Henry's Emanations
Someone to HATE
The only thing people enjoy more than having someone to look up to, is having someone to look down on.
We like it because it increases our self esteem – we find someone to hate and then congratulate ourselves that at least we’re not like them. The viler we can convince ourselves the figure of hate is, the more saint-like we ourselves will seem in comparison. Hate figures are also very useful in providing someone to blame.
This effect seems to be almost universal. It's as though the human brain has a built in mechanism which goes ahead and chooses someone to hate whether we ask it to or not. The mechanism can be easy to spot in other people, not so easy in oneself, and some instances of it are more obvious than others.
Typically, and rather sneakily, it will choose someone (or a group) you already disapprove of for legitimate reasons. It will then blow the disapproval way out of all proportion. We in the West used to hate the Russians for example, and they in turn hated us, and this hatred was way beyond anything justified by our actual differences.
The exaggerated hatred of a group of people often goes hand in hand with hatred of a particular viewpoint or ideology. Hence the Americans took hating communism to absurd levels.
Racists choose foreigners to hate, that's pretty obvious. Less obvious is the fact that the mechanism is also at work in many people who hate racists. Nothing wrong with hating racism you may say. The trouble is the mechanism exaggerates it to an extent that people become irrational and cause more trouble than they save. Perfectly pleasant people get lynched for accidentally using a forbidden word regardless of the context or intent.
People love to indulge in a bit of righteous indignation.
Relationships Reality
When it comes to RELATIONSHIPS, its about time we grew up and faced reality.
Love doesn’t, never has and never will follow the neat little rules we try and impose on it.
The idea, for example, that there is somebody for everyone, that you will meet them one day, you will fall in love and you will live happily ever after is laughable nonsense.
It does happen, but we all know it’s extremely rare.
In the real world, many of us will have all sorts of different relationships, of various lengths, with varying amounts of love, sex, companionship, commitment – various people will be right for us at different times and in different ways.
Many of us may find that we ‘love’ more than one person, or that we have intense ‘likes’ for people and we’re not sure if its ‘love’ or not.
Silly question. Love is not black and white, it comes in infinite shapes and sizes.
The truth is, love is a mess.
A glorious, wonderful, exciting, chaotic mess!
People fall for the wrong people, they fall for people who are already 'spoken for', they fall for other people while they are in a relationship, they have affairs, they hurt people and they get hurt.
But its nobody’s fault - these things happen all the time - they are perfectly normal and natural.
They are reality.
If we’re grown up, rational people we should accept this reality. In fact we should not only accept it, we should celebrate it.
We should embrace the chaos.
Love is a mad roller coaster ride. It can be the most wonderful thing in life, and it can be hell. Nothing else can give us such joy and elation, but nothing else can hurt so bad.
There will be ups and downs, periods of relative calm, moments of elation and moments of despair. If you start out knowing and expecting this, it’s much easier to ride out the lows.
And embracing the chaos means throwing out all the rules.
The rules don’t work. They box us in and tie us down; they restrict and strangle our love.
The exclusivity rules for example are just awful. We’re supposed to put all our eggs in one basket. Once we have a lover, we are supposed to ‘forsake all others'. Even if we feel love for another person who needs that love we must withhold it.
This creates a world of have and have-nots. As everyone stampedes to grab a partner before they’re all snapped up, some people inevitably, and often through no fault of their own, get left out.
These poor souls are left with NO love, NO sex, NO hugs, NO deep intimacy in their lives. And these are things that we all need for our emotional, psychological and physical well being.
But it’s even worse than that – depending so much on our one main relationship puts such a strain on it that it may fail, or lose all its sparkle.
And we’re so scared of getting left out that we sometimes grab onto a partner even if they’re not right for us, then we inevitably meet someone more suitable, fall for them but suppress that love because its ‘wrong’.
NO LOVE IS WRONG. All love is good.
Any love suppressed is a stupid tragic waste.
Relationships have become competitive:
“must get a lover – pick a target – shove everyone else out the way - grab on and hold on – MINE now – don’t let anyone else near – all you single people can go to hell – I’M SORTED”.
It’s a selfish, grabbing, clinging, possessive love. YUK!
It seems to me very likely that the obsessive love that leads to stalking etc. is made more likely by our current approach.
With the current system, we judge relationships by how long they are. Longer is better.
If you stop and think about this for more than about five seconds you realise it is utterly idiotic.
Yes of course, good relationships tend to last longer than bad ones, but not necessarily, and making length the goal is ridiculous.
What matters is the quality of the relationship – how long it lasts is almost irrelevant.
A bad relationship might last sixty years if both parties are too scared to break free. A good relationship might end quickly for all kinds of reasons.
I’m not saying you should give up at the first sign of any problems, but if length is the goal people end up struggling on for years when they just need to let go.
Staying together for a long time is celebrated. Having a large number of partners is frowned upon.
This makes NO SENSE.
Neither should be celebrated. Neither should be frowned upon.
We have the idiotic ideal of the one, exclusive love that lasts for ever. Hardly any of us achieve this, and we beat ourselves up for failing.
We think ‘one love forever’ is ‘better’, but surely someone who has had an impressively large number of partners has lived more, learnt more, grown more and had a fuller life.
We must liberate ourselves from all this nonsense.
The current love relationship model is a disaster. It is nasty, selfish, childish and stupid.
We must change to a rational approach to love; one that faces reality.
You might think that sounds unromantic.
WRONG. Quite the opposite. Our current rules stifle romance.
I want more love, more romance, I want to liberate us so we can embrace all the wonderful positive feelings we have for each other.
Some people will have one exclusive love for ever, and that’s great, but lots of others will have many and varied relationships and that’s great too.
Be positive. Face reality. Embrace the chaos.
Fully grown up, whole and independent individuals love each other unconditionally, and its a giving love, not a needy love. They don’t mind being single, so they flow in and out of relationships more easily, and if they do stay with one for a long time it will be because they have found a soulmate, not because they’re scared to leave.
The enlightened way is to give your love freely, not to expect any back, and to joyously embrace any that comes your way.
This may well be unattainable for most of us, but most of us don’t even try, because we believe the standard jealous, possessive model for relationships.
Assisted Dying
Justin Welby has been a vocal opponent of assisted suicide but his arguments make very little sense.
He says that allowing assisted suicide would amount to abandoning ‘respect for the lives of others’. Surely respecting the lives of others means allowing them to make their own decisions about their own lives and their own deaths. He wants to refuse an option to people because he doesn’t trust them to make their own free choices – that’s not respecting people, that’s treating them like children.
What does respect for ‘life’ mean? We should respect people and respect their different views and outlooks.
He says that although suicide is legal, we would try very hard to stop anyone actually doing it, and he says the change in the law would ‘turn this on it’s head’. On the contrary – the present law is illogical and unfair. Why should suicide be effectively illegal to those who are not able to carry it out for themselves (people who are more likely to have a good reason to do it). Assisted suicide should be brought into line with suicide. Both should be legal. We would still be free to try and talk someone out of actually going through with either of them.
Welby says the change in the law would be one of ‘monumental proportions’. No. Doctors already regularly face decisions over whether to carry on keeping a particular patient alive or to let them die. The new law just adds the patients own wishes into the equation, and rightly so.
Some people worry about a ‘slippery slope’ but this is the daftest argument of all. It effectively says ‘'We mustn’t go as far as it is right to go, because it would be wrong to go further than that', which is frankly loopy. If there is a slippery slope we’re already on it, because suicide is already legal. But as someone who supports assisted suicide, getting it adopted feels more like climbing a mountain. There is so much opposition to these things that there is no slippery slope.
Opponents of assisted dying are worried that some people may feel under pressure to die, so as not to be a burden etc. They are basically saying that we should deny a basic human right to everyone in case some people are coerced into it.
If assisted suicide is legal some people may feel under pressure to die, but it is at least possible to prevent that happening. If it’s not legal then some people will be forced to go on suffering when they want to die. We’re worried that some people wont be able to choose freely so we don’t let anyone choose freely. Where’s the sense in that?
Welby talks of a sword of Damacles hanging over elderly people. But I feel a sword of Damacles hanging over me now, knowing that if I am suffering and I want to die, no-one will be allowed to help me. To me this seems an unbearable and terrifying prospect.
And in a way that’s the point – TO ME. We all feel differently about these things. I have no desire to force assisted suicide onto Archbishop Welby or anyone else, so why does he wish to force me to go on suffering?
Running through Welby’s arguments is a particular attitude to death. His sword of Damacles is death, mine is suffering. He seems to regard death as a terrible thing. I don’t. Death is not good or bad, its inevitable. I don’t fear death but I fear dying, and I fear not being in control of it.
I recently had a cat put down. She had various illnesses and was not getting much enjoyment out of life. The vet injected her and she was dead within seconds. It was quiet, quick, painless, dignified. I wish we could treat humans as well as we treat pets.
What I don’t understand is why we cant have some kind of opt out or opt in system. I want the right to make a legally binding declaration that I wish assisted suicide to be available to me if I want it. This eliminates most of the problems. People like me can sign up, just as we might make a will, long before there is any potential pressure on us to die. And those who have not signed up may be pressured into it when they are terminally ill, but this would be evident to the doctor and could be taken into account.
Whatever happens, the status quo is unacceptable. Personally, I find it utterly outrageous that I will not be able to ask for my own life to be ended when and how I want.