John Higgs's Octannual Manual #58
Howard Hughes's Jars
Hello - and we’ve made it to Spring! Hope the sky is blue where you are.
Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who will be published three weeks today, and I’m going on tour to talk about it. The first event will be at the (sold out) Laugharne Festival in Wales on 29 March, and I hope to see Brighton folk at Shoreham Ropetackle on 8 April.
If you’ve been waiting patiently for me to announce a London date - you now have two to choose from. The first is at 21 Soho on 15 April with the golden Andrew O’Neill - tickets for this are here. And the week after I’m in Walthamstow with legendary music journo Andrew Harrison - tickets are here. There’s also an online event via the How To Academy on 10 April, if that makes more sense for you.
And I’ll also be at Bath, Wendover, Liverpool, Margate, Clevedon, Wells-Next-The-Sea, Belfast, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Lewes, Sheffield and York, plus a few more things still to announce. More details on all these are here.
SOME WORDS ON HOWARD HUGHES’S JARS
When you think about Howard Hughes, one of the richest men of the twentieth century, what tends to come to mind is not his pioneering achievements in aviation, but the fact that he spent his later years alone in darkened hotel rooms surrounded by jars of his own piss. I recall being shocked when I first heard this - it seemed then so different from how the ultra rich were supposed to live. But the rich have continued to get richer since then, and it no longer seems surprising.
When you become extremely rich, you become isolated. You will be surrounded by people, but they will not be equals or peers who will talk frankly and honestly with you. They will only be there because of the money and if the money vanishes, so will they. You will be, essentially, alone with your staff and the constant buzz of people attempting to get something from you. You will trust no-one, feel no loyalty, and avoid facing what you have lost. On paper billionaires are rich, but in practice they are some of the poorest people alive. It is not surprising that, in these circumstances, long standing or latent mental health issues flare up, as they did with Howard Hughes.
All of which brings us inevitably to Elon Musk - on paper the richest man alive, and in practice a total basketcase. Of all the questionable things he’s done recently, one is particularly revealing. Musk told Joe Rogan that ‘the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy’, during part of an approving discussion about the notion of ‘suicidal empathy’. This is a paranoid belief, popular with the far right, which argues that empathy - the ability to be aware of and share another person's feelings, experiences, and emotions - does not enrich you or help you succeed, but will in fact destroy you.
Anthropologists, of course, will tell you that this is nonsense. Empathy is the root cause of human civilization, and it was the development of a theory of mind regarding others that led first to language and then to cooperation, culture, technological progress and everything that followed. Empathy is also what allows us to imagine what it is like to be as isolated, alone and unloved as Musk appears to be, which helps us to understand why he finds empathy so painful that he has to reject it.
Dismissing empathy will, of course, only create further mental conflict. Musk’s self-image paints him as a saviour figure, fated to save humanity from climate change by establishing life on the radioactive hell-hole of Mars. Yet if empathy is a weakness then his reasons for doing this collapse - and so does his entire self image. How long can someone pretend to care for mankind when he doesn’t even love his own daughter? Ketamine can only mask this contradiction for so long. At which point, a jars of piss collection is probably the best we can hope for.
Empathy is, I think, key to the great waves of social change since our culture became digital. When we first got online, we were suddenly confronted with vast amounts of different types of people who we wouldn’t have previously met or interacted with in real life. Initially, our levels of empathy expanded as we tried to understand and get on with such disparate folk. This led to a period of rapid progressive advancement. When we look at culture from the days before we went online now, we often find ourselves wondering how people could have been so thoughtless and insensitive.
And yet, empathy requires a high cognitive effort. Our brains evolved to be able to handle around 150 stable social relationships - this is known as Dunbar’s Number. Mentally modelling larger amounts of people is extremely hard for us, and the pressure to do so may be one of the factors in the huge rise of mental health problems in the generation that grew up online. In this context, a backlash was perhaps inevitable, and something that very dark political figures have been quick to exploit. The rise of the bogeyman word ‘woke’ can be hard to comprehend if you see it as meaning ‘being decent to strangers is wrong’, but it makes more sense if it means ‘being decent to strangers is exhausting.’ If recent Western elections are anything to go by, the key issue for the electorate seems to be the extent to which they are prepared to give a shit about people they do not know.
But there are signs we are adapting to this overload, such as a willingness to abandon the vast spaces of social media to the bots and the terminally aggressive. Increasingly, we spend more online time in more intimate spaces - WhatsApp groups, podcasts, subscription newsletters like Substack, password-protected Discord groups and the like. This is Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest theory of the Internet in practice, the retreat to smaller, safer spaces where we are not constantly being algorithmically manipulated or surveilled, where we are less likely to be attacked.
Turning back towards your tribe like this can seem like an unforgiveable retreat to grandiose types - especially those who think that it is down to them to save the world. But those 150-large groups are all interconnected, and it doesn’t fall to you to save everybody - it falls to everybody to look after those close to them. If those around you are doing okay that will radiate out - without you even having to worry about it.
Empathy is an extraordinary gift. The best we can do is expand it as far as we can, but not push ourselves any further. This is far wiser than following Musk and denying empathy outright - for where can that lead, other than isolation, mental collapse and a growing collection of increasingly unhygienic jars?
AND FINALLY
The website RetroFuturista.com has just put out a free online magazine of interviews, which includes me, From Hell’s illustrator Eddie Campbell, The Gits and much more. If that sounds interesting you can find it here.
I imagine many of you are already listening to Broken Veil - a six-part podcast series from Joel Morris and Will Maclean with the unsettling atmosphere of folk horror but much more contemporary stories. But just in case you’re not - give this fantastic independent series a try, and be forever worrying about where the line between fact and fiction lies.
That’s all for now. I hope you enjoy Exterminate/Regenerate.
Until next time!
jhx
The Doctor Who book is really superb. Listening to the audiobook
"Initially, our levels of empathy expanded as we tried to understand and get on with such disparate folk."
Were you on a different version of the internet to me...? 😈😅
I witnessed the exact opposite, most evidently during the early days of the 'Rainbow Civil War' (2010s?), whose consequences we are still feeling now. From what I witnessed, very little has undermined empathy and fostered polarisation more completely than social media. The nearest contender is probably twentieth century war propaganda.
Wishing you 'bon voyage!' for your newest paper baby - and do let me know when your Daleks tour is coming to Nashville, TN! 😜
Chris.