A Diary Of Despair

This is my attempt to express an overwhelming sense of hopelessness at what is unfolding both in Britain and much of the world. Why on Earth would I want to write this and why would anyone else want to read it?

I am writing it because I don’t see anyone else being sufficiently honest about the situation and as yet I have not seen anyone else try to identify all the causes.

As I write, the house diagonally opposite has tree monsters hacking down trees and bushes for the third day running. Yesterday they largely destroyed a hedge used by dozens of birds. The mess is awful. Now, there is a chainsaw and the awful sound of the branch grinder. The noise is terrible. Hell is commonly thought of hot, but what if it is also incredibly noisy? To me, though I don’t believe in the literal concept of Hell, this is a sample of what hell would sound like.

This apparently trivial event of destruction, though not so trivial for the birds who have just lost their homes, points to the first culprit: libertarianism. I might boil this dreadful political philosophy down to a simple sentence: I’m going to do whatever I want and screw you if you don’t like it or it hurts you. This is one of the main tributaries of our disaster and is, in part, both caused by the economic system and reinforces it.

Of course many of us cannot do what we want, mainly because we cannot afford to, but also, because some people, perhaps not many, still have a conscience and a sense of being part of something larger than their own greedy, selfish egos. It might also be called a sense of decency – not a very scientific term, but many of people still recognise it as a useful phrase.

It is quite possible that many children start out with a sense of decency, a sense that it isn’t a good idea to do just whatever you want and that other people and other things also matter. However, though many schools do try hard to develop messages like these, they are always going to be overwhelmed by the economic system and the need to earn money.

The next culprit is that, given the scale of destruction and that almost everything is going in the wrong direction, it must be the case that the majority of ways of earning a decent or reasonable living are destructive either directly or indirectoy. If they were ameliorative, then things would be broadly improving.

Since this is a diary, I will just stop here for now, leaving the reader to think about how they make a living and whether anything they do to earn money does any good for the planet or is all or most of it having negative effects?

Not many minutes later: as the infernal noise of chainsaws and grinders carries on relentlessly, making it very hard for me to get on with the writing the book (about natural gas) which some people have very kindly paid me to write, I am reminded of another thing I find astonishing about the British: they don’t care about noise. Now this may go along with the libertarianism – damn you, I am going to make as much racket as I like – but whatever the cause my anecdotal experience is that too many British people think that noise doesn’t matter and that you can indeed make as much of it as you like no matter it might upset others.

I will talk more about noise another time, but for now, ask yourself how much noise do you make? Do you have music or talk blaring out of a radio, TV or mobile device most of the time? Do other people have to listen, whether they want to or not? What is that endless sound or noise doing to your brain? How can you think clearly or at all when there is so much signal pouring into your brain? And not just any signal, but sound, which for many animals is part of our early warning system and so very easily evokes strong emotions generating fear pushing us towards fight or flight. Are most people perhaps partly or greatly wound up by continual noise and are always in a heightened state of fear?