Dr Iain McGilchrist and Mark Tyrrell Discuss the Coronavirus Situation

I recently had a discussion with Dr. Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary, about his views on the Coronavirus situation and what it might mean for the World.

Watch it in full here or read the transcript below

Interview transcript

1. Mark: It’s good to see you and I guess up there in Skye life pretty much seems as normal.
2. Iain: Certainly my life does. Self-isolation is part of my modus operandi. I’m quite used to that but I’m fortunate because the space here, I have a nice garden, and there’s nobody around so I don’t feel the sort of cabin fever that I think a lot of people in towns and cities must feel.
3. Mark: That’s right. I really think a lone parent a highrise with two children it must be really difficult.
4. Iain: I think very testing indeed, yes. So I count myself among the most fortunate.
5. Mark: Yeah. So thinking about this whole pandemic and the way that it’s arisen, it really resonates with me what you wrote about the west hemispheric wave attending to reality, in that we think we know what’s going to happen, or perhaps we assume a little bit what the future’s going to be, and then life is what happens when you’re making other plans. This weird, kind of unexpected for many world changing, life altering, occurrence is happening right now and there’s a lot of uncertainty, we don’t know when it’s going to finish, when it’s going to end, when people can get back together, do you see that as something that the left hemisphere would struggle with more than a wider context we’re looking at things?
6. Iain: Yes, I think that we’ve got used to feeling that it’s all under our control, which is to revert to the hemisphere idea. And certainly the point of the left hemisphere is to be able to control, predict and manipulate. I think we were overdue an event that showed us that this is not the case. Often I remember one of the things with patients who have anxiety is the feeling that things are not under their control. I spent a lot of my time saying to people, “Well that’s not so bad because actually very little is under your control. Almost nothing starting from when you were born, who your parents are, how you were brought up, what height you are.” These are things that are given and you make the best of that. So I think that’s good.
7. Iain: I think more importantly thinking from the hemispheric point of view the mention of a context. I mean, I have a lot of things actually, but the context. In other words, we’ve narrowed down the context to the very immediate things that we think we understand and control. And it’s rather time that that was recast. I think it’s become harmful. I think we’ve become self-obsessed, unimaginative, rather inward looking, in the way in which we work as a society. Sometimes it takes quite a serious jolt to get into another way of thinking. And I think it was going to take something like this, or God forbid a war, to make us think about our lives and the way in which we relate differently.
8. Iain: I mean, at the moment there is what is often described as a meaning crisis. I’ve often asked about the meaning crisis. Somehow I feel that it takes a crisis to restore meaning. Crisis actually is an interesting word. It was introduced in English to describe the turning point of a disease. So the crisis was the moment at which you saw the force go into the disease and it was either going to get worse or better. This was the crucial point of judgment, which is what the word crisis literally in Greek means.
9. Iain: And so I see this as a turning point which we can either use for better or fail to use. I’m worried that when it’s over we may forget what we learned, but there’s a lot that we can learn in the meantime. It restores a sense-
10. Mark: Yes. Last night there was a big sort of national cheer for the NHS in the UK. I don’t know whether you heard any of that where you are but probably not. You know, fireworks going off and there was a sense of connectivity and that we’re all in this together. I don’t want us to have overplayed that because obviously lots of people are suffering and it’s very, very hard financially and physically of course for lots of people, but there is that meaning vacuum that we may have had collectively. The sense that we are working together to overcome something. It hasn’t been around for a long, long time it feels. It feels that everything became very splintered, all these different groups, interest groups, and so forth. Whereas now, as you talk about the crisis, might be precipitating a new way of relating to reality as a nation or as a world even to some extent.
11. Iain: Yes, and I think one of the two obviously good things that come out of this situation however much hardship it may cause is that a renaissance of humanitarian spirit and, of course, the other is the effects on the environment, which I’m sure we will come back to. I think it is a very important point that we have become atomistic and it sometimes takes a common cause like this to bring out the best in people.
12. Iain: One of the reasons there’s been a meaning crisis actually is that there hasn’t been much for people to commit themselves to that is not self-generated and self-focused. And this gives us an opportunity to think about other people and there are many wonderful stories of people looking after their neighbors. There are also sadly stories of people using it as an opportunity to abuse trust and so fort. I’m afraid unfortunately there are always going to be people like that. But the positive thing is the sense of being able to belong and to help one another.
13. Iain: Interestingly in our society there are two extremes that are more like one another than the terrain in the middle. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that a society which is entirely communitarian in some rather totalitarian way, such as a communist state, is one extreme. It doesn’t actually produce communitarian spirit at all. And the other is being an aggregation of atomistic entities. So the distinct, not just distinct but actually separate from one another, and that has a smoother effect that doesn’t give rise to communitarian spirit.
14. Iain: What you want is rather than either of these extremes that have more in common with one another than they have with the middle position… The middle position is a benign position in which we are ourselves but we use what is unique and special to ourselves, the gifts we have, to help others. So I think that’s what we’re beginning to see. I’m very much hoping that we can learn from that. I think everyone will learn from it having experienced a bit of it and carry it on when this crisis, God willing, is over.
15. Mark: That’s really interesting. So the two extremes would be an extremeness of capitalistic, self-referential on an individual level, some society perhaps that’s familiar to us, and this sort of totalitarian, forced collectivity kind of system, which paradoxically tells people to become more self-interested and less community minded. This balanced way in the middle is really perhaps kind of ideal that the world needs as a sort of corrective, perhaps.
16. Iain: It’s in all relationships whatsoever this need for togetherness with difference. It’s also imaged how a good couple, a married couple or a couple of partners who has committed to one another, live. Which is to say that if the relationship is working well there isn’t fusion so that the two become as one and they lose their identity. But it also isn’t that they’re so separate from one another that they don’t have a depth of communion with one another. So what you’re always aiming for is preparation and enough togetherness. That’s really what I’m getting at.
17. Mark: Yeah.
18. Iain: But it’s not as it might sound a rather boring compromise. What I’m trying to emphasize gives rise to something that is full of life, which neither of the other extremes actually have. So it’s not a kind of flabby compromise, it’s actually the thing we should always be aiming for.
19. Iain: One of the things that comes with a crisis of this kind is also a sense of proportion which is related to it. So we can easily get things out of proportion particularly when there are very few immediate hardships. We live in the west in a society where most of us, and I count myself among them, for most of our lives have not experienced many of the things that in other societies and in other times and places people have to endure as part of the whole business of being alive. So we can get things in psychiatric proportion because we will always need something to resist and something to fight for and something to complain about, but it can easily become a little bit trivial. I think what this crisis gives is the opportunity to see things in a new light. Certainly I found myself reframing my relationships altogether so that one realizes that close relationships with family and friends, which fortunately because of modern technology we can keep up, become extremely important. Our duties throughout this and our sense of commitment to others is clearer. I think this is a benign development.
20. Mark: It’s certainly noticeable. People I know and myself it’s something that you are actually talking to people that you care and love, and there is that sense of paradoxically greater connection because you’re actually extending your care and your concern for other people around you. It was very responsorial to see that half a million people responded to the call to work for the NHS as volunteers.
21. Iain: Yeah.
22. Mark: I think the government was looking for 200,000 and 500,000 people have responded to that. So it’s very heartening, I think.
23. Iain: Yes. I’ve got more than that upping the stakes to 750,000 if they can get them. This is absolutely fantastic, especially as we know that it might hit the second and I hope the situation will quickly improve, but who knows, but at the moment there really are not enough protective gear, masks and clothing and so forth or testing kits.
24. Iain: This is very close to my life because my eldest daughter is a nurse in California in one of the areas that is locked down and has a high mortality rate. In her hospital, there were no masks and there were no testing kits. She was so shocked by this that she’s a member of a group of other healthcare professionals who chain together, mainly in the US, and she emailed them at their hospital and said, “Is it just my hospital or is this what you’re experiencing”? And was appalled to find that this is the general situation in America. And I don’t want to get party political about this but I’ve heard some, I don’t know whether they’re true, but stories that Trump was offered testing kits and offered protective gear but turned them down on the basis that they weren’t needed.
25. Iain: This was a couple months ago. That may or may not be news, it might be what was fake news. I don’t know. But in any case, that is part of the problem. It wouldn’t surprise me if that were the case because, as you know, I believe that one of the many elements that goes to make a picture of a society dominated by the left hemisphere’s outlook is that the left hemisphere is in denial, I mean in a very strong way in denial, that there’s anything wrong. If half the body is paralyzed it will claim that it can run a marathon. So he’s completely out of touch. So when you’re in this state of affairs, you think all is fine. I think Trump is an expression of that mentality and perhaps-
26. Mark: Almost a metaphor for the left hemisphere.
27. Iain: Sorry.
28. Mark: I say almost a metaphor for the left hemisphere, Trump.
29. Iain: It’s one of say 20 aspects of modern culture.
30. Mark: Yeah.
31. Iain: Or even more that look like it bears the hallmarks of the left hemisphere’s take on things. So it’s important that that gets corrected, not in some horrible pranky way, but as I say to restore a sense of proportion that we can’t assume that things will always go on in the way that they apparently do now. Immediately one thinks of Taleb’s book The Black Swan, in which an event which may be very rare is almost certain to crop up sooner or later, probably not in the next few minutes, but when it does its consequences will be so devastating that you need to have prepared for it.
32. Iain: I was very struck by learning that Singapore had a 330-bed hospital which was equipped to deal with such an outbreak such as this, and it was kept ticking over and empty all the time until this crisis came along and then it was suddenly able to come into action. Of course, they have one of the most successful communities in dealing with this virus. So we don’t seem to make provision for the idea that things will not always be like this, and our culture encourages that sort of thinking not to save, not to be sensible about preparation for things that we don’t like to think about, but instead to disregard them as we carry on spending and doing and traveling and thereby polluting and using up the good things that this earth has to offer us.
33. Iain: There are other good things that is coming out of this and we must all be aware of that which is the both immediate and less immediate impact on the environment. When I say immediate, I mean as my friends in London say, it’s quite extraordinary to hear the street. There isn’t airplanes flying over, there isn’t traffic, there isn’t the hum of machinery. You can actually hear birds. You can hear people’s voices. Seeing more humans, even if there is a cost that is paid for that.
34. Iain: Also in the longer run, we see even in this very short spell that pollution in the atmosphere over China and over Western Europe, as viewed from space, is clearly less and the water is becoming purer, fish are returning to places where they haven’t been seen perhaps in a lifetime. People tell me that they’ve seen for the first time certain insects in the gardens, even in London. So things are responding. That’s one of the most extraordinary things is nature is quite wonderful if given a chance. We have been so relentless in our attack on it that if it could just exist, certainly for the period that we’re going to have to, but perhaps take that into account when this crisis is over. I do so hope because if we don’t my hunch is that something else will inevitably come along. Gaia, as it were, will take steps to restore herself. That might sound a bit mysterical but any complex system cannot take certain amounts of input without changing its nature altogether.
35. Mark: I think when you said… Sorry.
36. Iain: Go on.
37. Mark: What you said about hoping that we remember the lessons from this when, and if, it finishes is really interesting. I’m often struck by the fact that when we’re not in pain anymore, physical pain, we don’t really appreciate not being in pain anymore. It’s almost quite valuable to remember what it was like being in pain, whether that’s something through the left hemisphere which tends to shut down and deny negatives to some degree and not account for possible bad things happening. But we do need to take lessons forward because it’s been so dramatic, hasn’t it? I’m amazed how quickly nature seems to have reasserted itself. If I go in the park there’s three times as many squirrels and birds and bees than there were two weeks ago. It’s been so fast it seems to me.
38. Iain: Well it’s a completely wonderful thing. It may remind us actually how miraculous nature is. I do think of nature as not just a bunch of stuff but as something that is connected to us in spirit as well as materially. I do hope that we do remember these things but, as you say, when one’s out of pain one doesn’t remember pain.
39. Iain: I had two personal memories of this. One was that many years ago, about 30 years ago, and I got stuck in a lift in a hotel in Madrid where the lift went up suddenly to beyond the top floor of 15 floors and got lodged at the top of the shaft and the doors wouldn’t open and the thing wouldn’t move. So I tried the intercom and ventilator. The intercom failed to work. The ventilator worked for 20 seconds and then went off. I was in there with my brother. I thought it’s the weekend, this is Saturday morning, the top floor is only used for conferences, nobody’s going to find us for 48 hours.
40. Iain: Anyway, to cut a long story short, somehow we managed to make our presence felt and little by little the thing was manually winched down and somebody managed to unlock doors and we came out on the 15th floor. While I’d been in the lift, I said to myself, “If I ever get stuck… When I get out of here, one of my things is I will not be using lifts, I will simply use the stairs.” When I came out, incidentally, the lift is all right now. Do you want to go down to the bottom floor? And I thought I could walk down the 15 floors. I thought, no, I’ll use the lift. How crazy is that? So we do lose track of these.
41. Iain: The other thing that happened to me is I live in the country where our water supply comes from a stream. In January, a year ago, for 14 days we had no water. No hot water. No cold water. You can imagine what that means, nothing to wash dishes, nothing to wash yourself, nothing to do any of the normal things even to cook or whatever. It all had to be brought by buckets from the stream and so on. I really thought how miraculous when the water came back I could scarcely believe you could just go to a tap in the room and turn it on and out it would come. Water, just to command like that. And once more there’s another one that would produce instantly hot water.
42. Mark: Yeah.
43. Iain: For a few days I did realize that but no, now I find I’ve completely forgotten about it. So it’s how do we internalize the memories of the really good things and make sure we don’t squander them?
44. Iain: One of the things I’ve noticed is that I’m much more careful about not wasting anything in the house. I mean I’m always pretty aware of waste but I really want to make sure that I don’t use up any of the things I’ve got in the house any faster than I need to because I’m not sure when exactly I’ll be able to replace them. And that’s a very healthy state of mind.
45. Iain: When I’m reminded of the fact that in the 18th century paper were so scarce that people used to… Thank God in those days, of course, they had much clearer and more structured handwriting than we do, but they used to write a letter first of all down the page and then turn it to 90 degrees and write across the page so they only used one sheet of paper. You’d have to have quite good right hemispheric skills to be able to even read that I imagine. But nonetheless it’s a lesson in how we need to [inaudible 00:23:25] things. Nowadays we have an infinitely greater number of people using paper than we had and it’s not a resource that we can just carry on relying on. [crosstalk 00:23:38]
46. Mark: And sort of valuing stuff that we don’t usually value. Literally valuing it. We’re allowed out once a day for exercise to go for a walk or something. I found myself getting excited at the prospects of doing something that usually you take completely for granted. It does sort of produce a level of wellbeing. And not to say that lots of people aren’t suffering and that it’s very difficult, but that’s very important lessons.
47. Mark: What about the financial situation, of course, because it seems to be that the economies are pumping billions, or in some cases trillions, of dollars in them and some made up money, helicopter money kind of thing. This is obviously going to have consequences, isn’t it? I mean, it’s very hard to see how the economies as we know them are going to continue, or the world economy’s going to continue as we know it.
48. Iain: Certainly. Of course, I’m the last person to ask about this because I really don’t understand economic systems. What I do understand, of course, is that they can print money. In the end its value depends on things that are happening, work that is done, things that are produced. And if work isn’t being done and things aren’t being produced then everything that we have is being devalued. I may be wrong but I think that seems to be a basic truth.
49. Mark: Yes.
50. Iain: So quite what will happen in the wake of this I don’t know. But I’m very glad that at least we look after people who are less fortunate than, for example, I may be. Although I’m a retired person and therefore can’t afford to have much of the money that I have devalued. But I think that’s the last thing on my mind at the moment. I’m sure that will work itself out. What won’t work itself out unless we’re very careful to remember the lessons is how we care for the environment. And also how we think of one another and how we value peace, class and silence? The tendency will be, and possibly is now, to fill up silence with doing stuff and listening to things that are being said like, no doubt, this podcast.
51. Iain: That is good up to a point but like all things it’s only good up to a point. And taking the opportunity to listen to some silence is a very beautiful thing. Silence is a precious thing, it’s a rare commodity, it’s not an absence so much as a presence. We’re never more absent than when we’re constantly bombarded with stimulation. We’re much more present when we’re there in the moment attending. That’s sort of built-in to the sort of way I live here and I’m very lucky in that. I chose to live here probably because that’s an offer. But I’m hoping that it will strike a lot of people that peace and silence and not having to be doing all the time, not having to be buying, not having to be winning, not having to be striving, but actually being with oneself and thinking peacefully is a very valuable thing to do.
52. Iain: I think that, like many bad things, some good can come of it. As indeed many good things, I’m afraid, we value can lead to unforeseen bad consequences. So we never really know until we see the whole picture, which in one lifetime we probably won’t, what good and what bad comes from things.
53. Iain: It especially reminds that I know you will know but perhaps some listeners will not, the Chinese story of the man who loses a horse. His horse disappears one day. It’s most of what he own and very important to him. So his neighbors say, “What terrible luck.” And he says, “Well, bad luck, good luck, who knows.” Then the next day, his horse comes back together with another horse that it’s met on the hillside and now he has two horses. And the neighbors say, “Oh, how lucky you are.” And he says, “Well, good luck, bad luck, who knows.” The next day his son gets on the new horse to break it in, and the horse is a bit wild and throws him off and he breaks his leg. And the neighbors say to him, “Oh, what a pity. You poor man. What bad luck.” And he says, “Well, bad luck, good luck, who knows.” The next day recruiters for the Imperial Army come through recruiting all the able-bodied men to go away to war and they pass over his son because he’s not able to walk. They say, “What luck you are”? He says, “Well, good luck, bad luck, who knows.”
54. Iain: In other words, we just haven’t the knowledge of the consequences of what’s happening. And it’s much too soon to think that anything is 100% bad or 100% good.
55. Mark: Yeah, because we just don’t know and we don’t have a wider context.
56. Iain: No.
57. Mark: We have a narrow context. At the moment, this doesn’t seem good, or this seems bad and therefore it is. But the wider context is, of course, time as well as unforeseen consequences from things. There also seems to be that we’ve all been plumaged into a state of huge uncertainty, which we’re not really used to. We like definites. We like to know what next week is going to be like or next year. Suddenly the world has got to learn to deal with uncertainty which seems to be a more mostly right hemispheric ways of dealing with unknown contexts.
58. Iain: It certainly is. One way of thinking about the tasks of the two hemispheres in generating communication with the world and our living in the world is that the left hemisphere wants all the time to narrow down to a certainty, whereas the right hemisphere is opening up to a possibility.
59. Iain: So the right hemisphere appreciates that, in fact, nothing is ever certain. Certainty is a nonexistent state that the best one can say is that one approximates to it to some degree some of the time in some things. But the reality is that our life is always completely uncertain. Becoming used to that and accepting that, becoming used to the fact that there’s very little in this world that we can control and the wisdom is making the best of what comes to us rather than trying to force and outcome, which we really haven’t got the ability to do. To think in that way that we are in uncertainty, we’re not all powerful, but we can do the little things that are within our spirit. That is the very balance and wise perhaps in mind that perhaps we’ve lost the grasp for. And, again, it’s not about despairing that we can’t do things, nor having this grandiose idea that we’ll sort it all out. We don’t know what we’ll be able to sort out and that’s perfectly all right.
60. Iain: Again, one of the problems I think is that we tend to think in a disjunct way about problems that the world faces about communities, about ourselves in a community. We tend to have the atomistic fragmented view. You might think, well in that case if you believe that it’s good for everything to hang together then surely you must welcome globalism. Well I think two cheers or perhaps one and half for globalism, but certainly two cheers for localism as well. There are advantages in thinking globally and there are advantages in thinking locally. In terms of the environment, to be helping backup local producers, to source what we can locally, to validate our local communities and what could be produced there, that is not just going to be a useful thing to help us get through the crisis. It’s going to make the difference between whether we survive once this crisis is over or not. We can’t go on having a purely globalistic way of thinking. We need to balance that with a proper sense of the value of our future in a locale, in the community where we belong.
61. Iain: Once again, it’s not one or the other but it’s something very life giving in which you are committed to your local community but not in some tribalistic way which severs you from a larger community. But that you are in harmony with that larger community but not forsaking the all-important local community, be that family, household, those with whom you worship, or whatever it may be, those in your workplace. Those are the people with whom you need to hang together. We need to get back to, once again, it comes down to a sort of balance.
62. Mark: And, as you say, thank God we’ve got the internet and so forth at the moment. It can be the case that we’re more intimate with someone on the other side of the world than we are with our neighbors. And we know more about someone on another continent because of Skype and so forth than we do with someone right next door. That’s a very strange set of affairs really, isn’t it? It’s a very weird thing.
63. Iain: It is. It’s slightly weirder sounding that it might be in the sense that quite often it enables you actually to keep together with your family and very close friends in the way that you would have done in the past, say up until the end of the second World War. Except in extraordinary cases, your family and friends would have been very local to you geographically. When you realize that until 1945 90% of the British population had not traveled more than about five miles from the place they were born in.
64. Iain: So we’ve seen a completely extraordinary overturning of the idea of local community because we’re all so disparate. And so I see the ability to be close to one’s friends and family if they are separate as a benign thing. What I don’t see as benign is tribalism on the internet. There is no possible group to which you can belong that is monopolistic in its goodness and truth. When you start identifying with it totally without being able to be critical of it at the same time that you value its strengths, then you’ve gone somewhere that we don’t want any of us to go. There’s a big difference between valuing and belonging to and supporting people that you live with and people whose lives you share and becoming tribalistic.
65. Mark: Absolutely. What’s really important is that when you think that we get recommended material on the internet that the algorithms deem that we’ll be interested in. So we’re only getting feedback which confirms our group think, or our prejudices, which is perhaps what the left hemisphere kind of does anyway. Yeah. The tribalism on the internet is a curious thing.
66. Iain: And not really unusual in other places, most prominently universities.
67. Mark: Right.
68. Iain: I think I put that up there as one of the crisis of our age, almost up there with… I mean, probably nothing quite compares with destruction of the environment. Because if we really destroy nature and destroy the world then there’s nothing here for us to live on or with. But one of the other crises is that of rigid thinking. I think there is no excuse for banning certain things from being discussed, as long as they’re done in a civilized way. Unfortunately, banning people from doing so has rarely done itself in a civilized way but with viciousness, hatred, and vitriol, and that really doesn’t help anyone. That can never produce good.
69. Iain: Anyway, I think this is not going to be the last crisis of this kind we’re going to see. Particularly in the globalized world that we now live in where any kind of illness is going to spread very quickly, much quicker than it used to in the past. But we may also experience a crisis from migrations populations who are finding it hard to live through climate change in the places where they used to live. I think there may become shortages of resources and, in a way, this is almost certain to happen because the books have got to be balanced.
70. Iain: As much as we live in a world where money is thrown in, we’re always… The government only has something like 3% of its global wealth actually in tangible goods. So if everybody wanted to cash in their money and stick is under the bed, there would be a massive crisis. In much the same way, we’re living on borrowed time and on fantasy goods.
71. Iain: There is a fantastic clip on the internet that I do think everybody should have watched. I’ve certainly sent it to a lot of my friends and certainly to my family. By an American mathematician called Al Bartlett. I think it was 2002. Quite apart from anything else, it’s the most beautiful talk to watch because he’s not a young man but he speaks in perfect sentences without a script and making point after point that is very telling. So I take my hat off to him for that, if for nothing else. But his message is of staggering importance. It’s that we don’t understand exponential change.
72. Iain: This was brought home to me by one of the instances he gives, which is worth recounting. If you have bacteria in a jar that double the size of their colony every minute, and at 12:00 p.m. the jar is full when was it half full? Answer, at 11:59. When was it a quarter full? At 11:58. And at 11:57 only three minutes out of the hour before it was completely full it was only a quarter full. People would have said, “What’s the problem? What are you talking about we’re running out of room”?
73. Iain: Now when you apply that to the way in which our exponential use of resources, exponential pollution, it’s carried on. We’re going to meet a point at which reality breaks in. He writes in an unforgettable scene on one side of a chart all the things that we think of as positive in which we’ve managed to control nature. So we’ve helped to banish disease. We’ve relieved one another of famine. We have largely managed to diffuse wars. All these things are absolutely marvelous, but we’re growing enormously in population as a result of it. We simply can’t support it.
74. Iain: So which of these negative things would you like to step in to restore the balance? It’s a question that nobody wants to face. But, as he points out, it’s not a question of whether you want to face it, it has to be faced. If you don’t face it nature will take this out of our hands. The only way to face it is to limit population growth, grossly limit our demands on the environment, and to get much, much cleverer about limiting pollution. Otherwise, various kinds of horrors which created a virus will seem like a pale shadow, I suspect, will be worse than ever.
75. Mark: And it seems perhaps that we do also need to become clearer about what we need as human beings emotionally as well as physically. We do need a genuine sense of connection and community to people. We do need to feel that we have some influence over events but we can’t control everything, as you’ve been saying. It does seem that we need to get back in touch with what individuals need as much as nations and the global kind of community.
76. Iain: Absolutely. One of the paradoxical things about one’s society in the west is that although it’s very me, me, me, me centered, actually it’s very hard for an individual to express their individuality. They get swallowed up in categories. We’re very quick to categorize people by whatever value we want. So they get put in boxes to do with their class or their skin color or their sex or whatever it might be. And, in fact, a capitalist society, although it has strengths, it has many downsides. One of them being the inevitable need for everybody to compete in order to stay where they are. But another being that it actually trades on the idea that you can be somehow unique and different. Well, actually cynically, I’m hoping to make everybody want and desire the same things and behave in predictable ways.
77. Iain: So there’s a conflict there whereby people hang onto some peripheral thing, perhaps something they’ve bought or a fashion trend that they’re following or the way in which they color their hair or something used to mark them out, but really this is just a sign. It’s just a superficial representation. Whereas the true uniqueness of a person is something that runs right through them, like you’re in Bryson like the word Bryson runs right through Bryson Brook. So your individuality is not a bunch of choices on the surface, it’s who you are in yourself which is entirely, entirely unrepeatable.
78. Iain: So of all the people you know are not really sort of made up as you might imagine out of a coloring kit, where you put together some of color number 42 and some of color number 60, and then you’ve got a new person. No. Each individual person is not made up of bits and categories but is a seamless new hope in the way that a great work of art is not imaginable until it exists. You couldn’t sort of just make it up out of bits of other works of art that you know. You can make a bad works of art that way, but great works of art, which are much more like living beings and they’re like things as we say, they’re individuality is a vibrant element in them.
79. Iain: What I’m really saying is that a society community that works well maximizes the ability for someone to be themselves without that resulting in individualistic striving against the community, but rather contributing as a gift your individuality to the group. After all, who we are it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes out of what nature gave to us in the sense of our genetic heritage and what has been given to us by the society in which we grew up, beginning with our family, a little mother, the family, the society. That is how we come to be the unique person that we are. And then once we are that person, we don’t just go off thinking, Thank you, I’m now complete as a person. You give back into the society that helped to make you. You help to make it.
80. Iain: Now unless we hang onto that idea of getting this balance, which is not, again I emphasize not a sort of flabby midway compromise, one in which you are maximally connected and maximally yourself.
81. Mark: Really interesting in what you say about the parody of individuality that just being yourself has become an advertising slogan really. Be unique, be who you are, and all of this stuff. Yeah.
82. Iain: Yeah. I mean what you do to behave like a flock of people who like this particular sweatshirt and so it’s not that it’s cynically appealing to your sense of individuality. But if it thought that really it was only going to sell one to you it wouldn’t be doing it at all, would it?
83. Mark: Right. The cynical ploys is everyone wants to think that they’re an individual whilst behaving not as such.
84. Iain: Yeah.
85. Mark: This is fascinating. This idea of crisis while leading to possibility opportunity, or perhaps the man with the horse story. We don’t know. We’ve seen that in history as well, haven’t we, that perhaps a balancing of things have been preceded by crisis in some way.
86. Iain: I think it takes a crisis to shift sufficiently our take on the world. Our take on the world has gone badly wrong in the last 50 years. In my view, that’s the theme of atmosphere. I try to explain how and why that is. The book that I’ve just finished writing called The Matter With Things, I go much further into how that has happened and what we might be able to do about it. But when things are that badly askew, it’s no good having a small shift because it’s immediately, once again, subsumed into the old way of looking at things, adapted, subversed, and then it’s no longer a threat to that system that we’ve gotten used to.
87. Iain: It takes something almost cataclysmic and thank God coronavirus is not really cataclysmic. It’s dangerous to some people. I don’t underestimate the suffering that it can cause. I myself am in one of the high vulnerability groups so I know that it does that. But it’s not really a cataclysm of the kind that we might be facing if we were overrun by totalitarian people or there were a plague, which could wipe out a third of the population.
88. Iain: It’s as it were a trial run if you like. It’s a sort of rehearsal for worse things that may come. And my God should we take that into account when this is over and not forget it. Rather, as they say, if you want peace prepare for war. If you want a stable society then build trust and build your defenses against the things that are not any longer beyond imagination.
89. Iain: So I think it has its value when something happens that really gives things a major kick and wakes people up. When I was growing up I’m old enough to have heard a lot of people talk about having a good war. What they meant by that was not that they benefited from the war in any way because they hadn’t and sometimes they’d lost family members. Usually this was also invariably a phrase only used by people who had seen combat. But what they meant was that something happened in their lives that really gave meaning and the sort of sense of facing a common danger, behaving in a way that you didn’t know you could do, the degree of selflessness that you’re capable of. This drew out from them a sense of richness, of meaning in their lives, that in peace time they could never recapture.
90. Iain: Now if we could only maintain that sense of the value without having to be under a cataclysmic threat we will have taken away something very important. So I think there are powerful lessons to learn from this. We simply cannot afford to forget when this crisis is over, whenever it is. There are simple things like I hope that we will never go back to air travel to the degree that we have been doing it. I hope that we will always think is this really worth a trip or can this be done over media. And I’m not saying that people should never travel of course. But it’s a sense of getting this into some proportion and at the moment it’s way, way out of proportion.
91. Iain: One thing that would help enormously, and it’s well within reach, is to have a technology such as Skype which is considerably better than Skype. Skype is excellent and similar things like Zoom and FaceTime and all those things are good up to a point. But then rarely I do do some talks to an auditorium over Skype but it’s not really as good as it could be. I think that if you put a lot of effort into making that technology so good that you could feel as though you were in the auditorium with the people you are looking at, you know the connections were that good, a lot of what we do that requires traveling around the world really wouldn’t need to happen at all.
92. Mark: No.
93. Iain: So there are all kinds of answers to this that are well within our reach and we haven’t thought about them enough because we’ve been content to go on really thoughtlessly polluting and destroying. I am no paragon and if I must travel and then I do. And then right now I can’t. Bad luck, good luck, who knows. It is in some ways wonderful to have nothing in my diary and to be able to focus on quietly on what I need to focus on.
94. Mark: Well it’s been absolutely fascinating and thank you very much, Iain McGilchrist. I hope you stay healthy.
95. Iain: You too.
96. Mark: It’s really good talking to you.
97. Iain: Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
98. Mark: Bye-bye.

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About Mark Tyrrell

Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.

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