I was going to write about the Void, and the Fear, and the Anger; and how humanity seems addicted to bullying, with everyone practically, from big tyrants, to little chippy vegans, via the radical trans and the radical feminists all the way to nursery - but really that’s all so dull. Often actors will say that they prefer to play the villain rather than the hero, because villains are so much more interesting, but thinking about it, that may be more to do with the fashion of demonising our great heroes so that people turn to rotten little tyrants, and rotten big tyrants and more bullying.
And I was going to mention why we obey tyrants - that’s a pretty dull topic, too, but it has to do with tyrants being emotionally two years old, and that many individuals respond by allowing themselves to become infantilised, regressing more or less eagerly to the state when, phylogenically, humanity began to behave badly - though, I should say, that we are always (unconsciously) seeking to resolve our difficulties which began when our ancestors were the equivalent of two year old infants now, developed the capacity to tell lies, and spent a lot of time yelling, having highly vocal discussions about what to do in the face of natural disturbance; and also that obedience is part of what we humans are.
But what I want to write about is something different and more interesting.
But it’s late and I must sleep.
Getting Along 2
About five years ago, when I’d had to move house and - due to the appalling state of the private housing marker - had to move several more times, I gave one of my beloved sisters a painting, out of affection for her, and because I wanted to keep the painting safe; it was one of a series and I’d saved it from the wreckage of constantly moving house.
And about five months ago I realised that she had deliberately destroyed it. In my family to destroy a painting is almost sacrilege and I was very shocked. Perhaps the worst aspect of the case, was and is, that I cannot talk to her about it, there can be no resolution: she is very defensive; when she feels threatened her voice becomes harsh and strident; she is more than twice my weight; she will contradict herself, deny that she has destroyed it, say it is hers anyway and she can do what she likes with it; convince herself that it’s all my fault anyway, and possibly start shouting at me. And I cannot put myself through all that.
But because can’t discuss it with her, I was left feeling helpless. And then I experienced a moment of terrible anger. And I realised that her destruction of my painting had actually traumatised me: I had trusted her and she had destroyed that trust - though to be sure, her behaviour in this instance was only the last in a long series of contemptuous acts towards me (and towards other people who had loved and trusted her).
The psychologists call it ‘narcissistic injury’. It is unfortunate that they use the word ‘narcissistic’: we are taught that narcissism is wrong; we say someone is a narcissist when we want to be insulting; we are taught that we must think of others rather than of ourselves, and so on. It is better to say it is an injury to The Myself. By her action, my beloved sister has deeply injured me, a personal and visceral hurt.
The most important person in the world, to me, is me! And the most important person in the world, to you, is you. That is natural and necessary. When I love, I am concerned for my lover; I want him safe to safeguard my love for him. Love is both selfless and selfish. The mother wants her baby safe, the baby wants her mother safe, there is self interest in the truest love.
A few weeks ago a friend mentioned that when people read a will they want to know how much money there is in it for them, and they’re simply not interested in being left anything that hasn’t got money value. That made me think! My wonderful and fascinating life is not wonderful or fascinating to anyone else! I was a bit depressed for a day or two, but then I saw it as a liberation.
And that, I think, is what this section is about: untying the knots that bind me here.
Getting Along 3
It would be wrong to blame my beloved sister for destroying that painting: it would be unkind; and it would be stupid. Blaming does not lead to resolution.
We may recognise that such behaviour is infantile; it is the kind of thing that a toddler might do; a toddler who has not yet learnt to recognise that his or her behaviour affects other people - when one behaves well, other people will respond well, and when one behaves badly, other people might be upset. My beloved sister has not yet learnt this.
When I was three years and some months old, I defaced a painting by flicking turpentine onto it from a brush left soaking. Why did I do that? I knew it was wrong. I can remember how I was feeling as crept behind the curtain where the artist had screened his work from the guests at his party: I felt naughty but justified; I felt that I was doing something that was wrong but right. I felt that I was doing good.
Looking back for clues, I observe that my mother was angry with the artist; was fighting him and that she was somehow losing her fight. It is very possible that she was particularly angry that he wasn’t painting a picture of her, but of someone else.
My mother didn’t tell me to deface the painting, but she wouldn’t have to. The infant feels what the mother feels, and the infant doesn’t need words. I was my mother’s little soldier, and fought her battle for her. She seems to have recognised this: there was a big row, but I didn’t get into trouble.
Much earlier, I mentioned two separate incidents: a toddler punching his younger brother hard in the testicles, while the mother stood by, not seeing; and a toddler kicking his younger sister in the aisle of a supermarket, and when I told him not to, he told me that his mummy let him do it. When mummy’s unhappy the toddler feels that he or she must act on her behalf. The toddler feels this will make the beloved mummy happy, and when she’s happy the toddler is happy. He or she is acting for and on behalf; and it is very possible that the child is doing what the mother wants to do herself, but knows she must not do.
(It occurs to me now that the Poppet mentioned in the previous section was simply doing to us as her mother had done to her - but that is a different area of interest.)
As we grow up we must learn to take responsibility for our own actions. Not everyone does learn to think for themselves; many, perhaps most people act as they think the mother would want them to act. That is good when the mother has taught well, but otherwise it is not good.
And why did my beloved sister destroy the painting I had made with love and had given to her with affection. Did she perhaps remember that incident when I defaced that other painting when I was three and she was in her teens? By destroying my painting, was she identifying with me? Was she somehow doing what she thought her mother (our mother) would want her to do? Or as a great grandmother herself now, was she acting on her own behalf?
Of course, I could repaint the picture. It’s one of a series, and I could do it. But then we come to the matter of obedience? To remake the painting would be to disobey my beloved sister’s wishes, and wouldn’t that be wrong? The perplexities of infancy re-emerge.
Oh, the complications - sorry, complexities - of sibling relationships! It is difficult enough being human without the added confusions. And I shouldn’t have been born. Perhaps there is some value to me in being human, but I think of the energy of me being used out in the world, participating in making the world, the real world, in the sky, the oceans, the mountains, and I feel the frustrations of being trapped in human form.
Getting Along 3
It would be wrong to blame my beloved sister for destroying that painting: it would be unkind; and it would be stupid. Blaming does not lead to resolution.
We may recognise that such behaviour is infantile; it is the kind of thing that a toddler might do; a toddler who has not yet learnt to recognise that his or her behaviour affects other people - when one behaves well, other people will respond well, and when one behaves badly, other people might be upset. My beloved sister has not yet learnt this.
When I was three years and some months old, I defaced a painting by flicking turpentine onto it from a brush left soaking. Why did I do that? I knew it was wrong. I can remember how I was feeling as crept behind the curtain where the artist had screened his work from the guests at his party: I felt naughty but justified; I felt that I was doing something that was wrong but right. I felt that I was doing good.
Looking back for clues, I observe that my mother was angry with the artist; was fighting him and that she was somehow losing her fight. It is very possible that she was particularly angry that he wasn’t painting a picture of her, but of someone else.
My mother didn’t tell me to deface the painting, but she wouldn’t have to. The infant feels what the mother feels, and the infant doesn’t need words. I was my mother’s little soldier, and fought her battle for her. She seems to have recognised this: there was a big row, but I didn’t get into trouble.
Much earlier, I mentioned two separate incidents: a toddler punching his younger brother hard in the testicles, while the mother stood by, not seeing; and a toddler kicking his younger sister in the aisle of a supermarket, and when I told him not to, he told me that his mummy let him do it. When mummy’s unhappy the toddler feels that he or she must act on her behalf. The toddler feels this will make the beloved mummy happy, and when she’s happy the toddler is happy. He or she is acting for and on behalf; and it is very possible that the child is doing what the mother wants to do herself, but knows she must not do.
(It occurs to me now that the Poppet mentioned in the previous section was simply doing to us as her mother had done to her - but that is a different area of interest.)
As we grow up we must learn to take responsibility for our own actions. Not everyone does learn to think for themselves; many, perhaps most people act as they think the mother would want them to act. That is good when the mother has taught well, but otherwise it is not good.
And why did my beloved sister destroy the painting I had made with love and had given to her with affection. Did she perhaps remember that incident when I defaced that other painting when I was three and she was in her teens? By destroying my painting, was she identifying with me? Was she somehow doing what she thought her mother (our mother) would want her to do? Or as a great grandmother herself now, was she acting on her own behalf?
Of course, I could repaint the picture. It’s one of a series, and I could do it. But then we come to the matter of obedience? To remake the painting would be to disobey my beloved sister’s wishes, and wouldn’t that be wrong? The perplexities of infancy re-emerge.
Oh, the complications - sorry, complexities - of sibling relationships! It is difficult enough being human without the added confusions. And I shouldn’t have been born. Perhaps there is some value to me in being human, but I think of the energy of me being used out in the world, participating in making the world, the real world, in the sky, the oceans, the mountains, and I feel the frustrations of being trapped in human form.
Getting Along 5
We must obey the mother: to obey the mother is entirely natural behaviour. The perverse behaviours of my sisters towards me is done in obedience to their mother, (who is also my mother). My beloved sisters also often behave perversely to each other, and again they are obeying the mother; copying her behaviour to her children, taught by her example. And our mother, in her behaviours to us, was merely obeying her own mother, who had rejected her. There is no blame. It is no one’s fault. We must learn responsibility for our own behaviour.
Obedience to the mother is a given in nature. Words between mother and child are unnecessary. This natural behaviour pre-dates any language, of words, or sounds, or signs. We may recognise that the mother herself is unconscious that her private feelings are felt by her child; and unaware that her unconscious messages of command are obeyed by her child. But the child does not need words in order to register and to obey the mother’s feelings and desires.
We are, to a great extent, even as adults in thrall to the natural need to obey the mother: we are all, to a great extent, what our mothers taught us to be.
There is one factor that rivals the innate need to obey the mother; and which may help us to recognise our blind obedience, and perhaps help us to overcome the ill effects of our blind obedience; help us to establish a good balance between obedience to the mother and obedience to our fundamentally good and loving human nature. We may call it God, as many people do; we may call it reason. George Frankl said reason with love.
It is hard work! Our natural obedience to the mother pre-dates both God and reason. (The other animals have instinct and therefore do not need reason.) Human nature is fundamentally good; all babies are born good and loving, but that in itself provides conflict in families where the mother makes unloving demands on the child, and teaches unloving lessons. The child must obey the mother, but the child must also obey its fundamentally loving nature. In unloving families this obviously makes a conflict within the child.
Having consciously accepted that I was not wanted, I must ask a question: should I have been born? And the answer must be, ‘No. I should not have been born.’ (It is no one’s fault; no one is to blame. My parents, like so many individuals, did not learn to take responsibility for their actions.)
But I was born. And the next question is more difficult: should I still be here?
Getting Along 6
Beloved Sister no.2, the Destroyer of Paintings*, copies her mother by pushing people away. As a 2 year old she was ‘pushed away’ by the mother (her father had gone much earlier) by being put into an orphanage, and it is clearly to be seen that she has pushed away many people; and although I tried to remain loyal, she has managed to push me away, too. Naturally, by the age of 2 she had developed the capacity to tell lies, and has used this ability thoroughly.
My Beloved Sister no.4, that is the one next above me in age, naturally looked on me as ‘her’ baby, and behaved towards me as the mother behaved towards her, again naturally. In many families, the elder child defames the younger as being ‘competitive’. In our case, I just wanted her to stop calling me stupid, and had no thought of being in competition with her. (She dazzled me! She was a very beautiful child, and in my eyes she was extraordinarily clever, able to do so very much; and she was also one of the funniest, most amusing, people I ever met.) Outside my own family, I have witnessed this defamation often: the elder child accuses the younger of being competitive, difficult and so on. Recently, a man libelled his younger brother as being competitive in a roomful of people; I saw the sadness and bafflement on the younger man’s face. And it is baffling: one loves, but is rejected; one’s love is rejected and even turned against oneself. It is as if the very love one has is seen as a sign of one’s inadequacy or ‘badness’, wrongness.
The elder child perceives the younger as being competitive; the elder child feels that he or she is being competed with; and of course, the younger child unknowingly has usurped the elder’s place within the family. It is completely natural that the elder child is distressed by the reality of the new baby. And the new baby is so different. The elder child expects that the new baby will be the same person as he or she is, but the baby is a completely different person. So the elder child is baffled, and skilfully passes that bafflement onto the younger!
It is very difficult for people to see themselves. I’ve written a lot about other people, but have not managed to write about myself in the same analytical way. My mother and sisters all had or have brown eyes. My father and I were (in his case) or are (in my case) blue eyed; and my mother used often to complain of our ‘cold blue eyes’. I think that I do give the cold blue eyed look when people behave in certain ways, as when someone I know and like says or does something which seems to me to be particularly crazy, dangerous or weird. So the cold blue eyed look is an effect of my bafflement.
Also, I think people sometimes see me as arrogant. Naturally, I don’t think I am arrogant. But I am frequently baffled by the behaviour of other people. And I’m getting pretty fed up about these behaviours. Whenever I think that one of these days I’ll be at the end of my time, I cheer up enormously. Something to look forward to.
There are always underlying causes of behaviours.
*She has form in this regard.
Getting Along 7
The rules for old people are made up by young people. The rules for women are made up by men. Mothers make up their own rules.
We took George to the hospital. In a side room he was asked a number of questions to determine his mental acuity. The specialist pointed to a young man in uniform and asked George what that young man’s job was; George said, ‘a porter?’ but the chap was a nurse and George was marked down. I didn’t recognise the guy was a nurse, and I wasn’t old, and I’d been working in that damned hospital for three years. An old person brought into hospital doesn’t care who the prime minister is or what day it is or what a banana is for. Obviously, the old person, like anyone else, just wants to be treated for the condition he or she has.
Young people don’t know what it’s like to be old. Men, notoriously, don’t know much about women, but men make up the rules for women as for everyone else. The men are in charge because many thousands of years ago the matriarchs gave up the struggle; and we may accept that the men, like the hospital experts are doing their best.
The rich make up the rules for the poor. It may be that the rich are doing their best for the poor, or it may be that the rich are doing the best they can for themselves. My point is that we human beings are very much on the wrong track. Women and the poor and minorities rise up because they all experience the chains of oppression; but having risen up, all the women and the poor and minorities want is the sweets of wealth and power: everyone wants to live in the palace, and having got into the palace, they find that they are still oppressed, and additionally, the new rulers find that there is a huge army of new groups looking to usurp them from the palace. We generally find after the revolution that nothing has changed.
The question, ‘Should I still be here?’ is not the right question. If I shouldn’t have been born in the first place, it’s obvious that I shouldn’t be here at all. But I am here. Suicide is out of the question - for me - and I can’t just lie down and die, though I feel it would be for the best if I could. There are at the moment more or less 7 1/2 billion human beings cluttering up the planet. We are a huge amount of the earth’s energy, by our numbers we are squeezing out other life forms, and we are using up what energy is left to keep ourselves going. Obviously, someone like me, who doesn’t very much like being here, shouldn’t be here.
On the other hand, I see the wonderful possibilities in being human. And I am an animal, and have a natural resistance to cease functioning in my animal form. I am human with a big human brain, and I am an animal with some instincts still intact. Though we have tried over the millennia to crush our instincts, we haven’t quite managed it, and that leaves me with a puzzle. And I suspect that many millions, perhaps billions of other human beings are confronted by the same puzzle, more or less unconsciously, because the whole question is surrounded by strong taboos - we’re all supposed to be grateful for being alive and human, and it isn’t nice to complain! Actually we are taught that it is immoral to be unhappy with our lot because it’s all the will of God.
But God is in our human minds, and it is the function of our human minds first to identify and then to resolve the difficult problems we humans have caused.
It seems obvious to me that we will resolve very many of our difficulties by bringing far fewer new human beings into the world; to give the planet a chance to recover somewhat; and to provide a possibility for all human beings to fulfil their potential, to be happy. For that, patience is necessary.
Meanwhile, what about the millions, or more likely billions of us who are frustrated in our attempts to fulfil our potential? Now, that’s a question.
Getting Along 8
Several months ago, another memory of my mother’s miscarriage broke through into consciousness; in my mind’s eye, I saw her dying; I watched the life draining out of her; she was on the landing, collapsing, crying out, but softly, ‘help me, help me’, and I watched, helpless. I couldn’t help her; I could only watch, and feel her dying.
Fortunately, my father was just in time to save her life.
In my infant understanding, I knew that I must do as she had done. I must obey her by doing as she did. I knew that I must scream in rage and terror, and so die. And that memory, that lesson, that knowledge, pushed so far back into the unconscious, has haunted me all my life since I was three and a half years old. And since remembering, I have had a strong feeling of being a naughty little child who is disobeying the mother.
I’m sure, I hope, that very few infants watch as their beloved mother dies. But I know that as a species, we humans are haunted by similar horrors from the infancy of our species. As a species, we have pushed these awful species memories deep into the collective unconscious, but still we are haunted.
Infants must obey. Moreover, they want to obey. Human nature is fundamentally good, all babies are born good and loving. Obedience is a natural phenomenon. Love and obedience are both natural, and combine, so that the child not only must obey, but loves to obey. To obey is a loving natural act.
The child wants to obey the mother, even when obedience puts the child in danger. Moreover, disobedience to the mother causes the child suffering. As in my case, even when the child recognises that obedience is very dangerous, the child suffers by disobeying. There is guilt; and there the loss of love, and nothing is more important than love. There is a sense in the child of being unloveable. All these feelings and confusions are quite common among children and adults, and we may recognise the workings of our phylogeny.
My beloved sister, Destroyer of Paintings, was abandoned at the age of two. At two years old, the child has developed the capacity to tell lies. My beloved sister certainly learnt to tell lies, but was never taught to be responsible for her own actions; she has never learnt that everyone does bad things, and that it is alright as long as one accepts one’s mistakes and learns from one’s mistakes. She has developed a way of life which depends on her own lies: she tells a lie; she knows it is a lie; she will stick to that lie; and convince herself and others that her lie is actuality.
This pattern of behaviour is very common in humanity. For instance, money. Money is not part of the real world; humanity has fabricated money and the financial economy. It’s all a fiction, a gigantic lie, but we believe in it. We believe in this giant fiction we have made. We depend on it. We build our lives, individually and collectively on a complete fantasy. It is a lie which seems to have become part of our fabric as living animals. And for many individuals, money is valued above love.
Getting Along 9
My neighbour, Lillian, is a Baha’i. She told me that she believes there will be one more great catastrophe, and then human beings would ‘come to their senses,’ as she put it.
It seemed a gloomy prospect to me, but I didn’t argue with her, because she is 85 years old and a bit depressed.
What upset me about the idea, is a) that humanity feels helpless in the face of catastrophe, and b) that on past experience, people do not ‘come to their senses’ after a psychological trauma; people become traumatised and behave even more irrationally than they had before the trauma.
But this morning I began to see that we are the catastrophe! In our horrendous numbers, and our appalling behaviours, human beings have been overwhelming the entire planet.
When we acknowledge that we are the cause of the present catastrophe, then we may begin to feel less helpless. As we recognise that we must change our behaviours, we see that we can, are able to change our behaviours.
We have begun to change our perspective on plastics and are facing our responsibility to clean up. There are forecasts the the human population growth is slowing down. There is evidence of greater respect towards other life forms on the planet.
We have made a start. As we make greater progress towards acknowledging our mistakes, and amending our behaviours, then we will gain hope and confidence, and then we will have the desire and ability to ‘come to our senses’.
Getting Along 10
In Sigmund Freud’s theory the human psyche is divided into three: the Id, the Ego and the Super Ego. Freud characterised the Id as infantile and wild, and in need of education by the adult Ego.
George Frankl proved that human nature is fundamentally good, all babies are born good and loving. We recognise therefore that the psyche of the human child must be different from the Id as described by Freud.
Here in this work we have added the idea of The Myself: the identity of the individual from birth and through life; the identity which the individual recognises always as his or her self; and the identity of the individual which the individual knows is his or her fundamental, and therefore fundamentally good, self.
However, we must recognise that though each of us is fundamentally good, human beings are capable of some terrible behaviours. We may therefore recognise the Id as that damaged part of the human psyche which is capable of these bad behaviours.
George Frankl told me, ‘You must be the mother now.’ Speaking directly to the Id, I say, ‘You must not use nuclear weapons.’
Getting Along 11
The Id developed originally when our very early ancestors had survived severe psychological trauma. They had been flung out of dependence on nature. They needed moral guidance, but had lost the moral guidance of instinct. They began to develop, or to try to develop a new moral guidance.
The Id is the record of the attempts of our ancestors to make sense to a damaged species in what seems a dangerous world.
Parents of young children will know the endless why?:’Why? Why, mummy? Why, daddy? Why? Why?’ the young child is trying to build his or her morality.
Parents may also recognise that the Id is a literalist: the Id believes that what it is told is literally true. And the Id tests what it has been told and what it has accepted as true: ‘Mummy said that I mustn’t eat those sweets, but she didn’t say I wasn’t to eat this chocolate.’
We have spoken directly to the Id and have said, ‘You must not use nuclear weapons.’
The Id may now say, ‘Nuclear weapons must not be used, but there are other weapons which can be used.’
Speaking directly to the Id, we now say, ‘You must not use chemical weapons. You must not use any weapons of mass destruction.’
It is easy to recognise that some men, and women, want to fight physically. A young man might like to ‘bundle’, to have a fist fight with another young man, to invite another young man to a fight, and we may see such fights as part of growing up. Such fights may be seen almost as part of play, and such fights are not caused by anger with or animosity against each other. Such fights are by mutual consent, and are enjoyable to the combatants.
As a youth in Vienna, George Frankl was a champion boxer. As an adult in London he used to go the gym to spar, until he was fifty years old. He told me that the discipline of boxing was important, that young men learnt to take punches as well as to give punches.
War has a long history, has rules and regulations developed over many centuries. We recognise that for a long time war has been seen as inevitable, as ‘part of human nature’, but Frankl’s proof overturns such thinking: human nature is fundamentally good, all babies are born good and loving. War is definitely not part of human nature.
It has also often been said that war is necessary in order to keep down the human population. Research has shown that the human population rises after a traumatic event. War is a traumatic event and on the evidence war increases the human population; one example, though there are many examples, is the Baby Boomer generation, that huge increase in human births, which followed immediately after the trauma of Second World War.
We must recognise that it is sometimes necessary to go to war. It was necessary to stop the barbarism of Islamic State, for instance, as it had been necessary to stop the vicious Nazi rampage across Europe.
On our streets, especially in the big cities, there is a terrible increase knife crime, including murder which has become frequent. Many young men enjoy fighting. How much better it would be to give combative youths the opportunity to train in boxing, wrestling and the marshal arts; all these have rules and codes and discipline, and such boys who like to fight enjoy the process of learning and the discipline. Youths so trained would be far less keen to knife each other. Some individuals say that it is wrong to teach boys to fight, but Frankl disagreed.
But what am I saying! All this would cost money! And where’s the money to come from? Youth clubs are closed through lack of money, school playing fields are sold off to raise money. Some state schools find it financial difficult to provide books.
We must recognise that some very rich people are philanthropic, for example the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which does such great work with their fabulous wealth. Many donate to charities.
A few years ago, I listened to a very rich woman, an entrepreneur or businesswoman, as she said that people were jealous of her wealth. No, madam: it isn’t jealousy, it’s disgust.
Why does this woman assume that people who criticise her wealth are jealous of her? Human nature is fundamentally good, therefore she knows that she is good, she naturally feels that she is good, and therefore she knows that her activities in accumulating vast wealth cannot be bad. But she almost certainly does not recognise that all people are fundamentally good; it seems that she takes the view that people who do not work hard as she has done, who do not get rich are feckless and good-for-nothing wastrels. The rich tend to be afraid of the poor, as if poverty were a disease they are afraid of catching. And, whether she is conscious of it or not, she probably believes that it is ‘natural’ for some to be rich and some to be poor; it is the natural order of things. This belief is what is known as Fascism: that God ordained the natural order, where some are naturally leaders while the majority are sheep to be sheared, naturally. It is an intellectually very lazy belief; as is are the dogmas of Original Sin and Karma. Those who hold such beliefs have looked around them, seen the way things are ordered in human society, cannot understand it, and simply accept all ills as being ordained by God or nature. Phooey.
I have had a glimpse at the very disturbed state of the human psyche out of which our dependence on money came, and that glimpse was very ugly and disturbing to me. The origins of our very inequitable money economy lie in the ancient unresolved traumas, and at the present moment I do not wish to investigate further. Perhaps later on.
Getting Along 12
Children develop the capacity to tell lies at two years old.
Our early ancestors developed the ability to tell lies at the equivalent stage of evolution, when their circumstances had become difficult.
Until that point in evolution, our ancestors complained about difficult conditions, as we see when our babies and infants are ill. The baby suffering infant colic will be distressed, will cry, and so complain about the condition, but does not take action to change the condition.
Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels call a lie ‘the thing that is not’. Until the child is two years old, he or she simply does not know what a lie is. I must have been two years old when one of my sisters accidentally spilt the milk and told our angry mother, ‘it wasn’t me. The baby did it!’ I was astonished, amazed; not because my sister had blamed me, but because she had said ‘the thing that is not’. If I had been younger than two years old, I wouldn’t have, couldn’t have recognised a lie for what it is.
A lie is an attempt to change the truth - which is impossible. All human beings over the age of two years, has the capacity to tell lies. It is important that parents, teachers, guardians kindly ensure that the child knows the difference between being truthful and being untruthful. It is very important that everyone knows the difference between what is and what is not true.
I am not sure how many grown men and women do know that difference. Professional story tellers, actors, playwrights, novelists, do probably know the difference; actors are trained, playwrights and novelists are paid for their fantasies, and although there may be much truth in a work of fiction, everyone knows it is fiction.
My father knew the difference between a truth and a lie, but I am not at all sure that other members of my immediate family really understood. All babies are born good and loving; a child who is constantly told that she is a bad girl, will become seriously confused. The truth is that the child is good, but if mummy - and therefore everyone else - believes she is bad, then the child will think ‘I am bad’. The child will grow up greatly conflicted.
We may speculate that our early ancestors actually believed that they could change difficult conditions, by lying about them. There are adults now who apparently believe the same. A grown woman, or man, may believe that saying, ‘I didn’t do that,’ somehow makes it true that she didn’t do it, even though the evidence is perfectly clear that she did do it! As if lying about it, actually changes it; that all you have to do is tell a lie, and the world is changed!
As far as I know, everyone at some time has told a lie, but how many adults are there among us who have never understood that a lie is a fantasy? How many grown individuals actually know that the truth cannot be destroyed?
Possibly more than we might expect. We may recognise that our entire human world is built on fantasies. As a species we have deceived ourselves into believing so many lies, so much nonsense. And that is why we are in such trouble now.