EIGHTEEN. September 19th 2022
So runs the final line of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” Pete Townshend’s classic rock rant about the hazards of expecting meaningful systemic change in the way we are governed even when change at the top has been brought about through civil unrest and rebellion. His words have stood the test of time not only because they bring to a resounding climax a cracking tune and lyric, but because they contain an obvious truth, proven time and time again through the history of public events and private experience. We know they are true. And yet we act as if they aren’t. Either we’re very slow learners or we’re determined to delude ourselves. Ignorance and stupidity, anyway, are the words that spring to mind
If we’d done anything, even a tiny thing like putting a pencil cross in a box, to bring this about, it might be reasonable to have some hope for change (although, as The Who’s song is keen to point out, even that would be naive – as the saying goes, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”). But why anybody would expect any profound or significantly progressive shift to result through the transfer of a symbolic title from a dead monarch to their heir is completely beyond me. Whatever differences in tone or nuance of opinion, they are pillars of an Establishment which has pursued, over centuries, policies based upon injustice, exploitation and oppression. Their high public profile and celebrity status has served to entrench and reinforce a habit of deference to assumed authority and compliance with the prevailing culture of innate privilege, corruption and inequality. That’s the whole point of them.
It should be quite breath-taking, then, to return to the country from a two-month absence free from newsfeeds, to find media and social media dominated by people basically pretending to be very sad and posing questions about ‘what will change’ as a result of this inevitable event, no aspect of which the people of the country have influenced in any way. It should be, but it isn’t. I’m long enough in the tooth to have experienced a number of these supposedly transformational events and their actual outcomes so as to know what to expect, how the process goes. 1. People are unhappy / dissatisfied / worried. 2. An event occurs which basically blows them away for a while – they find it very interesting or emotionally affecting, perhaps in a surprising way, or at the least it distracts them from their unhappiness / dissatisfaction / worries. 3. This event somehow serves, for a while, to re-connect them with ‘good’ feelings or maybe what can be described as a clearer ‘sense of self’. They suppose / imagine / hope that the event will be the catalyst for significant change in society so that they will become much less unhappy / dissatisfied / worried. 4. They wait for the desired changes, which don’t come. Crucially, they do nothing themselves to bring about these changes. They get a bit more unhappy / dissatisfied / worried. They hope for another event or person to change things for them. When it eventually comes the process starts all over again.
Various psychological and sociological theorists have written about this phenomenon, about how a sense of crisis (whether experienced as challenging or as inspiring) is an opportunity for change and growth; which opportunity can turn out to be wasted or can be taken to improve things or, most often, sadly, taken advantage of – I would say – to make things worse for most people (and better for a very few powerful people). When I was a therapist I thought and talked about this stuff a lot, particularly because an Italian bloke called Assagioli had developed a relevant model – which he called “Stages of Spiritual Awakening” – central to my training. These “stages” are basically the 4 stages I’ve described above.
The really important thing about Assagioli, and his (neglected) gift to psychology is that he emphasised – in fact, banged on and on about – the Will. I mention this now because, to me, it seems fundamentally and crucially important. Assagioli knew that people, ordinary individual people, had to do stuff if things were to change for the better. He knew that being ‘more aware’ or ‘enlightened’ or even having ‘better’ thoughts or feelings or values wouldn’t be enough. People had to make choices and Act. Everybody knows this really; whether the change you want is to break the habit of watching a never-ending newsfeed, or to give up heroin, or to get fitter, or to be nicer to your mum, or to have a better society, or to stop climate change BEFORE IT’S TOO FUCKING LATE. You have to Act. We have to Act. As some people in the 12-step movement are fond of saying, ‘If nothing changes, nothing changes’.
This is why, for me, these kinds of public events, experienced collectively as absolutely monumental because they are so amplified by a news media system which is way beyond public accountability or any concept of real public ‘service’, are so depressing and alarming. There are a few stand-out examples in relatively recent UK history which illustrate well how the 4 stages model gets acted out. The easiest to recall in this context is Princess Diana’s death in 1997. Those old enough will remember how this was presumed to be a collective moment of coming together, of the “nation” becoming more in touch with and honest about emotions; which, it was predicted, would make us happier and healthier. 25 years on, we have a growing mental health epidemic of truly frightening proportions and a government, mirrored by most of the media, in which false representation of motives and intentions has become routine. Fast forward to 2012 and the London Olympics, another supposedly transformational national experience the outcomes of which were confidently predicted to include a reduction in levels of obesity and an increase in our capacity for friendship and respect. As is standard with these events, the media talked incessantly about how it had ‘brought us all together’. Ha bloody ha.
The most recent example, of course, is the early stages of the covid pandemic; still recent enough for anyone, I reckon, to have in mind how it was presumed by very many people that the shocking temporary forced changes to our lifestyles in this period would have lasting beneficial effects. Communities would become stronger. The world would be equalised. We would value and reward the contributions which people make to society proportionately and fairly. We would be kinder to ourselves, to each other and to nature, for which we had learned a new respect. Much of this was encompassed in the socially-compulsory gesture of the Thursday night “clap for carers”; which, once again, was “bringing us all together.”. Enough said, I think.
Of course, there are plenty of other examples of this kind of thing in the history of our country and others, and we’ve all experienced individual versions of it too, in our private lives. And it’s not that these ‘big moments’ aren’t potentially transformative. The point is that they are only transformative if YOU do something, if YOU do some thoughtful work to clarify the qualities you believe you’ve identified in the experience and then to bring your new awareness into reality, to embody and enact it. I am personally repulsed by the idea of someone queueing for hours on end to see a box with a dead Queen in it. I really find it difficult to imagine myself into the inner world of someone who wants to do that. But honestly if someone says that because of and through this experience they personally expect and are determined to develop and express through their own lives some of the qualities which they think the Queen demonstrated, then I’d say “Good, fair enough”. If they say, and prove, that shuffling along in an endless line with a mass of fellow-feelers is going to make them more like whatever they think the Queen was like, then this would be a good thing, as we would presumably have a load more people who are patient, selfless, fair and honourable and who put their sense of duty to nation and society before their own personal needs and interests. There has perhaps never been a time when we needed more people like that. If it’s true that about a million people queued up and that even half of them are successful in developing an overriding sense of self-denial and public duty (and , by the by, a taste for large outdoor gatherings), then I guess we can confidently expect that there will soon be large enough numbers of people protesting on the streets to demand the radical changes needed for just governance and the preservation of a habitable planet.
Unfortunately, we know from our observation as well as from the banal remarks of most of these people that no such process is in place (this remark from one “mourner” being not untypical: “I have no sensation in my knees at all, or my legs, but it’s been fine, most of the people in the queue have been lovely and we’ve had quite a nice time”). This is really, in fact, more or less the opposite of activism. It’s the passive indulgence of feelings to make you feel better for a while – like getting into a warm bath, listening to your favourite record, smoking a joint, going on holiday. It’s an escape from reality. It’s not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with doing that, but we shouldn’t pretend that we’re doing anything more that that, like achieving enlightenment or making progress toward meaningful social change. To do so, as the theorists about this stuff point out, is to engage in what is called “spiritual flight” and actually to deter and stifle the possibility of real change. Things get worse rather than better. This is most especially so if you try to insist that others invest in your fantasy, that everyone buys into your surreally distorted version of reality. This is how you end up with endemic addictions, political parties run by dangerous fanatics, and cults in which people have become so essentially crazy that they are lining up to drink the Koolaid.
That, of course, is precisely what’s going on here. Far from being a progressive step towards a better society, it’s a deliberately regressive one, seized upon almost joyfully by a criminally, decadently corrupt government desperate to associate itself with spurious concepts of unity and renewal and by its equally criminal supporters / manipulators in the media. It’s a blanket over useful thought and true feelings, fully intended to reinforce the lies they tell you all the time: that we’re all in it together, that the rich and powerful are somehow looking after everybody else and not just themselves, and that everything’s going to be alright.
Whether we allow this to be another nail in the coffin of social awareness and justice or experience it as a pin-prick, a stimulus to wake us up to the urgent necessity of action is, I think, up to us, to you and me. It’s been painful for people in our movement to have to repress, yet again, the urge to get out on the street because the time is not right. I think the judgement to wait, to postpone, was the right call. Similarly I think the many months of concentration on movement-building, trying to gather strength and numbers, was also the right call. But we can’t wait forever. We can’t endlessly postpone our active campaigns while one minor crisis after another (they are all minor next to the climate crisis) preoccupies us, demanding our collective attention and resources ‘for the time being’. Sooner or later we have to start wondering whether the series of crises (the gaps between them inevitably shorter and shorter) are actually serving the purpose of distracting us from the terrifying thing to which we really need to be paying attention.
The clock is ticking and things are getting worse. It might be asked what, who are we waiting for. The answer is You.
A Reluctant Activist 