What Cannot Be Dissolved is the Real
Grow seed-crystals of trust: Antidotes to the Hubriscene, Pt 12
This week’s piece is an expansion on a voice letter I sent to this week, which is part of our years-long ongoing conversation about how people can show up for one another in the strange times in which we find ourselves. My tone might sound different compared to other pieces but I have decided to leave it unsweetened. Forgive my rant, or perhaps just rant along.
Leaving aside the slew of land-expropriation news from elsewhere, in my country right now, rich landowners are seeking to turf-off everyone from even being able to walk freely on ancient paths on ‘their’ land. Meanwhile the guardians of national parks in America were laid-off this week, and soon we will watch as every last piece of Earth that can be parcelled and sold is grabbed by the richest and most powerful. It is a travesty.
Without access to land, ordinary people begin to doubt that they are part of nature, and cease to be able to care about it, thus a vicious cycle ensues. This has been the shadow side of ‘progress’ for many hundreds of years here in the UK, as we were the first country to industrialise.1 Without consideration for the public good, an environment of individual kleptomania has been normalised. If Earth is the creation of The Great Mystery, we are beholden to the Creator to care for it. If Earth is ‘just’ a wonderful planet, we are still beholden to each other and to our descendants to care for it.
It should not be seen as radical to say ‘slow down’ to all this carving up. My long-term small ‘A’ anarchism and my intermittent small ‘C’ conservatism2 go hand in hand in saying, ‘Let us keep what is good for those who come after us. Let us consider needs other than just our own in our decision-making.’ Too hard to swallow? How about, ‘Consider the future needs of your own children, grandchildren and those of the people you love!’
When I am at my lowest ebb with what goes on in the world, I wonder, do those who hoard all the wealth, land, power and goods not love anything but money, ownership, power and goods? It is not my mission to depress myself or others, so follow me on a line of thought today that leads to practical resistance to both instrumentalist machine-thinking and the idea that success in acquisition is the best measure of human flourishing.
Places to be
Hey Brother Dougald, I'm sitting here just about to mend my work trousers, which I use to go and paint and mend things, then we're going to go to a local friend’s gentle yoga class tonight. There's an amazing community here and so many people are already friends from my twelve years of regular visiting, so it feels like somewhere to be, if not for ever, then for some time.
Regarding the online spaces we are inhabiting, I’ve never been on Twitter / X or used Facebook, but I am on Instagram. I think the algorithm has changed so much there since the war in Gaza. I noticed a shift in tone this year, people are exhausted and they just don't bother posting about current affairs anymore. It is impossible to tell if this is down to what people are personally posting or what Meta allows to be seen. Others have upped and left, gone elsewhere. I don’t have any energy to start a new thing, and besides, I am settled at Substack. When I'm on the ‘Gram, I'm usually looking at crafts and art-related imagery and yet I still feel as though I waste some time doing that. It's not exactly wasted, perhaps, but I could be doing my own work. I've been getting a weekly news digest that's physically delivered to my house and I'll pick up the first of those on Monday when I head back for the day from the house-sit. Then, the laptop is purely for writing, visual tasks and communication, which I am happy with, for now.
I have resumed occasionally checking the BBC news online, although it's so neutered since I remember it from before lockdown. They don't even call ‘ethnic cleansing’ what it is, or they'll call it such in one instance but not in another. Their language has become coy, they're shy to call ill deeds by their true names, which always means there's money involved.
There's no shock left in me, I was just surprised at how fast it was, the corporate takeover of government, both in the UK and the USA, which happened in Italy before with Berlusconi, and is the current status quo in Russia with Putin, (there being no distinction between the love of money and power in the so-called left and so-called right, these days.) I am sad to say that I'm also not surprised by the cruelty with which so many treat each other online and in person, unlike your friend. Having been on the sharp end of other people’s financial and housing power over me, I have experienced first-hand how little the rich and powerful of all stripes care about their effects on the poor or precariously housed. We mean nothing to them and so they do not even consider their decisions to be cruel. We are the huddled masses, to be brushed aside at a whim.3
Having experienced what felt like the worst, nothing in me now feels panicked. All the long term planning and care that's in there is kicking-in. Real life connectivity that we've spent time making is the heart of it.
Crystals of community versus the universal solvent
I don't know what people thought having (any) billionaires in the world would do. Money isn't the universal solvent; money is a token. Love of money, (whether it's the root of all evil or not, I'm not qualified to say,) but it is the universal solvent. When there is the love of money and power, the beautiful crystals of community that form in the solution of society are always re-dissolved. They are destroyed by the catastrophic effects of such a vast disparity of wealth, health, opportunity.
A few months ago I read some great local history about a small town in the north of England where there were literally hundreds of societies, groups, choirs, assemblies, bands, organisations, regular lectures and event committees. The researcher was comparing that period of flourishing in this ordinary and quite unremarkable place to the dearth of what is available there today, now that we are atomised in not just our homes, but in separate rooms in our homes, each on our own small screens. (The Machine Stops made flesh.4 )
The remaining crystals: community, shared goals, solidarity, arts, voluntary societies, and so much more, go back into this adulterated solution and they just can't re-form. Even when you put the seed crystals in there on a dangling little thread of cotton and you leave them in a sunny windowsill5, still, when there's the presence of billionaires, millionaires, (and in my experience, third and fourth, or even second homeowners in a place), nothing much can form. The very rich sequester themselves together, shunning all normal contact6 - never in shops, churches, parks or the street, just socialising with their own kind in places where they do not have to encounter the garish and shabby ordinariness of the rest of us. The love of one's own security, power and money over caring for the distributed heart, (which is kept beating by all of us), is an awful solvent
‘There is no such things as society,’ Margaret Thatcher famously bragged in a woman’s magazine in 1979, insisting that only the individual and its immediate family existed. Well, she was wrong, then, but her malediction has almost come true.
It reminds me of n-hexane, which fatally sickened people cleaning iPhone screens in factories in China, or 111 trichloroethane, which used to be widespread in the leather industry, and caused brain disease by removing fats from workers’ brains via inhalation, rather than just degreasing the hides.
For me, in love as I am with physical analogies, that's what the billionaire class is: a toxic solvent that needs banning for everyone’s wellbeing. That's what the admiration and allowance of billionaire-hood creates, the fact that we don't legislate against it, against third homes, against the hoarding of land and wealth, the hoarding of security, (which I think is aligned to it), is a dreadful toxic solvent. It's spilling everywhere, even in places where no such solvent existed before, where the instructions to ‘give away all your money to the poor’, ‘love one another’ and not to ‘store up treasures on earth’ used to mean that even when we came across such behaviour, we would know it for the poison it was. As soon as you get one part per million of it in something that was otherwise wonderful, a community organization, or a group that was going well that suddenly has to be for profit: it's adulterated.
The third heart, the seed crystal
I think there is a way forward. You can't remove the poisonous solvent at this point, or at least, I can't and most of us can't. I've been thinking for the last day about how to describe what it is that could counteract the solvent and I think it is actually trust. It's about cultivating relationships (as
puts it so well) ‘good enough to trust’. There is always a risk: we could be wrong about someone, about a group of people, we could be let down. Indeed, I know that I've been the person who's let someone down. Then I picked the pieces back up, (which is very humbling), and carried on, the best I could, as an impure, imperfect person. But hopefully now, one worth trusting.And so one of the things I want to write about is encouraging people, myself included, to form real-world relationships that can bear the weight of what we’ll one day need to ask them to carry. This week I was going to be writing about how not to get inveigled into fights and plots, how when we make strenuous efforts to ‘resist evil’, instead we find we are constantly referring to evil. We end up in a fight to stop fighting, which is about as effective as having sex to support chastity.
So I've been wrestling for a few weeks with how to put this, and next week I will write about it more,7 but this morning I woke up at five to six, and my mind said: trust.
You write about it so much: places where we commit to being trustworthy. It doesn't mean we won't disappoint, and it doesn't mean we won't be wrong, but where we've just said, damn it, I'm going to be trustworthy, and I'm going to trust someone else, and I might be wrong, and they might be a secret narcissist, they may even pull one over on us.
We've got to get that out of the way right at the start. A person may not be of good faith, they might be a good actor and that's just how that is. It's worth it for the ten people that you will really be able to trust, who have got your back, who would never ‘cancel’ you. Even if they disagreed fundamentally on something, they would appreciate that two humans can come to very different positions on things but that they both might be doing so in good-faith and with well thought-through reasons. They would never do the call-out thing, they would talk to you in person like an actual human, rather than treat you like a broken flint with which to carve a notch on their belt, then throw back in the gravel.
But ‘cancelling' is the least of it now in this new era. It seems quaint, suddenly, doesn't it? When everything is at stake: your money just being turned off in a moment8 and everything you've ever put online suddenly being public. Not by some Russian hacker this time, but by one’s own administration.
This thing I really care about is building real world friendships, connections and trust. It can only be done on the local level and it can only be done via real conversations. I often remind my friends of that, and how I'm not party to much outrage online, so I don't know what the pervasive vibe on X or Facebook is. Instead, my job is to calmly and quietly, hopefully with a bit of humour, say, ‘come on then, let’s roll up our sleeves, we're the people for now’. I know I seem extremely old-fashioned, but I have made my peace with it. I really enjoy
for that, they're real-world practical and still spiritual.9With the kleptocrats in power by turns, whether on the so-called left or the so-called right, it’s not a secret conspiracy, all one needs to do is patiently follow the flows of money and power, see who benefits from laws, executive orders and policies. There isn't even anything hidden. I suppose it's the years of martial arts, but I am inclined to just watch someone closely and let them reveal themselves.
I haven't decided yet whether trust is an antidote or if it can prevent what these billionaires do; it remains to be seen. I don't think it can prevent their proliferation, as no country seems to want to say, ‘This much wealth and no further!’
Yet I think that if you're in a strong solution with others based on long-standing trust, your bonds can't be broken.10 They are based on life experience and so they remain real, no matter what virtual or financial inducements are offered, ie. no matter what solvent is poured onto them. In the podcast The Sacred,
often talks about someone’s ‘sacred values’, that which no amount of money or power offered could make you betray them. Perhaps it is time to identify, recognise and cultivate our own (personal and shared) sacred values. To find or make fitting containers for these qualities, these virtues11, if you like. Our societies might not yet be able to form the beautiful crystals we used to form, the things we once made happen, like those incredible reading groups and self-organising educational groups in the north in the 19th century, the brass bands, the unions first formed here in Dorset over at Tolpuddle… Due to so many forces, well explained by so many, modern societies have dissolved into their nuclear family subsets, and further into the atoms of each alienated person. It's like molecules being broken apart that should be forming together into coherent larger crystals. I feel with our future solutions of trust, the crystals will be tiny at first, but they will be good, and we can only build things as far as we can trust people.To grow these crystals, we have to start somewhere, and I think it’s in trusting our own hearts, and in the ‘third heart’ (as my Grandmaster used to call it), the thing that grows between two people, that partakes of us both. That’s the place to begin. It might seem small, but what a strong, timeless thing is love and trust!
And maybe that's the way it has to be for a while. I was reading Václav Havel's writing about Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, which an Uncivil Savant reader sent me. The way people have organized against totalitarianism in the past, the way they did against the Nazis, against the Soviets, against the British Raj in India, against the Fascists in Spain: everything really is about trust. There will always be spies and bad-faith people trying to infiltrate good honest communities. That's one reason why we don't have to say we're doing anything, or making anything. As soon as you announce you're one thing then they can say things about it.
We can take a leaf out of the ancient Taoists’ book and seem ‘cloudy, like muddy water’. What are we doing over here? Nothing much, it’s just locals, drinking tea…
So, this nameless thing, which is only the same as ekklesia, I think, is perhaps just the guts to be trustworthy, and to say ‘These are the people and I'm here for them.’ I feel, St. Wite is my patron in all this. She had the guts to say, ‘These are my people. Do them no more harm.’
This practice is real: love is real, friendship is real, trust is real, solidarity is real. It’s about action and presence, both in convivial times and in hard times. We can seed a thousand tiny crystals with our actions, we can’t know how and where they will grow.
I feel hugely inspired by the work you and Anna are doing, and
, and so many others. Sorry for the long ramble, but I always appreciate talking things through with you. It's nice to be back to an occasional epistolary way of writing online, because I really don't want to be general, I want to be particular. That requires addressing my thoughts to a real person. I'm always glad of you guys in my life and for your insight especially. Take care, Caro.11th Feb 2025
This week’s three good things:
It’s so great to say that is now on Substack. I didn’t bully him, honest, but I did (rather relentlessly) encourage him. Anyway, now you can enjoy reading him via your inbox.
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Which is pretty much a definition of my Taoist disposition…
If you can get in a private plane to escape a consequence of a problem, you are the problem.
Sadly I have lost the link to the original report I read, so here is one about Box, a small Sussex town where some of my partner’s family live. Here is a great starting point for books and articles on the subject of the historical flourishing of voluntary societies.
I did love those 1970s crystals gardens, my brother an di used to grow…
It is the very rich who will not assimilate into society, rarely the poor or those of average means. If certain people want to complain about ‘immigrants’ not assimilating, they should also scrutinise and chastise equally the very rich, as they favour their own schools, special imported foods and strange incomprehensible customs: exactly the things they complain bitterly about with the foreigners.
It isn't withdrawing, and it isn't being a hermit, and it isn't condemning, and like most good things, it's really only the apophatic way that you can describe it properly. More next week.
This has just happened to a friend’s PayPal, today.
‘If it ain’t practical, it ain’t spiritual’, being my motto for life. Just wish I could remember where I first heard it…
This is borne-out by long standing religious communities, for instance.
Virtue is a very useful but under-loved word. It is also the usual and best translation of the word ‘te’ or ‘de’ in Tao Te Ching / Dao De Jing: ‘The Way and its Virtue’.
Nest time we are together we could make this into a hand-decorated zine with the title "Caro Off the Cuff." Just beautiful and fittingly enraged.
Yes to all of that. It seems to me that the rich and powerful are afraid of trusting; there is a vulnerability in acknowledging that at some point you will need to rely on the kindness of others. So they isolate themselves in their fortified houses and cliques and become ever more estranged from the rest of us and 'real life'. I am exhausted by the continuing horrors that are unfolding across the globe in this era of disintegration; there is the tension between needing to know and witness what is happening and wanting to run away and hide. I try to remember that I am responsible only for my own actions and their effects; trying to live a kind life: walking lightly on the earth, being a useful member of my community, honouring those who have gone before me and who will come after me in the continuum of human existence. Not turning my back on the destruction but witnessing, acknowledging and doing what I can to support the brave ones (XR, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Medecine sans Frontiers) by fundraising, emailing and so on. It never feels enough but we all do what we can; I want to be able to face the Ancestors, when my time comes, and say I did my best and tried hard not to make things worse. I find your writing inspiring and thank you for it. We must keep beauty and laughter like little flames in our hearts.