THE ABSOLUTE NECESSITY OF BECOMING ECCENTRIC

      You’re only given a little spark of madness.

      You mustn’t lose it.

      Robin Williams

      So let me tell you about what happened the other day. I was shopping in town, probably being efficient and busy and rushing from one shop to another to get the things I needed, squeezing the shopping in between the other busy things I do, and taking no time to idle or gaze, when I passed a girl wearing a T-shirt on which was emblazoned the words: ‘Galileo was wrong. I am the centre of the Universe!’

      This pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks (a sermon illustration I thought!). Of course I’m sure the girl herself was enjoying the irony of the text, but at the same time its breathtaking conceit provides a penetrating insight into the human condition and the particular vanities of our present culture: a window on our self-centredness, for we do indeed imagine ourselves to be the centre.

      We may have dispensed with God. We don’t need that pathetic prop anymore. We may have stopped believing that politics can deliver progress, but we still crave something. Making sense of life, understanding cause and effect, asking the big questions of what life is about and why we are here, these things seem to be hot-wired into us. But now that all the big promises have fizzled out there is nothing left to do but reset the compass of the universe to self. I am the brightest star in the galaxy. And everything else revolves around me in dependent and adoring orbit.

      Human beings have always been rather prone to thinking like this, but in our present situation it is more beguiling than ever. It’s not that we no longer need or want other people (in fact we need and want them more than ever, for they provide the affirmation we crave), it’s just that they don’t exist in their own right as equal players in a drama whose centre is elsewhere, but as satellites upon which we can shine. The narrative that now makes sense of life, and around which other things revolve, is your life. Anything that happened before is of little value (for it was only a prelude to the real story which begins in us). Anything afterwards? Well, we don’t think about this one, for the end of our life is truly the end of everything.

      In order to bolster this conceit it becomes ever more necessary to disconnect with anything that might put us back in touch with the essential, independent ‘otherness’ of other things or other people. So you only care for other people in so far as these are people whose lives affect you, meaning that they are the ones upon whom you can shine, and from whom you can get what you need. And you stop caring about people whose lives are not in touch with your own, as if they don’t exist at all. All the problems of the world, from teenage pregnancies to melting ice caps, AIDS, animal testing, third world debt, fair trade, race hatred and religious intolerance, are entirely inconsequential because they don’t affect you. Hence there is little interest in the wider issues of justice and peace unless they directly impinge on our lives. ‘I am not pregnant. The water levels are not rising in my town. I don’t have AIDS. No one has ever harassed me because of my race or colour. No one has ever experimented on my pet cat, so why worry?’ This is the attitude of self-love that we learn early.

      Occasionally, one of these issues will affect us and we will set about changing the world on this one thing with a passionate intensity. But we fail to make the connection with all the other things that hold back the flourishing of the world. Politics, we say, like religion, has only caused the world’s problems and can’t solve anything.

      But even as we say this, the foundation of our world view slips a bit. In order to keep ourselves at the centre, and in order to stave off the end of the universe (which is, of course, the end of our lives), much must be done to foster inner peace and outward beauty. And from the smorgasbord of New Age spiritualities, philosophies and self-help strategies a perfect creed of tranquil self-delusion is constructed, where crystals, herbs, incantations and a large dose of positive thinking dull the pain of impending self-demise. Creams and potions, designer labels, surgery, botox, collagen injections and harsh regimes of exercise and diet battle with the body’s steady decay.

      And even here it is possible to spot a hideous paradox in the culture itself. You are expected to put self at the centre and worship self-advancement, yet at the same time you are endlessly bombarded with images of how you ought to look and how your lifestyle ought to be. The only conclusion you can draw is that somehow being ‘yourself’ isn’t good enough. It is impossible to switch on the television or open a magazine without seeing some youthful vision of sexually charged and highly toned humanity. With it comes the empty promise that this car, or that perfume, or this diet, or that surgical operation will deliver the body/salary/sexual fulfilment you crave. And none of it does. Or, to be more accurate, it delivers just enough to get you hooked.

      We wear the T-shirt, but its insistence that I am the centre of the universe now appears rather desperate; for the inner truth is that we don’t feel this way at all. We pretend it is what we want, and we desire it with the same despairing hunger of any junkie, but in order to get it we now realize that what we really want is to be someone else. Our own pathetic imitation of humanity is too fat, too old, too ugly, too poor, too ordinary (too human, too frail). Actually, we hate ourselves. That is what believing yourself to be the centre has achieved. There is nothing at the centre except a self-loathing and a futile desperation to be someone else – someone rich, someone beautiful.

      For this horrible malaise there is only one cure I know. It is to put something else at the centre. But how and where will we find such a thing?

      For