Is it just vanity to write a blog? It might be. The way I think about this is to believe that my decision to act is mostly made at a intuitive level and then rationalized afterwards. I think first as the perceptive and instinctive animal that we all are. (But where do these instincts and intuitions come from? Our ‘free will’ is baffling to natural scientists, enshrined in Christianity as a test of our Godliness, a response to a Jungian Archetype, engagement with Quantum Consciousness, the Christmas play thing of marketers and so on). Then I use my reason to challenge that instinctive reaction. Gregory Bateson says that reason’s challenge has to do with our place in the social group – which is about relationships. Hence my musing over vanity, which most of the time is not good for relationships. Bateson also says that humans have big brains mainly to cope with the complexity of relationships. The fact that I am going ahead and writing this blog presumably means that my reason says its OK to go ahead, that it’s mostly not vanity, that the relationships I cherish will at least not be damaged by it. Truth be known, I wouldn’t be doing it at all if it had not been for the other BHMA trustees wanting a blog on the website - to give the BHMA the profile of an active and questioning and up-to-date organisation (which of course it is!). So it’s partly fashion (which makes me squirm) but it’s more about exerting influence – that is, power – which is where I ended up in the last blog before this stream of consciousness took over.

Power! We all have it. Those who weald it know they have it and know how to use it. Those who don’t weald it, don’t know they have it or don’t know how to use it or both. My biggest worry is about the purpose for which power is used. There doesn’t seem to be much connection between the exercise of power and the wisdom to know what needs to be done. It’s impossible to be a GP for so many years and not be tired of political gimmickry. As I said before, there seems be a process of power eroding wisdom, perhaps through separation of the powerful from the powerless. Our society’s answer to this is to rely on the collective good sense of the people through democracy. But Adolf Hitler was voted into power, so that ‘collective good sense’ is not proof against disastrous decisions. Our instincts can be aroused by a despot: instincts need to be checked through reason or we become fools. Maybe it’s Freudian Id coming through, or the ‘trickster’ archetype, or a dark bit of the quantum field etc ..but unreliable whichever the case.

I have somehow got back to the very beginning of this series of blogs: then it was the foolishness of the blame game, now it’s the foolishness of choosing the wrong leader. In both cases the foolishness is ours. Perhaps mine is to write this blog. Foolish it may be, but I don’t think there’s much vanity in it. I think it’s more an exercise in trying to work out what to do about our society. There is a discipline imposed by doing this in public! More next week!