Who put you in charge?

Some people are utterly amazing, I spent six months or so liaising with a team of palliative carers a few years back. They’d come in twice a day to give personal care to a friend I was keeping an eye on. Their work was backbreaking at times but they did everything with such good humour; the humour was vital. I’d make them a drink if they had time to knock it back before the next client, they knew I made good coffee and deeply respected what they did. There is an invisible army in Britain of underpaid, mostly, women that live out of cars and go from person to person caring for the sick and vulnerable. I was offered a job with them, funnily enough, but my life took a massive downslide and the opportunity passed. I’ve always known that humanity is as much bodily fluids as poetry and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise (but many do).

There is a lot of skill that comes with caring for the sick and dying, they knew more than the doctors in most cases as they saw it every day, the lady in charge was an SRN (state registered nurse) but it was only because I am very observant that I spotted that she was the boss, they were a unit and functioned so. They were part cleaner, part medic, part counsellor and part comedian and all of this with utter grace.

And so undervalued.

I’ve met so many others who treat such people like dirt, they give themselves airs and graces and waft through life as if they own the world; that it and the people in it are their playthings, little person shaped pieces on a board that they can pick up and move around for their own ends and amusement.

Other people would like you to think they are amazing, they give themselves big titles or act like they speak for everybody. I was doing some maths in my head this morning I’d counted about 15 people that I know of that, for no good reason I can see, have appointed themselves as pillars of the community. They weren’t born with extra brains (far from it in mostly) they have no visible gifts but for some unfathomable reason they act like they are in charge and their opinions matter more than everybody else’s.

For the sake of argument (and easy maths), let’s say there are a hundred people like that in this town who are (as they would describe it) bringing the community together. so one hundred out of 92,000 is… Roughly 0. 1% have appointed themselves as leaders, champions, heads of the community. Questions spring to mind; Who by? Why? What qualifications? What are the other 99.9% of people doing?

I have regretfully had a window into this world and watched these characters scurrying from cafe to cafe, getting this person to do this while that person does that and not actually doing anything themselves in-between, there might be loads of people involved in whatever but as they are the spokesperson, it’s them in the press, it’s them in the media and years later when you put their name in google, they are often the only one linked to the project. It’s a clever trick to say ‘community’ when what is really meant is ‘me! me! me!”

I think of those beautiful people up top and it angers me that while they are wiping bums, changing incontinence pants, emptying catheter bags and applying cream to bed sores there is a ridiculously visible minority that lift nothing heavier than a full cup of coffee and deal with nothing messier that a rare leaking ball point pen that will get paid twice as much and rewarded with attention.

I was wise to their game from the get go. Often, those that set up a ‘community’ project become the most important thing about it. You will find their name attached to some focal point or a statement that could have come from a whole team. All those little minions that they shined their light upon so briefly are left behind in obscurity as they inevitability move on to the next thing when the funding money runs out. They are like animals moving through the savanna , going from water hole to water hole, draining it back to dry mud and heading on, leaving a barren wasteland behind them.

I hate the insincerity of such people, they are all smiles and eye contact and they overuse your name because they did a course once where they learned how to manipulate people into getting what they want. They are the equivalent of the sets in an old western, painted fronts and bare boards and props for the parts that you aren’t supposed to see. That charm is linked to a switch, not a dial, and it flicks on when needed and off as quickly.

I have tried to remain anonymous for most of my life and I’ve met these types when they haven’t been aware of my skill set and they have looked right through me and every kind word is met with stoney silence and a glare; and then I’ve been introduced to them later, maybe a week, maybe a months, maybe a year as Chris Hoggins, “whatever” and you see the light bulb moment of what use I could be to their goal for attention and suddenly they are all charm and loveliness… but I never forget a name… or when someone blanks me.

Whether it’s turning your birthday party into a charity fund-raising event, using your victimhood as a moneymaking exercise, humiliating the homeless for your childhood ambition that you should have grown out of when you learnt the difference between right and wrong, claiming to be something you are not so that you can become the focus of a cause or running groups for the vulnerable while you and your immediate family are making their lives worse, a few people in my town or in any other town will always have an obscene need to be loved, admired and / or worshiped.

One thing that particularly fascinates me is how willing they are to scupper anyone else’s good works, often much better than their’s, for no other reason than it wasn’t their idea. They do not stand for the public good, just their own.

It’s safe to say that such people have some serious psychological issues that need to be addressed but like most of a narcissistic bent, they can never see that the problem that needs fixing most of all is them.

Fairwell to alms

I’ve spotted a disturbing trend in the last few years, perhaps it has always been there and I’m only just seeing the pattern now, or maybe it’s a convergence of a particular set of circumstances; I suspect the latter and here’s why.

The Christmas before last my phone pinged with an unusual text. I am incredibly careful about who I give my number to as I’ve been attacked in the past by deranged politicos who were pointed in my direction by someone who didn’t want to take the blame for their own actions. The message was from a local charity telling me that I had a food hamper waiting for me and I just needed to go to a place in town to collect it. I was livid! A mental health organisation I use had passed on my details to a third party without my permission, breaching data protection rules. I instantly put in a complaint to the organisations and the management were horrified, it had been a support worker thinking they were doing me a favour and they ended up being retrained and the organisation changed its guidelines to prevent it ever happening again.

Getting the hamper charity to expunge my data was more tricky, they acted like I was completely insane and when they finally complied, all I got was a ‘non’ apology. People aren’t stupid, they know the difference between “I’m sorry!” and “I’m sorry that you feel that way!” one is a genuine expression of contrition and the other is assuming that they are mentally superior to you and that you are too stupid to notice the difference.

On research, the hamper charity bore a striking similarity to many others that have sprung up since the onset on austerity policies in 2010, they are almost solely populated by boomers and female ones at that. The boomer generation, those born between 1946 and 1964 and regarded as the generation that had everything land in their lap in Britain, their education was free up to degree level, they even had maintenance grants that you could live comfortably on, you could buy a house on the equivalent of 3 years of the average worker’s wage as opposed to 20 years now, jobs were well paid with holidays and sick pay and everything worked properly and things were nice.

I can understand it to a point, you get to a certain age, your kids have left home, you don’t have to work that hard because the house is paid for and your income is basically fun money. Then, one day, you look around and you start to feel guilty. You see the way the world has turned, you see the struggles, you see the poverty and you start to feel uneasy… You feel the guilt of the left leaning boomer gnawing away in the pit of your stomach.

If someone feels uncomfortable, they naturally want that feeling to stop and what better way for a well off person to feel better about themselves than to get involved with a charity… They could campaign for a massive, society wide, redistribution of wealth that would see them a lot worse off but no, charity will do just fine.

I’m not a religious person but there is an interesting bit in the bible about charity, Corinthians chapter 13 ” charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up”, I’ll spare you the rest but it is there for a reason because charity can go horribly wrong.

I see much of charity now as akin to carbon offsetting, where companies plant trees whenever they cause fossil fuels to be burned somewhere. A lot of charity or do-gooding is basically guilt offsetting, you wave a banner at an Extinction Rebellion protest then you trot down to Gatwick and hop on a short hall fight on a mini break or two or you lounge around the comfort of your paid for home and spend one night every two years on a sponsored sleep in a cardboard box night for charity (surrounded by security and next to clean toilets of course) and you even get a t-shirt to wear to prove what a good person you are.

There is, however, a point where that need to assuage the lucky person guilt turns into the more toxic virtue signalling. Other people can see you doing good and start to regard you more favourably for doing so. Charity and worthy causes become your social life, you start to associate with others with the same mindset and you end up in an echo chamber where everyone feels marvellous about themselves for all their good deeds. Be it money raising, protesting or something more hands on it eventually becomes less and less about actually helping and more about how visible that help is, ending with photos in the local press or the online equivalent.

As I mentioned, this is primarily a female activity as women tend to naturally be more social anyway. Sadly, a common exception to this rule is the amount of guys who have worked out that this is a great way to find a partner and much cheaper than signing up to a dating site.

So where are the poor people in all this? That is the question I was asking myself when I was met with condescension for simply making sure that my right to a bit of privacy was respected. I have had personal dealings with these sort of people in the past and even the most well meaning and benign of them suffer from an extreme form of cognitive bias. I’m sure there are a few exceptions to this but on some basic level they see the poor and unfortunate as being beneath them. I should know because I have experienced this at first hand many times.

I grew up in a working class family that were plunged into extreme poverty during the Thatcher years, being an undiagnosed autistic person, I struggled through school while living in squalor, I did work that caused me to have a breakdown (that was really an autistic shutdown) and I have struggled along on the poverty line ever since. That said, I have a higher than average IQ and a wide and quite high skill set, what I don’t have is the ability to function properly in a world built to please the other 99% of the population. I missed every single life goal because I was too busy trying to deal with a mental health problem that I was misdiagnosed with and the treatments often made my autism far worse. This meant, without sounding too arrogant (another autistic trait) that I was often smarter and more talented than those that were supposed to be in a position to help me, I just lacked the social skills to use my gifts properly.

Do gooders don’t like it when the good they do is questioned. They expect you to assume a cap doffing role where you graciously accept the minimum help you get that still leaves you grubbing along close to the bread line. They can’t or ,on a subconscious level, wont acknowledge that the difference between you and them was nothing more than an accident of birth. They need to believe that they got where they did because they worked harder or made better life choices, if you even start to question their lifestyle, they see you as a threat to them and they actively go out of their way to destroy the little you have, whether personally or through their network of similarly minded chums… Hell have no furies for a virtue signaller scorned.

Heaven help anyone who mentions their investment portfolio, the buy to let property they have as a pension or how ethical their actual pension is. You can’t question the money they blow on wine and organic whatever in Marks and Spencer, Waitrose or on their Ocado delivery, you can’t correct them when they tell you every item of clothes they buy is from a charity shop and you mention that what they are wearing is that seasons M&S, Boden or some fancy little boutique in Tunbridge Wells. You can’t point out that they spent more on their last trip to the hairdressers than you spend on food in two months but if a poor person buys a pouch of tobacco… All hell breaks loose. Oh yes, and never, never, never, ever question them about their cocaine use or whether the people they buy their drugs from are exploiting anyone, they will totally destroy you for that.

The thing that virtue signallers will never do is actually lift you up to their level. Partly because they don’t want you seeing what thundering hypocrites they are but mostly because they are actually addicted to what they are doing. They need that warm glow of thinking that they are on your side, that they are providing you with that gram of comfort or support so they can sleep soundly at night amidst all their luxuries. God forbid that you see what lies behind their solid wood doors in terribly nice areas into the carnage of their personal lives. They might have to acknowledge that they are not much different from you.

I, for one, want a world where everyone has the same chances, where wealth acquisition is never allowed to run rampant, where you don’t need to climb up the rungs of society because the ladders no longer exist. I want a world where virtue signalling boomers don’t get to wander up and down with banners declaring slogans that they don’t really believe in or hold events that demean those that they claim to be helping. I want a world where these clowns get to do their jigsaw puzzles, arrange flowers in the church, go rambling, visit National Trust properties, potter about in the garden or go to classes to make terrible paintings and handicrafts because their ‘help’ is no longer needed and they can mind their own bloody business and fix all the messes that they haven’t dealt with in their own sad little lives.

And breath! 😅

How the other half live

It’s Christmas Day and all around the country, nicely scrubbed middle class people will trot off to a homeless shelter, roll up their sleeves, stick a pinny on and maybe a Santa hat and help to feed the homeless. They will then go home (already a plus) to warmth and a full fridge and what other comforts are waiting for them. It’s a modern form of confession really, assuaging the guilt for the lovely life they have by a bit of nicety to society’s unfortunates.

Clement Attlee once said that charity was ‘a cold grey loveless thing’ and I’m inclined to agree with him. It really shouldn’t exist in a civilised society and the fact that so many homeless shelters and food banks are needed is a testament to how far this country has slipped backwards. But while it is needed, it is needed all the time and not just on one or two days. there is poverty all year ’round. Many of those that do the charity Christmas thing, do so out of guilt, and those that don’t mostly do it because they are at a loose end and want to feel better about themselves and their lives. Personally, I have never wanted to be someone whose main role in life is to make a wealthy person feel better about themselves. That would just add insult to injury.

Last year I was offered a charity food hamper. It appeared as a text on my phone and I was referred by a support service that I need to use from time to time; I went ballistic. I looked up the charity, who worked for it and their structure and found a contact email and demanded to know what information they had on me, how they got it and that it be immediately removed from their records. I am incredibly careful who gets my contact details as I have had abuse in the past and the sort of do-gooders who would be likely to go in for this sort of virtue signalling are the sort of twisted idiots that thought I was a legitimate target to attack. When I finally received a reply, it came with a ‘non’ apology, one of those, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” rather than actually being genuinely sorry. This sort of thing is red rag to a bull to me and I reported them to the charities commission for breach of GPDR rules…

Once I’d dealt with them, I tackled the service that referred me who knew they had screwed up and there would be no way they would be working with that charity ever again and that the person who handed over my email and phone number without permission would be re-trained and that they would not give over any more details of mine or anyone else’s in the future.

Any form of charity is transactional it’s not just the poor person getting the hand out for the cost of some of their dignity, it’s what the giver gets from it in terms of superiority, warm fuzzy feelings, self righteousness or assuaged guilt. However you look at it, it’s a trade off and an unfair one at that.

If you want to actually help, do it all year round with genuine life choices rather than mere tokenism, make sure your lifestyle doesn’t exploit people. Research who actually helps people as opposed to who has the best marketing campaigns. Do good rather than being seen to do good, find out who your pension invests in and how ethical they are. Cut out the short hall flying, never shop at amazon or anywhere else that dodge their taxes, never use air b n b and certainly, never, ever, vote tory.

Most importantly, if your life is a mess, or you do shitty things, own it, face up to it and fix it. Don’t leave it to someone poorer and more vulnerable than you to make you feel better about yourself, it’s really not their job; it’s yours, deal with it!

Playing with lives

What is it that you do for fun? Watch telly? Read a book? Go to the cinema? Down the gym?

Whether it’s the same everywhere, I don’t know, but around here there is a small but annoyingly visible minority who like nothing better than to spend their free time interfering in the lives of others. It’s important to clarify from the get go that there are an awful lot of talented and diligent people out in the world who have trained hard, are deeply responsible and know what they are doing, but these aren’t them. What I am referring to are the rank amatures who play dangerous games with other people’s lives and the community in which they live.
It’s so easy to set yourself up as a self proclaimed expert in something, you just need five minutes on Facebook and, boom, your a charity organiser, a therapist, a professional musician, whatever. It helps if you have a bit of money to play with and for you to have a comfortable enough life that you can actually waste time on some grandiose scheme rather than have to just keep your head above water.

What drives people’s need to put themselves out there when they clearly don’t have the talent or diligence to do things properly? Vanity mostly, a need to be seen be someone else as a ‘good’ person. 
Actually being a good person is something else entirely, you work hard, keep your head down and when you do get attention it is often because you finally had to say the brave and unpopular thing that no one else would. Plus the truly ‘good’ rarely think they are; their well adjusted egos wouldn’t let them be that conceited.
The vain, the narcisistic, the insecure and the downright stupid need to be seen to be wonderful people and are the sort of people who do high profile do gooding that rarely does any actual good. Their main defensive shield is that anyone who speaks out against them is a bitter or negative person, it’s a cheap shot but it usually works for them. It’s only when things blow up in other people’s faces that they finally get rumbled for the charlatans that they are. Unfortunately, most of the failures of these people are of the getting bored and leaving things to rot sort rather than of the carted away in an ambulance variety. They leave a trail of embarrassing failures and hopes that have been raised and dropped again whilst they themselves have moved onto the next fiasco.
These sort of people treat the world like a spoilt child treats a train set. They set everything up, let it go around a few times, and then get bored and just leave it sitting there gathering dust. Nobody should do that to another human being, yet they do, time and time again.

Didn’t you do well?

I had a very interesting experience the other day, I was sitting with a bunch of like minded people who were actually doing things for the right reasons. This doesn’t happen often outside my close knit group of very few friends and new occurances tend to fascinate me.

My community is full of truly pathetic people, it’s a much misunderstood word but it is utterly apt in this description. There are very few people I encounter that are actually doing what they do for the right reasons. They turn up at worthy causes to be seen to turn up at worthy causes and to meet the approval of everyone else there as a worthy and valid individual because they don’t seem to be able to exist outside of that circle of mutual validation. Like the light bulb in a fridge, they fail to shine when they aren’t being seen to shine by others. 

Compare that to the other day when everyone I was talking to had their own thing, they were doing it and had been doing it for a long while and they were doing it for themselves, because they had to, compelled to even. 

They weren’t doing what they do to feel better about themselves, they weren’t doing it to fill the yawning void where their soul should be and they weren’t doing it so that they could tell someone, they weren’t  doing it for some sort of approval.

That is the problem with much of what I see and hear around town, a lot of what is done is just done so people look good. The irony being, that most of the activities done to look good are done by essentially bad people and there is something rotten at the core of what they are doing and why they are doing it.

The first thing that anyone involved in the medical profession learns is the Hypocratic oath, and the first part of that is that one should do no harm. Much of what I see that is described as charity or community work breaks that very simple rule and is at best useless and at worst will actually causes either immediate harm or harm at some point in the future, yet still it goes on, as do activities that are just designed to draw attention to those participating in them.

The problem with having quite so many of the emotional and mental walking wounded in the community is that by that they reach a critical mass at which they can band together and convince themselves that they are perfectly normal, which is exactly what they do. The upshot of this statistical anomaly is that anyone who dares to pass comment on adults who either suffer from terribly low self esteem or some form of narcistic personality disorder become the odd one out by default, which is exactly what happens  to people like myself. In the end, you can actually start to feel that you have a problem in a way that these very damaged people are incapable of comprehending because, well, they are damaged.

You can’t talk these sort of people out of acting like dogooding arsehole and they won’t thank you for trying, (Trust me, I know!) all you can hope they do is get bored and go on to the next pile of crap before they cause to much harm.

Actually finding a few new people whose past doesn’t consist of a trail of chaos and carnage that goes back decades is rather refreshing and it helps me to soldier on through all the rubbish I have to deal with on a daily basis.

And the answer to the question in the title? If you need to ask, then you probably aren’t. 

Could it be you?

There is a look I have come to know well, I call it ‘the face’. It is the expression that appears on people’s face when an unnamed person is mentioned. The face is an odd combination of anger, disgust and horror with a tiny dash of amusement that encompasses everything that they feel about this person. They have been awful forever, from what I can gather, and they never seem to have got the hint that they might actually be the source of their many problems.

Everyone I meet far and wide has a story to tell of how this one person has negatively affected their life. A ruined relationship, a partner stolen,  a nasty insult, a bitchy comment, a plan scuppered or an event taken over and yet the most overriding account of them is an unshakable faith that they are always in the right. They are like the Johny Appleseed of discontent, spoiling everything they encounter.

There are plenty of people just as unpleasant around but this one and a couple of others stick out as the worst of the worst, the ones beyond redemption. 

It is a perpetual horror to me that there might be a ‘Chris Face’ people pull and it’s not a pretty one. I know there are plenty of people out there who don’t like me but as they consist of liars, bullies, cheats, frauds, hypocrites,  show offs, crooks and the criminally negligent, I shan’t be losing any sleep over any of them. But outside the local arsehole community it would deeply upset me to be thought badly of.

The common thread amongst terrible people is that they permanently believe that they are wonderful. The worst of them seem to have a constant need to do grandiose things, setting up community events that draw attention to themselves or charitable efforts that help them in terms of free publicity much more than anyone they are purporting to assist in the process. I watch the things that people of this sort create with a mixture of amusement and horror and wonder and think , “do they realise how horrible this is?”. I have little problem about hideous people humiliating themselves, they can do it constantly for all I care. It’s when the vain desires of horrible people spill out on civilians that I take issue, when everyday folk and particularly the vulnerable get caught up in a conceited person’s fiasco there seems to be little thought to the harm that can be done.they became pawns lost in the cause of someone else’s victory.

I have been a life long sufferer from depression and low self esteem issues and it’s been a constant struggle not to sink under the weight of them. I have done a lot of work on myself with the help of some brilliant therapists but it still remains a cause for concern. I am not only concerned that I might slip backwards into the pits of despair again but also of going the other way and turn into some ego driven maniac. I would like to think that my constant  self vigilance is what is keeping me in check.

I have witnessed at close quarters those with none of these checks and balances and they are pretty ghastly people. Beyond the false smiles and forced joviality, their need to stamp their presence on everything is paramount. I can’t bear to spend more than a few moments in close proximity to anyone like that, they make the air positively prickle with their all encompassing need to be top dog.

What puzzles me though is whether they know that they are doing it? It’s rare that anyone as narcissistic as those I’m describing has anyone they are close to unless, of course, they are as much of a mess as they are themselves. But surely the lack of functioning relationships must be a bit of a giveaway?

When they wake up in the morning does anything slip through all that awfulness? Is there a second where they think, “hang on, perhaps the world doesn’t need me to arrange all this pointless stuff and boss everybody around?” Do they look at their string of failed interpersonal relationships and think that the common factor in it all going wrong might be themselves?  I guess they really don’t, else they would have done something to change the situation.

I guess, for those so empty inside, that is it, that is their world. Their relationships are so shallow and their lives are so empty that they can only be filled by the most public attempts to demonstrate how amazing they are. Nothing less than mass worship and the ability to conrol the lives and actions of others will do. 

Personally, the idea of a life so predicated of self absorption and self agrandisement fills me with horror. I guess that means that I’m ok.