“Once you start worrying about something or once you start thinking about something, that can of worms is fully opened and you can't, you can't close it. You have to figure out how to deal with it, how to move forward. And I find that the best way to deal with those sorts of cans of worms or those tunnels is forward, not back, because backwards, that end is closed. In terms of the tunnel metaphor, you can't return to some form of yourself, some version of yourself that hasn't already wondered, questioned, pondered, or become concerned about those sorts of things.”
Healy turned around at Heathrow as the pound collapsed
“So Healy gets in the car from the Treasury to go to Heathrow Airport for his flight to Hong Kong. And during the journey from Central London to Heathrow, the pound falls by another 2¢. By the time he gets to the VIP lounge at Heathrow, he's in a massive dilemma. If he gets on the plane, he'll be out of communication for seventeen hours. So if the power falls more, no one will be able to talk to him or ask his advice.”
Self-awareness is a biological evolutionary accident
“Self-awareness is a problem. We've arrived with a sense of self-awareness by a process of evolution that doesn't really care. Obviously, care I'm using loosely there because evolution doesn't care at all about anything besides its just continuation, propagation. But the experience of consciousness and self-awareness from the first-person perspective is not central to the reason for why self-awareness and consciousness arrived in the form that humans experience it.”
“He says, and I quote, for too long, we've been living on borrowed time. For too long, this country, all of us, yes, this conference too, has been ready to settle for borrowing money abroad to maintain our standards of life instead of grappling with the fundamental problem of British industry. And then he goes on to say, the cozy world of the postwar consensus has gone. We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase unemployment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists.”
Embracing uncertainty reduces the burden of awareness
“If you continue on that path, you get to a point where you become more comfortable with the confusions and the uncertainties. And you don't get better at justifying them. You don't get better at dealing with the problems of being a conscious entity in the world. But you get better at recognizing that the lack of answers, the lack of stability, the lack of rigidness is par for the course and par for the beauty of the course.”
Consciousness creates a fundamental conflict with reality
“As a self who is aware of that self, we attach to that self, we attach to the ideas of that self, we attach to people and things and our desire to make sense of our perception and understanding through all of the concepts that we form by nature of having that degree of awareness. And yet, reality in existence is fickle, chaotic, uncertain. We are going to lose everybody and everything through time or distance, decay, age or illness or death. And so, we find ourselves in this sort of cosmic ocean, where the waves are crashing on our heads constantly.”
Britain's £4 billion IMF bailout was a national humiliation
“A country like Britain, formerly the world's banker, should not be going to the IMF begging for cash. Now a problem is the key contributors to the IMF are the Americans. And politics in America at this point is well to the right. The Americans will undoubtedly ask for very stringent terms, probably cuts. They'll say you can have the money, but you have to sort your economy out. And for a Labour prime minister, this is obviously a nightmare.”
Callaghan was unaware homosexuality existed until well into adulthood
“He said he was completely unaware of homosexuality until well into adult life. This is a man who served in the navy. He's actually only found out about it when he became an MP. And he was amazed when some of his aids said to him, some of your MPs are gay. He was like, what? I don't believe that.”
Callaghan kept his cabinet united through 26 marathon meetings
“And the answer is that he actually handles it brilliantly. It's one of the great examples of prime ministerial management in British history. So what Callaghan does in the next two months, he has 26 cabinet meetings and he basically says to his ministers, fine. You talk this out. You talk yourselves into exhaustion and I'll be the Empire.”
Tony Benn praised Chairman Mao as the century's greatest figure
“Because when Chairman Mao died, Callaghan refused to have a moment of reflection. Ben was absolutely appalled that Callaghan wouldn't pay tribute to Chairman Mao in, British cabinet. He says, in his diary, Mao merited a moment of reflection. He will undoubtedly be regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest figures of the twentieth century. He certainly towers above any other twentieth century figure I can think of in his philosophical contribution and military genius.”
The Sex Pistols became famous before releasing a single record
“So I would say that if you look back at the previous twenty years, only the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had matched that level of fame or notoriety. And here's the funny thing. At this point, the Sex Pistols had not released a single record.”
Punk emerged from 1976 youth unemployment and national despair
“The Sex Pistols seem perfectly cast to capture the mood in 1976. So Tony Parsons in the NME in early October says they're the quintessential product of The United Kingdom in the nineteen seventies. The music they play reflects their times, no more, no less. And then they get their first appearance a week later in the national newspapers in The Sun.”
Healy only needed half the IMF loan due to Treasury miscalculation
“There's a little twist to the story. It actually turned out that because the Treasury had got their figures wrong, Britain was borrowing less money than everybody thought. So Healey only needed half of the loan and was able to repay it early. Now, of course, people don't know that initially. And at the time, people saw this as the whole business was seen as an abject national humiliation.”
Increased self-awareness often leads to increased suffering
“I think a lot of people have this sense that the more that they learn about themselves, the more difficult life becomes. That there's a kind of enjoyment, freedom. There's a freedom in naivety, would be a way to put it. And that the less naivety that they have, the more challenging the world seems to be. Complexity and responsibility and self-doubt and self-esteem issues come in. This tighter and tighter spiral, this ever-increasing resolution that you look at the world with, I think to a lot of people, feels like a personal curse.”
