Struggle
Not having to, versus having no choice but to
You maybe saw this note, which is simply a response to a correspondent’s remark about goldfish and their attention span:
Since then, a lot of goldfish have gone under the bridge, and I’ve been thinking about the whole goldfish scene. I know that some of you likely wonder at the links I perceive in The Endless Chain, and in a way it’s what we call red car syndrome that leads to these links. The theory goes that, if you buy a red car, you will all of a sudden realise that every other car on the road (or so it would seem) is also red. What you thought would be a colour to make you stand out from the crowd is in fact the colour of the crowd. The same applies to blue, yellow, green, black, silver, champagne, white. It’s not that tons of cars are the same colour as yours, it’s that you have deliberated about what colour car to take, and that thought process has impressed itself on your mind, so that there is an awareness of _____ cars up there. It will wane over time, as you get to the point where you accept your red car as just another colour.
So it is with the struggle of goldfish. The struggle of goldfish remains a subject for goldfish, until you start to reflect on the whole shebang. Here is what I wrote in my response to the correspondent’s remark:
I think there is only one thing that a goldfish would “struggle” with, and that is breathing, if you removed it from the water. It is shocking to me that such a simple act, to which we lend no serious consideration, can result in the death of a fellow earthly creature.
There are three bands of existence: that in which there is contentment, in which the days go by and the nights go by and food is plentiful and leisure is plentiful and life takes its natural course. Then, at the other end, is the extreme at which contentment is exceeded to such an extent that idleness is present and out of idle hands comes the devil’s work, a positive determination to create the third band, which lies between the first and second: struggle.
Struggle is the product of a paucity of contentment, and can arise out of natural circumstances. But struggle can also to a great extent be procured by those who do the devil’s work. They create a situation in which others, be they creatures of nature, or nature itself, or other humans, require for their survival to struggle. No one and no thing should have to struggle through the negligent or deliberate machinations of others.
The irony is that deliberate acts (dol) and negligent acts (faute) are actionable in many quarters of the law, be it civil, administrative, criminal or corporate. So, why do so many people have to struggle at the mere whim of others?
(Dol and faute are the French legal terms for wilful harm and negligence.)
But isn’t that right? Why should we have to struggle? The other day, I watched a video on YouTube which is on a channel that I frequent because I think it’s informative and it’s well produced and the owner of the channel is a person worthy of respect. His name is Petter Hörnfeldt. He’s a Swedish airline pilot whose channels look at developments in the air travel industry, and accidents that have happened over the relatively short history of airlines.
You might think that my reason for watching his videos is that I travel a lot by air. Not a bit of it. I have not been in an aeroplane since before the pandemic and I do not intend to ever go in one again. I think they are a stinky, overblown, cattle-moving convenience to people who just have to be on the other side of the world, rarely for valid reasons that modern telecommunications could not cater for, or to pander to their vanity. When I hear about the huge quantities of kerosene that airliners take on to carry their bulk across the globe, I shudder. That they discharge it into the air we breath as after-burn or in preparation for an emergency landing, I shudder again. Oh, demon oil, the source of much modern pollution: heavenly Father, forgive them even though they know full well what they do.
The reason I watch Mentour Pilot is because an airliner accident is a human story. A story of men and women who devote their lives to the safe carriage of members of the public from one place to another. I actually wish they could all be made unemployed at a stroke, but I am not cruel, so my wish would be contingent on ensuring a soft landing for those who are jettisoned.
Once you acquire a realisation of the human aspect of any story, that will, like a red car, attune you to human stories. You will start to appreciate the hurdles that others have to surmount and, optimally, compare them to the hurdles that you must surmount, and then draw up a comparison that tells you accurately why others struggle and you don’t, or why you struggle and others don’t.
Of course, we live in a world in which all the causes of what ails others lie within their realm, not ours; and all that ails us lies in the realm of others, and not us. Immigration, Palestine, Jewish, MAGA supporter, Democrat supporter, Labourite, Faragist, the EU, drug lords, right-wing dictators, left-wing dictators. The roots out of which all our troubles spring are many, and there really is a fantastic choice. It’s like a 22-screen multiplex cinema: a story for everyone’s taste. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Seldom do we arrive at a point where we conclude that the problems caused by left-wing dictators, and those caused by right-wing dictators, are not caused by them being left- or right-wing, but by them being dictators. We resist that conclusion, based on whether we ourselves are right- or left-wing. If we need to knock a pin into a piece of wood and have a mallet and a sledgehammer as our choice of tools, we will argue till the cows come home as to which is the more appropriate, instead of going to find a pin punch.
Breaking out of this mantra that it has to be someone else’s fault calls for a measure of introspection, of self-criticism and humility. Even though I am writing in this vein, I must tell you that that is a place that is not easily achieved. Much easier is the rat race, the competitive world of trying to be the top dog. And, while we seek dominance, success, comfort, just an ordinary family life, we never, ever do so at the cost of others. Really. Everyone has the chances that we have had. Everyone can have what we have. They just need to work for it. Go to school, go to college, graduate with honours, get in with a good firm and work your way to the top. What could be simpler?
In a piece I wrote a few years ago about progress, I talked about orange juice and how the difference between the cheapest and the most expensive I could find in my local store was a factor of 13. And I asked Does the expensive brand taste 13 times better than the cheapest brand? And my conclusion was that, for many, how much better it is, is irrelevant. The mere fact that it tastes better at all is the criterion on which they direct their hand towards that expensive brand. Like choosing between a sledgehammer and a mallet to hammer in a pin.
When you’re able to make those choices based on the taste of the product, rather than its price, then you’re in the second band: comfort absent struggle. But, you will protest, you do not create situations in which others have to struggle. Of course you don’t, because you live, as do I, as do we all, in an economy, in which profit extraction is legitimate, in whatever form. Business is business. That is the founding principle of our lives: to extract maximum profit. (In monetary terms, lest you labour under any misconception.)
The video that I was watching on Mentour Pilot the other day was about the craziest airline accident ever. Many incidents occur without the pilots being able to do anything, and yet they valiantly struggle with their machines with one goal in mind: the preservation of life. Others make mistakes. Others are insouciant of their lax discipline. But the flight of Germanwings 9525 was a tragedy beyond compare: the pilot deliberately flew his aircraft and all its passengers into a mountain. If you were around in 2015, you will recall hearing about this crash. You can look up how it occurred: pilot Lubitz, suffering from suicidal tendencies, masked his treatment from his employer and attended for work as if things were normal. It was his fault. It really was his fault. There’s no question: he locked his colleague out of the cockpit and directed the aircraft at an Alp.
Hörnfeldt does an interesting analysis of the crash. The simple facts; the pilot’s mental state; and then the means deployed to deal with that mental state that virtually obliged Lubitz to lie to his employer. The costs invested in training. The knife-edge he was placed on after his initial treatment. The travelling public of course is concerned. How can we ensure that air travel is made safer by ruling out the risks of a repeat of this tragedy? The safest place for any air traveller is actually on terra firma (although, nota bene, people do also die there), but, no matter, we must strive for safety, safety, and, of course, profit. So, not too much safety. The video is here.
Yesterday, at the shop where I work, I was confronted by quite the oddest question I have had put to me in a very long time. You have to understand, this is a high class grocer’s, where the general feeling is that price is of no concern. We do have some very competitive prices (our butter is the cheapest in town) but, on the whole, whilst the management doesn’t quite consciously embrace the adage that a fool and his money are easily parted, it does often happen to turn out that way.
A lady came up to me at the cash desk brandishing her till receipt and, politely, asked whether she could ask me a question. I mulled over my answer for a second, but instead launched into nice guy mode. “Yes, madam, what seems to be the problem?” Then it came: have the prices gone up since last year?
If I hadn’t been quite so bemused, I think I would have had to stifle a guffaw. I was honest. I don’t know, I don’t monitor the prices in the store, it’s not part of my duties. However, I think that with inflation and all, there is a good chance that prices are higher now than they were this time last year. “Except,” I added for dramatic effect, and for no better reason than that it is absolutely true “my wage, which is the same as it was last year.” My wage was of no concern whatsoever to the lady. “It’s just (it’s always “just” something) that my bill is over 400 euros and last year it was only 200 euros.”
This was starting to be like a conversation straight out of Alice in Wonderland. “Maybe you bought more this year than last year?” “No, I bought LESS,” she insisted. I wanted to say “Prove it” but instead offered an interim solution.
“Keep your till receipt from this year and, next year, come back and buy exactly the same products, and then you will know for a fact the increment year-on-year. And, what’s more, you will have the proof to show me. And then I will tell you that there is nothing I can do about it. What you take down from the shelf to purchase is in your power, and your power alone.”
I can assure you, you can buy the essentials, the bare necessities, at our store for about 50 euros: meat, vegetables, starch, like pasta, rice or potatoes, butter, cooking fat, and maybe an extra like a packet of digestives. But if your bill is 400 euros, excuse me, you have let yourself go. You are not struggling, because, if you were, you’d have a budget, and a carefully pared-down list of purchases, and you’d be paying in cash. How do I know? Because that’s what I do.
I don’t know what work the lady does but there’s a high likelihood in our part of the world that she is in European public administration. EU-bureaucrats do not struggle. Their stipends are generous, they pay no more than 3 per cent income tax, they have free bus passes and free parking and car allowances and meal vouchers. Their lives are comfortable, and yet they brandish their till receipts at low-paid cashiers and complain vociferously that their grocery bill is twice what it was last year. It is a microcosm out of which it is very easy to emit loud noises, but into which it is very difficult to talk reason.
If they’re silly enough to rack up that kind of bill, then we’re silly enough to sell it to them.
Image: the aircraft that was destroyed on Germanwings flight 9525, photographed in 2014, a year before the disaster. (By SEBASTIEN MORTIER - https://www.flickr.com/photos/129731853@N07/16914334221/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39186945).