How Free Are We Really?

The title of this post could be interpreted politically, and maybe it will be by the time I reach the end. As usual, this is not planned. I’m just setting down my thoughts as they come to me and splurging them out on the screen. But yesterday I made an interesting discovery which I feel impacts on my personal life and to some extent my identity.

As you doubtless know, I’m a herbalist. I have a whole blog devoted to that along with home ed. I qualified in 1999 CE at the age of thirty-two, having previously read for a humanities (philosophy) degree at Leicester University, and there were six years between graduating from my first degree and starting the herbalism course via the College Of Phytotherapy, during which I gained an MA in Continental Philosophy, got married and we had a child. This probably sounds like a fairly circuitous and unusual route for someone’s career path, such as it is, to take, and there are indeed not that many herbalists (there are probably still too many but that’s another story for another blog), so if you met a woman humanities graduate from Leicester Uni who is a herbalist, the chances are you’d think that was unusual. And there are also coincidences to be taken into consideration of course, and I’ve widened the scope of some of this to make it sound more plausible.

Now I don’t want to doxx anyone, so I won’t being, and therefore I’m going to have to be vague about this, but I can’t really pass over this without saying something because I’ve found something very interesting about which I previously had no idea: I am not the only woman who graduated from Leicester University in the late ’80s to early ’90s with a humanities degree and became a herbalist. I have somehow managed to avoid finding this out until yesterday. And we even knew each other at the time. We were acquaintances. Not friends, although we got on all right. We just didn’t know each other that well and didn’t have much to do with each other. There were five thousand undergraduates at that institution at that time, so it’s not that intimate.

It’s possible to do some stats on this, but before that it’s worthwhile reducing some of this down to some kind of testable hypothesis, along these lines. How probable is it that a woman graduating from Leicester University in the period 1988-91 with a humanities degree would later qualify as a herbalist? That’s five thousand students. Divide that by two and you have two and a half thousand. Divide that by the five faculties of the university and you get five hundred. Finally, there are currently four hundred and five medical herbalists of the kind I and this other person are in Great Britain plus the Isles. The population of Great Britain and the Isles is currently around 65 million, but was lower in the late 1960s when she and I were both born, so I’m going to go with the population in 1970, which was 55 million or less. The probability of being a woman humanities graduate of Leicester University in the period 1988-91 is therefore around 1 in 110 000. The probability of being a herbalist now from the population of Great Britain and the Isles (by the way, that last bit includes only three people and none of them are Orcadian or in Na h-Eileanan an Iar, which is a bit ominous), having been born by 1970, is less than one in 135 000. So far, this is just playing with numbers and not really statistics. There are probably quite a few variables involved, and the ones we can spot – gender, age, degree subject area, location – are quite possibly not the most important ones, but simply correlate with these.

I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of who becomes a herbalist because that belongs on the other, long abandoned, blog here, but a few things are worth mentioning. Herbalism, for most people, is what one now calls a “side hustle” rather than a main source of income. Some people can for whatever reason only find side hustles, which is Sarada’s and my position as a couple, and is rather unfortunate for our economic situation. I don’t know if this applies to the other herbalist, but there’s a tendency for this to happen more to women than men. Offhand, I’m not aware of any men at all who have one. I am aware of men who are dismissive and disrespectful of them and say they’re pretend businesses. These people should probably consider why people are in the position of not having work that pays better. Perhaps they’ve spent a lot more time doing unpaid work which enabled their male partners to go out and derive higher incomes? Or they may be socialised away from high wages.

When I was training in the 1990s, nine out of ten herbalists were women. It’s alleged that back in the ’80s, every single herbal student was female. I’m a little sceptical of this. Over this period, most herbal students were mature and already qualified in something else, such as pharmacy or nursing. Their attraction to herbalism was often characterised by frustration with healthcare as usually practiced, whether from personal experience or through seeing it in their paid work. Another factor may also be involved. In the case of myself and this other herbalist, we have moved from the humanities to STEM, although this particular kind of STEM field is perhaps a little unusual for such a profession. I suspect that this is related to an inherent bias towards women with aptitude in STEM ending up on humanities degrees and needing to “course correct” later. Another thing she and I have in common is that we chose to qualify in science subjects in order to meet the entry requirements for the course (which was the same one at the same institution), so there was clearly a reason, not necessarily the same one, for us not doing those qualifications at school age. It should also be noted that herbalism as practiced is unusual for a STEM field because it requires a high degree of empathy and interpersonal skills, and these are also expected by the clients, unlike some other fields such as allopathic medicine where the same would be equally useful but are not necessarily expected, particularly by people with a learned pessimistic view of healthcare. A possible major difference here is that I got the highest mark in chemistry for my year when I was thirteen and proceeded to give it up, which is an unusual thing to do. Therefore it might not be worth considering this in gender terms as much as what happens when someone with talents in science and technology ends up studying language or philosophy and needs to change direction later.

Another factor here is location. Leicester University was described at the time as “middle-class, middle of the road, middle of the country”, which is a fair portrayal and is probably still true. Overall it was right in the middle of British universities for academic achievement and long-term graduate earning potential. It’s decidedly not Nottingham. Nottingham is a kind of high-flying arts specialist university, in a way a bit like Kent at Canterbury but not to the same extent. A person in the “wrong” field is more likely to end up at Leicester than certain other places because their academic achievement in that field is likely to be lower. Hence these two variables, humanities changing to science and being in the “wrong” academic subject, may in fact be related. This might be reflected in a higher than usual number of women students in the humanities, but to be honest I don’t think that was so.

A further factor is that we both stayed in the English East Midlands. This could be to do with the characteristics of this region or a tendency not to go far geographically after graduation. The first thing that comes to mind when considering the East Midlands as part of Great Britain is its shockingly low biodiversity compared to other regions, and that might be expected to make it harder to practice as a herbalist. In practice, it does seem quite straightforward to grow and obtain the necessary remedies here, and this would in any case vary according to one’s choice of herbs. I’m unusual in trying to stick to herbs which are either native or grow well here and am in fact quite focussed on invasive species, which is probably unusual. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wonderful about the East Midlands that makes it suitable for practicing Western herbalism, and in fact I think that for England, it’s a particularly unsuitable area. Therefore our presence in this region probably reflects something about us. I can think of another CAM practitioner who is also a female humanities graduate from Leicester the same year as I, and she also lives in the East Midlands, but in her case there may be less connection to the ecological situation since she isn’t a herbalist. That, I think, eliminates herbalism per se as a factor.

The thing to consider here would be how likely someone was to move away from their university location after graduation, and why they might or might not do so. Having children is one factor, such that if you haven’t moved by the time you become a parent, you’re less likely to do so. I don’t know if this other herbalist is a mother, but it makes some kind of sense that if her career changed direction after a few years, it might lead to her becoming fixed in one area. It would also be useful from the viewpoint of social capital – you would build up more contacts in the immediate area which you could then use later in your practice. The other ways I think it could be made to work is either not directly practicing but doing mainly teaching, writing books or joining or taking over an established practice.

All of this, though, is a case study of a specific pair of people I happen to have noticed because I happen to be one of them. It helps me put my biography in context because neither of us were aware of the other’s life but we have ended up pursuing similar paths, even though to us they probably seemed like rational and free choices most of the time. The specifics of our situation are not that interesting to others. What is interesting is the question it raises about the nature of freedom. Many people do feel restricted in their choices, or they just are. Human trafficking and homelessness come to mind here, but it also happens in wealthier situations such as children entering the family business or expected to follow what their parents see as an illustrious profession. Those people are probably aware of their lack of freedom. As for the rest of us, maybe all we really have is the illusion of freedom. This is not quite the same as the idea that we are individually determined. I am pretty much convinced that on an ontic level there simply is no freedom, and that that is an illusion, substantially because both determinism and acausal events both mean one has no influence over them. However, the kind of freedom I’ve been discussing here is rather different, because it’s a little more like the idea of political liberty than the idea of free will. In fact, it’s intermediate. Whether or not you believe in free will, you will tend to have an opinion about the rôle of such things as free speech and the political franchise. That has no bearing on the issue. However, a governments also successfully manipulate the electorate in various ways, including but not limited to propaganda. That said, there’s no way they would be concerned about manipulating women into changing career direction from the humanities and becoming herbalists near their university towns. This is not only ridiculously specific but also only really doable in a “free” society like this one in broad strokes. It’s unlikely that anyone, anywhere, in government or the civil is attempting to socially engineer an increase in herbalists. They’re more likely to be doing the opposite. But this means that there are social forces operating on all of us anonymously, without purpose or intent, outside anyone’s consciousness, which are however just as deterministic as a centrally-planned political economy, and they are as detailed as those famous cases of identical twins separated at birth who end up living with the same breed of dog with the same name.

What are we to make of all this? I have no idea.

Two Forthcoming Projects

Shamelessly nicked from here, and will be removed on request, but I regard this as an ad for the OU course this is taken from

I generally resist medicalisation, and I’ve previously written on ADHD, so this isn’t primarily going to be about that issue in spite of the illustration. Nonetheless it’s there, and it means that like many other people, perhaps even everyone, the cog that represents me doesn’t fit well into the social machine, which is a problem for both society and myself. I would also say that my ADHD is just something which came to the attention of educational psychologists and medical professionals in the ’70s, when it was called hyperactivity, and is an aspect of my personality among several which entails a poor fit with society. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a problematic work per se but maybe somewhat salvageable, there’s often a category at the end of each set of disorders labelled “not otherwise specified”, which is the wastebasket taxon as it were, a “diagnosis of elimination”. As a healthcare professional, I’m aware that the textbook cases are the exception, and most of the time people have an array of signs and symptoms which can’t be easily pigeonholed, and the real puzzle is why anyone at all actually has the same condition. Leaving that aside, it’s also unclear if it’s appropriate to view mental health analogously to physical health at all, and there’s the social model of disability. Hence I will assert myself, controversially, as being “neurodiverse, not otherwise specified” and leave it at that. Strictly speaking this is a neurodevelopmental condition rather than a mental health one, but let’s not get even more bogged down.

All that notwithstanding, a few days ago someone asked me what my plans were. I misunderstood the question, thinking I was being asked about how I planned to generate an income in the long term while it was really about our relationship, which of course I won’t go into here, except to say that a plan to generate an income can be very important to a relationship because it’s nice to be in a position to take care of someone well and have enough money to help others, and there is of course the psychological benefit of being gainfully employed, such as it is, and also occupied in something which connects to the common good in some way. It’s partly about good mental health and social obligation. That said, I completely reject the work ethic because most paid work is probably harmful in the long run to society and the person doing it, and the problem is finding work that doesn’t do more harm than good, and that’s rare. Even so, I do sometimes succeed in getting people to give me money for what I do. In particular, I currently have a couple of ideas for medium-term projects, which I’m going to outline here. In doing so, I’m going to yank this blog post in the direction of another blog of mine (which I hardly ever write), but these things happen.

I’ll use headings again, I think. At some point I might even work out how to do hyperlinks within the post, but that’ll probably involve tinkering with the HTML. I don’t think it can be done with the WordPress block editor (grr).

1. The Ethical Periodic Table

Right now I’m not sure what form this will take, but it seems to lend itself much more to something online, or perhaps an app, than a physical book. Like my second idea, this has been kicking around a while, and this is the thing. I’m pathologically procrastinative. In case you’re wondering about the wording of that last sentence, I’m trying to avoid using a noun to describe myself because I think that fixes one’s identity mentally in an unhelpful way. Anyway, it goes like this. The Periodic Table may be the most iconic symbol of science. Right now I’m hard pressed to think of another one, although the spurious “evolution” parade purporting to show constant progress and the chart of the “nine” planets come to mind, these however being very much popularisations. As well as having chemical and physical profiles, each element also has an ethical, social and political profile connected to how it interacts with human society. For instance, arsenic is very high in drinking water in Bangladesh, tantalum has been associated with civil war in the Congo and there is an issue with phosphorus and algal blooms, among many other things per element. My “vision” is to provide a clickable periodic table with links to information, which I hope will be regularly updated, to balanced social profiles of each element, and I’m also curious as to whether there’s a pattern here: do some groups of elements present bigger problems than others and are there possible substitutions? This clearly lends itself much more to a computer device treatment than a book of pages, although one of those books with tabs might work. This suggests it could be an app as well as a website.

2. Corner Shop Herbalism

I detest the tendency for certain exotic herbs to become pushed and regarded as miracle cures and the answer to everything. I think this distorts research and is often environmentally unsustainable. I also think there’s a lot of gatekeeping in my profession which does not serve the public interest, but at the same time I’m aware that many people lack the necessary knowledge to deal with their own health problems easily, particularly in the realm of diagnosis. Consequently, for decades now I’ve had the idea of producing a book called ‘Corner Shop Herbalism’, which is about using herbal remedies which can easily be obtained over the counter or as invasive weeds or other common species in a foraging style, while maintaining their sustainable use. I’ve already planned this book to some extent and it covers a surprisingly large number of species, probably totalling more than a gross. This would be accompanied by various other chapters about when to seek professional help and details of why herbal medicine is a rational, vegan and useful approach to health. This could also be a website, but it lends itself also to being a physical book because that makes it a field guide useable with no electronic adjunct, and who knows when that might become necessary? We all know of the Carrington Event, after all.

Publicity And Marketing

This is the difficult, possibly insurmountable, obstacle. Self-publishing nowadays is easy. You just organise your manuscript into printable form, get a cover together and have people order it. People have different sets of skills, and the ability to publish without approaching a publisher replaces the problem of getting yourself published with the problem of publicity and marketing. This works fine for some people if they also have an aptitude in those areas, but it usually fails. I have a Kindle Fire, and I do recognise the considerable ethical issues with Amazon of course, but one thing I see a lot is a very large number of ebook adverts and recommendations. I have never followed up on any of these. Although I’ve advertised my business profusely myself, my usual response to an advert is to wonder what’s wrong with the product that it needs to be pushed. You don’t see ads for potatoes or petrol because people recognise the importance of those in their lives and they sell themselves.

Advertising is ethically and practically complicated. The German “Anzeige” translates both as “advertisement” and “announcement”, and I find this enlightening as to the nature of advertising. At its best, if you believe in the fruits of your labour as enhancing to potential customers’ quality of life, you still need to make them known to the public, and this is absolutely fine. However, the quality of goods and services often seems to be in inverse proportion of how heavily something is advertised, which supports my tendency to become suspicious of a product. There was a fairly prominent advert for the British Oxygen Corporation in the 1980s CE which depicted a lake full of flamingos which they claimed had previously been lifeless and that they had managed to restore to a healthy state. This immediately provoked the question in me whether they had done something dodgy more generally and were trying to boost their image. It isn’t relevant whether they actually did this, but if this kind of suspicion is often raised, it can make publicity counter-productive. On the other hand, maybe few people think like this. Regardless, there’s a tension between the contrariness of people generally and getting your product out there, and I don’t know how to resolve this.

I never pay for advertising now because of my history with it. The only advertising which ever worked was the Yellow Pages and by that I mean that no other form of paid advertising got me a single client. With the Yellow Pages, it worked to a limited extent and then, oddly, about half way through one year of advertising it suddenly cut off completely and I never got another customer (for want of a better word). I am still mystified by this. It’s clear that online advertising and other such activity killed the Yellow Pages, but there was no gradual decline in my case. It just stopped dead with no period of tapering off. After that, I cancelled the advertising and relied on word of mouth, which is of course very useful.

How to apply this to books though? Is the kind of marketing and publicity applicable to a herbal practice, and apparently not very, comparable to that of a book? It would seem to involve other aspects of publicity such as talks, walks, courses and signings, the first two of which I’ve done often and fairly successfully in terms of raising the general profile of herbalism but not clients. Would this work for a book? Is it possible to put together a course based on the ethical periodic table idea?

Many people worry about their image on the internet, and their data being used for nefarious purposes. Whereas these are legitimate concerns, mine are not in this area. From the start, I’ve thought of behaviour online as consisting of postcards. Everyone can see what you’re doing, but there are so many of them the chances of being noticed are minute. It’s like the lottery – the odds of winning are insignificant. In some places the odds are stacked against you, as for example with YouTube. As far as reading is concerned, there’s the issue of what might compete with the time which could be spent reading your own writing, and it’s notable that many people don’t even venture forth from social media to bother reading the content. I am guilty of that to some extent myself, but also watch myself so that I do it as little as possible. There’s much to be said about social media and personal data, but I won’t say it here because most of it is only relevant to my writing in terms of constituting a distraction from it. Consequently, I will do some promotion of the work on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t anticipate much response. How one would actually succeed in getting a response is another question, and I have no answers. I do know that my own efforts at search engine optimisation haven’t yielded much.

It’s easy to imagine a conspiracy or malice here, but in fact the answer is far more likely to be the impersonality and volume of the internet which causes this. Therefore, anything one does in this respect needs to be done for its own sake, and not to get an income or make a living. What one actually does to make a living is unknown, and as far as I can tell impossible. I’m always overawed by people who manage to have a full-time paid job because it is so far beyond my capabilities and I have no insight into how people do it. Consequently, I just do things which I consider worthwhile, and I definitely consider these two projects to be valuable, so I’ll be doing them with no expectation of a significant response. This is galling, but I’m used to it. I still don’t know how I’m going to survive though.

That’s all for today.