WHAT GREAT ONES DO THE LESS WILL PRATTLE OF

(Captain to Viola, Twelfth Night, Act,scene 2, by Will Shakespeare)

February 2018 – The headline above has buzzed in my mind for ages, and by ‘ages’ I mean several years, on and off. It might have something to do with the fact that Twelfth Night was part of my GCE English Literature curriculum all those years ago (before GCSE was invented). Or, maybe, it might be to do with years spent working in and around international news gathering. No matter.

It also brings to mind an image of Les Dawson in one of his voyeur-vision comedy roles.

I put it to you that this concept (sometimes called gossiping, or muck-spreading) is the lifeblood of many tabloid newspapers, many glossy magazines, many voyeur-vision programmes, and many Facebook and Twitter contributors. What’s more – you know I’m right. Supposedly ‘Great ones’ do (stuff) and the supposedly ‘lesser’ prattle about it. And many of us, maybe most of us are guilty as charged. And that, dear reader, seems to be close to the limit of ‘life as we know it’ for many who live in our sophisticated, educated, democratic, western society.

It makes me feel a bit sad. I understand now the disappointment and resignation in the late Peggy Lee’s challenging rendition of ‘Is That All There Is?’. Listen/see on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=43&v=LCRZZC-DH7M

Or Steve Cutts’ animated film:

http://www.openculture.com/2017/12/will-you-really-achieve-happiness-if-you-win-the-rat-race.html

Reverting to the position of the muse, I can’t help but wonder why we strive as we do for things we know we can only use for our time here and then lose, inevitably; why we try so hard to accumulate money (when a wise man told us years ago that ‘the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.’); and why we find it so difficult to live in peace with each other?

John Lennon and the Beatles sang a song entitled “Money (that’s what I want)”, and somebody shot him. Is there a lesson here? Perhaps we need a different focus?

The best things in life are free
But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees

Now give me money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want) yeah
That's what I want

Your loving give me a thrill,
But your loving don't pay my bills

Now give me money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want) yeah
That's what I want

Money don't get everything it's true
What it don't get I can't use

Now what? I’ve just introduced a word that not all my readers spotted or will necessarily understand or define in the same way. The word? Evil.

In search of a definition I turned to Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/) It has a great deal to say on the subject, beginning with:

“The Concept of Evil”

“During the past thirty years, moral, political, and legal philosophers have become increasingly interested in the concept of evil. This interest has been partly motivated by ascriptions of ‘evil’ by laymen, social scientists, journalists, and politicians as they try to understand and respond to various atrocities and horrors of the past eighty years, e.g., the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and killing sprees by serial killers such as Jeffery Dahmer. It seems that we cannot capture the moral significance of these actions and their perpetrators by calling them ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘very very wrong’ or ‘very very bad.’ We need the concept of evil.”

Elsewhere, another wise man listed the attitudes and actions that bring us down and he didn’t even mention the love of money. He named them as: “from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” And that same wise man didn’t have popular newspapers to help him to identify the headings.

If these attitudes and actions blighted our species all those years ago, what have we learned and what is different today? Answers: Nothing and nothing. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun and we are our own worst enemy. And we just love to talk and read about these attitudes and actions, don’t we? Even better, we still seem to believe that the solution to everything is to throw more money at those attitudes and actions that keep on coming back to bite us, and we blame our politicians for not releasing our tax funds to resolve everything. Why else do we think that our young people are suffering mental illness? Why else do theft, murder, slander, and deceit require a police force and an army of lawyers to provide justice and keep the peace?

And we talk about the importance of British values! Per-leeze!

OK. I shall stop there. My purpose today was to draw your attention to some of the subjects that have been on my mind. But if I haven’t challenged you in some way, please feel free to carry on as usual. Nothing will be any better than it is now and some things are likely to become very much worse. On the other hand, you might like to link up with others who would quite like to change the way we live. You will find some of them at www.newchartistmovement.org.uk and some at www.ukcolumn.org .