Who do you think you are?
image: projectarchive.net
Normal is a state of mind. Whatever environment you grew up in was normal. This is why a full man can’t understand a hungry man, the rich can’t understand the poor. Not accurately. They can appreciate and sympathise at an intellectual level but true empathy requires for a person to have walked that walk themselves.
It is why rigid social structures prevail despite not promoting the best for everyone. It is, crucially, why we live in a world of such unequal opportunity. The imperative to change is not there in those who have power and those who do not have power have limited means by which to demonstrate their frustrations. Within each of us there is a desire to assert our own wants that manipulates us like a puppeteer does a marionette; what is necessary to bring about optimum circumstance is education.
A person with a strong desire but a weak education can easily become tyrannical over themselves and others. Without a sound education there is always the possibility of becoming the creature of whim or fancy. A sound education, in this context, is a well rounded interface between the individual and the world, an awareness of their situation.
This is why I assert that development is not a matter of where you are in isolation, but critically it is mitigated by where you have come from. Not in geographical terms although that is a factor too, but in the terms of the nature of the journey you have travelled between two points. Regarding biographical stuff, consider the following.
My father was a violent criminal. A gangster who used firearms in the 60s, a time when gun related crime in the UK was a very uncommon phenomena. As a child I did not understand that not every-one’s father lived this way and I saw a world that for me was normal. The criminal underworld is a place of outlaws, a world within a world that has its own warped values, dispenses its own retributions for perceived slights and is a very unstable place indeed. It is composed of people on the make, on the run, looking over their shoulder, mistrustful of everyone and ruthless opportunists whose only loyalty is to themselves.
Not a nice place to be. My father spent very little time out of prison in my formative years and the time that he was out was always volatile involving the police, bail conditions, lawyers and a segment of society you would not choose to mix with . There is much written about criminality and criminal psychology and I do not intend to chip into that pool of knowledge. Suffice it to say that it creates a, retrospectively, strange perception of what life is about and how to be.
My earliest memories of my father were visits to various maximum security facilities around the country. These were surreal places usually located in the back of beyond that necessitated some huge effort to get to, we didn’t have cars when my father wasn’t around. When he was they were Jags, Bentleys and Rolls Royces but when we really needed good transport it was buses and trains and taxis.
It was strange to be searched, taken through seemingly endless locked doors and into various ante-chambers before actually meeting up with your dad. Sometimes it was through armoured glass and speaking through a handset and then other times, usually when a sentence had been passed, it was in communal visiting rooms surrounded by prison officers.
Prison officers reacted differently to visitors, particularly children. Some were pleasant and seemed to understand the stressfulness of the situation and the uncomfortability of it. Others seemed to take an almost sadistic pleasure in demonstrating to either the prisoner or their family who was the boss and who was in charge. Perhaps as though they were demonstrating to you that they had your genetics sussed matey, and were ready for you. As a child it was impossible to understand when it came time to leave why your father couldn’t come too, if only just for a little time. This was raw, and the emotional roller coaster of being in a maximum security prison visiting room was always extreme because of the rapid peaks and troughs experienced.
Strangely enough certain protocols exist between parents and children irrespective of circumstance. In a more traditional setting a parent might point out interesting features along the way. “That’s where such and such happened” or “That was where the xyz treaty was signed”, which then opens a dialogue and informs the child. In this setting it was pointing out notorious criminals or terrorists who had been on the national news. Murderers, rapists or IRA terrorists were pointed out just as famous buildings or landmarks might be.
In that peculiar world of bespoke moralities the terrorists resented being kept with the common criminals. Their crimes were, they reasoned, politically motivated and consequently set them part from crimes motivated by greed or psychopathic behaviour. I always found it odd imagining the conversation with someone’s parents whose child had been blown to pieces while they were out for an evening’s entertainment as opposed to the parents of a child whose misfortune had been to encounter some psychopath acting out their tendencies. The terrorists actually believed, at the time, that they occupied some moral high ground that vindicated their atrocities. Either way it was a disconcerting event to be in a room filled with these notorious murderers, rapists and criminally deranged individuals. Even more disconcerting was the eventual realisation that your father was ‘one of the lads’.
There are lots of individual episodes that I could recount, some of which are very harrowing, that created an extreme framework in which to grow up. All of which were treated by me as normal. I realised soon enough that visiting maximum security jails was not what my friends did and so I contrived the tale of an international businessman often out of the country and also a military man posted overseas. We moved regularly and I could count the number of schools in double figures before I entered a more stable environment.
I don’t wish to glamorize that world, it was and is a cess pit, the odds of coming out of it relatively unscathed are very long and the values and psychologies it fosters are not useful. To give it a context, when my paternal grandmother died my father was in prison. It is usual in such circumstances to allow a prisoner to attend the funeral of a parent on compassionate grounds. At the time the then Home Secretary intervened to block such a course of action on the basis that my father was such a danger to public safety that the risk of transporting him could not be justified. To me he was just my dad.
Why do I say these things? It’s simple really, a developmental journey is not a matter of where you are. It is a sequence of events that amount to a cohesive pattern. Crucially it is about where you have come from, success, happiness are all relative states. The journey you have taken is what defines your character, the experiences you have lived through delineate the trajectory of your life and add texture to the individual you are in the process of becoming.
This for me is a partial response, it is in many ways cathartic, to the enquiry why or how to you assess yourself as being able to comment upon happiness which, when all is said and done, is an allied state that travels among a conglomerate of positive and meaningful states that broadly define what I would call the Good Life.