image: kaj bjurman

Knowing that I am a fool keeps the door open to me. Wisdom is the certain knowledge that that there are no certainties; we live within a framework of guarantees that are extended to us by a benign Universe. We however are as children lost in a great forest who occasionally catch glimpses of the sky through the canopy of leaves and branches as they are moved by the actions of a breeze or wind.

I thank the powers that be that I am not subject to the whims of men, a meddlesome and petty tribe whose sole occupation seems to be confounding the smooth running of the natural worlds by whose grace we all exist.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the Great Mother and Father of us all yet we contrive to repay our debt in the most churlish and ignoble manner. We bicker among ourselves and the nation state has come into existence as the acme of interference with the integrity of the individual.  

The option of becoming a hermit is no longer with us as we crawl about the face of our planetary host like a plague, diminishing our possibility by engaging with mediocrity and fetishising the mundane. So we have to engage with this overpopulated, overstuffed, self-important, smug world.

All power to the spirit of benign exploration and promoting that which is best in human life. An optimist is one who sees 0.0000001% of a possibility and says “That’ll do, I’ll take it.”

 image: antonio martinez

In his dystopian polemic Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell described the nightmare of totalitarian society.

In the UK in 2008 we currently have almost eight million CCTV cameras monitoring our every move, from which lane we drive in to which street we walk down and everything that we do there. The argument for such a network has always been the same, if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to be worried about. Most UK citizens now are used to being monitored when they drive, filmed when they make a purchase and recorded as they open a door. Indeed it is estimated that if you are in an urban centre you could be filmed by an average of two hundred cameras in a day.

Who is watching all these feeds? Who is monitoring the screens and for what purpose? Petty villains have realised that all they have to do is wear a hat or pull their ‘hoody’ up and they are anonymous. Nothing has ever been prevented because of CCTV, occasionally it allows us to witness the antecedents of a particular incident but it is often inconclusive and in the case of some atrocity committed by a determined individual it is utterly irrelevant.

So we have given birth to the surveillance society, watchers and watched. In ancient mythology there is reference to the Nephilim or the Watchers, but these beings, magi, angels, call them whatever, are usually characterised by their illumination and benign disposition toward the human race. 

We find ourselves being studied by people far less benign and dramatically less illumined. It creates a precedent and means that the concept of the private citizen or the private individual is eroding rapidly. We are allowing our fears to drive disproportionately the kind of societies we live in. Orwell spoke about thought-crime as the ultimate invasion of the integrity of the private individual, thinking the ‘wrong’ thoughts, thoughts that contradict the party line.

 Any of the world’s thinkers will tell you that privacy is implicit to your well being, personal integrity is a paramount consideration. You were born alone, you will die alone. Reality TV shows and the exponential growth of the cult of celluloid exposure have made public spectacles of us all to the point where we take it for granted at a subliminal level that we are going to be filmed and watched.

It’s a slippery slope, the thin end of a wedge that will be justified with words like security and terror. There is a nasty habit of behavioural norms and laws to protect society from itself being implemented in haste and then staying on the statute books. When we have all forgotten what we were supposed to be filming each other for we will be left with  a legacy of billions of CCTV cameras all over the world, all assuming that there will be some need to gather their evidence for consideration by a jury or worse. I’m reminded of Gil Scott Heron who told us that the revolution would not be televised; it seems that everything will be televised after all, including you scratching your backside.

Fundamental to our evolution as a species is the need to trust and communicate with each other. CCTV is just one example, there are others, of the gradual disintegration of those basic personal liberties.

Happiness? I suppose I feel an obligation to turn it to happiness in some way but it’s a no brainer really; I don’t understand how anyone could feel comfortable knowing that their personal integrity was being compromised for an as yet unproven utilitarian objective.

That’s my opinion, but remember, opinions are like a***holes, everybody’s got one.

 image: gothphil

There are times of relative quiet and times of relative busyness in world affairs. At the moment the world is behaving like a child with a behavioural disorder. Ominous clouds appear to be rolling across the horizon from all directions, the structure and shape of our world seems to be under pressure from every conceivable angle.

Lessons learned along the way are crucial here. Perspective and context are everything or the alternative is to be the plaything of opinion formers whose objective is to sell copy, win your subscription or whatever it might be. It’s an old cliche now, but I have learned that things only become cliches because they resonate somewhere within us all, they encapsulate a temporary truth almost in a crystalline form. The cliche? Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper - if you’re younger or not from the UK, this refers to the time when fish and chips were wrapped in newspaper by the proprietors of the shops that sold these delicacies.

The lesson that grounds me always is to stay located in what’s real. Take a walk in the great church: nature. Immerse yourself in the natural worlds and you will see that despite the social Armageddon the Universe still works its magic. The leaves have just started to fall in significant amounts in this part of the world, the colours are resplendent, reds and golds, the Milky Way is awesome on a clear and chilly night such as we are enjoying here at the moment.

Be humble in the face of it, remember the old adage, people make plans and God laughs. There is no certainty in the world of men and women that is worth basing your life upon yet the natural worlds drip with absolutes and a sense of being-ness.

There’s always been a misplaced desire to master nature on the part of certain character types, show it who’s boss, conquer the wilderness and so on. This gathers momentum when we are going through a cycle of fullness such as we have just experienced and it is easy to forget just what the deal is here. This becomes a kind of collective narcissism, and we start to be seduced by our own feelings of superiority, believe our own hype. Don’t lose sight of it, we are guests here, we are visitors, we didn’t come here to challenge the natural worlds for supremacy.

Everything we need to live a fulfilled and meaningful life, the platform for something more substantial to build upon is here, provided for us by the natural worlds. Responsible stewardship is the way, not total domination.

 image: ca11merick

The seminal album by the Doors was called Strange Days. The band took their name from Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, essential reading for the postwar generation who were left decidedly underwhelmed by the path that the world had trodden the previous few decades. They set out intending to ‘change’ things and we are too close to know just how history will view their attempts to reconfigure the world.

Strange days was something I thought this morning. My daughter has just completed her MA in Philosophy and Theology and is heading off for a conference in India in a few weeks. So she is getting her vaccinations and the process has left her, understandably, feeling a little bashed around. She asked me if I could take her into work this morning because she was on an early shift, 6.30 am.

It’s a beautiful morning here in England today, windy so the day broke with dramatic splashes of colour and dark clouds blowing across the sky. Driving into the city we spoke about Rabies, she’s having her Rabies vaccination today, the size of the Indian population and how it’s the world capital of Rabies at the moment. We discussed those diseases that have been virtually eliminated from the world, certainly the western world and healthcare in general.

Yesterday I was an advocate for someone in a protracted grievance with a healthcare trust. This involved sitting down around a table and hammering some knotty issues out with the chairman of the trust and some of his top ranking officers. The issues were resolved and I was caught by the building adjoining the one we met in - where we went for a post meeting debrief - which is a brand new state of the art cancer treatment facility. Hugely impressive, atrium, expansive architecture and built for purpose. 

I dropped off my daughter, posted some mail from the night before and got a latte from Starbucks for the drive home. We have great radio here, I listened to Radio 4 which is a talk radio station and the discussion was about the financial crisis we are experiencing. Tokyo’s stock exchange has lost 25% of its value this week, Indonesia has suspended its stock market until things stabilise and there is shock that an essentially western crisis has affected the east so dramatically. Our world, or the one I live in, has become so incredibly sophisticated and complex.

One of the commentators in his voxpop said that traders in Japan have abandoned fundamentals and structures and are basically stampeding for the exits. Curious. Because it is at times like these, when reason heads out the door that strange things can and do happen. Fear is the great debilitator.

So I listened, drove, and sipped my latte as I went against the flow of the traffic and was reminded of the Doors album, Strange Days. Strange indeed, Horatio. Watch this space. 

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In 1841 Charles Mackay published Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Though its style may seem archaic to the modern reader, its content is utterly relevant, particularly in light of current events.

You may think what is happening at the moment is a new departure, yet such folly has been the stablemate of human culture and societies since the beginning. In recent times there is the Y2K fiasco, remember planes dropping out of the sky, nuclear power stations going into meltdown, the world’s computer network resetting itself to ‘0000′ and so on? The dot.com bubble, and the Ponzi or pyramid schemes that took Albania and parts of south eastern Europe to financial and political meltdown. Do the research and the list of gullible, duped and confidence tricked individuals is pretty extensive.

Why do I mention these things in this context? It’s very simple really, true development is something that occurs outside the corral of what is happening n the world at any given time. While world events may flavour your experience of the culture you are in, they must never drive your personal assembly or come to dominate what you think about or how you think. That is, of its nature a huge study in itself. Happiness, as I mentioned earlier, is not a matter of finance or acquisition of material possessions, yet somehow it has metamorphosed into contemporary shorthand for just that.

Charles Mackay refers to the following schemes, manias, delusions and scams:

The Mississippi scheme — The south-sea bubble — The tulipomania — The alchymists — Modern prophecies — Fortune-telling — The magnetisers — Influence of politics and religion on the hair and beard — The crusades — The witch mania — The slow poisoners — Haunted houses — Popular follies of great cities — Popular admiration of great thieves — Duels and ordeals — Relics

Each of which demonstrates the susceptibility that we all experience to a greater or lesser degree to a good yarn, a charismatic individual or plain and simple greed - by which I mean the perceiving of an opportunity to gain a greater return than is necessarily reasonable for whatever investment of whatever commodity one is prepared to make.

Some fifteen years ago I heard of an individual whom I knew by acquaintance with a somewhat chequered past making a living by ‘arranging’ mortgages for people who would otherwise have not been considered suitable candidates following the usual routes. These were things done on the QT, a nod’s as good as a wink, and no questions asked.

It transpires that around the developed world there was a growing network of Mr Fix-its undermining the financial stability of blue chip institutions and the, so called, Dogs of the Dow. Many of those institutions whose pedigree was considered beyond question are now wrecked upon the rocky coastline of the new topography that was being created by the Mr Fix-its and bag men.

If you’re adversely affected by all this, then commiserations. Remember you can’t take any of it with you and true happiness is not within the gift of the world’s economy. Houses built on shifting sands will always collapse, Ponzi and those of his parasitic inclination will always prevail for a short time while there is a gullible and uneducated constituency upon which they can prey and then others will have to rebuild the havoc they have wrought.

 image: e-chan

I attended a seminar today on the prevalence of ADHD in young people. Among other things that I do in a professional capacity, I have helped and supported kids like this for some years now. It’s extraordinary to discuss with other people those things that become acquired skills and how, as we evolve as individuals, those skills become a part of the portrait that our lives represent.

In many respects a responsible adult surrogates their sensibilities into the world of an individual who may be experiencing a chaotic reality. Their own cognitive process and ability to rationalise what their sensory apparatus is telling them is compromised by a range of factors. These range from the genetic to the stalled or simply dormant.

For us all the process of personal development has its mechanics rooted in the programming of our neural pathways. Put simply, the more we energize a particular route the more established within our repertoire as individuals it becomes. Given poor guidance, the absence of positive mentors or a compromised education we grow in an incomplete way. The pathways that become charged are those that are often the least beneficial to the person who has become their host. In pop culture this is known as the development of bad attitude. A fragmented development occurs, some things become accentuated and some things neglected which gives rise to a disjointed process characterised by the manifestation of inappropriate behaviour and poor decision making in our lives.

The art or the skill is in developing a sophisticated inner compass that negotiates the highways and byways along which we travel. There will always be opportunity for conflict and drama, but likewise there will be the opportunity for seamless passage from one chapter to the next in the unfolding of our lives. These things are seen in the skills present within the diplomat, the negotiator, the orator and the leader who seems to have the ability to make complicated processes appear simple and glaringly obvious.

In our own lives we must strive toward the assimilation of such skills, we must learn to be accomplished in the business of living so that our lives give the impression of being very simple, harmonious and gliding through the turbulent waters of the ocean of humanity like a sleek craft. When that impression is conveyed successfully the natural magic of life is such that the act will have become real, we will have powered those neural pathways, those synapses in such a way that a crystaline structure forms in our own mind and our own behavioural patterns.

For those who share a love of the esoteric, your reference here is the mummer’s art, the craft of Shakespeare and the ability to sublimate oneself to the already proven and demonstrated. In the movie Patton, the general surveys the scene of an ancient battlefield where the Carthaginians were defeated by the Romans and suggests that he was there, two thousand years before, this before he defeated Erwin Rommel, the finest military strategist in the German army. His allusion being that great warriors were in some way immortal, destined to reincarnate and fight military campaigns throughout time.

I do not know. However, the inference here is that the record of greatness exists and may be somehow accessed by any of us. That is a powerful notion, a singularly immense concept suggesting that we are all, in some way, washed by the same stream of life and that by proxy we are interconnected in a way that transcends the spatio-temporal concepts of here and now.

What we each have in our grasp is such a magnificent opportunity, I can do no more than salute those of you who pioneer the human story in your own way, whatever that may be. Strength, resilience and fortitude.

On Monday, happiness fell below 40% for the first time

WASHINGTON D.C. — The percentage of Americans experiencing a lot of happiness/enjoyment without a lot of stress/worry hit a new low for the year on Monday at 39%. The depressed mood coincides with the beginning of the turmoil on Wall Street and in the financial markets that began to unfold in the major news media on Sunday and Monday.

The index, which asks Americans 18 and older to reflect on the level of happiness and stress they experienced the day before the survey, has shown consistent upswings in mood on weekends and holidays for most Americans. Reflecting on the typical Saturday or Sunday, 58% of Americans report a lot of happiness and enjoyment without a lot of stress or worry. This drops to 46% on a typical Monday. This past weekend, Saturday was like most Saturdays (58%), but Sunday was uncharacteristic (53%), in line with the news of imminent troubles of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch. Still, the drop from Sunday to Monday was more than typical at 14 percentage points, and the drop in mood from Saturday to Monday was a full 19 points (compared to a typical 12-point drop in mood over the weekend to weekday transition).

The record low mood experienced Monday came with the news of Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch being sold to Bank of America, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average registering a record decline. The lowest previously registered measure of happiness was 41%, with two of the four occasions when the number dipped to 41% also coinciding with economic woes, specifically on March 18, when the Fed announced a rate cut in response to a weakening economic outlook and on June 9, when gas prices rose to record highs. — Raksha Arora and Jim Harter

Survey Methods

For the Gallup Poll Daily tracking survey, Gallup is interviewing no fewer than 1,000 U.S. adults nationwide each day during 2008.

The U.S. mood results are based on data from Jan. 2-Sept. 16, 2008, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones (for respondents with a landline telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

To provide feedback or suggestions about how to improve Gallup.com, please e-mail feedback@gallup.com.

image: jeepz

 image: stuck in customs

Following on from my earlier post, it must be remembered that the majority of discord in a society comes from a small but persistent group of the population.

Teaching happiness, which is only a loose form of language that covers a whole paradigm, is essential if our societies are to become more settled and positive places to live. The only alternative is to create ghettos within our major conurbations and de facto no-go areas where the law abiding and upstanding members of the community wouldn’t want to try to do business or build lives for themselves.

A process of aggregation occurs and the neglected and ostracised of society gather together in a form of perverse mutuality where they then perpetrate crimes and abuses upon one another. It’s a little like the attitude of turning a blind eye to criminals shooting each other, let’s face it, who’s bothered if there are a couple less gun toting hoods roaming the streets? But that isn’t the crux of the matter, that attitude rears its head only when the situation has already spiralled out of control, and serves no-one well. The art in creating a society fit to live in and worthy of its members is to put useful linings in place well before young people start to go astray.

Crimes against people and property are committed by criminals who don’t respect the integrity or lives of others. Why is that? How have they got to the point where they consider then own self serving ends to be of greater importance than the well-being of others? How has a misplaced sense of entitlement come to characterize those most likely to fall into the role of pariahs upon the body of society?

Answer these questions in a less than glib soundbite way and you will begin to access the necessity for ‘happiness lessons’ and the whole fundamental process of being a net contributor to society with a committed interest in seeing it flourish rather than seeing it as no more than an opportunistic free for all to be scammed, abused and made lesser.

We are witnessing remarkable increases in the number of violent and sexual crimes committed by young people, the drug related crimes are virtually off the scale in terms of their increase, check the Home Office statistics, and this is part of an integrated situation we find ourselves in. If we come out the other side of this then we will also need to consider the rehabilitation of people who have completely lost their way and become those unfortunate statistics. In the meantime, as we all know, prevention is far better than cure.

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There is indignation abroad in England at the moment. Someone, somewhere has dared to suggest that happiness can be taught. That children might be given ‘happiness lessons’ at school.

The indignation comes from the riposte that this is in some way cultish or sinister. Is it not the case that any organized program of learning can be easily dismissed as cultish? Fancy all those people being taught the same twenty six letters and not asked to think why twenty six but just blindly and slavishly adhering to an imperialist system that they are mercilessly brainwashed by, for example.

There are learned habits that frankly do no-one any good. Many of these are to do with redundant or irrelevant thinking. Simply to expose young people to a way of thinking that opens possibilities rather than closes them down is a step in the right direction.

Do I have any evidence for this assertion? Look at the current climate in western culture. There is a succession of generations who are propagating a negative attitude in such a way that it is becoming accepted as a standard a default position. The idea that nothing is worthwhile, self respect and the respecting of the integrity of others is becoming alien or seen even as a sign of weakness.

This is not to say all young people are like that but the emergence of an underclass in Britain, a soap addicted, obese strata of society whose contributions to that society are minimal is a real and tangible problem. The concept of a life worth living is something that needs to be taught.

In part of my professional life I work with EBD kids and their families. If the majority of society knew exactly what was going on in their midst and the kinds of attitudes that are grafted onto these young people there would be legitimate indignation. It’s seldom within the remit of this blog to talk turkey but this is something that needs to be said.

There is a major strata of our society that is riddled by substance abuse, has no clear focus or role models to base their lives upon and is frankly out of control. If attempting to teach happiness - and without viewing the curriculum I can only presume it addresses such things as self-esteem, valuing others and being a responsible and integrated part of a caring society - is a response to part of that problem then more power to its elbow.

 image: pensiero

There are those things that are caustic and those that are a balm to our lives. Consider your life as being like a ship that sails upon an ocean of possibilities. You are the navigator, the captain, the engineer and all other things. What kind of a craft would yours be if this were to become real?

Some things aid our progress, others hinder it. Extending the ship analogy, there are things that add momentum to our journey and there are becalming influences that position us in the doldrums.

I saw a headline this morning on a newspaper, ‘$3 Trillion to Save The World’. I didn’t read the article and my mind began to play with the headline; I’ve heard estimates that that was something around the figure it might take to shift the balance from a fossil based fuel dependency to a regenerating fuel based dependency. I’ve heard it said that the war in Iraq has cost that much so far and I know the world economy is worth somewhere between $50 and $60 trillion annually. $3 trillion is a big figure but relative to what?

What could it be for, I mused and then I began to think, who wants to save the world anyway? If save the world is a euphemism for preserve the status quo then it isn’t really worth saving, in its current form, unless you’re one of the estimated 9 million millionaires (0.15% of the world’s population) or 1125 billionaires for whom the whole system obviously works pretty well. But that is to fall foul of the trap that money is the solution to the world’s ills, and really it is not. I’m with Sophie Tucker on this, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me honey, rich is better.” Better doesn’t equate to problem solving, it just means that the wheels are lubricated more generously and therefore turn without so much fuss and noise.

In terms of a deeper significance to human life there is simply no place for money and yet we live in a world that quantifies everything in fiscal terms, from GDP to GND, from the hourly rate to the annual rate. It’s a system, but no more than a system, yet it has become a religion, the religion of our age. Within this I’m not knocking it, obviously there has to be a way to organise almost 7 billion people and somehow distribute that $50 - $60 trillion annual pot. Yet an estimated 3.25 billion people, virtually half the population of the world are pulling in less than $2.00 per day, so does that seem well managed?

So what exactly is someone wringing their hands about saving? An iniquitous system that condemns most of our human family to an impoverished existence? A crude system that proceeds like a herd of elephants across a well laid out garden?

It’s not about saving, it’s about changing. Face facts, the world as we know it is finished, it’s dead in the water, it can only be sustained in its present form for a few decades longer, assuming no unexpected occurrences. What then? What happens when the oil wells run dry, the coal has all been extracted, the axis about which our civilization spins ceases to exist? 

It’s a world of smoke and mirrors. How many times have you been made promises that haven’t been kept by companies, organisations, individuals, gurus? Except for the very upper echelons of this strange society that has come to pass, it is a place that breeds immense frustration, ill will, and fragmentation of various kinds. People are OK in it, but very few experience true fulfilment or satisfaction, and those who do derive it despite the world rather than because of it.

The world has given us remarkable technology but we don’t know what to do with it. Look at the generation of kids coming through who live their lives vicariously through some character in a virtual environment. They never leave their bedrooms and perceive social interaction as a burden rather than an opportunity to explore and develop themselves as individuals. Is it their world that we are trying to protect? Is it our children’s virtual fantasy that is under threat?

Or is it the artificially extended lives of people ready to go whose maintenance systems are pumped up with steroids, and whose misery puts money in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies who create drugs that can do things that maybe we don’t actually need.

This is not me being cynical, it is me trying to extract the reality of the human condition from the fragile world we have created and wondering when push comes to shove just what will survive a serious body blow to the world we have allowed to come into existence. I see a very artificial world struggling to keep itself afloat and I can’t help but wonder if it has run it’s mile and needs to step aside for a more efficient model that offers a greater return to those involved in it.

I’m also reminded that there is no birth without pain. The transition from where we are to where we may need to be will not be without turmoil and huge upheaval. That will come as sure as night follows day but the assumption that all things stay the same will serve its adherents poorly as they try to adapt to and understand the transition period.