I am considering re-starting my blog posts. Why? I suppose it is a desire to be known. Not known as being identifiable by a large number of people, but for those small number who do know me, or read this, better known. What I think. How I feel about things.
That is bizarre when you think about it. Where does this instinct come from? What I feel and think is of little interest to others. They are more interested in what they feel and think. And I do not suffer the delusion that what I feel and think matters in some wider way. What people think seldom matters. What they do about it does. But you don’t do things through a blog post.
And it is not an instinct all share. One person very close to me likes not to be known. For him, he feels it gives others power over him to know him and about him. A bit like letting other people know your hand in poker. Another friend too said something subtly different, but along a similar line: that having secrets made him feel empowered.
I am the opposite. I feel I have power when there is nothing left for people to find out. No one has anything over me. Whatever anyone levels at me I can say, yes. Here it is. Next? I don’t feel like my life is analogous to a game of poker. Whatever I have to win or lose is not something that other people can give or take away. It is in my gift alone.
Maybe that instinct to be known led me into politics in the first place. I would have said that it was a desire to change things for the better. But there are many ways to do that without asking 80,000 people ‘do you love me?’ every five years. There is something in me, and in all politicians, that makes us seek an audience – to what we do, and who we are.
(It is a form of vanity. Not bad in itself – that attribute, like all attributes - can be used for either good or bad. The important thing is self-awareness of what your attributes are. This makes it more likely you will be able to direct them to what you think you want to become. Self-awareness of course, is an attribute in itself… and, like humility, if one is sufficiently lacking in it, one can think oneself very rich in it…)
When I was a politician, I felt that if people were going to vote for me, they deserved to know as much about me, what I thought – and more crucially, how I thought, as possible. But politics was frustrating because its nature prevented openness. Saying honestly what you thought and who you are usually resulted in such distortions that at the end of it all, a more dishonest picture of ‘you’ was portrayed than if you just kept silent.
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| I admit it. Freedom did feel good... |
But I am not a politician any more. On that day when I was to finally go to bed with either victory or liberty, I remember realising that the prospect of liberty made my heart beat faster and made me feel more alive than the prospect of victory. Which was a good thing, because that is what I got. After my liberation from service was announced, I was asked by the local BBC political correspondent what I thought about ‘everything’. I recall the delicious surge of joy when I realised that what I said didn’t really matter anymore. And as I remember, I said as much.
But as I started to etch out my new life, I began to realise that liberty is not just constrained by a job. Loyalties, consequences, perceptions, all of these curtail saying what you really think; doing what, in absence of consequences, you’d really like to do. And of course, when I thought
about it, they do on a daily basis. I cannot in practice tell my meeting acquaintance that the thing they are telling me about is of no interest to me whatsoever, if I want to maintain work and friendships. We are always constrained in acting by the consequences of our actions. It is a word much bandied-about, but it is hard to imagine what real liberty looks like.
But that is probably a blog for another time.
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