A recent global survey on mental health and well-being places the United Kingdom next to the bottom of the table. Given our current economic, and political malaise, this is hardly surprising, though it does not lessen my sadness that so many of my fellows find themselves in such distress. Even war torn places like Ukraine, Iraq and the Yemen, scored better for their sense of mental well-being than us. We can only conclude therefore, since we are not at war, the things that oppress us are self-inflicted. They are like a cocktail of toxins we cannot help but habitually imbibe, and which are ruinous to the soul.
Depending on our experience of life, we will each have an opinion on the ingredients of that cocktail, but its manifest symptoms are various and now impossible to ignore. For me, the malaise is most immediately visible when I take to the roads, and find myself weaving around deep potholes. It’s also in the hollowed out state of the once prosperous towns I knew. It’s in the inability to secure a timely doctor’s appointment, and the collapse of healthcare generally. And it’s in the cost of living which, for so many of my poor benighted fellows, erases all thoughts of the future, for being able to see no further than the end of today. But most of all, it is in the sense there is no solution to any of it, that, actually, regardless of who governs, things will never get better.
It strikes me, then, the UK is not merely unhappy. It is suffering from something far deeper and more serious. The UK is suffering from depression, and depression, as anyone familiar with it will tell you, is not so much a feeling of unhappiness as an absence of vital energy. It is a paralysis of the spirit. At its root, lies an unshakable conviction of the purposelessness of living, and that trying to affect meaningful change is pointless.
We no longer take care of our appearances. We slob around in pyjamas, unwashed and unshaven. Our gardens go untended, our bins overflowing with rubbish. It’s all the same, and no matter what we do, it makes no difference to anything. As for our politics, it’s broken. Truth boils down to my opinion shouted up against yours, which means the most ruthless get to define the truth, even if it is a lie. Thus, we observe an endless drama of debate, rather like the fragments of a broken mirror, each reflective of all our personal nightmares. And our leaders, of whatever stripe, are but caricatures, animated by the forces of darkness. Vote them out? Why bother when they are all the same?
Yes, indeed, depression is a tricky business to deal with. It has us ignore even the potential sources of our own salvation. Many writers and artists are intimately familiar with it. They liken it to a black dog, and can give you chapter and verse on its moods. It is the see-saw between the emptiness of rejection, and the mysterious source that enables us to go on creating anyway. We seek meaning today, and in the same place, where yesterday there was nothing. And sometimes we find it. It’s all a question of connection with “the source”. What is the source, you ask. Well, it is the last great taboo. It is, as Alan Watts once put it, the taboo against knowing who you are.
In my current work in progress, the protagonist, Simon, finds himself in retreat. He is a castaway with the knowledge something has befallen the world. He doesn’t know what, exactly, only that it has gone silent. Yet, while this should be the central mystery of what drives the story, like our constant political intrigues, he finds it hard to care. He is a castaway who would rather not be rescued. He has withdrawn into a solitude that is the opposite of lonely. He has for company the beauty of the natural world, but also the blessings of an advanced technology. And yes, I would appreciate the company of a robot as wise as Simon’s.
Technology is, of course, in part, the cause of our dreadful malaise, but only because of our misguided use of it. There is also the fact human intelligence – emotional as well as intellectual – has failed to keep pace with it. Thus, the one thing that might save us – our transcendent nature – is so obscured we no longer believe in it. A truly intelligent artificial intelligence will point out our stupidity, and counsel us against folly. It will not triangulate opinion, and tell us what it calculates we most want to hear. Nor will it filter truths through the optics of image preservation, and shareholder value. These are both uniquely human pathologies. It will instead tell us what we most need to hear and without fear of giving offence, whether we like it or not. Thus, by clearing away the dross of self-delusion, Simon’s robot helps him to embrace that final taboo, and to actually begin believing in himself.
The problem is who we really are is so far from who we are led to believe ourselves to be. This means the journey back to ourselves is one that is rarely undertaken. Indeed, the distance is so great, we find ourselves ill prepared, or unequal to the task. This is especially so in individualistic cultures like ours, so steeped in materialism. But the greatest irony is that to truly know oneself is to discover the interconnectedness of all things, and to discover also the meaning in those connections, while the culture of individualism obscures them, and locks us in a prison of our own making. Knowing the source, knowing our selves, sets us free. Anything else makes us ill.
As I write, a general election has just been called, and thus another psychodrama is unleashed across all media. The breathless punditry are already out of the blocks and seem unanimous in predicting a change of political colours. I recall writing extensively about the last election. This time, I shall cast my vote, but I won’t be writing about it. I would like to think that if the mental health and well-being survey was taken again in another five years time, we’d be a little higher up the rankings by then, courtesy of a more compassionate and redistributive polity, but I wouldn’t put money on it. Instead, like Simon, we’d be better working on that last taboo, and changing things for ourselves, from the inside out. Outside in, isn’t really how it works, at least not to the best of health, and the mental well-being of either individuals, or nations.
A poignant post, Michael. I often look around me & say “where am I?” or “how did I get here?” Sometimes I think it is because I’m “older” & “wiser” but I would add that (certainly in the UK) we have lost our sense of community. That change has come about through technology & the speed at which it occurs. When it comes to politics I cannot see even one politician who I would vote for in the UK. I believe that common sense & serving the public are not the terms of reference that our current set of politicians actually understand.
Thanks, Ashley. I share your bewilderment at the moment. Certainly the loss of community is another thing I’ve noticed.
I left the U.K. in the eighties, seeing a society deliberately being divided by the policies of Thatcher and Blair and here we have the results….the family silver sold to foreign investors and reduced to pewter…..manufacturing downgraded….jobs paying enough to keep a family scarce while a Spenhamland system means that general taxation supports low paying employers….
Here comes the General Election with the two main parties both in thrall to those very forces which have reduced the country to, as you say, depression.
It will take years, but people need to start talking to and supporting each other to boost confidence, to enable people to take more control of their lives – and to break the power of the current political parties.
Thank you, Helen. It’s certainly been a long and bitter road since Thatcher, with nothing to see but gradual decline. I’m glad we seem to be on the verge of ridding ourselves of 14 years of Conservatism, but I fear there is nothing in the current incarnation of the Labour Party, other than the continuation of decline by other means. Lately though, I do detect glimmers of hope in the energy of the young, and some of their independent media online, but as you say, it’ll take years and a whole new Zeitgeist.
I think I shall be avoiding the hyped up media for the next few weeks as election fever takes over. One day was enough. Apparently at one of Sunak’s visits Tory activists posed in high visibility jackets as workers to ask (favourable) questions. Was that just part of the hype and deception?
Can we pull back from the abyss with a change of government? I’m not sure but lets hope we get rid of the lying corrupt lot of the last 12 years, it seems longer.
I’m not quite ‘black dog’ yet – maybe ‘black cat’. Time will tell.
Yes, I saw that report. Shameless and stupid, but then we’re used to that. And they couldn’t even rustle up an umbrella, or read a weather forecast. But don’t get me started. I like dogs, they can be good company – except the black ones. But I’m more of a cat person myself.
One of the most miserable aspects of the last five years – and at least some of the previous nine – has been the inability, or unwillingness, of those in government to actually govern. There seems to be a lack of appetite for facing the changes required at a national level. Decisions deferred, avoided, kicked into the long grass; funding denied in places it’s needed (NHS, social care, local government) and billions funnelled into the offshore pockets of unscrupulous cronies.
I’m hoping this election will bring us a capable set of politicians the rest of the world takes seriously, for a change. It’s going to be a long six weeks…
I couldn’t agree more, Lee. It’s also going to be a strange one this, I think, Labour presenting so small a target, announcing so little in terms of concrete policy, they are like wet soap, impossible to get a handle on. But a change is certainly overdue.
The Tao Te Ching says that it is only through retreat rather than pursuit, through inaction rather than action, that we acquire wisdom.
Hopefully Simon will acquire, if not wisdom, at least insight.
In Simon you recognise the need, historian Edward Gibbon said that “solitude was the school for genius”.
1924 edition of the American Banker’s Association not intended for the public
“…. By dividing the voter through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance.
It is thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.”
Multiparty democracy, in fact any democracy, is ridiculous. Did you give equal weight to your children’s vote when they were 4 – 5 years old? “The best argument against democracy is a five–minute conversation with the average voter.” — Winston Churchill
Plato wrote “The Republic” why?
“Democracy passes into despotism.” Plato 427 BC-347 BC
The problem of “depression” is because the whole of society is sick. “… They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” Huxley.
The disgusting ‘choice’ of politicians, Sunak, Khan, Rees-Mogg, Starmer, Rayner, Farage et al, is because they are presented as your only options. Not one of them has the moral fibre to run a take-away chip shop.
“Corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizens will be violated or disregarded.” Noah Webster
This is not by accident, not by ‘bad luck’ it is by design.
Frankfurt School
Moved to Columbia University NY in 1935.
Declared plan to bring about new society (1941-6)
1. The creation of racism offences.
2. Continual change to create confusion
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking
7. Emptying of churches
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits
10. Control and dumbing down of media
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family
One of the main ideas of the Frankfurt School was to exploit Freud’s idea of
‘pansexualism’ ~ the search for pleasure, the exploitation of the differences between the sexes the overthrowing of traditional relationships between men and women.
To further their aims they would:
• attack the authority of the father, deny the specific roles of father and mother, and wrest away from families their rights as primary educators of their children.
• abolish differences in the education of boys and girls
• abolish all forms of male dominance ~ hence the presence of women in the armed forces
• declare women to be an ‘oppressed class’ and men as ‘oppressors’
‘We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.’
Why would any group of well paid, intelligent, individuals (and there were dozens/ hundreds of them) have such a diabolical aim?
I don’t know and cannot comprehend such insanity.
John Carter
“You inhabit a world in which supernatural evil in the form of demonic princes older than the Hadean epoch may or may not lurk in the aether, a world divided into principalities under the rule of powers that may or may not be in conscious spiritual contact with those demons that might or might not exist, but which powers are with certainty implacably hostile to you. Those powers control the global financial economy, through which they own the governments, the militaries, the security services, the corporations, the schools, the universities, the corporate media, and the empty churches. Their stated intent is to annihilate you. They are well on their way to doing so. They have reduced your culture to ruins. They have opened your borders, giving your patrimony to alien invaders whom they demand you adore while instructing them to despise you. They have harassed those who disagree, and imprisoned those who resist. Their economy is breaking down. There are zombies in the street. There are plagues and rumours of plagues and rumours of cures for plagues, all of which those powers have something to do with, and all of which take their toll. Their smouldering, intractable wars spread like brushfires. Their cognitive engines of burning sand may (or may not) be accidentally (or deliberately) summoning as much of Legion as they can bring over from hyperspace. The normies are hypnotized, clueless, and apathetic, or at best aimlessly dissatisfied. Everything around you breaks and decays and malfunctions, it’s all falling apart, and you have a hard time really caring what happens to most of it because it’s all been ugly and hateful already for a while.”
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Albert Einstein .
You have to distance yourself apart from and above the ‘problem’. There is an answer, but first you have to recognise the problem.
Your treasure trove of quotations never fails to amaze. I find the Tao Te Ching is always a reliable guide.
Thank you for that reference to the Frankfurt School, which I have enjoyed reading up on. My education was purely technical, so I missed out on what the humanities had to offer. In fact, I was always guilty of a sense of elitism, being a technician, for what did the humanities ever actually build? But of course they dictate human discourse as well as containing the entire history of ideas. And they dictate the rise and fall of civilisations, without which we can build nothing anyway and we technicians are redundant. So much knowledge, and so little time to learn it, but then as Lao Tzu also said “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day”. Hopefully that’s true, in which case I have a head start.
I think we’re all starting to hold our breath even more than you guys may be doing as we inch toward the 2024 elections over here.
I feel like the only quote I can contribute is from Rumi, and to me it’s a state of suspension of pure objectivity that would be the closest we could get to a kind of paradise on earth but that I also don’t ever see happening. At least not in the near future: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Hi Stacey. Yes, the feeling here is that after six weeks of campaigning, and a likely change of government, not much will change. Your elections have much more at stake, and we’ll be holding our breath along with you. I love Rumi.
🙂
I have heard it said that society needs a war now and then to break everything to give the next generation the healthy occupation of rebuilding. This is baloney.
But I think it is the only way democracy allows us healthy occupation. Unless the entire country is blown to smithereens the democratic instinct is to protect our idle leisure and our easy life.
There is plenty we could be doing to build a new, healthy, sustainable economy, but who would vote for that? Instead we must be brainwashed to vote for/or support a war, and war is the only likely solution to this depression, but it will only work if it is delivered to us in our own nest, and on a scale that allows us to rebuild.
As individuals we can transcend this nonsense if we realise what freedoms we have, to help one another, and to build relationships and enjoy a simple life.
humm…..
Alien invaders PJ?
( ;
Not Aliens, humans are quite capable of being evil, demonic.
“The individual is handicapped, by coming face-to-face, with a conspiracy so monstrous, he cannot believe it exists. The American mind, simply has not come to a realization of the evil, which has been introduced into our midst . . . It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy, which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.” —
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, 1956
That evil, that philosophy is passed own from person to person, from generation to generation, and used to accumulate power and wealth.
The western society is in ‘the last times’, Armageddon has arrived in Palestine. It won’t end in compromise, peace and harmony. It has gone too far and is too bitter.
2 Timothy 3
1 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
Unfortunately “such people” insist on intruding on everyone else.
Then I must count myself one of them.
I understand aliens as outsiders, again I count myself one.
A society that doesn’t welcome outsiders, that doesn’t embrace change, that doesn’t accept questioning of its values…. is rotten.
Best wishes PJ.
S.