And What’s This Book About?
Some people will insist it’s not reasonable for someone to write and share a book like this without revealing their identity.
I have sympathy with that view, but as a person who values their privacy, I intend to maintain my anonymity for as long as possible. Ideally forever.
My balls, my rules.
Still, you have a right to know a bit about me. I’m British, but live in Spain and am one of the early members of Generation X, so I’m old. That gives me the benefit of time to make myself a lot smarter than I was when young, though still not as smart as I’d like to think I am.
It’s only in the last few years that I’ve finally understood something my granddad shared with me as a kid.
Young men think old men are fools
But old men know young men are fools
At the time I thought he was insulting me, but of course, he was talking about himself. He was both the young and the old.
When we’re young, we think we know everything and are smarter than our parents and grandparents. We only realise just how daft we were with the benefit of hindsight when we can look back and marvel at the breath-taking stupidity of our youth. But we have to live that life. It’s through our mistakes that we learn the most.
So, with a wealth of mistakes to call upon, I wrote Divided We Stand United We Fall as some kind of personal anger management therapy.
The world makes me so angry. The sheer unfairness of it all. Even though I’ve actually done okay out of it all, at least I think so.
Mrs Forclift and I have been very fortunate to be born when we were so that we got so much more out of society than many who came before and those who came after.
We’ve lived our lives with a focus on happiness and while not wealthy, we have a degree of financial security which means we don’t suffer the corrosive mental stress that comes from constant money worries, though that largely comes from living a frugal life. For us, eating out means a picnic.
But for all our good fortune, the world winds me up. Of course, when I say the world, I mean people and the societies we’ve built, both the real ones and the virtual ones.
Why are we all so nasty to each other?
Why can’t we see that we want the same things and those things should be accessible to all of us? That if we all stood together to demand the rights that we all deserve, we might all enjoy happier lives, rather than wasting our time trying to make our pain seem lesser by making others’ pain greater.
Society is divided and it’s divided intentionally. When we spend our time sniping at those around us, we waste time and energy that could be spent focused on the real enemies of fairer societies – those at the top who enjoy the greatest wealth.
In Divided We Stand United We Fall I share my thoughts and beliefs about the many ways we’re divided and downtrodden by the powerful above us.
I want you to be as angry as I am and for both of us to focus our anger in the right direction.
A Great Book
Is it a great book? I’m hardly unbiased, so best you tell me.
In an ideal world I’d have had an editor to lay down the law, but I didn’t and I’m sure some would say it’s too long and too unstructured as a result. I felt the same after reading Breakthrough Advertising and before the reboot print run, some used copies were swapping hands for four figure sums (it’s still got a three figure list price new), so perhaps that isn’t a guaranteed recipe for disaster.
I did cut stuff and some stuff that I thought had good gags, but it’s not meant to be a joke book. Yes, it’s meant to entertain, but it’s meant to make us think. Oh, and make us get a bit angry with the state of the world and society, not with each other.
That’s probably been the greatest privilege of my life. The time and freedom to just think. I know some will read the book and say there doesn’t appear to have been a great amount of thinking, but we all have our own views. And while some of the things I’ve shared may be bat-ship crazy and over-dramatically exaggerated, when the stakes are so high, surely it’s best to go too early and too fast, rather than looking back and wondering how did we let that happen.
And maybe that over-enthusiasm will polarise, which isn’t a bad thing when it comes to provoking debate. Because debate is what we need, but in the right places.
You’ll be able to find more erudite and deeply considered books about social inequality written by much greater thinkers than me, but they’re written for their peers. They lead to debate at posh dinner tables surrounded by Tarquins and Anastasias who see the discourse as just a little effervescent amusement between the Shrimp Ceviche and the Steak au Poivre.
The debate is existential (oops, there I am going early and fast again), not a witty diversion.
We need the debate to happen around tables in cafes and bars and McDonald’s restaurants. To spark the sharing of opinions at bus stops and in nightclub queues and at shop checkouts.
That’s why I wrote Divided We Stand United We Fall to be a book that would be easy to read and easy to dip into. Something that will entertain, while making both of us think a bit more deeply about the society that we live in and if we get as much out of society as we put in.
It’s targeted at the young as they have the most to lose, but it’s been written with an eye on not offending the older generations too easily. After all, the central message is that we need to stop being divided and start working together to get a fairer share of a better world.
I want the book to make readers angry. Ideally at the unfairness of it all, though I appreciate some people may just be angry at me.
Which will you be? Only one way to find out.
Go and browse through the highlights and tap through to read one of them now. Or if you’re feeling particularly confident, then why not just start at the beginning and work through it all from there.
P.S. Wondering about that subtitle? When I started planning and writing notes for the book, I was so worked up that I believed the book would be full of profanity. However, I wanted the book to be something that a grandparent would be happy to share with a prized grandchild. Hence the plan to replace traditional profanity with the kind of vocabulary we’d expect from errant auto-correct. As it was, I think I worked out a lot of my anger before I started writing in earnest. For ducks sack, where did all the anger go?