Putin And Mental Health

It’s problematic to look at recent events simply in terms of mental health, at least as far as Putin is concerned. There’s a thing out there called the Great Man Theory Of History, which sees historical events as caused by individual agency. I’ve brought this up on here before of course. Freedom in the sense of political leaders being able to do as they will does, in one sense, exist, but historical circumstances lead to them getting into those positions in the first place. Thatcher, for example, may have been able to exercise her power in the sense that her political philosophy dictated the policies she enacted, but Foot would not have been able to do this because the electorate was so much against him, and whereas it’s possible to say that the electorate had been manipulated, the possibility of that manipulation also arose without individuals being important.

So: we say Putin might be mentally ill. There are a couple of issues arising from that claim, so before you turn against me and say, for example, that I’m stigmatising mental illness, please bear with me for a bit. In the Great Man Theory of History, we ostensibly have a leader who is mentally ill and this is what’s caused the war. But maybe it’s closer to the truth to say that Russian history reached the point where there would be a “mad” leader in power by now.

Unlike Sarada, I can’t claim to be an expert on Russian history. She knows a lot more than I do about it, although I’m sure she’d never assert that she was an expert either. She’s not currently following the news because she finds it too depressing, so I can’t benefit from her wisdom here. Being a former Stalinist, however, I have spent some time in my life following Soviet history rather closely, although after the breakup of the Soviet Union I lost interest as it seemed to merge into the general doings of mature capitalism. My chief impression was that the Russian Revolution took place in a substantially agrarian society which wasn’t fully capitalist but more feudal, and therefore that the phase of history where communist revolution was possible had not yet been reached. Consequently, some of the Marxist language used by the Politburo and the like was just rhetoric, but not all. Part of the problem which arose in the 1980s CE was that there were no leaders left who had clear experience of the Soviet Union during or shortly after the Revolution, and consequently they were unable to continue in the same vein. This is a different process than can be easily explained specifically through Marxist theory because it seems to be connected to the rise of “modernisers” in the Politburo leading to перестройка and гласность, obviously primarily Горбачёв. By the time that happened, I was no longer Stalinist and wasn’t as focussed on events in the USSR. I do remember that it was seen as a positive development on the New Left at the time. My perception of what has happened since is that it’s primarily due to the influence of laissez-faire capitalism and the coöption of nationalism and organised religion to manipulate a poorly-educated populace.

Given the limited and biassed information available to me, Putin seems similar in some ways to Robert Mugabe and to a lesser extent Papa Doc. It feels like he has been in a certain elevated position for so long that it has influenced his judgement, and that the ability to get into that position in the first place involves certain personality traits which amount to the seeds of mental illness. A few things have been said about him in this respect, but before I come to them I want to deal with the mammoth in the room here: the stigmatisation of mental illness. If one accepts that mental illness is a manifestation of brain pathology in the same way as heart disease is a manifestation of cardiac pathology, and so forth, and that this is a central issue in mental health paradigms, then Putin’s behaviour can indeed be interpreted, validly or otherwise, as at least a functional disorder. I would equate this with the dysfunctional behaviour of a whole range of leaders found in all sorts of circumstances, and also connect it with the issue of our own monarchy and its potentially harmful influence on our own royal family’s mental health. The problem is, though, that it’s easy to be facile about this and have a monolithic black box we just call “mental health”, end up othering people with mental health problems and seeing them as dangerous in some way. It would be a rather crass take on that to see his behaviour in that way.

A number of claims are being made regarding the Russian leader. One is that he has been influenced by two years of isolation due to the pandemic. He entered self-isolation in September 2021 when people close to him tested positive for the disease. Another is that he is exhibiting a condition common among leaders referred to as “hubris syndrome”. This has been attributed to Thatcher, Blair, George W Bush and others, and clearly this can, if it makes sense as a disease entity, exist outside the context of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. My impression of Bush in particular was that he behaved in a manner one might hope children would have grown out of by the time they were about eight at the latest.

Dr David Owen, of the “Shrinking David Party”, yes, that Dr David Owen, wrote a paper on Hubris Syndrome which is of considerable interest. Before I get into this, it’s worth looking at David Owen himself. He was a medical doctor and psychiatric registrar before he saw success in politics and was of course able to observe Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair first hand, perhaps giving him superior perspective on the alleged syndrome. At the same time, his trajectory from the Labour Party to the SDP suggests that he would tend to focus less on the social context of a syndrome and see it as seated more in the personality and organic tendencies of the individual than on the influences around them. That said, he does set it in a social environment.

It should be noted first of all that there is no such disorder category in any version of the ICD or DSM, the two most significant widely recognised manuals for mental disorders. That said, Owen does come up with a list of criteria, of which at least four need to be satisfied in order to qualify for such a diagnosis:

• Perceiving the world as an arena where one exercises power and seeks glory.
• Taking actions perceived to show oneself in a positive light and enhance one’s image.
• Excessive concern for image and presentation.
• A messianic way of talking.
• Identifying oneself with the state (or organisation – this is not just about political leaders).
• Use of the “Royal ‘We'”.
• Too much confidence in one’s own judgement compared to the judgement of others.
• Excess self-belief.
• Regarding judgement by history or God as more important than that of one’s peers or courts.
• Recklessness and impulsiveness.
• A broad vision, particularly concerning moral rectitude of a proposed course of action which obviates the need to consider practivality, cost and unwanted consequences.
• A particular kind of incompetence, distinct from the usual form, which follows from the above features and involves overconfidence leading to disregard for the detailed practicalities of implementing a decision.

The problem is more likely to occur the longer someone is in power, but of course I have a few questions here. One is about power. I think the way I left it was that one can exercise power if the situation in the world at the time is such that the thing one does was going to happen anyway, perhaps through someone else. If you want to be able to do particular things which are not in accordance with that, you won’t get to do them, either because you’re not in power or because there are other things which are doable that you can do, but not those things. In other words, power is more or less an illusion. A leader capable of becomng hubristic in this way needs to be convinced that they actually can have power rather than just being placed there by luck or an accident of history. Is it possible that any leader who recognises power as an illusion is immune from this syndrome?

I don’t honestly believe things could have gone significantly differently for Russia and the Ukraine. Maybe someone else than Putin could have come to “power”, but if so, I would expect things to go the same way for them. It isn’t the first time this has happened either. Хрущёв was deposed for similar reasons in 1964, so it’s possible that this will happen again. The political system is in some ways very different and in others quite similar. I don’t know enough about how Russian government works nowadays to say whether it’s likely that Putin could be deposed.

There is a condition called Fronto-Temporal dementia which is somewhat similar, and involves loss of moral judgement. There are reports, for example, of people looking on dating websites with a view to hooking up with people, in front of their partners and not realising this was problematic, or making inappropriate jokes, sexually harassing people, and all this turning out to be the start of organic brain deterioration initially involving poor communication between the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. The onset is much earlier than most Alzheimer cases, being between 45 and 65. It’s been suggested that there’s a link between these two conditions, and I can certainly see that a political leader might get further in her career if she had impaired empathy already as a character trait. Moreover, I can see a situation where a leader is not contradicted or resisted by their colleagues or underlings because of having surrounded themselves with sycophants, and therefore lose the ability to judge wisely.

The underlying question here, though, is whether this siting of a mental problem within Putin’s psyche is actually the most sensible way of looking at the situation. It’s certainly informative regarding behaviour in other situations, such as with absolutist monarchies in the historical past, and it probably applies to Tsarist Russia as well as post-Revolutionary, but another way of looking at it is as a pathological condition exacerbated by the political régime, which might have preferred a leader with the roots of this condition in the first place.

And there’s another question: is he evil? I have a strong bias against perceiving someone as intrinsically evil. When I hear about someone mistreating or murdering their own children, for example, I usually see it as fundamentally a psychiatric issue, although certain organic environmental factors might be involved such as head trauma from being abused as a child, lead in petrol in their formative years, perhaps fetal alcohol syndrome and the developmental neurological response to witnessing domestic violence and abuse as a child. The point rarely if ever comes when I conceive of a human being as actually evil, and I also think that evil is a relatively minor factor in causing the world to be a terrible place. Indifference and ignorance seem more important to me than cruelty. I can never decide if this bias is linked to my work and it’s notable that people who work in the probation service and law enforcement often do ascribe responsibility to negative behaviour. If evil is defined as deliberate cruelty, which is how I understand the word, it would suggest that Putin has empathy to a sufficient degree as to recognise when his actions cause harm.

However, I’m not terribly interested in the question as I believe it’s beside the point. Putin is just a symptom of a wider malaise. Portraying him as either some kind of evil mastermind or a “mad” dictator ignores the more general issue of why there are still people in such positions at all and what it is about the world situation which leads them to be able to act in such a way. There are other issues too. There wasn’t really any reason at all to keep NATO going after the end of the Cold War, and if it had been disbanded the provocative act of suggesting that the Ukraine join the organisation couldn’t have happened. Nor could it have happened if Russia had joined NATO. There are plenty of other atrocities going on around the world which don’t involve such a White population. In a way, I shouldn’t even be talking about Putin because that plays into his cult of personality and focusses the problem on him rather than the state of the world.

I probably will be returning to this kind of subject many times in the near future, but for now I’m done, and tomorrow I’ll be talking about Tethys. I don’t think any excuse needs to be made for putting our little blue dot into perspective in these circumstances.

“Is That A Inverted Gravimetric Universe Or A Temporal Neomorphic Universe?”

Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2120652

H2G2 casts a long shadow. Any radio science fiction comedy is bound to draw comparisons with it, and even more so if it’s on Radio 4. To some extent, the same problem exists on BBC television, where SF comedy is likely to be compared to ‘Red Dwarf’. This happened with the rather obscure ‘Hyperdrive’ with Miranda Hart, Nick Frost and Kevin Eldon, which ran for only two series. It wasn’t wonderful to be sure, but it was absolutely not a rip-off of ‘Red Dwarf’. It was ‘The Navy Lark’ in space. That series, of which I was never a fan but you know, it was okay, was probably unknown or forgotten by 2005 but is so much more similar to ‘Hyperdrive’ than ‘Red Dwarf’, and if people had known about that and resisted the urge to draw comparisons with the most prominent space comedy, I’m sure it would’ve been perceived much more positively.

There have been quite a few Radio 4 SF comedies since 1980, and H2G2 is rather like the Beatles in that it defined a genre and cannot be successfully imitated without being seen as derivative. What, then, do you do if you want to write a series of this kind? It has to be completely different from Douglas Adams’s work, and probably use a different kind of humour, and this is very restrictive. However, restriction is a wonderful spur to creativity and originality if you can dislodge your focus sufficiently on what you’re trying not to write. I would say Tony Bagley’s ‘Married’ has successfully escaped from Mr Different Adams’s fierce gravitational pull and managed to write something pretty fresh. I mean, he did it over twenty years ago now but it’s still good.

The premise of ‘Married’ (SPOILERS) is that steadfastly single and misanthropist architect Robin Lightfoot wakes up one morning to find himself in a parallel universe where he’s married with children and works at a greetings card company, and absolutely hates his new life. Meanwhile, his counterpart in the parallel universe has entered this one and proceeds to trash his life, since he too is misanthropic but considerably more actively antisocial and abusive. The series becomes increasingly surreal and science-fictiony as it proceeds until the existence of the entire Multiverse is threatened and the fabric of reality breaks down. Robin finds a solution in the final episode, but it isn’t clear if the Multiverse is saved.

Robin is played by Hugh Bonneville, cast somewhat against type. Arthur Smith is another central character, who plays himself, and Julian Clary makes a guest appearance. Many people who exist in this universe also exist in the other, but often have different life histories. It gently breaks the fourth wall a number of times. The only person with an initial grasp on the situation is his son, who reads a lot of graphic novels and is therefore savvy about parallel universes. In a sublime piece of technobabble, he explains to Robin that there are two types of parallel universe, Inverted Gravimetric and Temporal Neomorphic. It’s never at all clear what these are but they sound marvellous.

Although the drama centres, initially at least, on the interaction between the characters, the background is also intriguing. Much of it is based on the humour of rôle reversal. Tony Blair is leader of the Conservative Party. Environmentalists are campaigning for the legalisation of genetically-modified organisms and the use of organophosphate pesticides. Most people believe Francis Bacon wrote the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare. Jimmi Hendrix is a middle-of-the-road radio disc jockey. ‘The Guardian’ is a tabloid and has a porn page but ‘The Sun’ is a quality newspaper. There were eighteen years of Labour rule up to 1997, when the Liberal Democrats achieved power, led by Richard Branson, who is now Prime Minister. Alcohol is a Class A drug but you can buy Cannabis over the counter in Boots. There is no Sunday trading. Surrey is a deprived area but the northeast of England is affluent.

The humour is not confined to reversals. Fashion is how it was in the early 1970s, with kipper ties and flares. Richard Whiteley did something nebulous but awesome in the “Fuel Crisis of ’89” which has made him a universally-loved national hero and there are statues in his honour. Margaret Thatcher died in 1978. The death penalty is not only still in place but fast-tracked without appeal to avoid causing prolonged suffering to the perpetrator. Edward VIII didn’t abdicate and was replaced by Richard IV and then John II, who leaves his wife and comes out as gay, marrying his lover Adrian. He is of course played by Julian Clary. Janis Joplin is still alive. There’s no Marks & Spencers but instead there’s a Marks, Bruce & Willis. There’s a Channel 6. Radio 4 is called Radio 1 and there’s also a Radio 4 Live. The Today programme doesn’t exist. Nicholas Parsons presents a radio panel game called ‘The Transport Quiz’, which seems to be a reference to Mornington Crescent and ‘Just A Minute’. Kingsley and then Martin Amis read the Shipping Forecast. The Titanic wasn’t hit by an iceberg but was torpedoed in 1940. There are numerous other examples, all mainly for the sake of humour. They don’t particularly feel like they go that deep but they are fun.

I’m stuck with my usual quandary here of not knowing how well-known this is. I first came across it when its final episode was broadcast some time in the ‘noughties, and remarkably, if you know the ending, I seem to remember being in the bath at the time. This makes me wonder about false memories. I didn’t catch up with the whole series until about 2007.

Most of all, I wonder about the model of the Multiverse being used in the series. The real answer is “whatever makes the listeners laugh” of course, but those two terms, “inverted gravimetric” and “temporal neomorphic” have a real ring to them. Swapping the first words of each gets you “temporal gravimetric” and “inverted neomorphic”. The former is a real phrase, often used to refer to the measurement of subterranean water and its fluctuation. Temporal gravimetry is the measure of mass changes through time, so it is an actual thing but nothing to do with parallel universes. Inverted gravimetry is no closer. Neomorphism is to do with metamorphic change in rocks and is also a variety of gene mutation where a newly formed gene becomes manifest immediately rather than being masked or inactive.

These parallel universes are more like the “mirror Universe” of ‘Star Trek’ than the bog-standard “choose a pivotal point in history and change it” approach of alternate timelines. Like the Mirror Universe, the same people tend to exist in various universes, so they can’t be based on events which prevent people from existing or cause people to come into existence. They’re interdependent. Ultimately this becomes apparent in other ways, and it raises the question of whether the only kind of parallel universe is one which deviates in connection with events occurring within it. David Lewis’s idea of modal realism is easily confused with the idea of alternate timelines and quantum-related universe variations, but could in fact be an entirely different beast. We talk as if things could be other than they are. We say “if I were you, I wouldn’t do that” for example, but in fact that isn’t true because someone cannot be someone else and they just would act in that way. There is also the issue of paradoxes of material implication. Material implication is usually understood to mean “if P then Q”, but in fact it means “not both P and not-Q”, which lacks the kind of “direction” implication normally implies, and it means that there are peculiar situations where, to quote Wikipedia, it would be true to say that if the Nazis had won the Second World War, everyone would be happy, because if something is false, it being true can imply everything, and if sonething is true, anything can imply it. The idea behind material implication is to make it impossible to move from true premises to false conclusions, meaning that truth implying falsehood is always false.

But a different history may not be the only way in which a world can be different. An alternate universe might be just one which is located elsewhere but exists in the same way as this one does, with nothing else in common except what must be so for it to exist meaningfully as a universe. This could mean being observed in some way, or at least having its existence deducible from something observable. Maybe this kind of multiverse is like a cluster of mushrooms whose stalks sprout from their Big Bangs and become mature as caps, but multidimensionally.

Robin describes the multiverse as like a loo roll. Each universe is a single sheet of paper, separated from its neighbours but also coiled up tightly, so that you could enter another universe on either side by travelling a long way and finding a portal, which is the paper between the perforations limiting the sheets, or, much more easily, you could move towards and away from the centre and enter a neighbour much more easily, since the other universes in those directions are but a whisker away, as thin as a single sheet of toilet paper or even less. Just as accidents can occur where you accidentally poke your finger through the paper, or the roll gets wet and water wets adjacent sheets and their contents might bleed through (assume it’s monogrammed toilet paper) like ink soaking through successive sheets, so can there be bleeding through or accidental penetrations into other universes, but because they’re “rolled up”, it’s easier to enter a universe five universes away or a different number, than it is to enter any of the neighbours in other directions. Isaac Asimov explored this idea in his ‘Cosmic Corkscrew’, a completely lost and unpublished story written in 1931 where a man discovers it’s possible to move forward or backward in time by a set interval because time is like the coils of a slinky, and on travelling forward a single loop of the coil, say a week, he finds the world has ended, and is unable to convince anyone on returning to his present and ends up in a mental hospital. There is of course absolutely no scientific evidence for this but it isn’t ruled out. There’s just no reason for supposing it to be the case. It does work quite well as a model though – it’s coherent. It’s easy to imagine each universe consisting of time and space, and then there being extra dimensions which link them together in different ways, so there are not only portals to adjacent universes separated by gigaparsecs but also extra dimensions in which other universes it would otherwise take countless æons to reach are only a hairsbreadth away, if only we could find our multidimensional equivalent of an inconvenient finger poke or splash of water.

Maybe. But what does “maybe” mean here? Using possible world semantics, “maybe” means “true in some possible worlds”. In other words it’s a bold statement that there are universes where this has been done, that there are bridges between universes which have either arisen spontaneously, through accidents or have been made on purpose. It can become very difficult to talk clearly about parallel universes because language like “possibly”, “probably”, “perhaps” and so forth then become references to places where this is actually so. “Probably” means “true in most possible worlds” for example, but if there are an infinite number of them, how can the majority of worlds contain such a situation? The ones in which the state of affairs doesn’t hold could also be infinite, so how is that a majority?

There are two very implausible things which never seem to get ruled out in spite of the difficulty in accepting how they are reasonable things to expect. One of them is travel backwards in time, and the other is parallel universes. In spite of the “cat among the pigeons” effect them being true would have on science, it remains unfeasible to rule either of them out.

That’s all.

“Power”

When I was a child, I heard a school assembly radio programme which has stayed with me ever since. A man (it would be back then) decided to seek the most powerful person in the world. I can’t remember the details of the exact chain except that it ended with Jesus, which it would because it was an assembly programme in the days before they had fully embraced multiculturalism. That last bit didn’t particularly impress me as I was atheist at the time, although I do also see that given a theistic setting the idea that the Sovereign or other head of state is really at the top of the pyramid might be tempered in a healthy way by their own belief in God, that of the people around them or wider society. One aspect of theism which I think is often missed by anti-theists, and I won’t harp on about this because I don’t want to put anyone off reading this, which is in any case not primarily about religion, but still, is that it can act as a brake on arrogance and narcissism if the person involved genuinely believes rather than uses it to manipulate people.

Leaving that theistic aspect aside though, the chain can be illustrated fairly simply by a concrete set of examples. The Prime Minister can do nothing without her Civil Service and the mandate of the people, and perhaps also the Police and armed forces. They are ideally only upholding the law, and the law may be controlled by lobbyists and MPs with certain interests which defers power again to large companies. These in turn are controlled by their shareholders, which could be seen as a democratic aspect of economics except that many of them don’t act rationally or are, for instance, pension schemes constrained to maximise income and can’t legally make ethical decisions. Then there are the pensioners and employees, that is, ordinary members of society, who enable this situation, but we are ourselves persuaded not just by our own lives but also by the likes of the mass media. They in turn may have agenda but are also trying to sell advertising and papers, and the advertisers are promoting the interests of their companies and so on, in such a way that power and responsibility always seem to be absent from the location, away from oneself already, in which it is supposed to be situated. The buck doesn’t stop anywhere. Power and responsibility flee from the places you expect it to be.

There’s also the question of the people who appear to be in power. Alan Sugar, for example, wouldn’t have got anywhere if he’d sold good quality products which the public didn’t understand or feel a need for, and they could to some extent be manipulated to want it but there are limits. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are either blamed or thanked for a lot, but they were in different countries and were put there by social trends as well as propaganda. Their personalities were undoubtedly important but in another sense they were just people who happened to be in the “right” places and times. The policies they pursued had a lot in common because the time had come for those policies to be realistically implementable. It’s nothing to do with who they were, and this can be seen in the fact that they were leaders in different parts of the world.

And this is the heart of the matter. If all you can do when you get elected is enact policies which someone else would have had to if they had been, surely your power is an illusion? You can propose any policy you like before you’ve been elected, but if they deviate more than a certain extent from what other candidates are proposing, they will lose you the election, and if you get elected you are likely to find yourself unable to enact the policies you propose unless they’re even closer to what we’re all used to. Therefore, even politicians are just figureheads most of the time.

This is why Donald Trump puzzled me. It seemed to me that a billionaire ostensibly working outside the political arena has more freedom and power than a billionaire president of the United States, who has to work within certain parameters and is somewhat more closely scrutinised. Presidents and other heads of state only do what their bosses in the private sector tell them to. Therefore, Trump seemed to be voluntarily surrendering power when he ran for President. I can think of two explanations for this. One is that he never intended to win and didn’t know what to do when he got there, and also didn’t consider it in advance, and the other is that he may have felt he was able to make a difference, perhaps for himself alone but still a difference, because he didn’t understand the nature of the office.

Even a dictator is constrained into behaving in a certain way. Whereas his actions may be vicious and heartless, it’s the nature of the job and whereas it may fit their character and values, they may not be able to behave in any other way and avoid being deposed or assassinated.

This is not a long or sophisticated political or philosophical post. There isn’t really that much to say about it to be honest. It’s just an explanation for why I tend to put inverted commas around the word “power”. In fact nobody has any power at all. History just throws people into particular conditions and circumstances constrain their possible actions. That’s it.

1983

My cultural re-enactment project, which lags three and a quarter dozen years behind the present, has now hit 1983 CE. For those of you who are unfamiliar with what I’m doing, for the past five or six years or so I’ve been attempting to recall vividly and enter into the events of thirty-nine years previously. One reason I’m doing this is to capture the cultural shift which occurred during this time associated with the breakdown of the apparent post-war consensus and the advent of Thatcherism and its successors. Moreover, for me it marks an important period in my formative years, as it were. One could argue that all years are formative, and this is true, and it’s important not to consider certain aspects of oneself as rigidly and irrevocably defined, but most people would probably claim that important events happen early in one’s life.

There’s a notion in psychology called the “reminiscence bump”. This is the idea that one’s most prominent memories are laid down between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Twenty-five also marks the point at which the brain becomes mature. As I have often alluded to, the use of the duodecimal system makes a lot more sense than the decimal, and this is an example of that, as the age up to a dozen can then be seen to represent childhood and the age up to two dozen a re-conceptualised adolescence, where people can perhaps be forgiven for certain failings which older adults might be expected to take more responsibility for. In the duodecimal system, the year 1983₁₀ becomes 1193₁₂, so it’s in the same position in the decade as in the twelve-year cycle, though further from the end of the “great turn” of a gross of years, which occurs in 2016₁₀. For me, 1983 is the first full year of my own reminiscence bump, as I was fifteen years and five months by the start of the year. There are various views about what this is about. One is that it’s simply that more changes happen during this decade of life, so they’re simply more memorable, but a lot is linked to self-identity regardless of the cause. Unlike negative events, happy occurrences show a peak of recall at this time. It may be that they are remembered because they’re in a period of rapid change followed by a relatively uneventful stretch. However, I distinctly remember thinking of 2002 as the first year nothing major happened which was new, leading to a period of rather depressing rumination lasting several years. Nonetheless I do have the bump.

It was my O-level year. After taking them, I catastrophised and expected to fail most of them and be unemployed with no prospects from August onward. I was wrong. In particular this meant I’d have less contact with the girl I was in love with the idea of being in love with, who is now my oldest friend. 1982 had had the feeling of “endless summer” about it. I can’t be more specific. Summer 1983 was more melancholy and “moody teenagery”.

In a broader perspective, it was also the year I first realised we didn’t have fixed term parliaments in the UK, when Thatcher called a snap election to take advantage of the Falklands Factor. I found this somewhat enraging but mainly depressing. The day I heard about the election, I was feeling really pissed off walking down Stour Street in Canterbury when I was accosted by two members of the pro-Albanian communist party whose actual name I forget, and enthusiastically, and to them startlingly, bought their newspaper. This could do with some context. This was the first time I’d encountered the “silly newspaper” phenomenon where a tiny splinter group purporting or purported to be on the hard left produces its own newspaper to express its opinion on current affairs. I would expect this to have largely died out nowadays, but I don’t know.

It was also the year I learnt most about computers. Our family had just acquired a ZX81, which irritated me because of its low specs but it did lead to me learning BASIC, or Nine Tiles’ version thereof, and of course Z80 assembler and machine code. I went on to learn FORTH, ALGOL-60 and FORTRAN that year too, just for the hell of it. I wrote a few programs, including a virus, but I was also very conflicted about the whole thing because I felt like it was unhealthily obsessive of me to be this into computers. I still think that now sometimes. I was also worried that I was supporting a technology which might be destroying jobs and livelihoods, but this wasn’t really a problem at the time and it was actually a booming industry at that point. The year probably marks the peak of diversity for eight-bit microcomputers, and there’s a weird contrast here between the renowned “1983 Video Game Crash” and what I perceived to be a huge surge in success in this area. It may be the contrast between microcomputers and consoles or more noticeable in North America than Europe. At the time I considered gaming to be a guilty pleasure and was often quite bored by it. My main focus of interest was on computer graphics, and had been for a couple of years. The ZX81 was a terrible platform for this, although some tweaks were able to improve this somewhat.

Ironically, my focus on computers led in a few months to being better-informed and more skilled at IT than other pupils at my school who were studying it at A-level, while in the meantime worrying about failing my O-levels. This mismatch still happens today and I tend to be very unaware of my strengths and weaknesses, and also not apply my knowledge practically. When I learnt cursive handwriting, it was confined to practice books for a long time before I started using it in my more general schoolwork. I’m sure this is very significant but I don’t really know what it means. Probably if I did it wouldn’t happen. I put it down to neurodiversity, though the details of that are more obscure.

A few stats:

The top-grossing film of the year was ‘Return Of The Jedi’, a film which, since I can’t stand the ‘Star Wars’ franchise, I have never seen. Out of a sense of duty I started watching it a few months ago and got about ten minutes in before I was bored stiff by the thing. The most popular single was Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’, which was okay but nothing special I thought, but The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ won the Best Single award. Sting, and through him The Police, seems to have a disturbing obsession with jealousy and possessiveness. He even wrote a song about a dog once with that theme. The question arises of whether possessive “love” was considered positive at that point. Certainly there are later examples such as ‘When Harry Met Sally’ where there seems to be no problem with men stalking women but somehow if it’s the other way round you’re a bunny boiler, as in ‘Fatal Attraction’. ‘Play Misty For Me’ dates from 1971 but again the villain is female. I can never work out exactly what Sting is doing there, but the question arises of whether it was received in the manner intended. It was, after all, another time.

‘Coronation Street’ was the most watched TV programme. I probably wouldn’t’ve watched it, although I did, mainly because I tended not to watch television at the time at all. I was mainly a Radio 4 listener, although by that time I was also listening to a lot of Radio 1 at the weekends, and from study leave and through the summer also during the day through the week. This meant I heard a lot of “Our Tune” that year. Less said about that the better, probably.

I was probably atypical for a British teen in that I bought very few records. I’ve always been very nervous of vinyl and tended to focus on cassettes. If I remember correctly, I bought three singles in 1983: the Stranglers’ ‘European Female’, ‘Midnight Summer Dream’ and the Lotus Eaters’ ‘First Pictures Of You’. That’s probably it unless the 12″ of ‘Uncertain Smile’ counts. Vinyl seems very delicate and easily broken to me and I feel it degrades quite quickly. My real days of buying vinyl were the late 1990s and the first decade of this century, when I got a load of second hand records from charity shops. I also had basically no money. I didn’t get a paid job until the year after.

There were a number of landmark events that year. The first was the school exchange visit to Dunkerque, which at the time I regarded as the highlight of my life. That week was the happiest one of my recollection and it was drastically different from anything else I’d done up until then. I remember a mosh pit, and generally a very sociable and enjoyable time. ‘Safety Dance’ by Men Without Hats, came out at about this time, which is about mosh pits.

Thinking back at that time brings an impression of melancholy in a kind of self-indulgent way, kidding myself that I was yearning after a particular girl who was now my friend, loads of music, tinkering around guiltily with a computer and reading a lot about IT and come to think of it not actually reading many books apart from that, which was unusual for me at the time. I did look at a fair number of art books. John Peel and Anne Nightingale were very important to me. Politically it was all pretty depressing. CND was in its ascendancy, but I remained to be convinced it was the right way to go. A couple of years later I not only became convinced but went on to help run the local CND group, not very competently. The landslide Tory victory was iredeemably depressing. Jeremy Corbyn became an MP, and I quickly noticed that his views seemed very reasonable compared to almost everyone else in Parliament. Apparently Blair and Brown also entered Parliament but they were just nothing compared to him and I hadn’t even heard of them until the mid-1990s. Tony Benn was still around of course. The summer was unusually hot and sunny. NHS cleaning services were privatised. A couple of years after this, I experienced a pang of conscience when I took a cleaning job with Hospital Hygiene Services at the local hospital, and there is in fact a personal trend here of wanting to work in a nationalised industry but finding it increasingly difficult to do so, to the extent that for a long time it was almost impossible to reconcile paid work with my conscience.

Less political happenings included the arrival of the CD to market, although CDs were being played on the radio the previous year. There was controversy about the cold perfection of the sound quality, which some people felt was “too good” and removed feeling from the listening experience. This trend has continued to this day, for instance with the audiophile preference for analogue recording and reproduction, the Loudness War, compression artifacts on MP3s, and in other areas the replacement of CRT tubes with flat TFT displays. There’s a sense of disconnection this plugs into. With chemical photography and analogue recording onto vinyl, it feels like there’s a more direct link between the singer or musical instrument, the grooves being laid down from the magnetic tape, the pressing onto vinyl and the stylus picking up those grooves and converting them back to audio. Likewise, with a photograph light has been focussed from a scene, caused chemical reactions on a surface which is then processed and converted directly to physical film emulsion. There seems to be a physical chain which is broken by digital processing, and I can relate to that. It also feels like we lose control when these processes are performed by chips manufactured in clean rooms and the like by extremely large companies. That said, nostalgia for the CD now exists, since CDs are not digitally compressed in the same way as MP3s are, and they are also physical manifestations of what you’ve bought. In 1983, however, CDs and their players were very much the preserve of the yuppie and possibly the audiophile.

Certain inevitabilities came to pass this year too. The pound coin was introduced: something which had been long anticipated. The twenty pence coin had been issued the previous year, and the ten franc piece had recently been introduced in France, with some similarities to the new British coin. This also meant the pound note was on its way out, though they stayed legal tender in England for another five years. Since Thatcher was in power at the time, the pound coin was compared to her as being “thick, brassy and thinks it’s a sovereign”. The internet began to use TCP/IP, although for most people, including myself, this was entirely unknown and foreign. At the time, there were teletext and bulletin boards, and that was it for most of the public.

AIDS was becoming significant. Terrence Higgins had become the first person to die of it the previous year but I don’t recall that the government had started to use it as an excuse for homophobia. That said, the situation regarding homosexuality was still pretty poor at this point, with the age of consent still being at twenty-one, and because of my age I came to associate sex with danger in that respect before I had had any sexual experiences with another person. I suspect this juxtaposition is not so firmly established in most people older than I.

I was finding the future looked pretty grim and depressing at this stage, not just for myself but for the world in general. It may have been the year when I wrote my vision of the probable future, which involved almost universal poverty and unemployment with considerable progress in computing and IT destroying most paid work without replacing it. I actually envisaged 95% unemployment, and I attributed the problem, and I still think this is significant, to a payoff between space travel and IT. I’ll probably go into this in more depth in a later post, but the gist of my view is that there’s a tension between advances in information technology and human space travel where one suffers if the other advances. Hence we have arrived in a present where IT is predominant and space exploration practically non-existent in terms of humans in space, but if space travel had become popular and advanced, it would probably have been because IT didn’t advance as much, and 1983 seems to have been the year I thought of this.

It was also the last year I was confident about mainstream literature. I was entirely open to reading mainstream literary novels and poetry at this point, and felt I got a lot out of them. I have certain views on this. On the one hand, there is the perspective that reading mainstream literature improves empathy. On the other, according to Shelley “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, and I think this is potentially a bad thing. The behaviour and emotions depicted in novels and poetry kind of makes itself true by being expressed, and can lead to people having a particular view of their lives and the feelings and doings of themselves and others based on the suppositions of authors and poets, which seems to exclude other possible ways of being as a person. Nowadays I feel rather suspicious of literature for that reason, but there was also a very early fall from grace which took place the year after when it felt like my understanding for it was closed off irrevocably from me. But at this point I was flying high. I was even writing poetry, but that’s what angst-ridden teenagers do so that’s nothing special. I was really into Samuel Beckett, having forced my French exchange student to sit through endless televised plays of his, there being a season of them the previous year. I also had a mild interest in existentialism, although its apparent amorality was off-putting

Another aspect of my personality which hasn’t really expressed itself much is that far from being a “sciency” person, a category many people seem to want to put me in, I was pretty much an “arty” person and unsurprisingly quite pretentious. I was into Art Rock, embarrassed about my liking for Dalí and very much into other surrealists and absurdist drama. This has been expressed strongly at certain points in my life, and one of them was my mid-teens. There was a recurrence in my early twenties. Fashion-wise, I was afraid to express myself at all and was in the phase, which lasted throughout the ’80s, of believing it was possible to present a neutral image. I was mainly pining for a social life too, and probably my impression of Canterbury being boring stems from the difficulty of living in an outlying village. I used to walk a lot. I also chose my A-levels, which committed me to the humanities or social sciences at degree level.

That, then, is my 1983. It was kind of intermediate between the more caring attitudes of the ’70s, still had a lot of the prejudice which was normal at the time, but government policy had yet to succeed in swatting all the positive aspects of the post-war period. For me it was also something of a watershed year with a number of crucial aspects of my identity being laid down at that point.