Last week I sat next to the bed of a dying woman. Today I spoke on the phone to another dying woman, tearful she was. Speaking as someone who finds it difficult/inconvenient to have ‘normal’ relationships with other human beings, I was all the same moved to sympathy. To any empathic-minded individual, or Buddhist, The Moment when all life’s energies on earth come to the fore makes other stuff seem somehow immaterial. We all know this, and yet we plod along in life pained to ignore such moments as if they are never going to happen.
Likewise is our ‘global’ economy administrated as if the very worst or least probable estimates of economists, business types and so forth, are so unthinkable we choose to ignore them; they are inconvenient truths best not thought about really. We borrow off the magical new equity in our homes, and borrow to the very maximum of our credit ratings, to purchase what I shall describe as a dumb-Hollywood lifestyle of blissful ignorance that anything is about to go wrong. I myself am paying off debts of about five thousand pounds, for things I no longer own or use, things which in the past provided some utility, and helped our economy to grow, and kept Chinese people in work. Perhaps if I hadn’t those same Chinese people –sick off their communist lot – might have overthrown their peculiar democracy, and the world would have been a better place?
Anyhow, what I’m moved to write about this evening is the idea of responsibility. Those of you who know me well have all heard my ranting about our peculiar Democracy, and how foolish it is to let idiots have the vote. We debate who are the idiots, of course, and I have generally concluded how much life would be better if we were governed by an infallible computer program. But it seems to me that our progress is only real if it is sustainable, otherwise we’re all back in the shithouse eating dung, and swatting off corrupt and drunken landowners whilst feeding a family of illiterate dung foragers. Ours is a life as fragile of the few miles thick bit of atmosphere that prevents all life on earth vaporising into space, and I wonder how much this new economic and political crisis has really made the human race think about their actions, their future and their own responsibility.
It is why I salute the #occupy protestors, even though they remind me that too much conspiracy over-complicates the simplest message they have too echo: there is a moral dimension to money, and the human condition – greed in particular – is one which must be regulated beyond our instincts. Consider the gift of security alongside the very real fact of dying, do it every minute of every day, be mindful of it. The sickness of selfishness – perhaps product of upbringing and probably little else – should be treated in the same way as paedophiles should be treated, diseased and disregarded folk that they are. It’s time to take collective responsibility for the actions we as individuals are responsible for, and to empathise with every other person we don’t know and understand. For me, that means trying to understand why bankers love money, why politicians love authority and status, and how the Queen looks when she’s wiping her arse. And more besides.
My point, I think, is that so much is missing from the many important decisions taken on earth because our societies are unused to the consideration of others, and nowhere is this more apparent than in economics and politics. We have a massive slice of cake, flavoured with saccharine, we love it and want more and yet fundamentally it is disgusting.
Of all the decisions I have to make tomorrow, number one is that I want no more cake.
