The greatest love of all?

The greatest love of all?

One morning last summer, on my way to work, a woman jumped on the bus and started screaming “You cut me up!” at the driver. She just kept repeating “You cut me up! You cut me up! Where was I supposed to go?” over and over and over and over. Double figures, perhaps triple, all condensed into two minutes, all before an audience of two full decks. Eventually she called the driver a c**t and he rose to his feet. She backed off to her car, still screaming, “I’ve got your number!” and of course, “He cut me up!” for the benefit of passers-by.

Whatever the rights, wrongs and even danger surrounding the driving incident, her outburst was pure self-righteous indignation. She, the all-important human, out in her all-important Ford Escort, had been treated disrespectfully by another road user. The effrontery! Her family name in tatters! She must be avenged.

In excess, self-respect becomes a rod for your own back. With less of it there’d be less room for all that indignation. She could’ve just called him what she called him in her own privacy, and got on with her day. Instead she probably festered on it for weeks. Perhaps she got her old man onto him? He’s a builder, you know?

Pride, and what is fashionably termed ‘anti-social behaviour’ go hand in hand. Whether it’s children or adults boasting of their violent escapades, it’s nearly always justified by excessive pride and self-respect: “Nobody does that to me!” “So I said, you looking at me?” “You can’t turn around and say that to me!” Me, me, always bloody me.

Although the desire for a certain level of self-respect seems to be an innate yearning we live in times that milk that yearning for all it’s worth. Like sex, selfishness sells.
Advertising endlessly appeals to the all important you, and the you-betterment the product promises to deliver. Strategies like, “You will be cool if you own this” or more likely, “You must be pitiful if you don’t” can only work on those frightened of not being cool. All the crap about owning the right trainers would dissolve without this excessive self-respect. “I must be seen using the right mobile” would mean nothing if the “I” hadn’t elevated itself to such an unsustainable level of importance in the first place.

Through much of pop culture, anything other than unbridled self-worship is painted as a dangerous heresy. The platitudes come thick and fast. To question them is to flirt with self-destruction: “Whatever else, remember: you’re number one.” “You’ve got to respect yourself, without that you’re nothing!” (Copyright, every soap-opera ever). A whole vein of popular music, from country to soul to rap is dedicated to driving home these essential values. All together now….

“Learning to love yourself……is the greatest love of all!”
“Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die? Oh no not I, I will survive!”
“Pride! (a deeper love!) Pride! (a deeper love!)”
“The record shows! I took the blows! and did it myyyyyyyyyyyyy way!”

Truth is, it’s horses for courses. If you’re a dirt-poor black American, immersed in a culture of drugs and guns, then perhaps self-respect is an important survival strategy. Likewise if you’re the housewife who’s decided she won’t take her husband’s beating any more, it might be valuable to take stock of your virtues, your strengths and stoicism. Luckily though, most of the people buying these records and following these fictions simply are not. If you’re just another well-fed kid who’s never encountered hardship, or been held back by social prejudice, then perhaps such goals aren’t the way forward. In fact, perhaps it’s your current glut of self-respect and self-importance that’s making you miserable in the first place.

Arthur Smith recently spoke some sense on this subject, on Grumpy Old Men. He noted the value pop-culture places on possessing something called ‘attitude’. As far as he could see ‘attitude’ was simply being snotty, being rude and self-absorbed. Being boring and selfish, really. He had an equal contempt for the current cult of self-respect: “So what if some people don’t respect me. F**k ‘em!”

Quite right, but I don’t think I’d even go that far. I’m more, “So what if some people don’t respect me, they’re probably right not to”, which is not self-deprecation but a statement of fact. I’ve never done anything that might garner anyone’s respect. So what!

Apologies if this is starting to sound like “Thought for the day” but I need to spit it out. Until embarrassingly recently I often referred to myself as a depressive. Thanks largely to the editors of this site (Medialens, for it was they) I have come to see that all I really am is a bit of a whiner (some would say wiener!). It was only because I took my own problems, my own existence, so seriously, and dwelled upon it so much, that it was possible to regularly feel bad about my lot.

The way out, of course, is to consider the plight of those worse-off than yourself. If you take time to deliberately force your own life out of your mind, and instead concentrate solely on the misery others face (plenty to choose from) you can buy yourself a reprieve from you own nagging. The rope slackens, and you can breath again. You realise it was you yanking at it all along.

Works at all levels. When you miss a green light, or someone pushes into the queue ahead of you, or a train pulls off just as you race onto the platform, it’s very easy to go into “Why me?” mode, or snarl “Typical!” (when it’s no more typical for yourself than anyone else.) At such times a thought for those with genuine problems can be most calming, humbling.

At the other extreme, even legitimate personal grief can be mitigated with a moment’s thought for those worse off. However painful, even a death in the family is not as tragic as the death of all your family and the loss of your entire means of material subsistence – sad to say, an everyday occurrence in the countries we ‘liberate’ and bring to ‘democracy’. A few minutes concern for them is a chance to escape your own loss, and then return to it in a more placid and capable state.

At first it might sound callous, trying to benefit from the suffering of others, but in fact everybody wins. You belittle your own problems and simultaneously increase your comprehension of the problems of others. Who knows, it might spur you on to act selflessly too.

Although there is good evidence that some people’s genetic constitution makes them susceptible to depression it’s hard not to wonder how many of today’s Prozac poppers are unwittingly manufacturing their own depression. Didn’t used to need this stuff. It makes me wince to think how many doctors and shrinks and councillors are telling depressed patients to love themselves more if they want to get better, when that self-love may well be the root cause of their misery.