Category: amateur psychology

Becoming a Woman: Revenge, Ethics, Law and The Wounded in a Hindi Film

13.10.16

Is it wrong to desire revenge? Some people suggest that it is. My own research into the Victorian period has shown that not only is the desire for revenge seen as irrational, being emotional, and unreasonable, but that it is also feminised. The desire for revenge is a transgressive desire which attacks the very foundations of Western rationality, the rationality and reasonableness of (white, middle-class) men. Perhaps the most famous example of this feminisation is Miss Haversham in Great Expectations which I read as a schoolboy, but it is also in other famous novels like Vanity Fair, where Miss Sharp favours revenge too.

It is with some surprise that I noted that revenge was also feminised in my favourite Hindi film, starring my favourite actor, Sunny Deol. The name of the film is Ghayal, which means, literally, “wounded”, although I believe the correct translation into English should be “The Wounded”, which would make a significant difference to the overall meaning of the film. Ghayal is not just a film, it is an entire philosophy, some of which I will try to make clear in this little piece. I return to the film when I begin to forget who I am and where I come from. The film is a revenge story. The villain kills the hero’s brother. He is framed for the murder and then an accusation that he killed his brother because he was having an affair with his sister-in-law leads her to suicide. The hero triumphs and has his revenge outside of the law. The film is divided into a number of sections, but the obvious structuring is to contrast everything that follows with a first happy period.

Female revenge is present even in the first happy period, which is full of comedy. One day, the heroine of the film travels to see the boxer hero at his training camp. Because he is scared that he might get sent home, he says to her that he doesn’t know her and tells her to go away. The hero is the only person in the world that the heroine loves and who loves her back. She has no family as her mother and father are dead. When the hero tells her to go away and pretends that he doesn’t recognise her, he is refuting his love for her and treating her as a non-person with no identity. He is excluding her and returning hate and apathy for her love. He hurts her badly, he wounds her absolute trust in him and herself, in other and self.

The heroine does go away. But then, the hero has to apologise. He finds her in a restaurant and tries to speak the words of love to her. But now, the heroine’s mind is concentrated on revenge. She tries to provoke the other customers in the restaurant by turning all of the hero’s words against him to insult them, saying that he has called people bald or fat, etc. She wants the hero to be beaten by the mob, she opportunistically manipulates them to give the hurt and the satisfaction that she will feel. The customers are equated with India – this is an explicit comparison that is made. But Mahabharat (Great India, or ancient India) is also invoked when the hero actually touches the heroine.

As soon as the woman is touched, she opportunistically uses the status of victim to further manipulate the mob. She pretends that she is a damsel in distress, she mimics completely passivity and helplessness. She calls out that the hero, who she pretends is a stranger, mirroring his refutation of her identity, has touched her and rhetorically questions the crowd: Is there no man among you (to protect me, to have the courage to protect me, to protect not only me but all women, the women that are your sisters and mothers)? Here is when the Mahabharat comes to the rescue in the form of Bhima. Bhima is perhaps most famous in the epic saga because of his relationship to women, law and revenge. Draupadi, the wife of five men, was dishonoured by Dushasana who vowed to keep her hair unkempt and unmanaged until they were washed with the blood of her oppressor. Bhima was one of her husbands and he vows not only to bring his wife the blood, but also to drink it. Their vows and laws are based on their revenge. The beginning of legality is based on revenge, the revenge of a woman.

The heroine only forgives the hero when he falls from an elephant in trying to win her over. It is only when the hero is hurt that the heroine is able to forgive him. He has now shared her hurt. He has felt what it has been like to have been in pain. He has hurt himself for her. This is love.

The main revenge story is also marked by its relationship to the law and feminisation. First of all, the hero is clearly “the wounded”. I was discussing wounds and their relationship to femininity with one of my supervisors – someone had questioned my tying together of the wound with femininity in a poem by Robert Browning at a postgraduate reading session – and she told me that the wound has indeed been historically been associated with women, which a number of commentators have noted. He has been hurt badly. The hurt is that his loved ones have been taken from him. But the hurt is not just the loss of his brother, who is murdered, but also his sister-in-law who is like his mother that commits suicide. She is murdered just as much as his brother because she is dishonoured and shamed by what the world has been led to believe about her and her brother-in-law. However, the main hurt has been from the law. The law rejects the hero’ hunt for his missing brother and then he is subjected to brutal torture when he is framed for his brother’s murder. It is in the courtroom that the accusation of the incestuous relationship with his sister-in-law is made that leads to her suicide and extinction, her non-identity. The entire legal system fails him. What he should have been able to trust does not help him, it takes away his love, what he loved most. It takes away that which gives him his identity – his family, the brother and sister-in-law that are like his father and his mother.

Thus, the hero’s quest for revenge is a quest for revenge against the law. It is explicitly stated that his campaign of revenge is a campaign against the law since it is a direct challenge to law and the rule of the law. Of course, this law is only there to protect the villain, the rich man who plays Western music on his piano. Yet every time the hero pulls the gun against the villain, he is impotent. The crisis of impotence reaches its head towards the end of the film. Yet, in the most beautiful scene of the film, when the hero’s campaign of revenge is about to fail and he is pounded by a group of policemen and the law which forms a tight circle around him, the heroine sees him as the victim. She remembers what it is like to be the victim. She knows its reality. She knows what it is to be the wounded. And it is woman and the wounded that help the wounded. They see the place of woman in the wounded. She gives him the loaded gun and he is no longer impotent. He shoots and he does not miss. He hands himself over to the police with a smile on his face and a child that he rescued from the villain, the child that was separated from his mother by the villain and snatched from her, separated from the one he loves the most, applauds. The crowd of the people applaud too. The hero walks beside the heroine who gave him back his potency, both towards the law.

On ethics and law. There is a structuring of five. Draupadi had five husbands. There are five in the family: the hero, his brother, his sister-in-law, the heroine and the evil uncle who is a lawyer, the one that makes the suggestion of the incestuous affair. The brother, before he dies, says that five fingers of the hand are not all the same. The hero has four associates in his desire for revenge (five in total), each of which fall, leaving only him. This is because in revenge, the only one concerned and interested and self-serving can carry out their revenge for themselves. The hero kills the evil uncle, the lawyer: the identity of lawyer, liar, must be eliminated. Law itself is a prostitute: it is said to sleep on the bed of those such as the villain, the rich man. It is not the sacred prostitute, it is the one that only serves the rich. Law is there to be hated. It destroys love and unity. It is the insertion of law and the lawyer into the family which leads to the dishonour of woman and her extinction. It is law that stops a woman becoming a woman and which threatens her integrity and existence.

There is a lot to learn from “The Wounded”. Hurt is only appeased by hurt. Because when the oppressor is hurt, it is then and only then that they learn what it means to be hurt. It is only then that they learn the disintegration of self and integrity. It is only then that they learn what it is to be a victim, to be woman. And all of the negative stereotypes associated with an angry and revengeful women are the very things that we need to be: touchy, sensitive. When we want to hurt the law, we have to attack the places that hurt most. We must take everything from the law and give nothing. We must be merciless and relentless. For it is only the execution of revenge that teaches empathy. It is there to eliminate the ego. The oppressor must be humiliated in a contest, in a duel. In the film, the hero kills the villain, but the real defeat of the villain is in knowing that the law which protected his vicious self cannot save him because he has hurt others. Either no-one must be hurt or all must hurt. This is the lesson of empathy. Hurt only desires further hurt. Hurt can only be satisfied by further hurt, by being placed in the exact same place and position that you place another through hurt. Revenge is the teaching of empathy and the production of emphatic persons, learning empathy with woman. This is what is law.

Waiting for Justice

03.06.2018 –

Christianity, Islam and Judaism share similar features as religions. In particular, they are all based on similar ideas of justice. In each religion, an all-powerful god occupies the position of a judge and there is a day of final judgement when good actions are rewarded and there is punishment for bad actions. The idea that the god of these religions is a judge is said to derive from the political and cultural context of the time when the bible was first written, where it was the prerogative of royalty to mete out judgement. Since god was likened to a king, it was natural that he should also be seen as a judge. The idea of a final day of judgement that comes in the afterlife is possibly derived from the ancient Egyptian beliefs where there is a similar concept.

Because their god is a judge, justice is therefore considered to be a foundation for Christianity, Islam and Judaism and notions of divine justice inform and influence ways of living for believers. But what is interesting in each religion is the fact that the believer has to wait an entire lifetime in order to receive their just desserts. Justice can only be achieved upon death in another time and space, not in the earthly realm and earthly time and space. It is apparent that waiting for justice is really what informs the believer’s actions and choices. Why is the wait for justice so important to these religions and their philosophies? Why is it necessary for their conceptualisation of justice?

From an atheist’s point of view, the requirement that justice can only be meted out by a god in the afterlife and one has to wait for it forever is a convenient mystification that disguises that fact that god doesn’t actually exist and can’t intervene in earthly affairs. However, let us consider the wait for justice in the believer’s own terms. How can each believer wait their entire existence for justice?

Science tells us that human beings are driven by reward-seeking behaviour. We do something because we get a reward out of it. The reason why we hunt for food is so that we can enjoy eating it. The reason why we have children is because we enjoy the process of making children and derive pleasure from it. The religions mentioned above, however, all defer the concept of reward. There is no immediate reward (or punishment) for action in this world. There is only a divine reward or punishment, not an earthly one. One reason why a believer has to wait for justice is therefore to destroy the reward-seeking motivations and behaviour of the individual. The believer is prevented from following human impulse and the instinctual drives of the body. They sacrifice such impulses and drives for a belief. Hence, the human body is being repressed in each religion in order to foster and support an imaginary belief. The human body is being sacrificed for a thought. One component of the wait for justice is therefore an illusion. My speculation is that this illusion is pleasure-inducing, since the reward system relies on pleasure (the pleasure of food or sex). The pleasure derived from this illusion that there is an absolute and final justice which transcends earthly considerations and the desires of the body occupies a prime place in the reward-seeking and reward-inducing components of the believer’s mind (I believe one can say that this would exist in the dopamine system in the brain).

What kind of a pleasure is induced by a wait? There are two things that one thinks of here, each with a sexual component. First of all, one thinks of frustration. Frustration can be enjoyed if one is a masochist. The pleasure in frustration relies on a simple idea, that the reality of a fantasy will not match the pleasure contained within the fantasy. If justice is considered important and foundational to each religion, it is because the fantasy of justice is considered to be more pleasure inducing than the reality of earthly justice. The second thing that one thinks about is foreplay. The prolonging of the beginning of the act can induce pleasure as a specific type of frustration and inform action. The wait for justice in each religion can therefore be conceptualised as a type of foreplay.

I think there is one further component of the wait for justice. Divine justice is seen as final, absolute and perfect and true in each religion. One can therefore wait for it patiently and hopefully. On the other hand, earthly justice is messy, limited, imperfect and frequently based on falsity and mistake. The ones that wait for justice can therefore be likened to a single person that keeps on waiting for the perfect mate to come along even though he or she knows that perfection does not exist. Such a person will not go on dates or consider any substitute or alternative.

The ideas of divine justice have been interpreted in radically different ways by different groups in each religion. I remember reading a pamphlet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses which stated that the devil owned the world and there was no such thing as earthly justice. What is interesting and perhaps most important about the wait for justice in each religion is the case of the Protestant. In Western countries, those people that are most likely to support the earthly system of justice and the laws of the land are conservative Christians. These people appear to believe that the divine system of justice has been translated into earthly form in the mundane and banal form of the English judge. There is therefore a big strand in Western thought in which divine conceptions of justice still play a big role in the conception of what justice is.

What are my own thoughts about the wait for justice? I believe that one should never wait for justice. I believe that the wait for justice is a mystification that favours the powerful in society. If one keeps on waiting for this justice, then one no longer takes affairs in one’s own hands to change and transform this unjust world of ours. I do not believe in any perfect, absolute and unlimited form of justice that is out there waiting for humankind. The very concept of justice is an illusion. I do not understand how people in this world of ours can believe in this illusion. There is merely the self-interest of the powerful which governs all things in this world of ours, including our laws and conceptions of law. And this self-interest forces those with little power to lose their voices and their will, to forsake their self-interest. There is no justice. Yet, even though there is not justice, there is still self-interest. I do not believe we should wait for justice. I believe that we should fight for our own self-interest and our own truths. That is what the idea of “justice”, to use the outdated and misleading term, means to me.

Abstract Love vs. Situated and Local Love

25.09.2018

The choice between abstract love and situated and local love is evident in a quote by E. M. Forster –

“I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

Let us characterise abstract love. Abstract love is love of the country in the above quote or the supporting of “causes”, which are “public”, or, rather, “publicly accepted”. A “cause” can be defined as either a “charitable undertaking” or “a principle or movement militantly defended or supported” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online). Abstract love supports “principles” rather than human beings (the opposition is between friends and the abstract entities of country and cause). The country is an imaginary entity which is also largely publicly supported in the idea of abstract love. A country is largely an idea. It only has status as a piece of fiction. There is no such thing as a country. There is just a varied collection of people in a geographical space, who all live varied kinds of lives, not some kind of unchanging, abstract entity. Abstract love says that you should love all these people that you don’t know for whatever reason because of the abstract idea of a country and for abstract principles. Think about that in detail. There are no intimate human relationships required, no close contact with the recipients. In abstract love, the love that is most supported is the love of the stranger, of the anonymous. In abstract love, there is a morality which is that you should love a fictional idea more than you love those close to you: politicians tell you to love the country. This is felt like a compulsion by Forster who has to resist it strongly. What is the object of love in abstract love, the idea of the politicians? The country is seen as something larger than a single human being, as more universal. There is an idea of the larger versus the smaller, or the general versus the particular. The country is public, the individual is private. The country is emblematic of “good” group membership, community, etc. Love of the country is therefore contrasted to the love of the individual human being who just stands for personal love.

Let us now characterise situated and local love. In this form of love, you support individuals who you love. You know them. The reason that you love them is that you know them. You don’t love strangers and help them: it is those close to you that you love. This love is entirely intimate. It is situated because you just happened to be somehow connected to the person by complete chance. It is not about principles, it is about your own situated love. Biographical details are more important in this form of love than principles and sharing publicly accepted group affiliations. This love relies on an idea of the domestic sphere rather than the private sphere: you love those close to you, not those that political figures tell you to, as in the case of the country. It is about what you yourself choose to support as an individual. In situated and local love, you are not a removed and detached “objective” thinker with ideals of “universality” (abstract love pretends it is this – it is not, as you will know if you meet any nationalists). You are subjective. You favour the particular over the general, the smaller over the larger – the individual over the nation state. That is, you choose your own private group of membership (in friends) over what is publicly accepted as the main form of membership (nationality).

I have already said which love I choose. Why did I choose the smaller over the larger, the particularistic over the general? Because who else is going to help the poor members of my family in India? I have noted that they are systematically oppressed. Yet, for all the talk about altruism and abstract love, they have no support.

You might say that the abstract thinkers are in the minority and that is the problem with the world. After all, there is no one helping the people that are starving. But there is a morality to local and situated love. This is that you should tend to your own garden first before you start addressing other issues. First of all, my mother helps her family. Then, if she can, she helps people from our socially disadvantaged community on the basis of group identity. My mother is particularistic, not abstract and general. It is the same with the rest of our family. According to lovers of abstraction, this is seen as self-serving, selfish, etc. It is seen as a bad form of group identity and belonging (i.e. tribalism). It is seen as the inferior form of loving since it is situated. But the strength of situated and local love is that it is from insiders and local: who else is going to help anyone in that community that is outside that community? How many thousands of years of oppression have my people faced? No one helped us except our own. That is reality: people are selfish.      

Internalising Stereotypes: Suggested Identities, Individuality and Free Choice

25.04.2018 –

Abstract: Oppressed groups in our society internalise negative constructions of identity and learned sets of behaviours transmitted in media which override personal responsibility and individuality. They do this because they are required to exhibit such identities and behaviours on the public stage because of the constraints imposed upon them by culture.

Keywords: Stereotypes, Cultural Brainwashing, Free Will, Personal Responsibility, Negative expectations

Elaboration. Clarification. Evidence.

Speculation, even that of the armchair theorist, has to be sustained by the holy trio I have just cited. The last time I wrote, the topic was how the justice of the oppressed has been constructed as inevitably having a violent and bodily conclusion. The argument that I made was that the identity of the violent individual and even the framework of action of this individual have been transmitted across Western culture and time as a model for the behaviour and personhood of oppressed groups in our society. This is a model which they turn to in order to construct ideas of justice and individuality and to deal with injustice in this society since it is conceived of as “their own justice”, a justice that is peculiar to them and in which constructions of personhood and difference are inherent. Another reason why they turn to these models for identity and action is because they have been systematically denied any other form of expression in this society so that they cannot become factors in public thought, politics and in the apportioning of power.

There is a big assumption in the argument that I made. Instead of talking about individual responsibility, consciousness and so on, I cited the phrase “cultural brainwashing” in the key terms at the start of the speculations. I argued that individuals take up the identity and framework of action evident in the plays of Shakespeare and such productions as the recent Black Panther movie because they have been insidiously insinuated to them from the time before they have even been born.

Why have I assumed that the identity of the violent avenger is suggested to oppressed individuals and can override conventional notions of individuality, free will, conscious choice and personhood? Is there any proof of this? Just because something is there in Shakespeare and the Black Panther movie, and a similar thing seems to happen in real life, does that prove that my speculations are correct?

While I was pondering whether fiction can be invoked to prove something that happens in real life, I thought I would make a few notes on the topic of suggested identity and the internalisation of stereotypes and how both relate to free will, choice and conscious thought. To introduce the topic, I want to write about a recent change in advertising standards which you can read about here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40638343 

As the BBC writes, the Advertising Standards Authority have set out a mission statement to “crack down on ads that feature stereotypical gender roles.” There were particularly aggravating examples that were cited:

One example was an advert for Aptamil baby milk formula that showed girls growing up to be ballerinas and boys becoming engineers.

Complaints had also been made about adverts for clothing retailer Gap that showed a boy becoming an academic, and a girl becoming a “social butterfly”.

What was the justification for cracking down on such adverts? As the BBC journalist writes:

The review suggested that new standards should consider whether the stereotypes shown would “reinforce assumptions that adversely limit how people see themselves and how others see them.”

“Portrayals which reinforce outdated and stereotypical views on gender roles in society can play their part in driving unfair outcomes for people,” said Guy Parker, chief executive of the ASA.

“While advertising is only one of many factors that contribute to unequal gender outcomes, tougher advertising standards can play an important role in tackling inequalities and improving outcomes for individuals, the economy and society as a whole.”

There is a simple idea at the heart of the justification of the advertising crackdown: media plays a role in constraining individuals to adopt certain identities and schemas of action. Media can determine and limit notions of personhood and action. Media can override ideas about free will and choice to produce certain types of individuals that act in a certain kind of way. Stereotypes in the media can be internalised and magnify and build on societal expectations to influence behaviour and identity. There is a qualification: media is just one factor in contributing to “unequal gender outcomes”.

The question remains, however, whether this justification is valid or not. The ASA suggests that media is just one aspect of an entire societal apparatus which is producing gender and gendered forms of identity and behaviour. They make the same claim about cultural brainwashing that I do, that such cultural brainwashing produces zombies that lack responsibility and free will. How exactly is this process of cultural brainwashing played out?

As I was thinking over this topic, trying to work out how individuals internalise expected identities and learned sets of behaviours, one persistent image kept on coming to mind. I am talking about the case of the athlete with the home crowd advantage. There is no need to focus on a particular example, since everyone knows exactly what I am talking about. Here is the typical scenario. There is a home crowd which is composed of people of the same nationality. The home crowd have one athlete in the final who is of the same nationality as them. If one looks at the past record of this athlete, there seems to be very little chance that they will win anything. The athlete’s ranking is not that good. However, the crowd expects the athlete to bring home a medal. Somehow, amazingly, the athlete performs better than he or she has ever performed in their life. They fulfil the crowd’s expectations and bring home a medal. It is the same with teams as it is with individuals.

Here, then, is the prime illustration of how a society’s expectations can be internalised in order to produce a certain identity, that of medal winner, and an expected set of behaviours, a medal winning performance. But what isn’t remarked on and what is brilliantly weird about this phenomenon is that it actually happens. How can someone whose body hasn’t ever and seemingly can’t perform at that level suddenly do what it does in the final? Why does their body and their behaviour change so radically? It is precisely because of the societal expectation that they act in a certain way and become medallists. And this societal expectation is based in nationalism and ideas of national identity. These athletes are drawing on notions of shared and constructed identities in order to behave in a certain way. All the training that they did in their life never allowed them access to a medal winning performance before. It required an internalisation of shared national identity and a meeting of the expectation and demand of the nationalist crowd in order to achieve that result.

One can see then, that individuals can internalise identities and behaviours which are expected of them by society and which themselves radically transform them and their actions in a way that is nothing short of miraculous. The expectations of a group can change the very fabric of reality. These expectations can override conscious thought – the athletes have always consciously tried to win but were never able to gain the victory, however much they trained and tried. It is the adoption of a shared cultural identity and set of behaviours by athletes which, although they are seemingly unrelated to the task in hand (after all, it is not a requisite qualification of being British that one is a gymnast or fast runner) completely changes performance and result and, indeed, alters the body at a fundamental level.

Well. Let us return to our ideas about how culturally shared negative expectations of oppressed individuals can transform their behaviour and override conscious thought, free will and choice. If the scenario in the athlete example can be seen as analogous to how a culture works, then we can see how and why negative expectations fundamentally change the character of individuals. Such expectations, transmitted though media, are internalised and are too powerful to resist. They do away with ideas about free choice, individual responsibility and individuality. Such ideas crush the very stuff that persons are made out of to reproduce stock types. They are too powerful. The group’s expectations completely overwhelm and defeat the individual. The individual can then only exhibit learned behaviour. The word exhibit is important. I think the athlete situation is analogous to the situation in culture because of one important point. Both the athlete and the oppressed individual are on display. They have to perform as though they were in a play to a society that is watching since their actions take place in public. This is why I think that the justice of the oppressed is a form of communication and perceived as the only way to express ideas about justice and the resistance to injustice.

Well, such are the speculations of the armchair theorist. What is the importance of such idle speculations and this short note on the matter? I think the significance is that in Western media, there are only really negative representations of oppressed peoples. They are always shown as violent, barbaric, backward and criminal. Where are the positive role models? When was the last time you saw a British Asian as a hero in western media? The fact is that it is negative expectations of us that are always channelled in the western imagination. If people then internalise and act on these negative expectations, which are not just in media, but everywhere around us in this society, are these people really to blame? If personal responsibility and individuality are really obliterated by group expectations, can we point the finger at perceived criminals? Surely our ideas about law and justice, which rely on notions of free will, choice and individual responsibility have to change?

The Consolations of Being Single

25.06.17

In one of the pages of Mrs. Oliphant’s long and incredibly boring novel, Miss Marjoribanks, the unlikeable heroine consoles herself. She is astonished that she has not received many offers for engagement. As a result, she dwells on the stupidity of men and their lack of discernment. It is a commonplace of the singleton to console themselves in such a manner. There is the narcissistic contempt of members of the preferred sex which validates one’s own existence. Can these people not see that I, too, am worthy of love? They are blind and ignorant.

I want to update the narcissistic contempt of the singleton for our own times in my own words as a singleton. It has been many years since that rambling Victorian novel has been written. How do singletons console themselves now? Here is a little list of arguments.

1. I’m happy that I didn’t settle.

As I watch the couples around me, I am often amazed at how they can be attracted to one another. Not only do I find the females unattractive, but I also can’t understand what the women see in the men. To my mind, these people have settled. Clearly, my assessments are based on physical beauty, and so what? I don’t believe this is superficial. The same people that prefer shared interests in a partner are more superficial with their blind conformism. Those who talk about “personality” and the cult of the individual also avoid the reality that most people in our society are fundamentally the same underneath everything. I, the singleton, can still pursue beauty and the dream of beauty. Although I have forgiven women in the past for not being what I have dreamed of them, I can, as a singleton, worship the goddess without any guilt or pangs of conscience.

2. I’m happy that I didn’t have to change myself for somebody and I don’t have to do what I don’t want to do.

One watches the slow tussle for control in the relationships around oneself. The woman has to change herself for the man and the man has to change himself for the woman. This is despite the fact that the change that is being asked for is completely unreasonable. In putting themselves into the shackles of a monogamous relationship, the people in a relationship have to become different people. Thus they have to do what they don’t want to do almost all of the time. An obvious example yesterday was in the shopping centre and seeing the bored look on the faces of the men while the women looked through handbags and shoes. In a relationship, you have to talk about things that you don’t want to talk about and feign interest in them. You have to go places you don’t want to go and eat food that you don’t want to eat. You have to spend money on things that you don’t want. The singleton has something which someone doesn’t have in a relationship: independence and freedom. No relationship responsibilities outside of the family. You don’t have to pretend to be someone else.

3. I don’t have to put up with the family (and friends) of the woman.

When one has been in a family one’s whole life and has never had a break from being in a family, the one thing that one doesn’t want is another larger family. Especially one composed of older people telling one what to do all the time. One also doesn’t have to make friends with a bunch of strangers that one’s partner knows, even if one secretly dislikes them.

4. I don’t have the burden of keeping secrets from the other person.

In life, one learns very early on that you cannot tell other people everything that you think. It can be very destructive to say what one’s honest opinion is in our society as people hate the truth. Being out of a relationship, one doesn’t have to incessantly lie all the time to the other person. The stress of lying is therefore avoided, as is the responsibility to be always cheerful.

5. I keep my personal space.

I don’t have to share activities with someone all the time and can pursue my activities in solitude without any disturbance.

6. I don’t have to feel the hurt in a relationship.

The less said about how painful a relationship can be with arguments and suchlike, the better. It is a horrible experience.

There are possibly other arguments. The general drift of my arguments obeys the rules of narcissistic contempt for others that do not give me love. Only so much has changed from the days of the Victorians.

A Negative Statistic about Christmas – 18.12.2017

Gleaming images of beautiful families assail us everywhere around December time. Positive messages and good cheer seemingly abound. Beneath the surface, however, there are grimmer realities. Consider the food wastage. In 2014, 4.2 million Christmas dinners were wasted across the United Kingdom according to Unilever. The most startling popular statistic, and the most worrying, is that of the “Christmas Suicide”. This statistic, that there are increased rates of suicide attempts in the holiday season, is a popular myth and has been debunked by several authorities. However, it is pervasive. Why is this so?

Through one perspective, the “Christmas Suicide” myth could be interpreted as reflecting a deep unease and anxiety about the holiday season. Beneath apparent happiness, we are told, there lurk tragedy and depths of despair. Happiness is a bubble, reality is sadness. We are only separated from suffering by a hair’s breadth, for we too could be contemplating demise by our own hand. Is it human nature to be unable to keep away thoughts of suffering during our most special and happiest moments? Or is the experience of suffering that we have gone through to build family relationships an unavoidable and irrepressible memory?

Such questions deserve more thought. However, my opinion is that the Christmas suicide myth rests on a cultural idea of loneliness that is used to depict the anti-social elements in society as dangerous. It is the lack of friends and family, we are told, that leads an individual to murder him or herself. This lack leads to a deep and hopeless despair. This singling out of the lonely betrays a complacency which the social individual possesses and an unflinching and unwarranted trust and belief in social arrangements. He or she is surrounded by people in the holiday season and anything else appears both perverse and dangerous, a threat to life, society and the individual. But what of the loneliness of the crowd? Of never being able to express to others what is inside, or to feel a true companionship? Such feelings are buried and displaced onto the Christmas suicide in a convenient fashion.

By all means, think of those that are not as lucky as you in Christmas time. Empathise with the less fortunate and the lonely. However, do pay attention to the differences between cultural myths and prosaic realities. When you are enjoying time with the family and friends, pause to think how much you are the real, happy you and how much you are simply a character in a story about Christmas and its insiders and outsiders.

Cat Psychology: Performing Strays in Abu Dhabi

26.11.2021

They slink away. They ignore you. They seem thoroughly unimpressed with your presence. This is the typical cat on the street in England.

Although I’ve never really been permitted to have a pet, I have done a bit of light reading on the subject of cat psychology, part of my general interest in our animal sisters and brothers and their minds. I used to try and blink at them on the streets as I understood this was a form of greeting with them. However, I never got much of a response. The English cat is highly anti-social.

However, compare the stray cat in Abu Dhabi with our native species. Once beloved pets, these animals had been callously left behind in the country when the ex-pats found their visas or their appetite for the country had run out.

These cats would follow me around, meowing pathetically for my attention. One would find them wandering around by themselves or in packs of five or six. They looked visibly malnourished, although kind people would leave out food for them. They would stare at me, with a deep longing in their eyes.

On one occasion, I found that one of these stray cats had ambushed a small family gathering in the park in front of the apartment I was at. It was actively performing for the delight of two young children. This black and white creature was playing dead, lying on its back with its paws up in the air, listening to the children’s squeals of delight.

These stray cats, once used to receiving human love and an audience, now craved an audience of humans. They would actively seek out an opportunity to perform and to receive some kind of acknowledgement from human beings. Those that had once given them food, shelter, nourishment, care, love.

The cat, seemingly so aloof in England, seems to be a slave of love, just as we are. This sheds light on a mammalian need for affection as well as the dynamics of inter-species connection. To me, the observation also suggests the roots of the need to perform for an audience. Perhaps, the performer is a being that has been starved of affection, or who has the greatest hunger for it. When the cat has companionship and the treasures that go with it, they don’t feel a need to perform for strangers. However, when this sense of society is gone, then an evolutionary instinct seems to kick in and drives the behaviour of the mammalian mind to seek out strangers, and with them, sympathy and the formation of potential relationships. Really, I think, our mind is controlled by our circumstances, especially our circumstances of love. And could this be what is foundational for all our cultural endeavours which seek to find affection from strangers, such as acting, painting, making music and writing?

When are we intimate with others?

Being intimate with someone in a conversation is a deeply moving and lasting experience. We feel that we have been fully understood for once, in a world where we are largely misunderstood. Swirling, cascading feelings of closeness, belonging, connection, satisfaction. The mind is flooded with good chemicals. We feel refreshed, renewed… more human. But, at the end of the day, when you review your conversations with others – if, like me, you do – do you remember feeling really intimate with another person? Take today for example. Most of the things I talked about with family members were practical and tied to daily concerns. When is it, exactly, that we are intimate? Even when we are with our closest friends, family or significant others, intimate conversations do not happen all the time. They are reserved for special occasions. As a young man in search of love, and as a writer and a human, I think the quest for intimacy and someone to have it with is one of the key quests of my life, if it is not the only one. Such is the importance and relevance of this topic: the conditions of intimacy. That experience of being fully understood which is apart from our normal, transactional conversations.

Having intimacy depends on both sides of a conversation. There has to be a type of perfect reciprocity which is rare in life, since we are all usually in a different head space at different times. For intimacy to occur, one has to be receptive and so does the other. One has to let down one’s guard, so does the other. One has to be willing to confide and think deeply, and so does the other. Such conditions seem to require the apparatus for serious thinking: time, relaxation, privacy, lack of distractions, a strong feeling in the mind, absolute sociability, the support of a strong and long-lasting relationship.

Yet there are also exceptions. Sometimes, one is most intimate with strangers. I believe there is a psychological term for this, when one opens up to someone one doesn’t know. I forget it for the moment. Perhaps this form of intimacy is even more psychologically interesting than the more conventional form. Is it based on a type of daring? Or does it seek to free itself from the burdensome judgement of people we have known for an age? Is it a more liberating and productive form of intimacy in building relationships?

What does it say about the human condition that we don’t have intimacy always? Perhaps we cannot trust all the time, and perhaps this is natural, given what other human beings can be like. Perhaps we wear armour for most of the days of our lives, an impenetrable skin which does not let others inside or for us to go outside of ourselves and live in an other for a while. If connection is so energy sapping and such a leap and expenditure of trust and risk, such an invitation for potential misunderstanding or even hurt, then intimacy may be the rare and choice fruit of our lives. We are not always fully understood. Which is why intimacy is so special and fulfilling. Yet one imagines a world where we can all be intimate with each other, fully understood. Perhaps this is the ultimate, if not expressed and recognised, goal of the human condition. To be fully, finally, understood.