Conclusions on Happiness

A drawing from the midst of catastrophic mental breakdown. Tokyo, March 2016

In general, we wish happiness for the people we care about.

Nowadays I find it very difficult to feel this wish. Now it may just be that I am a terrible friend. But maybe there is something else to it, too.

In Japan, a country I am about to leave after five years, I experienced for the second time a long, dark night of the soul. It was most of all in the unspeakable pain of this ordeal that I became conscious of the smiling masks and proclamations of happiness that surrounded me everywhere. Here there is no escape from it. It appears that displaying happiness at all times is seen as an obligation, policed in everyone by everyone; while on the other hand, expressing a hint of dissatisfaction is a considered a sin which merits the punishment of social death.

For long, long months, I would find not a shred of compassion in my surroundings. Even while butchered inside by neverending heartbreak, I was shunned, judged, rumoured about, lectured to on Reality and How Life Works, and told I was faking it for attention. There were even those who condemned me for writing critical stories and sad poetry, and said, as though it were obvious, that I should try writing happy things instead. Tokyo was a perfect zero-empathy environment which I barely survived, has at the end left me shipwrecked, and whose wounds on my soul will burn for years to come.

Perhaps that is why I have come to look upon happiness as a loathsome, horrible thing.

Tokyo, March 2016

Indeed, in a world as oppressive and exploitative as this one, there are few things I find so repugnant as happy and comfortable people. The instinct, when faced by those people, is to rage: how dare you find it in yourself to be satisfied with this world, where your happiness is necessarily enabled by systems whose defining feature is their destruction of the bodies, minds, hearts and souls of every person they were not designed to benefit?

In other words, each of us who is in a position to be happy, is there not because he or she has chosen it – enough of that feeble fakery, those endless platitudes that you make your happiness for yourself. No: if you are capable of choosing to be happy, it is because you are privileged with at least a certain condition of resources, relationships or power over your life to be able to do so. It is because you are not shrieking with the impossible pain of having those conditions robbed by the social and economic structures under which you live when they deem you different or inferior.

And that is why to wish happiness for those I care about would feel like wishing a curse upon them. Wishing upon them a toxic condition: the ability to be alright with a broken reality, to be happy while knowing that it makes them complicit in, say, the established structures of family or affectionate relationships, the employment structures, and the hierarchies of race, sex or class that they happen to be privileged by, and which in the same action exclude and tear down so many others. What astronomical selfishness, what barbarous indifference, is required to feel such happiness! Is that not a dehumanizing condition to live in, in the same way that torture also breaks the torturer?

Perhaps that is why happiness comes across as so hideous to me. Only a heart of the darkest villainy could truly feel happy and satisfied in a world like this. It does not matter if it was not their hands that built their pleasure boats, or shaped and filled the canals of blood and tears through which they ride them. They are wilfully benefiting from that infrastructure, and that makes them complicit in its crimes.

Tokyo, April 2016. The allusion is to the convenience stores and separation of rubbish types in Japan. Above the door: “Society”. On the bins, from left to right: “unhappy people”, “thinking people”, “feeling people”, and “non-burnable rubbish”.

Perhaps deep down, many of them know this. Perhaps all such happiness is a mask, however thick, to conceal a conscience wracked with poison and decay, and which, deep in its inner sanctum, knows its own feebleness, and dreads a day when it will be measured and held to account for what it has done. Perhaps the happy person is really a broken and fearful wretch who deserves to be pitied, rather than despised.

Of course, the same has been said of torturers too.

Or maybe they are just ordinary humans trying not to be driven mad by this world, and it is I who is the villain for attacking them for this abominable crime of being happy. But perhaps who is right and who is wrong no longer matters – who after all can judge?

What it means though is that happy people cannot be my friends. We seek opposite things for the world. They seek the continued existence of the systems that enable their happiness. I seek to cast those systems down in flames and remake this as a world for everyone – myself not included, for I am exhausted of it all and long only for my end, the release from this pain. But if by then I have succeed in upsetting those happy people, in injecting enough doubt and discomfort to make them reconsider whether this world is really as okay as they insist on believing it to be – maybe then, this wretched life will have accomplished something worthwhile.

The Abuse of Gratitude

We are often reminded these days of the wonderfulness of gratitude.

If it is not presented as the solution to all possible problems, then it is at least, we are led to believe, the next best thing, a vital ingredient in health and well-being and a sign of moral and spiritual correctness. If you have achieved fulfilling work and a comfortable life, then supposedly it is because you spent an hour a day listing fifty to a hundred things to be grateful for. If on the other hand you are stranded in misery, then what reason could there be, we are led to believe, other than that you are not grateful enough?

In short, so the story goes, if there is one thing that all right-thinking people show, and all wrong-thinking people do not, then it is gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.

It is time to correct this mistake.

Gratitude is not as magical as advertised. On the contrary it can be put to savagely destructive effect, and as a social tool to shame the vulnerable and the different it can turn into barefaced psychological violence.

That is not to say that gratitude is inherently a bad thing. On the contrary, when gratitude is sincere, deserved, and expressed without ostentation, then by all means let us celebrate it. It is good that we should feel thankful for blessings and kindnesses received from others, be they humans, other animals or plants, or the wider natural world. We are a social species living in interdependence with our planet and with one another, and through gratitude we recognize and value those relationships and encourage ourselves to reciprocate.

But this is already so ubiquitously proclaimed, from ancient religious and philosophical texts to endlessly regurgitated slogans on contemporary social media, that we need spend no further time on it. Instead, let us turn to our abuses of gratitude, of which it seems to me there are two types.

The first we may call gratitude-tripping. This seems a popular response to problems in this world, especially those we convince ourselves we can do nothing about. So instead we retreat into a psycho-chemical fortress of grateful feelings, as per the mantra: I am grateful for (x); I am grateful for (y); I am grateful for (z), and so on till the problems have been banished from our minds.

The word tripping is usually applied to the consumption of psychedelic drugs. The parallel is close enough to use that term here. I will not pretend to neurochemical expertise, but the behaviour changes that often come with intoxication on gratitude seem so stark that I am sure they reflect some chemically altered state of consciousness that bears comparison to the effects of mind-altering substances. Consider those ruthlessly euphoric smiles; that total imperviousness to attempts to engage in logical conversation; that instantaneous guillotining out of anything remotely construable as “negative”; and above all those steamrolling proclamations of gratitude for anything and everything possible, including things all people have rights to or were never actually given.

Of course, when gratitude-tripping affects no-one other than the individual, it is entirely in his or her rights, and we cannot fault him or her for it any more than we might for his or her private choices on smoking, alcohol and so on. As in those cases however we can still be alert to its potentially addictive excesses and scrutinize it as a widespread social phenomenon. As with other mind-altering exercises, escaping to gratitude is not a substitute for recognizing and solving problems and at worst can hinder efforts to do so. It can represent an acceptance of the “life’s unfair” and “nothing we can do about it” dogmas, and a forgetting that life is as fair as we together make it, and that most significant problems today are systemically caused by social structures we created: exploitative economic systems and working arrangements, gender and its full range of ills, a worsening politics of tribalistic violence and prejudice, climate and resource stresses, and so on. All of these are problems we can resolve, if we have the courage to acknowledge them and support each other in the struggle to improve the world.

Each of us has likely suffered incredible pains – and pain breaks people – from at least some of these nightmares. That they deal them out to us all on a massive scale has helped spread the myth that they are natural and inevitable parts of life, which could not be further from the truth. They are socially inflicted injustices: that is, we can do better than them, we are entitled to better than them, and in the face of any one of those ills, ingratitude is a totally justified response.

Gratitude-tripping is thus a problem in that it can drive us in the opposite direction, reinforcing the pressure to accept a broken world. But it becomes acutely cruel when it is practiced not merely as an individual’s own retreat from courage, but as something designed for other people to see – in particular to shame those suffering too much to be able to express much gratitude themselves, and to pressure them to join that gratitude-intoxicated illusion which holds that the world is fine. In other words, it becomes gratitude-shaming.

These days the likelihood that you have either seen or experienced this is surely not low. The gratitude-shamer hears a grievance or sees somebody suffering, and in response shames them for not being grateful enough. There is an active-passive spectrum for this. They might actively shame by directly attacking the sufferer for the selfishness of expressing his or her misery, and demanding he or she be more grateful instead. Or they might shame more passively by indulging in some very loud and visible gratitude tripping, as though ignoring the sufferer but with the clear design of inflicting on him or her, plus any witnesses, the same message. Other platitudes and clichés from the box of tools for trivializing other people's suffering are often deployed to accompany this: “everyone has problems”, “others are suffering worse than you”, “choose to be happy”, “be thankful for what you have” and so on.

The underlying fallacy at play here is often the suffering contest fallacy. It presumes that suffering is universal and inevitable, and that there is value in comparing one’s suffering with others, in particular to be grateful at the thought that others in the world – commonly stereotyped as “children in Africa” or “people in developing countries” – are suffering worse than you. A major thrust of gratitude-shaming is usually to gratuitously remind the target of this fact, seeking to make them feel guilty and selfish for their own pain and placing pressure on them to accept and be grateful instead.

In the first instance, this is rarely effective. For every case in which it relieves its target’s pain, there are countless more in which it drives them deeper into shunned and alienated agony, and it is no coincidence that suicidal people are among those most targeted by this kind of shaming. On top of that, the reasoning behind it is broken. Once more, those problems are usually society’s creation and society’s responsibility to solve, not things to be accepted; moreover you do not know how much that person is suffering because you are not them. Every person experiences things differently, has different strengths and vulnerabilities, and there is no honourable course other than to take at face value that he or she is suffering in proportion to his or her expressions of that suffering; to treat it as dramatic or exaggerated is an act of abuse. If you were going through the same ordeals as him or her you might find it trivial, but for all you know he or she could be experiencing it as the most horrific of all imaginable hells.

On top of that however the suffering contest fallacy is plain barbarous. Aside from its obvious ethical dubiousness (we are supposed to feel better at the thought that others are going through pain even worse than ours?), it can be wheeled out to trivialize and dismiss all suffering in the world except the very worst possible. Whatever your pains and grievances, you can expect no kindness, no compassion, no warmth: instead you are supposed to stop whining and be grateful, because there are always those more impoverished, more oppressed, more in danger of violent death; there are always more tyrannical governments, more violent police, more insufferable relatives, more disadvantaged classes and more bloody atrocities than whatever insignificant nothing you have the gall to complain about. Like this, gratitude shaming becomes a licence to cause – or worse, stand indifferent to – any person’s pain, then to kick them even deeper into it by trivializing it with a meaningless comparison.

Thus is gratitude abused into a tool found ever in the hands of the violators and oppressors: a thing not for mending hearts but breaking them into smaller pieces, not for healing wounds but for tearing them asunder. What does this really represent? In simple terms, a flag held high and proud to signify the shaming individual’s or society’s failure of empathy.

In an age when empathy has itself become a popular catchphrase and a thing we constantly insist others should show us, gratitude-shaming represents the barefaced hypocrisy with which we brandish that concept of empathy, and the hollowness to which we thereby reduce it. The real might and value of empathy is its power to show the miserable and the wretched that they are not alone: that we love them, we care for them, we recognize their suffering as unjust, and we will be there with them in deepest emotional solidarity in their struggle against the forces that caused it. Gratitude-shaming, in its capture of empathy, turns that on its head: empathy becomes the obligation to laugh when others laugh even if you or others present are sad, to join in with the gratitude-tripping chorus of intoxicated howling. It means to pretend you cannot see those who are struggling, and most of all to keep your pain to yourself, to never dare express it in the presence of others, lest you be judged and shamed as an ungrateful, empathy-lacking villain.

Perhaps in the end it is just another reflection of that greatest of humanity’s weaknesses: arrogance, especially the arrogance of large groups. To be there for those who suffer – to accept that they may have a point – is to open our minds to the possibility that the world, in particular those parts of the world we call our own, are not okay. It would be to admit that our societies have got things wrong, can do a lot better than they are, and must always be open to criticism.

In this age where raving tribalist nationalisms are emboldening themselves on every continent, baying for the blood of anyone who challenges the narrative that “we” are great and “they” are foul, it is clear that we still have a profound problem with finding this collective humility. Those who suffer within our in-groups remind us that we too are not all that great, and we loathe, abhor and ostracize them for it. We do not want to feel that guilt and shame, so instead we project it back onto them in punishment, and what more twistedly effective way to do so than to dress it up in all the magical smiles and starlight of gratitude?

May we be grateful when and where it is due. But may we learn that ingratitude also has its place: that there are times, and those times are many, when we have every right to say no to injustice and oppression that should not exist, and that it is in the public good that we do so.

Let us never demand gratitude of others, and never grace it to those who demand it of us. Rather, let us be there for those who suffer, show them compassion and love, and stand at their side in the struggle against the forces that have harmed them. Let us end the suffering contest, and instead take suffering as a problem to be solved together. Let gratitude be abused no more. 

The Dancing Mountain

In the heart of Kanagawa stands a mountain like no other.

Raise your eyes! For it soars beyond the grandest peaks of high Tanzawa

To stand amidst the clouds and summer light, tall as the spires of Tōnodake

Vigorous and dark its might – not even dominant Ōyama dares contest.

Its rumbling slopes are rugged as the burnt bronze earths of Hirugatake

Yet on high its woods unfurl and burst to life, lush and sweet like the blossoms of Kōbōyama,

Pierced by shafts and sunbeams radiant as the rhododendrons of Hinokiboramaru.

Oh mighty tower, how your rocky cliffs and rapids thunder in the storm

As though you live – you live! – and dance beneath a golden sky

And when you dance, all the mountains hold their breath transfixed,

Behold your streams and sparkling marshes churn, erupt, disgorge,

Their blistering currents blue and clear as the summer seas beyond Sagami Bay.

Dancing mountain, wild and free, the guidebooks do not list you

No map can chart your whirling ridges, gliding outcrops, twisting paths

And yet, I hear, if I take the train to Hadano Station

I need not make the climb to Yabitsu Pass

Just follow the eyes of the mountains. And there, they whisper, there are two ways up

Each no easier than the other – but oh, the panoramic landscapes, oh the firm and fragrant earth,

Igneous beauty, forged and sculpted in the molten depths, for there, too, you danced, made the furnaces of old your stage and in their flames grew strong;

And then the trail turns rough, on crushing high plateaus of ancient rock that does not break;

There is no shelter here, the winds swing fierce, as though you swerve and bank to sweep your climbers off

Until at last, they reach and grasp the boughs of the deep dark forest in the clouds

Wherein they cling for life, they sweat and heave, dare not look down, for it’s a long way down

But cast their gazes up those sleek and sylvan contours: now the summit comes in sight.

For those who climb the dancing mountain, it is said far more awaits

Than the view as far as the summer seas beyond Sagami Bay.

Although, I wouldn’t know.

For though I weep upon the thought, I cannot climb the dancing mountain.

How I long to climb it, know I must if ever to speak or write of the magic of Tanzawa

And yet, the way is closed. On my approach, the trailheads seal and shift;

No matter where I search, there is no path. It turns away. I cannot dance the mountain’s dance.

I fear I may have wronged it. Or perhaps, the realm it stands in is its own:

Dimensions held apart by walls invisible, the other side to always see but never cross.

A distant realm, a warm and sunlit place too bright for me – my very presence there would blight its light and sully its blissful skies.

Shadow that I am, I can only turn away, cry despair from the evening shore; but then I turn again

For who if not all the mountains can take their eyes from the dancing mountain?

Perhaps, if I set sail and find a different world

(A different world – anywhere but here!)

Then there, somehow, it will be too, its ridges reaching in

That I may yet sit high upon its cliffs, and feel from every side the raw and coursing might of the dancing mountain.

So must I dream, and only dream, as shedding tears that never end

I fly away across the summer seas beyond Sagami Bay.

A World Without Gender

Can you imagine a world without gender?

No masculine. No feminine.

We do not need them. We are one hundred billion, not two.

For men are from Earth and women are from Earth

And so too all those not men or women.

A world where to be one sex or the other means absolutely whatever you want it to mean.

A world of actual people.

Can you imagine it?

A world where women and men are equal

For your sex says nothing about your power.

Thus, the power of women restored to the legends, the media, the books, the films, the games

To the workplaces, where there are no “men's jobs” or “women's jobs”

To the parliaments and politburos

To the laboratories, boardrooms, courtrooms, bedrooms and sports fields

As well as to everywhere else.

Everywhere else.

No longer female objects to male subjects

Rather, subjects all.

A world which looks up to women. Can you imagine it?

A world where we are not ashamed of our own sexuality;

Break free of the stigmas, tricks and taboos that tar it with filth.

When shall we cease to cower at our own damn body parts?

For sex is not dirty. Coercion, censorship – these are dirty.

So let us speak of it! Free, informed, constructive

Not with tittering panic, but logic, magic and rigorous dignity.

A world where to be a sexual being is a wonderful thing. Can you imagine it?

And while we are at it, a world where we no longer serve that terrible myth, that such a thing exists as Normal sexuality

Nor cast out or punish those who do not fit it

But recognize instead that all sexualities are different

And that this, too, is a wonderful thing.

Where we cease to insist that there is one way for male sexuality, another for female sexuality

Nor impose a single standard of beauty upon us all

But rather understand that it is okay for women to be big, or men to be small

Or women to be strong, or men to be weak

Or men to love men, women to love women, three to love three, four four, five five

And that none of these is better or worse, more right or more wrong than all of the others;

That wrong is not what is different, but what hurts.

A world at peace with its beautiful diversity. Can you imagine it?

A world where affairs of the heart are free of competition and strife: not a battlefield, not a market, but a realm of joy to which none shall be barred from entry

None left to cry alone

None left un-hugged.

A world where societies do not expect diverse human beings to live under fixed, rigid systems

But nurture all possible arrangements of love and family

So that all might live true to their own hearts and minds.

A world where the power of love, of those who wish to be together, is supreme

To never be split by the guns and laws of nations, nor the fists and blades of dogmas or interests

And where love is love: not a point-scoring contest, not a tool of status or gain, not a test of conformity to masculine and feminine standards which do not exist

But a true concern and devotion to fellow persons born of the stars.

A world where tribulations bring us closer, not drive us apart

And where at last, for goodness's sake, we drop the lie that nastiness and cruelty is in the nature of these things

And understand that love does not hurt; only societies that fail at love hurt;

That there are no star-crossed lovers, only society-crossed lovers.

A world of love. Can you imagine it?

And yes, a world with no rape. No sexual violence.

A world where we understand that force has no basis, no place, in our sexual nature

And never has, and never will.

For these abominations are born not of flesh, but of that meaningless conflict of female and male

Of masculines and feminines:

Nothings we invented from nowhere.

Instead, a world where we can no longer conceive

For one to know pleasure from the carnal agony of another

Nor see our bodies reduced to objects.

No, not only a world where rape does not exist

A world where it cannot exist

For so long as it does exit, the human race prostrates itself in disgrace before the universe.

No more. No more. A world of sexual peace. Can you imagine it?

That is a world without gender. Can you imagine it?

BUT WE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO IMAGINE IT

WE HAD A RIGHT TO THAT REALITY

THAT WAS TO BE OUR WORLD

Break now from the mountains of bone and blood in which these madnesses have buried us

For madnesses they are, horrors, hells, and nature birthed none of them.

All, we created.

All, we must un-create.

Do not dare, human, to call it Idealism

For that is a label spoken by cowards, monsters and fools.

You fiends, you fiends, you are born of the stars! Why then do you not love?

Enough, enough, go and get back your love!

Will you build a world free of gender?

Or will gender build a world free of you?

A Walking Wall

17th March 2016

It's a wall.

What is there to see? It's only a walking wall.

A walking wall with a drawing of a sad face on it.

Nothing more than a wall.

How should I know how long it's been there? It's a wall. It sits there. It walks around. That's what walls do.

Let's talk with people instead. What point is there in talking to a wall?

A walking wall with a drawing of a sad face on it.

Come on, let's go. It's not as though walls need friends.

Walls can't talk. That sound is just bits of stone crumbling off. It's not as though it means something.

Walls don't cry. That's just the rain water leaking out through its holes.

Walls don't scream. That's just the wind howling through its cracks.

Such shoddy construction. What an ugly wall. I don't want to look at it. Come on, let's go and do happy things instead.

Only a fool would waste time on a wall.

Walls neither happen nor are happened to. They are just there.

You don't think about a wall. It is just there.

You don't talk to a wall. You stand next to it and talk to people.

You don't laugh with a wall. You sit on it and laugh with people.

You don't love a wall. You hide behind it and pretend to love people.

You don't care for a wall. You care for the people on one side and hate the people on the other.

The wall is just there. That is all. It is not as though it sees or hears you doing these things.

Look out!

That was close, the damn thing almost fell on you!

What were you thinking? That the wall wants a hug? What the heck would a wall need hugs for?

Dodgy, creepy, dangerous wall! You hurt people on purpose, don't you? Kick. Kick.

You should kick it too. It's fine to beat and shout at a wall. It's not as though a wall feels pain.

Well, this worthless thing could fall down at any moment. Let's leave it here and go and do something fun.

Hmph. Next you'll be saying the wall is lonely and wants to come with us. But you know, it's only a wall.

Walls have no empathy. Why give them attention? They will only make you upset.

Who would ever want a negative wall like this anyway? This walking, crying, howling wall with a drawing of a sad face on it.

Only a fool would love a wall.

*

Every wall must fall one day

Collapse to dust and blow away in the wind.

The walking wall longs for that day.

Oh, how it longs.