Address to the nation

I've been thinking about stereotypes recently.

I tend to think that to accept a label, such as heterosexual, Christian, geek, woman, custard, atheist, Ben Elton or comedian (not the same thing, after all), is to admit that you are a stereotype.

At this early stage I must digress.

Dazai Osamu wrote a piece of literary criticism called Nyoze Gamon (So I Have Heard It Spoken). The title is highly sarcastic. It is, in archaic Japanese that sounds to me like Buddhist scripture, though I may be wrong about this, a reference to an unquestioning attitude – the attitude of simply believing what you're told. Dazai begins the essay by quoting a French author (I can't remember which one now), that if you want revenge, if you want to hurt someone, to attack the individual him/herself is a very boring trivial thing, what you must do is attack the person's god. Dazai goes on to say that there is someone he wants to attack, so, in order to do so, he must discover what their god is, and attack that. He wants to attack the Japanese literary establishment, and he decides, in an inspired, witty, profound and somehow languid rant, that the god of the literary establishment is 'the family'. It is, as he brilliantly puts it, the "egoism of the family". The interests of these writers, he says, does not extend beyond protecting their loved ones.

I think that, in the past, on this blog, I have attacked certain people and groups of people. I hope I have not done so in a boring, trivial way, though probably I have. In any case, I feel that what I have really been attacking is not the person, but the god, that is, the stereotype with which they most feel comfortable. After all, how can I attack, for instance, atheists? How can I? There's no such thing, except as a fetish, a stereotype, a god. It is the god I am attacking, and if you feel pain, it is because it is your god.

If I do this, it's because I hate labels. More and more, as a writer, I find they are the bane of my existence. But with that statement I have just given myself away, and laid myself vulnerable. It should be fairly easy to guess what my god is, if you wish to attack it. I seem to accept the stereotype of 'the writer', or at least, one stereotype of the writer – a rather Romantic one, it seems. And when I realise this, I realise how complicated the whole thing is. I don't know what I mean by 'whole thing'. Labelling, I suppose I mean.

There are other labels I accept, too, even if only with some feelings of ambivalence. For instance, 'English'. That is a label that means something to me. I'd even go so far as to say that 'Devonian' is a label that means something to me. It is for such things that wars are fought. When, O when, will beautiful Devon ever be free?

Are these my own 'family values'?

There has to be something that is more important than writing, or writing becomes a stereotype. But what is that more important thing?

One thing occurs to me – freedom.

Perhaps that sounds limited, and I'm sure that it probably is, and other people will say things like 'love' and so on, and make a good case for them, but I'm going to attempt to put the case for freedom here.

Recently, on this blog, there has been some discussion as to whether free will actually exists or not. Since no one is independent of their environment, a fairly strong argument can be made that there is no such thing. Everything is cause and effect. The Buddhists call this cause and effect, in Japanese at least, inga kankei, but I believe that this cause and effect is also what is meant by 'karma'. Karma is a chain of cause and effect, and there is actually no solution to the problem, no way to break the chain. And yet, the breaking of the chain can happen. The breaking of the chain is not 'caused'. How can it be caused? If it were caused, it would merely be another link in the chain. The breaking of the chain is what is often referred to as enlightenment. It is spontaneous, and occurs because the chain has in some way been transcended. Another word for 'enlightenment' is 'liberation'. And it occurs to me now, that perhaps one way of describing enlightenment might be as the discovery of free will.

We have not acheived free will yet. It is waiting to be acheived.

Some people think that freedom is a dangerous idea, and these people come in many guises, and probably constitute just about everyone on the planet at the moment, though there may be a few exceptions. Why do people think that freedom is dangerous?

They think if everyone was free then the world would be filled with rape, pillage, rampant crime and sadism of all varieties et cetera. I would like to suggest that this, in fact, is what we have at the moment, without freedom. This is what we have because we are not free. If we were free, why would we need to fight, or to oppress, or to torture? These are our chains.

Freedom from labels and ideas would mean that there was no label in whose name to fight a war, or seek revenge.

I was hoping that this would be a witty and scathing post, but it's ended up quite serious.

There was more stuff that I meant to go into detail about, but suddenly I feel like that would be backtracking – stuff about Rudolph Steiner and this and that. And Plato not liking artists, and Boethius placing philosohpy above art. And this and that. Maybe I can go into those details later, if it's necessary.