Prisons We Choose To Live Inside by Doris Lessing

Originally delivered as a series of five lectures on CBC radio for the 1985 Massey Lectures (the Canadian equivalent of the BBC’s annual Reith lectures), this late mid-career (or early late career) 80-page Doris Lessing essay is a disappointingly stunted and self-defeating diatribe against the dangers of “group think”, which heartily champions and dives into the mainstream liberal Western view of rising neoconservativism: that what we had in Europe, Canada, USA etc in the eighties and nineties was the best we ever had it as a species, and that liberal capitalism is the peak and the dream and the zenith, baybe…

How wrong, alas, how wrong…

–///–

Having read Lessing’s under-read masterpiece, Children of Violence (a five volume work of autobiographical fiction that gets increasingly less autobiographical to the point where the final chapter of the final book, The Four-Gated City, is set in the shattered remnants of a late 20th century that has been ravaged by global nuclear war), I am aware – of course – that as a young woman she was a committed and idealistic member of the Communist party, and drifted away from this.

Elsewhere, even in her later writing, there remains a general (but not consistent) progressive edge to her writing and thought, but it is important to realise that there is a limit to this, and Prisons We Choose To Live Inside is a great demonstration of this: Doris Lessing believed in Democracy.

Democracy.

The vote.

Political representation.

Parliaments.

Governments.

Free and fair elections.

Etc…

Understanding propaganda and the ways in which economic power is maintained, though, and she still believes in it as an idea and an ideal…

Lessing writes here about Margaret Thatcher’s heavy use of Saatchi and Saatchi (an infamous marketing/advertising agency here in the UK) during her mid-80s re-election campaign and – Lessing still believes that getting the opportunity to vote is, in itself, an important and genuine victory…

Whereas, in reality, it is almost always a symbolic one, and the actual machinations and machineries of government and governance and trade and economics are never put in a position (even in most “liberal democracies”) where something as trivial as “the will of the people” is permitted to affect them…

Obviously, one shouldn’t expect anarchism from establishment/establishment-adjacent novelists (they don’t give the effing Nobel Prize to just anyone!), but – for me – a long-form essay that seeks to disparage the dangers of being swept up into group-think, exploring the idea that people often do end up within thought bubbles, echo chambers, should try not to hold anything as a universal truth…

people find and choose to spend time with like-minded people – or people they think are like-minded – over those who disagree with or “challenge” them.

Lessing writes about how people have been shown to double down when questioned, how extremism and extremist thought feeds into and compacts itself, making a feedback loop that makes people increasingly stuck…

However, though, this essay is as guilty of doing this as the Communist or Fundamentalist Islamic states considered the enemies of Canada and the UK in the mid-80s that Lessing here rails against…

When one believes that one is right, one tends to ignore arguments against ones opinions…

And when you believe that living in a country where the ruling party (whose policies explicitly and aggressively only benefit the elites) are able to spend vast sums of money and use persuasive techniques (elsewhere termed “brainwashing”) to win elections is fine as long as it’s legal to tell people they did this, then you really are in a position where you’re trying to defend the indefensible…

I dunno.

I don’t see any Western democracies that are working out well for the majority of their inhabitants.

Working out well for their elites, sure, working out well for the already rich and powerful, yeah, sure… But for the rest of us, meh…

These places are not for us…

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Lessing does address this, of course, lamenting that younger, supposedly leftist or leftish anti-capitalists continue to repeat Marxist criticisms that – to her, in the eighties – feel like tired old communist clichés, and that anyone expressing opinions like mine is just doing so from a luxurious position where they have never had to live under the yoke of an explicitly undemocratic government…

Maybe.

But the democratic government we do have doesn’t fucking seem to me like it has the best interests of the majority of the population at heart…

I dunno.

I dunno I dunno I dunno.

A minor work, imo, from a major writer.

Not a Lessing I will be recommending. But it is important to remember that my personal politics – i.e. optimistic anarchism – remain a fringe opinion…

I don’t know how people live without despairing, those people who presume everyone that isn’t them is a selfish shit… But they do, and most of them seem to be much happier than I am.

Who knows?

What is this world???

And, more importantly, why???