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What does it mean to be white, what does it mean to be black, what about all the shades in between, and since when has discrimination be so easy to spot?

Twitter seems to know, so I asked for clarification… I thought the Twitter police would string me up, or worse still, the racism police, but I didn’t get a single response, probably because I’m largely anonymous there.

Social Psychology defines Racism as prejudice and discrimination against people based on their ethnicity or race. Prejudice is an unfavourable attitude toward a particular social group and its members. And Discrimination is the behavioural expression of that prejudice. According to Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice, prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory behaviour consist of three components;

Some scholars don’t accept this model. Rupert Brown suggests the following definition;

“…the holding of derogatory attitudes or beliefs, the expression of negative affect, or the display of hostile or discriminatory behaviour towards members of a group.”

I remember when I was a kid in the scouts in the 1980s. We went to an international scouting event in the UK, and my friends and I found ourselves isolated and on the receiving end of a tirade of abuse from an English scout leader. As far as he was concerned, everyone from Ireland at that time was a terrorist. We got an apology, but that didn’t remove the experience of being singled out simply because of where we came from. That was mild compared to what Irish people living in the UK at the time had to endure. The IRA had active units operating in London at the time, and I suppose we could forgive people’s general response. But discrimination against children? Discrimination at all? Maybe not.

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We are obsessed with our self-image. Even for most of us who play a very minor role in the grand stage show we call life, there is a desire to be seen in a particular light. Depending on the situation, we may be a leader or follower, the boss or the employee, the parent or the child, the inflictor or the afflicted, the sadist or the masochist. My go-to humanist socialist, Erich Fromm, wrote on this phenomenon extensively1. So too did his predecessor, Sigmund Freud. Both acknowledge the thinness and destructiveness of the surface level self formed through a relationship with its environment.

When we stare into the mirror, we see a reflection. It is a representation of us that serves to reinforce the ideas and concepts we hold of ourselves. We dress up to fulfil that image, and when what we see staring back meets the ideal, we are ready to go out into the world. But weaknesses exist–unacknowledged in large part–and are concealed by a nice haircut, skinny jeans, and new shoes. The image we have borrowed from the world of other people holds a central role in all our affairs and exchanges and protects us from those weaknesses.

Who are we really? We don’t know, but the image will do just fine for now. Kicking the true self further down the road, if indeed it exists, we delay self-realisation and the opportunity to connect with a genuine and authentic version of ourselves. In this sense, the world in all its wonder and depravity is a reflection of all that we perceive ourselves to be. We are a microcosm of the macrocosm.

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I’m in conflict. I’m always in conflict; it’s the nature of my reality. It’s the nature of your reality too. To wear the blue or the red jumper, have chicken, beef, or a bag of lettuce for dinner, addressing your own mortality, or trying to solve The Collatz Conjecture - we live in a state of questioning. Life is an unsolvable puzzle, a paradox. Like an infinite Russian Doll scenario, it seems there’s no answer to be found. For if there were, what would be the point to life?

I buy into the premise held by Eastern philosophy that says for every dark there is a light, up there is a down, yang there is a yin, and so on. Duality seems to be a fundamental property of what we call reality. Right now, however, in the affairs of human beings, there seems to be a decidedly lengthy period of darkness. We could argue that it’s several thousand years old, and only in the recent one hundred years or so it has become more pronounced.

Technological advancement has brought about many improvements to our lives, but is it really all that wonderful? We’ve got iPhones and the internet, MRI machines and the Mars Rover mission. You can turn the heating on from your mobile phone and video chat with loved ones on the other side of the world. It looks and feels great on the surface, but we get the sense that there’s something funny going on. We’re amused and entertained to such an extent that we can’t see we may have been duped. Look a bit closer, and society takes on the attributes of a lipsticked pig.

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Over the past twelve months, I have felt an increasing need to protect my internet activity and private data from misappropriation and misuse. An apparent “compromise” of my password information held by Google pretty much made up my mind. I needed to take greater care of my online information and be less reliant on one provider; Google. Not only that, I needed to keep my info to myself rather than give it away for free. However, my attempts to shield myself may be in vain. Here’s what Cnet said recently on Google’s privacy policies;

For example, Google has admitted to scanning your Gmail messages to compile a list of your purchases in spite of publicly declaring in a 2018 press release, "To be absolutely clear: no one at Google reads your Gmail, except in very specific cases where you ask us to and give consent, or where we need to for security purposes, such as investigating a bug or abuse." Perhaps by "no one" Google meant "no human," but in an age of increasingly powerful AI, such a distinction is moot.

Every email you write, and every email you receive via Google’s email servers tells them something about the way you live and work. Google Drive saves your files in a convenient way allowing collaboration with others across the globe, and it’s all free. Brilliant, right? The Google Maps application tells them where you’re going, where you’ve been, and for how long. The search terms you use when looking for garden hose parts, or cake ingredients, might give you the answer you were looking for, but it also tells them who you are.

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The English Grand National was on last Saturday and I usually have a punt on a rank outsider. I’m not otherwise into betting, but the Grand National is a bit of a spectacle so it’s fun to have a stake with the rest of the family. Although my wife holds an entirely counter view, you could take the entire horse racing industry and send it to the moon for all I really care.

Pundits talk about odds, and it’s supposed to be an accurate assessment of the horse’s chance of winning, but it’s really “just” the bookies’ opinion. Sure, there is the matter of recent form, the trainer’s expertise, and the skill of the jockey, but bookies sometimes get it wrong. They just need to get it right more often than not and they win. And bookies always win over the long run, just like the house always wins in Vegas, otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.

So when they talk about odds, what they’re really talking about is the pattern. They are up close to the phenomenon and they are familiar with how the pattern plays out. As such, they know how prominent aspects replicate over time. They can’t know the entire pattern, no more than the rest of us can, but they are so close to it, so attentive to it, that they see more than the rest of us. There are aspects they cannot see, and there are aspects that don’t grab their attention for very long because they don’t replicate as often as others. And it is here that our winning of the bet lies.

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This week, I’m examining freedom or the absence thereof. The subject is current and apt, given that protests seem commonplace in every major city of the industrialised world these days. Whether it’s outrage at the unlawful death of black Americans, support for an outgoing narcissistic president, riots against the threat to Hong Kong democracy, or demonstrations against Covid restrictions, populations globally are up in arms over infringements to their civil liberty and sense of freedom.

Regarding Covid, the majority seem accepting, albeit reluctantly, of restrictions to free movement and are toeing the line. But many are not. Much to the consternation of the political classes and the conformist middle ground, there is dissent. What is it about this group of people that takes them to the streets in protest in the middle of a pandemic? Are they prepared to risk their lives for their voice to be heard? Is the pandemic a hoax, or are they simply misinformed? (I’m not going to try to answer that one today). Perhaps they are already marginalised, frustrated and ordinarily at odds with the society in which they live, and now Covid has broken their will to patience.

What about the rest of us occupying the middle ground? Maybe we’ve become too soft, too docile, manipulated by media organisations and political actors and pacified by consumerism so much that we can’t see the prison bars. Maybe our comfort has not yet been disrupted to sufficient extents to take us to the streets. What if you were on the bread line and have been there all your life; would you think differently about what’s going on? What’s true is that if we are unwilling to challenge official lines and accept the actions of those who do as fulfilling an important purpose, then we are at risk of becoming what Erich Fromm called “automatised people.” Maybe we are already.

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I don’t assign myself to any religion. If anything, I am agnostic as far as God goes. I prefer to think for myself thanks very much. I go inside when I have a problem, and lo and behold! I usually find the answers I need, eventually. I don’t seek solace from the discomfort of my life in any other man’s ideology. And it is an ideology of men, not women. Although women in the Church have been equally guilty of vile abuse of their fellow human beings, it has been power-hungry men at its centre. Our will to respect one another, live in harmony and acknowledge a higher order of reality is merely a convenience that allows bullish narcissistic men to take control.

It’s not only religion that has been guilty. Political ideologies have been just as destructive to society. Of course, they all start out with an apparent great idea and the best intentions, but their dogmatic idealism invariably leaves certain people out. Some pretend to be secular and inclusive, but it’s not long before cracks start to appear and the original idea becomes outdone by an individual and collective sense of importance. The institution now becomes the point of focus rather than the premise on which it was founded, and in that mode of mind, abuse of power usually follows.

If worshipping idols, be they virtual or actual, is your bag, then fire away. It’s not my intent to convince you otherwise. I just don’t understand how any human being in their right mind can bow to an organisation that is so obviously rotten to the core as the Catholic Church. I don’t know why any human being in their right mind does not see the deity in themselves, in fact. Unlike Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, the self-deity I’m speaking of doesn’t have an image. We’ve got to get behind the veil of the self-image if we are to see it. That’s the tricky bit, and what religion does is present another layer, so instead of becoming clearer, things become more clouded.

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Yesterday I was on to something, but then I lost it. It happens like that; an idea lands, and it writes itself in my head as I brush my teeth or make dinner. If I don’t get it down on paper, I lose it. It disappears back from wherever it appeared like the flame on a dying match. No problem though, there’s always another. That’s what happens when we’ve been doing something for a long time; it produces itself, and we’re merely there to facilitate it. Sunday Letters is on the go since 2015, and before that, I had been using writing as a marketing tool for my work. After over ten years of writing, it has become something more than a means to get what I want. It is a conversation with myself, an attempt to understand what’s going on, to understand myself. I had to learn the hard way how this process works, however. I used to think we could make it happen, you know, success or whatever you want to call it. The material reflection needed to follow. Otherwise, what I was doing wouldn’t work and, therefore, not worth the effort. That’s the measure of it you see. But in that frame of mind, we miss way too much, and we can get lost.

In another location here on Substack, I’ve been writing about leadership as it applies mostly to business, but it’s also applicable to other areas. In particular, I’ve been writing on the essence of the personality type associated with success, with material success. Thus far, I have figured out that if we’re not tuned to the mode of being necessary for success, then we fail. Because, sticking with the business arena for a moment, that world is by its nature highly competitive. That’s the nature of the beast, and if we’re going to enter it, we’ve got to be willing to kill or be killed. In that process, we must take advantage wherever we can get it, and if that means manipulation, deceit, coercion and so on, then so be it. The only thing stopping us is the voice of our own integrity whispering in our ear. But then again, if you listen to that, you’ll likely be eaten.

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I was at home at about 9 pm when the phone rang. The hospice called earlier, my sister said. They got a cancer care nurse to assist in the final few days. She had arrived at the house, and it was, in fact, only a matter of hours. I had been over earlier that day, and I knew time was short, but I didn’t think it would be as quick. How could I? It was happening for a while, maybe a year or more before she was diagnosed, but something in me didn’t want to acknowledge. I knew, but I didn’t know. In retrospect, the dots became joined, and her behaviour made sense. I had never experienced someone this close to me die before, and now here I was, about to watch her slip away. Joanne overheard my conversation and suggested I get over there without delay. She’s a hospice nurse and all too familiar with how ends play out.

I was filled with questions, and driving in the dark I felt that any effort to find answers was futile. Our instinct, it seems, is to try to save the ones we love. Just sitting by and watching them deteriorate is counter-intuitive. So we search for something, anything, to keep them here. Second opinions, experimental drugs, alternative treatments, prayers, we do whatever we can, no matter how ultimately useless and dire the situation, to save them. But there was something about her illness that made all of that pointless to me, even naive. Instead, it all simply collapsed into fact, like I was watching from the outside. I was in it, suspended in an alternate universe over which I had no control, like watching a car crash in slow motion and my mother in the driving seat. My role, it seemed, was to offer consolation. I had little else.

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