Thirteen Keys to A New Vision of Life

Cultivate your cosmic lack of importance.
All is relationship, everything is interconnected.
Be content with what you have, the way things are.
Love your neighbour as yourself, do not do what you hate.
If you want to be rich do nothing for money.
Blessed are the poor. Do not distinguish between people.
Thoughts are fictions, thoughts are choices.
Nothing remains, everything must be let go.
Flow as the river, without thought; act non-action.
When you see the ordinary as sacred everything is in its place.
Peace is the highest good. The middle way leads to peace.
Now is the time, there is no other.
Know nothing.

These are all actions, how to live life, states of becoming. They are called ‘keys’ because I think each helps unlock something if we take them seriously.


Cultivate your cosmic lack of importance


It all begins with humility. But the first key is not “be humble”. Instead, I speak of a cultivation, a tending to, a concentration on, an ongoing process, something also relevant to every key here. I also speak of a context rather than an abstract. That context is the cosmos, the universe, everything we can imagine existing. In the context of that, what are we? To cultivate your cosmic lack of importance is to groom yourself into a non-egotistical state so that when various people tell you that you matter or that you are important you take it in a context in which it should be more properly set. So cultivating your cosmic lack of importance is not regarding yourself as the lowest of the low or the dregs of existence. Instead, it is an “everything in its place-ness” where that is just to co-exist with all things. It is an inability to concern yourself with status or rank or importance. It is a living, active humility, a non-egotistical becoming.


All is relationship, everything is interconnected


That all is relationship and everything is connected is to recognise and actively embrace that you are not the only thing that exists. Once that is realised, you begin to see things in the context of other things or as a set of interlocking relationships. It becomes the viewpoint of actions and consequences or non-actions and consequences, for, whether we act or don’t act, things must follow. This, then, becomes an existence which is about consequences, relation and interconnection. Since you are not all that exists and since things must inevitably affect other things, a more rounded view than “just me” becomes necessary. So this realisation is also a further example of a non-egotistical existence and a contextualisation of ourselves as a link in a chain or as a set of interlocking relationships. We surely cannot abstract ourselves from everything else for it is everything else, in its possibility, that gave us birth and enabled us to exist but, more than that, that enables existence at all. So such a view is the end of the abstraction or instrumentalisation of both people and things. Instead we think of their linkages, relationships and interconnections in non-egotistical ways.


Be content with what you have, the way things are


At first flush, this might sound cruel or harsh. We imagine any number of oppressive situations or contexts and we ask how the people in those situations could be “content” with them and so accepting of “the way things are”. Indeed, many in our society today preach the exact opposite to this third key that I am here putting forward. They speak of not being content with your lot and the way things are. But this key needs to be approached in the right way to understand what it means. It does not mean to be accepting of oppression or to explain away pain caused by others or the domination of one person over another. Instead, it means to cultivate (there is a lot of cultivation involved in these keys for it is not imagined these are qualities we necessarily have already) a principled indifference to circumstances, to see through the narratives humans impose upon life. It is also to accept that no one person, or group of people, control the way things are or what happens, both things far beyond the capabilities of either. In fact, it is a refusing to rush to settled conclusions about this time, this place, our life and its context. It can also be seen as a seeing things at their best possibility at all times and an acceptance that change is always going on. In fact, this key very much interacts with key seven in this respect. Yet there is also a sense of flexibility here, a privileging of flexibility over possession of something thought ideal which can easily lead to greed for more or an obsession with possession. Indeed, this key seems not to accept that an ideal ever exists to be possessed. Instead, we cultivate contentment in ongoing situations, a training of ourselves, a discipline, a meditation, regarding a process. We treat all circumstances as imposters just the same.


Love your neighbour as yourself, do not do what you hate


These two commandments compounded can be seen as a summary of the entirety of social morality and, indeed, the key to achieving it. The first is famously taken by Jesus as a summary of the Jewish law and exampled by the parable of the Good Samaritan in which he suggests that even your enemy in danger is your neighbour. He thus answers the obvious follow up question to “love your neighbour as yourself” which is ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Yet this is also a third key which focuses on the dissipation of ego. For in taking yourself as the measure and acting to others as you would hope you yourself receive there can be no ego. For here is recommended both an active “love” of neighbour rather than a mandated passive attitude if a neighbour should, by chance, come your way, and an active not acting towards others in ways you would hate, the negative form of “the golden rule” known in human societies since antiquity. In both cases activity, an active mentality, is envisaged. It is a way we are imagined to actively pursue, a path we choose to go down. If growing numbers of us acted this way human societies would be transformed.


If you want to be rich do nothing for money


No one ever suggested that these keys would leave the world as it is with just a little decoration around the edges, as if all that is needed is a few cosmetic changes to a world that is basically sound. On the contrary, that’s not my view at all. Instead of basically sound I see it as fundamentally flawed and one way it is fundamentally flawed is economically. This is far from simply a case of redistribution of wealth, however. Indeed, I seek to abolish wealth, eradicate money, and obliterate commerce. My fifth key takes this from the individual point of view by totally devaluing money and by asking each one of us to find wealth in other things. For the fact is that money is not the inherent way to wealth. Instead, money is a communal agreement to accord value to it from which imagined wealth springs measured by how much of it you have. But, that being the case, we can change our minds. We can choose to find wealth elsewhere. We can forget the dogmas of economics, devalue them and infuse other things with value instead… such as human life and dignity. Money is basically a system of valuations but, as can be clearly seen, it is not one without negative effects. An economic system requires losers and so creates them and holds them up as examples to the rest of what might happen to them if they aren’t careful.


So why do we live in a world where people starve because they cannot pay for food? Is an economic mantra more important than human life? Why do we live in a world where someone might die of a treatable medical condition because they can’t afford to pay for the treatment? Is an economic mantra more important than alleviation of human suffering? And the important thing here is this isn’t a given, an unavoidable fact of nature: its a human choice to value money and economy over living beings. I find that inhuman and I revolt accordingly from any kind of economic system which judges people according to ability to pay or financial means, something our current world does as a matter of course as it credit rates them and judges their current and future earnings ability. In my view, we need to free ourselves of this terrible burden and imagine a world without money, without finance and without commerce and it starts with each one of us forgetting the monetary motive in our daily lives. We could make money valueless and make caring for each other the supreme value if we wanted to. Its in our gift to decide how society should run. We should dare to dream of better rather than settle for worse or imagine that our course is set. For that, of course, is what the haves in an economic system will always want the have nots to think. But how about we remove such structural inequalities whole and entire? If you really want to be rich do nothing for money.


Blessed are the poor. Do not distinguish between people.


I would describe this as a reversal of the current world order, a bottom up rather than top down ethic. “The poor” I regard as the ordinary mass of people, unassuming, perhaps existing from day to day, week to week, month to month, which is most of us. They are those you would not raise above others. They are not famous, they have no status, they are those who must be active to maintain their circumstances. But this ethic goes further than that. It is not just about treating these people, these ordinary, every day, regular people as blessed, and blessing them by your actions towards them everyday in friendship and community, but it is a refusal to admit notions of status, rank or standing to our social ethics and morality at all. People should not be compared and judged better or worse based on judgments about things like race, creed, colour, gender, physical and mental ability or sexuality. There should be no method or idea which splits people up along ideological lines in order to have “the better” and “the worse” or “my side” and “the other side”. Not distinguishing between people entails the abandonment of any and all partisanship. Instead, the prevalent creed here is one of common humanity, even common life if we see ourselves as living things like so many other things that are alive. And so this can also broaden to encompass an ecological dimension as well. But it is important we begin with those in the worst circumstances and work up rather than the other way around. In caring for the worst off we care for ourselves, for we are all the same. To add value to another’s life is to add value to our own. What you do to another, you do to yourself.


Thoughts are fictions, thoughts are choices


Everything you think is wrong. Everything you think is an imposition of thought, that is always related to the thinker, imposed on things outside that thinking. Thoughts are interpretations and interpretations are not inherent to things as essentials of the things. Instead, they are rhetoric about things, ways to explain things, possible descriptions, meaningful understandings. But in each case they could be different. Our thoughts about a thing or situation are not the thought or situation or even equivalent to the thought or situation. They are just one possible set of thoughts about it. So everything you think is wrong. But only because there is no right. So thoughts are both fictions, sometimes useful and sometimes not, and thoughts are choices, in the sense of things that didn’t have to be and in the sense of other options (redescriptions, reinterpretations) are available.


The consequences of this are huge. For example, if some thought is giving you a problem then rethink it in a different way for the first way was neither the only way nor the essential way. There is also the thought that we need not think at all, at least not in the way we have formerly been taught, as if life and truth and knowledge are about having the right thoughts and, having collected up all the right thoughts, thought itself then ceasing to be necessary. Taoism speaks of non-mind and non-thought and these are important concepts for this particular key. In thinking we are not seeking a thing called knowledge or truth which we can possess and thought itself is not about possession. Indeed, here we do not seek to wall ourselves in by the artificial boundaries of thought which lead to knowledge at all. We seek only an emptiness which is an openness. That which we “know” is accorded no status. It is not ranked in a hierarchy. Our minds should not hold onto things but, instead, let them go. This encourages becoming and avoids the ossifying lack of flexibility that “knowledge” or “truth” promote. In thinking, it should not be imagined we gather the essence of anything for our thoughts are merely temporary and ephemeral, impressions as we pass by. High understanding comes from not understanding at all.


Instead of knowledge as facts that can be possessed and may be accorded the supposed honour of “truth” this ethic valorises knowledge that is experience. It is an experience in the moment that we each can have. It is not based on academic learning or a canonical narrative. It is not about building up a collection of right thoughts you distinguish from the wrong thoughts. Here possession is loss, not gain. Here every moment has its own integrity simply because it became and it is about its own natural authenticity. Reality, imagined by scientists or philosophers, does not exist. It is artificial. What is real is what you experience as you experience it rather than how some commentary, any commentary, may describe it. Commentary is interpretation and interpretation is never foundational in any intrinsic sense. Commentary is boundary rather than openness to reality. There is no reason why reality need be, or could be, reflected in words. So there is no need to seek truth. Simply cease to cherish your own opinions, a further anti-egotistical move.


All you know is wrong. All you know is fiction. All you know is choice. Thinking can only ever imprison you in a room of your own creating. Freedom, and, ultimately, peace, is not-thinking not-thoughts with a not-mind. Here I promote mindfulness, the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience. Epistemology is abandoned in favour of possibility in which there is nothing to gain and nothing to know. Thoughts aren’t fixed realities but simply movements of a mind that is thinking and so we see thoughts for what they are: the passionate attachment to unreal and non-substantial things, the creation of fictional identities that fade so that only the energy remains. We must realise that nothing is as it seems, that what we think is not the same as what is.


Nothing remains, everything must be let go


This key is an observation, a context, one it is imagined the reader should take note of. This is that everything is moving, changing, passing away, in every moment of our lives. Of course, we are doing these things too and none of this has anything to do with how we feel about it, whether we believe it or whether we have knowledge of it. For this constant change is not something constrained by us or our thoughts. Rather, it is the other way around. The mountain range we observe may seem solid and eternal but over millennia it wears away to dust. It doesn’t just happen one day; it is always happening until it doesn’t exist as a mountain range anymore. So nothing remains and everything embodies change. But, that being the case, it is sensible to adjust ourselves to this situation by having minds appropriate to it. The things we hold in our heads, both as objects and ideas, must also be let go. For, just as we cannot stop the mountain range wearing away, so too these ideas and objects pass away as thought and language changes over time. Here we combat the conservative notion to freeze things in time and give them an eternity and a fixity which is strictly inappropriate to them. All conservation in the end is a wanting to have things forever as they are now or in some other imagined better state and this is always a fight against an unstoppable force, the force that is change. The issue is, however, that our nature, nature itself, is change and we must accept and internalise that fact if we do not wish to lead constantly dissonant lives. We must learn that nothing remains, all things must pass and so all things must be let go.


Flow as the river, without thought; act non-action


Here is a metaphor and a concept. The metaphor is the river. The river just flows. It goes wherever the water will go and adapts to circumstances as they are come upon. It has no purpose and does not want anything. It just flows, never holding on to the ground it flows over, always continuing on the way. The concept is non-action, wu wei in the original Chinese. This non-action, so I understand, is an active quality. It is not a doing nothing. That is why the second half of this key is to act non-action. In a way, the river is itself a good metaphor for this too. For the river acts, it flows. But none of this is deliberate. Flowing is what rivers do even as the flowing that is living is what human beings do. Yet do we live as the river flows, with non-action, an unintentioned lack of concern with where and how and why and what for? Non-action is lack of intention, lack of care or worried concern, but, more than that, an indifference to such things, a cultivated lack of intention. Should the river care if it flows this way or that, here or there? So within this key is also a hidden warning: beware the dangers of care, of desire and of intention which can lead us astray and disrupt our lives. Be as the river.


When you see the ordinary as sacred everything is in its place


The key here is to see every moment as a special moment, to fully inhabit and experience each of those moments. It is also not merely to see the ordinary as the sacred but to see the sacred as the ordinary, to not section off bits of life as special but to allow the special, the meaningful, the valuable, to infuse the whole of life. This then becomes a recontextualisation and reconstitution of life itself. Some bits aren’t more important than other bits; each bit just happens as it will in an ongoing process and each is indebted to what came before as will that be which comes after it. Sacred and ordinary therefore become synonyms rather than opposites.


Peace is the highest good. The middle way leads to peace.


This is a key that I have thought long and hard about. In fact, its not an exaggeration to say that my whole life has been spent thinking about it. The issue is “What is the highest good?” and my answer, after almost one half century, is that, in the end, it has to be peace, personal, social, planetary, cosmic. There are other values or qualities we might wish to take that place instead (like love or compassion) but, ultimately, these are things which lead to peace in themselves by their existence and their being in evidence. So, finally, it is peace I take as the goal and this goal is the unspoken goal when I speak about all of the other keys.


But if peace is the goal how is it achieved? The answer seems to be that it is by avoiding extremes and hence the preference for the middle way devoid of intention, desire, care, concern, worry. In ancient Greek thought there was sometimes a dichotomy presented between reason and passion, logic and feeling. But I reject this bifurcation as inaccurate and misleading. There is no such thing as a passionless reason or as a reasonless passion. When operating by logic, so it is imagined, we have not then turned off our feeling, as if it was something we could ever turn off in the first place. What we are is organisms, holisms, that include both reason and passion, feeling and forms of logic, at all times. There is no turning these off. They are always there. So the peace that we seek must always appeal to both or neither equally for there can be no one without the other. Here too we must follow a middle way rather than appeal to one thing at the expense of another.


No doubt this involves appealing to more than yourself for even a person who has isolated themselves still has surroundings. So there is an element of co-existence to this, a sense in which peace is about more than simply your own, settled state. Can one be at peace if elsewhere others are not? This is an important ethical question that we should be concerned with. For myself, I imagine that the more people who are at peace, the more they will be able to share that peace with others - and so increase their own. Peace, then, involves fraternity, co-existence, holistic thinking, a “middle way”, that is in the midst of everyone and all things.


Now is the time, there is no other


Existence is always in the now, this present moment. We never exist in the past we imagine or the future we expect or hope for. We live in an ever present that rolls on. When we die and our identity fades our matter will still exist (some think our consciousness will as well) in that ever present but we will not. This key is really nothing more than a fresh realisation and emphasis of this, that now is the only time we ever exist in, the only time we can ever influence or experience. So we should enjoy and experience each moment of now for there will never be another time. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it now.


Know nothing


It is a long held insight of philosophy that wisdom is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. The keys I offer here, especially this thirteenth and last, are broadly anti-epistemic but not anti-wisdom. They take a dim view of knowledge as it has been valorised and rhetoricized in the Western tradition, they see through its puffed up, egotistical claims of insight and importance. This key challenges us to take the same attitude and do the same thing, to throw off canonical narratives and fictions imposed by personal and organisational authorities, to see that life is not something we need a set of hard and fixed rules for. Understanding, might I suggest, is not something that anybody needs to have. Bean-counting up the universe and writing the complete set of facts in a book that we can call “The Book of Knowledge” is literally an unachievable aim. One can be happy, or at peace, without reason. As the Buddha once claimed, “There is nothing to stick to.” (He said this because “Everything changes”, by the way.) “If you understand,” runs the proverb, “things are just as they are. And if you do not understand, things are just as they are.” So what is the difference?


The issue is that knowledge as a general category is very prone to being used egotistically. This key, by the way, is nothing to do with knowing how to do things. When I say “know nothing” I do not mean “do not know how to do anything”. On the contrary, this key is about how we view knowing and knowledge philosophically, what place we give to them, what stature we imagine they have. Enlightenment here is regarded as knowing what you do not know rather than counting up all the things you suppose you do. Knowledge, under this rubric, is never a cause for pride. Indeed, often knowledge is regarded as a trap or a blind or a stumbling block. So sure are we of what we know that this knowledge becomes a bind and a stumbling block that has been self-imposed. Better than knowing, then, is an empty openness to all things. Here the ethic is that if you change how you see you will be able to see how you change. Knowledge, on the contrary, is not about change at all. It is about setting in stone. But in a world of change can that ever lead to peace… or only to ever increasing dissonance? So this key is to see knowledge more as experience than collected facts and to see this insight itself as a piece of wisdom. What you possess, you lose.


Note

These thirteen keys should not be read separately as if they were distinct items. Instead they should be read interactively and in relationship with one another, holistically. Then one can, hopefully, see the consequences of one for another. It is the thirteen keys together which unlock a new vision of life, the world and existence.

Partisanship, Collectivism and Individuality

This blog is to be about thoughts arising for me personally from the Avital Ronell affair. The what? you may be asking. Who is Avital Ronell? This, it turns out, is a point well made for those  of us (overwhelmingly most of us) who are not academics and who, much less, are denizens of that very niche location "comparative literature studies".  Ronell is a Professor of German and Comparative Literature at NYU (New York University) who was this year accused of a campaign of sexual harassment of a male postgraduate student under her supervision. This becomes stranger when we learn that Ronell, who is 66, identifies herself as queer whilst her accuser, Nimrod Reitman, thirty years her junior, identifies as gay.  Yet it is not my point here to trawl through the accusations in detail and those who want to do that will surely find several reports detailing this by searching accordingly. Instead, my point here is to raise fairly broad questions about our society that arise from this example for in its juxtaposition of the imagined "usual" roles in cases of sexual harassment a number of rather ugly things crawl from under the rocks.

One aspect of this case that immediately strikes me is that before the case was even made public (by leak from what is meant to be a confidential process) a number of colleagues and supporters of Ronell (from across US academia) had written to her university employers pleading her case. It has subsequently been revealed that they did not have the full facts of the case  at their disposal when they did so. These supporters included Judith Butler, one of the better known feminist academics in the world, who has since had to back pedal on the content of the letter in support of Ronell, not least because the content of the letter intimated that Ronell's status and the quality of her academic work should be held in her favour and also because the letter in part attempted to discredit the male complainant.  One can only imagine  how such arguments and tactics might have played with the co-signees of this letter had the accused been a heterosexual man and the complainant a female of any description. Arguing that status should speak for an accused and attempting to discredit accusers has been excoriated loud and long by many commentators (and rightly so) when the roles are reversed.

This raises the spectre of partisanship and jumping the gun where the individuals in such matters are identified as allies or enemies of the cause. Clearly, those writing to NYU in support of Ronell did so as those supporting someone they identified very much as an ally. Their belief was that an ally should be defended even as many of them no doubt believed her incapable of the acts she was accused of. Some, I'd have no problem believing, no doubt imagined it was all part of some greater conspiracy to bring down feminists like Ronell. But what strikes me is how many on the Ronell side of the fence are those who often write about power, or the operations of power, yet in this case seem totally blind to the fact that, in this situation, Avital Ronell was the one with the power and, according to others, she had been observed to abuse it before. Yet the point here for me is not what Ronell did or didn't do, grievous as that may be in its own right, but that those studying power and its effects become totally blind to their own studies when its an ally in the firing line.  Some, such as Queer Studies scholar, Lisa Duggan, would much rather we focus on "the structural issues". This seems to me like a smoke screen. It is not structures which make people do bad things. There is and always will be bad people responsible for bad things when they are done. Obsessing with structures does not, and should not, let the guilty off the hook. Indeed, if everyone acted appropriately the ideological and idealist structures would be shown up as the excuses they often are. Personal responsibility does not stop because "the system made me do it".

But there is a further unprobed assumption of the Ronell supporters here and its evident more widely in various other debates. This is that, somehow, being gay or queer or feminist is somehow special and that being one or any of these things somehow makes you immune to doing wrong. To be gay or queer or feminist somehow is imagined to make you one of the good guys, ineluctably on the side of right and constitutionally incapable of doing wrong. This belief is casually sown across social media by any number of sympathetic accounts such that the problem in society becomes maleness or heterosexuality or, more archetypally, male heterosexuality, the combo that should not dare to speak its name. At this point Harvey Weinstein might be thrust in our faces to hammer the hackneyed point home that heterosexual men + power = the subjection of all women and the corruption of a hoped for equal society. This attitude, where it raises its ugly head, is nothing other than a crock, a simple shitty belief. But it is instructive of one flavour of feminist agenda.

The problem, however, is that Feminism is not one thing and the word itself has become of doubtful use, in my opinion. For what does "feminism" actually mean? Often, its suggested it means equality but I would reject such a naive equation out of hand. Whilst some feminists, and some feminist agendas, approach and pursue the quite sensible and humanist desire for equality, often trying to avoid confrontation in the process, others are much more blatantly little other than anti-menist in which, according to their anti-menism they dub "Feminism", men are always the problem and removing power and influence from men is always the solution.  Thus, in cases of sexual assault or rape where women are the victim some such people say we should simply believe the woman's account regardless of evidence or any kind of thorough legal investigation.  Check out past Guardian columns of Jessica Valenti for lots of that.  Whether you think this is right or wrong it doesn't look much like equality and you can bet that Valenti doesn't think we should ever just believe men for whom a gender they did not choose has made them constitutionally unreliable in her eyes.

This itself belies an incipient and seemingly thorough-going collectivism in much discourse today as I pondered during my daily walk. Why is it that today no one is seen as an individual anymore, a person with their own story to tell and their own life to lead, a person who makes their own decisions and is their own set of beliefs, desires, hopes and fears? Instead, in much discourse today, academic or otherwise, everybody is designated as a set of labels and descriptors, they are ciphers for a category of human beings. I, for example, become not the name on my birth certificate which designates a person who has led an individual life but am, instead, a British white male heterosexual. And you better believe that there are some people out there who have lots of things to say about British white male heterosexuals and it doesn't matter whether or how much any of these things apply to me personally because if I am a British white male heterosexual then they are both true of me regardless and good enough to pass muster in some conversations. Does this dissection of society have any credibility at all? Because I wonder. What this becomes is lots of people in ideological bubbles talking about their thoroughly rhetorical and ideological creations AS IF THEY WERE FACT which are then applied to real world people as if the rhetoric just slides out of the conversations into reality without a join, a map that naively is the territory it rhetorically claimed to map.  Having watched several George Carlin shows online recently I have found myself becoming more persuaded of his position, which he came to in the 1990s, which is that individuals are fine. How you get on with a person you meet is real world stuff. But groups of people, collectivisims, that is a crock of shit. It is easy to see in much modern discourse, where all that is talked about is ideologically conjured groups that are as idealist as they are ideological, how this has proliferated to our mutual disbenefit if not destruction.

In fact, truth be told, I hate all the partisanship. I hate the social media rhetoric of team this and team that, I hate the idea that we are all allotted our groupings and then we are set free to battle against each other to the death, a real world game of thrones that never stops. Is this the best our greatest academic minds can conjure up? Is this what billions in currency buys us from our educational establishments? Must academics and others set themselves up in fiefdoms from which they direct cultural battle operations? This last item was also evident earlier in the year in the UK when a campaign was started by some female academics who felt disrespected for their imagined achievements and so began pointing out that they had a PhD. They changed their social media accounts to reflect their titles, Dr this and Dr that. What struck me about this was that there were some female academics opposed to this move and who wanted to challenge the notion of status, societal as well as academic, that this might insidiously also communicate.  I wonder if you feel that someone with a PhD has a status which demands some form of special acknowledged respect? For myself, I think being a human being is what demands respect. Titles and social denominations much less so for if we give the first the second becomes unnecessary.

I've gone on long enough for what is just a personal blog. Yes, of course I acknowledge that there is a world out there and that the struggles are often real.  There is pain, unfairness, inequality. I agree we should lessen pain where we can, decrease unfairness and increase equality. But I don't think you have to sign on Feminism's dotted line to do it. In fact, I don't equate Feminism and equality at all. Equality is a humanist value in my understanding and the ethical goal is to respect a human being for being a human being in all their particularity. I simply don't go along with all the sectarian collectivisms that we have conjured up. That is what leads to people writing letters of support for an ally before they even know the facts. It is what leads to Nationalism. It is what leads to the notion that we, but not they, should be "great again". Collectivisms make life about those like me and those not like me and that, in blunt language, is partisan bullshit. I, like Diogenes before me, am a citizen of the world. I am not to be reduced to a British white heterosexual male. I'm another person, a human being. We all are. So you can keep your categories and collectivisms. I'm not interested. I will continue to treat people as individuals with their own integrity and regard them accordingly.  I would suggest you do the same, for all our sakes. But in the end that's up to you.

Who Are You?

It is a fact of life that we don't see problems or issues with something until some event or insight allows us to see things from a different point of view, not the one we hold, not the one we regard as "normal". So it was that yesterday I found myself reading Albert Camus' short novel, The Stranger. The Stranger is an existentialist story about a character called Mersault. Mersault is in almost every respect an unspectacular and ordinary man living in French Algeria (much as Camus himself did). He has a mother (who has just died when the story begins), a job and lives in a room in a building that also allows him to mix with others and notice their habits. He is neither an idealist nor particularly active in any other sense. He is just a guy living his life, an everyman.

But Mersault is also the "stranger" of the book's title. He is this stranger because, from the existential point of view of the book, Mersault is a man who simply refuses to pretend. He is honest, so most others would say, to a fault. If someone is addressing him or talking to him and he has no thought or response he simply says nothing back, leaving an ugly silence. When thinking how to act in public he doesn't generally bother thinking how to act in public. He just unreflectively does what he wants - unlike pretty much everyone else who has been socialized into public expectations. At his mother's funeral he never cries and sits by the coffin drinking coffee and smoking. He leaves as soon as possible after giving the impression of little remorse and having imparted the fact that he doesn't even know her age. When he gets a girlfriend she asks him to marry her and he agrees but concedes to her that he'd marry any girl he liked in the same way. 

So Mersault is a man who absolutely refuses to pretend. It is not that he is doing it for effect but that he himself refuses the pretense that is living as a social being. He ignores expectations whether they be to do with funerals, business or personal relationships. He doesn't really care for social consequences in any sphere of life. He speaks and acts a bald, unfettered truth as if this should have no further, social implications. Mersault is a man literally out of phase with the world around him. He is in it but not of it. Its every day concerns and its ways make no impact on him except to irritate or bore him. He comes across as a lackadaisical individual whose own world is a completely different set of signs, symbols and significances. For this Camus calls him "the stranger" since, to everyone else who is "normal", he seems passing strange. Its also worth pointing out that in the course of the story all this comes to be used against Mersault so being strange is not without dire consequences.

It is, of course, Mersault's own strangeness that shines the light back on to the rest of society for in Mersault's character we see its opposite, the socialized character that society expects, in sharper relief. As Hannah Arendt saw it, writing about the book in 1946, "the stranger is an average man who simply refuses to submit to the serious-mindedness of society, he refuses to live as any of his allotted functions." And its this last point which starts to tweak my ever sensitive nipples in regards to the subject of personal identity, my subject for today. 

We all are assigned a number of functions by society. I'm male so that could be son, father, brother, co-worker, citizen, British, English speaker, etc., etc. There are a number that apply to each of us and maybe you can think of roles which would apply to you. But these are socialized roles and each one of them has expectations attached because in each of them we can think of stereotypical ways in which each of them should be acted out in various situations. Yet if we read The Stranger we find that Mersault is oblivious to people's views about him or expectations for him. Indeed, it seems as if he never even cares to consider the question. It is because of this that Arendt can go on to write in her review that "Because he does not pretend, he is a stranger whom no one understands... he refuses to play the game, he is isolated from his fellow men to the point of incomprehensibility." One insight that the story gives us is that in public or with others you really shouldn't say what you really think - for this will have social consequences. And so the existentialist novel is starting to weave its particular concerns into the fabric of story. Its asking "Must you be dishonest and inauthentic to be a person in society?" There can be no doubt that you must. But is this a good thing?

And so I find myself asking "Who am I?" And, to be honest, I wish that more people would ask it of themselves too. There is a great strand of philosophy extending right back to Socrates with his "The unexamined life is not worth living" that encourages if not demands that people know themselves better. ("Know thyself" is, itself, a ubiquitous Greek maxim that has been attributed to many.) The great Friedrich Nietzsche has a strand of his philosophy that is about "becom(ing) what you are" but you cannot do this unless you know what it is you are. Well, that's not quite correct. Its truer to say that you cannot become what you are unless you drop all the pretense and expectations that others exert upon you and begin to live authentically as yourself. To do this is not without its price though because you can be sure that others will not do the same. You will then appear, once more, as Mersault did to his fellow Algerians, strange, different, aloof, a bit of an oddball. But it is the testimony of Mersault that all you can do is be yourself. So why do so many play at being like others and fitting in? What is thereby gained?

And its with this that we come to the meat. The conclusion of The Stranger seems to pose a dilemma. Already in the book it has been hinted that choices in life, the path we take through its shadowy corridors, maybe doesn't make that much difference. I write notes as I read, things I need to remember or important points that I'm gleaning from the text. I had already written midway through the novel "Recurring theme: this option or that one, it makes no difference." With the ending of the novel I think this is made more explicit. The Stranger poses all readers a challenge. It asks them to consider life as going from Point A, your birth, to Point B, your death. These are the only fixed points. It then challenges you to answer the question: What does it really matter how you get from Point A to Point B? And, I think, it asks you to consider that question primarily from the position of Point B.

And we can make this quite extreme. Think of yourself as anything and taking ANY possible path from Point A to Point B. Living life as a criminal, a thief, a cheat, a murderer, a philanderer, a pimp, a confidence trickster. How about a terrorist or a pedophile? I am not saying these are good things to be or urging any choices here. I'm trying to be extreme in order to make Camus' question in The Stranger more pointed. People are many things in life and have many experiences. They make many choices. A number of them most would call immoral or even evil. Many religious people would hope and believe that their god punishes such things. Failing that, the State may punish people for certain life choices. Mersault himself is sentenced to death in The Stranger for shooting an Arab and its from his cell that the question is framed. The point is not the details of the life you lead. The point is what difference does it really make how you get from Point A to Point B?

It seems to me that, in this way, Camus offers the question "Everything you are, everything you do, leads up to nothing, Point B. So what matters the route?" Indeed, in the story Mersault starts to understand why his dead mother now seemingly took a close male friend near to her death. Mersault imagines that seeing the door to life closing and the door to oblivion opening, she felt a new freedom. Mersault, in his cell, says that "for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe". This, it seems to me, is death as the release, death as the escape from life. This is death as freedom and life as always a somewhat constricting prison.

And so my question to you, my readers, is this: Who are you? Who are you really? Are you a person who fits in, or someone who is going to be you regardless of those around you? And what difference do you think it makes how you get from Point A to Point B?





PS On this occasion I have need for a postscript. For when I read the story of Mersault I felt like I was reading an alternative biography of my own life. I am, myself, a stranger and much of Mersault's characterization could equally apply to me. I don't fit in socially and very often don't try. I'd be the worst employee in the world and am, no doubt, a terrible son and brother. I have been in the past a boyfriend and felt very much the way Mersault does towards his girlfriend in the story, Marie. Indeed, I recall telling my last girlfriend, when she stupidly asked, that the girlfriend before her was the most beautiful girlfriend I had ever had. This, of course, was not the answer she expected nor the answer that people would expect me to give. But I straightforwardly told her what I regarded as the truth. Shouldn't that be enough? No, for in a social world there are expectations and, reading this story, I feel the weight of them, and my own strangeness, all the more.

Show Someone You Love Them This Xmas: Give Them An Expensive Technological Device!

I want you to rank the following things in the order of importance that you would give them, the least important at the bottom and the most important at the top. Forget about practical considerations and judge them as things in themselves as far as you can.

Money
Food
Someone to love who also loves you
A friend
A 2 week vacation to any destination of your choice

I'm going to go out on a limb here and take a bet with myself that virtually no one put "money" at the top of the list. I say this because, judged in isolation, I think people, freed from their own ideologies and the ideological influences of society, become more intimate with each other and more minded to their own personal well-being. So I'm expecting (and hoping, to be honest) that you put "someone to love who also loves you" or maybe "a friend" at the top of your own personal list. But you were and are free to choose to order that list as you like and you must justify your order to yourself alone, if you can.

My title today, and the subject of this blog, are somewhat sarcastically approached. The subject, in broad terms, is money. More tightly conceived, it is to shake readers from normality in relation to economics. It is to shine a light into a few dark corners to show that the way the world works financially is not a given but a choice. When some get rich and some are poor somewhere down the line that was a choice and one that we, in some small measure, consented to. Immediately as I wrote this line the Boston Tea Party comes to mind. This was, famously, an incident concerned with American colonists not wanting to pay British taxes. And so they dumped all the taxed tea into Boston harbour. Essentially, it was a financial dispute. The aggrieved colonists felt that they no longer owed money to the British Government and so they refused to pay. Eventually this led to the American Revolution (which, it sometimes seems, some Americans are still fighting today).

I used to live in Germany and, for part of that time of my life, I lived in Berlin. Berlin is quite a fascinating city and often quite a liberated and liberating one. It is a hotbed of ideas, musical and often political. It seemed to me, as one coming from often apathetic England, that many more people in Berlin were engaged with society and everything was much more social in its arrangement. Politics there, to my mind, was much more about every day people and their thinking than it was about a few self-appointed people discussing or deciding things in a detached way. This is probably because in Berlin the people in general, the polis from which we get politics in the first place, might be asked in a referendum what should be done. It seems a form of democracy in which more people are involved and to my mind that can only be good. If democracy is going to be used then it should be as direct and as little beholden to power bases as possible.

But I digress. My point in mentioning the political background of Berlin is that one day whilst there, on a balmy summer's day, I was handed a leaflet in the street. It was from one of Germany's smaller political parties, the Pirate Party. (For reference, Berlin is covered in political and other kinds of statements. You see them all over lampposts and basically anywhere public you can stick something. Its like everywhere is a public noticeboard.) This party is somewhat counter-cultural, especially in relation to the two main parties of Germany who largely follow Western capitalist models of society. The leaflet was about a proposal that the Government should pay every adult of working age €10,000 per year (with no obligation at all on those receiving the money). With this €10,000, to be thought of as a subsistence grant, pretty much every adult should be able to feed and clothe themselves for a year. Of course, this amount wouldn't cover luxuries. You could not live the life of the rich and famous on this. But it would mean that people, in general, should find themselves able to feed and clothe themselves. The proposal was that if you thought you needed, or even if you just wanted, more money than this then, of course, you were still free to have a job or make money by some commercial enterprise such as having a business. With this you could drive your big car or pay for your expensive holiday or whatever else your heart desires.

Now put the details of how it might or could work to one side. I wonder if anyone reading this has an immediate ideological problem with people "being given money for nothing"? Because, as always with me, its not so much the "what" as the "why" that I care about. And so I wonder if I have any readers who struggle with or flat out disapprove of the idea that people should get money just for being alive to help them stay that way? It wouldn't really surprise me if I did because we live in a Western society deeply infected with individualism and the idea that you get what you have through the sweat of your brow. (In past blogs I have argued that this mentality was historically encouraged by rich people who needed poor people to work for them.) So the idea that Government, an evil concept in the mind of American colonialists and extreme individualists alike, might just take it upon itself to make sure that people don't starve by just giving them money seems somewhat completely unfair. After all, that's someone else's money the Government is giving away, right? Maybe you even think its yours.

Such a scenario is to cut right to the heart of the politics of money. Some people would put it at the top of the list I presented in opening this blog. Some people in our actual world have dollar signs in their eyes and their lives are dedicated to making as much money as possible. They see in dollars happiness, freedom and every pleasure of life. Most people in our society, either actively or passively, are capitalists. The guiding principle of capitalism is that a free, open market decides the price of things. But have you ever noticed how many capitalists, especially the successful ones, don't like the market to be either free or open? Have you noticed how companies try to become monopolies so that they can leverage the market in their favour? Have you noticed how sometimes cartels get formed so that prices can be rigged? Have you noticed how, in financial markets, bankers and others cheat the system to make vast sums of money - for themselves? Have you noticed how business gets together with politicians to set the rules of society in the favour of their bank accounts? I remember how a man now putting himself about as a philanthropist, Bill Gates, in the late 90s throttled and killed a plucky little web browser called Netscape (which later morphed into Firefox I believe) because he wanted his new Internet Explorer to be the way that everybody connected to the Internet. In Europe the EU eventually ruled Microsoft's practice of bundling IE with Windows illegal and Microsoft were thereafter forced to offer a choice of numerous browsers to users when they installed Windows for the first time.

That is a fairly trivial example of how powerful businessmen try, even when they already have a dominant position, to get even more power and even more money. There is, of course, an endless list of much worse ones. As I said above, my example Bill Gates today likes to present himself as a humanitarian and a philanthropist. He sprays around billions of dollars like it was so much confetti and I guess we are all meant to think what a great guy he is giving away his billions. These are caring capitalists, right? In the last few days Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame has stated he will do the same thing. He aims to give away 99% of his $45 billion fortune in Facebook shares.... leaving him, his wife and their new baby with a mere $450 million to live on. What a great guy, right? And, by the way, Mark thanks you for allowing him to set up a company which sells your lives and information to the highest bidder where they are doing god knows what with it. Mark is profoundly grateful we live in a society where this can be bought and sold. His no doubt fabulous house and large swimming pool are entirely down to the fact you uploaded your holiday snaps to Facebook and tagged all the people in them. You might say that Facebook is an enabler company to a capitalist society in general in that it collates people and their likes and dislikes so that commercial entities can profit from them. And, oh, isn't it fun?! (It needs to be fun so that dummies, I mean people, will take part.)

Needless to say, these billionaires do not impress me and I find it hard to understand what I, and people like me, have in common with a billionaire. I imagine that if I had $45 billion dollars or something closer to $79 billion like Gates then it would be the work of a moment to me as well to give billions away. After all, who needs even $5 million dollars in the whole of their life? I would guess that most people get by, somehow, on far less and barely earn a couple of millions in their entire working lives. So giving away your billions leaving the odd few hundred million for yourself is no big deal. Its no hardship. We should not imagine that these people are really giving anything up because, for them, it is trivial. Its like you casting loose change at a guy in a cardboard box on the street. If it was going to bite or really affect your pocket then you wouldn't be doing it and you can bet they wouldn't be either. So let's call it what it is: public relations budget. Those with extreme wealth have long been aware that those with much less or even nothing look longingly at them and quietly seethe. And so they see the value in good public relations. "I gave all this away" is a great line to reel off at a party of the well heeled in society or at a news conference for public consumption. Yes, I'm that cynical. More importantly, so are they.

For I say don't look at the figures and don't be bamboozled by the big numbers. That's what is there to blind your eyes. The amount of money is the wow factor that neatly takes your attention away from what matters. What matters is that the world isn't changed. People are still poor. People still die. People will still let the poor starve and the not very rich suffer with medical conditions because they can't pay for them. People still live under bridges, in boxes and sleep on park benches. The fact is that even if we had ten times as many Bill Gates's and Mark Zuckerbergs the world would still be the same. The solution is not pieces of paper with numbers on. A very rich capitalist or even 100 very rich capitalists are not going to turn the world into a paradise. What they are going to do is keep it a world where there are a few exorbitantly rich people and lots and lots of poorer people. The odd few billions here and there, whilst welcome, not least to those getting great PR from helping a few poor and sick people, is welcome if I'm not to be overly churlish. But you need to look past this to the bigger picture. 

And so you need to ask what role you play in the great capitalist dream (or is it a nightmare) that is our world. Many people this Xmas will get technological devices as presents made by Chinese people made to work 16 or 18 hours a day and housed in great warehouses so that they are right by where they work. Every year some commit suicide due to the working conditions. Are you happy with that? Or is it a case of "out of sight, out of mind"? How many of the every day, trivial but very real abuses that capitalist business practices inflict upon ordinary people are you aware of? Do you know how supermarkets work to drive down prices so that when you go to the store things appear very cheap? Are you aware of the environmental affects of having stuff jetted and transported around the globe so that you can have the thing you want that you have seen blanket advertised? My point is that we all play a part and we all have a responsibility. The ones who make the money and who suck on the capitalist teat need a great deal of regular Joes and Joannas from which to get rich and fat and so they need to tie most of us in to their capitalist dream. But let's be clear: not everyone is meant to benefit equally from the dream. Capitalism doesn't work if EVERYONE is a millionaire.

The world doesn't have to be this way. Sometimes, I think this is the most important thought in the world.

Music and Meaning

Today I am... empty. Worthless. Meaningless. Irrelevant. Invisible. I knew this would happen. Some weeks ago on this blog I even predicted it and spoke of "Fall" and how, for some, this season is literally that. But knowing something intellectually or as a fact is not to feel it or to experience it with emotion. I also said at that time that I expected my music to become... worse. And it has. Its not anything I'm doing. I'm not trying to be worse. Or to not be worse. Its like an internal collapse that renders me irritable. The pathways that once poured forth of their bounty have run dry and only a viscous poison now leaks out. Putridly. And so now to make music is to sow poison or to administer my own death by a thousand infected cuts.

I was on a walk one day this week, one of my semi-regular attempts to give my mind time, space and fresh air. Suddenly, it occurred to me, quite by itself, that all my music is as nothing. Rubbish, empty, meaningless waste. This was a shocking but somewhat unsurprising thought. It was unsurprising because, as you will know if you have read some of my previous blogs, I am not one of those people who sees meaning in the universe, at least not the kind which is fixed, inscribed in the heavens and stable. Temporary, contingent, here-today-gone-tomorrow meaning I will grant you. But what use is that? In that moment, none at all. I felt adrift, in the void.

My music, I came to realize as I continued on my walk, the thoughts racing and the connections being made with every step, had become a place where I located meaning. Everything I release has some kind of personal meaning and some kind of internal sense and reason for its existence in my mind. It is the only way I can make anything at all. If I listen back to something I can tell you what it means and, often, what I was feeling at the time and why. But so what? My own personal monologue in sounds is neither profound, worthy nor meaningful in the end, right?

This week I have also started reading a book by Jacques Attali. The book is called Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Within the book, Attali attempts to set music and its uses within a historical and political context, showing first where it came from (ritual murder) and in its various places throughout history from the ecstatic cult of Dionysus as something wild, inspirational and dangerous, through its use by Jongleurs to the privilege and patronage of courts and kings, the liturgy of churches, the means of asserting wealth and power and to the present day as a marketable commodity. My description there is not quite complete but, if you're interested in music, you should get hold of the book and read it in any case. 

I have to date only read the first chapter of the book but Attali uses this first chapter to set out his total thesis in any case and then uses the remaining chapters to flesh out the fuller details which give his final points the substance to go with their sharpness. Now the book itself is not without its difficulties and its vocabulary, one which you need to tune yourself into. The book was first published in 1985 and was written originally in French by a French academic of the economy. I am finding it to be a fertile land for my own thoughts to grow into - without necessarily having to swallow the whole of what Attali says. But he is certainly suggestive. Incidentally, I became aware of this book earlier in the year when there was a BBC report about music and its current crisis as something becoming increasingly worthless in monetary terms. Attali, in this very book, had, it was said, predicted this crisis in 1985, a crisis of proliferation. Basically, he had said we'd get to a point at which there would be so much music it would become a worthless commodity.

And, indeed, even in his first chapter, Attali is talking about music "as commodity". This quote stands out from the first chapter:

Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its meaning.

Now you need to know his full thesis to get all the sense of that quote for it is a miniature history of music in his argument. But the final phrase is the key one here. Music stockpiled until it is literally meaningless. And is that not the case today? Is there not so much music that it literally becomes as nothing? Maybe you will reply that there is lots of music that means a lot to you. I wouldn't dream of denying it. But the music you personally are aware of is but a drop in a very large ocean. And think of all the music that means literally nothing to you. If you think about it I think you will find yourself agreeing with me and with Attali. Music, says Attali elsewhere in chapter 1, "goes anonymous in the commodity". Get a social media account and become friends with lots of other musical people, as seems to happen quite a lot for reasons I'm not quite sure of, and you will soon find yourself thrust onto the horns of a dilemma as each one of them produces music you are invited to listen to. Some you will like, some you won't. Some you will hate. But the overall picture will be one of music constantly being churned out, factory-like on a continuous conveyor belt of production. It is neither an appealing nor an appetizing image. 

The "industry" metaphor is picked up on by Attali as well. Of course, many people hate the title "The Music Industry". It bespeaks of commerce and business and factories and production. But are these negative or positive connotations? Well when music is a reflection of the society that makes it and an instrument of power for those who publish it (both themes Attali takes up) it is something that cannot be ignored either way. Attali talks of music as "a play of mirrors in which every activity is reflected, defined, recorded, and distorted". For him listening to music "is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political." Of course, Attali wouldn't be the first person to think that all music is political. Music has been political at least since the first jesters and jongleurs wrote ballads mocking the powerful. Today we have the notion of the protest song. But music's political nature is much more insidious than that. What music you listen to, purchase or give your support to says something about your society and your place in it, about what sort of society you want there to be. Do you want it to be edgy, questioning, democratic or do you want it to be conservative, supportive of the status quo, stable, secure? Do you want music to be the tool of those who control it on a business model or a medium for vitality, revolution and freedom from authority?

Attali attacks this latter point when he speaks of sound generally. We have only been able to record sound at all for about 100 years. Before this point music as a commodity was a physical impossibility so the idea that it could be is equally new. But with this new technical ability comes the ability to eavesdrop, to record, to censor - and to use these things as weapons of power. But equally recorded sound and recorded music could also be used by these same powers to enforce their message (in sound) upon the people. The Nazis, for example, had a favourite type of music, folksy songs called Schlager which, incidentally, still exists as a style of music in Germany today. It was thought by the Nazis that this kind of music inculcated the ideas, values and beliefs that they wanted to propagate, wholesome, family music. After the Second World war, at the end of the 60s, it was this kind of music, as well as American rock and blues, that German musicians such as Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream wanted to get away from. Thus, they produced a new electronic music that sounded nothing like any of those kinds of music which, for them, spoke from and to another kind of people and a different set of ideas. But the thinking is clear: music contains a message. In its very sound and style it can act very clearly as a megaphone for a set of values, attitudes and beliefs.

So when you listen to your Saturday night TV show such as The X Factor do not think this is a meaningless act. By doing so you are taking part in a political game. You are giving legitimation to a form of music and to its message. Most obviously you are supporting commercialism as an idea and the idea that music is about "stardom". This is, as Attali notes, an agenda in which "Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector." But is that what music is - just one more thing to be packaged and sold, a device to make a few thousand people much richer than you? That's certainly what Simon Cowell would like you to think. By listening to such music and such shows you are literally rubber stamping the idea that Cowell deserves to be where he is socio-politically and you where you are in turn. Needless to say, I've never watched the show and never would. This is because I neither stand for nor want to promote the kind of society that this music promotes and evangelizes for. "Art bears the mark of its time" is another quote from Attali. We should have the insight to see what the music we listen to, the music our society promotes, says about us individually and as a group.

But there's one more point there before I wrap this blog up. And that is that there is only so much time in the world. To listen to one thing is not to listen to another. To accept the commercialized, packaged music that those at the top of the socio-political order want to spoon-feed you, the kind which is unthreatening, is to reject other kinds. If its true that music is political then its true that your choices are political too. You can support or not support society as it is right now in the music you listen to and promote, in the form of society you legitimate by your listening choices. Attali points out that political power has always had to ban subversive noise "because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy, support for differences or marginality". This is a musical as well as a political argument. What kind of music do you make? What kind do you listen to? It is a very straight three minute pop song? Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, repeat to fade? Does it have words? Is it unchallenging? Primarily about melody? Maybe its in a strange time signature, non-chromatic, abnormal? You will never hear the latter on TV or in film either. And whilst there is the odd radio station that plays non-standard music it is a minuscule proportion of the overall total and to a tiny audience. As Attali puts this "They are direct translations of the political importance of cultural repression and noise control."

And so, as Attali sees it, "What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power". And he is right. People want to be stars. They see music as a way to make money and take their proper place in the pantheon of capitalist commercialists, winners in a society of "richest is best". As such, music is but a reflection of the society it finds itself in where even the losers can only dream of being richer. For that is how you win. Am I the only one who sees this as a trap and a great big empty void?

In the last few months I've been searching Bandcamp for modular synth music. Now, besides the gripe that a number of people seem to list their music on Bandcamp as "modular synth" when it is anything but (false tagging is a bugbear of mine), I have noticed that maybe 80% of the people who do have modular synth music on Bandcamp have charged money for their albums. One direct repercussion of this choice of theirs is that I will never hear it. I can't buy things online since I don't have a bank account and so I don't even bother to listen. But I do wonder why so many people, none of whom I, or the world as far as I'm aware, have ever heard of, feel the need to charge money for their music. And its here that we see the insidiousness of the politics. All of these people live in a commercial world. They have been taught, with their mother's milk, that work comes at a price. It would be betraying their modern, commercialist society to "give stuff away". Perhaps it also makes them "feel like a pro" to charge money too? I think so. Isn't that just self-deceptive ego?

Now don't get me wrong here. I fully agree that anyone can charge anything they like for their music. One album I saw was $999. I wonder how many takers they had? All I'm saying, in line with some thoughts that Attali helped foster in my mind, is that giving your music a price is a political act. It endorses and encourages a capitalist society and all the necessary thinking that goes with that. "A worker is worth their pay", right? Maybe. But first of all you have to take the step of thinking that work is something you should be doing and that music is work at all. These are two steps that I don't accept at all but they are steps that a capitalist, commercialist society would love to encourage, not least those who think that music is a product you sell, a most modern thought.

Given all this context maybe its not so surprising that I felt empty, worthless, meaningless, irrelevant, invisible, after all. For I make music that is free and in a way that I hope no one would ever mistake it as a "product" that you pay for. My music is not just an expression of my own personality but also of a different politics and a different set of values from those of the society I find myself in. It encourages its listeners to think differently and not merely be dragged along with the stream of history, a stream always directed by others for their benefit. It asks its listeners to think for themselves and act in their interests.

But maybe its just easier and more convenient to listen to The X Factor. But what of the question I asked back near the beginning of this blog? "My own personal monologue in sounds is neither profound, worthy or meaningful in the end, right?" Well, maybe it is. Maybe all those "personal monologues in sound" are. Maybe the strength of music is not its popularity, its sales figures or how rich its makers are. Maybe its in its diversity, difference and relationship with other musics and its makers. Maybe we here alone on this rock in space only have each other for company to make sense of the void. But what will you value? Commerce, which homogenizes due to market forces in support of "the way things are", or diversity and difference which brings the chance for an encounter and a chance to open your mind to new and other ways of being and understanding?

This is the final article written in support of my latest music, Industrial Sounds For The Working Class, which is available now at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com

Individual or Community?

I am working on a new project for about the next 2 months and that project is called INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS. It is an overtly political project with things political, cultural and social to say about our world and our species. It has been borne in on me this year more than ever that we humans are all human beings together on this planet. We are the same but we devise bureaucratic, cultural and social ways to divide us one from another. This, to me, seems like self-defeating craziness. Others will say that it is only the state of nature and will then go on to delineate some "nature red in tooth and claw" ideas about how all life progresses only by antagonism and by setting one being against another. But all of these ideas, whichever side of the notional divides we invent you find yourself on, are just ideas. And ideas are not compulsory. We can swap the ideas we have now for other ones. We can change the way we live now and live other ways. It would be a very foolish person who said there is only one way to live and this is it. 

Today, as part of a series of articles that will build up to the release of INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS, I want to showcase and somewhat discuss two ways of looking at people, human beings, our species. These I have called "individual" and "community" in an attempt to not use partisan language of any kind. For some the use of partisan terms will be a stumbling block to actually reading what I say, so locked up in various kinds of rhetoric will they be. Political partisanship is a great problem today as many people only ever hear the viewpoints they approve of and feel to be right. There is a general lack of willingness to see that every way of doing things is in some sense a compromise and that other ways are always possible. People get caught up in their own fantasies of personal identity and put this before the actual lives of people with disastrous results. I, however, hope that I am aware enough to recognize the fallibility of all human thinking and the need to have an appropriate humility in all things.

But there is a further point to be made here. Society, that thing which Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s said does not exist, does not operate with equal benefit to all. Structures of power do not favour everyone equally either. There will be winners and losers. And there will be ideology in operation. For some, their ideology will be that there should be winners and losers and this will have consequences for other people. The point I'm trying to make here is that in political, social and cultural contexts we are required to take a stand here and take a stance towards all the other people that are around us. This is what newspaper owners do when they brand unemployed people "scroungers". This is what politicians do when they describe refugees as a "swarm". This is what presidential candidates do when they say they want to build walls along their borders. They are making their personal position in regard to everyone else known.

The two attitudes I want to showcase today, then, are that way of looking at us which regards us as individuals all responsible for ourselves as men and women alone in the world and another way which regards us all as people, members of the same species with far more in common than will ever divide us. For avoidance of doubt and to make clear where I'm coming from I choose the second one. Of course, I do have to choose because in life we all have to choose. And we all do choose, if not in a ballot box then in the regular decisions of our daily lives and in our habitual practice. You cannot be politically neutral. If you refuse to share your beliefs then you act them out every day anyway in every choice that you make. To take part in society is to make choices that affect the lives of others. To go along with a system is to give it the support of your practice.

It was Ayn Rand who said "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask for another man to live for mine". Rand is a poster girl for a politically right of centre individualism which lauds the individual as the basic unit of life itself. You should rely only on yourself and to rely on others is an abdication of this responsibility. You are nothing more than a lazy burden if you need things from other people. This creed is quite powerful and thorough-going in today's world, not least in political circles. There is also a very common political rhetoric which really springs from this kind of original thought. This is the rhetoric which lambasts those without a job, immigrants, the poor, the sick and generally anyone who is, for reasons of their own making or not, economically unproductive. For this mentality if you cannot look after yourself then there is something wrong with you. You fall into a kind of sub-human category and need to reclaim your dignity by looking after yourself. 

Of course, this ideology has problems. Have you ever noticed how all these private individuals with their Ayn Rand beliefs who run companies are more than happy to take government money to help their business or subsidies to provide this and that service? They don't believe in society, especially when it is giving money to other people, but they will happily take any benefits that come their way and use facilities built with public money. But I thought life was all about looking after yourself and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps? Not so, it seems, if the money is being put into THEIR pockets! Of course, in business it was always this way. Business, as we now know, and especially in terms of manufacturing things, began when wealthy people needed the mass of common people to move into towns and cities and work in their factories. This social upheaval from about 1750 onwards changed the way of the world. From the beginning, workers were always exploited and had to fight for their rights. 

Now I don't mean to deny it is very true to say that those on each side of the divide see things their own way. In researching my project yesterday, for example, I came across the following meme:

The first thing I noted about this meme is that it uses a certain rhetoric. The bad guys here are "socialists" and the good guys are "capitalists". Those familiar with political argument will be well aware of these terms. This argument is reduced to a discussion about nice houses. I picked this meme out because I am familiar with pretty much the same point being restated in almost the opposite way. There was a famous football manager in England called Brain Clough (manager of my home town team, incidentally) who was also famously a socialist. He once stated that the difference between the two parties this meme addresses was that the capitalists wanted something nice to keep it for themselves and that the socialist was the one who believed that everyone should be able to have nice things equally. Remarkable how the two positions can be swapped around, isn't it? My own view here is that the meme writer has swallowed his own rhetoric a little bit too much. I've never met a "socialist" who thinks no one should be allowed to live in a nice house. (Clough himself had a very nice house.) But I have seen many who do actually live in nice houses and get criticized for doing so! Often this is by very rich individualists who have a confused understanding of what it is their opponents are meant to believe. But it  is also true that I don't know of many "capitalists" who think that everyone should have a nice, big house. Of course, they believe in this theoretically and they sell things like the so-called "American Dream" as a support of the idea that one day they might. But, as has been said, "Its called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Opposed to the individualist view is the community view. This is that view which looks at people all together as the same, members of a common species, having a common dignity and worthy of equal treatment. For people who hold this view a person's worth is not measured in Pounds Sterling, Dollars or Euros. It is measured in a simple human dignity it is believed we all have just by being here. Rather than imagining that any station in life is achieved by you and you alone, this mentality accepts that we are all in some sense related and stand or fall together. Such people would tend to believe that "An injury to one is an injury to all" which is a far cry from the ethics and philosophies of Ayn Rand. Such people might smile to themselves approvingly when hearing the French motto "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" - Liberty, equality, fraternity.

Of course, the main difference between the two views I'm talking about here would be, from my point of view, that the first takes a "devil take the hindmost" view of life whereas the second thinks that since we are all linked together as inhabitants of the same planet then, in some sense, our fates are linked too. Therefore, we should help our neighbour because, in doing so, we are helping ourselves. The individualist seems in some way scared that by helping others he somehow lessens his own position or disadvantages himself. The community person I describe does not. The individualist sits in his home oblivious to the world outside his front door, hoping that it will not invade his peace. The community person recognizes that for the world inside his house to be ok then the world outside it needs to be somewhat ok as well. The individualist thinks about his advantage, the community person everyone's advantage.

You can see where I am going with this and maybe extrapolate in different ways what this might mean. Where you stand changes the game and each position leads to consequences. I write this blog only to point up this basic difference in outlook. Of course, I'd be the first to admit that its much more complicated than this. No doubt people on many political sides are already calling me all names under the sun and thinking that I have misunderstood them. Well, I wasn't trying to understand them. I was putting forward my view. If you have Twitter you will be finding more of my views on this as I tweet under the hashtag #IndustrialSoundsForThe WorkingClass as part of my current creative project.

We live in a world of the extremely rich who live in gated mansions and the extremely poor who live in boxes or under bridges. This did not happen because it is nature's way or because some principle decreed it must be so. Neither is it the case that things must be this way. It is also true that fairness and equality are not principles that operate all by themselves. They only operate by the actions of human beings, human beings who can also choose to act neither fairly or equally. Similarly, what we value - money, principles, wealth, power or people - are also our choices. And choices always have consequences - and never just for us. The last word here goes to Dr Martin Luther King who criticizes individualist thinking:

The project INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS will be published in January 2016. Further blogs will follow this one in the lead up to its release.