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Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 07 March 2019

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Michel de Montaigne, the patron philosopher of the ordinary life. Photo:thefamouspeople.com

‘More than ever, modern life forces us to confront our own mediocrity. Our computers and phones constantly bombard us with news of the achievements of exceptional people: actors winning awards; athletes performing incredible feats; royals being praised for their beauty and philanthropy. As we sit and scroll, we can’t help but feel distinctly ordinary - and inferior - by comparison.

Consolation for our plight can come from unexpected places. Michel de Montaigne is the patron philosopher of the ordinary life. In his masterwork, the Essais, he attacks the pretensions of the aristocrats and intellectuals of his day, daring to criticise their work and achievements and reminding us of their fundamental humanity (“Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies”). At the same time, he venerates the lives of average, unheralded people - “In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than Cicero.”

The next time we take stock of the success of others, we should keep Montaigne's perspective in mind and remember that wealth, fame, esteem or glory are no guide to the worth of a person, and that living a virtuous, ordinary life is achievement enough.’

The Wonders of an Ordinary Life

‘We live in an age with a high regard for extraordinary lives – that is, lives that the vast majority of us will never lead. Our heroes have made outsized fortunes, appeared on gigantic screens and demonstrated unique virtue and talent. Their achievements are both dazzling and continuously, in the background, humiliating.

In the late 1650s, the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer painted a picture called The Little Street. Doing so was a quiet but momentous and revolutionary act, with an impact that challenges our values to this day.

Little Street by Johannes Vermeer. Photo: overstockart.com

It showed nothing more outwardly impressive than an ordinary street in Vermeer’s home town of Delft. Someone was doing a little sewing; some kids were playing on the stoop, a woman was busy in the yard. It is one of the greatest paintings in the world.

Up to this point, the most prestigious cultural works had emphasised the merits and value of aristocratic, military and religious lives, that is, of lives filled with extraordinary moments and advantages. The great epic poets, Homer and Virgil, had written of heroic warriors; Renaissance artists had produced magnificent visions of saints and angels.

And the routines of kings, queens and aristocrats were constantly celebrated and held up for admiration on the most prestigious canvases.

But Johannes Vermeer went in another direction. He wanted to show us what could be appealing and honourable about very different sorts of activities: keeping a house tidy, sweeping the yard, babysitting, sewing or – as in his equally significant painting of a kitchen maid – preparing lunch...Continue to read

Me, Myself, And I: What made Michel de Montaigne the first modern man?

The Power of 'Good Enough'

Photo:auntieemsguide.com

How settling can make people happier and more satisfied than gunning for "the best"

Too many choices? Are you a "maximiser" or "satisficer”?

Do you always search for the “best” or are you happy with “good enough”? Are you searching for the good life, inner-peace, contentment and happiness?

Then, opt for “Good Enough” in Life

In Praise of ‘Enoughness’ and 'Lagomist' Economy

In Praise of Good Enough

Excellence is overrated. Let’s embrace being good enough instead

Schools, bodies, relationships – this quest to be outstanding can be damaging, even to people who really are outstanding

‘We live in a society obsessed with being exceptional. Whether it is as workers, parents, students, lovers or cooks, we are expected to be outstanding. We must strive to be the best employee, craft an outstanding body, have an amazing relationship, all while being exceptionally happy. Even the most ordinary institutions also are expected to be nothing less than excellent. Companies want to be “world class”, schools have become “academies of excellence”, and humble local GP surgeries strive to be “outstanding”. Being good enough is seen as simply not good enough.

Our quest to be excellent has many positive consequences, but it also can be damaging. Lionising excellence can create huge inequalities. When high performers are showered with rewards, the great mass of us who are average miss out. This can spark resentment in those who feel that they don’t measure up. But the obsession with being exceptional does just harm the great mass of average people. It can also do damage to people at the top as well.

Recent research on “insecure overachievers” has found that a burning drive to always be outstanding often leaves even the most exceptional performers feeling like they are not good enough). This can create severe damaging physical and mental health problems. Ultimately, the quest to be outstanding means all of us feel like we will never measure up.

If excellence is a harmful trap, how can we get out of it? More than 50 years ago, the psychotherapist, DW Winnicott provided an answer. During his work with parents and children, he noticed that those striving to be the perfect mother or father would often end up creating problems – for themselves as well as the child. Well-adjusted children often had parents who were “good enough”. They weren’t so neglectful that their child was harmed. Nor were they so amazing that the child felt they couldn’t escape the overwhelming shadow of their parent.’...Continue to read

All in all, to my mind, Good Enough is Good Enough: A reflection on the toll exacted by perfectionism

‘High ambitions are noble and important, but there can also come a point when they become the sources of terrible trouble and unnecessary panic.

One way of undercutting our more reckless ideals and perfectionism was pioneered by a British psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott in the 1950s. Winnicott specialised in relationships between parents and children. In his clinical practice, he often met with parents who felt like failures: perhaps because their children hadn’t got into the best schools, or because there were sometimes arguments around the dinner table or the house wasn’t always completely tidy.

Donald Winnicott. Photo:bing.com

Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequences of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism. So as to help them reduce this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: what he called ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pretty decent, usually well intentioned, sometimes grumpy but basically reasonable father or mother. Winnicott wasn’t saying this because he liked to settle for second-best, but because he knew the toll exacted by perfectionism – and realised than in order to remain more or less sane (which is a very big ambition already) we have to learn not to hate ourselves for failing to be what no ordinary human being ever really is anyway.

The concept of ‘good enough’ was invented as an escape from dangerous ideals. It began in relation to parenthood, but it can be applied across life more generally, especially around work and love.

A relationship may be ‘good enough’ even while it has its very dark moments. Perhaps at times there’s little sex and a lot of heavy arguments. Maybe there are big areas of loneliness and non-communication. Yet none of this should lead us to feel freakish or unnaturally unlucky. It can be good enough.

Similarly, a ‘good enough’ job will be very boring at points, it won’t perfectly utilise all our merits; we won’t earn a fortune. But we may make some real friends, have times of genuine excitement and finish many days tired but with a sense of true accomplishment.

It takes a good deal of bravery and skill to keep even a very ordinary life going. To persevere through the challenges of love, work and children is quietly heroic. We should perhaps more often sometimes step back in order to acknowledge in a non-starry-eyed but very real way that our lives are good enough – and that this is, in itself, already a very grand achievement.’

The above article, ‘Good Enough is Good Enough’ was first published in The Book of Life.

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How Can I Be More Normal? Watch the Video

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..And now, come and be my fellow-traveler on a journey of self-discovery: Come and visit My Wisdom Corner. Surprise yourself. You will love it!

What is this life all about?

Why am I here? What’s my Life’s purpose? How can I make the most of my Life?

The Wisdom Corner

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”- Jalaluddin Rumi, The Persian Sage of Beauty, Wisdom and Love.

Come, come, whoever you are, come

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Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 06 March 2019

Hits: 2811

Hands Off Our Land!

‘If this public land sell-off continues, there could be none left by 2050’

Photo: telegraph.co.uk

Since Margaret Thatcher came to power, 10% of the area of Britain has left public ownership, and sold to private interests, against the common good of the nation. No wonder the country has lost its soul, heart, moral fibre and purpose.

Celebrating and promoting greed and extreme values-free economic system is sinking to the nadir of decadence.

A Timely Reflection on the biggest privatisation: the land beneath our feet*

N.B. Before this reflection, I wish to share a few examples of  articles I have written over the past few years, highlighting the consequences of the biggest robbery and theft of all time, namely, the so-called privatisation, deregulation, and marketisation, neoliberalism, if you may:

The Broken Economic Model

UK’s economic model is broken, says Archbishop of Canterbury

People’s Tragedy: Neoliberal Legacy of Thatcher and Reagan

Bastard Economics of Greedy Neoliberalism and the Killings of the Innocents in London Tower

Dear Prime Minister-Britain needs a New Economic Model

Remaking Economics

And now reverting to our reflection on the sell-off of our Motherland, our Sacred Home:

A Timely Reflection on the biggest privatisation: the land beneath our feet*

Photo: Stop the Sale and Privatisation of ALL public Land.

‘In her memoirs the late Margaret Thatcher wrote that privatisation must be “at the centre of any programme of reclaiming territory for freedom”. Since 1979 British prime ministers have been true to her word. Thatcher used territory in a metaphorical sense, but it was also true literally: the privatisation of land is the biggest, and least well-known, sell-off of the state’s assets. As Brett Christophers, a professor of economic geography, points out in our pages, almost 10% of land has been transferred from public into private ownership since Thatcher came to power. In his book, The New Enclosure, Prof Christophers calculates that approximately 2 million hectares of land – or 10 % of Britain – has disappeared from public hands, the bulk of which has entered corporate, as opposed to charity or community, ownership. This is a privatisation of half of the state’s estate, worth about £400bn, and dwarfs any other transfer of public wealth to private hands.

Marketisation, privatisation, liberalisation, deregulation, self-regulation, downsizing, outsourcing, cost-cutting, profit-maximisation, cost-minimisation, highest returns to the shareholders, values-free actions and education, alternative facts, falsehood, lies and deceitful thoughts, brainwashing, bribery and corruption,…:

These are the main ingredients of the Bastard Economics of Neoliberal Ideology

The scale of the disposals was masked because the process took place largely in silence and by stealth. Often tracking the sales was difficult because of the opacity of transactions. The diversity of public bodies in the UK offering sites – from forests to airbases to hospital grounds – made it hard to piece together. The sales often took place at knockdown prices, with the public sector barely realising a fraction of the current value. This process has been briefly illuminated by tenacious journalism, such as this week’s story exposing how nine years of swingeing central government cuts to English councils have resulted in a vast and irreversible sell-off of public assets. In many cases local authorities have begun offloading their assets – playing fields, community centres, libraries, youth clubs, swimming pools – to fund redundancies made necessary by Whitehall cuts.

Would Henry George’s ‘Remedy’ help us combat today’s global crises?

The defence of privatisation is that it can increase efficiency and spur investment. Such an argument is difficult to sustain with land. When the Cabinet Office looked into whether public bodies were holding on to vacant space, officials reported that, au contraire, it was the private sector that had a problem – maintaining a vacancy rate three times as high as government. Neither has land use been invigorated by private developers. Last year the New Economics Foundation pointed out that the government’s target of building 160,000 homes by selling off public land was 12 years behind schedule and would take until 2032 to achieve. The Tudor enclosure movement was supposed to have turbo-charged the capitalism of its day. Even if this dubious claim is true, it is unlikely that today’s equivalent is having any positive effect.

Where there appears to be some historical echo is in the appropriation of wealth by a rentier class which has grown up alongside large aristocratic estates. A staggering 23 of the top 100 richest people in the country last year have property listed as a major source of their wealth. That dwarfs the other biggest sources. Then there is the corporate hoarding of land: one study lists 50 private companies that together own about a 40th of Britain. Lastly there is the growing social dislocation: the share of young families privately renting has increased from just 9% in the late 1980s to 34%. Land can bring political influence, power, wealth and pleasure. But these things ought to be widely shared, whether land is built upon or not. It ought to be there for the common good: to be run across or gazed over or protested on.

Ownership of land matters, and it ought not to be solely for the market to decide who is included or excluded from it.’

* Guardian Editorial, ‘The Guardian view on the biggest privatisation: the land beneath our feet’  was first published in the Guardian on Tuesday 5 March 2019.

See also:

Hands off #OurLand: gifting green space to QPR highlights wider threat to cities

The biggest privatisation you’ve never heard of: land

If this public land sell-off continues, there could be none left by 2050

The Must Read Book

By Brett Christophers

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain

Photo:Verso Books

'Much has been written about Britain's trailblazing post-1970s privatization program, but the biggest privatization of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatization of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.'

Buy this book

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