I am a pessimist. I prepare for the worst and then I am relieved when it does not come to pass (yet). I try to ensure that I contemplate the darkest moments (fleetingly) on a daily basis so it doesn’t suddenly whack me around the face like a wet fish with no time for preparation. I want to die before my loved ones but am also aware that this is selfish psychological self preservation. I do not rejoice vacuously when something goes very well because I am all too aware that all highs are followed by… well you get the drift.
It does not matter whether it is at the micro or the macro level, my range of pleasure is quite narrow. I have been on anti depressants for eight years following a near mental breakdown but find that these daily pills merely suppress my emotional responses further whilst preventing the lows that I was occasionally experiencing before. A bit like being bi polar with most of the time thankfully spent between the extremes (although I know some may disagree). What this emotional state does enable though (for those who are thinking ‘I am glad I am not him’) is a picture of reality that exposes the grim and the grime alongside the sunshine and the Middlemist red.
Looking back over history we have been expected to rejoice at many things. With the increase in literacy and mass communications these expectations have increased and at the same time have become harder to control. Gone is the deference in which few dared challenge the elitist viewpoint. It has been replaced by the hegemony of the mass media and school curriculums that prescribe our successes. Over time though the celebrations following victories in wars and coronations of monarchs are declining as more and more have never experiened either. Politicians of course love them. The victory in the Falklands in 1982 enabled the most unpopular prime minister in history to win the election the following year with a landslide. The coronation of the present monarch, in 1953, cemented the return of the Conservative government and helped keep them in office for a further eleven years. But when we look back at these times and many others with a little less sunshine and a large dollop of monsoon we can begin to realise that things were not as they seemed.
By far and away the biggest travesty served up for the people of this country was World War 1. If ever nationalists were able to stain the name of so many people it was this monstrous crime. In hindsight, sticking millions of men in holes dug in fields and moving a few hundred feet forward and backwards for four years whilst being shot at and terrorised by mortars and labotomised generals does not look like that much of an idea. But when seen in context it becomes even less so. Very rich men (mostly) of many nationalities had for centuries conditioned their populaces to rape; pillage and exploit millions of their own species (whilst these same populaces were being raped, pillaged and exploited themselves – oh the irony) only to see this power being eroded towards the end of the nineteenth century. Instead of asking why and using their public school education to engage the cerebral parts of their brains they decided to enact one last assault on the good citizens of their respective countries in the vain hope that by wiping their competitors away they could have control. Alas for us they managed to manufacture a war out of a localised dispute and murdered millions of people. Then just when we would have thought that it could not get any worse they called a truce having achieved next to nothing; only for the resolution (21 years later) with the massacre of four times as many. It takes a strange type of pride and patriotism to see this as a success. We allowed our leaders to create Hitler and his henchmen and then to fuel their passion to rule the world. Why? Because they saw a lot of the characteristics of these fascist monsters in themselves. Who was it that helped create the concentration camp? None other than Winston Churchill during the Boer Wars. ‘The greatest ever Briton’ as he is often referred to by the media and establishment cronies. Who would they perceive is the worst? Think of someone with empathy and altruism and they would stand a great chance.
And on we can go: Nelson, Wellington; numerous kings, queens, dukes and earls, generals; field marshalls; squadron leaders; city financiers; hedge fund managers; politicians; journalists, school headteachers and principals, magistrates, judges… have destroyed this country through their ignorance and ambition. As Lord Acton famously cliched ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ and as Steven Lukes pointed out back in 1974 ‘the third face of power described how power can covertly manipulate others to do something they might not actually want to do by changing what they want’.
All of the various roles noted above and many, many more are filled with people who should be ashamed of themselves. Yes ashamed not proud. One of my favourite books Erich Maria Remarque‘s All Quiet on the Western Front which also includes one of my favourite quotes sums it up: “I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”
Even the welfare state which should be the beating heart of our society has become for too many synonymous to the agonies of having a permanent kidney stone. A health system for all should not be about making people fit for work. Work should be designed so that people can reduce their ill health (both physical and mental). Education should not be a tool for exploiting the masses but a sense of liberation for everyone who interacts with it. Benefits should not be a whip to legitimate state and corporate bullying of those who are not ‘economically productive’. Productive for whom by the way? Legal aid should ensure everyone has a fair opportunity to receive justice but it isn’t. Housing should be flexible and not dependent upon long term loans that fund a small group in to often unimaginable prosperity. We were conned by those who were either naive (although compassionate) and those who for a moment feared us. Now the latter seek their revenge.
This is history. This is our past. If we don’t experience it consciously we can be certain that billions have and will continue to unless we stand up and confront it. It will be those living on the other side of the world; those in our street and those we helped create. Being melancholy and on anti depressants is not so much the cause but the symptom. Until we condemn the past and rearrange the present, the future is doomed to repeat all of the same mistakes and more. What is the point of the past if we are not going to see it for what it was? The opportunity to bring the warmth and the optimism of spring into ours and everyone else’s lives. There is nothing wrong with the monsoon if it exposes the charlatans. And for the time being there is nothing wrong with the anti depressants until such time when I hope I no longer need them.
Douglas James
