I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member

There is a lot of truth to this.

I think Groucho meant that if someone invites you to join their club it feels like they are the one to gain from the relationship and so you end up being used. You want to get into a club that doesn't want you so you can wear it as a badge and gain, while they take the loss.

But being Jewish, and given my suspicion of Jewish thinking*, I wonder if Groucho looked at it the other way.

If you have doubts about yourself then if you were the club you would not want yourself? So you only identify with clubs who do not want you. You feel kinship when you are not wanted, cos that is your view of yourself. And that is the irony you want to belong where you are not wanted and vice versa.

So I didn't have a contract renewed recently owing to a falling out with the company. Quite whether it started with me losing interest, and they responding to that, or they responding to some feature of me and me losing interest I cannot calibrate or know. Or perhaps they are one and the same, and we only divide it into sides afterwards. These things are always two sided. Anyway it ceased to work. But what has occupied my thinking since is how the individuals in the "organisation" closed ranks and behaved as an entity in quite a complex way to secure my removal. I am mostly unconscious to this kind of thing and only realised as I analysed afterwards. I have seen this happen to other people. It is actually quite extraordinary how groups self-organise to "include" and "exclude" people. This is a really fundamental part of human make up.

Contrary to this view however we spend a lot of our time in the Liberal Democratic West being told we are individuals free to chose etc. But little is said of the collective identities that we also have. And this is not just individuals buying their season tickets and taking their seats to watch their football team, it is a genuine "organism" that exists that takes over our behaviour. In Europe we are aware and even celebrate this in ideas of Solidarity and State. But in the US it is itself a rejected entity. So ironic (and Ayn Rand was vaguely aware of this) that as a collective the Libertarians organise to exclude the collective. You can't out-think the "collective." As an individual you are already beaten before you even pick up the collective language of your thoughts to think about it.

I think Monty Python intended this to be mockery of religious followers who do not think for themselves and just recite mindlessly whatever their guru teaches them. Obviously Monty Python skipped the passages in all religions that warn people of this and encourage them to embody the laws and become a living example of the law not a dead reciter of laws. In fact is this not one of Jesus' main points to the establishment of his age that they do not embody the laws they protect:

 "The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them." [Matthew 23:2-4]

And in Buddhism there is a whole word Ehipassiko which means come and see and test for yourself.

So the irony really is on Monty Python and the fact that it is them who are the collective reciting "individuals" like robots and not really understanding what it is to be free. Those people in the clip reciting "we are all individuals" are actually all the liberals of the Western Democracies who have been told they are free but actually have no idea what this means other than get a job, do some shopping and go and vote, or dig deep into "oneself" and be creative and create new products. Strangely all things the establishments tells them to do. And why? Well I suspect we are told to do this because it makes the economy grow and all those rich people invested in the system then get richer. So the ruling class are actually plugged in to the system in a way that makes them encourage the working class to seek employment and work. Not sure there is a conspiracy here, it is just that this self reinforcing loop has become socially stable and no one has got wise to it yet (Marxism for one tried to but not taken shape yet, or the "collective" has excluded it for now).

Being an "individual" then in fact turns out to be a collective action. And our whole life is really made up of joining collectives that influence our behaviour which we confuse with "my choice" because we belong to Western Liberal Democracies that tell its collective this. Without a strong sense of irony none of this makes any sense ;-)

But what really came home to me in being "excluded" was how this sets up a division between people. I presume people who join a club want to be there. And so when someone enters the club who does not fit or who threatens the club they work to exclude them and protect the club and themselves.

Yet in the grander scheme of things, especially in our modern world of inclusivity, we are all humans and the idea of someone being outcast is something we don't like. We think of the Jews being persecuted by the Nazis as the epitome of what happens when a whole group gets excluded. I prefer to remember the American Indians who were excluded by the Western Imperialist Capitalist economy that got imported unknowingly on the backs of the colonists. In both cases millions of people were hunted down and killed. We definitely think this is not good. These days we prefer at least some level of inclusivity for all people.

And so we arrive at the irony. Unlike Groucho we wonder whether we want to join a club that excluded us? You see if it excluded us then it would exclude other people and this is not a good thing. If being excluded was of any consequence to us, then if we joined we would be weighed down by the knowledge of all those people who our club was excluding.

And so I came to think about the company that excluded me. Wow! would I really want to become part of the ranks of a club that closed out other people?

Suppose I don't care and am easy whether I get included or excluded so that I don't care about other people being included or excluded? In which case then joining in club means nothing to me. This is close to my own position where I don't even realise I am a member even when I am. I guess that is confusing for women who are always trying to form a club of 2 and I don't even realise. Perhaps this is the result of my experiences with "My Muse" early in the blog?

But then there are people who really want to join, and feel hurt if they are excluded. They also should not join knowing that the organisation they join is excluding other people.

Whichever way you look joining a club is not something of interest.

Which gave me a slightly different view on my previous work colleagues. While I was casually doing my job, I think they really got hooked on being part of the club. At least their behaviour at the end was certainly very protective of the club and they were certainly very willing to embody the interests of the club.

Despite all this talk of  Liberalism and Democratic Individualism we are all very susceptible to embracing the collective. Friedrich Hayek acknowledges this when in 1940 he wrote that while Capitalist businesses are collectives, you stand a much greater chance against something of the scale of a business compared to a state. Surely in his lifetime he saw business grow far beyond the wealth and power of states? We have almost all countries indebted to organisations, and a growing number of countries unable to free themselves. The other thing he doesn't seem to have noticed is that states are ideally democratic and the collective undergoes constant evolution and revolution (revolving) as its stake holders jostle for a voice. Meanwhile Capitalist institutions are Totalitarian under a CEO who reports to the Capitalist investors. How does Hayek think this is anything to celebrate? Ridiculous.     

Anyway quite opposite to Groucho who would join an organisation that rejected him, I settle myself in the irony that I could not be happy in (and so refuse) any organisation that would not have me (or someone) as a member.

But before ending a final irony. That is too neat an ending. How comfortable for me! At the start I acknowledged that everything is two sided. All organisation have some right to exclude people. People who are incompetent or criminals for instance. So being excluded from an organisation should never be "comfortable." But at the same time being included in an organisation should not be too "comfortable" either. The "ego" is highly activated in matters of inclusion and exclusion and we will twist narratives and gain fuel for narratives from every aspect of "organisation". "I got a promotion" encourages "I am awesome" or "I lost my job" encourages "I am worthless" etc. trying to narrativise to protect oneself is red alarm bells always.

Quite a rich terrain to explore here, just wanted to jot down some of the twists and turns.

* And this is hugely ironic given that there is an ironic undercurrent of Jewish thinking in the likes of Freud et al. - yet I would say the ultimate irony is that Jewish thinking is not ironic about its own irony - and Jews will laugh at that cos they think they are hugely self-deprecating and ironic - but at root are they really ironic? Jewish thinking is conservatives at root as it will never compromise the Jewish Identity and this leads at root to Dualism and separate sides and not irony.