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

13

Uncertainty and anxiety are deeply connected and almost universally co-present in human interactions. Picture a feisty teen schoolroom: the teacher maintains order by keeping the students on their toes; the students vie with each other and test the limits of the teacher. Sometimes they use tricky questions; sometimes they make ambiguous remarks; sometimes they snatch moments of humour at the expense of another. No one ever gets to relax; no one can trust what’s happening; no one really knows where they stand; everyone is watching their back all day long. It’s in such an environment that we learn to be adults and for many people it carries on for the rest of their lives in ever more refined forms: the cocktail party; all day at work; the drama club; the social networking group, whatever.

But it starts much earlier than that. Even very young children soon learn that they can manipulate their parents by asking loaded questions and that parents start cooing at your early signs of intelligence and then wrapping themselves in knots to please your every whim if you dress it up in a cute question and whine slightly. Parents fight back by asking overbearing and embarrassing questions to impose discipline and morality. Pretty soon the word “why” is a cosh and every interchange is loaded with behavioural uncertainty as the kids test adult authority and parents try to establish civilisation. You don’t notice it when you’re locked into it but I’ve never seen a young family who weren’t playing many complex, interlocking variants of this game in which everyone is damaged, some terribly so and the usual results brought about: loss of trust, peace, certainty, even love. This also never ends and usually drives our adult close relationships, not to mention our own families in due course. Similar patterns, more grotesquely played out, can be observed in relationships with domestic pets.

By the time we reach independent adulthood it’s pretty much impossible not to be living in repetition compulsions relating to games you are still hoping to win and it’s extremely rare to find anyone whose behaviour is not tantamount to a set of strategies to establish their own primacy or at least protect themselves against domination by others. Entitlement culture is born and we become suspended in the climate of lie where nothing has a genuinely innocent purpose any more and except in the early stages of endless love no-one ever lets anyone relax into knowing where they are and that who they are is totally appreciated. This only lasts in the best of times until the sex runs out and you have to design a modus operandi about household routine and how to hold conversations in order to go any further. Welcome to the negotiated relationship, that everlasting, all pervasive purgatory for our souls – now cut off from any chance of heaven.

And don’t forget that in such a world your home life is supposed to be a refuge from even worse threats to emotional stability posed by the “rat race” in the “concrete jungle”… A land where your dress code, your smartarse talk, your clever politics, your blood curdling submission in the face of bullying and favouritism, your deliberate lying to make the sale and your acquiescence to the incredibly low moral standards of the marketplace – all of these things are a poison to the soul, all day, every day, until you no longer notice and may even become a champion for the whole disgusting “system”, especially if it brings you personally a measure of success as you claw your way over the hopes of others.

In such a world love is very rare, friendship is simply a joke and the chance of anyone feeling genuinely good about themselves is almost nil. The best you can get is fake bonhomie, uneasy political truce, confused ideals, negotiated relationships, a desperate need for distraction and a pile of consumer goods to reward you for selling yourself. Thank God you’re so stylish and you never make an aesthetic, ethical, ecological or political faux pas!

The special people who run things actually want all this anomie, of course; it’s an ideal divide-and-conquer strategy and they didn’t even have to think it up because it arose naturally from the ping pong game of truth and power fought in advanced societies between old moralities and social controls and the new, liberal, correct ideologues that infest our media. The soft government regulates to give kids more rights so that teachers can no longer bully them into submission; the kids take more freedom than was meant and threaten the stability of the system; so the incoming hard government imposes ridiculous new standards on the teachers forcing all the good ones to go mad or leave, bringing in mediocre people with no standards themselves who can’t even organise education, let alone make it inspiring. Result: billions spent each year to deliberately produce social chaos and letting in threats to the whole culture through violence, drugs, unwanted pregnancy and teen megalomania generally. Result two: the next generation is even crazier and huge ghettos of untouchable subhumans eating only junk food develop in all major cities, where no one else dare get out of their car.

Groovy film makers sometimes stir the pot by making the downtrodden masses look like victims who are really very nice people but they aren’t. Nor are the global billions living in filthy slums. Some of them are sometimes OK but the culture they produce from within themselves is generally cruel, brutal, selfish and even more devastating to the soul than the dead culture of Stepford suburbia. Anyone with any sense has already left town, no matter what the price, because nothing good can ever grow there. Even the people in Hollywood know this, so obvious it is, Obi Wan, yet the media liberals, hiding in their groovy inner city wholefood trattoria, somehow feel the need to deny it. This is hard to understand, but I assume it is form of denial that makes a nice clashing paradox with their apparently non-judgemental memes, such as the one where only fascists are bad and capitalism can be cool, you know…

Anyway, I don’t really care to discuss “society” because it’s an infinite debate, going nowhere forever, so many vested interests generating endless memaganda (propaganda for their memes), everyone in denial but guarding their own little privileges, even among the poorest of the low, obviously among the would-be specials, desperately among the suburban slaves and dishonestly among the city slickers. They’re all right, all the time, and you simply can’t argue with that. They right even ten years later when their views have changed. They’re so right they can smell that you’re a troublemaker from the very first sentence you speak…

No, what interests me is the ontology of all this and just for now my attention falls upon the challenging interrogative as a basic unit of inter human commerce. People could ask genuine questions, seeking information, understanding and knowledge, yet they hardly ever do. I am not opposed to all statements that could be transcribed with a question mark. Instead, my target is the false question that is intrinsically a challenge and may also express itself merely in voice tone or body language, and may hide itself in affable humour. The Mind (not the intellect, the heart or the spirit or even the brain or a collection of electrons but The Mind, the guardian of the entitled ego)… The Mind never, ever hears a pure statement of question and never reposts in purity either. It does not know how and was never designed to do so. Its purpose is to weigh all incoming and outgoing traffic for status and like a bad email filter it sometimes deletes the good stuff and sometimes lets in attacks. In fact it lives in training mode for the whole of your life, constantly trying to figure out what kind of conversation, representing what kind of status relationship, will finally make you the supreme being it wants you to be.

Someone like me can rattle virtually any Mind within a couple of minutes because I transmit strange messages on unusual frequencies, which drives The Mind immediately to escalate to red alert status. I can see it in their eyes, the questions: where is this guy coming from; what is his status; is he taking me seriously; am I being respected for all my knowledge and achievement; does he admire my beautiful personality and fabulous taste in clothes; is he making fun of me… and on it goes.

Luckily The Mind doesn’t get to meet someone like me very often so it normally has a much firmer grip on its environment and can blank unwanted intrusions without straining its ironical-putdown and raised-eyebrows-in-scorn modules. And if that’s not enough it can walk away, though it prefers to give intruders a good kicking first so they’ll never forget the day they dissed the Mighty Mind.

But all minds will meet people bigger than themselves who make them feel like small-time outsiders and all minds will begin to perish when life hits them with divorce, failed ambitions, job loss, treachery, debt, sickness, cancer, heart attack, ageing, not to mention in poor countries political upheaval, war and natural disasters. And traffic accidents, the mechanism of tragic change that is so obvious even to Hollywood scriptwriters. All minds will reach for the bottle, the pill or the meditative trance one day, either that or they blow a fuse into depression, Aspergers or Alzheimers to take themselves out. Everyone will know devastating loss and shock and depression to add to the rejection and resignation they already know and have been trying to forget.

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