CHAPTER THREE
HOW SHOULD I ADDRESS DEMONS?
The last example of the previous chapter expanded the field of enquiry dramatically, and introduced a new problem.
Until then, I seemed to be simply advocating talking to something—car, copier, cat, plant or whatever. Though revolutionary in concept, as I explained, it is hardly revolutionary in practice because it comes so naturally. Many more people talk to objects than would admit it—”Hurry up, you silly thing!” says the secretary as she stands fretting by the office printer.
But when I suggest talking to a complex comprising discrete phenomena—like a run of bad luck— and naming it a demon, then we are moving up a gear. How the hell does one talk to a run of bad luck? Let us begin with an illustration.
ILLUSTRATION – A YOUNG MAN WITH A PROBLEM
A bright young man has just left Oxford with a good degree and track record for enterprising extra curricular activities, and he needs to get a job.
He’s got used to a Summer vacation, so puts off thinking about the problem until September. Then he thinks about it.
After a couple of weeks thinking he discusses it with someone who suggests looking in the Guardian job adverts. So he buys the paper every day and studies the ads.
The jobs all sound so boring that he does not reply to any of them. After three weeks he hears that several of his old friends are being interviewed for jobs and panic sets in. He studies the next Guardian very thoroughly and decides that one of the jobs doesn’t sound too awful and might be worth considering. So he considers it for a week or two, discusses it with friends and family, looks up the company’s website and imagines what it would be like working there. In the third week he prepares a very careful application letter in great detail, re-wring it several times to get it perfect, then keeping it and re-reading it for a few more days before sending it off.
He is told that the position has already been filled. This precipitates a mild depression and it is a week before he looks at adverts again, and now they look as dull as ever but he makes a couple of desultory applications, trying now to sound as dull as the positions advertised. Then a fellow graduate who has just got his first job on a mouth-watering initial salary tells him he has nothing to worry about “I only got this job after I’d applied for hundreds of posts—you’ve got to keep applying—ten, twenty letters a day!”
This launches a period of frantic activity and hundreds of applications. After a few weeks he gets his first positive response, but cannot now find the advert among the mountains of old clippings, cannot remember anything about the company nor why he applied. He could look for a website, but his computer is on the blink after all that frantic work, so a few days pass and he feels a bit stupid and decides it is too late to respond, so tears up the letter. This has, however encouraged him to go on applying in a more positive spirit.
Mother is getting worried for him as he is spending more and more time brooding in his room, and suggests he ought to ask Uncle Ronald—a very successful businessman, but one whom our hero considers to be a ghastly prat—so he does nothing about it until mother invites Uncle to dinner. Uncle Ronald fixes an interview with a senior director, but the interview is a disaster because the man seems like just another ghastly prat and our hero responds by going moody. He doesn’t get the job and Uncle Ronald is embarrassed, but Mother is very sympathetic.
Stop, gentle reader, at this point and answer this simple question: will you come to the rescue and offer this bright young man a job?
Really? Why not? He’s had rotten luck and surely deserves a break!
The first thing to demonstrate is that one’s demons can be much more easily detected by other people. The answer I am hoping for is that you would not give him a job because he “clearly has a problem”— in the sense that he owns or is part of the problem himself.
But if we try pointing this out to him he might well protest, insisting that it wasn’t his fault he’d run out of stamps that day and the post office had early closing, that his computer went on the blink, that he’d applied for so many jobs that he got the people’s names muddled and said the wrong thing etc. etc.. All these failures are quite unconnected and surely could have happened to anyone....
Despite all these protestations we are left with a feeling that he is not really trying, that he is somehow pretending to himself that he is searching for work.
OK, so he now admits he has a problem, but externalises it: maybe by calling it “a run of bad luck”, or himself being “a victim of our corrupt capitalist system” or “typical inverted snobbery against Oxbridge graduates”. If he does come to own the problem it amounts to total identification with it: “I’m just a loser, I haven’t got a chance”.
As independent witnesses, however, we recognise that he is part of the problem but is not identical to it. Being aware of a problem does help distinguish oneself from it, so we might decide it is his “attitude” or his “commitment” that is at fault.
But what I am now suggesting is that he should externalise the problem in a different way, by calling it a demon. This guy has a demon that is persuading him he ought to get a job while sabotaging his efforts. The demon has occupied the space between desiring employment and failing to get it, and is quite comfortable in that niche. If our hero were to get a job, that space would close up and the demon would have to go or else adapt—maybe making him dissatisfied with the job he now has. So it is in the demon’s interest to keep him failing to get work. Equally, the gap would close if he were to give up wanting a job, so the demon wants to keep him trying.
This illustrates the fact that demons usually like to be left alone in their niche. The best option for this demon is that the hero just keeps trying and keeps failing, but it is not that simple. Our hero is a human intelligence that detects patterns and needs the stimulus of new approaches from time to time and this tends to raise the stakes. So, the way things are going, he might take to drugs to relieve the pain of not getting a job, and the resulting changes to his character make him even less employable. Then there is the possibility of suicide attempts, and maybe turning to crime.
If the demon wants to be left alone, the first problem will be how to convince our hero that there really is a demon. This is why he either projects the problem out by saying that he is simply unlucky, or a victim of society, or else totally takes over the problem by saying he’s a no-good loser. Whereas I say that he has a demon—a third thing that is neither fully out there nor fully him. The situation is summarised in this diagram—a whole host of “simple explanations” lie out there trying to tempt us away from the central realisation that he has a demon.
“Tempt us away”? that’s a curious way to put it —but it reflects the fact that all those other simple explanations are themselves just demons trying to attract our attention—an important extension of the argument but one that we put aside for the time being and will return to later.
So the next problem is to resist our own rationalising habits described in the introduction—the tendency encouraged by our religious and scientific culture to analyse and dissect rather than to personify. The questions it raises are along these lines: “but what exactly is this demon? Is it a problem in society or is it an unconscious complex?”. Is he not getting a job because he is a personification of youthful rebellion, a principle that could actually regenerate some hidebound organisation were it not for the fact that the establishment resists change and will refuse such people a job rather than accept
