David Bennett

I was in my late teens the first time I went to Amsterdam and walking around the city centre, around the canals and looking at the buildings, I fell in love. Even then I knew that part of the reason was that it was so easy to detect the care that had been put into the buildings, each individual one, when they were built, but also that any craftsman could have built the buildings. And that singled them out from modern buildings where the techniques and the organisation seemed to be, or are, foreign to the common or garden craftsman.

For example, if a hundred men today sat down and put themselves to working out how to build one of those houses in Amsterdam, I’m sure that they could gather the materials, read the references and work out how to build such a house and actually do it. Whereas if a hundred men sat down and looked at some modern buildings, they’d be lost. The techniques are somehow very removed from what an individual can do.

Anyway, that was then and then much later on I heard car mechanics and car owners complaining that the electronics in a modern car were now a black box, meaning that they were unobtainable. The insides of them, the construction of them were unobtainable. If they went wrong you simply sent back to the manufacturer to get another one.

In contrast, in years gone by any man who set his mind to it could learn the techniques of how a car works and they could rebuild a car. And I know the comparison between how to build a house in Amsterdam and how to rebuild a car is an analogy that stretches too thin quickly, but there is something about human size and human methods that unites them.

The fact is, as we all know, that we now live in a world where probably worldwide a few thousand people understand the code that runs basically the whole of our human systems. And outside of them, forget it, nobody knows.

And the point of this is that when we divorce ourselves from a feeling that the construction methods we use are of us, then we lose ownership, authorship and a sense of position relative to those things and we become effectively slaves because we don’t know how to do it.

‘We’ being the great mass of humanity. And I think that’s wrong. I think the great mass of humanity should be able to put together the techniques and the means to build the things with which we occupy our lives.

But that is not the turn we took.

If you could have everything you wanted, where would you stop. You wouldn’t. You would want to taste everything that existence has to offer.

We can’t have everything we want and so we are defined by what we cannot have. We cannot even have independence. At the most obvious observation we are dependent on the air around us.

In The Man Who Could Work Miracles, the Gods gave a middle aged man, a clerk probably, everything he wanted with the exception of the power to force others to love him. If he had settled without that demand he might be here now. But what he could not have caused him to see how hollow it was to have nothing except that which he commanded.

When Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990) said that there was no such thing as society – was she lamenting the fact?

We live in a careless world where many statements are misattributed or were never said in the first place. Still, I was pretty sure she said something on the subject because it was widely reported at the time.

But still, let’s get the quote right.

It’s here in an interview she did in 1987 for the magazine Woman’s Own. You can find it in Margaret Thatcher Foundation: Speeches, Interviews and Other Statements.

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

… [It] is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate … [t]hat was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system … when people come and say: ‘But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!’

It doesn’t sound as though she is lamenting the fact that there is no society. Rather, she seems to be saying that the concept does not exist in reality.

She seems to be saying that a person shouldn’t think he or she can have an easy ride by living off the back of other people. But beyond that there is nothing – just individuals swimming in the stream.

Is that inevitable? Is ‘society’ an illusion?

If everyone cared for everyone else and identified with their wants, that would make a society where everyone felt part of society and not outside society.

You can’t impose that. Well, you can but even empires crumble because they are held together by force rather than by mutual bonds. Society, if it means anything, has to be felt from within and built from within.

This is a foreign concept for us, the idea that we are a society and identify with society. We are used to feeling that we navigate our individual ways through society. For the most part we feel that society is a thing and we are in it, but we didn’t make it and we don’t feel in our bones that we are it and it is us.

Of course if there is pressure from outside then we huddle together and come together, as people who live through wars tell us. But again, being pushed from the outside to come together is not the same as having a communal vision of society that we are it and it is us.

What was it like in the days when generations of people lived in a village and everyone grew up together?

It’s inevitable that in that environment the villagers would get close to one another, sometimes as close as with their own family. Maybe everyone thought of the village as a big extended family.

How did individuals view themselves in the days when communities were close knit and stable for generations?

We cannot know for sure, but within living memory we have seen how individual expression has blossomed and is multiplying faster and faster.

There was a time when change was not expected.

Now we expect change. We expect more and more rapid change.

Change and different varieties of expression are part of us now.

All these varieties of expression fill a need and a desire or they wouldn’t have taken off like they have. So what is it like to be an individual now? With so many billions of people on the planet, it is easy to say that many people are redundant, irrelevant. They are not needed to keep the species going or to develop new ideas or methods or technologies.

Add to that the feeling many people – especially younger people – that things are getting worse, not better. People see that money is getting tighter and the planet is going down the drain. Or at least things are not getting better for them and for most people, even if a few celebrities are raking it in.

So it is getting tougher for people to find meaning in their lives.

How do people find meaning in their lives when they feel irrelevant, inconsequential, alone?

What is the origin of the need to feel relevant, meaningful, and significant?

In Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl examines the perennial question that people ask; what is the meaning of life. He says that the meaning is found in how one responds to life as it comes to meet you.

That may be so, but in a crowded world the bottom can get knocked out of a person’s will to act responsibly when they feel that it simply doesn’t matter because however they react to life, they are redundant in the whole structure.

It gets worse. How does a person even know which of their responses are truly theirs? We are all influenced by our environment, and what is to say that the environment is working for us and not against us?

Frankl also said that a person must find meaning, that it cannot be given (much less imposed) from outside.

But against this is the fear of losing one’s way – of being swept up in a convincing story and then being attached to a cause where attachment fills a need greater than an examination of the truth.

Eric Hoffer writes about this in The True Believer.

Has it always been the same, at least since man became an urban animal?

One thing is certain is that when man lacks the support of the family, the community, the village – he is plagued by uncertainty.

We have to live with uncertainty, and in its nature it is unpalatable. We cannot stop thinking of ourselves and our outcomes, but we can put a cap on it by not dwelling on the self and its needs, but on what is outside, waiting to be fulfilled by us. In the balance between meaninglessness and meaning, thinking of the other counterbalances the weight of a world of meaninglessness and changes the world and us.