States of Democracy: The Freedom to Think Otherwise

“THE MIND ALWAYS HAS THE POWER to outstrip injustice and say I've had enough", wrote Rosa Luxemburg, reminding us that revolutionary moments always begin inside ourselves.   World history is of course the history of revolutions of the mind, whether they result in Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the American segregated bus, or Anna Hazare, now in day nine of his fast to protest against corruption in India. 

Rosa Luxemburg is an important thinker for our revolutionary times.  The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, a 600 page collection of intimate correspondence to friends, lovers and colleagues, has just been published this year and I wholly recommend them. They are passionate calls by a utopian revolutionary, with her feet firmly planted in the ground of clear thinking.  What is exciting about her work is the way she weaves political, the psychological dynamics and our personal actions on the path of political transformations.  Her writings on how the oppressed, become the oppressors are profoundly important for our times.  Exploring the nature of democracy, she writes "With rampant inequality democracy is a hoax". I’m wondering if she were alive today, what she would make of the anti-corruption movement that is spreading across India, what her extraordinary thinking ability might bring to the discussions.

Any evolutionary imperative, in India or otherwise, begins with human struggle. A revolutionary moment, whether to stand up simply for our individual human rights, or indeed for those of others, means to take a risk.  The ultimate risk is what degree of uncertainty we can tolerate inside ourselves in the ebb and flow of change.  Luxemburg wrote to her lover, “One must constantly carry out anew an inner review, or inventory of oneself, in order to re-establish order and harmony.”  But it may be a call to ask ourselves in this inventory, what sort of abuses are we accepting as okay, simply because they are common and familiar. 

The Gandhian traditions of this non-violent protest, exemplified by Hazare and his followers, are grounded in the belief that when you are governed by unjust laws it is your duty to obey higher laws of our common humanity. Anna Hazare says that he is willing to die for the cause of a corrupt-free India. Many are concerned that if he dies, India will have a blood-bath of some sort, although there are many claims that due to the suicide laws here, he will be force-fed, something even the British didn’t do to Gandhi. 

A revolution is the idea that ‘freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.  Many of the people of India are demanding a new birth, one they can mark on the Indian calendar, a second Independence Day of the country, only from their own, rather than British oppression.  This spontaneous agitation, which has been gathering increasing momentum over the last few months, demands greater participation, equality, as well as respect.  Respect, Richard Sennett, insists is that compassion for others is insufficient, without some kind of action or deeds that embody the performance of actually changing things. Respect for the right to peaceful protest, was precisely what Anna Hazare and the India Against Corruption movement was asked for. Initially they were refused.

The government responded to the beginning of Hazare’s fast, quoting various bureaucratic reasoning, by imprisoning this humble elderly man.  The opposition party, the BJP, shared their outrage at the restrictions on public protests, saying they were unheard of even during the period of British rule and demanded "bold decisions" to tackle corruption.  Hazare, in a creative act of leadership, when given the right to leave the prison, flummoxed the leadership by refusing to leave until convinced that his protest at Ramlila Park, Delhi, could peacefully go ahead.  He held them to ransom by their own bureaucratic musings. With the appeal of a digitally-recorded motorbike handbook, the political leadership of the country seems unable to go beyond a rhetorical of the marketplace, as though appealing to citizens as distant objects rather than the human beings they are. Manmohan Singh, was quoted as saying “All concerned individuals should convey their concern on the (Lokpal) bill to their representatives in Parliament and to standing committee.”  It sounded rather like the automated messages from those annoying call-centre in Bangalore.

A further source of leadership instability in India, are the rumours that the empress, Sonia Gandhi is having treatment for cancer in the U.S. One must ask whether the political power has the strength to weather more storms, should she in fact be seriously ill.  Singh looks dejected.  It’s painful watching him weather the onslaught of attacks by the opposition in parliamentary debates that resemble a free-for-all in an English boarding school.  Leadership, for which there is of course no agreed definition, and for which one’s own values are deeply embedded in our preferred construction, has to at least involve two things, the ability to: firstly, to build the architecture of democracy, community and secondly, to energise that community in a way that motivates, is reasonably predictable and contains anxiety.    There may be a developing architecture of democracy in India on the outside, but this must go hand in hand with some degree of trust in both the ability and the true intentions of the governing team.    

I find it difficult not to see two India’s; the first is the India experience through the eyes of those of us who live here and secondly, the India through the many of the writings of the NRI lense abroad.  The lived experience of the effect of corruption, the real human abuses, the denials of a right to human dignity are wearing on even the most robust people.  For many, the dissonant effect is to simply put one’s head down, pay a bribe, turn a blind eye and get on with one’s life, flattening one’s energy to a point that the stench of pollution competes with an insidious aroma of depression. But I can’t imagine Jesus, or Gandhi, or Mandela or Luther King, folding their arms and saying, “well, you know, the thing is, there’s nothing you can do, you just have to ignore it.”

The alternative for people living here is to engage actively and refuse any act of oppression however small or great.  Rosa Luxemburg, an activist all her life, murdered at the hands of would-be Nazi’s in 1919, was relentless in her passionate fight against injustice or abuse of power.  She refused to give up, despite, as she put it, “knowing the gnawing and painful, but creative spirit of social responsibility.”  For some Indian’s abroad, I think it may be all too easy and understandable emotionally, to confuse the revolution in one’s own life or in the NRI community as a whole, with revolutionary transformations in India.  One does not equal the other.  The revolution of the self-made man does not make for community, nor does it necessarily change the lives of the poor.

India may be the 9% poster-child of Asian growth, but that growth is profoundly in the hands of a few and some argue, at the expense of democracy. “Why is every 4^th India dying of hunger?” asks the activist Vandana Shiva.  “What about the third of Indian children who are categorised as ‘wasted’, who will never grow-up to be physically and mentally healthy?” The biggest wall, she says, that needs to come down is the wall of illusion: the illusion that the more money that moves around, (didn’t we learn our subprime lessons), the better off we all are, in some elusive trickling-down effect.  A former physicist, she criticises this illusion for its failure to account for the vector, the direction in which money flows to destroy or build.  Campaigning for the rights of farmers, she shares her outrage on many global platforms, of the compulsory purchase of farmers land to build townships in the country. In a recent talk, she described the building of a town outside Delhi, stating that farmers were forced to give up their livelihood and their land, contributing to an ever increasing suicide rate amongst farmers.  Their land sold through government and business, finally sold to the developers at a price inflated 200,000%.  This sort of profit in the vector did not flow to the farmers, just towards the hands of big business.  

No changing Lokpal Bill, however sophisticated, will adequately address these sorts of issues. It will not bring farmers suicide rates into the GDP calculations. That is not to decry the protests in anyway, for all revolutions are momentary movements, important moments, that create unpredictable shifts in consciousness.  One must also though, retain as Luxemburg put it, “the freedom to think otherwise”, to think critically beneath the dizzy excitement of the endless coverage of Hazare’s fast, on the Times Now TV channel.  At one point, it resembled a fantastic, twenty-four hour long ‘will he die or won’t he’, Bollywood movie, directed by Yash Chopra with a Shahrukh Khan news-anchor.  Dare we think, or articulate, or discuss, that laudable as these protests are, we are asking those some people to act entirely against their own interests? They know they can govern with decency, they knew this already. 

It’s easy to say don’t bribe the policeman when he asks you for 100 rupees when you fail to stop at a red light.  But when you learn that he had to pay a 300,000 rupee bribe to a senior policeman, to get his job as a junior policeman, that his village mother pawned her jewellery to raise this, and he wants to pay her back, we begin to touch merely one layer beneath the surface of the deeper and deeper and deeper rooted nature of corruption in India.  Such “Freedom of thought is integral to democracy”, as Luxemburg puts it; no matter what the machinations of the mass-mind are demanding we don’t dare to think at all.   Psychoanalysis adds something important here, reminding us that the mass-mind is a place of non-thought, where to think “otherwise”, is to risk affecting the group’s profound source of self-esteem derived essentially from similarity of its members, not diversity of thought or members. 

These are revolutionary times that must be understood in the wider global context of citizen agitations around the world for calling for reforms. When we contextualise what is happening here, with important awareness of what is occurring more broadly and how it interlinks with the wider call that capitalism and democracy, hasn’t delivered on all our illusions of what it can deliver, we can be somewhat more measured in our planning and thinking. India is part of a growing global refusal to accept dictatorship, abuse of power apathetic, self-interested leadership, demanding instead, the right to fair and reasonable governance.  We are witnessing a lack of trust in government and corporate leadership, with widely held concerns that Roosevelt aired many years ago, that when business and government go to bed together what we are likely to get is fascism. 

Of course, there is nothing more degrading or less dignifying, to experience abuse of power in a corrupt society. Democracy, whether on a national or intimate level, entails moments between people, where one “Does not own, control or master the other.  It lets the other be,” wrote Luxemburg.   Each of us, has to locate within ourselves how we relate to what we believe is fair, or right or just and act accordingly.  Every moment of our lives is potentially a democratic moment or one that seeks through some sort of authoritarianism, to deny us our human liberty.  I like what India’s spiritual guru, Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, reminded me recently, that when you are caught between conflicting imperatives, always choose the one that is in the longer term interests. 

Luxemburg wrote, “I am of the opinion that one should, without trying to be too crafty or racking one’s brains too much, simply live the way one feels is right and not always expect to be repaid immediately with cash in hand.” Her friend said of her, “The only point of the cause for her was to increase the human quotient of happiness.” Surely, that is the whole point of these revolutionary times.

Violent Innocence

BOMBS IN BOMBAY and blasts in Britain, a smart capitalist might see this as wise time to buy a few shares in a window replacement company. The rest of us might dare to think more radically in trying to understand what all this sort rage and anarchy is about, beyond the convenient and dismissive rhetoric of thugs and terrorists.

On my recent flight to the UK, I sat next to a charming Englishman, an Economist who shared with me a number of observations about Britain.  He observed, he told me, that since the credit crunch, that devastated the livelihoods of so many people, there were more high-end cars in the hedge-fund streets of Mayfair in London than ever.  He added that it appeared the gulfing divide between the haves and have-nots appears to be growing.  He also told me that he feels there is an underlying anger and despair in Britain about the future and the bail-out of the banks, did little to help the plight of individuals who had lost jobs, businesses and homes.  Within three days of telling me this, the riots broke out across London, then Birmingham, then Manchester.

Struck by the similarity of a conversation I had on the way to the airport, I tell the Englishman, that interestingly, a friend who has lived in Bombay for many years sensed there was more anger brewing in urban India.   I shared with him that my friend had said, “There is a tangible tension in the City that you didn’t use to feel,” he observes. “We have these great lifestyles, with drivers, cooks and servants, who we all get so cheaply because they live in slums. It can’t go on forever.”  The Englishman asked me whether I felt India might join the revolutionary ranks of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia in demanding greater justice from political leadership and the state.  However without a strong social movement against injustice, I shared that it seems unlikely soon.

The book he occasionally glances at, possessively in my lap, is the stunning collection of essays by Jacqueline Rose, just published this year by Duke.  I explain to him with the passion of a nine year old Spice Girls fan, “She is an extraordinary woman who brings the full force of psychoanalytic thinking to such a daring range of topics as the politics of Israel and Palestine, Suicide Bombers, Feminism, Peter Pan, Sylvia Plath, the South African Peace and Reconciliation process.” 

What is very clear about Rose’s approach to mobs, gangs and terrorists, whether in Britain or Bombay, is that we are madly off the mark, possibly deluded citizens, if we lazily presume this sort of phenomena is merely about individual pathology, or some sort of essentialist diatribe about certain religious or class based groups in society.  Tariq Ali, in his London Review of Books blog, reminds us of the singular event, the police shooting of an unarmed citizen, the tipping point of the riots in the UK, happened “Because grievances build up over time, because when the system wills the death of a young black citizen from a deprived community, it simultaneously, if subconsciously, wills the response.” He also adds that for the 1000 deaths of young men in custody in Britain, since 1991, not one single policeman has been charged, despite overwhelming evidence.

What Roses applies, is that without bringing into the field of politics the difficulties and challenges of the inner life, not merely in an individualistic way, but in terms of the collective inner life that shapes politics and world events, healthy, sustainable, transformation will not occur.  Drawing upon Freud, in her essay on Mass Psychology, she warns any country to be aware that:

“If a culture has not got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture that their labour makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share.”

Introducing Rose at a recent talk she gave at the London Review of Books, Paul Myerscough rather magnificently laid out the kinds of ways in which she asks us to think the unthinkable into politics and our lives.   The unthinkable, firstly as that which we can hardly bare to think.  The unthinkable, that dares to poke around in the private and collection operation of fantasy.  The unthinkable, as out of sight and awareness in those things that can’t be admitted into our consciousness.  It is to think the things we don’t want to think about and we can’t think, because it hasn’t been thought before.

This is precisely what we hope also happens of course in the consulting room  work -  we open up a space, for radical thinking - a space to ‘think the unthinkable. Whether the war is going on inside or outside, lurking beneath is invariably a narrative of victimhood.  What Rose reminds us, as is that it is healthy to acknowledge an event, a moment when we feel we have been a victim, but we are absolutely stuffed, the moment we make victimhood or suffering a part of our identity. 

The complacent state of victimhood, involves of course living either individually or collectively, a life to the tune of a stuck record that says “It’s not fair, look what they have done to me.” Not only disempowering, it is used to justify all manner of hideous cruelties and offensive acts of retribution.    Most difficult global affairs or charged interpersonal conflicts, therefore involve what Christopher Bollas describes as ‘Violent innocence’.  It is this, Rose reminds us, a discourse of suffering and victimhood, that underpins certain types of Zionism, which allows a complete denial and negation of the brutal oppression of the Palestinians. At the heart of this, in opposing sides in a war, is an inner collective life, that battles over the right to claim “My side is suffering the most.”  The space in between, would involve the difficult task of allowing both narratives be heard, for meaningful dialogue to occur. However, the sort of sophistication of both collective and individual consciousness this requires, is often painfully lacking and not without dangerous consequences.  This is of course, partly because it demands a deep inquiry into oneself, or indeed one’s nation and the operations of collective fantasy. 

It’s the voice that says, hey, hang on a minute, how much more destruction do we need to witness, before we begin to think the unthinkable, to step out of our tribal mentality and radically think for ourselves.   Martin Luther King once said, “It’s not what the bad guys do, the problem is what the good guys don’t do.” I think a contemporary version of that has to include what the good guys don’t dare to think. Therefore in a sense, our not doing something, in this case, thinking the unthinkable, maybe even more insidious that we dare to imagine.

Peeking into the Past, to Get Out from Underneath It

Peeking into the Past, to Get Out from Underneath it

“Every historian discloses a new horizon.”

George Sand

HISTORY IS THE STORIES we tell ourselves about the past.   In his book India After Gandhi, the author Guha, put together a sequence of events to create a narrative of building the nation-state of India since Independence. One of the things I rather like about this book is that as an historian, he is willingly to research into lesser known libraries and characters off the main road of India’s history. 

Sitting with a client is not dissimilar to picking up a history book and waiting for the narrative to begin. As I sit with a client we’ll call Neehal, he shares with me a very tight narrative of his life: Cathedral school, a first arranged marriage that ‘failed’ within two months, a second arranged marriage he describes as “failing,” a job in banking.   In reporting his most recent history, he tells me he is angry at what he describes as the “unfairness” of being turned down for promotion at work because of he has “anger issues.”  Guha’s book is a fat four inches thick, my client’s history of his life is barely one page.

Forming representations of past events, will of course depend not only on our level of intelligence, but the sensitivity we are accustomed to receive in sharing ourselves with others, as well as, bearing some honesty about our role as the creators of our own history.  The child, who is force-fed not to feel or what to feel, or how he ‘should’ react, will have enormous problems digesting and figuring out who he is, with his experience disavowed in this way. Cut-off from himself it is likely he will be terribly cut-off from others.  History is of course invariably biased, distorted and often self-serving. Ludicrous tales for example, of Indian history, suggest that quite contrary to the evidence, the British simply dreamed up drawing a line across India and created Pakistan and that was that. The implication of this historical view is that Indians must have been a rather passive lot, to be merely victims of the all-powerful British, which of course, they were not.  In other words, in every story, there are more deeply embedded narratives and assumptions.  How much more difficult it is to ask ‘How did we let this happen?’, or ‘What is my role in this history?’ In the consulting room, we hope that our clients leave us at the end of our time together with a more logical and thoughtful sense of their history, even willing to look at data they may find offensive, so that they can make better adult choices going forward.  

As Christopher Bollas puts it, as historians of our own lives, “We must be willing to wander in and out of recovered memories, in particular those which are seemingly trivial.” We are all personal historians.  As a historian of my own life, I once wrote a piece that began, “Why use the word nest, just call it empty.”  It was a self-reflective article that centred around the history of my daughter leaving home for University.  A pair of tweezers sat untouched on a bathroom shelf for months after she left. I hated those tweezers. As a more empirical piece of history, it would read something like: September 2006, daughter leaves home, mother embarks on major renovation project on the house, managing it mostly from a hotel room at the Intercontinental on Marine Drive, in this city.  Gnarls Barkley’s song ‘Crazy’ was a popular song that year. Yet this simple representation of the tweezers is imbued with more meaning, more resonance than any simple list.

Psychoanalysis approaches history through such seemingly ordinary observations, known as ‘screen memories.’  Clients may bring us lists, but we are interested in what might be brushed aside, made not list-worthy.  Many years ago, a client called Clara came to see me after she had left an abusive relationship.  “Did you ever get a sense that he had this side to him?” (A question of history of course) She replied, “Funny you should say that, the first time I saw him I thought of a boy who was the bully when I was at school.”  So history naturally contains both that which we are willing to turn away from, as well as turn towards.

Many clients come to see a psychologist because they are simply longing for a sensitive conversation about their history.  Sifting through the material of the past that Neehal presents, we begin to deconstruct his over-riding historical text, which goes something along the lines of “I was a difficult child, nobody could reign me in, my parents were busy, they were wonderful people, and I deserve what I got.”   Essentially, at the heart of his feelings about himself, were that he was bad through and through.

But what if the parents are not the perfect angels or terrible villains we claim to recall?  Several times in the sessions, when Neehal described some adolescent capper that he got up to, stealing a car, taking his father’s watch, I found myself again and again, wondering wherever were his parents?  It seemed as though he had grown-up in an environment of material abundance and a sense that he should be ‘grateful for being so lucky’, yet at the same time, bestowed very little in terms of psychological containment or adequate attention to enable him as a boy to develop the important attributes of being ‘grown-up.’ 

Children, as we know, will of course protest about everything: “I want my toy”, or “I’m not going to bed” or “I want granny now” even though perhaps granny has passed away.  Each of these moments is a negotiation, an opportunity for tenderness or indeed cruelty towards the child.  The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined the term the ‘good enough’ mother (parent) who more often than not, responds to the child’s demands with understanding.  The core message Neehal received was that his feelings didn’t matter, (therefore in his mind he didn’t matter), and in response to his cries for help, was often flooded by his parents self-absorbed narratives about ‘what they had to put-up with from him’ or ‘can’t you see I’ve been working all day.’ Each time he received a battering from his father, or verbal insults from his mother, in equal measure, they would fake seductive reparation with the gift of material things, or sudden lavish attention, ‘as-if’ the abuse had never happened.  What terrible confusion for this little boy.

How the parent communicates with the child will help a child digest reality that you can’t always get what you want. Digesting is not just about force-feeding children a list of rules of how they should behave. It has to be a conversation, not merely an autocratic colonizer taking over the child’s experience and reality.  It certainly isn’t about teaching children how to abuse by hitting, slapping, pinching and abusing them. Without adequate developmental containment, it is hardly surprising that Neehal had great difficulty anchoring himself in reality and continues to be prone to regular emotional outbursts.  Any efforts to think as a child about what was happening to him were silenced.  As a child rarely soothed in his distressed, he inevitably has a hard time learning how to sooth himself. Facing how he was repeating his childhood experience of attachments, he had to visit the abusive side of his himself. 

You might say that Neehal started out as a poor historian of his own life.  In his historical narrative, there was one villain and it was him.   Everyone else was a good guy, end of story.  Well perhaps it would have been the end, if he hadn’t chosen to come to the consulting room.  Towards the end of one session, having shared with me the way his father physically hurt him, I mentioned in passing that in my experience, clients talk about the easiest parent first.  The hardest work in the sessions was facing some of the realities of his relationship with his mother.

There is I think, some very deep confusion’s about any sort of psychotherapy.  Our task with our clients is not to help them feel more, as the popular press likes to suggest.  No, they are generally feeling too much already.  What we do, is try to help our clients think better.  X occurs, Y occurs, why do you draw this particular inference, or interpretation?  It is about daring to look a little more deeply with a less emotional perspective.  Sometimes, a client will extrapolate “I am bad”, because it is just too unbearable to imagine the alternative that he was actually very neglected as a child.  What we are seeing here, is the case of a child, whose rage towards his mother, is swallowed and redirected towards himself. To keep the dangerous mother at a distance, he was still as an adult man, keeping her very close. The part of himself he had to meet in our work, was the deep sadness and loneliness he often felt as a child.  Over time, we explored the terror he felt whenever he let anyone, particularly women, get close to him.  The hardest part of all this work for Neehal, was to connect with the rage he felt towards Mommie Dearest. Yet, he was able to take-in and digest that a part of him that was in fact not furious about the present, but furious about the past, and how it featured in his own repetition of abuse in the here and now.    

By reviewing the past in this way, by being better historians, we get to transform it. Any historical narrative that merely suggests we have been colonised by others whether nation or person, forced to conform, held-back, abused, is a denial of individual or collective collusion and collaboration in one’s own fate.  We can either keep living this old interpretation of history, or make a choice now to create a different history for the future.

So rather than merely regurgitate and live from a victim narrative, which merely reduces a nation or a person’s confidence to a puddle of inferiority, we try to do something else. Rather like taking the debris of the past in our own hands, we creatively use our psychology to make something else out of it, renewed with vitality and the possibility of making associations between back then and now.  Just as historians give birth to new ideas, as historians of our own lives, new insight, new awareness give birth to new futures.  Never, is too late to do that, or indeed ever too late have a sensitive conversation with yourself, even if everyone around doesn’t know how to listen.