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It is not you, It is me
[ 9 minute read ]
This is fiction in that I interviewed myself at home without a radio station and in private.
mental health - PTSD
Yesterday, I rented a radio station studio and interviewed myself, live, on air. I decided that I would allow listeners to phone in with their questions, and I would answer them honestly.
'Today, I have Martin Cadwell in the studio. Good Morning.'
'Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here.'
'First, Martin, let me start with a question that has always puzzled me. You are free with your words, both in public and as soliloquy. Why do you feel that you should impress your attitude on your surroundings?'
'Well, you certainly pull no punches! Thank you. Why? Hmm! My attitude. I think our attitudes are born from our experiences. We very soon learn to take short cuts in our thinking at a very young age and if these short-cuts work in some situations, we store them as heuristics. Some people might just put it down to experience. I have experienced a lot of different people in different cultures of all ages in different countries. That doesn't make me a special person in any field of study, but it has given me an idea of how borrowing from one culture, age-group, or ideology and transplanting it into a set of circumstances I find myself in, could be a better solution to how things are actually, without intervention, playing out. I suppose I am seeking a righteous solution by speaking aloud.'
'You say that you are seeking a righteous solution by speaking aloud and intervention. Would you consider that you are trying to find a match to your thinking?'
'Well, for a long time I thought that everyone was the same. Everyone has the same level of intelligence and everyone is at the same level of mental development. I was even convinced that everyone suffered in the same way from exactly the same maladies. For example, from having no experience of what a divorce feels like, I did not recognise that divorces are painful. So, in my mind, nobody suffered by divorcing their spouses. My approach had always been one in which everyone around me interpreted the world, and their immediate environment, just the same as I did. So by offering my opinion as advice, I suppose, yes, I was trying to find a match, and that match would then be the rallying point for a good solution to unfold. I felt that I was merely saying out loud what everyone else also thought but seemed to have temporarily overlooked.'
'You speak now as though wherever you go there is conflict. Do you think you bring that conflict?'
'Let me just finish my last answer. I was seeking a collective of similar thoughts that rally around a single banner to smother conflict.' In answer to your question, do I bring conflict: Yes, I am a very conflicted person. Something I did not realise, was that I was learning from everyone around me, soaking up my environment and trying to make sense of it. You probably know that I had some problems at a young age that made it difficult for me to experience emotions in the same way that other people do. Unfortunately, I was negatively impacted upon by the very same person's who were the people I was learning from. That is the same for all of us. Ideally, I suppose it would be good for children to spend some time away from their family and friends, in sterilised groups of people, to enable them to gain some perspective, but that simply wasn't available to me.'
'I think they are called retreats, aren't they?'
'Yes, retreats. So, as a child, like any child I was conflicted, but still modest enough to recognise that I am learning.'
'And that was a fully formed thought then?'
'Yes. And, I think it was this that set me apart from other kids. Where emotion should have been, I was filling the space with my childish logic. I knew that I had to learn from others. I didn't know who I should be learning from. So, lots of rubbish got mixed in, much like today's A.I.'
'You are smiling. Do you empathise with machine learning?'
'If you mean do I regard A.I. as a conflicted child with no emotion, yes, I think that is precisely what it is, and what I still am, in many ways. But, I don't think I am the only one that is like that. A.I. is supposed to emulate humans, and I think it is doing it very well. It makes, what we regard as mistakes, but if the same mistake was attributed to a human we would just say, to err is human, and look fondly at the comical blunderer, or in a court, try to discover how a fault occurred and seek redress.'
'Do you think you should be punished for all the mistakes you have made, which in your book, you regard as vicarious mistakes? What do you mean by vicarious mistakes?'
'If a child grows up in an environment where everyone throws their rubbish into a river that pollutes the next village downstream, it is, in my estimation, that the child will also throw rubbish into the river. This is not a mistake because, to the child, it is normal to do this. In discovering that the next village is polluted by rubbish in the river, and the child continues to throw rubbish into the river, it is a mistake to continue to throw rubbish into the river and claim that it is safe to do so. Realisation, however, is bifurcated here. It is safe to have polluting rubbish washed away from a village, and it is not safe to have polluting rubbish washed into a village. A vicarious mistake is a belief that stems from someone else's inability to reason properly. If the child believes that the polluting rubbish is washed clean by the time it gets to the next village he or she is making a vicarious mistake in not realising that the pollution is in the water, making it unsafe to drink for the people of the village downstream. So, it is a trickling down of mistakes that are absorbed by a learning entity in the formation of a supposedly reasonable decision-maker, in later years. As to being punished, I think we can only punish ourselves. It would do no good for me to punish you, and you to punish someone else. With, supposedly only six degrees of separation between all of us, the anguish I cause you by punishing you, and so on, would come back to me from hundreds, if not, thousands of people daily.'
'We have Simon on the line in Kent. You have a question for Martin.'
'Hello, thank you for having me on. Martin, I think you are up your own fundament. Why do you think you are so special? You have already told us you are damaged goods. Why should anyone listen to the rubbish that comes out of your mouth, when you know it pollutes us?'
'You shouldn't have to, should you? I understand why you are cross, why you consider me weaker than you, and why you feel sidelined.'
'I didn't say that. I am trying to establish why you think your holier than thou attitude is useful to the everyday population of Britain.'
'It isn't, Simon. I am not comfortable in my life, or with my life. I have, in talking to myself, told myself I wanted a divorce from myself. A complete separation. I spent many years sifting through my life trying to find episodes in which I was the instigator of conflict and lies. I have tried to forgive all the people who hurt me, failed to protect me, lied to me, and cheated me. I have not been able to do that in its entirety. I have not been able to do that because I find it difficult to forgive myself once I have forgiven everyone else. I am a product of my environment and I failed to recognise that until it was too late. Of course, Simon, I am not at fault for blindly acting as I did before I knew it was wrong. I made vicarious mistakes because I did not know differently. I cannot forgive myself for continuing to act badly, for allowing the vicarious mistakes to become my own mistakes. I did not spend any time trying to separate other people's mistakes from my own. So, Simon, I don't think I am better or worse than you, because I still use heuristics that are hard-wired into my make-up. A long time ago, someone said to me that he wished he did not know so much. He was troubled. It was obvious. Today, Simon, I am troubled. Yesterday I was troubled, and tomorrow I will be troubled. When I wrote my book, I had an idea that I would put a preface in it that read, 'If you want to know about me, observe yourself.'
'Searing! Thank you for your call, Simon. I hope you feel that Martin has answered your question. Martin, you mentioned that you have tried to forgive everyone else but find it hard to forgive yourself. Could you go into a little more detail?'
'Forgiveness is not something that is done on the spur of the moment. If someone stole my car, I could not simply and immediately forgive the thief. None of us can. I might just as well attribute no value to my car or any of my belongings. There would be no point in taking the keys out or locking the doors. I have PTSD. I have to make a conscious decision to forgive. I don't have the emotional connection to other people in the same way that most other people do; not all people, because everyone, I feel, think, is different and have a greater or lesser ability to empathise with other people. Most of me is made up of childish logic with amendments made by the adult-me who has experienced more than childish-me. The emotional detachment I experienced as a child left a vacuum for ruthlessness to thrive. It is that ruthlessness alongside emotional detachment, which by the way, I can to some extent, still switch on or off, that allows me to be objective about my past actions. I know I can be objective. In many ways, I live my life as an ascetic and place little value in assets. I recognise that optional and discretionary goods are luxuries, and many other people do not. I never seem to remember this though. It is this lack of enthusiasm in me to engage on a personal level with other people's perceived need for things; things that I regard as superfluous to a settled existence that I cannot forgive in myself. I know I can and should, but I don't want to because it is the last shred of who I am, or more precisely was and still am. It is a spoiled part of me which I cannot eradicate.'
'Martin Cadwell, thank you. It has been a pleasure.'
'Thank you. The pleasure was mine.'