The Origins of Unhappiness, by David Smail (1993)

Instead of looking inward to detect and eradicate within ourselves the products of 'psychopathology', we need to direct our gaze out into the world to identify the sources of our pain and unhappiness. Instead of burdening ourselves with, in one form or another, the responsibility for 'symptoms' of 'illness', 'neurotic fears', 'unconscious complexes', 'faulty cognitions' and other failures of development and understanding, we would do better to clarify what is wrong with a social world which gives rise to such forms of suffering.

I have become less and less able to see the people who consult me as having anything 'wrong' with them, and more and more aware of the constrains which are placed on their ability to escape the distress they experience.

For what are on offer in the psychotherapeutic bazaar are not so much - indeed, are not at all - substantiated theories of psychological damage or demonstrably effective cures of emotional pain and confusion, but a range of more or less homespun philosophies of life and the attendant strategies they spawn for trying to cope with it.

Very often the need for solidarity with a person who is perceived as possessing power in relation to the individual's predicament outweighs any rational assessment of how effective that power actually is. [...]

There is a great deal of comfort to be gained from association with someone who is able to convince you that s/he knows what s/he is doing, even if s/he doesn't.

The notion that there is something 'wrong' with the person in distress which has to be put 'right' is absolutely central to the medical and psychological disciplines which have grown up over the past 150 years. [...]

And yet the evidence that despair, confusion, misery and madness can really usefully be conceived of as varieties of 'pathology' is slender in the extreme, and, even at its most persuasive, rests on the ideological interpretation of otherwise ambiguous research findings rather than on any intellectually compelling demonstration of its validity.

What is a 'mentally healthy' way of life - for instance, is compliance better than opposition, or assertiveness preferable to meekness?

For the problem psychologists and psychotherapists are addressing is not really a technical one of how to cure an illness or adjust an abnormality, but how to live a life, and that is simply not a closed question of the kind which can expect a simple answer.

It would take an optimist of outstanding proportions to expect a mere book to make any difference to this state of affairs, but nevertheless I think some of the main reasons for it are discernible, and need to be stated at every opportunity.

For power is the social element in which we exist. It is almost impossible to think of a human experience which is not shaped by power, does not carry either a positive or negative charge of power. We are thrown at birth into the most highly charged and potentially shocking field of power which it is possible to imagine. At no other point in life is the disparity of the power between the individual (the infant) and the adults (usually parents) around it likely to be so great. Stamped at the root of our experience is a message of overwhelming significance - that we have to deal with a world which is immeasurably more powerful than ourselves.

The world forces on us at the earliest point of our experience strategies for dealing with it which I doubt we ever really abandon.

[...] I suspect that the 'psychodynamic' view which relates 'panic attacks' to early experiences of abandonment is often very close to the mark.

How insightlessly unfortunate that view of 'childcare' which suggested that babies who disturb their parents' peace should be left to 'cry themselves to sleep'. What failure of empathy could see such 'sleep' as anything but exhausted panic and despair, could fail to imagine the agony of a powerless little creature whose world, from its perspective, had quite literally deserted it? And how inevitable that such an experience, especially if repeated a few times, should come to lie in wait as the not inappropriate response to all those occasions in later life when the threat of abandonment is reiterated. Such threats stir into life what the individual knows from his or her earliest experiences.

We have all been children, and we all know that to be a child is to be at the mercy of adults.

The whole of our early experience is acquired in a state of 'littleness' through which most of us come to accept without question - even without noticing it - a world which is shaped and structured through and through by powers we have virtually no alternative but to obey.

As adults we would be outraged by the treatment which as children we accept - and are expected to accept - without demur.

Such power acts as a stamp on the child's experience, it impresses its content on the growing organism with a force which marks that organism - the person - for ever. Power exacts respect and 'loyalty' towards whatever it presents as its central demand. The stances the child takes up towards the issues life presents it with are shaped and authorized by power. The parental word is the word of God.

We often overlook, I think, the close relationship of love to power. We prefer to think of love as unsullied by the indecency of power, or even opposed to it. And yet, when we are little, the form our loving takes is exacted by power. [...] uncomfortable as it might be to suggest it, our learning to love contains a strong element of choiceless dependence.

For one of the services performed by orthodox psychology within what Michel Foucault has called the 'discourse of power' has been to reinforce the tendency already established in human beings to look a little further than their noses for the causes of their unhappiness. Although most of us are ready to accept that our distress stems from 'circumstances beyond our control', we usually identify such circumstances as those we can see, and have little interest in pursuing their origins out into the further reaches of the social network. Psychology, in encouraging us to restrict our gaze to the microenvironments which provide the context of our personal experience - the ambit of our personal being - wittingly or unwittingly aids the process whereby the machinery of social injustice is kept out of sight.

Therapeutic psychology has been remarkably silent about the actual experience of relative social insignificance - the awareness of being among the 'little people'. This latter is, of course, essentially the experience of class, and while a great deal of sociological attention has been focused on the class issue, I can think of no approach within the so-called psychotherapies which takes seriously the way class position is reflected in the self-consciousness of the individual. The reason for this, no doubt, is once again the fact that therapeutic psychology prefers to overlook difficulties which could not plausibly be dealt with within the confines of the 'therapeutic relationship', and though individuals are often exhorted by their therapists to 'esteem' themselves more highly (it is, of course, mainly those in the lower-class brackets who are going to be disadvantaged by their position), class is fairly inescapably a social phenomenon, and not one over which individual people can be expected to exercise a great deal of control.

Class disadvantage is a form of injury inflicted on the person at birth. Even those who, in contrast with the class fugitive, heroically stand their ground and fight for social change, who use their experience of oppression to try to modify the system rather than to acquire the secrets of exploitation themselves, even they cannot escape the injurious effects of caste making. The most admirable working-class leaders often betray a kind of apprehensive awareness of somehow being out of bounds. The uneasy handling by union leaders of the language of the 'educated middle class', so easily lampooned by the unkind satirist, is no doubt an unavoidable consequence of the secondary acquisition (as opposed to the 'interbreeding') of intellectual powers, but the peppering of their speech with expressions such as 'with respect', the bodily posture which is either defiantly stiff or defensively hunched, testify to a fear of the power they challenge which, though certainly not groundless, probably exists less as a response to any immediate reality than as a built-in part of their own experience of themselves as people. The confident slouch of the hands-in-pockets, old Etonian cabinet minister speaks not so much of a current possession of power (on some measures the union boss might posses as much) as of a confidence in social worth which was sucked in with his mother's milk.

At the root of their experience is an acceptance of the valuation placed upon them - their worthlessness is their personal worthlessness, and they wither before the public gaze as a plant withers before the icy wind.

She is one of those rare people who have a kind of innocent clear-sightedness which rests on a combination of irrepressible honesty and great intelligence. In many ways her intuitive sensitivity is far too finely tuned for the world in which she has found herself, and there is within her a latent conceptual power, an unrequited love of truth that needs desperately to be met by an outside world which understands it. [...]

Mrs MacFarlane had not learned to criticize her circumstances; she had simply accepted her proximal reality as the actuality of an unchangeable world, and (with medical encouragement) had interpreted the protests of her nervous system as an indication of weakness and instability rather than as an entirely natural response to painful difficulties.

Mrs MacFarlane bears no trace of snobbery, indeed she shows no particular awareness of social classification of any kind, and is warmly acceptant of most of the people she encounters from day to day. The kind of treachery 'class fugitives' display towards those with whom they shared their origins plays no part in Mrs MacFarlane's reasons for voting for a political party which is in fact either totally indifferent or hostile to her interests. Her political sympathies reflect, rather, a wish to emphasize her moral distance from rock bottom. Not only does she vote Conservative, but she associates the whole language of the politics of the left, its references to 'the working class', 'socialism', etc., with a degraded and dissolute world from which all moral decency has disappeared. She is caught in an ideological mystification which indissolubly associates the cure with the condition and so prevents her from criticizing the grounds of her own unhappiness.

Class injury takes another form where loving and concerned, but socially deferential, 'respectable working-class' parents bring up their children to honour middle-class values - especially educational ones - at the same time as drilling them in the art of 'knowing their place' and generally not getting ideas above their station. Products of this combination often find themselves occupying space that they feel is not rightfully theirs, living the life of a displaced person but without ever having known quite where they were displaced from.

What we need is not an unlimited supply of psychological therapy so much as the rehabilitation of politics: the realization, that is, that power can be used for good as well as for ill, and should be.

Psychology and philosophy themselves postulate countless variants on the theme of 'motive', 'impulse', 'will', 'responsibility', etc., all of which similarly seek proximal causes for actions which, in fact, can only be accounted for within a very much wider environmental power structure. [...]

Both our own actions and the actions of those around us may be mysterious not because we cannot penetrate the depths of each other's inner worlds, unconscious minds, etc., but because we simply cannot see over the power horizons which limit our view of the causes of things. We are this restricted to telling ourselves stories, making guesses, speculating and surmising about happenings in our proximal worlds which have distal causes well out of sight.

The illusion of accessibility to the past - greatly and to my mind illegitimately exploited by 'cognitive' psychologists which place heavy therapeutic emphasis on the reinterpretation of history - is probably maintained by an unexamined assumptions most of us have that the past somehow exists in the present as memories in some for of internal space. It may easily seem to us that we can reach into this space, shuffle its contents around and so set in train a chain of readjustments which will lead to a radical difference in the way we feel now.

Interestingly, it is felt that such retrospective adjustments are possible only win those matters of what one might call character which are typically subject to moral scrutiny and debate; nobody is likely to assume that the more solid and indisputable achievements of past learning - such as language acquisition or the possession of particular practical abilities - are open to the same kind of interior tinkering. While it might be thought that I can examine my past and revise my reasons for being hostile or anxious, nobody expects me to be able - however expedient it might be - to forget my knowledge of English and acquire one of Chinese by merely recalling the circumstances of my learning the former and reflecting on the desirability of knowing the latter.

Once I have learned to ride a bicycle or play the piano I cannot choose to forget, thought of course such abilities may fade with the course of time.

The idea that we are in large part the products of a past which we can do nothing to change - not to mention a present whose influences are well out of reach - suggests to me that it would be valuable to resurrect a concept of 'character' which has largely disappeared from psychology. 'Character' gave way to 'personality'.

In fact, people are the people that they are by reason of the things which have happened to them and the nature of the world in which they are currently having to live their lives.

Our psychology is not ours to manipulate at will and we cannot detach it from the social powers which hold it in place.

The explanation of individual experience and conduct is, then, to be sought in a complex set of social interactions in which the most likely pattern is for extremely powerful distal events - political or economic perhaps - to reverberate through a network of influence and interest until they work themselves out in the proximal relations which make up the context of the individual's personal life.

Moralizing and psychologizing are the stock in trade of those whose interest it is to narrow the power horizon of the average citizen, and so the language used is a relentlessly proximal one of motive and blame rather than cause and effect. The mass media wield their ideological power in an effort to define reality, not to explore and expose its nature.

Those who truly stand in isolation are the people at the bottom of the power pyramid, so stripped of any kind of institutional or socially shared power that they are reduced in the final analysis to the utterly proximal powers afforded to their mere existence as embodied individuals: for a man this may mean recourse to brute force, for a woman to the bartering of her sexuality.

Almost no adult individual is totally powerless, if only because, as I have indicated, he or she may have recourse to the powers afforded by embodiment. While such power may at times reach a zenith of quite spectacular violence, it is still in the overall scale of things extremely puny, and will be called upon with any regularity only by the socially least advantaged members of society. The power afforded by the simple act of association with others is very much more effective, and for this reason alone the more powerful are always likely to seek to limit the extent to which the less powerful are able to form associations of any kind.

Exploitation of the phenomena of power by association is, of course, well recognized by those who need to maintain and augment their ideological capital by patronizing the powerless and cultivating their interest. Almost everyone can feel part of the Royal Family if the ideological machinery is tended carefully enough, and if the paparazzi didn't exist, the rich and famous would have to invent them.

Our experience is unintelligible if we are not taught a language with which to describe it.

What makes some manifestations of 'psychopathology' so puzzling is precisely the fact that there are for one reason or another no adequate 'forms' through which they can be rendered socially intelligible. [...] What makes somebody 'mad' is not some mysterious internal process or biological fault 'inside' him or her, nor indeed and internal breakdown of personal rationality, but the failure of outer form to give communicable meaning to his or her experience of a world which is and was precisely as real as any other.

There is, in my view, little doubt that it is in the interest of the distal powers of a virtually global economy which depends on ceaseless growth, mediated more proximally by the complex disciplinary machinery of a managerial bureaucracy, to manufacture a mass consumership intent on its private satisfactions, trained to attribute its discomforts to 'internal' faults and failings, and detached from public 'forms' which might make possible an accurate critique of its situation.

Fright, anger, superstition and suspicion are prominent among the basic biological characteristics which we have in common, and it is surely no accident that when social cohesion can no longer be maintained through common allegiance to culturally sophisticated and highly developed categories of meaning, one witnesses the emergence of aggressive, magical and paranoid forms of social order - as for example in genocidal racialism, religious fanaticism and other forms of association round fundamentally irrational but emotionally highly charged systems of meaning.

Margaret Thatcher and her government were merely representatives of a culture which had been flourishing in the Western world long before it made its presence so forcibly felt in Britain. The political influence was not the origin of this culture, but the concentration of power which gave it impetus. The Thatcher government were not the originators but the engineers - the managers - of powers which had already thoroughly dominated the other side of the North Atlantic for some time, and were now blowing across it in a gale.

A significant part of the ideology of 'postmodernism' or 'postindustrialism' was designed to loosen allegiance to 'outmoded' intellectual, philosophical and ethical systems which threatened to impede the permeation of every level of society by business concepts and practices.

A world without truth is an adman's dream, and, when it comes to respect for the truth, there was left following the revolution almost no distinction between the most exalted strata of the academy and the most banal fabrications of television advertising.

Business must dispense with truth if it is to avoid limits on its expansion and to be able to ceaselessly invent new needs.

Managerial mediocrats are often very nice people, completely unaware of the sources of the power they are mediating, and it's hard to take exception to their activity if you locate the reasons for it somewhere behind their kind and obviously well-meaning eyes.

The mediocracy maintains the credibility of its managerial rule, as well as the ultimate viability of its enterprise, by exploiting the knowledegable. It cannot, of course, become knowledgeable itself without ceasing to be mediocre.

Technical and professional knowledge becomes 'mystified' as something which no manager could be expected to have, but which needs to be subject to management control through the exercise of economic power. Managerial 'expertise' thus becomes quite detached from technical know-how, which it makes economically subordinate - its servant rather than a necessary requirement of its own function. Not only, then, is mediocratic management protected from recognition of its own mediocrity, but it places itself in a relation of control over the technical knowledge which might otherwise threaten it. Business, in other words, can take over professional knowledge without having to go to the trouble of actually acquiring it.

Even where professional expertise was not subjugated through the device of consultancy, many people performing technical functions vital to the concerns of an organization but incomprehensible to the mediocracy managing it found themselves in a painfully ambiguous role of indispensability coupled with low status.

It is very easy to come to believe that one has a special gift for counselling. [...] In truth, however, such is likely to be the experience of anyone of reasonable intelligence and good will who can shut up long enough to allow someone else to talk.

Now my point is not that such advice is wrong or misguided - much of it indeed is obvious common sense - but that it breaks down public 'forms' of appropriate social conduct and offers them back to the individual reconstituted as commercially available professional knowledge. Unintentionally, of course, it alienates people from their own bodily sensations and mediates their experience by making its meaning dependent on professional interpretation. The person becomes unable to say to him or herself: 'This terrible experience has numbed me', but must say rather: 'What can this strange numbness mean? I must seek the explanation from an appropriately qualified expert.'

'Relationships' had, in fact, to bear a heavier and heavier strain as they became billed as the main source of warmth, intimacy and satisfaction in a world which was otherwise more coldly competitive than it had been for decades [...]. It was, then, not surprising to find a growing army of professional advisers at hand to counsel those who found the strain too great and, once again, to imply thereby that the business of relationship was no amateur matter.

The function of this mediocratic caste of therapists and counsellors [...] also provided shock-absorption for a society in which emotional and psychological, as well as physical, damage was a necessary part of its economic and ideological policies. [...]

Counsellors performed the ideological function of representing as proximal causes of distress which were in fact distal, and then offered comfort and advice to those who identified themselves as falling short of the norm in 'coping skills', the 'management of stress', etc. What was essentially distal economic coercion was represented proximally as a remediable personal failure, and counsellors occupied the space vacated by reason in this conjuring trick to create a substitute 'credibility'.

Consumerism is, of course, not just a phenomenon of the eighties, but the necessary ideology of an economic system which depends for its survival on limitless expansion of the market. The logic of this system, its adamantine rationality, is inexorable, and its triumphant progress has spanned much more than a mere decade, but the special contribution of the eighties was perhaps to slacken the few remaining ethical brakes on the raw injunction to consume which lies at the root of, at least, affluent Western societies.

Even if the shreds of alternative ways of life remaining from religious and political systems which had placed convivial society higher than economic self-interest constituted by the beginning of the decade little more than a kind of desperate hypocrisy, they were in any case swept away by the assertions of a 'new right' which proclaimed its philosophy as competitive individualism with absolute confidence. There was, said Mrs Thatcher, no such thing as society. For individuals and families to grab what they could for themselves was presented, and widely accepted, no longer as selfishness or greed, but merely as the obvious and inevitably - and in a sense therefore the most sensible and virtuous - thing to do.

Life had for most people long been structured and shaped by the need for money and the craving for consumer goods. So far as Britain was concerned, the eighties simply made such concerns official and provided a formal ideological framework in which they could flourish.

Just as the yearly cycle is marked by a series of consumerist celebrations - birthdays, holidays, Christmas, etc. - so the course of our lives has tended increasingly to be demarcated more clearly by the spending sprees they give rise to than by their significance as social rites of passage.

The childhood preoccupation with 'toys' is a good example of this. Given a chance to talk to and occupy themselves with the adults around them, most children are fairly indifferent to toys. However, in a world in which those adults are themselves busily preoccupied with their own corners of the market, children have less chance of socializing than of learning the arts of consumership in their own specially prepared world of toys. Not only do they receive, from the moment their eyes can focus, a training in the acquisition and rapid obsolescence of consumer goods, but they are also inducted into a world of make-believe which offers virtually limitless market opportunities and which may very well serve to detach them for life from any commercially undesirable anchorage in the realities of social existence. [...]

There is, in fact, no recess of personal life, however intimate, immune to the intrusion of the market. Sexuality is a case in point. Early in adolescence the addiction power of male sexuality is commercially harnessed to a marketed female insecurity to create a model of 'relationship' which leaves both boys and girls - and later young men and women - at times incapable of controlling and almost always unable to understand both their sexual feelings and their need for intimacy.

Very few people have the confidence any longer to allow their subjective experience of their bodies to guide an understanding of their 'relationships'. A woman who doesn't feel as sexually rapacious as the heroines of her husband's videos is often easily persuaded that there is something ('frigidity') the matter with her. She is far less likely to take her body as a valid index of the state of her intimate environment than she is to regard it as a substandard commodity. Many women find themselves conforming with a king of weary despair to the fantasy-infused sexual expectations of their male partners authorized as 'normal' by a commercial world which relentlessly fetishizes sex. And man, as much deprived of an understanding of their own needs for tenderness as of the arts of expressing it, become totally mystified by their female partners' ultimate disgust with and fear of sex. The market defines as 'abnormal' (and hence in need of further consumer activity) states of social and interpersonal being which are an inevitable part of virtually everyone's experience, but which, like not wanting sex, offer no other market opportunity.

The predicament of the old gives the starkest testimony imaginable to the spiritual profligacy of our way of life. We have no use for their knowledge, for their memory, for their humour or for their love. We leave them as isolated as we dare in cold and lonely rooms where the most they are likely to have for company is a car, or a weekday visit from the district nurse. And, just as we talk most animatedly about our holidays, or our cars, or our microwaves, they will tell us, if they get the chance, about their operations, their pills, and the progress of their leg ulcers. My point is not a moralistic one intended to stir up shame or inspire new resolves to care. It is rather to indicate the structure of the boat we all find ourselves in, and in which, individually, we shall all eventually flounder.

There is, in fact, one stage of life where the market does seem, at least partially, to lose its grip in this way. The 'mid-life crisis' is not so much a personal breakdown as the temporary absence of a market structure to distract and absorb the energies of post-child-rearing, middle-aged people who have suddenly found themselves confronted by a world which offers little to preoccupy them other than the approach of old age and death. What inevitably feels like a personal hiatus may thus more meaningfully be understood as a gap in the market.

Consumption on this kind of scale is, of course, not a matter of spontaneous choice, but is maintained by the institutions of a highly elaborated culture. [...] Consumption is, of course, not restricted to any one social stratum, but then neither was work. Just as the economy used not to be able to function without an industrial proletariat exploited for the purposes of production, so now, in countries such as Britain, it cannot function without a semi-employed proletariat exploited for purposes of mass consumption. 'Enjoyment' thus becomes the social function of the mass of society on which the Business economy depends.

Consuming class people are more likely than their mediating class counterparts to feel an obligation to provide their small children with instant comforters like sweets, to provide the family with a restaurant-type service at meals [...], and to make the chief consumerist festivals like the summer holiday and Christmas into occasions for particularly lavish spending. The mediating class - successors to the 'old' middle class - will by contrast lay more stress on the importance of delayed satisfaction to occupancy of a social position which necessitates the exercise of managerial power.

The ultimate market success it to exploit the properties of the human nervous system such that a stimulated 'excitement' is followed by an 'instant satisfaction' in a maximally accelerated cycle. Food, drugs, alcohol, tobacco and sex clearly lend themselves admirable to the process of 'addictification', and the challenge to the market resides only in its refining and augmenting their addictive properties.

The ultimate Business logic is, then, to reduce the average member of the consuming class to an addict of the mass market, locked by the nervous system into an optimally cycled process of consumption, rendered immune to unprofitable distractions, dissociated from any form of solidarity which might offer resistance to the function of enjoyment.

What therapists have to realize, of course, is that their contact with their patient is not curing anything, but merely providing a form of empowering proximal solidarity which depends for its effectiveness on its continued existence. There is nothing the matter with this so long as the therapist is able to continue offering support and the patient is able to keep on paying for it.

Priests, doctors, and therapists have no doubt all in their different ways contributed to the professional mystification of comfort-giving, but there is really no secret about it. Its essence is to allow another person to be without trying to impose upon him or her either a responsibility for being that way or a blueprint for being another way.

What we are in most immediate need of as we suffer the torments of a cruel world are companions with whom to share our suffering. We need acknowledgement of our condition and affirmation of our experience.

If the causes of your distress are not inside you, but relatively far off in environmental space-time, can you really be expected to do anything much about them?

[...] a memory which has not been verbally encoded remains embodied as a feeling which simply cannot be turned into a coherent account.

Much of the time, to be sure, we don't know what we're doing or why, but this is not, as it is so often taken to be, a psychological mystery of the 'unconscious mind', but the rather prosaic result of our being unable to identify the environmental influences which operate upon us.

Whoever controls language, then, to a great extent also controls thought. In this way, as Foucault has established, the very nature of knowledge is bound up with the authorization of power. People who are submerged within a particular field of power often have great difficulty in giving credence to ways of speaking and thinking which originate from anywhere outside it.

But before [Steve] could voice such criticisms, he had to be, so to speak, offered a language in which to do so. It wasn't, of course, that he literally didn't know the words, but rather that he had not been accorded the authority to apply them to his experience in the way that the psychologist was suggesting.

We need to realize that, rather than the patient being a problem for the world, the world is a problem for the patient. We are the embodied products of environmental space-time. To make a different to our lives we need to be able to exert what little influence we have on the environment to make it, from our perspective, a little more benign. It is not we who need to change, but the world around us.

The ideological enterprise of psychology and psychotherapy has been to detach person from world so that social exploitation can be represented as personal breakdown.

The more one is able to reach out beyond the immediate proximal influences on one's life to impinge upon the structures which control them, the more chance one will stand of being able to relieve the distress they give rise to. The means which make such reaching out possible are, of course, precisely those which people have down the ages tried to appropriate in order to establish or maintain social and material advantage: money, education, association with powerful individuals or groups.

The great danger in the professionalization of help in the form of 'therapy' is that it hugs what little it knows to itself for commercial gain, rather than passing it on to its clients. [...]

Disparagement, certainly, is a feature of the psychiatric and psychological literature. It is extremely difficult to think of any major text in these fields which does not either belittle those who become the objects of its attention, or patronize them by holding before them an ideal of how they ought to be. At the same time, there is, of course, absolutely nothing to justify such professional conceit - no evidence that the authors of such texts know better than anyone else how to live their lives, and none that the application of their methods actually leads to a significant amelioration of distress.

We have nothing to thank those people for who seek in one way or another to pass judgement on the validity of our experience. Our pain is not an indication of what is the matter with us, but of something which is hurting us from outside.

But given the complexity of traffic, the number of people and the complexity of their differing aims in travelling, it is an astonishingly stable and predictable situation. So it certainly is not the case that we cannot and do not willingly conduct ourselves according to rules. What seems to permit us to do so is our being able to appreciate their usefulness and see that they have been constructed in our interest.

But if the Highway Code can command our assent, there seems to be very little, other than 'the market', to organize our conduct on the grander scale, and the absence of a coherent and codifiable moral order is making the experience of living increasingly difficult and painful for larger and larger numbers of people.

As a last resort people seem to seek refuge and stability by huddling together on any moral high ground that offers, whether in rigid adherence to 'politically correct' ideologies concerning gender and sexuality, etc., or in the sometimes quite fanatical espousal of surprisingly small-scale moralisms such as vegetarianism, anti-smoking campaigns, and so on.

It is quite remarkable, how politicians, when they are about to lie most blatantly, preface their utterance with 'the truth is . . .' The truth they invoke is the truth which constrains the opposition and shuts up objectors, the same truth to whose demands generations of school children have been terrorized into trying to conform, the truth which paralyses dissent and exacts obedience.

Our vulnerability to pain our recognition of it in others is what binds us across otherwise unbridgeable divides.

It seems that, in some circumstances at least, the more people are reduced to the status of suffering bodies, the more they are able to act with and for each other in a quintessentially moral way.

To exploit the difference between male and female [...], to invent and accentuate 'racial' issues, to valorize the body in terms of its sexual potency and make it the foundation of an industry of pornography, to invest it with symbols of power by any means available - all these are the techniques of a system which, to survive, must find every new ways of dividing and ruling, objectifying and commodifying. To manufacture physical differences and distinctions which generate shame, insecurity and competition is to distract us from the subjective embodiment which gives us our most fundamental solidarity.

In fact, of course, others seen as threatening may not so much possess power as occupy positions in which they are constrained to mediate it.

To identify evil in the embodiment of the evil-doer is to make a serious mistake, and is one which, of course, the interests of power are happy to have made.

Once rendered powerless, we are all the same. There is no need to execute the tyrant whose power has been removed, and to do so is merely a pointless cruelty. We need rather to dismantle the structures which make the acquisition of tyrannical power possible (a much more difficult and demanding task).

From an objective perspective, the absolute magnitude of power is negatively related to its proximity to the person. From a subjective perspective, the relative magnitude of power is positively related to its proximity to the person.