Steve_Bamlett_blog

If you won two free plane tickets, where would you go?

Piaget insisted that the egocentrism of the child before its cognitive and emotional development was a very complex thing. He bowed to Freud in relation to the possible explanations of a child’s emotional development, preferring to look at how mature cognition, by which meant the reflexivity, and multiple perspectives that come with reflexivity, of adult thinking as an ideal develops. That phrase ‘as an ideal’ matters, for it is clear that many adults do not think using multiple perspectives or even reflexively at all. The belief in ‘common sense’ feels intuitive, however mythical it is continually proven to be by any science worth the name and by the findings in particular of neuroscience, which ought to have put a stop to the naive notion of direct perception of a concrete world.

One aspect of child egocentrism is magical thinking; the belief in the child that its thoughts are the absolute locus of control of the world, which translate ultimately into the belief in the power of egocentric wishes and dreams as agents in the real world. How frighteningly far this can go is palpable in any good reading of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, wherein dream wishes are so feared that they have to be repressed or defended against in some way. That fearful aspect of wishful thinking is not evident in Piaget’s version of magical thinking, which rather concentrates on the naive take of the child on complex realities that cannot be grasped without a supplement of thinking from outside the ego, in cognition that is truly social and learned (and constructed) socially.

But one aspect of it is the belief not only in the power of wishes but of the absolute freedom of the individual mind from the power of the world to set limits to the idea of imagined space and time, from that imaginable at least in a weak and child-like ego system. It remains in the notion that the best things in life are free, which is an axiom rooted in the notion of the imaginary unlimited nature of ‘natural resources’. Such thinking is not as simple as the thinker of it would like it to be. The air I breathe on a Swiss mountain top, to which a plane has carried me together with other fossil-fuelled vehicles, will have cost me the price of getting there, have created waste products that limit the safe air available to all and limited the duration of its coolness that those others feel who cannot afford to travel from a place like my old pitmatic Crook to get there.

But in pitmatic Crook they still can dream that a free plane ticket might be made available by their wish,or the more powerful wish of a more powerful other who is on their side, even if only momentarily, – like, for instance, God, the angels, the fairies or ‘luck’. I can imagine myself on a beach in Rhodes and forget the likelihood I might be confined to the same beach by sea on the one side, a literally flaming sea-front on the other, as I escape tree fires ‘fossil-fuelled’ by the waste products of my flight. I can continue to think the fuel expended in my flight did not contribute to my plight. I can dream of the cultural freedom of a city like Madrid (the Velasquez paintings in the Prado that I long to see in the flesh) and not think that I might die of heat exhaustion in the process. More importantly, I yearn to believe that I and the population of Madrid risk destruction NOT as a consequence partially of my fulfilled wish of a fee plane ticket; as Spain becomes an extension of the desert lands of North Africa.

My wish to go somewhere will inevitably make me think plane tickets are a commodity that can be described as ‘free’. But they will be paid for eventually. If not in obligation, or collusion, with the giver’s agenda, it will be in the unseen costs passed on to the near future (not even in the days of ‘global boiling’, as the UN names it now, necessarily of future generations but of your own slightly older age).

If only I could get a plane ticket to a place where my conscience is free from awareness that I contribute to global society more often for the worse than the better then I would want my free ticket to be there. It doesn’t exist of course, as put like that is more clearly the truth. This isn’t an argument for suicide but a responsible society governed less by wish fulfilment and more by serious democratic planning.

It’s only a bit of fun though this prompt, isn’t it? Why spoil the game by reminding us of the consequences of a belief that our dreams and wishes are greater than we are prepared to admit, that they collude with the notion that the few have every right to meet all their wishes and dreams and that right ought to make them the even more admired by the many who cannot? For our rights are ONLY realised by the entitled few in such a society.

But, it isn’t just ‘a bit of fun’. It is the soft edge of consumerist ideology so essential to capital, the engine house of demand creation in a growth economy. Of course since Malthus people who become wary of the scarcity of all resources, even ‘natural’ ones, have been called gloomy. Jonathan Swift, in his ‘Modest Proposal’, in which he urged the Irish poor to eat the overproduced commodity of their offspring, was really telling us that we can enforce cheerfulness over anything and our thinking will not always be perceptible as self-evidently cruel and effectively barbaric. Everyone was disgusted with Swift’s satire as distasteful, for he told them baby flesh was very tasty indeed and nutritious, but they miss the point. We can wish for our free conscience but someone will pay the cost just as the many continue to do for the powerful few. But the poor person at their gate still feels that wishes are free and that people who say they aren’t are just killjoys. And the rich dance so ‘bootiful’. If I had a free pass into there … Mightn’t I dance like them.

With tough love

Steve