Vaclav Havel on Meaning and Authenticity

I am reading a book called Letters to Olga, a collection of letters that Václav Havel wrote to his wife while he was a political prisoner. It is very good - and a testament to Havel. The prison authorities insisted he avoid all sorts of topics when writing his letters, they used up most of his time and energy in forced hard labour - and yet in spare moments he managed to produce letters that are full of intelligence and wisdom.

This morning I read the letter Havel wrote on October 24, 1981. In it Havel muses on what happens to a person when they start to question the value of things they once held in high regard. Although what he is describing is different, the mental state he describes such a person finding themselves in reminded me of how I felt as a teenager when I first read Camus's L'Étranger and then moved on to postmodernist literary theory - or was it deconstructivism? - finally disappearing down the dead end alley where one grappled with questions such as whether Flaubert's aim was to paint a neutral picture of his character Madame Bovary, while unconsciously pushing his readers to see her in a bad light via his unwitting choice of adjectives that are weighted against her, or whether he actually judged her and deliberately set out to make the reader dislike her too; is his text a conscious manipulation of the reader or did a bias slip in while he thought he was being objective and neutral? Via that weird form of hair-splitting, where the focus becomes not meaning but intention, madness lies. 

Havel describes very well what happens to you then, when you have drained all meaning from something precious: 

'The moment one first thinks of asking "so what?" of an event once felt to be supremely meaningful, an exceedingly important experience, one proper only to man, is germinated, though we may scarcely notice it: the experience of absurdity. This "so what?" question has a special infectiousness or power to expand. As soon as you admit it in a single case, it can easily be raised again in a thousand other cases. As soon as doubt is cast on a single, hitherto indisputable value in life, there is no more reason not to cast doubt on everything. At the end of all this doubting, however, there can only be the dispiriting impression that everything is hopelessly senseless, trivial, empty, and futile. Suddenly life seems no more than a game, an imitation, a mock-up of itself. It seems that no matter how much things resemble what they present themselves as, in reality they are not that at all. Speech becomes sounds that only sound like speech. Creation becomes a set of functions that only look like creation. Love or human community becomes an empty sequence of habitual functions, gestures, and phrases about love and human community. Life manifests itself as mere vegetating. Gone is the feeling of truth, authenticity, and ultimately reality. They are all reduced to shadows and apparitions, dead outlines, forms without content, the mechanics of convention and routine. The last "islands of meaningfulness" have sunk irrevocably beneath the ocean of Nothingness. In this existential state of mind "meaning" is present only by virtue of its total absence. It becomes that which man desperately lacks, what he thirsts after, and whose absence he painfully suffers.' 

This also led me back to a podcast I heard recently in which Theodore Dalrymple was asked what was a thing he believed strongly when younger but about which he has now changed his mind. Dalrymple nominated his late found recognition of the importance of the ceremonial aspects of life and a new willingness to accept odd conventions that earlier had seemed to him illogical and absurd.

In a way, I think all this is a way of saying that without a certain awe in the face of life's essential mystery - what Havel in the same letter refers to as "the darkest and most distressing mystery" - existence loses depth. As he says in another letter from that October, "The temptation of Nothingness is enormous and omnipresent, and it has more and more to rest its case on, more to appeal to."

Student Debt in Britain

I just read an article in the New Statesman, 4-10 September 2026, (for full text, see photographs below) that I found hair-raising. If you haven’t time to read the whole thing, let me quickly run through the salient points, as until I read the piece I did not understand anything about the debt demands young graduates in Britain have to deal with. Now I’ve read the article, I think the circumstances successive governments have created for the next generation of young adults are outrageous. Anyone else who was as ignorant as I was about student debt may be interested. The situation graduates are put in seems unfair and stupid and likely to corrode any kind of trust or faith they might have had in their own society.

The article begins by outlining the situation of a young woman who studied for a BA and, on graduating, completed a certificate to qualify as a teacher. She took out student loans, as this was the only way she could finance her study. This led to an initial debt to the Student Loans Company of of £35,719 for her BA and a second debt of £12,827 for her teaching qualification. Since graduating, she has worked as a secondary school teacher, and she is now on a salary of £42,057 per annum. She has been paying £95 per month toward her loan debt but, more than a decade after she embarked on her first degree, her debt continues to rise by £400 per month. She now owes the Student Loans Company £76,765.23, of which £28,219 is interest.

“Graduates with salaries above £30,000 pay a 37 per cent marginal tax rate (basic rate income tax 20 per cent, National Insurance 8 per cent, plus 9 per cent student loan repayment). For those with salaries high enough to push them into the higher tax bracket (40 per cent on earnings over £50,270), it’s 57 per cent. Under Keir Starmer, Labour froze tax and student loan repayment thresholds, so more young adults will effectively pay more in tax and student loan charges in years to come.”

Today’s young adult graduates carry more debt than their parents’ generation did: on top of student loans, the size and length of mortgages for those who can afford to buy their own home are increasing - it is now not unusual for people in their mid-to-late thirties to be granted a mortgage on the proviso that they sign a contract promising to work beyond the state retirement age.

Increasing indebtedness, with no end in sight for many people, is one reason young people are having fewer children - and, when they do have children they only do so later in life. The writer herself explains that she is 38 years old, has a ‘good’ job, earning far above the national average wage, but only managed to pay off her student loan fairly recently. She has managed to save £50,000 for a deposit to buy somewhere to live but it is not enough to buy anywhere near where she calls home. She describes herself as one of the lucky ones, because she’s solvent, but she still knows that, although she very much wants a child, she will be 40 before she can have one, “a fair bit later than I, or the limits of my fertility, are comfortable with.”

A successful self-employed plumber may now earn more and have less debt than a mid-level solicitor, who has the additional worry of possibly being replaced by AI in the not too distant future. And yet even Hannah Spencer, who claims to be a plumber, appears to be affected by the economics of being a young adult in Britain today:

“Working hard used to get you something”, she said in her victory speech after the Gorton and Denton by-election, “It got you a house, a nice life, holidays, it got you somewhere. Now, working hard - where does that get you?”

Unsurprisingly, neither the New Statesman nor Hannah Spencer go anywhere near the question of the economic consequences of immigration and the housing and benefits that flow to new arrivals. But that’s another story - or another aspect of the terrible financial tangle Britain finds itself in.

My main question is: how is it justifiable for the government to charge interest on student loans? Who can possibly think that alienating and impoverishing a huge number of your younger citizens can ever be a good idea?

Quaint

On a long trip in remote places, you end up listening to a lot of podcasts. One we heard today, driving in rural South Australia, (see pictures below), included Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove having this exchange, in which Gove’s Westminster-bubble-naivety is amusingly punctured by Cummings:

Cummings: The Tories have just moved on in the public mind, to a place even worse than universal loathing and hatred: they're kind of parked in the you're-just-waiting-to-die space. 

Gove: So the public think of them as wheelwrights or thatchers or stained-glass-window-makers; the party's seen as a quaint, irrelevant organization? 

Cummings: No, I wouldn't say quaint; I'd say, if you're going to have a metaphor like that, that it's more like the local vagrant who used to smash everything up, but he's now a cabbage sitting in a wheelchair and not relevant any more. That's the metaphor I would use.

[Photographs show Mount Remarkable in Melrose, South Australia, including the North Star Hotel, "the oldest licensed hotel in thd Flinders Ranges" (it had a very welcome log fire today).]

 

For full podcast, link is here.

The Start of an Adventure

I have been in Fremantle in Western Australia since Friday. It is an architecturally beautiful place and, because somehow each time when I've been here it's been a weekend, I have enjoyed Mass at St Patrick's Basilica all of the several times I've visited. They have a priest whose homilies are full of the kind of tenderness I think the world needs more of and a cantor with a beautiful voice. It is very cheering, no matter where one is in the world, to gather in a sacred space with others who have left their homes to come together in obedience to the obligation to go to Mass. 

The rest of Fremantle, by contrast, on weekend evenings has become, every new time I visit, more and more heaving and frenzied. Twenty years ago I first saw scenes of wild, senseless "partying" in a town in Devon in England - no drinking or eating establishment where music wasn't at such a volume you couldn't have a conversation, packs of young people moving in excited blocks (strangely many of them exclusively girls or exclusively boys). I saw the same thing repeated in Liverpool a year or two later. I assumed it was a very English thing - updated Hogarth.

Now though such scenes have arrived in Australia - or certainly Fremantle. The people involved begin the evening looking excited, go through a feverish stage and in many cases end up very obviously very drunk. Puzzlingly there doesn't seem to be any particular desire to hook up with the opposite sex. The girls in particular seem to have made a lot of effort with hair and glittery make up and very short skirts and very high heels. But not apparently to attract a partner, just to attempt to be queen bee within their own mob of females.

Anyway, such urban scenes will soon be behind us. We are setting off to drive to the Eastern states. Our country is so vast we haven't explored the half of it so this will be all new to us - very exciting.

In the meantime, yesterday, before Mass, I walked down to South Beach, Fremantle. It was beautiful in the autumnal light.

Buxton Memorial

There is always something new to discover in London. This is the Buxton Memorial, built to commemorate the emancipation of slaves following the 1833 Slavery Act. It was originally in Parliament Square but, puzzlingly, in 1957 it was moved to a place where hardly anyone sees it - Victoria Tower Gardens. The move was timed to mark the anniversary of the 1807 act that abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

It seems a mistake that this monument commemorating Britain's leadership in abolishing the slave trade has been hidden away.

Australia Leading the World (in the Wrong Direction)

Sall Grover speaking at ARC yesterday 

Yesterday at London's Olympia, during the ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) annual conference, Sall Grover, a young businesswoman from Australia, told the story of what happened to her when she was targeted by a man who used transgender ideology to demand that his rights should override those of women. The man, (who claims he is a woman), took Grover to court and, with the help of the Australian Human Rights Commission, (an independent authority within the Australian federal government’s Attorney-General’s portfolio, funded by Australian taxpayers), won two cases against her.

Grover's fight through the Australian courts continues. She is preparing a challenge to these earlier verdicts. As always where law is concerned, the process is very expensive. If you support her arguments and can spare her some money to help pay her legal costs, this is her crowdfunder

Despite being in the eye of a legal and ideological storm for several years now, Grover remains extraordinarily good humoured, while continuing to advocate and fight for reality, freedom and truth.

Here is a transcript of the speech Grover gave to an enthusiastic London audience:

“Hello, thank you so much for having me. I have flown halfway around the world to tell you that men are not women - something so obvious that, in a normal world, it would not need to be said - but we are not, apparently, living in a normal world.

For those of you who don't know me, I am the woman who had to go to court to establish what a woman is, and lost to a man - twice. In 2019, I created a social networking app called Giggle, exclusively for women. I had absolutely no idea I was doing this at the one time in human history when people have begun pretending not to know what a woman is.

In February 2020, when we were beta-testing the Giggle app on the App Store and Google Player, I woke up one day to find thousands of men on the app and thousands of one-star reviews calling us transphobic, and calling me a TERF.

I'd never heard the word before, and so I googled it - and I found that there were many women already raising the alarm: Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel, to name a few. What they were saying was so insane that I had to see for myself whether it was true. I started doing my own research and discovered they were not telling a word of a lie. Not only were men claiming to be women, but people were believing them.

I still didn't know enough about transgender ideology at the time, and so I naively thought it would all blow over. But in January 2022, when I was 14 weeks pregnant, I received an Australian Human Rights Commission complaint, citing gender identity discrimination. It was from a man who claimed to be a woman and who had tried to use the Giggle app. He had gotten on it, but I had removed him. I don't remember doing it. There were many men who tried to get onto the app, and we would remove them.

The man who took Sall Glover to court for refusing to allow him to join a site set up exclusively for women.

He only became a person of note in my life when he called and texted my telephone. He was the only potential user of Giggle ever to do that. I put his telephone number into our server; I saw a picture of a man. I called my dad and said, "A man that we blocked from Giggle has called and texted my phone. I'm quite freaked out by this." My dad said, "Block his number and don't tell your mother, because she sees the threats that women receive speaking up on this issue and lives in fear."

To settle in the Australian Human Rights Commission, I was told that I would have to:

• let the complainant onto the app;
• let all men who claim to be women onto the app;
• go to sex and gender education classes, (which I knew could only be re-education);
• pay the complainant $20,000;
• apologise to the complainant - for which the best I could do was say, "I'm sorry you're a man";
• and - (and I think this is the most sinister element) - moderate all content on the app so that men who claim to be women would not be offended by what women said.

In other words, not only did this man want to be in the women's space, he wanted to control it.

I said no.

The complainant's name is Roxy Tickle, and he filed in Australia's federal court, thereby creating the world's first sex vs. gender identity discrimination case. To make this situation even stupider, the case is called Tickle v. Giggle.

This is actually my life.

In terms of legislation, what has happened in Australia is that, under the government of Julia Gillard, our first woman prime minister, (she has spent over a decade dining out on that fact), the Sex Discrimination Act was changed: the definitions of man and woman were removed and gender identity was put in. What this change has created is a completely muddled act. Whereas it once existed to protect women, it is now being used as a piece of legislation to punish us for not going along with an ideology.

The Australian Human Rights Commission intervened in the case, with the Sex Discrimination Commissioner arguing on the side of Tickle - and, by extension, all men who claim to be women. The commissioner argued that men are women - to the point where they need pregnancy protections in law, in case anybody perceives them to be pregnant! 

What they are doing is giving men who claim to be women legal protections they don't need, while taking away legal protections away from women, who do need them.

I lost in the federal court. I was told that sex is changeable. I was found to have indirectly discriminated against the complainant - and I was fined $10,000 because during cross-examination I laughed.

I was punished for laughing, in a case called Tickle v. Giggle. It's so stupid

So I appealed - and I genuinely thought that we were going to win. I thought that the full Federal Court was going to be the barrier preventing this ideology from infiltrating all Australian institutions.

We should have won. We are right. Men are not women, and there is absolutely no evidence that there was an intention to have one amendment change the legislation to the point of excluding women from it.

But unfortunately the full Federal Court went even further. They said there was direct discrimination.

They also said that looking like a man is a protected characteristic of being a trans woman. Yet trans women are women.

The court increased the damages to $20,000, because not only did I laugh, I also called Roxy Tickle a man in court.

Tickle's side, his legal team, said that I had called him a man in 50 interviews. That's not true - it's hundreds. I've never called him a woman, and I never will.

Now we have to go to the High Court. This is the highest court in Australia. If I lose, beyond the devastation of women being excluded from Australian law, I will have to pay one million dollars for Tickle’s legal costs. This case has already cost $AUD 1.2-1.3 million, all of it crowdfunded by people all around the world generously supporting the case.

Why is this important? What am I here to tell you? I'm here to say that, if a state can force you to accept men as women, they can force you to accept anything. Freedom of speech, belief and association are the bedrock of a free society - but they are in direct conflict with transgender ideology.

I believe that this is among the most important issues facing us at the moment. If we don't eradicate transgender ideology from law and society, we're going to lose reality, because transgenderism is forcing us to ignore reality and our instincts, and it's imposing an ideology upon us. Women's rights are just the canary in the coal mine. This impacts everyone.

Gender identity, gender ideology, transgenderism, whatever you want to call it, isn't true. It's not real. Every aspect of it is a lie. In fact if you look at each claim it makes, you find that in every single case the exact opposite is true:

• Men are not women.
• Women are not men.
• No one is born in the wrong body.
• Sex is not changeable.
• Gender identity isn't real.

We are told to be kind and inclusive, but people's empathy is being attacked to force them to be cruel to themselves. Why do I have to be kind and inclusive to a man who claims to be a woman, at the expense of my perception of reality and my own rights? How is that kind?

People ask me, "What can we do?" Speak. At every opportunity, every time it's needed, say, "Men are not women and I will not be forced to accept transgender ideology."

Silence is being mistaken for consensus. I'm often asked if I regret taking this stance and giving up years of my life, having to raise and spend millions of dollars in legal fees, getting called a bigot, basically derailing my career. Wouldn't it have been easier to just pay this man $20,000, let him on the app, and accept that the word "woman" has evolved?

No. It is not easier to submit to an ideology that isn't true, to give up your rights and to watch society crumble under the weight of nonsense.

When I was pregnant, having to decide whether or not to fight, I knew that I was having a daughter. And I knew that I would have to teach her to stand up for herself - and I couldn't do that if I backed down the first time it really mattered.

The Australian government - the Albanese government - could do their job and fix this, free, in a week, but they won't. They'll let me do it for them instead. And, while it may not be coming from the government itself, finally, after years of inaction, some political pushback is emerging.

I know that I will eventually win, one way or another, because the truth always does. I will be able to relaunch my company and provide women with an online platform to connect with each other all around the world, I'll be able to sleep soundly knowing that my free daughter has rights - and Roxy Tickle will never be a woman.

Thank you.”

I Would Prefer Not To

Having listened to almost the whole of Europe 2031 ai - https://europe2031.ai/ - (it is an imaginative speculation about the near future in a world with very rapidly improving ai capabilities) - I would love to know the reaction to it of others who understand the issues it deals with better than I do - & are generally better informed than me on the topic (basically almost everyone, I suspect).

One thing that struck me about the piece is that vast areas of the world, with huge populations & economies, (India, Southern America, Africa) don't seem to get a mention - will the populations in those areas sit idly by as things spiral? 

Leaving that question aside, for me perhaps the most striking thing about the scenario Europe 2031 ai paints is the assumption it is based upon - the idea that this new, ever more powerful tool will be allowed to just hurtle on unchecked, bringing the majority of people no spiritual or financial enrichment, while causing almost unimaginable disruption. 

A very few will become very wealthy and some medical breakthroughs may, (or may not), be made: will that be enough to keep the bulk of humanity onside as ai takes over? Will societies really allow meaning to be removed from the lives of many, almost entirely in order to profit a few? 

Already the West is in political turmoil because too many people feel that nobody in power listens to them or acts on their behalf. Will an ever enlarging ai presence be accepted in our restless contemporary world?

What are we ushering in exactly - and do we have a choice? Is ai, like the atomic bomb, a double-edged sword we might one day wish we had rejected? Is it too late to take the Bartleby approach?