Live merrily, oh my friends, free from cares, perplexity, anguish, grief of mind, live merrily.
Marsilius Ficinus, quoted by Robert Burton in Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire! — Blake, ‘Milton’, 1804
We don’t care. — Punk slogan, 1977
When it comes to anxiety, I’m here to say: ‘It’s not your fault.’Shed the burden: that dreadful, gnawing, stomach-churning sense that things are awry mixed with a chronic sense of powerlessness is the simple result of living in an anxious age, oppressed by Puritans, imprisoned by career, humiliated by bosses, attacked by banks, seduced by celebrity, bored by TV, forever hoping, fearing or regretting. It – the Thing, the Man, the System, the Combine, the Construct, whatever we want to call the structures of power – wants you to be anxious. Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business. Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food, so the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away.
The veritable stream of scare stories in the newspapers about rising crime makes us feel anxious. Newspapers set out to provide entertainment and gossip, stories that feed our need for shock and horror. They do it well. Flick through the Daily Mail on any given day and you’ll find that nine out of ten stories are negative and unsettling. Every radio bulletin and every TV news show, every newspaper and many of our daily conversations drive home the same message: worry, worry, worry. It’s a dangerous world out there, filled with crazy, suicidal, bomb-hurling terrorists and murderers and thieves and rotters and natural disasters. Stay home! Watch TV! Buy stuff on the web! Curl up on the sofa with a DVD! In the words of the Black Flag song ‘TV Party’: ‘TV news knows what it’s like out there, it’s a scare!’ As in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we are told that we are in a perpetual state of war – it’s just that the enemy sometimes changes. We are no longer at war with the IRA; we are now at war with Al-Qaeda. Different enemy, same anxiety and same end result: mass powerlessness.
But if we bother to investigate these myths for a few seconds, they soon reveal themselves to be mere convenient fictions. According to the brilliant anxiety analyst Brian Dean, the truth is that crime rates have remained fairly constant for the last 150 years. Dean maintains that our fear of crime is vastly out of proportion to the reality. The truth is that we face far more danger from automobile accidents and heart disease than from crime. Motor accidents kill ten people a day in the UK, and heart disease hundreds, but no one talks about banning cars or criminalizing the stress that puts a strain on the heart. The propaganda of insecurity, for Dean, is at the root of the problem: ‘Our beliefs programme our realities. If we believe that the universe is fundamentally unsafe, then we’re going to experience perpetual anxiety – which isn’t a good way to operate our brains.’
Our work, organized into the cursed jobs system, doesn’t help, condemning as it does so many of us to meaningless toil. E. F. Schumacher was the great thinker behind the book Small is Beautiful. An anarchist and an idler at heart, he argued that the very enormity, the giant, impossible, dizzying scale of modern-day capitalism saps the spirit. He also believed that this enormity had made work into something pointless, boring, souldestroying, something to put up with, a necessary evil rather than a pleasure. In his book Good Work, he argues that industrial society causes anxiety because, by focusing primarily on greed – or what the medievals called the sin of avaritia – it doesn’t allow time for the expression of our nobler faculties:
Everywhere shows this evil characteristic of incessantly stimulating greed and avarice. .. mechanical, artificial, divorced from nature, utilizing only the smallest part of man’s potential capabilities, it sentences the great majority of workers to spending their working lives in a way which contains no worthy challenge, no stimulus to self-perfection, no chance of development, no element of Beauty, Truth, Goodness. I say therefore that it is a great evil – perhaps the greatest evil – of modern industrial society that, through its immensely involved nature, it imposes an undue nervous strain and absorbs an undue proportion of man’s attention.
In the current scheme of things, when we’re not working, we’re consuming. We leave the factory gates and pour our wages straight back into the system at Tesco’s. We suffer a strange split in our roles in society between that of worker and consumer, the oppressed and the courted. At least in the nineteenth century people knew they were merely a pair of hands operating a machine and that they were being exploited for another’s profit. Therefore, it was perhaps easier to rebel. The contract was straightforward. Certainly, we all know that a vigorous culture of resistance grew up among the workers in the nineteenth century, the era of work and slavery. Now, though, the moment we leave the factory gates and start to make our way back home, we the are serenaded from all sides by advertising. The service culture makes us into little princes surrounded by simpering courtiers eager to curry favour so that we will give them our cash or let them have their wicked way with us. They make us feel important. The world of advertising practises its dark arts of seduction. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), the fantastically carefree Situationist Guy Debord put it like this:
The worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is plainly showed to him by all the forms of the organization and supervision or production, now finds himself, every day, outside of production, and in the guise of a consumer; with zealous politeness, he is, seemingly, treated as an adult. At this point, the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s ‘leisure and humanity’.
The commercial world, then, treats us like celebrities – ‘Because you’re worth it,’ it says. It flatters and kowtows to us and keeps on doing so right up until the moment when we hand over our credit-card details. Then we are cast aside and condemned to a purgatory of being held in a queue on a customer service line for all eternity. What fools we are.
The whole panoply of modern state control, also, is surely designed to make us feel nervous. The very institutions and devices that are sold to us as comforts and security measures create insecurity by constantly reminding us of dangers. Police; speed cameras; CCTV cameras; burglar alarms. Those two dark jailors Health and Safety are used by the interferers to foist ever more stringent attacks on our liberties. It’s worth remembering, for example, that when the police force was proposed by Home Secretary Robert Peel in 1828, there was a huge outcry from the people, who complained about the attack on their freedoms that such an idea represented. Before the government-run police force, law-keeping was managed by locally elected constables. There is now a colossal machinery of state to deal with perhaps 50,000 hard-core criminals in the country, while the 60 million lawabiding citizens have to suffer. These devices are an attack on spontaneous enjoyment of life, on pleasure.
I am anti-crime, but not because I morally disapprove of lawbreaking – in fact, I am attracted to criminals and the ASBO kids precisely because their criminality flags their refusal to submit to authority. Delinquency is a sign of life. I am against crime because it feeds straight into the government system: for every crime committed, there is a tenfold attack on personal liberties. One bomb leads to a thousand new laws. Governments love crime, as crime gives them a reason to exist – protection of the citizenry – and an excuse to control us. Therefore, the real anarchist should avoid criminal acts at all costs.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is becoming a reality in other ways, too. At the time of writing, the US government is trying to subpoena the records of Google, the search engine which can record everything we have searched for, thus gaining an insight into the innermost workings of our minds. The Internet threatens to turn from being a tool of liberation into a tool of surveillance, a spy in every home. I suppose the same thing could happen to our emails. Our most intimate conversations are being logged, recorded, saved, and they will be sitting for ever on some giant hard drive should the authorities need to look at them in the future. Big Brother is not only watching us but listening to us, eavesdropping on us and even peering into our brains and inspecting the contents of our very souls. What’s more, we have submitted entirely voluntarily to this system. It was never like this with the Royal Mail. And now there is a new threat to our civil liberties in the U.K. in the form of ID cards, on which will be recorded our misdemeanours
Anxiety and our being surrounded by anxiety-inducing agents is at the absolute centre of the capitalist project. That is why I say: ‘It’s not your fault.’ Everywhere, the same myth is perpetuated: you are just one object away from happiness. It could be the latest U2 album, a donation to charity, a more comprehensive insurance policy, a different credit card, a fabulous holiday, a better job, a faster car. .. However many times we are disappointed by the failure of this myth to bring us satisfaction, we keep coming back for more. In the words of CRASS founder, Penny Rimbaud, we ‘feed the hand that bites us’. We remain unsatisfied. Capitalism is constantly and perpetually disappointing. The very thing that promises you freedom can quickly
become the thing that oppresses you.
Anxiety is the sacrifice of creativity in the service of security. It is the giving up of personal freedoms in return for the promise, never fulfilled, of comfort, cotton wool, air-conditioned shopping centres. Security is a myth; it simply doesn’t exist. This does not stop us, however, from constantly chasing it.
Some of us may find a sort of pleasure in anxiety and its opposites, just as some enjoy swinging from white to brown, crack to heroin, from the highs to the lows. I recently sat next to a genial man in his sixties in the dining car of a train. He asked if I wanted to have a look at his Evening Standard. I said, no, that newspapers made me feel anxious by parading a load of problems which I am utterly powerless to do anything about. He replied: ‘Oh, I rather like feeling anxious. Then I have a drink!’
We are still scandalously encouraged by the medical drugpushing establishment to believe that heart disease can be avoided by mechanical methods, i.e. stopping smoking or taking toxic pills, when it is perfectly obvious that although these might be contributory factors, the real cause of heart disease is an uneasy heart.
Idleness, doing nothing – literally doing nothing – can help fight anxiety. One strategy is simply to forget, to abandon your self and let things flow through you. Nietzsche recommends this:
To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all, for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, premeditation (for our organism is an oligarchy) – that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.
By ‘forgetfulness’, Nietzsche means the skill of learning to live. Remembering can be an enemy. How often do we lie awake at night ruminating painfully on all the things that we have to do in the future and all the things in the past that we have done wrong? This to me is why a little moderate boozing is a splendid idea, as long as the quality is high. Real ale is compost for the soul. And this is also why it is important to read decent stuff. Put quality materials into your mind, quality ingredients. A diet of good writing, without crappy newspapers and magazines, which just make the anxiety worse, will produce quality thoughts and a self-sufficient, resourceful person. Feed your mind.
In gardening, the reduced-effort method of mulching the soil with rich organic matter rather than laboriously digging it every year is coming into vogue. This is the natural, low-work way. It allows nature to get on with it with minimum intervention from man. It is the same with your mind: mulch it with quality ingredients, books, food and beauty, and it will become fertile and produce useful and beautiful things. Mulching the mind also involves a lot less work than digging it up. Digging can actually be harmful, as it will bring weed seeds to the surface that otherwise would have lain dormant. These weed seeds will then germinate and produce a new load of unnecessary work.
We also need a diet of stimulating company, good cheer, merriment, feasting and fun. ‘Good cheer’ or, to put it in the modern vernacular, ‘having a laugh with your mates’, is one of the highest pleasures that life has to offer and can blot out those anxious feelings, largely by revealing that they are shared. Removing newspapers and TV from your life helps enormously. I have managed to cut down to one newspaper a week, which leaves a lot more time to concentrate on the important things in life, like drinking and music. Replace TV with friends, and newspapers with books.
For those of us ‘in populous city pent’, as Coleridge put it, I would highly recommend avoiding the underground and bicycling instead. I had two years of commuting in London by bike. Fifteen miles of cycling a day, nearly two hours’ worth, and what a joy it was. Cycling brings an exhilarating sense of freedom and self-mastery as well as a very enjoyable sense of not spending money. You coast through the city, in it but not of it, living it and not controlled by it. On buses and trains, you are sitting targets for the advertising hoardings. On a bike, you can simply sail past them. People cite ‘danger’ as a reason to avoid cycling, but this is a pathetic excuse and an example of the mean spirit that this book is fighting. So what if there’s a little danger in your life? That’s good. Wake up! If you can’t face the idea of a bicycle, then leave a lot of time for your journey and sit on the top deck of the bus. This, too, can be a great pleasure, for the same reason: you float through the city, a detached observer. I have experienced moments of true joy when on the bus, moments when I could almost repudiate everything I have written above and truly believe that this is a wonderful world. Or walk! Walk through the parks and admire the noble gardens! But, whatever you do, avoid the underground. As my friend Mark Manning, also known as Zodiac Mindwarp, says, ‘I can’t sit staring in silence at people I don’t know.’
Another strategy for dealing with anxiety is to ensure that your day is varied. One of the joys of living in the country is that there is plenty of physical work to do. Three or four afternoons a week, I trudge up to my vegetable patch and plant, dig, weed, cart muck or just stare. A diet of solely mental work is suffocating. ‘It is obviously much easier for a hard-working peasant to keep his mind attuned to the divine than for a strained office worker,’ says Schumacher. And this is proved by my neighbour, Farmer John. One of the great things, he says, about being a farmer, is the amount of quality thinking time you get. Another idea: do not go to the gym. Gyms are all mixed up with vanity and money, with the absurd quest for perfection. They are the consumer ethic transferred to the body. They are anti-thought, and their giant screens blot out our minds and divert us from our selves. Sometimes I think that life is becoming no more than staring at a screen. We stare at a screen all day at work. We stare at screens in the gym. Buses now have screens installed in them. There are screens on trains. Then we get home and stare at our computer screen before staring at the TV screen. For entertainment, we stare at cinema screens. Work, rest and play: all involve staring at screens. Screens make us into passive receivers. Smash the screen and find a pencil and a piece of paper instead. Goodbye, TV; hello, chalk!
The neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale was on the right track when he smashed up a computer screen on stage. By parading a stream of other people’s lives in front of us, screens remove the responsibility to create our own lives. We watch other people doing things instead of doing them ourselves. This makes us radically powerless, and powerlessness leads to anxiety. And anxiety leads to shopping. Shopping leads to debt. Debt leads back to anxiety.
Another simple solution to anxiety is to embrace a fatalistic theology. Catholics, say, are probably less anxious than Protestants. Buddhists are certainly less anxious than Jews. If you believe that there’s nothing much that you can do that makes any sense other than to enjoy yourself, then your anxiety will fade. If you have that Puritan cast of mind and feel that you are terribly important in the world and it really matters what you do, then your anxiety will increase. Self-importance breeds anxiety (see Chapter 24).We must learn not to care – not in the sense of being selfish but in the sense of being carefree. Today, we advertise ourselves as ‘caring’ people and fling flowers at the graves of strangers in order to prove our ‘caring’ nature to anyone who might be looking. ‘I’m a really caring person,’ we say, a phrase that means precisely nothing other than that we burden ourselves with the problems of others with no practical beneficial effect whatsoever. Talk of being caring is cant.
So, free yourself of care. To become cheerful and carefree is your revolutionary duty as a freedom-seeker. Stop working; stop buying; start living. Feast, drink. Eat capons and good hams. Drink spiced wines and fine ales. Make your table groan with food. Make jam and chutney. Play the hurdy-gurdy. Get a piano. I have just converted my home pub into a music room. We found an old honkytonk piano which was practically free. So now we can have sing-songs round the old Joanna. Just as your anxiety is a product of your imagination, albeit influenced by the commercial world, so your imagination has the power to replace it with good cheer.
Excerpted from THE FREEDOM MANIFESTO by Tom Hodgkinson Copyright 2006.
