I beg to differ. I think we have no right whatsoever to interrogate each other and expect answers, not to satisfy our curiosity and not even if we are pretending interest to get ourselves noticed. In fact if someone asks me a question I make it clear to them that they have overstepped a boundary and need my permission to get personal. Likewise, if someone is sitting in my living room and I am curious about them, I first ask if they would like to talk about whatever it is.

This may seem like a very high level of ethics to some but actually it’s the only thing that truly works. You cannot find stuff out by demanding answers. You find stuff out, if that really is your intention, by observing and noticing what you observe and looking for the spaces between the image and the reality. If there are very few space you have located an interesting person.

Some people pose questions in their “bloggs” as if they were interested in our opinions when actually all they are trying to do is get noticed, get liked and make us respect them. If I ask a daft question in a “blogg” I want you to know that I am joking, provoking and being satirical. Heaven forbid I should ever speak or write any words for any baser motice than the desire to communicate, illuminate, share experiences and learn about others.

Anything else is a tawdry insult and I will continue to hunt down such things when energy permits and throw them back in the faces of the idle manipulators who think they make clever personal branding for themselves.

If you wish to find out about things, that is different. You are asking for knowledge to be given to you and that is a totally different matter.

When “The Nice” dislike something I have said they usually reveal their true selves by coming back at me with a paternalistic/maternalistic question such as “Did you have a hard childhood, Steve?” Or some such crap. That’s when I go ballistic.

No one, no one on earth, has the right to use interrogation of any kind, even disguised as well-meaning understanding, to manipulate me or anyone else. If you are not intelligent and empathetic and insightful enough to learn by noticing then I’m afraid you will be stuck in ignorance for the rest of your life; if you want to ask me fake question to put me in my place I’m afraid you will fail every time.

Decent people feel affinity with what is true, even if they dislike kit. If they disagree they say so without resorting to sneaky attacks, most of which come as questions because that is the basic tool of the greatest menace of our time, to whit: coaches. Who abuse everyone they pretend to help with their reality-defining questions.

People rarely ask because they actually want to know. Their minds are already made up and they already know better than you. They ask because if they make you stand at attention to answer their questions they have dominated and manipulated you. Simple as that.

Death to all coaching whatsoever. And there’s no real money in it, so why the hell are they all doing it?

I think we’ve all had quite enough of grandiose exaggerations such as “core purpose” to describe basic choices made in life but we do all this with the language of course because it flatters our aching egos and we think it sounds cool.

You aren’t to blame, really, all those of you who were brought up in the perfect storm of British education when Labour progressive teaching theory was telling your dis-empowered teachers that instead of making you learn grammar and spelling you should all be invited to draw pictures accompanied by a bit of “creative writing” – when the Conservatives came along and hamstrung those self-same teachers with their National Curriculum, causing all the good educators who lovably threw blackboard dusters at you to quit forever.

It is a shame, however, that you do not know how ignorant you are, how little sense of sociological perspective or history you have, how you think this modern world is so iPadically marvellous and have no idea that human beings like us have lived differently, thought differently, felt differently and used much more subtle language. In Sixteenth century England even common people were able to speak with almost Shakespearean complexity and inventiveness, whereas those self-same social classes today can barely grunt and swear at each other, can mostly just jeer at people they hate and cheer at nasty reality TV which they think is entertainment.

So, a huge amount of ordinary parlance amounts to a cruel abuse of the meanings of words, some of which I have mentioned above. That kind of utter exaggeration for effect is called “hyperbole” and in the hands of a great writer is a legitimate communication device. In the hands of a 21st century ignoramus, however, it becomes a means of spoiling, diluting and obscuring the real meaning of anything.

Possibly the most abused word of all is the word LOVE. We routinely deploy it these days to mean just about any state of being from slightly liking a garment in a shop window to pretending we care for the whole human race. Worst of all, we have become so cynical about it that no one laughs when someone declines to use the word at all, even to those who need their affection, their partners and their children, their lifelong friends, parents and of course, their lovers.

It may interest you to know, then, that from the ancient Greeks and Romans onwards, before we shut them down, there were many words that had the meaning of love, all differentiated as to the object of your love.

EROS was a deity that stood for naughty love, erotic, taunting, teasing. AGAPE mean a generalised love of humanity and was later colonised big-time by the Christian religion. PHILAUTIA meant self love, tending towards self-centredness and behaviour such as we see online, vying for approval and affection. LUDUS was playful love, on the borderline between friendly playfulness and physical contact and could be with either sex or inter-generational, thereby making it potentially dodgy but great if it stayed relatively innocent. PRAGMA, the source of the word pragmatic, meant sensible love or the affection between ageing partners who have learned to live together. And there were other words and concepts for very strong friendship amounting to love, for family love, for love of your class or tribe or trading partners or colleagues or comrades.

They didn’t have clichés all narrowed down to one word and one concept, as in “Love is never having to say you’re sorry…” There weren’t ten thousands uneducated, juvenile bloggers piling in to show how very nice and wise they are every time the word “Love” or any other nice word came up. There weren’t a load of smarmy gurus quoting the Dalai Sheep, Mother Tormenta, Nelson Mundelo, a cunning poem called Desiderata, Krishnamurti, St. Steve Jobs or any other saintly source to show how much they understand love and everything else that’s nice.

People used to know that life is complex, subtle and paradoxical. They used to be adults. The price you pay for abusing your rich history of language and thought is that you reduce yourself to a simplistic, childish level of dreary assertion whose chief purpose is not to explore life but to make you look good. Nothing else. Most people do not speak or write a single thing without checking that it makes them look good first.

You can see that from the emptiness of their language. All idiotic, supposedly-branding memes and clichés. God help us if there is a God, and there’s another much-abused word….

(IGNORE the word “you” is it doesn’t fit you. This polemic was aimed at the Ecademy audience of ignorant space cadets)

I prefer to imagine what Prot from K-PAX would say if asked what the human condition was. He might reply that our world is totally lost: so corrupted by lies, hierarchies, religious fantasies and vicious social systems that nothing truly good can come out of it, not genuine love, or healthy self-esteem; not honest truth and certainly not friendship of any meaningful kind when there is so much competition and mistrust.

I would agree with him. The task ahead of us is to learn to be ourselves, all over again.

Let’s not mention repulsion for now; let’s try to stay with one side of the coin. Let’s not open up that ugly equation whereby one may only feel good by denigrating another, by bathing in the triumph of possession (of the wholesome relationship and by implication, the healthy life) – while the damned walk away distraught and alone…

One must glow in the light while the other hides ashamed in darkness. It’s the same desire. It’s the same passion. It’s the same so-called love.

Handle it skilfully, never owning up to the sordid parts and you will be rewarded by a complicit partner who is also playing the game, albeit lifelessly; handle it badly, acting out too much vulnerably – you will be mocked, rejected and reviled out of all proportion to your supposed crime.

The key thing that most people really desire is to be included and yet all social systems at all epochs in all territories have turned upon rewarding exclusivity for the select few and damning exclusion for the rest. Power, popularity, respect, wealth, beauty, love, influence – they are related and all collectible. To fail is to be cursed and we know this in our hearts.

Most of us have failed too much and need to pretend that we have not failed at all; this is sometimes called mindless optimism. Some of us are so afraid that we may have failed that we search like crazy for greater failures than ourselves; this is sometimes called gossip. They are both despicable.

This best truth in the room will be reached first by the most intuitive person involved if they have nothing to conceal. Those who are concealing guilt, suspicion, doubt or a fear of sharing the blame will always come up with some other, more devious truth, over and over again. That is what CBT and psychotherapy are, leeches on the soul draining bits out to stop it exploding. The best truth in the room will never be reached by anyone with an axe to grind, by anyone who is following a system, religion, discipline or coaching methodology, by anyone whose motive is to win the argument or say something popular, by anyone who has set themselves up as an expert, a wise woman or a guru.

Sometimes, in a room full of people stuck in lie, a dog or a child is the one carrying the best truth in the room. Often it is a person who is not powerful and remains afraid to say it. The combination of passive intuition and fierceness or courage is so rare in our world that most of these truths come nowhere near consciousness, let alone group awareness – leaving almost all interpersonal and personal problems forever unsolvable.

With the mental equipment people have available right now what is needed is a lot more than a bit of sincerity or even the authenticity we are all aping by being outspoken from time to time in the new internet age. We as a species are not moving closer to redemption; we are still pulling away despite decades of new lies derived from psychotherapy, democracy, feminism, the MBA and its associated frantic managerial enthusiasms, performance coaching, “the cloud”, networking, goal setting and “civilised divorce”.

The best truth in the room is the one that no one wants to tell.

Poetic truth will always be the truest truth in the room…because our lives are a series of interlocking dreams, narratives, destinies, chances, accidents and miracles – not rational transits from one plan to another goal. It cannot ultimately make sense. It is not designed or explained and cannot truly be corrected. What is lost or missed cannot be recovered. What is loved cannot be held tight, though what is hated often is..

But something almost all of us share is that we never got enough of the right kind of fathering. He was scary, unemotional, afraid to get involved, perhaps. He came and went. He upset mother and disturbed the peace. He gambled or boozed away the family income. He would rather be off doing something else. He left altogether in many cases…

All clichés and all importantly true in some people’s lives.  Think of your own life and the fathering that would have made you stronger, wiser, better able to cope, your ideal father, the one your soul will always crave.

Then think of the deal you actually got and ask how it damaged or lessened you.

Then think about what you did to overcompensate, in males perhaps something to do with toughness and aggression, ambition and competition, all sour substitutes for natural manhood. In females, well, if I had a tenner for every woman I’ve met who’s looking for daddy I’d own a yacht and a sub tropical nature reserve.

Why? Does it matter why? Sociologists put up reasons why some subcultures make fathers more untenable or give them more license to stray. But I reckon this is a feature of all cultures, everywhere, at all times. And something very profound we share in common.

And then we all try to be the good father that we didn’t get. And it still doesn’t work, not according to our kids, who will one day have the same complaints that we have.

You kind of have to be your own father in this world.

But anyone who has someone to love, even if that someone is just a dog, knows that we haven’t even begun to explore the real possibilities for empathy, telepathy, love, harmony, certainty and genuinely constructive action that are open to us when we stop following this stale culture of inequality, competition, theft and buyer beware… when we admit that we got it wrong and we were wrong to worship it.

The big tree looks dead at this moment, and it seems to be nuclear winter right now, but you can see evidence of tiny shoots that may grow back in time and open new life possibilities. You can find them in the minute detail of your own relationship to whoever you really love. Look there and you see a template through which the whole of the human race should be receiving your best contribution.

I hope you do realise, however, that your personal discovery of “the magic of networking” and the opportunity created by WordPress to blog your little heart stupid is not part of a new future; it is the last gasp of an old past.

To be new and different according to any worthwhile vision of a better future requires something altogether more radical and ethical than we collectively have ever dreamed of so far. It will not be an enterprise; it won’t have an MD, CEO, Field Marshall or President. It won’t be some passive dreamy stuff with flowers, supposed to be supported by the words of Ghandi or the Dalai Sheep. It needs to be here, now and real for each person, which is a vast requirement, for those of you who like listing the objections to anything before you give them a ghost of a chance in your imagination. Yes, thanks, it’s obviously naive and impossible as seen from here. How clever of you to notice; how stupid of you not to notice how wonderful they feel, the available benefits of love, trust, community, certainty, progress, sufficiency, sharing and rightness.

What comes next needs to be really really new, and I don’t mean the baiting of harmless policemen in the city streets by aggressive youths who haven’t the slightest notion of sharing the world or anything in it but are simply furious that they weren’t given everything that seemed promised by things like the the University of Bournemouth Media Studies course…

We are special – but not in a way that has yet been understood and demonstrated without contradiction. There is a very very long way to go and the first step is about seven billion challenging first steps, so there’s no chance, is there? Might as well just pump out some more shiny plastic simulated life devices….

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When mediocrity speaks we all have to figure out what, if anything, was being said.