Gone West: the wildly stressful effects of Bonkerization

What DO we think we're doing, with our contradictory and cockamamie approaches to stressors?

There was a time when, as any fule kno (sorry, my inner Molesworth¹ popping up), Britain ruled the world. Sturdy British chaps, and some notable women in good thick skirts², bestrode the globe, venturing so far and wide that the sun never set upon the British Empire.

I grew up at the tail end of this world. And although I was brought up in rather straitened circumstances, which is to say “We was flat broke, mate”, we knew that, by and large, the Brits were globally recognized for their adventurousness and fortitude.

As evidence, here is an extract from a radio programme³ (a BBC steam-radio production, no less) that, as it happens, was aired on my ninth birthday:

BILL: With the banana secreted on his person, Neddie Seagoon arrived at the Port of Guatemala where he was accorded the typical Latin welcome to an Englishman.

MORIARTY: Hands up, you pig swine.

SEAGOON: Have a care, Latin devil - I am an Englishman. Remember, this rolled umbrella has more uses than one.

MORIARTY: Oooo!

SEAGOON. Sorry. Now, what’s all this about?

MORIARTY: It is the revolution - everywhere there is an armed rising.

SEAGOON: Are you all in it?

MORIARTY: Right in it - you see, the united anti-socialist non-democratic pro-fascist communist party are fighting to overthrow the unilateral democratic united partisan bellicose pacifist cobelligerent tory labour liberal party.

SEAGOON: Whose side are you on?

MORIARTY: There are no sides - we are all in this together.

Lunacy? Sure, but what inspired, glorious lunacy! It comes from The Goon Show which, in turn, came from the mind and pen of Spike Milligan, supported by a cast that included Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers.

It was, of course, intended to be bonkers. That was the whole point. And it was gloriously funny.

Today, a lot of things seem to be just as bonkers. The only difference is that, very often, they are not meant to be. At least, I don’t think they are.

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Let’s briefly investigate this phenomenon of what I term, if you’ll forgive the use of arcane and archaic slang, Bonkerization.

There are many ways to approach the topic but, here, I’m opting for the lens of ‘Stress’. Stress? Why stress? Well, because it is an essential element of human life (all life, in fact), and an important contributor to our continuing existence.

Some important work on stress was conducted by a Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist called Hans Selye (1907-1982), as part of which he coined the term eustress, meaning good stress. It clarified the fact that stress is actually a spectrum.

The point is, we often think of ‘stress’ as being synonymous with ‘distress’. But, stress is also a contributor to good outcomes, so the term ‘eustress’ is a valuable addition to situate at the opposite end of the stress spectrum. (The ‘eu’ in eustress is from the Greek for ‘good’ - think of such words as eulogy, euphony, euphoria.)

Another important contributor to the study of stress is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. If you are not familiar with the name, Taleb, born 1960, is a Lebanese-American thinker and essayist … and, not least, a wonderful aphorist.

Much of Taleb’s thinking centres on randomness, complexity and uncertainty, and I don’t doubt that, for centuries to come, people will talk about black swan events, a Taleb coinage, which Britannica defines as follows …

black swan event, high-impact event that is difficult to predict under normal circumstances but that in retrospect appears to have been inevitable. A black swan event is unexpected and therefore difficult to prepare for but is often rationalized with the benefit of hindsight as having been unavoidable.

… plus, in the stress arena, his term antifragile has particular relevance.

Taleb recognized that the exact opposite of ‘fragile’ is not ‘tough’ or ‘robust’ or ‘resilient’. Here’s how he introduces his proposition:

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet.⁴ (My emphasis)

All of which is to say …
Stress is an important part of life …
We wouldn’t even be here had it not existed …
When properly confronted, it makes us stronger …
In fact, it makes everything stronger.

To be clear, eustress definitely contributes to human happiness - although I suppose it may be necessary or unavoidable on occasion to get to eustress via distress.

To give a really basic example, remember that sense of achievement when you first overcame your fear and swam a width of the swimming pool? Or, when learning to ride your bicycle, can you recall the sheer joy when you managed to travel at least five meters before toppling over? Bet you didn’t even feel the pain from that grazed knee.

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With this in mind, let’s investigate the issues a little further - in two directions:

1. The point is that a certain level of stress makes a positive contribution in all situations, human and non-human. So, why is it that, very often, in today’s western societies, we seem to be hell-bent on eliminating personal stress while, at the same time, massively increasing group (societal and environmental) stress?
   (Answering this question might well occupy several large volumes but I start the process of attempting an answer of sorts below.)

2. Taleb’s use of ‘anti-’ in ‘antifragile’ is clever and precise. Can the same be said of other current linguistic constructs like ‘antiracist’ and ‘antifa’?
   Answers to this one on the back of a postcard, svp, or in the comments. I may well attempt an answer in a future post.

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Personal Bonkerization

It surely follows that, if stress (in all of its forms) has been an essential feature of individuals’ lives for the development of our species, then striving to eliminate or, at least, greatly reduce it, may re-enable potential harms? Which is to say, the more you try to eliminate personal stress, isn’t it the case that stress becomes more likely to creep up and bite you?

In the final decades of the twentieth century and the at the start of the twenty-first an enormous amount of personal human experience, here in the West, was reclassified in therapeutic terms. Frank Furedi excellently and comprehensively summed this topic up twenty years ago, starting from the premise that:

These days, we live in a culture that takes emotions very seriously. In fact it takes them so seriously that virtually every challenge or misfortune that confronts people is represented as a direct threat to their emotional well-being. Everyday disappointments - rejection, failure, being overlooked - are regarded as risks to our self-esteem.⁵

Spot on, say I. And we have gone a good stretch further down this road in the two decades since those words first appeared.

A key means deployed to respond to the problem has been the Therapy Culture of Furedi’s book title.

The relationship between the narrative of illness transmitted through therapeutic culture and its impact on people is a dialectical one. The narrative of illness does not simply frame the way people are expected to feel and experience problems - it also constitutes an invitation to infirmity.⁶ (My emphasis)

Furedi went on to reference a survey, current at the time of his writing, that showed that children as young as eight were describing themselves as “stressed by relationships and school.” The survey team leader, Professor Stephen Palmer of City University, stated, “If you had asked 8-year-olds about stress 20 years ago, they would have looked blank … now they understand the concept and a significant number report experiencing it.”

In fact, all matters to do with ‘care’ and ‘protection’, particularly insofar as they affect young people, have moved to an extreme. ‘Care’, after all, is a therapeutic term and if you reinvent the world with that as a key issue and outcome it must inevitably lead to people viewing the world with it as a primary focus.

Which is to say, we, so to speak, ‘medicalized’ the whole western world. Among other things, this relieved people of much of their personal responsibility and repositioned them as permanently potential ‘victims’.

Societal Bonkerization

So, let’s now ramp this up to the societal level to see how it works out en masse. What happens if people slough off much of their active individual agency and recreate themselves as potential reactive victims of cruel circumstance?

The first thing to say is that, for many Western countries, it represents a major cultural change. And that’s a statement that leads to the question, what is culture?

Here’s a definition that I believe is a) accurate and b) squares with my sense of the word, having been born and brought up in the UK and, specifically, in England. Culture is …

… a unitary complex of interacting assumptions, modes of thought, habits, and styles, which are connected in secret as well as overt ways with the practical arrangements of a society and which, because they are not brought to consciousness, are unopposed in their influence over men’s minds.⁷

Okay, so, are we then able to define UK or British or English culture? Perhaps. Here’s one strand of it, from a work titled English Traits from the pen of American philosopher and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882):

[The English] require you to be of your own opinion, and they hate the coward who cannot in practical affairs answer yes or no. They dare to displease, nay, they will let you break all the rules if you do it natively and with spirit.⁸

Hmm, well, okay, I grant you that dates from getting on for two centuries ago but, to some extent, that’s the point. Cultures are like the currents of the deep ocean: established, strong, ongoing, slow to change. So it seems fair to use Emerson’s opinion, if for no other purpose than one of comparison.

Yet, today, expressing “your own opinion … natively and with spirit” may result in a visit from the local constabulary.

That appears to be what happened to cause PC Plod to knock on the door of UK journalist Allison Pearson, one year after she had posted a tweet in November 2023, and ask her to attend an interview for a non-crime offence? She was not informed which tweet had caused offence, nor who her accuser (sorry, ‘victim’) was.

And this is just one example among a burgeoning host of insane actions that we have now to confront. We are in mad territory. Bonkerization has already made extraordinary inroads into western lives.

The Allison Pearson incident prompted Lionel Shriver to write:

For police to pursue citizens for ‘non-crimes’ is a little like bin men coming round to your house to pick up ‘non-rubbish’ - thus hauling away your new sitting-room sofa.⁹

Bravo. It really is past time to push back and I shall continue on this theme in a future post.

To conclude this time, however, it seems appropriate to go back to The Goon Show, because that was the exemplar par excellence of delivering what might today be considered offensive, and yet have you laughing your socks off.

How about this? It’s Spike Milligan’s intro to the script for The Scarlet Capsule:

In 1903, the £22 fine that London Transport paid for assisting illegal immigrants caused immediate bankruptcy. Our story, set in the 21st century, tells how a group of rusting archaeologists discovered rotting commuter skulls near Finchley Central. Further digging reveals the mysterious graffiti-ridden scarlet capsule. Could this be the Lost Kingdom of the Northern Line, or merely an out of order telephone box? Leading demon Ned Quartermess is brought in to investigate, and immediately things deteriorate. With his Jewish kilt at half-mast, our expert is baffled by the insignificance of Minnie’s Irish stews.¹⁰

More of this kind of insanity, please. Any more of the kind we are currently experiencing will surely lead, in relatively short order, to the West … er … going West? And I cannot stress enough how big a tragedy that would be.

Thanks for reading.

1. See Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans, with drawings by Ronald Searle. The series includes Down with Skool! (1953), How to be Topp (1954), Whizz for Atomms (1956), Back in the Jugg Agane (1959)

2. For example, see The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt by Mary Russell (1994). Wonderful accounts of some extremely adventurous women.

3. Milligan, Spike. The Affair of the Lone Banana, The Goon Show, Series 5 Number 5, aired on the BBC on Tuesday 26th October 1954.

4. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand (2012)

5. Furedi, Frank. Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (2004)

6. Furedi, Frank. Ibid.

7. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity (1971, 1972)

8. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. English Traits (1856)

9. Shriver, Lionel. The true meaning of free speech. The Spectator (20 November 2024)

10. Milligan, Spike. The Scarlet Capsule (first broadcast by the BBC, 2nd February 1959 - intro in More Goon Show Scripts (1973)