#OpenMinday – A mature individualism @diane1859 @shepleygreen

What is Open Minday?

“To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people.”
Promo for The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis

Even if this belief is challenged by Curtis’ documentary, which illustrates how Freudian psychology has been employed by business and politics to control the masses through the illusion of individual power, the power of the individual is still formidable.

In the West we live in a culture which cultivates and rewards individualism. Though only a specific kind – survivalists are a joke and people outside of conventional society are suspicious, but we all act as consumers in order to get through the day.

That’s not to say we are all driven by consumerism, but if we want to eat, sleep under a roof, create something or enjoy something we have to accept our role as consumers or seek out an alternative – confining us to the crowd outside of conventional acceptance.

A great many people are very good at making our individualist society pay for them, but this is more a testament to the ingenuity of human beings than proof that individualism is a natural human instinct. The rage expressed against the 1% who are particularly good at manipulating the system only highlights how non-human individualism actually is.

Individualism, especially consumerism, is focused on ‘want’ and not gratitude or the urge to contribute towards something external, something ‘not you’. It’s a one-way path, where the world passes into the individual and remains there. Individualism hoards energy.

But for me this is only the first stage of a cycle, the childhood of individualism. The possibility of a return path from individual to the world is occasionally hinted at – those people whose ‘want’ actually drives them to positively contribute, even if they remain essentially selfish regardless of achievement.

If the first stage focuses on the things which travel along that path – the gain which being an individual brings – then the second stage begins when the end point of the path, your own self, finally becomes the focus. In this adolescence of individualism, the questions “Who am I?”, “Why do I want these things?” or “What do I really want?” are unavoidable.

They are huge and alarming questions. I have never felt that anyone taught me to answer them, and my developing self-awareness was so hamstrung by guilt and shame that I was trapped in this stage for almost my entire conscious life. Until I at last discovered that I’d had the capacity to provide the answers myself all along.

By accepting my self I could begin completing the cycle and discover how to return the energy which passed from the world into me back out into the world, and in a way I feel contributes something – the maturity of individualism. My method is this blog, my future writing career. My method is in my contributing to discussion, ideas, thought.

But I’m only a writer, that’s only my method. What’s your method of returning to the world? Look around you and you’ll see a hundred other people, each with their own innate method. But how many of us have discovered what that is?

At a weekend away last year I met a group of people I’ve become hugely interested in, particularly one guy who told me about his business in making furniture and how he was building his own house with his girlfriend, at the same time as a full-time tutor post.

He got up early to use his workshop, taught a full day, then returned home after working into the evening. The more we talked the more obvious it was that he had passed all the way along the cycle far earlier than I had. He had found his method.

Neither of us are exactly changing the world but we are both contributing to it. And, although both of our aims would be to make enough of a living out of our methods that we didn’t have to do anything else, there’s a difference between us and business.

Principally it’s in that simple word, ‘enough’. Consumerism, that one-way strain of individualism, has no understanding or place for the word enough because it suggests that there could possibly be an end to ‘want’, which is only possible if consumerism ends.

As I drew out the other week, the modern structure of business is also unfamiliar with the word enough. The desire to make a living out of your individual method only breaks the flow back into the world if you allow it to forget about ‘enough’ and focus on ‘more’.

I see a future where a vast gulf opens up – between child-like or adolescent individualists (businesses) driving for ‘more’ and mature individualists driven by getting ‘enough’. The businesses will only ever get bigger, because mid-size or smaller companies will be either consumed by corporations or will fail to support the drive for ‘more’, and die away.

The further the corporations get from individuals, the more the mature individualist  groups will be free to express their methods and strive for quality that businesses focused only on wanting more are unable to match. And yet this new mature, mirror-like individualism will still be contributing to the world through the pursuit of individual goals.

If your method creates a product – writing, building, crafting – then it can be easy. But where I see the need for Government is in enabling a change to the shape of our culture so that individuals whose method isn’t so straightforward a match to retail-style society (ie, caring, teaching, healing) can fulfil their individual goals of having ‘enough’ too.

But my point right now is a request for everybody to ask what method exists within themselves, to strive for a mature individualism where that method is expressed in return for ‘enough’. Finding my method taught me that ‘enough’ is less than I thought I needed.

I’ve tried to open your mind this Open Minday, but if you’re interested in expanding your thoughts about society, economy or capitalism then @diane1859 @shepleygreen are the perfect place to start.

#OpenMinday – Spanking, and parenting @RealDoctorStu @KateKatharina @lizfraser1 @cherrymum1972 @NigelNelson

What is Open Minday?

I loathe TV soaps. But despite this, I can’t ignore the fact that one scene in Coronation Street, of a man smacking a child, is enough to trigger debate about a worthwhile topic in an admirable variety of places.

But whether it’s right to smack your child or not isn’t worth taking much time to think about. Not least because there’s already a huge amount of informed and intelligent writing about it, and my feeling is that any further debate is repetitive, and basically redundant.

What’s more constructive is asking what ‘right’ actually means. The problem is that both sides are so polarised, as @RealDoctorStu neatly illustrates by putting the two arguments side by side, and both truly believe they are right and have evidence to back this up.

I was smacked as a child. For me there is a serious difference between smacking and child abuse. I was smacked, I wasn’t abused. Does that sound depressingly like the repeated, eerily similar phrases every smackee seems to use? The ‘it never did me any harm’, or ‘I deserved it’ or ‘I knew I had done something wrong’? Then let me clear this up.

I was smacked because my parents had finally lost their temper, or their patience, or I had pushed them so far in the arms race of parent-child relations that they had (to them) nowhere else to go but the nuclear option. I wasn’t smacked because they were drunk, bored, or motivated simply to cause me pain and suffering. That’s where I draw the line.

We know that the abuse of children isn’t right. But even in attempting to agree on abuse, not everyone is ready to come along quietly. I don’t know how anyone can see @KateKatharina‘s shocking example of a US judge subjecting his daughter to an experience of inexcusable, pre-meditated abuse of trust and parental responsibility and not recognise it as abuse, as being wrong. But, still, some maintain he was justified.

The line of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ has to be decided personally. Writer @Lizfraser1 shares her discomfort with the idea of parents hitting their kids, but contrasts smacking with hitting. In the Corrie clip she points out the character’s rage as a crucial marker that his actions are more worrisome than the light physical, irregular, discipline she gives her own children.

Parents will, with a slight raising of the hands, confess to smacking. But they’re keen to qualify this as ‘occasional taps’, used ‘once in a while’. Like Liz Fraser, they acknowledge there is a fine line, stressing that smacking has to be ‘used effectively’.

That’s totally at odds with my feelings. I see smacking as the momentary lapses, the times when the parent felt they were left with no other choice, and abuse as the controlled, conscious violence. But parents who do smack see the line into abuse crossed by those who lack the ability to control their level of violence, who lose control and then abuse.

I’m more worried about the parents who consciously smack their children without being angry, impatient or at the end of their tether. Smacking, for me, is the last resort. For these parents it seems to be a vital tool in their disciplinary armoury.

Again, the question of whether it’s right or not to smack your child is defunct, dead in the water. The interesting question to ask is why would you smack your child?

Smacking is seen as discipline, and both arguments question the efficiency of this. For my own part, I will say that I didn’t benefit from smacking, it certainly never taught me anything, it definitely didn’t bring me closer to my parents and I hope that I will never lose my cool enough to do it to my children.

Will my children suffer because of this? Am I buying into a ‘myth’ that smacking isn’t effective? Nothing from my own life fits with the idea that smacking is essential to enforce reason, or to set up a deterrant that otherwise can’t be explained. I am not the self-aware, self-critical and intellectual person I am because I was smacked.

Take the children out of the question for a moment and everything is much clearer. Those campaigning for a ban on smacking seek to define all physical discipline as abuse, while those against… are they seeking anything other than a protection of the parent, a protection of parents struggling to make the best decisions they can?

We all struggle when called to justify decisions we’ve made that skirt the line between acceptable and unacceptable – because in making these decisions we’ve had to define that line ourselves. And often enough we’ve had to make these decisions sooner than we might have liked, without really thinking, without really considering.

My instinct is that I will never smack my children, but my experience tells me that it’s only in knife-edge moments where the decision to smack is made – if it’s even a decision, more a kneejerk reaction to powerlessness. I know that if I have the time to think about smacking I’ll not do it, and I trust that I will always make the effort to make the time to think.

Because it’s not only the child who is smacked that can be affected. In @cherrymum1972‘s example, the act of smacking (a cuff around the ear) is enough to undermine the safety of a child’s classroom. If the argument for smacking is that children can’t understand reason, isn’t that a reason to protect them from violence that they, in turn, can’t understand?

Again – why smack your child? And again, if the answer is thoughtful, considered discipline, then what lies behind the reaction from so many ‘normal’ people (as normal as commenters writing such things can be assumed to be) who seem to be only a few steps away from yelling “stick the boot in!”, or the classic “I was offended – that he didn’t hit her harder!”.

I wish I was exaggerating, but it’s chilling that there are commenters that stand by smacking with theories like “The worst thing that ever happened to…the world in general is the single mother” or MPs who celebrate the “short sharp shock” and crow that “growing up undisciplined is much worse than being smacked as a child”.

I don’t believe that any of these unfortunate people honestly trust anyone else, least of all their own children or the children of others. There is a sense that children are born as untamed chaos that needs to be forcefully pressed into routine, that they are irrational beings without reason who need to ‘learn the rules’ or be moulded into a routine.

How can you trust something you believe to be so chaotic to develop sensibly, to grow up into a ‘normal’ person? Sadly the eventual rebellion against repression, the pushing back of the child which finally comes when they’re strong enough, when they’ve had enough, only proves to these people that they were right. Not that they might have been wrong.

Children are trustworthy, and I look forward to proving this belief. We will trust our children, trust them to be human. We won’t need to smack them because we won’t force a routine onto them that they will chaotically refuse, and so we won’t create a situation for ourselves where going nuclear is the only option. We will shape our world around them.

And what harm will it do? Can’t we teach them right from wrong without hammering it home? Can’t we allow them, in the years when we have no right to expect them to understand ‘rational’ routines, to have what they need, when they ask for it? Can’t we trust them not to be tarnished, damaged by this beyond further teaching?

It’s easy to be scared as a parent. It was one of my first reactions – scared that my child wouldn’t love me, that the fact I would be unable to do anything but love them without question would give them a power over me that they could abuse.

But that’s my shit to deal with, not my child’s. It’s up to me to overcome this, not to attempt to avoid the outcome that I fear by forcing my child into a shape I can deal with, a shape that my otherwise rational life can handle without too much stress.

I like to think of children as comets, not moons. Moons are locked into orbits around the gravity of larger bodies. Comets are influenced by gravity but preserve their own wider, unpredictable orbits. I trust my children to be comets, to streak away into amazing places but to eventually come back. I trust my children to love me.

lxxxvii

There’s something hot and heavy about a final draft. I was editing a ghost story I’d written before Christmas, in the final few hours of a week’s work, juggling the things I needed to finish in the office with putting the final touches to the story.

It was something I was going to read out at a friend’s party, so there was already a sensation of performance attached to the words, but I found that the closer I got to the end, the ruddier my cheeks were getting, the hotter my blood.

As I played around with the last few paragraphs, making sure that the reveal was set up just right, that the words were sinister enough, that the image I was painting was perfectly chilling, I was intensely aware that if I looked like I felt I would have a job of explaining why finishing a ghost story was behind it all.

My forehead was blazing, I could barely sit still. The prospect of completing a piece of work in a way which tied everything together properly, which hit all the right notes, was exhilerating. It felt amazing, exciting. It was arousing.

But not as that might sound. It wasn’t particularly sexual, it was more emotional, more about being voluntarily vulnerable. I was laying myself bare, because in order to read this and achieve anything I’d have to be utterly serious, totally committed.

The prospect of how people might react to something I was so serious about, something which was a whole exposure of my ability and person and ambition as a writer, was giving me flushes, making it hard to sit still. It was exciting me.

Now. Without going into too much detail, I know this feeling pretty well. A few months into my first job I had an unbelievable email… thing… with a girl (married) from the same company. It went nowhere but at the time the possibilities, the exhileration of something happening which was so unlike ‘real’ life, was intoxicating.

I’ve also sent more than my fair share of conversations online or via text which were entirely, honestly and shamelessly… exposed. The longer the exchanges went on, the higher the temperature of my cheekbones seemed to soar. It was addictive.

Often, I can forget quite how passionate a person I am. Then, suddenly, like while editing this story, it can burn to the surface and I do, say or think things which a few moments ago even would not have even flitted into my mind. It takes no time at all for it to arrive.

But once it does, there’s a stark contrast between the things which drive it on and the rest of the world, the rest of life, which is now just a colourless backdrop. It stays with me, and I was wired for the whole of the drive home that evening, story printed and ready.

Why should writing have the same effect on me that being so… unabashed does? Is it the writing that’s the thing, given that in all the situations which take me to this place I’m creating words, expressing something, reaching for something impactful.

I’m sure that the idea of performing the words at a later date made a big impact, anticipating as I was that experience. But then, if you follow (and without me needing to go into detail) the same could be wholeheartedly said of the other experience too.

Should I write all my pieces with the intention of reading them out? Will that passion take me to places that otherwise unmoved writing might not? Or is it the connection with what I’m writing that can light such heat in my creative heart?

Or, alternatively, is it the illicitness, the taboo nature of what I’m doing even right now (feeling just a little of that face-warming glow) as I write for myself in an environment when I should be doing something entirely different, entirely not for myself?

I have what the internet tells me is ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), where sometimes my whole scalp will tingle at some trigger – an interesting accent, light breeze, or even right now, just writing about having it.

I don’t remember if I’ve ever had ASMR while writing (not about ASMR), but it’s obvious to me that writing itself is rooted so deeply inside of me that my passion must be entwined with my expressive impluses.

It’s no surprise then, that when I’m most in touch with my creative instinct, when I’m trying my hardest to express something with clarity and impact, that I should be excited, aroused even, by my efforts.

Will it be the same for all my final drafts? I hope so. But what I really hope is that the writing which leaves my face red, burning and almost blisteringly stimulated, has even an ounce of the same effect on anyone who reads it.

The etiquette of eating shit

In life, sooner or later, you’re going to have to eat shit. And it really ought to be your own.

This is one of the first lessons we should teach our children. Okay. Maybe one of the second lessons, after the differences between literal and figurative expression.

You can’t create or destroy other people’s shit, only your own. But that doesn’t stop people trying to make you eat their shit. Because they refuse to eat it themselves, and because once we’re presented with our own shit, the first thing we want to do is get rid of it.

So shit passes from person to person, each of us trying to offload it as quickly as possible before we have to suffer the indignity of handling shit. You shit on me, simultaneously highlighting how much of my own shit I’m carrying around. And I shovel it off to someone else when I just can’t cope being buried in shit any more.

We watch in fascination as others are made to eat their own shit, or even better the shit that someone else has left for them to deal with. We anticipate shit coming our way and instinctively palm off as much of the shit we’re currently handling to try to make room.

Some of us create more shit than others, some of us can sit in shit longer than others, some of us manage to avoid even coming into contact with our own shit, let alone anyone else’s shit. But shit always sticks somewhere. Someone, eventually, has to eat shit.

Shit is ugly. Shovelling shit on others is just passing on ugliness, like the spouse who beats their partner or the worker who feels powerless in their dead-end job but powerful when firing both barrels of their aggression into other people’s lives.

Parents spoonfeed their own shit to their children. Children spend their lives humbly trying to eat shit they feel responsible for, but which they can never properly stomach because it’s shit that rightfully belongs to their parents.

People actively eat shit that isn’t their own to protect others from having to eat their own shit, feeling that they’re making a positive difference but ignoring the fact that until you accept you have to eat your own shit you’re always going to keep on creating shit.

Some people actively shovel their shit onto others because they can’t accept they must eat it. Others then shovel shit elsewhere because everyone is shovelling shit onto them. And some refuse to eat their own shit because, well, no one else is eating shit are they?

Because shit makes us unhappy. And having to eat our own shit means we have to be unhappy and self-aware, which has the capacity to make you incredibly unhappy. Especially when those who can’t accept eating their own shit will only ever sneer and point disgustedly at the shit-eating, without any ability to see the shit-free existance beyond.

But until you come to terms with eating your own shit you’ll be forever shovelling or dodging or sitting in shit. Until you start eating your own shit you won’t ever know which shit is yours, and which shit is someone else’s. But once you start, when you can identify your own shit and accept that it’s up to you to consume it, you start creating less shit.

Eventually, once you’ve started eating your own shit and stopped creating so much more shit, you’ll be left with no shit at all. And you’ll be able to recognise your shit before you’ve even created it, controlling your shit so you never have to eat shit ever again.

As parents we should have already eaten our own shit so that we’re in a position to eat our children’s shit, until they become capable of recognising their shit and eating it themselves. Your shit can massively and negatively affect other people. It’s your responsibility to eat all of it so it doesn’t hurt the people you love, or anyone else for that matter.

Shit throwing is most obvious on the roads. I’ve been forced to change lanes because of a mistake and the person behind has beeped me because I’ve slowed down, at the same time as the driver zooming up my left has scowled and refused to let me in.

Then I’ve got frustrated at feeling like I’ve backed down or been humiliated or whatever and I’ve lost my temper and found myself swearing at both of them. All of us just passing shit around, all of us covered in it, all of us trying to get someone else to eat our own shit.

Yet the power to stop it is in all of us. If I eat my own shit in this situation – I’ve made a mistake – then I’m empowered and immune to the other shit. The beeper attempts to shovel their shit on me. The scowler follows suit. But if I get frustrated with all this aggression I eat that shit too, and none of the rest of the shit will stick anymore.

Except now the other drivers both find the shit they tried to shovel onto me being returned straight back to them. Now they’ve got to eat their own shit – that they’re impatient and aggressive – or attempt to instantly shovel this shit in another direction.

But imagine if all of us had already taken on the responsibility of eating our own shit a long time ago. I’d recognise my mistake and accept it. The beeper wouldn’t touch their horn because they’d be calmer. The scowler would just let me in and we’d all be happier.

It’s true that when you start accepting your own shit and face the fact that you’ve got to eat it, you begin realising how much shit you’ve got and how long you’ve been ignoring it, hiding it from yourself or attempting to offload it elsewhere.

But stick with it. Don’t give up on eating your own shit. Do it properly and it takes you out of the whole shit parade itself.

Sooner or later, you’re going to have to eat shit. Do you want to keep on living in a world of shit? Or do you want to stop having to dodge all that other shit by accepting that if you really have to eat shit, it has to be your own.

#OpenMinday – Three Men and a Baby and the capacity of all men @TheRealNimoy @_TomSelleck @TedDanson1947

The song over the opening titles of Three Men and a Baby (“Boys will be boys, bad boys, bad boys, nothing but trouble”) hints that you’re about to watch a film about overgrown boys struggling to grow up and face responsibility. This couldn’t be more inaccurate.

Admittedly, the song hasn’t even finished before Ted Danson and Tom Selleck have charmed an impressive number of women back to the penthouse apartment they share with (sorry, Steve) the less successful, but just-as-confirmed bachelor, Steve Guttenberg.

But this is just the set up, the Pledge. Don’t let it fool you. Because in actual fact Three Men and a Baby is one of the most sensitive and affirming films about fatherhood you’ll ever see. It’s practically a homage to the capacity and capability of each and every man.

Let’s skip through the thin layer of plot (mistaken packages, gangsters, police) because, heck, the film does so itself in order to bring the titular men and the baby into the foreground. The fathers/baby relationship isn’t a backdrop for a plot, it is the plot.

The inspirational Turn arrives sometime after Peter (Selleck) and Michael (Guttenberg) have discovered Jack’s (Danson) baby daughter Mary outside their door. And it’s as surprising as the discovery that the film is directed by cultural polymath Leonard Nimoy.

In the first moments of Mary’s arrival in bonnet and basket, everything we could suspect is confirmed. The two men are furious with Jack’s easy-going attitude toward the baby and horrified at the prospect of having to take care of it on their own.

Michael has no idea why she’s crying and exhausts himself acting like a clown to try to get her to stop. Peter goes cross-eyed when faced with the sheer scale of baby stuff he needs to buy and the bewildering advice offered by the first woman he asks.

The idea of the situation being abnormal is rammed home by the many mothers with prams and toddlers in every credible frame. The helpful woman, though certainly helpful, does look to be enjoying Peter’s discomfort and lack of knowledge.

Then the two desperate men attempt to change Mary’s dirty nappy and jerry-rig a replacement with one six months too large, which immediately falls off, giving Mary the opportunity to wee onto the sofa Peter is holding her over.

But think about it. Neither man freaked out at the idea of changing Mary or refused to deal with the dirty nappy. Peter doesn’t lose his temper even though the sofa’s covered in piss, and a few moments later Michael’s cleaning the sofa. The stereotype is wavering.

It’s obvious that Peter is rich, and so just blindly buying a haul of baby stuff would have been a worry-free task. But he doesn’t just buy ‘stuff’. He’s been to several shops, picked out stacks of equipment for every possible need the baby might have, and then spends the time figuring out what it’s all for.

Look back and you see that, despite the initial complaining (and Peter closing the door on her for comic effect) Mary is the focus for both men from the very instant they bring her into the house. The sofa they change her on doesn’t matter, nor does the carpet under the dirty nappy. Her needs are already at the centre of their world.

Michael’s character might still require him to play the fool every now and then, but neither of the men struggle with the responsibilities of looking after a baby. They meet the challenge, they come through, and they get on with what’s next. Peter even risks arrest to put Mary’s welfare first. Mary isn’t their baby but they are already good fathers.

Michael sums up this positive attitude when Jack comes home. He and Peter drop Mary on Jack and leave him to it, their return to the bachelor lifestyle illustrated by the midnight game of pool they both immediately get stuck into. Peter has concerns, but Michael just replies, no, let’s let him figure it out for himself.

Later we see how Peter, Micheal and Jack fall in love with Mary, and the film handles this in a really touching way that never makes light of the relationship. The script, the directing, the acting, they all take fatherhood, whatever the definition, seriously.

But what really resonated with me was what Michael says. Not only is Jack on his own (unlike the two other men) he’s also portrayed as the least responsible, yet he still gets on with it and figures it all out for himself. There’s even greater weight to the positivity of this when it’s repeated by Jack’s mother. It’ll do you good, she tells him.

This isn’t because she wants him to suffer, or to go through the sleepless nights and worrying. It’s because she trusts him, she believes in him, she knows he can do it and she knows that all he needs to do is commit to figuring that out for himself, and he’ll be fine. He’ll be better than fine. He’ll be a real father. And he is.

There are other shining moments, too. Michael’s finest comes in the final reel, with Mary returned to her mother and the way to the airport. All trace of the clownish manboy is now gone, and he reminds the mother that Mary likes to sleep 20 minutes after she’s been fed.

He doesn’t say that Mary must sleep, or Mary always sleeps. He tells her that Mary likes to sleep. This is a world away from when he didn’t even know how to begin understanding why Mary wouldn’t stop crying. Now he doesn’t just understand her, he builds his own life around that understanding.

Then, in the taxi rushing to the airport they talk to the driver who seems to be about to tell them that things get worse. Kids are hard, he tells them, but immediately gushes about how every father’s heart must melt when treated to their child’s smile. These are fantastic examples for any parent, whatever gender.

The film transcends gender roles in a way that is amazing for any film, let alone a big-name Hollywood film that came out 25 years ago. And yet, maybe it’s not that amazing, given the era. Maybe we’ve just gone backwards a little since then.

The Prestige of this magic film is when Mary’s mother agrees to stay in New York. It’s cheesy but it proves that the men haven’t just lived a great anecdote or survived a brief episode. Their world has changed and they’re ecstatic about it. Each one has become more of a man, more of a person than they were at the start of the movie.

Three Men and a Baby has a message for every father, every mother, every man and every woman, and it’s not about ‘facing up’ or ‘growing up’ or any hackneyed overcoming of stereotype. It’s about trust, it’s about believing in your own capacity to do anything. And, of course, it’s about how each and every man has the capacity to be the perfect father.

The Fog of Commerce -and- The Nomads of Financialism

“…War, organised war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and co-operative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten thousand years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus, and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide.” Dr Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

You have to be an idiot to hate Capitalism. Wait, I’ll clarify. You have to be an idiot to not live in a hut you built yourself, eating food you grew or raised or killed yourself, concerning yourself with the coming seasons (of the year, not Dexter) and hate Capitalism.

Capitalism is just an approach, it isn’t good or bad. Or, to put it another way, the theory of Capitalism is just that, a theory, but there’s an endless amount of seriously cool shit that has come out of a billion people all buying (haha) into that one theory. This is good, right?

As I understand it, Capitalism proposes a way of life structured around producers and consumers, employers and employees, money and goods, capital and debt. It’s made my life an exciting one to lead. But that’s just an interpretation of Capitalism in the real world.

In fact, as a simplification this might work but as a description of how Capitalism now functions in our world it’s utterly inadequate. Look, I’m not an academic. I haven’t done any proper research. I’ve just read and thought about this a lot. And this is what I think.

Capitalism, just like Socialism, Marxism, Humanism, Sexism, Racism, isn’t a human instinct. These are ways in which we attempt to combine instinct (survive, stabilise, sustain) with what happens when we meet other people with the same instincts.

Sexism and Racism are overtly aggressive and lamentable outcomes of instinct, because when someone else threatens the ability to fulfil one of our core instincts, we fear their power and we seek to undermine and weaken the threat in order to repel it.

Socialism and Marxism are ambitious outcomes of the instinct to mass in the safety of numbers, to gain the protection and the product of a collective movement of effort in a shared direction to a shared purpose. But they fail in a world where our instinct to work with others comes into direct contact with our instinct to distinguish ourselves from them.

Capitalism empowers our instinct to distinguish ourselves, to define ourselves, because it heightens the importance of the individual in the system, the separate pieces of the machine. But our instincts to share, to give and to care receive none of the same rewards as our more self-interested instincts, which causes tension.

It’s a system ripe for influence by powerful members of the system, and open to the seizing of advantage by those with a knack for the way the system works. Inevitably there are successful individuals and unsuccessful individuals. The gap only gets bigger, and as a result so do the tensions which the system unavoidably creates.

I’ll take the liberties of an wilfully ignorant and perhaps over-confident writer and expand Adam Smith’s invisible hand to be a theory like so: In a free market, producers or employers will react to what consumers or employees do, money will respond to the movement of goods and capital will correspond to debt.

My issues with the prevailing, currently exercised interpretation of Capitalism is that the invisible hand is tied, often by the same powers who demand it be allowed to move freely. Because we’re not living Capitalism pure, not now and perhaps not ever (it’s probably impossible to purely express a theory at this level). We’re living Financialism.

That sounds a lot better than Moneyism or Wealthism, but all three express what I mean. I believe Capitalism is more than just a system of money. It’s one of all the aspects and roles I mentioned above. But Financialism, and the economic money/investment markets which drive what we think of as Capitalism, are concerned only with money.

Whatever the sad impact of this on you and me, it has happened because of what I like to call the Fog of Commerce and the Nomads of Financialism.

Like war, commerce is not a human instinct. They are constructs in the real world which are driven by human instinct, shaped by our desires – a commander wants the best possible victory with the fewest possible casualties. A consumer wants the best possible product for the least possible outlay.

When producer and consumer, employer and employee, money and goods are close to one another – the independent shop and the regular patron, say – a relationship exists which can easily and quickly react to the desires of either party. Just as, in a skirmish, a squad leader can precisely respond to attack and inspire the morale of his troops.

But the larger the producer the less able they are to react to or even consistently consider the many and competing desires of its consumers, like commanders in the fog of war. The greater the distance both physically and emotionally between the producer (in terms of influential personnel) and the consumer, the more obscuring the Fog of Commerce.

By this I simply mean that, at the top decision-making level of a large corporation, the desires of individual consumers is noise. Making sense of this noise costs, but generalising is cheap. And unless the noise is too loud to ignore, decisions can be made based on information that is in turn based on a decision to prioritise cost over relevance.

Example: A pharmacist I knew was, after a mild bank holiday weekend, asked by her supervisor why sales of cold medicine hadn’t reached the expected targets. As a professional, she knew it was probably because the unexpectedly mild weather meant people didn’t have colds so didn’t need medicine.

But as a staff manager herself, she knew this answer wasn’t accepted at any level of the command chain, all the way up to the head directors. Understanding unexpected events is difficult, especially when you’re removed and obscured from the event itself, but plotting expectations on a graph and theorising controllable reasons is cheap and easy.

All of this might just mean that big, bloated organisations eventually suffer as disgruntled consumers either turn elsewhere or, if they’re sufficiently ambitious or driven, become producers themselves. Corporations that don’t adapt fall away, small upstarts become big conglomerates, the cycle continues.

This does happen, of course, and will continue to happen. But I believe it should happen far more often, and would happen more often without the Nomads of Financialism.

In Dr Bronowski’s lecture, he defines the nomads who by all accounts invented war as non-producers, non-farmers. He draws a picture of a world where the horse acted as both the trigger for this nomadism and as the first engine of war, enabling the nomads to strike unpredictably, seize goods indiscriminately and flee too quickly to be caught.

I’m all too easily drawn to generalisations about investment bankers, economists, hedgefund managers… But there’s a simple reason. I fear these roles. The people who hold these roles don’t perform either of the two main functions I see in our communities – they aren’t builders and they aren’t hunters. They are the Nomads of Financialism.

I used to work at a well-known magazine publisher, which I won’t name because I like a lot of people there. But this is how my image of their upper echelons was shaped – when I joined, they’d just survived a rocky and challenging beginning to the new millennium, and were admirably now happily back into the black.

Immediately following this announcement came the intention to become the biggest niche publisher in the UK. To grow. Which, in practice, meant spending all that capital (and more) on investment in a huge buy-in of new titles. This would make us the biggest niche publisher, which would in turn raise our share price. It would create money.

I’m not enough of a fool to suggest I know exactly what happened next, but I do know that a significant and unexpected number of the new arrivals didn’t prove to be as good an investment as they should have been. From a stable but non-remarkable position, this company had succeeded in creating instability for an overall non-remarkable result.

Risk is risk, yes. And I might have it totally wrong. But what I know is that I saw a company with capital and comfort, money in the bank, end up as a company with debt and questions. And for what? For growth.

In Financialism, there are only two goals. The first is to make money, and the second is to use that money to make more money. Having money isn’t enough – you have to have growth, because without growth you won’t have more money. Nomads are driven by nothing but these goals, because the system rewards only these goals.

Nomads don’t create product, they benefit only those who are part of the global financial market. They eat, sleep and think money at a level where it probably even transcends money itself and becomes like The Matrix, a buzzing, seemingly incomprehensible mess of figures and numbers, the real picture buried somewhere in the tangle.

If the investment bankers who can see that real picture are like commanders who can read the battlefield, then below them are the troops – the investors who eagerly enlist in the action to seek money and more money, in a world where growth is the only visible option.

Why should this matter to any of us? For me, I’ve self-indulgently loved writing this because it’s finally given me a framework to discuss my fears and my intuitions without having to resort to shrieking. It’s a stance and a model that I can explain, stand by and argue about.

But what should matter is my point that the problems caused by the Fog of Commerce are perpetuated by the Nomads of Financialism. In true free market Capitalism, the cycle should work out and those who resist the progression of time should fall away or lose power. But in Financialism, it’s the Nomads who can influence who falls and who succeeds.

Or at least, they’ve been allowed to project the image of holding this power. If my old company had stood by its stability, what would have happened? Financialism states that the Nomads would have pursued growth (and more money) elsewhere.

For a company sitting on its own money, that’s not a problem – it’s a fortified, privately owned concern. Except, if the people at the top are caught in the Fog of Commerce, they run the risk of becoming Nomads themselves, of being attracted by the exhilerating horseback (bear with me!) pursuit of growth.

But for a company which has investors (Nomads) the decision to say ‘enough’ and ignore rapid growth isn’t always an option. Without growth (ie, more money) the Nomads will strip their assets and gallop off to more attractive opportunities. Leaving a company whose stability depended on the interest of investors in very unstable condition.

And this is why people think they hate Capitalism. Because in Financialism the Nomads are Capitalism, because they control and glorify growth in a system which suffers the Fog of Commerce. We don’t hate Capitalism, we hate the Nomads. We hate them because we fear their indiscriminate approach, their apparent lack of concern for us.

We hate them because we wish we were Nomads too. We wish that we could get rich quick, get famous quick, get what we wanted right now. We wish we could roam, without concerns, and only look after our own interests. And those of us who don’t wish this struggle because the perception is that the roads to alternatives are closed to us, the Nomads are holding all of the crossings to new territories, new ideas.

Financialism is an arrested cycle, a perpetual stall. It goes nowhere interesting, except for the cheapest and quickest route to growth. And in a world where many people with an ounce of talent either want to be a Nomad or are afraid of Nomads, we forget the fact that we don’t actually need them. We just need to resist them.

I see a future where the individualist drive of Capitalism finally matures within us, creating not a self-directed consumerism but a self-powered optimism. We realise that the global financial market doesn’t have to exist. We realise we can live in a world without investment bankers. Without the Nomads of Financialism.

We just have to find a way to blend our instincts to distinguish ourselves, to discover who we are and what we do best, with our social instincts to build together, to hunt for the benefit of our communities, and to create an -ism which accepts all of our instincts, driven by the individual on a personal level but managed sensitively on a universal scale.

lxxxvi

Since we found out that my wife is pregnant, there have been two responses which have surprised me. One, the ‘Well Done!’ feels amusingly inappropriate, as if the person is uncomfortably saying, ‘So you managed to figure out where it went, then?!’.

But the other, less amusing response has been the ‘Ohhhhohoh, you just wait!’ near Schadenfreude of both older parents and people without children. The implication being totally negative and, effectively, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got yourself in for!’.

First, it’s clear that some people just don’t know what else to say. They’re parroting back to me and my wife exactly what they’ve heard other people say (I assume) which makes their dumb response a simple fill-in-the-gap discomfort. These people just make me sad.

What pisses me off are the people who fully believe the negative stance, and at that moment you can see the parents replaying their children’s early years through a gel of nightmares, while the non-parents wince at a vision of the utter loss of their free self-soul.

If I’m offended on behalf of me, my wife and our unborn child, how the hell would the children of these negatismo-people feel, to hear that the instinctive memories of their parents are all painful, all projecting that they suffered at the hands of their children.

I can tell you. We feel disgusted, ashamed, distressed and severely upset. After a recent meal with my family that showcased a concentrated burst of ‘You just wait’-ism, I spent the evening weeping in my wife’s arms. How dare someone be so callous?

We get it, okay? Parenting isn’t a cocking TV dinner, or a paint-by-numbers exercise, or any one of a million other facile analogies that all just suggest one thing – people are scared that yet-to-be parents will be too blind to the effort, sacrifice and care that kids need.

Well fuck you. Apologies for the direct forcefulness of my swearing, but I’m on the offensive now in any future conversation I have about our child, and I will not tolerate anyone telling me it will be anything other than a glorious, resounding burst of love and joy.

Because anyone who doesn’t think that can bite their own tongues off and never speak to me again. I’m not a shit-eating idiot. I know where food goes in and where it comes out. I know about the sleep and the noise and the money and all the other meaningless nonsense.

But for crying out loud, that’s not why I wanted a child. It’s not even a catalogue of reasons not to have a child. It’s just what happens, it’s just the territory. Me and my wife are so excited about having children because we know we’re going to love them to pieces.

I know people who have struggled. My own sister (and this is a favourite anecdote of my mum) called our parents in tears because my nephew just would not sleep. I feel for everyone who’s had a hard time. But for Christ’s sake, don’t fucking tell people about it.

Don’t publish your latest baby-related woe-is-me story to Facebook. Don’t whine to me about wailing or sleep-depravation. Talk to me about how you felt when your child smiles at you, about how you know I’ll feel when the same happens to me. Talk to me about love.

Otherwise, don’t have children. Because if all you can remember and pull out when someone tells you they’re pregnant is a shopping list of complaints, that person will have every reason to never tell you anything of worth or matter again. Or talk to you again.

Imagine how, in ten or twenty years, your child might feel to suddenly discover a Facebook post or a Tweet where you have, in a moment of stress and weakness and need, told a million strangers and a handful of friends that you wish you’d never got pregnant.

Imagine the pain. Imagine the heart-rending, soul-destroying and life-altering suffering you will be inflicting. You can reason it and excuse it all you like, but you said it, you did it. Your child will only hear you rejecting them, and from the moment that they were alive.

We have many ambitions as parents, and many decisions to stand by which we know many other people will judge us for. But one of my highest ambitions is to see these whinings for what they really are. If I fail I’ll be the first to stand up and accept that I have failed.

But we will only talk, ever, about how much and how endlessly we love our children and how proud we are of them simply for being them. Because that is all that is ever worth taking the time to talk about.

lxxxv

I had a fantastic hour in the studio last night, returning to write a story I’d struggled with before. Today, I spent the entire journey into work telling myself the arc of the three parts of the story as I see it, opening up a whole new theory for myself about Muses.

The minute I was in the studio I felt great, peaceful. Before I left the house I’d wavered, I could have gone either way, but the unwavering support of my wife kept me going – and as I pottered around tidying my desk and setting up the area, the peace returned.

This weekend we’re off to the Isle of Wight, our honeymoon location, for the anniversary of us meeting for the first time. The island is a central figure in one of my projects, but it feels like last summer’s visit opened up everything that was good about me, and my marriage.

I want to keep up the momentum as we go into the weekend, and carry it through the visit and out the other side to gain the absolute most inspiration and energy from the place. So this is a quick rattling out of some disparate thoughts that are clouding me…

–

I have always been the classic ‘all the gear and no idea’ sportsman. I got into mountain biking and didn’t just buy an entry level bike, I bought a £900 machine on a credit card just after getting my first ever job.

Idiot.

But what was the point of doing it unless I had the best kit? If I was going to actually do this thing, then I’d only want the best stuff later on, so why not get it now and actually gain the benefits early? Why not get everything first?

Because, obviously, that rush of a new project or passion isn’t guaranteed to last. I stopped using the bike. But I didn’t stop filling my time with stuff, new things to spend money on.

Basically, I need to cut down the things I’m doing. I need to write, read, shower my wife with love and affection and not a whole lot else. Otherwise I’m just spreading myself too thin. Otherwise, I’m not getting the most out of what I’m doing.

–

After reading an article on TGMP… Women had their identity crisis several decades before men? So, can you have an identity crisis unless you have something to push against? Can you have an identity crisis unless you feel threatened? Can you have an identity crisis unless the identity you have assumed is challenged?

–

I am hating it that people are telling me ‘advice’ along the lines of ‘your life is over when the baby is born’.

I hear people worried about what they’ll lose if they have a commitment, if they get married, if they buy a house, if they have a baby. Is this why why we have elongated childhoods, manbabies, careerwomen, separatesouls?

Because everyone is so terrified of losing freedom, because they believe it when people tell them that they’ll lose everything at these milestones, that they resist moving on? Is that why we’re all so unhappy? (Are we all so unhappy?)

–

The difference between success and just getting along, doing something as a hobby, is dedication and sacrifice. Obvious. But easy to hide, easy to let myself forget.

–

Ah. Clean.

#OpenMinday @GoodMenProject and being a man

What is Open Minday?

I don’t know what any other man is going through, because I am one man, me. But I know that for as long as I can remember I’ve had questions about what I ought to be striving for, about who I am, and about who can answer these questions.

For the past year, as I’ve got married and my wife became pregnant, the question of what it means to be a man in this modern global world has only got more important to me. I want to explore it, think about it, write about it. But often I feel in a minority.

The Good Men Project is a website I literally stumbled upon, and since then I’ve been reading as much of it as possible – principally because I knew it was the perfect Open Minday subject. There are other discussions about maleness, but I see nothing so prolific.

I’ve had to give up trying to read every article flagged up by @GoodMenProject because I’ve already got six of them queued and I’ll never get anything else done otherwise. It’s many things at once, but it entirely lives up to its goal to create a discussion about men.

But everyone would benefit from reading the website because essentially the discussion is about being a good person and the challenges we all face. It’s a rare exposure of the discussions, tensions and questions which sometimes I struggle even to share with myself.

It began as a project sharing the real life stories of men that “changed the writer and changed the reader”, and it is when stories are shared and confessed, when writers are at their most honest and personal, that the website reaps the rewards of its ambition.

Stories are enthralling and the honest, unedited lives of others are simply the most enthralling of all stories. Tell a story and people will listen, think and even change to far greater degrees than if you simply tell them to listen, think or change.

I have identified with so many different characters in so many different stories, with no requirement that they be anything like me. I project myself onto them, and when they act I think about how I would act. I think and I learn about myself.

My own ambitions as a writer are bound in my belief that the wholly personal story can be entirely universal. My confession may not be yours, my errors nothing like your own, but in talking truthfully about me I hope to prompt you to think and talk truthfully about you.

I believe there’s a best way to live, to think, to be and to act. Yet it’s not my place to tell you how to live or why. But I will tell you, if you want to listen, about how I made my decisions, and how I lived with them. I feel that will have greater impact on you.

If I’ve been disappointed in an article from The Good Men Project it’s because too often for me there’s a level of generalisation which I don’t appreciate, a level which goes against the story-driven heart of the project. ‘Most’ men? ‘Many’ guys? ‘In this society’?

There’s a far more productive world of discussion and action than this, but it’s borne out of the same tension I feel myself – something is wrong, and I can’t name it but I feel it, and I grasp for some sense by making general statements and casting judgements.

But this isn’t a constructive path. Generalisations serve no purpose and only detract from what might actually be being achieved, which for me is the exposure of those tensions, and how men and women are dealing with the changes around us.

We are people first and gender second. We must be, because we are people first and colour second, or nationality, or belief. We must be, because it’s the only thing we all truly share. Our differences don’t need pros and cons, they simply are.

Accept this and the question of what makes a man can only be a personal one. What sort of man can you live with being? What sort of man do you want to be? What I want or feel is only useful to give you a model, a comparison. No one can tell me how to be a man, but they can challenge my own feelings and thoughts about what being a man means.

These are the discussions I hope to read when I visit the site. How did you live with that decision and how does that make me feel about my own decisions? I’m not interested, actually, in the man you believe I should be, only in the man you believe you should be.

Again, at its best, this is what The Good Men Project can and does do.

The American flavour is unavoidable but I only ever struggle with some of the allusions, the phrases. Overall the questions, the worries and the tensions are all the same. Not to say there shouldn’t be a UK-centric one. I wish there was.

I still feel in a minority. The Good Men Project is a blinding light against men’s lifestyle guffspouts like Blokely, but that doesn’t mean we’re not still in a tunnel. There are a lot of bewildered men out there who don’t know, can’t accept or just aren’t being told that change is happening and it’s up to them to keep up or get left behind.

lxxxiv

Over the Christmas break I had a great opportunity to talk with my dad-in-law about being a father. With our own baby expected in July or August, I’ve gone through a lot of feeling and thinking in just a couple of months, and I wanted to tell another man.

I’d already told another man, actually, one of the group I’m ridiculously choosing to call ‘Young Dads’ at work, regardless of the fact that they are all (including myself) more than five years older than my own father when I was born.

But my wife’s dad is a man I admire, a man I love very much and admire a great deal, and a man who I still haven’t succeeded in being totally relaxed around. And in thinking about talking to him, I realised that he’s the very father figure I most want to emulate.

In the end, I didn’t get much of a chance to really talk to him about how I felt. I did tell him, and he did listen, and it was obvious that it meant a lot to him, but the situation wasn’t quite right and I couldn’t open up entirely as I wanted to. But why did I want to?

It’s vital to me that I break my discomfort with my father-in-law. This comes from a few places. My yearning to follow my creativity, my heart, and to be A Writer Beyond All Else, and my struggle to grasp how to dedicate myself without losing myself at the same time.

He’ll often say he was a ‘crap dad’, that he wasn’t there, but my wife doesn’t have negative memories like this. She remembers him being at gigs, on tours, and away a lot, but crucially she says that when he was there, he was all there. Nothing left behind.

This is the principal I most love and admire in him. My father-in-law has achieved great things, followed his heart and his talent, but he is utterly dedicated to his family. When you sit with him, he is there with you. When he was with his kids, they had the whole of him.

I am guilty, often, of being separated. I’ll drift off into thinking about writing, or an idea I’ve just had or a thought process I’m going through. And, regularly, I’ll then need to talk about it with my wife or anyone around me, without much awareness of their interest.

At the same time, should my wife not respond immediately or stay quiet or find what I’ve abstractly sketched out a little difficult to understand, I get upset, frustrated, distressed. No one is listening to me! No one is understanding me!

I simply can’t image my father-in-law doing this, just as I have never experienced my wife doing this. It’s terrifically self-involved and I hate myself for doing it. Because I am doing it, I’m making the choice, as much as I might want to complain that I’m just talking.

What my father-in-law does is listen. Perhaps that’s what makes me uncomfortable, sometimes. He is intent, he sees you and he’s interested, and you have the whole of his attention. He would do anything for the people he loves, and he has.

I wonder if I would have been able to stay so open, so honest and available in his situation. Should I become a success, should my passion become my career, I worry that I’ll find myself exploring it as an individual, and that this will impact on my family relationships.

Could I do what he does, live in two different worlds, go away for long periods of expressing my own indivduality, my inner talent and passion, before returning to my family and still be as utterly open and available in both environments?

Sometimes I can barely do this between the office job I loathe (not because of what it is, but because of what it isn’t) and the home I adore. Sometimes I come back listless and dithering because I’m lost in my head. Sometimes I rage at work because I can’t stand not spending my time pursuing my passion. Sometimes I just drift through both.

When I am a father myself I want to be there, active and aware, available and engaged for my sons and daughters. I want them to know they can interrupt me, know that my first thought is of them, and know that nothing they ask of me is too much.

My father-in-law does this, in my eyes and in the eyes of my wife. Is there anything more fundamental to being a parent? Can I aspire to anything more wonderful as a father?

The only thing that still troubles me is why I’m not open and honest with my father-in-law. I sometimes treat him like an old man. I don’t know how to relate to him. I only know how to look up to him. How can I become a man like him if I can’t talk to him?