Moral Fibre by Magician Kingsley Amis, author of Ending Up http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/ending-up-by-kingsley-amis.html and another fifteen or twenty masterpieces - 10 out of 10

 

Moral Fibre by Magician Kingsley Amis, author of Ending Up http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/ending-up-by-kingsley-amis.html and another fifteen or twenty masterpieces

10 out of 10

 

 

Moral Fibre is the fourth short story in the collection that has started with My Enemy’s Enemy –wherein an inspection would have expelled a negligent subordinate from the unit – followed by Court of Inquiry – which has had the vicious, resentful Major Raleigh organize a court for the absurd, insignificant mistake of leaving a useless, broken engine with no spare parts behind, while another one is available and nobody takes it – and ending the military series (for now) with I Spy Strangers, where service men have an ersatz parliament, with some extreme views are aired…what about having Hitler as an ally now, to fight the Ruskies, while the opposite camp is very favorable to the vile soviets, willing to fraternize with them, something I loathe, because I live in Romania, a country that at the end of World War II fell behind the wrong side of the Iron curtain, and therefore we have enjoyed the benefits of communism, hunger, cold, tyranny, freedom to spend time in the gulag, if one is not in love with the Dear Leader, for the last part Comrade Ceausescu, one of the most abhorrent monsters the world has seen, one which I am proud to say that I did my small part to help dethrone http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html ...he would be shot by a firing squad

 

Since we talk about Moral Fibre, we do see now what the heritage of the Soviet Union is, with hundreds of thousands dead in the ongoing war in Ukraine, started by the ultimate successor of Stalin, the KGB agent Putin, now one of the most dangerous demons in the world – he has repeatedly threatened to use atomic weapons (and he is clearly capable, he has no Moral Fibre and no qualms about killing as many as it takes to keep him in the Kremlin) and is pushing on in Ukraine, launching missiles on the energy system now, putting millions back into the Middle Ages, with no power, heat and little of anything else in terms of the basics – together with his friend, Xi, another vile dictator, who has been oppressing the Uighurs in Xinjiang, eliminated democracy in Hong Kong, Tibet (though that had happened before, with other Chinese thugs) and is ready to take over anything in the South China Sea, which they treat as their own place and bully, threaten and attack the countries in the area that have concomitant claims, surely more justified and reasonable, and finally, he wants to take Taiwan and make that place another giant prison, where liberty will die and everyone will be subjugated to the commies…

In moral fibre, we have a paradox where the social worker, Mair Webster, is the villain of the story, what with her efforts to save Betty Arnulfsen, that may end up suffocating the liberated, must-be-grateful woman, and the narrative is both thought provoking and humorous, for tragedy is mixed with mirth here, as we see Betty enjoying the time when she is with the ‘business girls’ and the narrator, John Lewis, has some moments when he is thinking of real enterprise as in opening small shops (perhaps not that, but since I do not remember what he thinks first, let us just go with this) until it dawns on him that when his guest says business women, she means prostitutes and this when she is in Flow

 

Flow is a classic of psychology http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/flow-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-this-is.html written by the co-founder of positive psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, where we find all we need to know about Maximum Experience, Being in The Zone, and the conditions for reaching this Ataraxia, which would be time becomes relative, challenges meet skills, we lose sense of self, we are in control, we have clear goals, feedback is continuous and satisfaction is complete…we can bring this into everyday activities.

When Betty is out with the men, going into bars, having sex with them and getting paid (she shows an impressive number of banknotes and Lewis, who is working in the public library, agrees that he makes much less than she shows off) a lot of money, but what is most important is the fun she has –positive psychology studies have looked at lottery winners, those who won more than one million dollars, and if they show an increase in their level of wellbeing for some months, then they return to the base level, which means that money is not the secret of happiness, those who are destitute see huge differences when they gain more, but once a threshold has been reached (it used to about 60k in Alabama and something like twice that, 120k in San Francisco) any increase in the amount we make does not translate into significant improvements in happiness levels, more important is what the other makes

 

Studies have shown that we compare with the others, in tests, people were offered two scenarios, one in which they had let us say 80k per year and others in the group had say 70k, and the alternative was a place where the tested would have much more, say 120k, but the rest of the party would have 130k, and what do you think they chose, the more sensible plan, where they would get more, even if others have bigger paychecks, no, they voted to have less, but more than the rest of the folks and this is summarized by Mencken in his bright, and amusing quote ‘Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband’, we should remember to compare with those who are in worse positions, such as the people of Ukraine now, the ones in Somalia and other lands like that…

There is a strange aspect in Moral Fibre, the fact that the social worker is the villain -though not really one like we meet in the Good Nurse https://notesaboutfilms.blogspot.com/2022/11/87-out-of-100-for-good-nurse.html where the worker that is supposed to help patients is literally killing hundreds of them – Mair Webster does not help Betty, on the contrary, she stifles the young woman and the work is done more for boasting, to serve the big ego, brag about the important contribution which has been essential in the life of the young mother, taking her out from the gutter, when in fact, it is suffocating a victim.

 

Random acts of kindness is listed as one of the best things we can do, and not just for the others, but for ourselves, research in the aforementioned domain show that this is the most rewarding activity and it can work as a virtuous spiral, in which the more kindness we show and good we do, the more we get gratitude and positive feedback and thus we can do even more and so on, only not with the coordinates of Mai Webster, which makes Betty jump off, run away with sailors to have casual sex, a time when she is happiest…when she is a house wife, she seems despondent, low, aggressive, calls Webster a cow’

 

http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world