Questioning the binaries of opposition

Why is everything ‘us vs them’ and becoming more polarised by the day?

Binaries are a very useful tool for understanding the world. Arguably, human beings are predisposed to seeing the world through the binary lens since most of our choices are binary. Yes or no. Do this or don’t do that. We learn this from the cradle. However, this prism of a binary choice is all too easily exploited by those who would prefer it if we were expending our energies fighting constructed battles between ourselves rather than looking at the bigger picture. A bigger picture that involves increasing controls over our lives in order to serve the interests of the so-called elite few.

If I disagree with someone about something, there is sometimes an emotional attachment to this disagreement. I am human. I feel it. Especially if I’ve had an otherwise difficult day. But I remind myself that one disagreement on one issue, or even several, does not make that person my enemy. Instead, all our positions on issues, including my own, are borne out of personal experience and innate predispositions because of things like personality. We should not blame each other. Instead we should try to understand, to empathise.

It is not a coincidence that personality, a very complex multi-faceted aspect of humanity, is so elaborate and nuanced and hard to categorise and yet is arguably more meaningful to us as individuals than any kind of identifier like race, sex, social class or sexuality. Our own individual personalities drive us in all sorts of ways until we allow ourselves to ‘identify’ hard with some aspect of ourselves. Once that identification has been set up, it can then be used to atomise us further and produce yet another binary of opposition. It leads to suppression of all other aspects of a person’s individual makeup as less important, and actually, leads to unhappiness. But that’s besides the point. Individual happiness is not the goal here. The goals are to sell us stuff, control us and have us fighting amongst ourselves. It’s hard to set up a binary for personality but yet there have even been attempts in recent times for prime exploitation, divide and rule, purposes, such as whether or not one falls on the extrovert or introvert side of the spectrum. During this crisis, introverts have been pitted against extroverts and vice versa, since the insular, home-loving, crowd avoiding quiet people of our society have done rather better under circumstances that force us to be insular, home-loving and crowd-avoiding. Were introverts really at home fist pumping the air and feeling glee at the suffering of people who would rather be at a party than playing an RPG? Who knows. Either way, it’s yet another ‘in-group/out-group’ struggle that we, as understandably traumatised human beings, could have done without.

To compound the problem yet further, the confusion built in to the rapidly evolving tech of the modern age has been written about again and again. Our brains are not designed for the level of decision making and choices we must make in a day. Our attentions are constantly pulled away from where we are and what we are doing, or even HOW we are, by the screaming demands of technology. We are bombarded with angry disagreements on all forms of media in the things we carry in our pockets. We are constantly assailed with exhortations to buy the things we don’t need based on a search or a throwaway conversation we had at breakfast that has somehow emerged as a popup on the article we got sucked into reading while looking at social media for a thing we can no longer remember. We have become slaves to the very things that were supposed to liberate us. It puts us into a state of fog and irritability that makes us more malleable and easily manipulated. And since behavioural psychology has been used for decades in both the corporate world and the world of government, and put on steroids in recent times, it is not surprising that we are an exhausted people. That more than once we have fallen for stuff that given a decent amount of time to step back from all of the white noise and hysteria, time to do a little research of our own, to have conversations without fear of social opprobrium and censorship, we would have seen through the naked attempts to steer us into courses of action that do not benefit us at all.

Of course, where there is a legitimate binary, the waters have been muddied yet further by suggesting that science and the understanding of millennia of existence on this blue green planet has got it all wrong and that certain things, until recently held immutable, are now to be understood as ‘fluid’ and part of a ‘spectrum’. Once again, this is a narrative bolstered in all forms of media, and now reinforced in law and governance, by the moneyed and powerful. Who stands to gain from this cognitive dissonance inducing gaslighting? It isn’t us and it certainly isn’t our children. And yet debates around this are also stifled, censored, moralised and those who question it are similarly pilloried.

It is not an inevitability that the existence of the latest ‘hot’ binary choice like whether to receive the Covid vaccine should become emblematic of opposition, yet it has unequivocally been set up in this way, and it is very clear which side the technocrats are on and thus the ‘acceptable’ one. The frames on social media, the pictures of plastered arms, masked selfies outside medical centres, breathless posts about ‘bravery’ and furious diatribes about selfish anti-vaxxers. Even Harry Potter style ‘house badges’ of Team Moderna, Team Pfizer etc. The other side, feeling utterly beleaguered, reacts with accusations of stupidity and sheep-like mentalities, and both sides dig into their trenches a little deeper. We must question why politicians and the tech companies are not merely ignoring the damage to society this causes, but are absolutely encouraging it. Who does it benefit really?

We are absolutely steered into tribes by social media, bolstered by the rhetoric of politicians, corporations, and mass media. Okay, so we have an innate tendency to want to join teams, a tendency to tribalism even. This is a natural if often not terribly helpful trait in human beings. We also have a liking for simple answers to complex problems. If that is then coupled with a ‘with me or against me’ mentality, history should teach us that bad things happen. These tendencies have been exploited to a ridiculous degree in recent times. This exploitation is not the doing of ordinary people. It is the doing of those who currently have the money and power and who wish to retain and increase both. Let’s not let them. Let’s remember the nuance, the shades of grey, the compassion for our fellow human beings and take it back.

Hugs for health

Regular human contact, the touching kind, is essential for human survival. We know this instinctively. The human infant reaches for the comfort of a soothing touch from a caregiver. In his famous experiment of the 1950s, Harlow’s monkeys preferred the warmth of a terry-cloth covered wire mesh ‘mother’ to the one dispensing milk. We have evolved to prefer human contact over sustenance in certain circumstances. A dying person will want the comfort of a loved one’s hand before anything else. Yet now we are saying, governments are saying, that not only is human contact unnecessary for health but that it could be an act of egregious granny-killing selfishness. If enough people believe this for long enough, the consequences for our longer-term futures could be very bleak indeed. We must ask ourselves, what responsible, nay competent, government would mandate an absence of touch to its people on the basis of a virus that has a similar infection fatality rate to a bad flu? That even the grannies, the over 80s, for the most part recover? What is in the minds of those who, like the Canadian authorities, are now prosecuting people for such outrageous crimes as shaking hands with strangers in the street since it violates the two metre rule they themselves are violating as they hand people the ticket – presumably covered with the same microorganisms and potential granny-killing viruses from their own hands? Where is the logic? Where is the proportionality? The common sense? All of these checked out of the building some time ago.

Even if not touching another human being was the key to stopping this virus in its tracks, would the prize, given the positive outcomes for all but the very unlucky few be worth the penalty? Can human beings really afford not to touch? Can we afford not to speak to each other without the medium of technology? Does the dancing and singing need to end permanently? After all, if this is the default response to a new or not so new virus, at what point do we say enough is enough? Or do we? Is a long life lived in a permanently stressed, depressed, fearful state intrinsically better than a shorter one lived in joy, love, relaxation and connection? Is longevity all we want from life? Given that we have denied the elderly in care homes meaningful contact from another human being, let alone a loved one, and that many have reportedly expressed a desire to die as a result, it rather suggests that a lengthy amount of time respiring on the planet’s surface is not what concerns even the most very vulnerable of us at the end.

One is reminded of a League of Gentlemen sketch where the germophobic, toad loving and terminally unhinged Harvey Denton insists that the nephew he has locked into his house (sound familiar?) cleans all of the brushes and cloths with yet more colour-coded brushes and cloths in a bit to wage an ‘endless war against the microbe’, only to then clean those, ad infinitum. If we follow the logic, there is no end to this. Literally, no end. We used to laugh at the ridiculousness of characters like Denton. Now, the Dentons are the ones in office, or at least some of the ones pulling the strings behind the ones in office, and people are expected to nod along to the endless diktats that dominate the discourse, if you can call it that, between the government and the governed. Thanks to the bolstering of those ‘safety’ messages from an uncritical media, many many people have been terrified into doing the very things that will do them the most harm once you balance the risks for the average person, both in terms of mental and physical health. After all, the two are most intrinsically linked, in spite of the ‘treat the symptom, not the cause’ methodology of our current health system.

Never mind hand shaking. That is small-fry in contact terms compared to a hug. Since the government released official ‘public health’ advice as to how long and when we should be hugging ‘safely’, we need to counter the message that something as beneficial to our wellbeing as a hug could be a dangerous sport. Otherwise we get into the realms of Denton absurdism – that being alive and breathing at all is something so fraught with peril that the only way to enjoy a risk-free existence is to live in a hermetically sealed environment devoid of all meaningful human contact or experience. In the past year, there are people who have imbibed this message so completely that they have indeed become terrified of others. We have all seen them, if they have been brave enough to leave their own homes, the all-too familiar look of terror in their eyes (since the eyes are the only thing visible above the masks they wear outside) as you approach them along a narrow and busy city street. Our government has done this. Many, but thankfully not all, governments all over the world have done this to their people. They have done this to us. That we now either view each other as Typhoid Marys, or as people who view us as Typhoid Marys is a hideous thing to comprehend. Such psychological damage has quite possibly never been visited on a people before by its government, aided and abetted by a media hellbent on petrifying everyone into a constant state of background fear and mistrust of others.

I was lucky enough to be in attendance at three social events on the weekend many restrictions were lifted. The hugging protocols varied from place to place. The first one I hosted and I am not ashamed to say that there was hugging on such a scale as to have spilled over into group hugging. No grannies were killed. Degrees of separation? Perhaps one of us unwittingly took a hitherto unknown virus away and then hugged someone else who then hugged someone else who then shook someone’s hand who then touched a library book who then…etc etc. But until recently, we collectively understood that risk from infection for the average person in this manner was simply part of the human experience and that a life in pursuit of perpetual avoidance of the dreaded microscopic ‘bug’ would be a life not worth living, and indeed would be one lived so out of balance as to be readily diagnosable as a mental illness.

Besides, if it wasn’t a Covid virus particle, it will not matter to the government or many people in this country, since all other illnesses and/or deaths elicit scant sympathy these days. Only Covid counts. Never mind the fact that if human bodies were so delicate then I wouldn’t be here to write this, let alone inflict my devastating hugs on others, and you wouldn’t be here to read it. Never mind the fact that every single flu season ever has never given anyone any pause at Christmas time and New Year, peak respiratory infection time, where even us reserved Brits quaff enough alcohol to make us practically lick each other’s faces. Never mind that human beings are social creatures, designed to share our micro-organisms and viruses that we carry in their millions, and yet still manage to reach the average grand old age of 81 in this country. Never mind that actually, contrary to the advertisers of 99.9% bacteria and virus killing cleaning products, we are supposed to live with the millions of bacteria and viruses on our planet in order to be healthy both individually and as a community.

And yet, I attended another social event where hugging was viewed as a rare and risk-fraught activity akin to dropping a tab of acid because your mates are doing it. I saw one hug. There were quite a few of us. And it was brief and tentative. I didn’t partake partly because I didn’t know people very well and partly because I could smell the fear. You need to hug properly, for at least 30 seconds, to get that oxytocin flowing, the stress-relieving effects to really kick in and any subsequent boost to your immunity (yes, it is scientifically proven that lowered stress results in less illness or ‘dis-ease’) to take effect.

The last event was better. I didn’t know these people either but they were a huggier crowd. There were even kisses. Even so, there were plenty of pre-hug murmurs of ‘I’m allowed to hug you now’. Even for those who have done the quick risk-benefit analysis in their heads prior to human contact with an old friend and decided that probably no grannies would be killed, and that they might benefit far more from actually being able to re-establish some of the relationships with people they care about after this past traumatising 15 months. For those, the notion of ‘allowable’ human contact looms large, the spectre of the state and propagandised sledge-hammer messaging prominent in their minds as they lean in for comfort and connection.

I met up with my mother in an ‘allowed’ visit for the first time in six months recently. At the end we hugged for longer than 30 seconds. She said afterwards that no one had given her a hug like that since I did six months ago during our brief Christmas window. I immediately gave her a second, lengthy hug. I fervently believe that I did more for my mother’s health in those brief minutes than any pharmaceutical intervention could hope to. She is a granny. She is also not only alive after our egregious risk taking but no more wants to live in a world without hugs than I do.

This is what they have done to us and we must not allow it to happen again. To paraphrase, if we can make people believe absurdities, we can make them commit atrocities. I heard recently that someone said they would gladly take 30,000 deaths from other causes if it saved one life from Covid. I think that pretty much qualifies as entering the realms of the dangerously, atrociously, absurd. One cannot help feeling that this person probably needs a lot of hugs. Now more than ever, we all do. Perhaps then, we will collectively see beyond one illness and acknowledge that there is more to life than living in perpetual fear of that one illness. Perhaps then, we will see logic and reason, proportionality and common sense return to us once more. And perhaps then, we can have a proper conversation about public health, what it means to be healthy and what it means to live a good as well as a long life.

Choose life, not a simulation

To be healthy, we need to make sure we are as connected as possible. Loneliness knocks years off our lives and is apparently more damaging to our health and immune function than smoking. Humanity depends on connection for its very survival and yet our governments, under pressure from profit making entities such as corporations, seem determined to undermine connection in every aspect of our lives. How much connection do we truly get from online interactions with other human beings? Sure, it’s better than nothing, and not every human being needs the same level or quality of social interaction to flourish, but we all need person to person connection to some degree or other. Whether you’re a socially anxious introvert or a gregarious social butterfly, meaningful connection with at least one other human being is necessary for health and happiness.

The trend towards atomisation and individualism is nothing new. We have seen moves towards increasing separation over successive decades, or even centuries, with an abrupt acceleration in the last ten years or so, as technology has at least facilitated if not driven the undermining of face-to-face interaction. Perhaps this is why we have also seen trends towards ideas and thus ideologies replacing concrete reality as the common experience that binds humans together, regardless of age, sex, race, or background. As we become increasingly untethered to reality, able instead to immerse ourselves in fantasy creations of our own or others’ imaginings as if we can think ourselves into existence, our collective psyche becomes ever more vulnerable to fracture. Our species has been on a path towards self-destruction in the form of disconnection from nature and denial of material reality for some time. The response to our current challenge, that of a not quite but nearly novel virus, is thus understandable within this context.

Along with this trend towards disconnection with the material world from which we all spring and cannot deny in any long-term, meaningful way – after all, we inhabit bodies that need feeding, rest, warmth, and human touch – has come a significant increase in aversion to risk, a desire for safety above all other considerations including privacy and freedom, and an excessive need to control and police others’ language, behaviour and ultimately thoughts. This is truly a dystopian vision of humanity and one which the likes of Orwell, CS Lewis and countless other thinkers of the 20^th Century warned us about. We have history as a handy aide memoire to what happens when people give over their freedoms in return for a sense of safety, usually in the guise of the state, voiced by a well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) human promising the undeliverable – a life free from risk and thus death.

Humans are not gods and, in this case, the vain attempt to thwart mortality by one cause, further misery and mortality is caused by a myriad consequence of the original action. Or life becomes unliveable for all but the privileged few. Or more likely, as is the situation now, both. The cure was always worse than the malady. In the beginning, we had an excuse of sorts for overreaction. But this time around, with the benefit of knowledge and experience of two previous lockdowns that did not ‘contain’ the virus but did instead result in deaths associated with its stringency and takeover of the health system, along with devastation to businesses and thus lives, and the education and prospects of millions, we have no such excuse.

A caged and frightened population is one easily manipulated to turn a blind eye to or even to orchestrate atrocities against fellow human beings. We are already seeing its beginnings in the arena of anger and divisiveness of social media. The new ‘public square’ is reverberating to the sounds of curses and insults as people struggle to assert their moral superiority over others they do not even want to understand. There is nothing so tempting as shutting off all empathy for the person who dares to question an orthodoxy one has accepted wholesale. How dare they? What kind of a person are they? Why, they must be a monster. And soon comes the cry, of ‘Burn the witch!’

If we are to get through this dark time, as in all dark times, we must find ways to connect with each other. This is the only way to build any kind of resilience. Resilient communities are needed to avert this sprint towards a future of misery for ourselves and our children, where walks in the countryside without a permit, travel overseas without a ‘health’ passport, quality learning without censorship, the chance to breathe the very air unimpeded without glares of opprobrium from the new class of the masked and pious, and the opportunity to sing and dance in a crowd of joyful fellow humans, is not consigned to the history books forever.

People have compared this situation to the Second World War – how weak and soft-bellied we must be to compare the suffering from enforced separation from our loved ones to the threat of death from a stray bomb in the Blitz. I have some sympathy for this view, and indeed in our cosy, internet-connected, well-fed home environments, we are a world away from the acute threat of death from an exploding doodlebug. But this is still missing an important point. Many people who lived through it looked back with fondness at a time which fostered greater community spirit and connection than they had experienced before. It was this togetherness, the ability to congregate, to work together, to dance and sing, to make the most of the meagre rations and home-grown produce that could be acquired, that brought our nation through and out the other side of a truly horrific experience more compassionate than they went in. And thus, the first Labour government was elected, the welfare state and the NHS were created.

What this should tell us is that we need more than just calories. Arguably, we need each other, to reach out and touch each other, far more than we need to consume takeaways and designer chocolates. And that’s if we are lucky enough to have a cosy place to live and more food than we need. This comparison to past generations’ suffering is lazy at best and reeks of middle-class privilege at worst. That this blunt tool of universal lockdown is being used in countries such as India, where people live in one room, ordinarily hand to mouth, with the effects of extreme poverty and the ever-present spectre of starvation, and that people are okay with this because of the ‘lockdowns = good pandemic management’ argument is very telling about how far we have come from the people who voted for a welfare state.

We may be weak and soft-bellied after months of over-consumption and sedentary screen staring, but the way to engender strength is to come together. That we are being forcibly separated in order ‘stop the spread’ of a virus, while laudable in some narrow way, is also counterproductive. Our immune systems need contact to function properly. We need connection to be healthy in all other ways and there is even a serious scientific case to be made for regular human contact to build more robust immune responses in both the individual and in the community. This contact ultimately does more to protect our most vulnerable than a mere vaccine. I say this response was wrong-headed from the start, given what we already knew about the virus in the weeks prior to the first lockdown. That China, locking up its citizens and posting fake videos of people dropping down dead in the streets, was used as a paragon of pandemic management is laughable. Sadly, we are the butt of the joke.

Alone and afraid, we are at our most vulnerable from everything. We must find ways to build meaningful connection once more, even when all other powers seem to be pulling us away from each other. We should wonder at the scale of the investment in such a message – that we need to see less of each other. That human connection is a disposable frippery. A luxury.

It is a right. And it is essential for our survival. Human connection is not dispensable.

Declaration of intent

I started off life inside my grandmother. We all did. Well, you lived in yours, of course, not mine! When my mum camped out in her womb for nine months, the genetic material that made half of me was present in her newly formed ovaries. Like a Russian doll, we are placed one inside the other, part of a matrilineal line of biological matter that makes us who we are, before experience and environment have a chance to get their turn to shape us in any dramatic way.

My grandmother did not have a nice life, or so I thought. For many years, my enduring memory of her was of a disabled woman, bedbound for the latter years of her life. I would see her swollen fingers twisted and distorted from crippling rheumatoid arthritis resting on the bedclothes. There was a hoist above her bed to help her get onto a commode. My slightly-built auntie who still lived at home did the rest, sometimes in concert with my long-suffering grandfather who never seemed to be able to do anything right. Granny, in spite of her difficulties, her battle to have any kind of life in spite of constant pain, still ruled the roost, and made it very clear her dissatisfaction with Granddad and the varying things he didn’t get right in a day. He took it all stoically, retreating to the armchair with cricket or rugby on the telly, or the pub at other times when we weren’t there. She only ever had kind words for me and my sister though, and thanks to her, a comic and some sweeties were always waiting on the side for us when we entered the two bed council owned bungalow, every other Sunday.

I loved my Granny. I loved my Grandad too but she was special. I remember kissing her on the cheek and feeling how petal soft it was and I remember the smell of her skin, unscented like the soap my auntie must have used to wash her with. I remember that before she was stuck in bed, all day every day, she had been stuck in a high backed chair instead. Before my sister was very old and probably before she can remember, I was occasionally permitted to sit my small frame on her knees and have a ‘horsey ride’ as long as I was gentle. I remember seeing the blue-grey lines of stitches in her swollen legs under the flesh coloured scratchy tights that made them resemble something out of a Mary Shelley novel. These were the remnants of one of the many procedures that didn’t go quite right; the sutures hadn’t dissolved and couldn’t be removed. This wasn’t the only medical experiment that she’d been subjected to.

My Granny had nearly died of tuberculosis when she was younger and spent a couple of years in a sanatorium, not expected to live. My Granddad diligently courted her anyway, although warned off doing so by his family. I saw a photo recently of her in the garden of the place, looking painfully thin. How many times did my Granny, the youngest of seven, look death in the face? How many times did she tell it in no uncertain times ‘not today’ until she finally succumbed to the inevitable, a stroke aged 62? In some small part, I have both grandparents’ stubborn streak to thank for my own existence. And also the experimental drugs they used to cure my Granny of her TB. She got out, got married, had my mum, got sicker again of other things, got told not to have any more children, had my auntie anyway.

I saw another photo of her. She looked so different to the mental image I had held for so long – strong, fit, beautiful figure. She was en route to Weymouth by bicycle for a day at the beach with her sisters. It would have taken them all day to get there and back from Bradford on Avon since they’d have covered over one hundred miles. I was astonished at the strength needed to complete such a feat. How fit she must have been! The image I had in my mind is replaced with this one, her confident face holding the camera lens in its gaze, not quite smiling but certainly happier. She had a body that worked and she was going to use it. I’m glad she used it properly until she couldn’t anymore. In that picture is everything I need to know about my Granny; that she wanted to live her life to the fullest regardless of what misfortune threw at her.

When I feel down about my life circumstances or a bit creaky in my bones, I think of my Granny. I live my life because after a point, she could not. It’s the least I can do since so much of me once camped out in her womb as well.

This is what I think of when I see how small my life could become under this current situation. I think of how small others’ lives have become or are becoming. I think of how when I had bouts of depression that made me tiny in the estate of my own perception, how I had to force myself to get out of my head by getting out of my room or home. We live small, we think small, we live small. This is not what we’re here for.

Once, my Granny cycled to Weymouth and back. Once, I jumped off the side of a mountain with only some canvas and a Slovenian man to break my fall. Once, my Granny got married and had babies even though she wasn’t expected to live. Once, I packed some bags and moved to the Far East. Once, my Granny named every flower we brought home to her on our walk around the River Avon. Once, I went on that walk, picking one of every brightly coloured bloom I could see.

This is my declaration of intent: I want to live because she wanted to live. It’s the least I can do.