plans to a considerably degree. Their plans were largely individual creations, though. They created dreadful messes and mass suffering, and they all failed in the end.  The reason why Putin is annoying so many people currently with his cyber war on the activities of the West is precisely because the Russians failed to do it by other, more overt political means. And ask yourself, coolly, one day:  is Putin succeeding, in your opinion? Be honest!

The second climate change denier was one who was more practically-minded, as she saw it, and believed in her own individual experience as unchallengeable. She wanted to say that the climate changes regularly within living memory, and it's just part of the way the world goes round. For example, she pointed out that she had memories of snow waist-deep as a child - I refrained from pointing out that the snow would not have to be that deep to reach your waist if you were three feet high at the time! But I agreed that weather changes, and we all have experience of changing weathers - the summers that were hotter than usual, the snowy winters, the droughts and the hose pipe bans followed by the deluges of autumn rain, such as we seem to be getting just now. But climate change is not weather!  This is an important misunderstanding. Weather changes with seasonal regularly and can be quirky in this country, but climate change occurs over centuries, and we have plenty of evidence that this is the case.

I asked her how she accounted for the fact that half a dozen extreme weathers were occurring across the planet at the same time. As we spoke, the Guardian weather watch feature was reporting 1) floods in Venice that were devastating their major artistic and architectural treasures; 2) 600 school closures in New South Wales because of uncontrollable bush fires; 3) major floods across South Yorkshire in which some people say they have lost everything, 4) typhoon Hagibis causing millions of Japanese to be told to evacuate their homes. And this was just November's news! One interesting feature of the Guardian article said that the Pentagon, home of the US military, who do not get involved in political matters, are preparing training for their military in the expectation of 'existential threats to humanity.'

“Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water,” the Department of Defense (DoD) told Congress in a 2015 memorandum. “These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.”

Are these preparations because the military have nothing better to do? Somehow, I doubt it. This 'practical' person also wanted to point out to me (current urban myth) that Al Gore had built his house on the seashore! She offered this as evidence that climate change was a folk tale. I suppose this idea is part of a conspiracy theory too - though why Al Gore would want to foment a panic about climate change is left unexplained, often the case with conspiracy theory addicts, I find. My news, which I offered in return, was that Al Gore is not responsible for the current concern about climate change, whatever we may think of him. 11000 reputable scientists are however responsible! They all share a common opinion that climate change is not just a little local difficulty, but a major world-altering fact. Gore is simply their messenger. I asked this person whether she placed no weight on what the scientist have to say. She seemed to have nothing to say in reply.

So for denier Number 1, climate change came under the heading of an international conspiracy, while for denier 2, climate change theory disagreed with the evidence of her own limited experience, which was all that she knew or cared about. Presumably, had she lived in Japan or New South Wales, or even Fishlake village, she might have thought differently? But why do I think, while wading through water waist high, that she would have found another 'reason' to doubt climate change?

My question here is, what is denial all about? Psychologically speaking, denial (or disavowal as Freud called it) is the flat refusal to accept evidence that some happening, feeling or historical event actually occurred. When you come upon it, it can be alarming. Max Glatt, a leading consultant on alcoholism of years ago, reported the case of a man with an alcoholic drink in his hand saying, "I haven't had a drink for three weeks!" This is denial. It is about being literally unable to see what is before your very eyes. It is not the same as lying. Lying is knowing what is true and distorting it to suit yourself. Denial is distorting what is true at a deeply unconscious level because what is true is unbearable.

When we feel we have no internal resources left to face reality, we choose the option of deciding not to see it. It can't be that the world is going to hell, can it, because I can't bear to think about that! It's a problem I couldn't solve or even contemplate solving, so it can't be true.

I'd now like to think positively for five minutes, without overdoing it. The scientists are not saying we can't save the world. They are saying we had better get on with it soon! And we must all do the unthinkable, which is to work together to solve it. We must do the thing we have never managed before, which is to get on the same page for the hymn singing!

This is not going to be easy. But you believed it when they told you the world was run by mad people in Outer Mongolia, didn't you? Or from a bunker in Texas?

True, it is asking a lot, maybe more than the world can manage. But we have one thing, one interest, in common, that we have never had before. It is saving the same world we all inhabit together! To do this is not a major mountain to climb. It simply means we must all stop denying climate change, and start thinking about whatever contribution we can make, however small to changing global warming. One small step for you, one giant leap for mankind!

So could you stop purveying conspiracy theories on the internet, and ideas rooted in your own narrow experience, and instead start encouraging others - via the same mechanism - to pay attention to what's important?

We cannot afford despair - it's self-indulgence!

A good New Year to one and all, as the Scots phrase it - far better than the English who want us to insist on being 'happy'.  Who can be happy with the current state of the world - without lying to themselves or others?

Those of us who cared about far more than 'getting Brexit done' have spent the season in various stages of despair. By the time I had heard round upon round of the sense so many had of being at the bottom of an endless pit with nowhere to go, I began to feel it was time to buck ourselves up. Can it really be that bad?

What are the negatives - the big ones? First of all the absolute denial of climate change seems in the mix. Yes, if you are very lucky, you will get the EU Withdrawal Agreement ratified (which is by the way not at all the same thing as 'getting Brexit done'). That remains to do, on our list of this decade's self-improvement targets. Meanwhile we have elected a government who appear constitutionally blind to the reality that the planet is going down the tube on a fast train! We are now stuck with this government for the next five years, minimum. The scientists tell us meanwhile that we have ten years at the very most to save the planet...  The New Year brought tragic pictures of a world on fire down under, while the world up over - us - drowned in floods of rain. Greta Thunberg should have been born ten years ago at least! But she wasn't, and we are only now just waking up to the reality that we we should have worried about it a long time ago. It was ironic that the Brexit debate coincided with the first real signs of a population starting to worry about the health of their planetary home... Was Brexit defensive, all the time? Enabling us to roar and whinge about things that were far less important, and in doing so to look away from what was really bothering us?

Second big negative is the appalling state of our public services. No Tory party that I can remember has ever understood the importance of the public services. They really did seem to be obsessed with the idea that the state was not to be trusted with our well-being, that the staff who worked in them were overpaid, bureaucratic and idle, that we didn't need half the services we had, and meanwhile private industry was undervalued and underpaid and could do everything twice as fast and twice as well.  The Tories really did seem to think at times that no public services at all would make us a healthier and more productive society. No, really! They did seem to think that. But they felt they had to keep kowtowing to the public sympathy for the NHS etc., in order to get elected, and then simply chipped away, inch upon inch, until the heart and guts of these services were relentlessly worn down, and we were left with a society on the brink of disintegration. Now, after ten years of austerity, we know exactly how important the public services are - and how wrong the Tories were. It is not only the underclass who feel that trying to get a GP appointment is a bit like planning to climb K2 with a week's training. Those very middle class Tory sympathisers who always voted for them - and did again - have concerns about the decline of the public schooling system, the expense and overcrowding of our trains, the sense of insecurity that comes with a reduced and underfunded police service - need I go on? And will an American trade deal actually compensate for all this? Not in this life!

The Johnson group did try to promise to throw a bit of money at these chaotic services. But already we have the usual sense that the promises are paper thin, and may amount to very little when they finally materialise. Why is it that somehow nobody gets anything in this country except the well-to-do, who even made money out of the banking crisis? 

Third negative is the obviously desperate state of our constitution, which goes way beyond individual political positions. We need to give people back a sense that who they vote for matters - that, indeed, it matters that they vote at all The people I meet are simply tired of placing a vote they know well is useless because they live in a 'safe' Tory or Labour seat where the same old, same old process and result occurs. If democracy itself is to be kept alive, we need to feel that we can make a difference with our votes! This means some kind of proportional representation, surely, at the very least has to be considered. We have no real way of knowing how keen the population as a whole was on the Johnson manifesto. They might still have won under a PR system, of course. But they would have won with a much smaller majority, I would guess, and some negotiation would have been necessary to ensure that all points of view had a voice.  Democracy is not solely about numbers, as I keep boring you by saying. Democracy is about creating a society where all points of view have a chance of being heard and respected. Switching the problem from one so-called 'winning' side to the other is not a solution. Johnson himself nodded in this direction in his acceptance speech. It's probably not that he doesn't know it, but that he will, like every other PM, soon become buried under a mound of clever and rich lobbyists who will get their way because they always do. Power counts, and unless we are willing as a nation to make it harder for the powerful to count so much, things will go on much as they always do.

Fourth negative is that the Labour Party let the country down badly. They presented their case poorly, behaved as though they thought the electorate was for sale, just as the Tories do, by 'offering' - the very language they used - a manifesto that seemed to the electorate to be full of calories and no nutrition. They offered no vision about what kind of country they thought they were heading for. And as a member of long-standing, can I make a few points that I have not heard around the media? Like, for example, that lack of trust went way beyond whether they liked Jeremy Corbyn's hair cut. Trust took a nose dive when they so obviously failed to expose the wide range of opinion within the party. Hence, some of those who are now standing as future leader are hardly known among the mean streets of Glasgow and Southend. We are told that Rebecca Long-Bailey is the front runner. Really? My sister phoned to say, "Can you tell me who she is?"  Were there, in fact, gags on the mouths of anybody who did not entirely share the details of the 'message' - or were not seen as reliably 'one of us.' These are not, please understand, people who are secret Tories, as some of the hard left seem to believe. On the contrary, they are passionately caring people who didn't get a look in because the inner cabinet of the leadership did not allow them to. And there was zero discussion of the presence of Momentum over every decision made. I have never understood why we need Momentum at all. Why do we need a party within a party? Why cannot those people simply be Labour party members and activists?  It is clear to me, at least, that they exist in order to keep control of the party in the hands of the chosen. And what is democratic about having 'chosen' ones among us? Is this not the same Toryism we have fought for decades? I do not want to go back, but I do want to look forward to a Party which is open to debate on all fronts - where power does not lie in the hands of a few.

Last negative. In the light of the fact that many of our great northern towns and cities voted Tory for the first time, who will now have the courage to point out to them that, while we understand their impatience, and absolutely sympathise with their desire to 'catch up' with the rest of us, whom they see as having got it made at their expense, we cannot share any position which is essentially climate change denying, white supremacist, narrowly nationalist, and based on some muddle-headed economic theory that says that if we 'put Britain first' we are bound to grow rich and powerful again as a nation. We aren't. All these so-called theories and attitudes have been tried and tested throughout the world, usually with disastrous consequences.

Take the USA as an example right now before our eyes. Some people grow rich, it is true. The same people who always seem to grow rich no matter what the economic theory in place. The rest remain hopeful but hungry, cold and disadvantaged, waiting for the good times to be delivered. At the same time, the nation grows ever more bitterly divided and restless - as America has.

The newly disadvantaged do not go away, they keep coming back.

"Hurrah for revolution and more cannon shot.
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on!"

said W B Yeats. Crime and alienation in their cities grows worse, leaving the white and supreme high and dry in their gated communities, afraid to go out and face those who have been let down once again. Most tragically of all, their nation becomes disrespected and unpopular all over the world. There has been no return to glory in the US. Rather a greater and wider loss of prestige and value by almost every other nation. One of the saddest things that Trump has done to the United States is to make it more despised than it ever was before. We see it now as a laughing stock, not a real place at all, which has somehow got lost in a fairy story a million miles from reality.  Does Britain want to go the same way? I think those who voted for Johnson did not vote for this!

What can we do about it all? What we can't do is despair, I'm thinking. Now more than ever we need to keep our hopes alive for a better world. Now more than ever, we need to hold on to our liberal values, our belief that we can achieve a truly united, peaceful, healthy and wealthy enough country to be able to provide for those who have too little. (We don't need riches that do the poor down, we just need enough - to borrow a famous idea from D W Winnicott.) Despair is self-indulgence - it is the 'me' game all over again.  Yet most of those who moaned to me in the agony of despair and disappointment after the election were not really badly off people at all. They often had interesting jobs and decent homes. They had some kind of life. It is easy to be an optimist when the going is downhill. Now, we need to be prepared to continue to battle for a better world, even if the going seems frighteningly uphill. We need to demonstrate by our lives, our work and attitudes that concern for others as well as ourselves is not fairy land, but a real and happy way to live.

The weakness of liberalism has often been said to be its lack of strength in action. It's all very well but doesn't get us anywhere, it is said.

Now is the time to show those around us that liberal values do get you somewhere! We can continue to work to draw attention to climate change, continue to work to do what we can about it. Marches are fine if you can make them, but there are small everyday things we can do better, like not buying single-use plastic, eating less meat, and recycling where we can. Recycling is a bore but we can do it anyway, instead of falling back on cynical excuses like the belief that the collection leads straight into landfill anyway.  Two wrongs don't make a right! Just because some MPs cheated on their expenses, doesn't mean that none of them are honest or sane. The fact is that most things are curate's eggs - good in parts! We must stop throwing the good part out with the bad! It's a straight road to getting an entirely bad world, if that's what we want. We can write to our MPs and be a nuisance pointing out where the manifesto commitments have not been honoured. 'Oh they won't read them,' I hear you say! Remember the lottery slogan? you have to be in it to win it! It applies to much of life.

The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing

We don't know who said it, but it is apparently the most popular quotation there is. How interesting! So if you love it, could you consider responding to it? Instead of nodding your head wisely and going away to watch another episode of 'Strictly Come Dancing'?  (I really have nothing against 'Strictly', truly, except that it gets massive viewing figures while Rome apparently is ok to carry on burning! Could you watch it and also do something?)

What it boils down to is this;  we need to find our voices! We all have voices, we just don't use them. We let other people ride roughshod over us when we hear them pontificating so much nonsense about race, sex, age, politics, religion, art, society, behaviour, education, crime et al. The essence of the populist attitude to life is: find somebody else to blame for whatever is wrong with the world. Somebody whose main qualification is that they aren't you!

Tolerance is about finding yourself to blame sometimes, I'm afraid. Being prepared to look inward, and not perpetually outwards. The single best thing you can do for the world is be a positive voice for good, for loving kindness, for awareness, for acceptance of difference, for liberty of values.

It won't save the world, you say. Really? So how come you have believed in liberal values all your life, in that case? Do you mean that you espoused them but never really believed in them before? And now, when the crisis is upon us, you are admitting that you have no faith in liberalism, and that's the truth? Well, I'm afraid you have to find that faith now. Starting today. Whatever you did or failed to do in the past, it's over now. From today we need to demonstrate, to model liberal values and be proud of them. Nobody is asking you to be a saint or a martyr. We need you to do whatever can, to whatever extent you can. One step at a time is enough. If we all take that one step. Whoever raises a lone voice to protest when they pass that daft sexist resolution in the golf club is saving the world. Whoever refuses to move house in order to get their daughter into the best school is saving the world. Whoever pays their tipping fees instead of fly-tipping them as a present to the rest of us is saving the world. Whoever refuses to disrespect a policeman who is black is saving the world. Whoever allows some teenage nerd to use social media to slander and threaten someone they dislike is supporting the populist cause. It's saying nothing and doing nothing that allows populism to win.

These are the things to avoid at all costs. They are all forms of defence against the pain of feeling despair.

1. Cynicism

Easy to wave it all away as rubbish and useless. It will be if you do that!

2. Anxiety

Fear is what prevents you constantly from finding your voice. Standing up to the intimidators will reveal to you, to your astonishment no doubt, that they are more frightened than you.

3.  False good cheer disguised as humour

Yes we need to laugh, now more than ever. But beware of reducing it all to a joke. Be not afraid to be serious, concerned, worried about threats that are real. Speak your worries and don't let them frighten you into silence.

4.  Depression that renders you inactive

Find your own activism and stick with it. It doesn't have to be political. It could be just getting up a bit earlier in the mornings. It could be forming a group of neighbours to keep the street clean. It could be just mildly letting people know that you can't afford to keep up with the Joneses. (Truth is good for the soul and saves the world.) It could be refusing to blame the school when your son goes wrong. Get him some help! Or some for all of you.

5.  Losing hope. The whole world is in a mess, but it is not an irrecoverable mess.  Focus on what is going well, and don't let it slide out of your consciousness. Tell other people what is going well in your opinion.

And a good New Year to one and all!