@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

10

Sorry, but it’s time to labour the point that what passes for human life on earth at the moment is simply not good enough and does not represent all that is possible to us. Getting most people to accept that is like trying to leverage a mountain with a tyre iron but one has to keep trying no matter what level of fake maturity sneers back at you. Because that’s all it is, you see: resignation, masquerading as world-weariness, cynicism, sophistication, adulthood and indifference to the bewildering complexity of our lives. How else could we live as we do in huge crowds, working all day at pointless tasks, saturated by useless communication, nerves stretched to breaking point, underlyingly exhausted and emotionally defeated while superficially pretending to party. We have to be faking it and when we do, we have to be lying – and when we lie what we start with is the huge one that this really is the life we wanted and we are in charge. One day more evolved beings will study our history and find this idea simply insane, because it really is a mass mental illness, a plague that has already claimed every sentient creature as victim.

You can see that I’m right by observing people under even the slightest stress, let alone what happens when the going gets tough, let alone when there really is something to worry about. Anxiety clouds every moment of every “normal” human interaction and it is cleverly covered by learned behaviours which are sometimes negatively referred to as “ego” or “character” and which supposedly constitute the rich and interesting entity known as “Me”. Most people can only talk in the first person, prefacing every remark with “I think…”, “I saw…”, “I feel…”, “I like…”, “I believe…” and whatever launches their presence into my space for another sound bite of pure, self-centred drivel like the ten million others I’ve had to endure since I got here. Very rarely does a conversation get started from a We, You or Us intent, though intellectuals like to create the impression that they are neutral, abstract, scientific and emotionally mature observers.

The word “mature” is extremely important here because it represents the key goal of all young people and it never leaves us because we never quite get there until, like Nelson Mandela, we really don’t care and can revert to “childish” play once more. Very few people are going to beat the Alzheimer’s and decay like he has, though, but then the guy has suffered a lot without selling his soul, which perhaps contains a clue as to possible methodology…

The obsessive quest for maturity is what leads spotty, sweaty, megalomaniac adolescents into ludicrous parodies of savage adulthood, though late developers, the painfully shy and the losers that the rest of them victimise have some chance of remaining true while the rest congeal into hierarchical and tribal groupings that are hostile to outsiders, patronising to adults and desperate to big themselves up by acting cool.

Now that I’m of retirement age middle aged business cabals look like teenagers to me and I simply marvel at the sublimely creative ways that rich people, media folk, intellectuals, freemasonries and religious zealots, recently “networkers”, the fashion conscious and those who think they are rebels have fine tuned their dress codes, languages and behaviours to instantly define Us and exclude Them. I speak as someone who can never interact with any social group because I don’t belong and they smell it immediately, so I have noticed this more than most people and I do know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t noticed it yet, then you simply have not been looking. Either that or it’s so all pervasive that you assume life must be like that and ignore it…

Life need not be like that. We cannot retain our original selves but we can try to return there by noticing when we aren’t. We can rediscover our soul’s own morality, vision and creativity when we stop being carried along by the memes of our social status and the tribes we belong to. It is possible to find the good (and bad) in every place on earth, but rarely do we even look outside the safe havens of people like us. The simple word for this is “conformity”, but it is hierarchical and driven by the fierce energies of the need to be significant, accepted, respected, a “somebody” – even though you never can be certain because everyone else is competing with you for those same things all the time and even people who say they love each other dominate, submit and complain, arm wrestle each other emotionally and cause each other thoughtless pain…

It’s not much good being a dominant, powerful, extrovert, alpha, “persecutor” (after Eric Berne) type if the people around you actually hate it and spend their entire lives plotting, resenting, bitching and making snide remarks. It’s pretty useless being the rebellious, angry, self-righteous “rescuer” type if everyone around you is fixed as what they are now because they’re trapped in it. And it sure as hell is no fun at all being a victim, tied to the wheel of some ringmaster who makes you jump all the time and winds you up into a fury which you can only assuage by losing yourself in grovelling submission. Do I hear sex in all that, perhaps? I’m pretty sure I do. I’m pretty clear that the biological prize for pushy men is permission to mate and for pushy women permission to be queen, where everyone else is subservient. I’m pretty sure that every teenage gang, like every wolf pack, has a dominant male and female both, though in advanced societies the boundaries are so blurred that everyone gets a chance to pretend they are the alphas over somebody, often their employees and their children…

What the dominant strive for is to become untouchable, at which point they can rest and act smug. Most would-be winners act smug in any case, on the fake-it-till-you-make-it principle. I see smugness in the behaviour of most of the people I meet and I see resentment, anger, sometimes fury, bubbling under the surface in them too. Usually, both smugness and anger are there to read in the voice tone, every time a person speaks, if you know it is there and are tuned to noticing it. Once in maybe a hundred people I hear genuine gentleness and appreciation in the voice tone and see it on the face but often those least spoiled individuals, those who could be leading the way are so cowed by the smug-angry-happy dominants and the whining-furious-triumphant submissives that they just keep quiet and resort to subterfuge, isolation, hobbies, trees, animals, art and alcohol to survive.

It’s not that simple, of course. No one is just one type of person as psychology tends to imply. No one is one sign of the zodiac. Everyone is a moving, broiling, changing, swirling, vortex type mass of solid, liquid and gaseous humours or qualities or energies – interacting in body, mind and mood, in various degrees of self-consciousness that also change on a scale from candy coloured dream machine to the almost perfect focus of an Olympic athlete and every shade in between. This fascinates us and is the subject of much enquiry and meme generation, yet we rarely stop to ask the reasons why. Actually it is because hardly anyone knows how to be themselves and even fewer people know how to recognise other selves and fewer people still even acknowledge any need to share the space with other selves. No wonder the world’s in such a mess that tragedy, comedy and Waiting for Godot sometimes seem like all that is possible…

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