'The Edge': Totalitarian Psychology’

The early totalitarian experience was something of an unexpected outcome of deeply traumatising events.  Grief and loss, fear and despair, rage and hate, violence and brutality, insecurity and destabilisation and a blind desperate need to hope, were the stock-in-trade for Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler and Mao.  They themselves were also the creatures of this highly explosive cocktail.  Thus the only kind of social and productive mobilisation that they were able to achieve was ineluctably tied to these reckless emotions and deeply negative experiences. They all eventually completely succumbed to them.

Aside from massive amounts of propaganda and a full on culture of marketed enthusiasm and feel good pleasures, what was needed to capture the full productive potential of totalitarian systems without their feral downsides, was a ‘gelded’ version of them.  Grief and loss were replaced with envy and jealousy; fear and despair with frustration and disappointment; rage and hate with discontent and greed; violence and brutality with competitive aggression and jostling; hope with expectation and sense of entitlement; traumatic social and civil insecurity and destabilisation with a more subtle but intensively massaged marketed pressure and an existential desecuritisation through social asset removal that inhibited full character construction and maturity.

‘Harmlessly’ mild negative emotions, individual insecurity and underdevelopment, and a self-winding sense of entitlement still provided powerful leverage for totalitarian control.

Unfortunately, the one thing that all totalitarian systems have in common is an inability to know when to stop.  No goal or objective is ever enough.  No pace is so great and no change pressure so demanding it cannot be ratcheted up just one more notch.  Thus, over time, the mildly negative behavioural stimulants start to wipe out the virtues that were once their dialectical partners. 

Even mild, but constant insecurity eventually starts to acid burn the software that keeps people sufficiently psychologically together and centred to be basically functional, and not a risk to themselves and others. In the end, the culture of rights and entitlements becomes monstrously inflated to bursting point.  It may have been more gradualist and toned down for a while, but the modern modified totalitarian suite is beginning to show the signs of stress, trauma and extremism that were symptomatic of its traditional forebears.

All versions of totalitarianism are underpinned by imbalances caused by overwhelming pressures from the formation of increasingly massive, disruptive and unstable industrial operations.  They tap into the increasingly stressful levels of energy required to maintain an ever more precarious equilibrium.  Individuals find themselves spending more time at the edge of themselves, just to keep up with and compensating for the ever increasing pace, perturbation and irrational demands of their world.

Stress can be a stimulating and empowering productivity tool up to a point, for a while.  The release of powerful cortisol and adrenaline hormones moves the whole body onto a higher level of alertness and energetic capability.  Too much for too long however, starts causing damage at virtually any site in the body, depending on the nature, location and extent of the pressures, on the relative strength and resilience of existing hardware (bio-mechanical) and software (brain programming) and the nature of an individual’s lifestyle propensities. 

Discomfort, pain, tissue damage, depression, immune suppression, eating disorders, over-medication, alcohol and other psychotropic drug abuse, premature ageing, behavioural disturbance and negative lifestyle outcomes variously co-ordinate themselves to progressively disable the victim.  On the way down however, totalitarian medicine (keeping you alive and productive in poorer health for longer) and totalitarian management (ever tightening administrative efficiency in the control of productive variables) are able to contain and utilise this negative energy for the on balance (there are downsides) super productive use of industrial power. 

An extreme example of this was the way the Ceaucescu regime in Romania used to recruit its future security police, by getting them out of orphanages where they had been systematically denied any emotional feedback and intimacy since near birth.  In return for leading very privileged lives, these very damaged people almost uniformly did an excellent job.  Possibly they could be a bit of a problem in their after hours roles, but they were so rigidly disciplined they could be tolerably dysfunctional as human beings.

Systematic personality desecuritising, underconstruction and overstress has the same kind of effect; of producing people who cannot relate to others properly; who are emotionally remote and detached from the consequences of their actions; who can only co-operate with others along a very narrow range of focus; and whose aggressive-defensive behaviour is as useful (and disruptive) for internal in-fighting as it is for destroying external threats and conquering territory. Corporate management systems are full of such mildly damaged goods.


The new gladiators, the professional sports heroes of the modern age, capture the essence of the character who is pushing all the parameters to the edge of the possible.  They share the same totalitarian and abnormally lopsided psychological profile of the Spartan soldier.  They have to be completely single-minded, for physical and mental training is all there is.  Maturity is limited to growth in their sports role.  They do not have and cannot afford to have the emotional breadth, energy or time to juggle extra curricula variables.  Their trainers are the more ruthless kind of parent surrogates who apply remorseless pressure, administer the latest technique and knowledge, and take care of all the management variables.

In totalitarian sport, cash flows take precedence over biological flows because the financial investments, rewards and performance criteria are so overwhelming. Thus the gladiators routinely ignore pain, push their bodies past the tolerable limits and take risks with themselves that prematurely uses up the resilience of their youth and endangers their long-term health. They clash without flinch, hesitation or thought for their safety.  They bear injury and surgical scars as a badge of their trade.  They carry in their wake a raft of medical and paramedical maintenance and repair teams who keep them going through extra seasons when they should be considering retirement.  When they do, it all catches up with them and they suffer under increasingly intensive medical care for the rest of their lives.  The post-steroidal miseries of former East German athletes are just the most extreme end of the normal distribution of professional sport post-retirement health outcomes.

Shane Warne, one of the most fiercesome cricket spin bowlers and greatest amphitheatre survivors of all time, was at his prime and on a good day, almost unplayable.  If you watched his action closely, you would notice that the last flick of his bowling action had almost the same concentration of energy as a martial arts blow.  The transfers of energy and leverage coming up from his shoulder through to his fingers in the last hundredths of a second of his delivery were enormous and he would do this maybe one to two hundred times a day in matches and practice.  To avoid an eventual shoulder reconstruction and having to take ‘illegal’ drugs that would speed and maintain ‘recovery’, he needed to be used sparingly.  He needed to play for just one team and have a season off each year, particularly as he got older.  To avoid permanent muscle injury and osteo-arthritis, retirement should possibly have been no later than his mid twenties to thirty.

‘Unfortunately’ for Warne, the media companies, the advertisers, the sponsors, the game organisers, the teams and the fans couldn’t get enough of him.  When that interest was quantified in dollars, there was a tsunami of pressure to burn him out.  Knowing that his income would drop calamitously once his career was over, he joined the rush as best and for as long as he could.

His brilliance as a sportsman was also matched by his immaturity as a character.  However, his adolescent sense of fun and lack of responsible judgement was only a more extreme end of the jockstrap culture.  It is full of emotional children armed with precocious and narrow skills who are masquerading in often (but not always and certainly not Warne’s) fabulous adult bodies.  It was just that Warne couldn’t do even the minimum to keep that side of himself out of the piranha feeding frenzy that is the fish bowl hall of fame.

Warne was almost as useful to the regime as a ‘bad boy’ as a hero.  The drugs he probably took to slow down his decline and accommodate the totalitarian demands on him became a convenient basis to put him on trial for counter-revolutionary crimes.  The regime could use him as a whipping boy for the grotesque excesses of their own system; its absurd and irrational expectations, its remorseless pressure and its need to keep feeding the monster new meat to replace the now stale and prematurely worn out.  The wretched boy didn’t stand a prayer anymore than did the victims of the nineteen thirties purges in the Soviet Union. 

Nobody dared question the interrogators.  Everyone involved had far too big a stake in the sports industry to question anything below a certain level.  Censorship in a free society is almost never imposed from above.  It is a critical floor beneath which you do not dig, unless you wish to risk being marginalised out of the system.  Nobody suppresses systemic critics.  Only their credibility and employability are affected.  Nobody is interested in hearing that modern sport is just another over-hyped, overblown and over funded marketing opportunity for sponsors to slake their hunger on.  Warne, at this point in his career, was but a slivered morsel stuck between their teeth.

After his Siberian Exile, he has continued to be a very successful post-shoulder reconstruction sportsman into his mid thirties, which is a testament to not only his resilience, but how good his medical support team and coaches are.  However, the question is not how long can he be made to last, but how much of his health will be left in the end?  As in Roman times, there were a very few successful gladiators who survived the arena reasonably intact to become trainers and eventually win their freedom and a well earned retirement.  The question then as it is now, is what of the thousands who did not make it, or those who carried too many wounds to enjoy what was left of their lives?


I once knew a triathelete who used to valet park cars at a local casino to make enough money to keep him while he trained.  His problem was that he had to eat every two to three hours and the work system could not always accommodate him in time.  He had so little body fat that any break from eating longer than that would cause him to have a hypoglycaemic crash.  At the age of twenty he already carried injuries and had been warned repeatedly against over-training.  His performance was just outside the sponsored top elite level and to get through that threshold was taxing him to the utmost degree of his endurance.  The breakdown of his health was a constant shadow over him.  I never did find out if he ever made it.


The Spartans used to organise flogging competitions as sport. It was quite often the case that the winner died, heroically of course; no more heroically than the bicyclist in the 2003 Tour de France who rode for much of the race with a broken collarbone.  Anyone who has ever pushed him or herself at all hard on a bike, particularly up a hill, knows how much energy is transferred through the collar bone.  The man had to have his teeth recapped because the pain he endured caused him to grind them down in the course of the race.  Ordinary teeth grinders take decades to achieve this.  He would have completely blown away the competition in any flogging enduro!  This isn’t just totalitarian behaviour.  It’s right on the edge of the insane.

Sometimes, during a battle, soldiers will continue to perform their duties despite quite severe wounds.  This makes some sort of sense if their own and other lives depend on their continued functioning.  To import those values merely to win a sporting title implies a loss of perspective on what is real and matters.  The only perspective that can make any sense of such radical behaviour in ‘peacetime’ is if it is attached to a Neo-Stakhanovite agenda. (Stakhanov was a worker super hero whose feats of labour were used by the Soviet regime to up productivity outcomes.)  It imports heroic battlefield psychology onto the sports field to model all out production warfare behaviour in the workplace and shopping mall.

The Spartans organised their flogging competitions to practice their soldiers in being indifferent to pain and wounds in battle so that they would continue to fight on regardless.  In part, that is what made them such formidable troops.  The sponsors of the modern gladiators, besides wanting to identify their products and services with success and achievement, use gladiators as exemplars of the corporate paradigm; i.e., the dedication, discipline, focus and determination to win at any price, no matter what it takes.  Both the Spartan soldier and the corporate apparatchik were and are equally dangerous fanatics sporting equally pathological values; competitive aggression that is so extreme it must abuse and destroy its own instruments to gain and keep the winning edge.

In the Post-Modern era, as the capital available for non-essential industries declines, this totalitarian form of ‘sport’ will start to disappear.  The record books that they will leave behind will never be replicated again. Sport will return to what it used to be; an occasional after work recreational pastime to promote broad public health and fitness, social participation and community enjoyment.


The effect on an entire society that is pushing the edges of the possible in order to get a competitive edge at the cutting edge is to force everyone inside it to push themselves to their own edges.  The evacuation of the psychological centre gives everyone a common consciousness.  They are all ‘edgy’.  However, the experienced effects can be very different.

The industrial driver percentile is advantaged, challenged and energised.  They are the aggressively competitive, smart, tough, sometimes unscrupulous, hyper-active stress junkies, for whom the winning edge is survival.  There is always someone just like them, just behind, who badly wants to edge them out.  They love risk and will go to the edge to sharpen and cut it.  Even if hubris takes them over it, they are unafraid, for they are resilient, flexible and can use the cliff and others on it, to break their fall.  They will be back, for they love the edge too much to stay away for long.

The next down percentile doggedly struggles on the edge, which is always narrow, slippery and steep.  The winning edge above them is elusive, but close.  To meet the challenge is an exhausting uncertain and precariously stressful balance, between progress and setbacks, worry and hope, making it or falling.  They risk out of necessity rather than the challenge.  They live a tough and disciplined life against the odds.

The next down percentile is grimly just hanging on or gradually losing its grip of the edge.  Fear and despair make them clutch desperately, as long as their strength holds out.  They know that if or when they fall, it will be a hard landing, for they likely will try to avoid taking others down with them.  They know they will not return from the valley of the shadow of marginalisation; the place of the fallen.  For the few, it is but a temporary purgatory.  For most, it is the damnation of disempowerment; a place haunted by broken dreams, lost opportunities and self loathing.

The long-term bottom feeders on the edge no longer have or never had any dreams, power or self-respect to lose.  These are the permanent edge dwellers in the existential garbage dumps of thwarted, underdeveloped, trashed, broken and picaresque characters.  This is the place of the lumpen proletariat, of psychological inconsequentials, of the semi-criminalised underclass.  All they are able to share is their alienation, rancour, misery and destructiveness.  It is dark and foul there to the uninitiated, but the inhabitants hardly notice, judge or care.  These human waste dumps grow and threaten to overflow, just like their third world urban counterparts and their poisonous legacy threatens the very groundwater of our being.
   
We, the people of the edge, can hardly any longer comprehend what it is like to be centred, balanced, stable, peaceful, reflective, unthreatened and able to recognise, respect and love the intangible and uncommodifiable qualities in ourselves, others and the world around us.


Fred Hogan was born with a lot of nerve, a bloodhound nose for an opportunity and unerring instincts about how to mobilise others to help him get to it.  Even when he was a quite young, he was always trying to cut deals, take short cuts, bend the truth, bluff his way out of trouble, deflect blame for problems away from himself, pin point leveragable weakness in others, capitalise on an advantage and take undue credit for successes.

He raised self-promotion into an art form.  He was smart and impatient of petty restrictions and moral nostrums. His precept was, ‘always stay inside the elastically permissive boundaries of the arguable and the deniable.’  At school, he became expert at staying just out of the reach of the hand of authority.  He was also a natural leader, with the ability to draw people to himself, involve them in his enterprises and keep their loyalty if he needed them.

He was very focused on doing well for himself and was always, even in his dreams, scheming and plotting new ventures.  He never had much time for study because others could do that for him.  Although somewhat ugly, he was never without an attractive woman on his arm.  They found him irresistible.  They loved his careless generosity, confident swagger, quick wit and visceral charm.

His larger than life chutzpah and sharp mind made him a formidable businessman; never more so than when the chips were down.  On one occasion, when almost at the point of bankruptcy, he challenged a supplier to accept a cheque (which he knew he couldn’t cover) for the full amount demanded, on the understanding that if the supplier took it, it would be the last time they ever did business together.  The supplier buckled.  Fortunately, the next day the market turned in his favour.  He survived to fight another day.

Freddy was a great ally if one knew exactly where the common interest converged and diverged.  He always did. At the divergence point, he became as sly and cunning at appropriating the common profit as he was at sloughing off the common loss.  However, within the zone of interest convergence, he would protect your back as if it were his own.  You could rely on it.  He would facilitate the path of partners, but even the closest of them would need to be vigilant if they depended on him as a supplier or distributor. 

Notwithstanding his sharpness as a businessman, he was ever a sucker for a salesman with a good line and a nifty gadget.  Often, he loved a good sales patter to the point that he would buy something he didn’t really want just for the pleasure of hearing it through to the close.  Sales talk was his language and he revelled in its finer nuances.

His ego was in constant need of enhancement and replenishment.  He liked to impress and more, he liked to be liked. The trouble was that while he could be abundantly munificent, he was egoistically insensitive and thus likeable only in small doses.  Rather tiresomely, he couldn’t resist exaggeration in the pursuit of charisma.  He was expert in making a slight knowledge go a long way, co-opting other peoples ideas as his own, or repeating them back to the originators as if this represented a process of co-thinking. At his table you would have to shout to make yourself heard because conversational barging was always the order of the day.

He liked to collect and patronise art and artists.  They didn’t mind eating the gourmet food and drinking the collectable wine he wasted on them. Freddy didn’t have friends so much as hangers on, some of whom had real talent that needed support, but mostly, they were just agreeable, entertaining or ‘interesting’.

Freddy’s fortunes varied, for his self-confidence and appetite for risk were great.  However, while in the course of his life he did lose several fortunes, he always came back to make even more.  His motto in these matters was, ‘everyone has to share my lot’.  Creditors always shared his misfortunes to the fullest extent possible, enduring long delays for payment, negotiating debt discounts for immediate satisfaction and on the one occasion he did go bankrupt, getting lost in a maze of holding companies, Netherlands Antilles bank accounts and family/friend asset warehouses.  On the other side, he had a small core of extremely loyal employees who he always managed to look after, especially in good times and to a lesser but adequate extent in bad.

He died quite young from diabetes and heart disease.  He was too much of a lush to ever restrain his appetites and his waistline. At his passing, he left behind several ex wives, a long suffering mistress, a bevy of casuals, a fortune for his children to fritter away and a large group of orphaned dependants and hangers on who were now too old to find a new patron.


Earnest and Dullina had always dreamt of owning their own business.  They devoured success books and became serious seminar junkies.  At last they had saved enough equity capital, come up with a good business idea, done their research, designed an excellent business plan and had borrowed prudently.  The hours of working directly in the business were long, as were the hours of working on it, to ensure that everything worked smoothly and as close as possible to plan.

Dullina, who was the main driving force of the business, was indefatigable in her grasp of the innumerable details that make a business work.  Earnest was good with the customers and motivated their employees with his enthusiasm and good humor.  And the business plan with which they started the business, carried them through very nicely for the first couple of years, but they didn't revisit it often enough for it to remain a useful living instrument for the longer term.

The competition was tough and getting tougher, as others started to capitalise on their trail blazing success.  This forced them to continually rework their business mix, reduce costs, revamp displays, invest in new capital equipment and borrow more heavily than they would have liked.  While they did their best to give their children, each other and themselves some quality time, it was not enough, but they persuaded themselves that once they had got the business bedded down, they would have more time.

At one Christmas family get together at around this period, the subject of their business was brought up by Dully's cousin, Fred, who was something of a wheeler and dealer in the city.  Amongst other things, he had a very sharp sense of business timing, as to when to get in and when to get out.

It wasn't hard to get Earnest to talk about 'his baby', despite Dully's efforts to shut him up.  Ernest had had a few and within five minutes, Fred had easily enough information to know for certain, that it wasn't so much a bundle of joy, as a temple of doom.  He tried to say something tactful to this effect, but Dully cut him off with a look that said, "none of your business".  He shrugged and turned his attention to Earnest's gorgeous younger sister.

It was their baby.  They had put so much of themselves into it.  It was doing well enough and providing the family with the sort of standard of living that they felt very comfortable with.  Besides, what would they do if they sold it?  What would they live on?  It took them two years of painstaking research, finding premises, getting the finance and all the rest of it for this one.  Why would you do that all over again?

The arrival in their market segment of a large business competitor meant even greater pressure.  They responded with investment in much more substantial advertising and signage and turning the business into a 24/7 facility.  The problem they could not overcome was the big competitor’s volume/price advantage and capacity to loss lead.

Although they had substantially upped their service standards, price was often a larger customer consideration and the service premium and other extra inputs remorselessly pressured the profit line.  The children saw even less of their parents, until an amphetamine problem with their eldest forced Dully to take time out, leaving Earnest to cope in the business increasingly on his own.  He started to drink and smoke too much.

Without Dully's constant steadying hand and administrative input, the quality and cost control, the eagle eye that would stop a pilferer even thinking about it, the follow up with suppliers and customers and checking the journal reconcilliations everyday, so that inconsistencies, ommissions and mistakes could be spotted and rectified; all this degraded. And she got so frustrated and angry with Earnest when she did check.  There would be the inevitable row followed by long frosty domestic silences.

Earnest and Dullina’s business started losing money. His health began to deteriorate, as did her sense of humor.  Within two years it had become unviable and unsaleable.  He developed a heart muurmur.  She developed an asp's tongue.  Eventually they were forced to close it down, owing large sums.  The pressure of the failure gradually made their marriage insolvent too.  They stayed together to repay the debts and see the children through.  When these accounts were settled, they too parted company, in bitterness and regret.


Bob Simmonds, his wife Jenny and their two young children Wayne and Janine came to South Australia from England in 1963.  Bob started work on the assembly line of the Elizabeth GM-Holden car plant in South Australia.  He was conscientious and hard working and soon came to the notice of the floor supervisors.  He steadily worked his way up over the next twenty years to become one of the plant’s senior line managers.  Jenny remained at home, raising the family increasingly on her own as her husband’s responsibilities increased.

Unfortunately, as the ‘70s progressed, the plant started to age and Japanese competition made steady inroads into the company’s market share. It started to cut costs and cut back on labour.  Bob was made redundant in 1983, at the age of fifty.  All the national carmakers were having the same problem, so getting a similar position in another plant was out of the question and besides, he was now considered too ‘old’ to be taken on as a new worker.  He drove a taxi for the next fifteen years and Jenny saw even less of him.

Quite a number of the parents whose children were at the local High School had suffered Bob’s fate some years earlier than him and had become long term unemployed.  Over time, this caused ‘problems’ at home and their children started to become ‘at risk’.  Unfortunately, Wayne fell in with this crowd.  At the critical point when he started to get himself into trouble with the school and police authorities and needed the firm hand of his father because his mum couldn’t control him anymore, his father was on twelve hour shifts, not there when she needed him, and too tired to be much use when he got home.

When Wayne eventually found his way into a youth training centre, he was lucky enough to meet a chaplain who took enough interest in him to gain his trust.  Under his mentorship, Wayne started to study and when he got out, was helped into a fitting and turning apprenticeship.  He really loved the work, but the forces that had driven his father out of the manufacturing industry caught up with him almost immediately.  Two employers went down underneath him while he was still doing his apprenticeship.  With the support of his chaplain friend and some government training assistance he was able to get his trade papers, but employment was patchy and insecure.

Wayne didn’t marry, but in his middle twenties had a daughter by a sixteen-year-old girl he had met at a party. Eighteen months later they had a second one.  The relationship didn’t last long.  His bouts of unemployment, increasing drinking and eventual violence became intolerable and she moved out into a refuge and eventually into a public housing complex.

Janine on the other hand was more academically inclined and eventually found her way to university and a teaching career.  She was a dedicated, conscientious and competent teacher who won the respect of both colleagues and her students.  However, this standard cost her very dear in terms of time, personal focus and stress.

She found it very difficult to pace herself in a way that she could sustain in the long run.  Schools were going through a lot of ongoing curriculum change.  There was enormous academic competitive pressure at the senior levels and a lot of uncertainty about how to manage ‘problem’ children in the middle school.  Devolution of central bureaucratic control of government schools, increasing interactivity with surrounding communities and increasing committee work, documentation compliance and reporting, expanded and intensified her workload.  Since she was keen to gain seniority, she had to commit herself to ongoing post-graduate professional development, in her own time and at her own cost.

By the time Janine was thirty-something she started to hit the career versus reproductivity crunch.  Her social life had taken bad last in her priorities for years and it seemed that all the men who were any good at all had been ‘taken’.  Casual sex did nothing for her at all.  On the other hand, she was now a more senior teacher with middle management as well as onerous upper school teaching responsibilities.  They soaked up what little personal time she had ever had.

But the worst thing was the stress and exhaustion.  Even though she was very disciplined about staying fit and eating properly, she always felt tired, her skin was coarsening, she was getting severe flu every winter, her blood pressure was a bit high, she would suffer regularly from indigestion and her back kept her chiropractor in business.

By the late 1990s, her father was dead.  She was helping to pay for the nursing home that looked after her mother.  Her brother was an alcoholic who was forever ‘borrowing’ off her.

She had also become an expert in the promotion game, because it was the only way she could manoeuvre herself into a position that would enable her to delegate enough workload to survive.  She was a deputy-principal, heading for the senior bureaucracy, where it was possible to work smarter instead of harder.

Even her emotional life picked up when she found a decent divorcee who had been superannuated out of teaching and his marriage because of the stress.  He cooked and kept the home fires burning.  There were no children of course.  She had aged prematurely, become peri-menapausal and was too set in her career path and ‘little ways’ to accommodate that kind of change.

However, her two nieces, Wayne’s children, all too tragically impinged on her middle age.  Their mother took up with a younger man who thought it might be nice to have the thirteen and fifteen year old girls as well as their mother.  She turned a blind eye.  When their horrified Aunt accidentally heard the girls talking about it and their mother’s complicity, she reported the matter to the police.  As the official investigations proceeded, the mother denied all knowledge, ditched her partner but lost the custody of her children.

Janine tried to take them on, but the eldest girl raged against her aunt for ‘interfering’, refused to co-operate or listen to reason, secretly took up with the ‘step-father’, who was now a heroine addict, as soon as she could, and moved in with him the day she turned eighteen.  The younger girl, who had already shown signs of being emotionally disturbed, spun out, became unmanageable and a serial runaway, acquired her sister's new drug habit, became homeless and was found hanging under a railway bridge two years later.

Their aunt was forever left with the unpleasant and guilty sense that instead of minimising harm, she had only managed to exacerbate and accelerate it.  This contributed to an increasing reluctance to take tough decisions, which meant that she became adept at avoiding or glossing over them.  This proclivity smoothed her promotion path no end, not right to the top of her profession, but near it.


Not everyone is quite so caught in the thrall of it all and can still maintain some distance from the edge.  My friend John grew up and started work during the early 1940s as an adolescent farm labourer in the Cotswolds; a rural English region which until the end of the 1940s, was operating much as it had done since the agricultural enclosure movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  John started work on farms still using horses for transport and ploughing, and using organic compost for fertiliser.

John, who came out from Britain on the same migrant ship as my family, worked for my parents as their gardener for twenty-eight years, coming every Friday and sometimes on Saturdays as well.  Although he had not had much formal education, he was a well spoken and civil man.  I never heard him swear or say ill of anyone.  He always retained a cheerful demeanour, an enthusiastically boyish sense of humour and an easy and infectious laughter. His unaffected warmth drew me to him. 

I always looked forward to our days together. We would go out onto the family’s ten acre property on the Yarra river like a couple of adventurers, to wrestle with blackberries and hawthorn, build or repair fences, clean the grease trap, mow paddocks, construct garden beds, retaining walls and steps, dig or clear drains, paint the house, construct sheds and cut and collect firewood.

Our favourite thing was blowing up spray cans in the incinerator, which we did religiously, first thing after he arrived at the house.  We would then enthusiastically work together, enjoying our camaraderie and productiveness.  He taught me to love physical labour.  During breaks we would sit under the vine covered veranda next to the kitchen and chatter happily about our labours.  At the end of the day I was always sorry to see him go.

John’s tastes and pleasures were simple, easily met and made him happy.  His first home in Australia started life as a tin shed.  Through his labours, it grew serendipitously down the slope it was built on, into the cosiest and sweetest above ground dwelling outside Hobbiton-Under-Hill.  For the visitor, besides the enjoyment of his and his wife Rosalie’s company and the invitingness of their home, there was John’s fresh grown vegetables and brewed beer, Rosalie’s blackberry wine, and his unalloyed glee at seeing to it that one just couldn’t fit in another delicious morsel of Rosalie’s cooking.  One left the house at the end of the visit weighed down with goodwill, good food and drink and their infectious happiness.

Some people took John’s simplicity, transparency, and lack of educational or social standing to mean that he was simple.  Some of his funniest stories however were about human foibles.  He told them altogether without the spite or malice that might have won him some cheap laughs.  The humour was in its degree of penetration into the sub-texts of human behaviour and motive.  He was not a comedian in any sense, but he had that same astute understanding of what makes people tick.   

Although there is over twenty years difference in our ages, much water under the bridge since that halcyon time together and considerable geographic distances between us, the spark of that friendship has never been lost. 

I feel thoroughly centred and humbly unaffected people like John are a rarity in any age, but particularly in this one.  It is not just that he and I have had a particular history.  In his own very small way he is an irreplaceable human treasure.  He represents the best in human nature and brings it out in others.


For a long time, as part of its contribution to the Cold War propaganda effort, ‘The Readers’ Digest’ ran a series of personal profile sketches called ‘My Most Unforgettable Character’.  They were people that contributors had known who represented the most solid, resourceful, resilient and endearing qualities of people who live in a free, but not always easy democratic society.  These traditional archetypes were somewhat similar to the rustic citizen soldiers of the Old Republic that populated the imagination of the more urbanised, decadent and sophisticated Romans of the later Imperial period.

These otherwise unsung heroes of often adverse family, community or cultural circumstances overcame the vicissitudes facing them by the exercise of virtue, integrity and fullness of being rather than the disposal of material resources (and often despite or perhaps because of the lack of them).  These psychologically centred, strong and honest characters were being recruited as ideological soldiers to defend the emerging consumer society against its Socialist protagonists, even as they and the historical circumstances that would produce them were being marginalised to the edge by an all consuming passion for goods and services that would in reality make them somewhat out of place and time.

The unforgettables were neither aggressive and carapaced, nor a feckless soft touch.  They were strong enough not to require such external security or fall prey to the need to have their egos fluffed up and propped with the appurtenances of social standing.  Their cultural successors are the opposite.    In the corporate battlefield they slug it out like armoured behemoths to extract the last ounce of profitable value.  As consumers they roll over and pay absurd premiums the more their bellies are tickled.

The unforgettables were chosen as models of moral clarity and scrupulously honourable behaviour that could be trusted against all odds.  They were as rock to the storms of life.  For their successors, these values get in the way of getting on and are therefore seen as naïve and simplistic.  Only the money matters now, even if that means pushing everything else over the edge.


One Melbourne Cup day I drove a wealthy and very attractive Italian couple to the Flemington Racecourse.  They were both extremely well dressed for the occasion.  She was wearing a black lace twin set and hat offset with slashes of red.  Her exquisite high-heeled shoes were red patent leather.  However, when it came time to let them out at the course, it was clear that they were not in a position to leave.  Unfortunately the heel and upper of one of her shoes had come apart.  She had to go back to the hotel to change.

It transpired that she had paid a thousand dollars for them the day before at Versaces’.  On inspection, it was obvious that the construction of the shoe (skimpy quantities of quality leather, but loads of design) was exactly the same as what could be procured from Target at a tiny fraction of the price.  I just couldn’t resist the temptation to point out that if there were a lesson in this, it was that no pair of shoes was worth a thousand dollars.  With a most endearing sense of unconscious honesty she said, “But my dear, what else am I going to spend the money on?


Network marketing is the ultimate sales pitch, for it takes human sociability and turns it directly into money.  Commercial advantage and consideration are piggybacked onto our closest and most trusting relationships.  The old fences between the realm of the private and public self are quietly breached to allow access into the less defended areas.  Commerce and intimacy become hopelessly fudged; the former ineluctably debasing the latter.  The sheepdog learns to take the fox’s cut, all the way down the line of the network. 

The marketing acolytes learn the ideological primacy of commerce and in their zeal to spread the benefits of the system, are sure in the knowledge that they are doing their friend or family customer a big favour.  And of course they are if one sees as a social good the reduction of all relationships to that of producer and consumer.  To those who don’t, it is a fundamental prostitution of intimacy and blight upon social intercourse.


People on the edge have all, in some respects, been weakened by living there.  Even its most advantaged and dynamic players hardly ever manage to do more than skate across the surface of their existence.  Their greatest substance is colour and movement. No matter what they grasp, it is an ephemeral vanity.  No matter how great their resources, they scrape to make existential ends meet.  They are always ‘hungry’ and vulnerable. They have plenty to sell but little to give. Their power is so great there is no cure, for it multiplies uncontrolled in their flesh.  Restlessness and discontent sleep with them like old and trusted lovers.  Their relationships tend to be poorly built, under serviced, quickly worn out and all too easily thrown away.  The closest most of them ever get to happiness is paid for fun and pleasures. Death threatens to annihilate the grandeur of their enormously fat and insecure egos and no amount of money and technology is too great to try and deny it its day.

Tap your toes on the corporate stairs.
Rap your knuckles round the corporate chairs.
Beat the opposition by the foulest means or fair.
Trample over colleagues without conscience or a care.
Be scared – of the corporate rapper.

CHORUS
I’m alright I’m a corporate fella.
I’ve got power and position to fulfilla.
You are here at the bidding and the pleasure
Of – the corporate rapper.

Speed that line to the factory gate.
Up the pace at the warehouse mate.
Cut the numbers at the office interstate.
There’s a penalty for slowness and consignments that are late.
We hate – the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

I am the maker and destroyer of worlds.
I get the choice of the best looking girls.
I live in a house lined with real walnut burl.
And I holiday in chateaux that had once belonged to earls.
Flags unfurl – for the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

Eighty hours a week I toil to make my richly golden crust.
At the end of it I’m knackered.  I don’t feel like even lust.
My wife she took the super, couldn’t see her for the dust.
And the children crushed the grapes of wrath like elephants with musth.
It’s a bust – for the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

Our corporate rapper got slower and fatter,
But the younger dab rappers rapped faster.
And it mattered.  They ratted.  His rap was in tatters.
Demoted, redundant and plastered.
Poor bastard – the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

His once fine house upon the sea has an oil slick on the beach.
His salt affected land on the River Murray bank’s got gum trees white and bleached.
His alpine lodge has got no snow coz the greenhouse upped the heat.
And the acid rain etches duco stains as his Merc drives down the street.
That’s defeat – for the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

He left behind a world less kind where you have to be thin and fat.
His lean and hungry beady-eyed kids grew into fine shithouse rats,
But they became sleek on a diet of pique and a fabulous excess of crap.
Thus their father was found in a crumpled up mound, dead for months in a Gold Coast flat.
And that was that – for the corporate rapper.

CHORUS