I've just read his "Booky-wook". Scary stuff!
It makes the Woss+Brand incident, about which I blogged before, a little clearer. Not that that's mentioned in the book -- it happened after the book was out. But the history is there.
The absolutely typical incident, which I've related to one or two people, is of him as a child aged about five, talking to what he describes as a "nice old man" in the man's front garden. He calls the man "warm and avuncular". And when the old man goes into his house for a moment, Russell stamps down all his flowers, the man's pride and joy, and then waits for him to come out again to see his face.
He likes hurting people. You can't really blame the drugs, because he wasn't on them at that stage. Maybe the drugs are because he hates himself so much.
And so the story goes on, hurting friends, hurting women, hurting himself of course, and the general public at large. Cutting himself, sleeping with prostitutes that he despises, stealing.
He's clearly very witty and intelligent. I've heard some of his stuff, and it can be entertaining.
I guess it's the perfect demonstration that insight isn't worth all that much. He comments in the book on the stuff he's done, and his own feelings. He does it in a boastful way, and then points out his own boastfulness, so you think, oh, he isn't really boastful, it's all just self-deprecating. But all that cleverness, all that self-understanding, doesn't help him a bit.
He describes another incident where he's at a recovery centre, and they all get taken off to go go-karting. He says, if you haven't been go-karting with a bunch of junkies, you haven't lived. I grin, and imagine he must be fun, for a moment. What happens is that as soon as they start, he deliberately breaks the rules at the place, so they all get thrown out. How much fun was that?
He then launches into a diatribe about "it wasn't the Geneva convention I broke, just some arbitrary rule" and so on. And he manages to convey the sense that "of course I don't really think that, I realise what a pain in the neck I am and it was wrong to do it". That's the tone of the whole book. But the thing is, even if he understands that and gets it across, he still does that stuff, and probably always will.
When you listen to what people say, those are generally just noises that their mouth makes while they get on with whatever it is they do. Listen to it if it's informative or entertaining, but never believe what they say about what they think, how they feel, what they're going to do . . . . instead, watch what they actually do. In Brand's case, he went on and f***ed over a bunch more people. Everyone has their act, their "thing that they say", whatever it is: "it was only an arbitrary rule", "you're not perfect either", "capitalism is to blame", "my childhood was abusive", "i didn't mean it", "they deserved it because of that bad thing they said to me". The smarter ones like Brand will say it all in an ironic way, so that you think they really "get" the opposite. Just watch what they actually do in life. Generally, people don't change much and keep doing what they always do.
