Robert Greene: The Art of Seduction

 

Conspiracy theorists destroy a rational society: resist them

John Thornhill in The FT

Buzz Aldrin’s reaction to the conspiracy theorist who told him the moon landings never happened was understandable, if not excusable. The astronaut punched him in the face. 

Few things in life are more tiresome than engaging with cranks who refuse to accept evidence that disproves their conspiratorial beliefs — even if violence is not the recommended response. It might be easier to dismiss such conspiracy theorists as harmless eccentrics. But while that is tempting, it is in many cases wrong. 

As we have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic and in the mob assault on the US Congress last week, conspiracy theories can infect the real world — with lethal effect. Our response to the pandemic will be undermined if the anti-vaxxer movement persuades enough people not to take a vaccine. Democracies will not endure if lots of voters refuse to accept certified election results. We need to rebut unproven conspiracy theories. But how? 

The first thing to acknowledge is that scepticism is a virtue and critical scrutiny is essential. Governments and corporations do conspire to do bad things. The powerful must be effectively held to account. The US-led war against Iraq in 2003, to destroy weapons of mass destruction that never existed, is a prime example.  

The second is to re-emphasise the importance of experts, while accepting there is sometimes a spectrum of expert opinion. Societies have to base decisions on experts’ views in many fields, such as medicine and climate change, otherwise there is no point in having a debate. Dismissing the views of experts, as Michael Gove famously did during the Brexit referendum campaign, is to erode the foundations of a rational society. No sane passenger would board an aeroplane flown by an unqualified pilot.  

In extreme cases, societies may well decide that conspiracy theories are so harmful that they must suppress them. In Germany, for example, Holocaust denial is a crime. Social media platforms that do not delete such content within 24 hours of it being flagged are fined. 

In Sweden, the government is even establishing a national psychological defence agency to combat disinformation. A study published this week by the Oxford Internet Institute found “computational propaganda” is now being spread in 81 countries. 

Viewing conspiracy theories as political propaganda is the most useful way to understand them, according to Quassim Cassam, a philosophy professor at Warwick university who has written a book on the subject. In his view, many conspiracy theories support an implicit or explicit ideological goal: opposition to gun control, anti-Semitism or hostility to the federal government, for example. What matters to the conspiracy theorists is not whether their theories are true, but whether they are seductive. 

So, as with propaganda, conspiracy theories must be as relentlessly opposed as they are propagated. 

That poses a particular problem when someone as powerful as the US president is the one shouting the theories. Amid huge controversy, Twitter and Facebook have suspended Donald Trump’s accounts. But Prof Cassam says: “Trump is a mega disinformation factory. You can de-platform him and address the supply side. But you still need to address the demand side.” 

On that front, schools and universities should do more to help students discriminate fact from fiction. Behavioural scientists say it is more effective to “pre-bunk” a conspiracy theory — by enabling people to dismiss it immediately — than debunk it later. But debunking serves a purpose, too. 

As of 2019, there were 188 fact-checking sites in more than 60 countries. Their ability to inject facts into any debate can help sway those who are curious about conspiracy theories, even if they cannot convince true believers. 

Under intense public pressure, social media platforms are also increasingly filtering out harmful content and nudging users towards credible sources of information, such as medical bodies’ advice on Covid. 

Some activists have even argued for “cognitive infiltration” of extremist groups, suggesting that government agents should intervene in online chat rooms to puncture conspiracy theories. That may work in China but is only likely to backfire in western democracies, igniting an explosion of new conspiracy theories. 

Ultimately, we cannot reason people out of beliefs that they have not reasoned themselves into. But we can, and should, punish those who profit from harmful irrationality. There is a tried-and-tested method of countering politicians who peddle and exploit conspiracy theories: vote them out of office.

Why I have no truck with the art of the pick-up

Pick-up artists exist to help men find sexual partners but their psychosexual babble is riddled with misogyny and bad advice

• 
• • Ally Fogg
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 June 2013 11.09 BST

Studying Austin Powers at work in The Spy Who Shagged Me could do more for your sex life than a pick-up artist, says Ally Fogg. But what has worked for you? Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

I blame Transformers. Many of my fellow heterosexual men appear to approach potential romantic partners as if they were those complicated robotic toys with a special hidden feature. All you need to do is turn her head just enough, raise her eyebrows, utter the secret password and woop woop woop: a siren sounds, her nipples start flashing and she instantly transforms into your own personal sex machine – Bonktamus Prime.

Having met one or two real, actual women in my time, I'm not sure they operate like that. They're rather complicated creatures, with all sorts of varied and conflicting character traits, moods, tastes, preferences, senses of humour and sexualities. It's almost like they are human beings or something.

Nonetheless an astonishingly large industry has built up online over the past decade, promising to help lonely men find the elusive sex button. It's not surprising that self-styled pick-up artists (PUAs) have found a market. They offer perfect psychosexual snake-oil, cashing in on the gullibility of the desperate. Their potions are dressed up in a frilly blanket of pseudoscience, snippets of social and evolutionary psychology, stage mentalism, neurolinguistic programming and self-referential received wisdom. It is mostly marketed through far-fetched personal testimony and miraculous anecdote. Most importantly, there are so many different models offered, so many conflicting "treatments" for low sex appeal, that unsatisfied customers can drift endlessly from one treatment to the next in search of the magic sex switch.

Nonetheless, PUAs have a few PR issues to deal with. Last week a Kickstarter appeal to fund a new PUA book came to widespread attention when it was noticed that the proposed content of the book – the collected wisdom of the Reddit community called r/seduction and in particular the contributions of a certain Mr TofuTofu – were peppered with the most gruesomely misogynistic advice. Alex Hern at the New Statesman outlined the worst of it. Kickstarter has now removed the post and apologised, saying "the project has no place on our site".

The proposed book was horrible, but even the more mundane threads on PUA forums are peppered with nastiness. The phrase "last-minute resistance" is used in discussions of how not to take no for an answer. The PUAs insist that their advice is always framed with discussion of consent and respecting a woman's right to refuse, and it is true. However that often seems to boil down to "back off until she stops screaming and then try again". The PUA typically describes consent as a final inconvenient hurdle rather than the starting blocks of any sexual event.

PUA techniques are certainly manipulative, but that in itself isn't the greatest sin. A lot of the advice is a gender-mirrored reflection of the dating advice columns that have filled women's magazines and self-help books for decades. However there is an important difference. PUAs often advocate intrusive, oppressive and sexually intimidating techniques for approaching women, on the promise that it will work on perhaps one woman in 10. Even if that were true, it would mean that nine out of 10 women are being subjected to approaches they may feel are discomfiting, harassing or downright frightening. Where is the concern about the impacts of this behaviour on the other women? Nowhere.

To be fair, there are PUAs who recognise at least some of these problems, and attempt to incorporate some basic human sensitivity. It should also be noted that there may be constructive sides to the PUA experience. Feminist writer Clarisse Thorn has documented the scene with compassion and sympathy, and notes that the community often acts as a kind of self-help and personal development network for socially awkward, shy and unhappy men – something Neil Strauss, author of The Game and original PUA guru has always advocated.

The social support networks may be a major reason why so many men claim PUA tricks have worked for them – just as many homeopathy patients insist on their own positive experiences. A parable featuring the greatest of all PUAs illustrates this well.

As I'm sure you'll recall from your classics lectures, in The Spy Who Shagged Me, the great philosopher, spy and international man of venery, Austin Powers was cast into sexual inconsequence when the evil Fat Bastard stole his mojo during an encounter with Ivana Humpalot. Ninety minutes and several dance routines later, he learned the valuable lesson that it wasn't his mojo that he was missing, but his confidence.

So my advice, for what it's worth ($49.99 to my Paypal account, as it happens) is to abandon the PUA gurus and study the master Powers at work. Things will soon be utterly shagtastic for you, baby. What advice would you share? Whether you are male or female, what has worked for you, or worked on you? Let's see if the seductive hive mind of Comment is free can put the commercial PUAs out of business once and for all.

'La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life'

Liberté, égalité, flirtation: How I learnt to play France’s national sport of seduction

When Elaine Sciolino arrived in Paris as correspondent for The New York Times, she quickly learnt how to play the French national sport - a subtle game of seduction that shapes everyday life

Saturday, 30 July 2011

The first time my hand was kissed à la française was in the Élysée Palace. The one doing the kissing was the president of France, Jacques Chirac. It was 2002, the Bush administration was moving towards war with Iraq, and I had just become the Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. Chirac was announcing a French-led strategy to avoid war. He welcomed me with a baisemain, a kiss of the hand.
Chirac reached for my right hand and cradled it as if it were a piece of porcelain. He raised it to the level of his chest, bent over to meet it halfway, and inhaled, as if to savour its scent. Lips made contact with skin. It was not an act of passion. Still, it was unsettling. Part of me found it charming and flattering. But in an era when women work so hard to be taken seriously, I also was vaguely uncomfortable that Chirac was adding a personal dimension to a professional encounter. Catherine Colonna, who was Chirac's spokeswoman, told me later that he did not adhere to proper form. "He was a great hand kisser, but I was not satisfied that his baisemains were strictly executed according to the rules..." she said. "The kiss is supposed to hover in the air, never land on the skin." If Chirac knew this, he was not letting it get in the way of a tactic that was working for him.
The power kiss of the president was one of my first lessons in understanding the importance of seduction in France. Over time, I became aware of its force and pervasiveness. I saw it in the disconcertingly intimate eye contact of a diplomat discussing dense policy initiatives; the exaggerated, courtly politeness of my elderly neighbour; the flirtatiousness of a female friend that oozed like honey at dinner parties. Eventually, I learnt to expect it. In English, 'seduce' has a negative and exclusively sexual feel; in French, the meaning is broader. The French use 'seduce' where the British and Americans might use 'charm' or 'engage' or 'entertain'. Seduction in France does not always involve body contact. A grand séducteur is not necessarily a man who seduces others into making love. (Neither is he usually a man in the mould of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, more of whom later on.) He might be gifted at caressing with words, at drawing people close with a look, at forging alliances with flawless logic. The target of seduction – male or female – may experience the process as a shower of charm or a magnetic pull.
 
How to play the game

'Seduction' in France encompasses a grand mosaic of meanings. What is constant is the intent: to attract or influence, to win over, even if just in fun. To play, several weapons need to be mastered. The first is le regard, 'the look', the electric charge between two people when their eyes lock and there is an immediate understanding that a bond has been created. The concept is a classic component of French seduction, rooted in antiquity. I decided to learn more about le regard. I knew in advance I would never learn how to do it properly myself, as I am hopelessly shortsighted, which means that my eyeballs get reduced to the size of peas behind my glasses. But as a journalist, I'm a trained observer. In real life a sexually tinged regard may also be used to disarm. On a visit to Strasbourg in April 2009, Carla Bruni found herself in front of a swarm of photographers calling her name. She decided to give herself to one of them. For five minutes she posed, looking only at him, ignoring all the others. He was gobsmacked. Le regard is not done with an open, wide, American-style grin but mysteriously and deeply, with the eyes. Never with a wink. "French women don't wink," one French woman told me. "It disfigures your face."

Words are the second weapon. Verbal sparring is crucial to French seduction, and conversation is often less a means of giving or receiving information than a languorous mutual caress. When words are used as a tool of sexual seduction, indirection and discretion may work best. The frontal approach can be considered brutal and vulgar. Private coaches can be hired in Paris to teach professional women how to rid their voices of chirpiness and men how to cultivate lower tones.

The kiss, the next natural weapon, is subject to its own rules. The most social kiss is la bise, the kiss on each cheek. I always have considered it a straightforward ritual. But Florence Coupry and Sanae Lemoine, my researchers, ganged up on me and explained how cheek-kissing could come with extraordinary power. "You can give la bise to say 'hi' to people you know, and there would be nothing special about it," said Florence. "But... let's say that one day... I also kiss someone I've been dreaming about... I'm so close to him for a second... and it will be absolutely delicious and maybe troubling. Maybe only I know what's happening... Or maybe he guesses it and then what could happen?" Sanae chimed in: "Sometimes his lips will touch your cheek, or he'll try to come as close as he can to your lips and touch your waist lightly with his hand. La bise allows you to get intimate."

Finally, the deal must be clinched. Christophe, a French man in his mid-twenties who is both clever and handsome, has a strategy. "I always play by the rule of the three Cs – climat, calembour, contact," he confessed. Climat is context. "You want to establish a specific atmosphere, which can be somehow magical," he said. "You can transform a random situation into an atmosphere where you feel you are going to kiss each other." Calembour, which literally means 'pun', comes next. "You need to make her laugh," he said. "But it has to be subtle." The clincher comes with contact. "At the fateful moment, you manage to establish physical contact," he said. "Not a big slap on the back. But... you touch her arm. Or crossing the street, you take her arm. This is a very strong signal. And if she does not reject it, you can almost be sure you can at least kiss her."

It doesn't matter whether the French are better at sex. What matters is that they take so much pleasure in all that surrounds the sex act. They make the before and after, the process and the denouement, seem just as important and thrilling and worthwhile as the climax.
 
Be prepared at all times

It took years before I fully understood French attitudes to public space. I found it both sexist and offensive that strange men felt entitled to comment on what I wore or how I looked. Yet in Paris, women and men are supposed to please each other on the street. You never walk alone but are in a perpetual visual conversation with others, even perfect strangers.

My own style is relaxed, even in the upscale neighbourhood where I used to live. Take the Saturday afternoon I was making cookies with my daughters and ran out of butter. Dusted with flour, still in my jogging clothes from a morning run, I dashed out to the shop. But this was the Rue du Bac, a chic place to see and be seen on Saturdays. I heard my name called and turned to face Gérard Araud, a senior Foreign Ministry official. He was wearing pressed jeans, a soft-as-butter leather jacket, caramel-coloured tie shoes, and an amused look. In his hand was a small shopping bag containing his purchase of the morning. Gérard invited me to take a coffee with him. We sat outdoors at a café on the corner of the Rue de Varenne. I should have known better and invited him into my kitchen. This was one of the premier people-watching intersections in all of Paris. I was inappropriately dressed.

The Swedish ambassador and his wife rode up on their bikes and stopped to say hello. Both were in tailored tweed blazers, slim pants, and expensive loafers. Then Robert M Kimmitt, the American deputy treasury secretary at the time, who happened to be visiting Paris, walked by. He accepted Gérard's invitation to join us. "I see that Paris hasn't done much for your style," Kimmitt joked. "At least I'm wearing black," I replied. When he left, Gérard made what he considered an important point with as much seriousness as if he were delivering a diplomatic démarche to a recalcitrant ally. "The Rue du Bac is not the Upper West Side," he said. "All right, all right," I conceded. I knew the rules: jogging clothes (shoes included) are to be removed as soon as one's exercise is over. Then I got a bit defensive. "This is my neighbourhood," I said. "I belong here. So I can dress however I want!" "You can," he said, with the sangfroid that makes him such a good diplomat. "But you shouldn't."
 
Why scent matters

Modern perfume was invented in France in the 19th century. It belongs to French culture, the same way lingerie and wine do, and I smell it a lot more often in Paris than in New York. Proximity is one factor. Since everyone does a lot more cheek kissing than hand shaking in everyday life, there are opportunities to get close.

The custom is to wear only enough perfume so that it can be detected when one is near enough to kiss. A sophisticated and alluring perfume can play a central role in a seduction campaign. Drawn to the scent, one is drawn to the person. Lured by sensations that cannot be expressed in words, one is tempted to suspend rational thought and follow the lead of emotion. After an interview with Olivier Monteil, the communications head of Hermès perfumes, he kissed me on both cheeks. I asked what he was wearing. "An experiment," he said. "Rose, spicy, peppery. You cannot smell it from afar, only when I kiss you."

Each year the French spend more than $40 per man, woman, and child on fragrances, more than any other people in the world. Americans spend only about $17 and the Japanese, $4. Spaniards and Brazilians consume more perfume than the French, but they spend less money on it. And there is more. The sense of smell itself is more important in France than many other places. As children, the French are taught to identify smells; there is a popular board game called Le Loto des Odeurs (The Lottery of Smells) that asks players to identify 30 smells, including eucalyptus, mushrooms, lily of the valley, hazelnut, grass, biscuits, fennel, strawberries, honeysuckle, and the sea.

I heard my favourite perfume story at the International Perfume Museum in Grasse where a young assistant offered to show me around. I'll call her Pauline. I asked Pauline about the relationship between perfume and seduction. To put it bluntly, she didn't seem to be trying very hard. Her full body was hidden under a loose black-and-white dress that nearly reached the floor. Large glasses sat crooked on her nose; her fringe fell into her eyes; no lipstick or rouge adorned her face. Her black shoes had square toes and clunky heels.

But Pauline and I found a connection, and the conversation turned to her own life. "If you don't seduce in France, you're a nobody," she said. "I'm very shy, and if you're plain or if you're shy... you don't fit the mould. I tell myself that if I stay in a corner, it won't work, but if I'm smiling and really show I want something, then it comes. It's a kind of game." "Do you wear perfume?" I asked. "Of course," she replied. She smiled. "My husband knew I always wanted Chanel No 5, and a few years ago he gave it to me. When I opened it, I asked him, 'Must I do like Marilyn?' Marilyn said that all I wear when I'm in bed is Chanel No 5," she explained. "My husband said he would like that. So I said to myself, 'Let me be quite crazy'. And I took off all my clothes." Suddenly, right before my eyes, Pauline became a sex goddess. I think I was beginning to understand the power of perfume.
 
Seduction and politics

The spring of 2008 was a particularly uneasy moment in France. Nicolas Sarkozy had been president for a year, and a recent poll had determined that the French people considered him the worst president in the history of the Fifth Republic. His failure to deliver quickly on a campaign promise to revitalise the economy was perceived as a betrayal so profound that a phenomenon called 'Sarkophobia' had developed. Around this time I read a new book written by a 34-year-old speechwriter at the Foreign Ministry named Pierre-Louis Colin. In it, he laid out his "high mission": to combat a "righteous" Anglo-Saxon-dominated world. The book was not about France's new projection of power in the world under Sarkozy, but dealt with a subject just as important for France. It was a guide to finding the prettiest women in Paris.

"The greatest marvels of Paris are not in the Louvre," Colin wrote. "They are in the streets and the gardens, in the cafés and in the boutiques. The greatest marvels of Paris are the hundreds of thousands of women whose smiles, whose cleavages, whose legs bring incessant happiness to those who take promenades." The book classified the neighbourhoods of Paris according to their women. Just as every region of France had a gastronomic identity, Colin said, every neighbourhood of Paris had its "feminine specialty". Ménilmontant in the north-east corner was loaded with "perfectly shameless cleavages – radiant breasts often uncluttered by a bra". The area around the Madeleine was the place to find "sublime legs". Colin put women between the ages of 40 and 60 into the "saucy maturity" category.

The book was patently sexist. It offered tips on how to observe au pairs and young mothers without their noticing and advised going out in rainstorms to catch women in wet, clingy clothing. It could never have been published in the United States. But in France it barely raised an eyebrow, and Colin obviously had fun writing it. The mild reaction to a foreign policy official's politically incorrect book tells you something about the country's priorities. The unabashed pursuit of sensual pleasure is integral to French life. Sexual interest and sexual vigour are positive values, especially for men, and flaunting them in a lighthearted way is perfectly acceptable. It's all part of enjoying the seductive game.

The sangfroid about Colin's book made for a striking juxtaposition with the hostility toward France's president. To be sure, the flabby economy was one reason Sarkozy was doing so badly at the time; another was that he hadn't yet mastered the art of political or personal seduction. But he was trying. Sarkozy's second wife, Cécilia, had dumped him after he took office. As president of France, he couldn't bear to be seen as lacking in sex appeal. In the United States, mixing sex and politics is dangerous; in France, this is inevitable.
In the weeks after Cécilia's final departure, Sarkozy had presented himself as lonely and long-suffering, but that had seemed very un-French. Then he had met the super-rich Italian supermodel-turned-pop singer, Carla Bruni, and married her three months later. On the anniversary of his first year in office, Sarkozy and Bruni posed for the cover of Paris Match as if they had been together forever. Sarkozy looked – as he wanted and needed to – both sexy and loved.
 
Anti-seduction

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was long known as a grand seducteur. Hints about his behaviour were the source of rumours for years. In a kind of French parlour game, journalists and authors quoted one another as a way to avoid responsibility for the stories (and lawsuits). Press articles appeared with enough detail and innuendo that any reader could connect the dots and draw conclusions. So many sources told so many stories that at least some of them had to be true, the French said. But the stories also made Strauss-Kahn a living legend, and some people expressed quiet admiration that such a high-profile political figure could find time for such an active social life.

The stories didn't seem to trouble his wife, Anne Sinclair, one of France's most respected TV journalists. Asked in 2006 if she suffered because of her husband's reputation as a seducer she answered, "No, if anything I am quite proud! For a political man, it is important to seduce. As long as I seduce him and he seduces me, that's good enough." Nor did Strauss-Kahn's reputation seem to hurt his political aspirations. He was planning to announce his intention to run for president in next year's election and was ahead of Sarkozy in the polls. Then suddenly, Strauss-Kahn was accused of being a violent criminal. He has been charged with rape of a chambermaid in New York and attempted rape of a writer in Paris.

Certainly, the scandal has nothing to do with seduction à la française. When seduction works, it's magic: it is hidden, mysterious, and oriented toward a glorious, crystallised, ideal image. But it can also entail inefficiency, fragility, ambiguity, and a process that at any time can end badly. It can degrade into the antithesis of seduction, what I call anti-seduction. The DSK scandal has rocked France, a male-dominated country, where women's salaries are 20 per cent less than men's and 18 per cent of the deputies in parliament are women. Suddenly, a serious national conversation has been opened about the abuse of power in France. Some French women have begun to speak out about an atmosphere that condones sexual behaviour that crosses the line and may even be criminal. The scandal has also challenged the assumption that the private lives of the rich, famous and powerful are off-limits to public scrutiny. No matter what the outcome of the two judicial cases against Strauss-Kahn, he has emerged as an anti-seducer.

i had gone off to live in Paris. And it has seduced me. "Every man has two countries, his own and France," says a character in a play by the 19th-century poet and playwright Henri de Bornier. In our years living there, my family and I have tried to make the country our own, even though we know that will never entirely happen. We will never think like the French, never shed our Americanness. Nor do we want to. And like an elusive lover who clings to mystery, France will never completely reveal herself to us. Even now, when I walk around a corner, I anticipate that something pleasurable might happen – just the next act in a process of perpetual seduction. I often find myself swept away without realising how it happened. Not so the French. For them, the daily campaign to win and woo is a familiar game, instinctively played and understood.
 
This is an adapted extract from 'La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life' by Elaine Sciolino (Beautiful Books)
 
France vs Britain: Seduction techniques
 
France

A smile is bestowed as a gift to those carefully chosen
Make-up: either eyes or lips, never both
Scent is subtle, a mysterious invitation
Mealtime is part of the seduction ritual
Secrecy is paramount, even in the media
Le regard, the look with an electric charge
Two to four kisses to greet, depending on social class
 
Britain

Indiscriminate smiling, particularly when intoxicated
Make-up all over the face, plus fake tan
Perfume tends to be overpowering
Dinner on the sofa, plus TV
Kiss and tell
Either blatant ogling or complete avoidance of eye contact
One kiss, then an awkward hover

Transcendental Meditation: Were the hippies right all along?

For years, it has been ridiculed as a 1960s embarrassment. Now Transcendental Meditation is back in a big way. So were those hippies on to something all along?

By Laura Tennant
Sunday, 10 July 2011 The Independent

Remember M-People's 1995 Top 10 hit instructing you to "search for the hero inside yourself"? A decade-and-a-half on, it seems that things have changed – these days, it's not so much a hero as a guru that many of us are hoping to internalise. For strange as it may sound, among those of us who seek to surf the zeitgeist, the most fashionable thinker of 2011 may turn out to be Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement – and the fact that he passed to a better place in 2008 doesn't appear to have discouraged us one bit.
TM, as its followers call it, is rapidly moving from kooky margin to respectable mainstream thanks largely to a burgeoning body of scientific research which indicates that regular meditators can expect to enjoy striking reductions in heart attack, stroke and early mortality (as much as 47 per cent, according to one study). And the apparent benefits don't stop there: according k to a pilot study just published in the US journal Military Medicine, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars showed a 50 per cent reduction in their symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after eight weeks of TM.
Meanwhile, educational establishments which introduce a "quiet time programme" – as did Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco – report drops in fights and suspensions, increased attendance and improvements in exam results. In this country, the Maharishi School in Ormskirk, Lancashire, gets glowing reports from Ofsted and achieves exceptional academic results.
An estimated four million people now practise TM globally – 20 minutes twice daily, as per the Maharishi's prescription – many of them over the course of many decades, and there are some famous, and rather surprising, names on the list. Clint Eastwood, for example, has been doing it for 40 years, a fact he vouchsafed via video link at a fund-raising dinner for the David Lynch Foundation, an organisation set up by the film-maker to teach TM to school children, soldiers suffering post-traumatic stress, the homeless and convicted prisoners. Other celebrity adherents include Paul McCartney, Russell Brand, Martin Scorsese, Ringo Starr, Mary Tyler Moore, Laura Dern and Moby.
TM reaches far into the rational and sceptical world, too; the American philosopher Daniel Dennett does it, as does Dr Jonathan Rowson, head of the Social Brain project at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and a chess grandmaster (more from them later). Now a psychiatrist with 30 years' clinical experience, Dr Norman Rosenthal has written a book, Transcendence: Healing and Transformation through Transcendental Meditation, which gathers all the available evidence for TM and urges healthcare professionals to offer it to patients suffering from mental illnesses ranging from mild depression to bipolar disorder.
While the research on the health benefits of TM is fascinating, there's another, more compelling, reason why meditation is in the air just now. Done consistently, it seems to offer some sort of corrective to modernity, a respite from anxiety and the ability to really, truly relax, without chemical assistance; a break from our constant, restless and often doomed aspirations to be thinner, richer and more popular on Facebook; the welcome discovery that happiness is to be found not in retail therapy, but within.
Those spiritual cravings explain why Rosenthal's book is now riding high at number 14 on America's Publishers Weekly non-fiction list. And according to TM UK's official representative, David Hughes, there's a similar surge of interest on this side of the Atlantic; figures are vague, but he reports that "there's definitely an ongoing increase month by month" to the estimated 200,000 people who have learnt TM in the UK since 1960.
I first began to ponder the notion of meditation while writing a piece on solitude. While aloneness might not be a state that comes naturally to most humans, without it, mental-health experts believe, it is impossible to be creative or even really to know oneself. It was the sheerest coincidence that on the day I contacted TM's UK website they were preparing for Dr Rosenthal's press conference.
My own adventures in TM began soon after – but first, a little history for readers too young to remember TM's 1960s "first wave". Many of those who do recall the arrival of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Britain in 1967 understandably feel that TM has been discredited beyond hope of rehabilitation by years of embarrassing rumours and implausible claims. Long before his death, the Maharishi's leadership of the movement had been associated with an unseemly desire to cash in on his celebrity followers – including, most famously, The Beatles (as well as McCartney, George Harrison continued to meditate every day until he died) – and the accumulation of a substantial personal fortune (in 1998, the movement's property assets were valued at $3.5bn). Sexual impropriety was also alleged; The Beatles were said to have fallen out with the Maharishi at least partly because of his attempted seduction of Mia Farrow, or possibly her sister Prudence, at his ashram in India.
Generations of Oxford undergraduates have joked about nearby Mentmore Towers, the Buckinghamshire mansion where the Maharishi installed 100 young men in 1979 to practise continuous, advanced-level TM (they've since been retired). The inherently comical idea of yogic flying (actually yogic hopping) has always strained credibility, as has the Maharishi's claim that if 1 per cent of the globe's population practised TM, the flow of "good vibrations" would bring about a universal state of "bliss consciousness".
Then there was the Natural Law Party, the "political arm" of the TM movement, extant from 1993 to 1999 and set up, according to David Hughes, to "get the message across" about TM and also, bizarrely, the dangers of GM food. The party was a resounding flop – testament, perhaps, to the British mistrust of mysticism and religiosity in politics.
TM also infuriates many militant atheists in a way that "mindfulness meditation", which draws on the Buddhist tradition, does not. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and the author of books including The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape and a blog, On Spiritual Truths. In a recent piece for The Huffington Post entitled "How to Meditate", he remarks that: "Even an organisation like Transcendental Meditation, which has spent decades self-consciously adapting itself for use by non-Hindus, can't overcome the fact that its students must be given a Sanskrit mantra as the foundation of the practice. Ancient incantations present an impediment to many a discerning mind (as does the fact that TM displays several, odious signs of being a cult)."
Against these objections should be set the fact that people who start meditating tend to keep at it, often for the rest of their lives – a phenomenon suggesting that its benefits, while slow and cumulative, are palpable. The aforementioned Dr Rowson, who was British chess champion from 2004 to 2006, has been practising TM for 14 years. "I'd say that TM is physiologically very powerful, and spiritually a bit shallow," he says. "There are few things better for giving you a feeling of serenity, energy and balance. But I don't think it gives you any particular insight into your own mind."
It seems that scientific research backs his experience. The bestselling Dr Rosenthal came to public prominence through his work on seasonal affective disorder at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland, where he also pioneered the use of light therapy to treat it. His interest in TM was piqued when one of his bipolar patients described how practising TM alongside his regular medication had helped him move from "keeping his head above water" to feeling "really happy 90 per cent of the time".
Dr Rosenthal began to examine the large body of scientific research into the effects of TM on long-term users, and also to collect anecdotal evidence from meditators. His book Transcendence is the result, though as he acknowledges in his introduction, "Some of you may find this preview of the benefits of TM – this seemingly simple technique – exaggerated and hard to believe. I don't blame you." He draws on 340 peer-reviewed research articles to back his argument that TM can not only reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease, but also assist in treating addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, ADHD and depression, not to mention helping high-functioning individuals achieve greater "self-actualisation".
Listening to Rosenthal talk, I was impressed by his medical experience and academic credentials. Yet TM's ability to reduce one's risk of heart disease interested me less than its effects on mental wellbeing and creativity. Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs described "self-actualisation" as the thing humans seek when their six basic needs for food, safety, physical shelter, love, sex and a sense of belonging have been met. Like many other evolved and somewhat spoilt beneficiaries of the affluent West, I too wanted to self-actualise, and I hoped TM could help me do it.
Acquiring the skill isn't difficult, but it does require time and money. Fees are charged on a sliding scale according to income – courses start at £190 for children and rise to £590. Initiates attend four sessions, and are given a Sanskrit mantra, which is repeated soundlessly in one's head while meditating. The objective, according to TM's website, is that "the mind effortlessly transcends mental activity and experiences pure consciousness at the source of thought, while the body experiences a unique state of restfulness".
The first thing I noticed was that repeating the "sound vibration" of my mantra took me to a place which was neither wakefulness, sleeping nor dreaming. Over the course of subsequent sessions I've regularly become detached from my physical self and dipped in and out of this "fourth state" of consciousness. Allowing sometimes painful thoughts and feelings to come to the surface has bought tears to my eyes, but I've also reached important decisions.
A month into my practice, I have not so far experienced "bliss", a condition beyond time and space in which one is not "ebulliently happy", as Rosenthal puts it, but "calm and alert"; a state, he explains, in which one realises that "just to be is a blessing". But I'm prepared to believe the effects are gradual and I'm struck by the fact that I no longer resent the necessary investment of time.
The effectiveness of this daily "yoga for the mind", as the meditator and fashion designer Amy Molyneux calls it, is the reason, I think, that thousands of people can ignore the Maharishi's theory in favour of his practice. But depending on your point of view, TM's spiritual aspects remain problematic. When the Maharishi School was granted "free school" status, for example, allowing it to scrap its annual £7,600 fees and receive Government funding, hackles were raised in more determinedly sceptical quarters.
Should we be concerned that a school infused with the TM philosophy is getting Government funding? To find out whether the organisation merited the accusations of "cultishness" levelled at it, I spoke to Suzanne Newcombe, a research officer for Inform, the charity run by the London School of Economics to provide information about new religious movements or "cults". "We've had a certain number of complaints from members of the public about the fee structure," she told me. "And occasionally relatives may be anxious about people who commit their lives to the movement. But we're not overly concerned about adults making decisions for themselves which don't hurt anyone else."
According to David Hughes, TM is a not-for-profit, charitable and educational foundation which, once it has paid its teachers and covered its costs, ploughs its revenue back into outreach programmes in the developing world. It is certainly not shy about proselytising; but if its impact on public health is as great as Dr Rosenthal believes, one could argue it has a moral responsibility to spread its message. As for me, I'm seriously considering introducing my children to a stress- and anxiety-busting daily ritual that seems to do no harm and may well do a great deal of good.

The Ten Best Seduction Techniques

Sticky Eyes

When you are talking to your quarry, let your eyes stay glued to his or hers a little longer than necessary - even during silences. A gaze that lingers awakens primal, slightly disturbing feelings. It induces the same "fight or flight" chemicals that race through our veins when we feel infatuation. When you must look away, do so reluctantly. Drag your eyes away slowly. This is a particularly good technique for men to use, as women always want to feel that a man is absolutely fascinated by them.

The Visual Voyage

As you and your date are chatting, let your eyes do some traveling - but only on safe ground at first. Take a visual voyage all over his or her face, concentrating on their eyes. If he or she seems to be enjoying your expedition, take small side trips to the neck, shoulders and torso. For girls, take sneak peeks at his body - and when he sees you pretend you are a little embarrassed. This should really get his juices flowing and is a great way to get a friend to think of you sexually. For the man this technique is a little more dangerous, so be wary. If your eyes travel too far south for too long you'll be in trouble.

Expensive Dining

This is good for a gentleman who intends to pick up the bill on the first date. Make sure you take your date to an expensive restaurant with an atmosphere like the one you wish to project - be it elegant, upbeat, cool or arty. Atmosphere is important because she will transfer her feelings about the room to you. It may be superficial, but women tend to judge a man on the first place he takes them.

Dress to Impress

Even when seeking only a casual liaison, do not go out dressed like an unmade bed. Dress as though you were auditioning to be his or her husband or wife. Men must make sure they are coordinated and dress affluently: women love good quality clothes on men. Women need to dress alluringly but not in a cheap way. He is going to mentally undress you anyway, so there is no need for that short skirt. However, you might want to try a slightly more revealing second layer of clothes so that you can, at the right moment, take off that jacket and reveal some wonderful cleavage.

Give First Date Butterflies

When planning your first date, find out what pulls your date's strings, and then plan an arousing, emotional adventure. You don't have to go sky-diving, but a little shared danger is a proven aphrodisiac. A scary movie is an easy way to achieve this - or perhaps ice-skating, where the woman may be nervous and might have to hold on tight. Afterwards, go out for dinner or a drink to discuss your shared experience.

Co-react

To capture your quarry's heart, you need to share his or her convictions and show that you feel them deeply. Watch his or her reactions to outside stimuli, then show the same emotions - shock, disgust, humour, compassion, etc. This is particularly important for men, who are more inclined to misjudge situations. Make sure your reactions suit the mood.

Smile

A simple but crucial technique. A smile is the most effective form of body language and a great way to let somebody know that you are interested in them. As you are looking at or talking to a member of the opposite sex whom you wish to seduce, let a soft smile of acceptance frame your lips. Don't give too quick a smile: just let a slow one float over your face. This will seem much more genuine - while making your romantic intentions obvious.

How do you feel about that?

A good tip for men: pluck up some courage and, whatever your quarry is discussing, simply ask her, "How do you feel about that?" It might seem awkward at first, but woman love to talk about how they feel and will nearly always respond enthusiastically. Women, on the other hand, should wait until a relationship is on stable ground before asking a man much about his feelings - otherwise there is a danger of rocking the boat before it is launched.

Let Your Quarry Pass an 'Audition'

Men should not ask a woman out too soon, lest she think you are interested only in her looks. The ideal time to ask a woman for a date is when she has said something relevant to her personality. For example, if she says something spiritual, say that you'd love to hear more about that, perhaps over dinner. A woman values interest all the more if she feels that you appreciate her inner qualities. Women, meanwhile, can move faster, as men are less afraid of being treated as sex objects.

Have the First Laugh

Another obvious but important technique. Women: make sure you laugh at your quarry's jokes and, when in a group, be the first to laugh. It brings you closer together. Men should try and introduce cute private jokes to create a bond between the two of you. This will help to make you seem like long-time lovers rather than first-date strangers.

'How to Make Anyone Fall in Love With You: 85 Proven Techniques for Success' - £8.99, by Leil Lowndes, is published by Element

Definitions: The Bourgeoisie

 

 

By Gaither Stewart

16 October, 2008
Countercurrents.org

"We are not fighting against men or a kind of politics but against the class which produces those politics and those men."
(from Dirty Hands, a political play by Jean Paul Sartre, first performed in Paris on April 2, 1948.)

 

"It takes a day to make a senator and ten years to make a worker." AND, as Caligula says to the senators: "It is much easier to descend the social ladder than to climb back up." (from the play Caligula by Albert Camus, first performed in Paris in 1945, words I include here just for fun, mockery and a hint of warning.)

 

Rome: It's a capricious irony of history that the word bourgeois, which pinpoints the capitalist class, is perceived by nearly everyone, including the bourgeois themselves, as an epithet and is almost universally rebuffed!

 

Generally we conceive of the bourgeois in reference to their over emphasis on form and formality, in total contrast with the image of the bohemian radical. Bourgeois characteristics include emphasis on tradition, pretentiousness, conventionality, propriety, status obsession, respectability at all costs, an affected manner of speech and an overall comportment befitting such a description. The bourgeois personality is one of seeming rather than being.

 

To most ears both the noun and the adjective bourgeois ring negative and evil. Both upper and lower social classes detest that person and class. Bourgeois bastard! Fucking bourgeois! No wonder few people choose to identify themselves as bourgeois, preferring "middle class" or some such.

 

My family discussion is a good example. For some time my wife and I have benefited from an apartment exchange with a person in a central area of Paris so that in recent years we spend several months a year there. Though I prefer Paris to my home Rome, my individualistic Italian, French-speaking wife doesn't share my enthusiasm. Scornfully, dismissively she charges that Parisians are too bourgeois. Too closed, too clannish. Bonjour, Madame, bonjour Monsieur, au revoir Madame, au revoir Monsieur, all day long. For her Paris is atrocious, people don't meet each other, they're indifferent, uninterested in relations with others, in their work, in their life. I can't pin her down as to what she really means but she stubbornly insists that Parisians are unbearably bourgeois. Clearly the sense in which she uses "bourgeois" is the most common in the world today.

 

In this essay I have in mind the socio-political meaning of bourgeoisie, the morally corrupt class that Marxism equates with the capitalist class. Precisely the corrupt bandit class of the USA to be saved by the great financial bailout of Wall Street. Which shows again that in the eternal class struggle the bourgeoisie is always the evil oppressor. The crucial distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the distinction between evil and good. Yet, the modern age is known as the epoch of the bourgeoisie, that is, of capitalism.

 

That is the great contradiction of our epoch. Since modern revolutions eliminated monarchies and simplified the class struggle, western society has been divided into two hostile camps: the bourgeoisie which runs things, and the proletariat which resists exploitation by it. The ethical pathos of Marxism is the exposure of exploitation of labor as the basis of human society.

One recalls that the bourgeoisie played the major role in the French Revolution. Since then, in the shape and form of the capitalist system, it has maintained the upper hand most everywhere, or sooner or later regained it, as in post-Communist East Europe. It has crushed the other classes and converted everyone else into wage earners. That is its nature.

 

For its prosperity the capitalist bourgeoisie depends on free trade. Except for down moments like today when things go haywire for free market capitalism, especially on deregulated and uncontrolled Wall Street and it turns back to the people to bail it out of the chaos it creates at regular intervals. Its survival depends on unending growth and constantly expanding markets, the continual acceleration and revolutionizing of production, political centralization and today in Europe and the USA on the exportation of jobs to the poor world. Meanwhile bourgeois (bandit) capitalism requires and has achieved the concentration of property and wealth in a few hands. That is its constant goal. It thrives on the incessant creation of new desires—subsequently morphed into needs—throughout the world. In that sense the bourgeoisie is through and through cosmopolitan.

Paradoxically, those primary requisites for the bourgeoisie's existence provoke the resistance of the proletariat. It's a vicious circle. In a great dialectic the survival needs of the bourgeoisie generate the resistance that can ultimately crush it. The resistance that according to Marxist theory will someday crush it. These days, there for everyone to see, for everyone to feel, the spreading sense of unease marking its successive economic-financial crises point to the eventual demise of bourgeois, bandit capitalism.

 

So why has it not already happened, one must wonder? Why hasn't it collapsed long ago? Though the bourgeoisie-capitalist class is small and the proletariat wage earners an overwhelming majority, why don't the exploited classes rebel and rebel, revolt and revolt, again and again? Why not? The reason is clear: the exploited classes are not only victims. They are also accomplices. Half victim, half accomplice. The historical paradox. The ruling class counts on this dichotomy to maintain the system. Divide and rule. Meritocracy. Rewards for obedience. Two cars and bigger houses for staying in line. A system based on money, domination and fear. Religion too, but especially FEAR. Fear of fear. Fear of change. Fear, fear, fear. A fearful people is an obedient people. Today's Americans are a sacrificed generation. Their illusion of true love has faded. Instead there is the feminine side—seduction and sex ever before us, in all its forms. But love is not the question. For love you still need illusion and innocence. And we are a disillusioned generation. All of us. Only fiction remains. And our bitterness, jealousy and fear. That's why you need an absolute, overwhelming desire to fight back. The only alternative is to flee into the mountains or the desert, 20 miles from anyplace. No banks, no commerce, no bureaucratic offices in sight. Or perhaps resort to walking the labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral in search of the final secret, the beautiful butterfly to change things.

 

At the same time there is a glut of everything in the Western world. Yet vampire bourgeois capitalism cannot cut back. Staggering, careening on its crazy course, it goes after more and more growth, to survive. It needs more and more production, more markets, more and cheaper labor, more consumers (while salaries everywhere are lower and lower so that consumption decreases), more power, more of everything, clearly unachievable forever. How fast can a man run, one asked after the new world record 100-meter dash at the Beijing Olympics? 9.5 seconds? Then tomorrow, perhaps 9 seconds. Then 8. But can it go on forever, faster and faster?

 

Bourgeoisie, Borghesia, Burguesia, Bürgerstand. Middle class! The French word bourgeoisie, originally in reference to inhabitants of towns or bourgs, is most expressive of the class's socio-political signification, especially in reference to the upper or merchant class, who are the capitalists. (Also in socio-political language the word bourgeois has pejorative overtones, smacking of undeserved wealth and nouveaux riches tastes.) Then there is their chief political support, the crutch of the bourgeois capitalism: the so-called petite bourgeoisie, the class between the upper bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the shopkeeper class, the urban people, the target of populist leaders since the Roman Empire, the followers of dictators from Mussolini to Hitler, who are the flag-waving super Americans of today.

 

On the other hand, the European bourgeoisie is not to be confused with the American middle class. They are not the same thing. Sociologically, in the pejorative sense my wife means, both Italy and France are largely "bourgeois" North Europe is even more of the petit petit bourgeois category, East Europe and Latin America are by nature proletarian with a thin bourgeois-intellectual class at the top. The European bourgeoisie creates more culture, while in the USA because of social mobility (itself rapidly vanishing) culture and art can come from anywhere.

Since the rebellious years after 1968 fixed class relationships have diminished in Europe too, especially evident in Italy and the France. Europe is again rich. Life style is more bourgeois! Still, within that bourgeoisie are the most educated classes, which in the past produced also the intelligentsia wing and the revolutionary vanguard. Therefore, and in contrast with the USA, from that same European bourgeois class—also marked by set values and tradition—have emerged the movements for drastic social change.

 

Today with the Right winds of neo-liberalism sweeping over Europe, those times seem distant. 1968 belongs to another epoch. Still, the term bourgeoisie as used by the radical Left in Europe and the USA (many or most of whom are bourgeois renegades!) depicts the society the Left opposes. Yet nowhere else were whole peoples more jubilant than Europeans over America's recent fall back on nationalizations of the core of the financial system (which despite stringent efforts the European Union has not yet succeeded in eliminating completely) in an attempt to save temporarily its economic neck and the "American way of life" and reinforce the transformation to Fascism.

 

One doesn't forget easily that the bourgeoisie was guilty of permitting if not creating Fascism. The European and American bourgeoisie propped up Fascism in order to preserve its own social rule. The basis of its rule, private property and the capitalism, was threatened by the proletarian revolution that Western Socialists (largely emerging from the same bourgeoisie), still in the throes of nationalism, were never able to pull off. For the European upper bourgeoisie, Fascism was little more than an annoyance that saved their system. Even World War II was preferable to proletarian revolution. We are witnessing a repetition of that history in the USA today.

 

The close collaboration of American and European capitalism right up until World War II was a confirmation of their secret alliance sans frontières. In the immediate post-war America's renewed alliance with the residue of Nazi Germany against Communist Russia was a resumption of the pre-war Fascist-Capitalist bond against Soviet Russia. In that sense the Fascist-Capitalist blood alliance created by the bourgeoisie of Europe and the USA protected each other against the working class.

 

The bourgeoisie in feudal pre-revolutionary France was a specific class. Much wealthier than the lower classes, it lacked the privileges of the aristocracy against whom it made the French Revolution. It made its revolution in order to rip political power from the hands of the aristocracy and acquire its privileges. It became the new ruling class.

Since then it has incurred the hate and wrath of all other classes. Deregulation is not new. Bourgeois slogans have always been 'no rules, no laws, all power to the middle classes.' Compromise with other powers, yes,—especially with organized religions and various forms of "democracy"—but forever at the expense of the working classes.

 

In the bourgeois world anywhere and under any form of government workingmen are destined to remain forever workingmen.

 

Lest one forget: despite the high-sounding and immortal words, liberté, egalité, fraternité, the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution against royal power and the aristocracy, and executed in the beginning by the "people." The only things lacking to the "freedom" of the bourgeoisie were equal privileges and participation in the government, i.e. political power. It overthrew the king, took power and then did precious little for the sans culottes. The bourgeoisie emerged victorious. In the bourgeois capitalist world the words liberty, equality and brotherhood have remained to this day empty slogans. No more than that.

The principle of private property is a religion that has nothing to do with homeowners. It refers to ownership of the means of production. That is great wealth and the political power to back it up. That religion was the economic basis of the French Revolution. That has never changed. For that same reason, the great Socialist revolution was always just around the corner, a hairsbreadth away. That again is the history of man.

Nonetheless the French Revolution was a great awakening. Despite its bourgeois character and the power it wielded, the communist idea kept coming to the front. According to Peter Kropotkin, in his memorable classic, The Great French Revolution, the word Socialism came into vogue chiefly in order to avoid the term Communism. Kropotkin: "Secret Communist societies became action societies, and were rigorously suppressed by the bourgeoisie." The fearful bourgeoisie first checked the revolutionary impulse in France and soon restored the monarchy to guarantee its survival. The spirit of the French Revolution was nonetheless contagious. Kropotkin closed his major work with immortal praise for it: "The one thing certain is, that whatsoever nation enters on the path of revolution in our own day, it will be heir to all our forefathers have done in France."

 

Soon Marxism came along to pinpoint and define once and for all the bourgeoisie as the exploiting class, the class that obtains its income from capital and commerce. The bourgeoisie is the ruling class because it owns the means of production—land, factories and resources.

 

Moreover it has the means of coercion of the lower classes. By control of police and army it is able to keep in line and exploit the work of wage earners who live only from their labor. Perhaps in no other major country do Marx's theses more concisely describe the societal line-up than in the USA today. Therefore America cannot remain forever immune to the class struggle, quiet today, deathly quiet, mute, unvoiced, but potentially explosive.

 

A graffiti on the walls of the Sèvres-Babylone metro station in Paris noted by French writer Michel Houellebecq—reductive, curious, ambivalent, and even permissive slogan as it is—rings like a warning, the very minimum warning, to the tiny American capitalist class, new born Christian or not: "God wanted inequalities but not injustices."

 

Power in America is aware of the menace and the threat of the extension of the struggle for justice to all social classes, to el pueblo unido. Therefore the system's perfidious use of terrorism and fear, religion, the American way of life and the future of our children to hoodwink the people.

 

One often hears the expression exploitation of labor. What does it mean exactly?

It's basic. The heart of Marxism. Its validity is recognized most everywhere. The capitalist owner of the means of production pays wages and production costs and then sells the goods produced by labor, keeping for himself the difference between costs and sales. Part of his profit is Marx's "surplus value." It's the size of his profit that creates inequalities. The point is the worker creates the wealth of the greedy capitalist, who squeezes the workingman up to the limit, gaining thousands of times more than the worker can earn in a lifetime. That is injustice. The owner, the entrepreneur and his executives (here we mean also the real owners and CEOs of banks and funds, of stock markets, insurance giants, holding companies and the like) gain the maximum profit without actually doing any work. And he has the bourgeois government ready to bail him out when he fucks up, which his greed causes at regular intervals. That too is exploitation of labor. That is injustice.

Karl Marx used the word bourgeois to describe the social class that holds property and capital making possible exploitation. Though he recognized the bourgeoisie's industriousness, he criticized its moral hypocrisy for its exploitation of other men. As time passed he came to use bourgeois to describe not only the class, but also its ideology: class society based on capitalism and labor. A society of the capitalist and the worker.

 

Members of the American middle class are marked by considerable diversity, who however tend to overlap. They prize non-conformity, innovation and independence and tend to comprise also the artistically creative part of the nation. Education is a chief indicator of middle class status. Education is fundamental to prepare members of the class for creative and leadership roles. For that reason, writers, educators, teachers, journalists, artists and the mainline media owners come chiefly from the middle class (es).

 

It is that middle class-bourgeoisie that has written the bulk of modern social and political history. The history most of us know best is their view of history. Now that history must be re-written. Everything must be reviewed. Everything must be revised. All of it—World Wars I and II, the "forgotten" Korean War where it all started, the Cold War, the USSR, Stalin, Iran, Iraq. Everything. Especially 911. GW Bush in power is not the same thing as Reagan who set the scene. But something changed. What has changed? That is also a mystery that must be clarified.

 

One change is that the real American upper middle class is shrinking in size. And from generation to generation it is becoming more elite. Sociologists instruct us that at today's pace another generation will suffice to eliminate the class. The prohibitive costs of higher education today guarantee the manifest elitism in America and the continuity of power in the hands of the smaller and smaller and best educated upper, to a great extent capitalist class, who more and more constitute also the political class, the caste. The American middle class is the most representative of the America the world is familiar with, not very complimentary of that class in view of the widely diffused anti-Americanism in the world. Yet it is threatened with extinction.

That is, eliminated by way of a golpe. A coup d'état. Executed by elite America against America itself.

 

The fervor of bourgeois revolution infected Russia from the early XIX century. Originally Social Democracy developed independently of the working classes in Russia, just as in the West. But as the class struggle intensified and sharpened, Lenin and the revolutionary Socialist intellectuals came to differ from the rest. Lenin preached that the choice came down to one between "bourgeois ideology" and "Socialist ideology". The former pointed toward reform and the creation of capitalism before social revolution. Lenin aimed at revolution, here and now, before the creation and organization of a great working class capable of making the revolution itself.

 

As elsewhere revolutionaries in Russia were powerfully influenced by Marx's comments in his "Critical Notes on the Kind of Prussia and Social Reform" on "the feeble reaction of the German bourgeoisie to socialism" and, on the other hand, "the brilliant talents of the German proletariat for socialism." Marx often compared the impotence of the German bourgeoisie for political revolution, responsible for the political impotence of Germany itself, with the social capacity of the German proletariat.

 

His social analysis of Germany has held good for 150 years! In his words, "it is entirely false that social need produces political understanding." That sentence would apply more to the USA today than to anywhere else in the world.

 

Lenin and his Bolshevik Communists opted for the Socialist ideology. They reserved special hate for the bourgeoisie intent on maintaining its privileges at the expense of the workers. The Russian revolutionary foresight is especially meaningful in Third Millennium America. After Lenin came to power he made it clear that Russia was NOT an island of utopia. The idea of a "petit bourgeois utopia" was to remain forever anathema to Lenin and thus to the Russian Revolution. "It is a question of creating a Socialist state …. This is merely one phase through which we must pass on the way to world revolution."

 

In Lenin's mind everything anti-revolutionary was bourgeois. Bourgeois attitudes. Bourgeois ethics and morality. Bourgeois plots. Bourgeois peace. Bourgeois legality. Bourgeois reaction. Bourgeois imperialism. The bourgeoisie was not going to stop him. No hairsplitting! "We are turning more and more to the Left …. We will destroy the entire bourgeoisie, grind it to a powder."

In the Leninist concept "the bourgeoisie is the class which inevitably rules under capitalism, both under a monarchy and in the most democratic republic, and which also inevitably enjoys the support of the world bourgeoisie." He knew what he was talking about. The world bourgeoisie—Democratic, Fascist or Monarchic—never forgave or forgot the temerity, the audacity, the effrontery, of the Russian Revolution!

 

The Bolshevik leader had learned his lessons from the French Revolution. In his 1918 cry of "All power to the Soviets" he meant a resounding 'No!' to the bourgeoisie who instead demanded "All power to the Constituent Assembly." Lenin was not about to hand over parliamentary power to a certain bourgeois counter-revolution. The resulting bloody civil war between Reds and Whites of Russia was between those two battle cries, between those two classes: the red revolutionary class and the white malignant bourgeoisie.

From that moment it was all-out attack on the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. "Death to the bourgeoisie!"

 

Pravda wrote on August 31, 1918: "Workers! If you do not now destroy the bourgeoisie, it will destroy you. Prepare for a mass attack on the enemies of the Revolution…."

 

Then in "Catechism of a Class-conscious Proletarian" also in Pravda: "The bourgeois is our eternal enemy, forever boring from within." The writer meant bankers, rich merchants, manufacturers and landowners, officers of the old guard, priests, White Guard reactionaries, upper bourgeois classes. The professed aim of the Red Terror was not to wage a war against individuals but to eliminate the bourgeoisie as a class.

 

Instructive for modern readers is Alexis de Tocqueville's remark about France in L'Ancien Régime et La Révolution written long before Lenin was born: "For the first time perhaps since the beginning of the world one sees the upper classes so isolated and separated from all the rest that one can count their members and separate them as one separates the condemned part of the herd, and the middle classes reluctant to mix with the upper classes but on the contrary jealously trying to avoid contact with them: two symptoms which if one had understood them, would have announced for all the immensity of the revolution about to be accomplished, or rather, which was already made."

 

That rings familiar, eh! I mean the separation and isolation today of America's elitist capitalists from the rest of the people.

 

In his essay "The Transparency of Evil" Jean Baudrillard, unpredictable and surprising as ever, notes that each transparency raises the question of its contrary, the secret. Still, some things, he says, will simply never be visible. They will remain in the secret world and are shared in secret according to a kind of exchange different from that of the visible world. But since today everything happens in the visible world, the virtual world, what happens to those things that were once secret? Step by step, delving into the secret within the secret, Baudrillard then chills you with this: they become occult, clandestine, evil. That which once was just secret becomes the evil that must be abolished. The problem is one cannot destroy them because to a certain extent the secret, like myths, is indestructible. Therefore it becomes diabolic and infects the same instruments designed to eliminate it.

 

I reflect on this equation of the secret, the visible and the diabolic and apply it to the subject here. Conclusion: capitalist power is the occult evil and resistance must abolish it. Our bourgeois governments profess democracy and transparency. Yet they operate in the secrecy that has morphed into evil, while continuing to boast of democracy and God.

Capitalism as an economic and social system can only work when there are new frontiers to discover. Since, as we have seen, new opportunities and eternal growth are basic requirements for capitalistic society and since they have been exhausted, I too believe America has completed its historic Manifest Destiny.

Destiny. American capitalism has long loved the word. Baudrillard recalls a story about the rules of destiny, "Death in Samarkand." On a square of a town, Death makes a sign to a soldier, terrifying him. He runs to the king and tells him that Death made a sign to him. Therefore he was escaping immediately to Samarkand. The king summons Death and asks why he scared his captain. Death answers that he didn't intend frightening the soldier, he just wanted to remind him that they had an appointment that evening in Samarkand.

---

Read amazing stories to your kids on Messenger Try it Now!

What men don't get about women

 

 

By Esther Walker
Monday, 22 September 2008

I am going to tell you a secret. It is one all women – but only a handful of men – know. It is this: most men are awful. And I mean awful: lazy, tedious, defensive, chippy, selfish, patronising, ignorant, insensitive donks, box-fresh from the Planet Clunk.
It's not that women are much better, but the point is that if you want to snare Miss Right (or any old floozy), the first step is to understand the outstanding badness of the competition.
Then all you have to do is not make the same mistakes. You don't need to be the wittiest, the most suave, the best-dressed, the richest or the best-looking to get the girl. You just have to not be a lazy, selfish, thoughtless prick. It is almost always as simple as that.
Let's start at the beginning.
Let's start with you being the One Who Always Rings. At times, nothing beats a little thoughtful text message, but for big things – arranging dates, enquiries after her health, gossip – ring her, for god's sake. Awful Men send a spineless "How RU?" text. Be the one who wants to hear her voice.
And be the one who cares about her well-being. Women are not pathetic, but from time to time we quite enjoy allowing ourselves to be rescued. So, for example, always see her to her door. Awful Men are the sort that happily put their girlfriends on the night bus at the end of an evening. And do you know what? Those girlfriends will, in time, run off with that friend of a friend who once went three miles out of his way to drive her home. If you're in a cab, stop at hers first, then yours (so she isn't lumbered with the fare or the creepy cab driver).
Men who have some sort of appreciation of just how wretched it can be, at times, to be a woman, are always impressive. You don't have to be an expert on oral contraceptives or the Atkins diet, but at the very least do not, as Awful Men do, cringe if she mentions anything to do with her period, do not screw your eyes shut and bare your teeth in nauseated horror at the mention of childbirth.
And, please, do not become angry if she suggests that she looks fat. Fretting aloud about weight is womankind's least charming habit but you can't stop them. Awful Men don't understand this and will either accuse women of fishing for compliments or scream "You're not FAT! For GOD'S SAKE stop going ON ABOUT IT!"
You must, always, simply put your head on one side and say, as if it's the first time you've had the conversation: "You don't look fat to me," and smile.
The best seducers take this appreciation of womanhood one step further with casual unkindness about Awful Men. "He's quite boring," they might say, or, "I don't know how she stands him," or "He forgot her birthday! She should dump him."
It is simply not in the nature of men to do this, which is why doing it will make you seem like such a rare and exquisite creature. It makes women feel like you're on their side, like you understand them. The least sexy thing you can say, as a man, is: "I don't understand women."
But don't make the mistake of gushing about other women; you might think it shows how much you like women, what a feminist you are, but all it does is make women feel bad. "She's a great girl," is the most enthusiastic you should get about another woman. Never say: "She's the funniest girl I've ever met," or "She's a legend" and the worst: "She's so beautiful."
No, pal: we are the funniest girl you've ever met. We are a legend. We are so beautiful.
If you find yourself trying to prise a woman away from her boyfriend, listen carefully to what she says. When women are unhappy with their boyfriends, they will tell everyone exactly what's wrong with them, but you have to know what to listen for.
She will say: "Oh I really wanted to see that film... but Steve said it sounded childish." "I love skinny jeans... but Steve thinks they're ugly." Your job is to be exactly the opposite of whatever desperado she's stuck with, without actually saying: "Your boyfriend is an idiot."
He's too passive? Take charge. He never listens to her? You're all ears! He didn't think her career was important? Women with careers are so sexy!!
The chances are that this Awful Man never does anything for her on Valentine's Day. Your attitude towards romantic gestures, even if you think they are embarrassing and contrived, must be that they are important to women, so they are important to you. Because, you see, something like Valentine's Day is not about you, it is about us. Women are much more sensitive to social embarrassment than men; the thing we dread when February rolls around is watching flowers arrive for everyone else in the office except us, and having to pretend we don't care that you don't care enough to spend £25 on a bunch of flowers.
Listening to women (just generally, not only to find out what she hates about her boyfriend) is the easiest way to earn their adoration. Ask the occasional question and listen dutifully to the answer. That might sound like far too much effort but the alternative – to drone on about your job, your new car, the boys' holiday you're planning – is the date equivalent of anthrax.
So, now we've got the basics out of the way, let's move on to the Restaurant Date, the battlefield upon which most romantic encounters are bayoneted and die writhing in agony.
Don't be late. Just don't; it is the behaviour of Awful Men. But if disaster strikes and you are late, you're in luck, as there is a way to salvage things that is so unbelievably money it's almost worth committing the sin of lateness in order to deploy it.
As soon as you know you're going to be late, ring the restaurant, explain the situation to the maître-d' and ask them to sit your date down and get her a drink. You spare her the embarrassment of fumbling for her phone as she sits alone at the table waiting for your sorry ass. And it is simply immeasurably cool for the maître-d' to arrive at the table, glass of champagne in hand, to pass on your apologies and say discreetly that you're on your way.
If you are shown to your table together, make sure she has the best seat, which is the one with the view of the room.
If you've been paying attention, you will know that, during the date, you should encourage her to talk a lot about herself and listen like a secret agent so you can deduce what she wants from a man and make her believe that you, right there, are he.
Now the tricky part: the bill. With arch-feminism on the wane it's now safer to assume that a man can buy a woman dinner without it being interpreted as an act of gross chauvinist piggery. Most women – not all, but most – are consciously or subconsciously looking for someone who will be supportive. It's not the actual money that's the issue (what self-respecting girl can't buy her own dinner?), and just because she lets you pay doesn't mean she plans to bleed you dry. The point here is what the act represents. It is symbolic and it says "I will care for you in times of need."
If you're not exactly Bernie Ecclestone, take her to an inexpensive restaurant where you won't bite your fist when she orders the steak or pass out on seeing the bill.
During the inevitable paying dance, she will offer to pay and you will refuse once. If she still says "No, no, really: let me pay my half," then you should be cool and let her. She is telling you that she doesn't want to feel beholden to kiss you at the end of the evening. Take the hint but don't take offence.
Only an Awful Man aims to get a woman into bed on the first date. It's just so tacky. Most women sleep with men on the first date (especially in winter) because they are too pissed, cold or lazy to get themselves home. If you make it easy for her to get home, she'll go, and will be impressed and grateful the next morning that you didn't take advantage of her.
Perhaps the most important thing to learn about seducing women is when to give up. Men whose seduction technique is to wear a woman down with constant phone calls, date requests and e-mails may get the girl – but it's never for long.
Two days after your first date, call and ask to see her again the following week. If she says she's busy, she's not interested; if she doesn't return your call, she's not interested. Then leave it; persistence is at first flattering and then annoying. And then creepy.
But, if she says yes to a second date then, my son, it is game on.
And the rest is up to you.

---

Try Facebook in Windows Live Messenger! Try it Now!

Desire: A dangerous flame

We think of it as an irresistible force – yet we are so in thrall to it that we have ceased to respect it. Jeanette Winterson looks at the power of desire

Thursday, 18 September 2008

Why is the measure of love loss? In between those two words – love, loss, and standing on either side of them, is how all this happened in the first place. Another word: desire.

While I can't have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I'd take a taxi across town to see you for 10 minutes. I'd wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say "Will you..." my answer is "Yes", before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Desire is always a kind of invention. By which I mean that the two of us are re-invented by this powerful emotion. Well, sometimes it is the two of us, sometimes it might just be me, and then I am your stalker, your psychopath, the one whose fantasy is out of control.

Desiring someone who has no desire for you is a clue to the nature of this all-consuming feeling; it has much more to do with me than it has to do with you. You are the object of my desire. I am the subject. I am the I.

When we are the object of each other's desire it is easy to see nothing negative in this glorious state. We become icons of romance, we fulfil all the slush-fantasies. This is how it is meant to be. You walked into the room... Our eyes met... From the first moment... and so on.

It is safe to say that overwhelming desire for another person involves a good deal of projection. I don't believe in love at first sight, but I do believe in desire at first sight. Sometimes it is as simple as sexual desire, and perhaps men are more straightforward there, but usually desire is complex; a constellation of wants and needs, hopes and dreams, a whole universe of uninhabited stars looking for life.

And nothing feels more like life than desire. Everyone knows it; the surge in the blood, cocaine-highs without the white powder. Desire is shamanistic, trance-like, ecstatic. When people say, as they often do, "I'd love to fall in love again – that first month, six months, year...", they are not talking about love at all – it's desire they mean.

And who can blame us? Desiring you allows me to feel intensely, makes my body alert as a fox. Desire for you allows me to live outside normal time, conjures me into a conversation with my soul when I never thought I had one, tricks me into behaving better than I ever did, like someone else, someone good.

Desire for you fills my mind and thus becomes a space-clearing exercise. In this jumbled, packed, bloated, noisy world, you become my point of meditation. I think of you and little else, and so I realise how absurd and wasteful are most of the things that I do. Body, mind, effort, are concentrated in your image. The fragmented state of ordinary life at last becomes coherent. No longer scattered through time and space, I am collected in one place, and that place is you.

Simple. Perfect.

Until it goes wrong.

The truth is that unless desire is transformed into love, desire fails us; it fails to do what it once did; the highs, the thrills. Our transports of delight disappear. We stop walking on air. We find ourselves back on the commuter train and on our own two feet. Language gives it away; we talk about coming back down to earth.

For many people, this is a huge disappointment. When desire is gone, so is love, and so is the relationship. I doubt, though, that love is so easy to shift. Loving shies away from leaving, and can cope with the slow understanding that the beloved is not Superman or Miss World.

We live in an "upgrade" culture. I think this has infected relationships. Why keep last year's model when the new one will be sleeker and more fun? People, like stuff, are throwaways in our society; we don't do job security and we don't offer security in relationships. We mouth platitudes about time to move on, as though we were doing something new-age and wise, when all we really want is to get rid of the girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife.

I don't want a return to the 1950s, when couples stayed together whatever the hell, but whoever said that relationships are easy?

Advertising always promises that the new model will be easier to use. And of course when you "upgrade" to the next relationship, it is also easier – for a while.

If you are pretty or personable, handsome or rich, serial relationships offer all the desire and none of the commitment. As sexual desire calms, and as the early fantasies dissolve, we begin to see the other person in real life, and not as our goddess or rescuer. We turn critical. We have doubts.

We begin to see ourselves, too, and as most of us spend our entire lives hiding from any confrontation with the self, this sudden sighting is unpleasant, and we blame the other person for our panicky wish to bolt. It is less painful to change your partner than it is to confront yourself, but one of the many strange things about love is that it asks that we do confront ourselves, while giving us the strength of character to make that difficult task possible. If desire is a magic potion, with instant effect (see Tristan and Isolde), then love is a miracle whose effects become apparent only in time. Love is the long-haul. Desire is now.

An upgrade culture, a now culture, and a celebrity culture, where the endless partner-swapping of the rich and famous is staple fare, doesn't give much heft to the long-haul. We are the new Don Giovannis, whose seductions need to be faster and more frequent, and we hide these crimes of the heart under the sexy headline of "desire".

Don Giovanni – with his celebrated 1,003 women, is of course dragged off to Hell for his sins. Desire has never been a favourite of religion. Buddhism teaches non-attachment, Christianity sees desire as the road to the sins of the flesh and as a distraction from God. Islam has its women cover themselves in public lest any man should be inflamed, and jeopardise his soul. In Jewish tradition, desire ruins King David and Samson, just as surely as modern-day Delilah's are still shearing their men into submission. Yet it would be misleading to forget the love poem in the Bible that is the "Song of Solomon"; a poem as romantic as any written since, that gives desire a legitimate place in the palace of love.

And quite right too. Desire is wonderful. Magic potions are sometimes exactly what is needed. You can love me and leave me if you like, and anybody under 30 should do quite a lot of loving and leaving. I don't mean that desire belongs to youth – certainly it does not – but there are good reasons to fall in love often when you are growing up, even if only to discover that it wasn't love at all.

The problems start when desire is no longer about discovery, but just a cheap way of avoiding love.

It is a mistake to see desire as an end in itself. Lust is an end in itself, and if that is all you want, then fine. Desire is trickier, because I suspect that its real role is towards love, not an excuse in the other direction.

There is a science-based argument that understands desire as a move towards love, but a love that is necessary for a stable society. Love is a way of making people stay together, desire is a way of making people love each other, goes the argument. This theory reads our highest emotional value as species protection. Unsurprisingly, I detest this reading, and much prefer what poets have to say. When Dante talks about the love that moves the sun and the lesser stars, I believe him. He didn't know as much as we do about the arrangement of the heavens, but he knew about the complexity of the heart.

My feeling is that love led by desire, desire deepening into love, is much more than selfish gene-led social stability and survival of the species. Loving someone is the closest we can get to knowing what it is like to be another person. Love blasts through our habitual sclerotic selfishness, the narrow "me first" that gradually closes us down, the dead-end of the loveless life.

There are different kinds of love, and not all of them are prefaced by desire, yet desire keeps its potent place in our affections. Its releasing force has no regard for conventions of any kind, and it crosses genders, age, social classes, religion, common sense and good manners with seemingly equal ease.

This is bracing and necessary. It is addictive. Like all powerful substances, desire needs careful handling, which by its nature is almost impossible to do.

Almost, but not quite. Jung, drawing on alchemy, talked about desire as the white bird, which should always be followed when it appears, but not always brought down to earth. Simply, we cannot always act on our desire, nor should we, but repressing it tells us nothing. Following the white bird is a courageous way of acknowledging that something explosive is happening. Perhaps that will blow up our entire world, or perhaps it will detonate a secret chamber in the heart. For certain, things will change.

I don't suppose that the white bird of desire is nearly as attractive to most of us as the white powder substitute with natural highs. Desire as a drug is racier than desire as a messenger. Yet most things in life have a prosaic meaning and a poetic meaning, and there are times when only poetry will answer.

For me, when I have trusted my desire, whether or not I have acted on it, life has become much more difficult, but strangely more illuminated. When I have not trusted my desire, out of cowardice or common sense, slowly I have gone into shadow. I cannot explain this, but I find it to be true.

Desire deserves respect. It is worth the chaos. But it is not love, and only love is worth everything.