The curious case of the bipolar youths of Bristol

They say the best books are the ones that tell us what we already know… They are wise. Earlier this year I decided to read the dystopian novel “1984” by George Orwell… I had never done it (it’s not a thing in my mother tongue), however, the references to it had been popping around me like mushrooms - particularly during the lockdowns. I live in the Bristol city centre, and to those of you paying some attention to the news in the past year or so, this will come to no surprise. For example, the slogan “2+2=5” has been sprayed painted in the plinths of fallen statues, banners used both during “black lives matter” and “Kill the bill” protests and, on occasion, during Extinction rebellion’s actions of overnight defacing of public property with posters or graffiti.

It was a difficult read and it took me a long time to get through it. Its common for a reader to identify oneself with the main character of the story and, if the book is well written, it is conceivable to imagine yourself going through what the person in the page is experiencing, and act in the same way. This is a very well written story… The main character of this plot is a complex one, a human one… and not particularly heroic or likeable at that: He is morally and physically weak and demonstrates a feeble character. Furthermore, he is not very bright and can be quite na?ve and gullible at times, particularly for someone approaching 40. He does not display any exceptionally virtuous qualities, apart from a good memory and nostalgia/curiosity for the past. I struggled to empathize with him in the beginning and I found the world around him exceptionally depressing. Hence, I could only read a few pages a week… it was disturbing me, it was scary, it was too close to what may come to be for comfort (and indeed has happened in places and at times).

During the same period, I also heard a podcast interview of Yeonmi Park… a young North Korean defector, that literally went through hell and back in the first 25 years or so of her life, now turned author…

This further cemented my initial feeling that “1984” could very well be taken as an essay of what the world can become if we are not vigilant. It confirmed as well my now solid conclusion that, oftentimes, the danger comes from where you least expect (including within yourself)… in the guise of the best intentions: “The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions”

Whilst reading this book I also realized that the kids (or young adults) making use of its references, had probably never read it or, if they did, they probably failed to make the difficult exercise of identifying themselves with Winston Smith, the flawed human who is broken into submission and into believing the illogical premise that "2+2=5", against all his senses. Smith, the all too mediocre last hope of humanity against the worst collective autocracy civilization had ever produced. The average man that paid elderly starving prostitutes for sex in back alleys, who considered his wife assassination, who swore he would lie, steal, kill and throw acid in the face of little children to fight against the tyranny of Big Brother and the “English Socialist (Ingsoc)” party - falling for the oldest temptation in the book, justifying his means through his allegedly morally superior ends - and who finally died loving nothing else but Big Brother. Nietzsche put it well “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

They failed to see the point…the message, that we are all…all… without exception, made of the same stuff, with the same instincts that evolution as bequeathed us, subject to the same pitfalls and temptations… or has the scriptures tell us...” born in sin”.

Are these youths - probably the most privileged of generations that has ever walked the face of the earth -, implying we are living under a similar repressive autocracy? With crime thought, thought police and alike? Perhaps… perhaps we are inching towards that direction, willfully blinded by greater needs or fear, like the proles of “1984” - there is an actual case to be made there, one cannot deny that possibility in the face of all these draconian restrictions and lockdowns of late. However, these youths fail to see that they too are indulging in some autocratic feelings of their own, and stretching the pendulum too far in the other direction…will it backlash?

How so do you ask? How are they harbouring these tendencies?: throwing their toys out of the pram if they are not listened to and obeyed, trying to bend the world to the way they wish it to be… perhaps fuelled by a feeling they are the first that can/want to do it, maybe imagining they are uniquely placed to do it, for the first time in history, never has anyone ever been so wise to the ways of the world as they have been and so they should be attended to!! And if so, what is the problem? Isn’t that their job anyway? The job of boundary pushing new snotty self-absorbed generations?

Yes, to a degree it is. To a degree it is desirable to have people constantly pushing boundaries. It is also important to have boundaries to push at. It is a delicate and precarious balance, difficult to attain and so easy to squander…Orwell’s prolific imagination devised a world where the scale tipped too far to one side, as an overcorrection to an earlier shift to the right side of the political spectrum.

But if so… if they are a force for good (the youths I mean), which of them should we pay attention to? The ones pushing the boundaries, or the ones celebrating them? The ones fighting the system or the ones waving the England flag? They use the same venues for protest/celebration… in some sense their attitudes of defiance are almost identical (as depicted in the images above), and the euphoric mob mentality is equally present.

Well… true enough they are unlikely to be the same youths, and if some of them are, I don’t think they truly are bipolar or dabble in the 1984 party prescribed doublethink… they probably don’t even see the paradox.

What is the paradox then? Well, they also say that for each action/force there is an equal and opposing reaction – or you might recognize other formulations such as: ying and yang, left and right, positive and negative, light and dark, chaos and order, masculine and feminine, entropy and enthalpy, gravity and dark matter, centrifugal and centripetal force, openness or conservatism, creativity or tradition, etc… Most of us exist somewhere in the middle, in terms of temperament I mean... we don’t lean too much to the right (order, control, sterile cleanliness, hierarchy, boundaries, borders, nationalism, patriotism, tribalism, tradition, ritual, conservatism, rules, obedience, deference, respect, close-mindedness, coyness, puritanism, obsession with honour, responsibility, judgement, absolutism, etc), or to the left (chaos, anarchy, fertility/creativity, collectivism, rules and boundary pushing, rejection of borders and absolute definitions or values, rejection of “social norms” and tradition, even rejection of gender definitions, rebellion and rebellious behaviour, critical and questioning mindsets, open mindedness, promiscuity, relativism, refusal of judgement and of hierarchy of values and individual responsibility, etc).

The ones leaning to the left of the left tend to be activist, tend to be the ones questioning everything and taking to the streets. Tend to be the ones breaking rules, inciting chaos to bring down systems that they always see, and will always see, as oppressing (because indeed they all are…to some degree really… all freedom has limits – and must have them). They are also the ones usually insisting on a more open society, far more welcoming to outsiders, a more collective way of living, based on trust and love… they have a more na?ve way of looking at the world (but not to be confused with harmlessness or goodness necessarily). They are the ones most likely to be seen at protests like ‘kill the bill’, burning police vans, tearing down statues and graffitiing whatever messages they think they must open our eyes to.

The ones leaning to the right of the right…well, they are, of course, very attracted to the patriotism implicit in the support of the representatives of your tribe, your team, the people to the inside of your boundary and border, your kin, your kind, your people. You might also find them in the streets, but for quite different reasons. They are very unlikely to be vegan or environmentalists (they don’t see nature as mother earth and tend to see it either as a resource or the dangerous and cruel force it can be), they are definitely not collectivists, and they definitely do not question established beliefs that are apparent to them, and traditions that have been in place for centuries. They have a more protective and defensive way of looking at the world, they tend to be more cynical about it as they tend to accept far better that, both themselves and all others, have a dark side, and usually integrate it in their personality in a far more efficient manner (too efficiently one might argue in some historical cases) than the ones to the left of the left – which tend to think of themselves as harmless victims of oppression.

In both cases, they dangerously and strongly believe they are in the right side of history and that their ends justify whatever means they see fit. Due to the voluntary integration of their dark side, the danger coming from the far right is more conspicuous and quite apparent. On the contrary, the danger coming from the extreme left appears insidiously disguised as extreme compassion for all things living… and damn you if you don’t agree with them. They are the proverbial wolfs in sheep skin or, as I prefer to think it, they are the harmless chickens that actually have residual T-Rex dinosaur DNA. I digress…

Statistics tell us that young people lean more to the left than the right… it also tells us that people tend to travel to the right of the spectrum as they get older. Therefore, it is the job of the new generations to question and push boundaries, it is the job of the adults to keep some order in place.

Still, if most kids lean to the left (even more so these days), not all do so. Some will be more than happy to wave their countries’ flags…some even, thou leaning to the left, will also very healthily wave a flag. Thankfully their instinct is telling them something that their rational mind is not yet aware of…that it is ok to be proud of your tribe, that it is ok to have a healthy level of patriotism… that it is important to have some boundaries – however porous you might want them to be – as well as nuance, and to stand in either side of the spectrum with moderation… not straying too far from the narrow path.

So, are they both just doing their jobs? Yes, in a way. Both these temperamental traits have been equally selected for in human populations across several civilizations…they must be both needed, in moderate forms, to achieve optimum equilibrium. Though, I would argue, there are far better reasons, presently, to take to the streets (in a civilized way) than what is bringing the left to do so these days… moreover… we are not only counting on them… but indeed dependent of their rebellious nature to restore the liberties we are gradually surrendering, in the name of possibly questionable public health benefits. In my view, that is a far greater cause than the fretting about statues nobody looks at or cares about - or whatever it is they seem to want to deconstruct this week. They, the left, better get their act together, as my days of chanting in the streets are long gone.

It is great to see again people joyously celebrating the sporting efforts of their nations' footballing teams!! Living life as it should be lived and enjoyed... After all, nobody wants to live in the sterile, dull and depressing world of “1984”, regardless of what good intentions brings it about.