Britical

Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know - Tao te Ching

Never trust a hippy - Sid Vicious

 

Maybe I’m really pulling my dick out on this one (as my mate C. would say), but I am willing to bet some of you have noticed the recent fashion for protesting one’s own goodness, godliness, "spirituality", and all things sweetness & light. The beauty of this post is, for purposes of my losing friends and alienating people that aren’t really friends anyway, is that if you’re guilty of this, you’ll be too self-absorbed to realise it’s about you or too self-absorbed to read it in the first place.

 "Actually, I’m a very… spiritual person", the hair-tossing celebrity will take care to confide with a straight face to several hundred thousand viewers of ‘Access Hollywood’. If asked about their latest stint in rehab, or the dump truck needed to transport their coke habit, they’ll likely smile and say, "I’ve really….evolved past that now?" More often than not, it will be a celebrity known within the industry for the exacting instructions and ensuing tantrums aimed at the hapless minions in their entourage. In other words, someone with their head several miles up their own arse. Whatever the airy-fairy concept of "spiritual" means to such people, publicly judging yourself to be wonderful - first cousin to declaring, yourself a "very charismatic" or "very sexy person" - is surely not for you to say, is it?

And another thing: is there not something a bit "off", chilling even, about inserting "Peace Out" or "Bliss & Gratitude" or whatever meaningless feel-goodism as your email "signature" by automatically making it so? Not that I don’t revel in the irony. After all, these sentiments, such as they might be (and my argument here being that they ain’t), are surely things to be acted upon, and without fuss, not just spouted about ad nauseum. They can even, horror or horrors, be kept to yourself via that dying talent, private thought (fucking bloggers). Otherwise, ‘Love’, ‘Peace’ and all the other worthy stuff you have no intention of actually making good on, become cheapened, soiled by some advertising scatter shot effect, like the guy in the bar at 3am hitting on anything vaguely female that moves under its own steam.

Now this hippy shit (for want of a better term), with its leather tie-on bracelets, crystals, grubby bits of red string, and Native American gee-gaws, in cahoots with its general feeling of woolly, New Age, West Coast (un)thinking, has trickled down, like so much diarrhoea, to the general populace. It has even reached Australia. And lately, unless you yourself subscribe to it very vocally, you will be judged "Negative" or "Judgemental" (yes, these people excel in unintentional irony. Bless.).

So I myself shall then judge the negative effects of the self-help industry, one of whose most irksome spawn is ‘The Secret’. In case you’ve been blissfully unaware, this is a scary and unstoppable juggernaut of books, movies and other derivative products made up of Positive Thinking gone completely rogue; i.e. simple optimism and hope recycled and re-engineered using spurious notions nicked from some bastard spawn of pretend quantum theory & Eastern Religion. Its heyday was a couple of years ago, but its legacy lives on in people insisting you need only "manifest your desire" to get the things you want - usually, I have noticed, things involving bigger cars, bigger houses, and a bigger bank balance. And so, if you fail to achieve these things via such childish magical thinking, there is an implicit and insidious sense of blame. (And God help you if you have cancer…) It is this that I despise most about ‘The Secret’ and its ilk. As that wise Mr. Shakespeare put it: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’

 

…Speaking of which, in the rest of the world (i.e., not America, darlings) where children may go to bed very hungry, with images, if not of sugar plums, then bowls of rice, dancing in their heads, are we really to believe they are guilty of not "manifesting their desire" properly? "Ah…", the hippies will tell you, too apathetic and busy self-improving themselves to actually do anything about such things, "It’s Karma." Nice, you think. Nice attitude - and you trust that if there were such a thing as Karma, that they might find themselves in their next "incarnation" picking flies from their starving children’s faces in some filthy refugee camp.

 

The "Self-Help" movement has always been about the self-ish self……the mememmemeME. There’s not much room, amidst all the self-affirmations and navel gazing, for anyone else. White folks rich only in money trot off to the South West or some desert in search of a "shaman" who, with the help of some hallucogenics, is happy to take their money and usher them into some faux-Native American "experience" - minus the smallpox, bullets and general raping & pillaging and shit. (Shame.) They will come back, faces aglow, the way people return from India wittering on about "Dharma", having found "ananda"…bliss among the wretchedly poor and unfortunate.

 

But the best thing about this faux-Buddhist mass circle jerk is, if you go on about your own Positive, Giving self enough of the time, you really don’t have to worry too much about anyone else at all. On the contrary, you will actually start to believe you’re some free-spirited being of wonder and enlightenment sprinkling happy, happy, joy, joy fairy dust on anyone lucky enough to be around you. The constant self-aggrandisement, whether via smarmy email signatures, misapproriating other cultures’ mystic legends (i.e. supernatural rubbish), Twitter, rainbow bracelets, yoga mats, your Facebook status, or your scraggly bit of red string…is meant to say it all for you. (And does it, how!) In sum, it serves to let you off the hook. With all this sound and fury, even if it signifies nothing very much at all, your underlying self-serving attitude cannot possibly be called out by anyone. So if you’re ever called upon to actually do something for someone else, even someone who may once have helped you, your eyes may glaze over with confusion quicker than you can say ‘Deepak Chopra’.

This is why I am no longer surprised or disappointed when such people back quietly out of the metaphorical room at the merest sense of anything requiring them to walk their talk. Their words, their accoutrements, are in inverse proportion to their actions. Luckily, these things should conveniently signal to you all you need to know beforehand. If you’re smart, you will have learned to rely on the so-called Negative and Judgemental people. It is they who step up to the plate. Talking less but doing more, they will practically knock down your door when you’re even slightly in need and then brush off your thanks, their effort a mere nothing to them. But the protesting too much hippycrits (yeah, I just made that word up)? To a person, methinks not so much. Namaste…ommmmm…..

Copyright Britical, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

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