A life full of lies, an autobiographical blog by Kevin Henley

Introduction

I have been teaching history to university and college students in Montreal, Canada, for over thirty years. My goal here is to present, as concisely as possible, the main events of my very active political and intellectual life, while simultaneously underlining how those events correspond quite well with the overall history of the baby boom generation. What I want to do is to attract readers genuinely interested in studying anti establishment ideas and politics. Once they have read my text, or at least the parts of it that they find relevant, I would like them to react to what they have read by offering their own take on those relatively recent events, and on how all that has influenced what is taking place nowadays.

Some people might want to react to this account of what happened in my public life because they were also involved in the same historical events. For example, hundreds of thousands of people participated like I did in the very distressing new left movements in North America during the 1960s and the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands more were active in the equally distressing union movement in Canada, not to mention the Quebec independence movement, over the past fifty years.

Still other lives were directly affected by the often acerbic debates within the teaching profession in which I also participated for many years. Others may be intrigued by the same bitter controversies in political, economic, social or cultural history for which I made my own contributions. This last group could include some of those who read one of the books that I published on skepticism during the first few years of this century, when I lambasted the various spiritual and secular ideologies in the world for having led so many people down the garden path. Like millions of other victims, I became extremely bitter over the years about the different ways in which many political and religious leaders have succeeded in ruining their followers lives, not only a long time ago but also very recently.

After five decades of study and activism, I have come to the conclusion that most people have been unable to make much progress in their lives, because of the extremely toxic behavior of the small handful of egotistical monsters who control the purse strings of the most important public and private organizations in this world. Unfortunately, human society seems to function as a kakistocracy, which is to say a world in which the worst people tend to rise to the top. As a result, humanity as a whole has become divided into two very unequal groups, a smaller gang of sadistic social climbers and a much larger group of long suffering masochists who end up doing most of the work and trying to pull up the slack created by the first group.

In fact, this fundamental division started to develop even before human beings began living in large urban based civilizations about 6000 years ago and seems to be getting worse nowadays rather than getting better. For a short time after the Second World War, it looked as if some of us had figured out how we could finally escape from the different varieties of official corruption. However, since the outbreak of the neoliberal counter revolution in the 1980s, the masters of the universe (money managers and traders), have ratcheted the entire world downward, back into a sort of infantile regression. They consciously ignore all the warning signals about economic, environmental or social collapse, deliberately doing exactly the opposite of whatever needs to be done.

Doing evil has become the official ideology of most of the people wielding real power, rather than being seen as an unfortunate consequence of the dark side of human nature, as it used to be treated in days gone by. Like criminals or juvenile delinquents, our self proclaimed masters have decided not to take an adult attitude toward anything at all. They are relying on belief in magic, old time religion and libertarianism to provide them with some sort of ideological justification for their toxic behavior. Those who behave in this perverse fashion are knowingly irresponsible, trying to do as much harm as possible, to everyone but themselves, in the shortest possible time, just to prove that they are the “baddest bad asses” who ever existed. Unfortunately, if this kind of atavism continues on for several more years, it will soon become impossible to avoid major relapses in the overall level of human development.

When I started my adult life fifty years ago, however, I had no idea that I would be making that kind of pessimistic observation half a century later. Back in those days, I was under the naive impression that even though the world was far from being perfect, things did seem to be moving in the right direction. Like millions of others, I thought that with a lot of effort progressive minded people could succeed in making our planet a considerably better place in which to live. After awhile, I found out that one of the reasons why idealists like me were thinking that way back then was because my childhood and the early part of my adult life took place during a period known as the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975.

This was an expression that was originally used by diplomats at the United Nations, who thought that those years were glorious because that was when most of the countries in Asia and Africa became independent nations instead of European colonies. Several economic historians agreed with the diplomats that those were glorious years because they constituted the most important period of economic development in world history, before or since that time. Many social historians also agreed with this positive assessment because the income gap between the social classes actually diminished during those years. Before that period, that gap had always had a tendency to increase, as it has been doing again even more drastically since the neoliberal movement started taking over.

The thirty glorious years were also a period in which governments tried to play a much more positive role than most of them do now. Following the numerous crises of the first half of the twentieth century, especially the world wars and the great depression, most countries gave up on the laissez faire attitudes introduced back in the nineteenth century and embarked instead on a long series of programs designed to encourage economic growth, as well as social and cultural development. The libertarian counter revolution that started in the 1980s, however, means that most positive government interventions have gradually been abandoned.

To be sure, as with any other period of history those same glorious years just before the advent of neoliberalism were not really a golden age. For one thing, we were then living during the most dangerous part of the cold war, when many people thought that they would be soon vaporized in a world wide nuclear exchange. Back then, however, a lot of us were under the illusion that if we humans could just avoid blowing ourselves up, things could turn out to be a lot better than they always had been in the past. So millions of us got involved in all sorts of progressive movements, trying desperately to figure out which was the best method for moving forward.

Several decades later, unfortunately, we are all living in a very different world from the one that baby boomers like me happened to land in when we were much younger. This makes me feel that everything in which I was involved over those two consecutive periods in fact fits very neatly into that larger pattern of recent historical evolution, from that more hopeful world to this less hopeful one. So in this text I want to move continually back and forth from my own public life to the general history of the past several decades.

Almost everything important seems to have changed drastically during my own lifetime. For starters, instead of a nuclear catastrophe, nowadays most people tend to think that if they are going to be wiped out before their time, it will probably happen as the result of a massive ecological breakdown instead. That is definitely not something that would have occurred to most people during the three decades following the Second World War, no doubt because some of the incredible economic growth during that period was based on environmental blindness. Although in reality the threat of a nuclear war has not declined as much nowadays as a lot of observers seem to think, recent financial crises have also revived the very real possibility of another great depression like the one that took place during the 1930s. As a result, even though some things are better than they were before, it is hard to find anyone who is as optimistic as people like me were fifty years ago.

In other words, much of what happened during the first several decades of my life took place because a lot of us got involved in movements that fitted in very well with the overall spirit, or zeitgeist, of that earlier period. However, even then we were still living in a world that was under the domination of extremely powerful egomaniacs, which means that many of our naive hopes for the future did not really have that much chance of success.

So let me get started on this double assignment, showing in a conceptual way how my own political and intellectual life intersected with the topsy turvy nature of recent ideological history. I first started thinking about the zigzag world I was living in several years ago, when I originally got the idea to begin writing about my own life. Quite a few things were happening to me back then that induced this kind of socially based self reflection. For one thing, after many decades of bouncing around from one unsatisfying job to another, I had finally started teaching history full time, a profession that I found more pleasing than anything I had done before that. Teaching history over and over again to thousands of younger people soon provided me with most of the insights that I needed in order to understand how my own life has been fashioned by the paradigm change from the thirty glorious years to the libertarian counter revolution.

I was able to gradually leave behind manual labor and only part time teaching, in the early part of my adult life, by following up my bachelor of arts degree with a master of arts and a doctorate. Both of my theses, for the MA as well as for the PhD, were focused on a nineteenth century battle that was fought between two rival doctrines, economic nationalism and economic liberalism. During my research, I soon found out that everyone involved was only too eager to defend his (or her) own particular point of view and to denounce his enemies point of view. Typically, each side chose to ignore information that did not lead them in what they thought was the appropriate direction. In other words, my research was pushing me toward an ever more skeptical interpretation of reality, just like in my political and professional life.

At the same time, I was also involved in several ideological debates within the teaching profession, most notably over the competency based approach, both sides in those debates also choosing to ignore any inconvenient or contradictory information that they might happen to come across. Over time, I found out that even the content of the history courses that we were teaching was often based on deliberate misinformation, each teacher endlessly repeating long established versions of historical events that were originally pre fabricated for political reasons.

Another major change taking place in my life had to do with my own political activity. After several decades of actively supporting such major ideologies as socialism and nationalism, in various different disguises, I became extremely frustrated and disgusted by the tremendous gap that always existed between what those movements were supposed to be doing, and what they actually ended up doing. So I finally decided to turn my back on all that and instead, I embarked on the publication of the books about skepticism that I mentioned earlier. For each book, I used a variety of references, as well as my own experience, to debunk the world’s major belief systems, focusing on the most important religions and secular ideologies. I published those books, one after the other, during the first decade of the current century.

This time out, I have decided to make my socially grounded, personal history directly available to anyone consulting the web rather than try to publish it in book form. Doing it this way gives me an opportunity to update and improve my earlier insights, as well as backing up my ideas with quite a few new sources, including hundreds of internet searches. Some of this research has to do with the various historical debates and controversies in which I got involved over the years, as well as the events and movements in which I myself participated.

Nothing in this world is more intriguing than the stultifying effect of ideology on the evolution of different people’s lives, whether they were themselves aware of that influence or not, at the time. Unfortunately, human thought seems totally dependent on metaphor and structural context, with the result that no one has ever been able to avoid ideological barriers to understanding. As Daniel Gilbert pointed out in his book, Stumbling on Happiness, human brains are constantly imagining future outcomes in highly imperfect ways, including things that should not have been included and failing to include other things that should have been included. People are constantly assuming sequences of events based on ideological projections that are more wish fulfillment than reality.

So we are always setting up blinders around our thought, constructing not only such ideologies as socialism and nationalism, that have become much more marginal nowadays, but also currently dominant ideologies such as liberalism and conservatism, not to mention the world’s most popular religions and sects. Most of the things that I tried to do during my life, and that other people around me were also trying to achieve, were therefore based on mythical interpretations of reality, in other words competing forms of collective hysteria. The lies that people are constantly telling each other lay behind the various errors that we made before we became older and (sometimes) wiser.