Probing Evil

Perhaps the hardest part about writing while on the road is realising that, about some things, there’s nothing original to say. Not only have countless before you tried to pen elegant prose on the very same subject, and not only will others follow after, but they’ll observe and write the very same things, the same impressions. Some experiences are so powerful, some glimpses back into history so clear that the feelings they elicit can seldom be parsed by words.

It’s not true of everything, naturally. One person will see in architecture one thing; and she’ll draw impressions from the people she meets that may be in stark contrast to what another concludes. If that weren’t true, what would be the point in travel at all? Wouldn’t we all just read someone else’s book while getting brown on a coconut-strewn beach?

Occasionally, though, you’re stuck. You see something you came a long way to see, and your impressions are so predictably orthodox you wonder if there’s anything to do but just to snap away some photographs and tick it off your list of things to do before you die. Any effort to describe the experience to those who didn’t share it is pointless. Because it’s the experience itself, the sight and smell and sound and taste, which transcends what mere words can express. Background, context and descriptive prose cannot, I’m saying, describe S-21 in Phnom Penh.

S-21 is also known as Tuol Sleng. It’s where the Democratic Kampuchea regime – known to everyone outside as the Khmer Rouge – set up a prison to detain individuals accused of, well, pretty much anything. They could’ve used a hospital or a military barracks or a food market for this purpose. And in a parallel world, visiting such a place would still be a bitterly upsetting and frightening experience. But the Khmer Rouge – in an acted of calculated malice – used a high school previously called Ponhea Yat to torture and execute anyone who could pose any threat to the regime, and its pursuit of ultra-communist, agrarian collectivisation.

There’s something almost wantonly cruel about using a high school. I suppose they had other reasons besides its almost poetic nastiness: the convenient location, the many small classrooms on different floors well suited for separating people from their families. But visiting this place, you’re struck, floored, dumbfounded, heartbroken by the juxtaposition of innocence and evil, of warmth and coldness, of the rampant destruction of what is good and its replacement with all that is bad.

S-21 is located in south Phnom Penh, and covers an area 600 by 400 metres. During the late-70s regime, it was enclosed by two folds of corrugated iron sheets, all covered with electrocuted barbed wire. The houses around the four school buildings were used as administration, interrogation and torture offices. All the classrooms were converted to prison cells. All the windows had bars. The ground floor classrooms were divided into individual cells of 80 by 200cm – roughly the size of a small single bed or a large beach towel. The most miserable part of visiting, though, is when you walk in the front gate. You’re walking into any high school in the world. It’s a place where kids ought to have been running around the playground, screaming and giggling, learning, flirting, reading and playing music. Superimposing pitch-black brutality onto a place of youth and optimism seems like a bad dream from which you can’t wake.

At first, interrogations were conducted in the houses surrounding the prison. But the interrogators seemed unable to help themselves from raping all the women and children they were interrogating, so in 1978, the chief of S-21, a former teacher himself, converted building B into an interrogation office for women and girls. Because the gang raping of 7-year old girls was an inefficient use of time and resources. This way, the interrogators would have more time for electrocuting them, burning them, drowning them and lashing them with electrical wire.

The number of workers – employees – totalled 1,721. These included 1,377 “general” workers, which in themselves included sub-units of male and female children aged ten to fifteen. These children were selected and trained by the Khmer Rouge to act as guards. Without going into unnecessary detail here, these children were exceptionally, wantonly cruel and violent to the prisoners.

Approximately 10,500 people were held at this high school. 2000 of these were young children, all tortured and killed, according to the various archives available now. I want to reproduce in full the regulations, (translated with world-class almost comic incompetence from the original Khmer) which were posted in each cell:

1. You must answer accordingly to my questions. Do not turn them away.
2. Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to protest me.
3. Do not be a fool for you are a [I love this] chap who dares to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Do not make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you do not follow all of the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

I won’t bother going into the idiotic repetition and intellectual emptiness of these rules: they speak for themselves. But reading them, as I did while sitting in the corner of a dark classroom on the top floor, I pondered – as often before – the nature of evil. And how the various evils of history compare, how they sit together. If Time or Letterman did a Top Ten Evils in History, what would be on the list and why?

Evil is a concept that always used to sit uneasily with me. It’s not that I’m not horrified when I see it on a screen, read about it on a page, or stand on blood-stained earth where it has taken place. I feel the horror as much as anyone who approaches the concept with ease and confidence. It’s that, overwhelmingly, those who commit what we call evil acts don’t believe themselves or their acts to be evil. History’s dictators have always had a lofty objective which they were convinced was virtuous every bit as much as everyone else is convinced it was not. Mugabe, Amin, Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Kahn, Mussolini, Bush (let’s not go there right now), Kim Jong-Il, Mao, and of course that bloated toad Pol Pot: what they share is both the fanatical belief of the zealot and a self-assured faith in the maxim that the Ends justify the Means. Serial killers only seldom consider their actions evil; usually they are proud to be cleaning the earth of some disease – prostitutes, homosexuals, immoral women. The percentage of serial killers who are devoutly religious might surprised any neophyte. Often, they’re doing God’s work.

The fanatics kidnapping Iraqi men and their families and drilling their eyes out while raping their daughters in front of them believe it too. Whether it’s the reestablishment of a global caliphate or the eradication of a different sectarian group or the approval of a deity or ultimate executive power through which their noble ends can be achieved, they all, they all believe that the Ends justify the Means and that consequently the means are – far from being evil – in fact virtuous.

It’s the fact that they believe this so unblinkingly which always made me uneasy. To import John Rawls – in my opinion the greatest thinker of the past half-century – how much of our revulsion is conditioned by our upbringing, by context, by culturally-specific values and circumstances? Had I been born an impoverished and devout Sunni man in Tikrit and had sectarian nonsense and hatred pummelled into me every day while seeing those I loved suffer, would I be the one with the power drill and the knife, raping the Shia women? When the ‘Veil of Ignorance’ is allowed to fall over our eyes, can we say with certainty what our actions would be when everything we know and have experienced is taken away? What is left of a man when all that is gone?

This is cultural relativism, and I’m pretty sure every humanities class at every university in the developed world teaches it to some degree or another. In other words, you don’t need to condone repulsive actions, and you are permitted to feel revulsion, but you have to temper your disgust and moral outrage. You must filter it through the prism of context, and hold back on untrammelled judgment.

This left-leaning orthodoxy has always outraged the Right, and because the Right has always outraged me, I’ve found some sympathy with the orthodoxy. Or rather, I did until 2004. August 2004, to be specific – and perhaps you’ll remember something that captured the world’s attention at the time: Beslan.

There’s something about the 24-hour news media. It conveys horror in a way no textbook ever can. For a couple of days that month the world was glued to its screens, waiting, hoping, for resolution of the hostage crisis. Because it was children this time, not theatre-goers in Moscow, or bankers and fund managers in the Towers, or even commuters on the Madrid rail system. These parasites, vermin masquerading as humans, went with automatic weapons into a school full of children. And everything got worse and worse.

When it ended, after the trigger-happy Russian troops stormed in and the ensuing firefight was over, there were hundreds of bloodied and naked children carried limp by inconsolable, broken men. Fatigued commandos stained indelibly with misery. Four-foot corpses festering in the Caucasian summer sun. More than three hundred children were dead, all of whom must have been frightened stiff like we will never know, and suddenly, immediately, totally, I understood the face of evil. It really shouldn’t have taken me so long, but it did.

What I’m saying is, I’d always struggled through the murky waters of tolerant relativism, grabbing in vain at the very existence of evil but it was a flapping fish that kept slipping away. But now I’m unshackled, and can look at a place like S-21, and allow the hatred to course freely through my veins. It’s cleansing, somehow.

Anyway, I was sitting there in the corner of the classroom, heartbroken at the awfulness of it all – something which can never be expressed in words even though everyone’s impression who visits there will be exactly the same – and I thought about the comparative nature of evil. Mugabe’s pernicious avarice and heartless disregard for his people will be remembered, but he’s not in the top tier. Hitler is usually invoked as the archetype of modern evil, for reasons that are probably self-evident to everyone. Stalin was ruthless – and killed perhaps more people than anyone in history – but he wasn’t genocidal per se. Mao maybe caused the death of even more than Stalin, and I think it’s unarguable that he caused the most misery, if such things are quantifiable. But even Red China recognised that in a collectivised agrarian society, you still need something approximating a pyramidal social structure. You still need the teachers and doctors and engineers and – some – intellectuals. As objectionable as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were, they made some, very limited sense on paper. You can understand at least what Mao was trying to do. I hope that statement is not too much of a stretch.

But Brother One and his Khmer Rouge: I think there’s a perfectly good case to be made that Cambodia 1975-79 represents humanity’s worst ever time and place. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing at all which is intellectually defensible about what this zealot group of murderers, torturers and rapists sought to accomplish. My heart aches for this crippled and tortured country. Perhaps two million people out of a population of seven million were killed because of the regime. Which is not only, in percentage terms, a loss of life probably unprecedented; but the people they killed – not that any lives are worth more than others – but the people they killed were the very people the country would have to rely upon to get back onto its feet. The thinkers, the professionals: those who would be needed to counsel the millions of traumatised orphan children, to rebuild an economy, to teach the skills and to take down history for posterity. A whole generation of the best and brightest was lost, and everyone lost someone they loved. So, I think: c’mon down, a big round of applause please for the Khmer Rouge: in my opinion the worst group of people ever to walk this bloodstained planet; the most evil, execrable and indefensible thugs and rapists of them all. And friends, bearing in mind the competition, I think we can all agree – that is really saying something.

But back in that same week of August 2004, my own watershed in shedding the shackles of relativism, two other things happened. The first was that Hicham El Guerrouj collapsed after his Olympic 1500m gold medal win at Athens, having finally secured the sporting immortality that had eluded him for years. He fell to the ground beyond the finishing line, spent, and tears of relief streamed down his pumping cheeks. He sat on the track, propped up by one arm like a dropped doll, as eighty thousand roaring spectators savoured a balmy night in the birthplace of western civilisation. Two of the other runners came up to him, they dropped to their knees next to a good and gracious man who deserved the gold so much. They smiled and embraced him through the dizzy cloud of fatigue, and – ignoring their own disappointment - cupped his exhausted face in their hands, an image for the pantheon of what’s great about sport; of life’s wondrous capacity to dazzle in a joyous snapshot for all time. I don’t know how everyone else watching felt. I can only speak for me. But time stopped still for that moment and I was flooded with love and admiration for my species.

The second other thing which happened during that eventful week was the launch of the Cassini-Huygens probe to Saturn and Titan. Sending probes to the other bodies of the solar system is commonplace enough now that people rarely get too excited. But this one was really special. Because while the Cassini probe would spend years to come photographing Saturn, the Huygens probe would descend to the surface of Titan – the mysterious Saturnian moon which is continually blanketed with an organic atmospheric carbon sludge that no telescope can look beneath. Scientist have been fascinated by the mysteries of Titan for decades, because it resembles most closely what earth would’ve been like during the primordial soup. It’s a glimpse back to our very beginnings.

And so I watched, jaw-agape, the launch of this remarkable vessel. Giddy with enthusiasm, I was so impressed at the acceleration of progress which allows, within fifty years, evolution from a cylindrical Soviet beeping satellite in low earth orbit, to a vessel which can plunge into a strange land billions and billions of miles away and send back what it sees. Months later, it did so, and surpassed the expectations of all the waiting scientists. I remember hearing the whooshing audio track as it plunged through the frozen sky of Titan. I remember seeing the first photographs of the surface, lakes and coastlines and boulders and a horizon. After an hour, the probe died of cold – as it was expected to do – but that hour of life down there was worth the millions of man hours and the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in it. Even aside from the scientific value, millions of children around the world watched it on the Internet, as excited as I was, and some of them will have picked up a science book that very evening, planning to become explorers themselves when they grow up. And this is the only way we move forward.

If there’s one thing about people and about the world which strikes me more strongly and more often than anything else, it’s the cavernous gap, the desperate disconnect between our good and our evil. And although I now accept that unqualified evil exists, and it was given a human face in the administrators, guards and conceivers of S-21, and I loathe them more than I can loathe anything, I find myself flabbergasted at how one species – for most of the time so remarkably alike – can be at once so good and so bad. What can you say about a species that kills its children in the same week as exploring other worlds for their future? What can you say about a species that tortures and burns people alive for nothing more than having an education, in the very same country that once built the magnificent temples of Angkor? What can you possibly, possibly say?

Which brings me back to the start: there are some things which have to be experienced to be experienced. You need to sit in the courtyard of S-21 and hear the crying ghosts of murdered children so young they should’ve been playing together in the streets. You need to visit the Angkor temples to appreciate their majesty and the ingenuity behind their conception. You need to watch Hicham El Guerrouj get embraced by his competitors after winning gold. And you need to listen to the wind rushing past the plummeting Huygens probe as it descends to Titan (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEM85Q71Y3E_0.html). Because it’s every bit humanity’s soundtrack as the crying ghosts of Cambodian schoolchildren.

These women

I want to write about women. Not the demographic of women native to the countries I’ve visited – although an expose of their endless sufferings would make a worthy tome in itself, and in time I’ll get around to putting together my many notes on that. But I want to write about the particular women I’ve met on this trip so far. ‘Girls’, I'm told, can be a pejorative term, even for females in their early twenties; we don’t call young men ‘boys’, after all. So, instead, I’ll just write a bit about These Women.

It’s rather lazy to import the wit of those much smarter than yourself, but a few quotes seem about right. “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little”, the conceited but amusing Samuel Johnson once fatuously wrote, someone who’d doubtless be appalled to find that the law has given women much more in the centuries since, without redressing the imbalance by taking away Nature’s powerful gifts too.

Germaine Greer – a woman of almost vicious pulchritude when she was younger (before she supplicated herself to Celebrity Big Brother and the feline lasciviousness of the revolting George Galloway) – demanded to know, in The Female Eunuch, “Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”

From her writings, it’s still astonishing to me that Professor Greer isn’t a lesbian, but her point is irrefutable. Who can deny the daily pressure on women to attain unattainable levels of physical perfection? And who cannot see the relative ugliness of us men? I know of not one heterosexual female (or homosexual female, for that matter) who believes the males of our species to be more aesthetically pleasing than the women. As Elaine Benes once quipped, “The female body is a work of art…the male body is utilitarian. It’s like a jeep.” It’s nice for men and women to all agree on something for once, I suppose.

The unbearably smug and unjustly handsome anti-semite revisionist historian, Mel Gibson, remarks in the film What Women Want (on that very subject), “After about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of that one. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate”. I quote that one because, although as I get older I find myself more and more confused about what it is which drives and inspires women, chocolate and conversation do seem to be two recurring themes – as generalisations go. It's like saying men want sex and respect or power. It’s pretty well on the money, but not particularly insightful and even less helpful.

And one final quote – my favourite – because it summarises rather well the point I want to make. It’s from Billy Joel – who married a supermodel, the bastard, but who came to regret it – “I've reached the age where competence is a turn-on”.

Indeed.

I grew up in Australia, and attended an all-boys’ school (and a particularly sausagey one at that) all the way through until starting university. Finding myself in lecture theatres like aviaries, replete with shrieking young women (girls, at that point, I suppose), I remember being struck by how a single-sex education can undermine your understanding of the other gender. I was never particularly gormless, I don’t think – I was, and have always been, able to talk to girls with a modicum of composure – but I saw around me those other young men condemned to school life without girls around, shivering in the muddy trenches of post-adolescence, and vowed never to foist the same fate upon my own sons. I’d had girlfriends during the school years – extra-curricular activities such as music, drama and debating were a saving grace in that regard – but I’d seldom had girls around me, doing the same things I was doing. I’d never spent time with them on a daily basis. I’d had taken from me the chance to see the way girls are, the way they mingle and gossip, and fight and flirt. The way they go to the bathroom in pairs, the way there’s so often a subtext to any question. The way their insecurities are so nuanced and their power so unexploited. The way they’re so conscious of what people are thinking, except on the dancefloor. I saw it at university, and bemoaned the lost years – all the while feeling real sympathy for some school acquaintances whose clumsiness with these new and mysterious strangers was going to be a cross they would bear for years to come.

My undergraduate years came and went, and for the most part I felt I got to understand women a bit. I learnt what makes them laugh and what makes them cry. I learnt to overcome the unspoken boys’-school prejudice that girls are so different from us that they could be a different species altogether. And I learnt that women are every bit the sexual creatures men are, just far more complex, and that whereas every girl (whether she grew up around boys or not) understands broadly what drives men and how she can use their predictability against them, the skill of understanding and unlocking women is a lifelong pursuit – and something a man usually only starts getting good at when it’s too late to really do anything useful about it. Because the man sees that the exceptional ones have been snapped up by the boys who used to kick sand in his face during recess, and the remainder are carrying the emotional baggage of having dated a handful of abusive and cruel Neanderthals and the ensuing mistrust leaves a minefield to be exhaustingly cleared.

But as the undergraduate years passed and so did postgraduate study, I found myself on the downward slope of a sine curve. Having felt I was starting to understand them and was learning from previous mistakes, I was in fact making the same errors over and over. Invariably, this comprised a regression to the “trophyism” of women; the misogynistic thinking that, because you can get your laughs and fun and conversations and real memories from men – without the complications which go along with relationships with women – the pursuit of women can, if desired, be simplified to the acquisition of more and more beautiful ones, until your twenties is but a scrapbook of vacuous dimwits with unblemished skin of silk and a scent that stops your blood’s circulation in its tracks. Coveting and chasing – the acquisition of beauty – becomes more than a past-time if you’re not careful. It becomes the backbone of your existence and can turn you into someone you don’t wish to be.

This is all by way of saying that there were many reasons why I dropped everything to do this trip. One was a career gamble, one a calculated assessment of opportunity, one a general ennui which was becoming worryingly incurable. But one reason was the desire, not to find the girl who ticks every box – that’ll come in time if it hasn’t already – but to reassure myself that they exist. That the sense of always compromising, of compartmentalising the fairer sex one way or another, is a demon who resides in the depths of context, and one who can be eventually vanquished for good.

I’m writing this sitting on the terrace of a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, with some girl’s (apologies, woman’s) perfume cutting through the heat and the stagnant water below and doing what it always does to me – making me giddy and stupid, dribbling like a lobotomised Aussie Rules footballer. And gazing furtively over at her (she, too, is writing. Something incredible and intelligent no doubt. I should go talk to her….Aargh it never ends!) it seems the right time to recount some things about the wonderful women I’ve met so far on this trip.

Just in the past couple of weeks, for example, there was Zohar, an Israeli who’s recently finished law school. Somehow she managed to excel at law while working at the same time as a stewardess for El Al – flying to New York a handful of times a month – and waitressing to pay the rest of the bills. All the while completing a second degree in Business. She is – as most Israelis – a sergeant in the IDF (something I find predictably alluring), and can carry a heavier backpack than mine for a longer distance. She’s deferred her clerkship at a firm in Tel Aviv for six months, and took herself off to Nepal to trek through the Himalayas seeking clarity and solitude. She has some real things to think about after a very rough couple of years, and I wont betray her valued confidences here. Suffice to say, though, a more fascinating, strong, determined, independent yet at the same time completely feminine woman you could never meet. We ran into each other in the airport in Bangkok, and after spending a couple of days exploring the city, travelled to the islands in the south and passed a happy few days on the beaches. My sadness, when I had to say goodbye, was profound. But I shall see her, if not in Australia, then perhaps in Israel next summer.

In Istanbul, there was Lauren, a Melbournian student of aeronautical engineering who’s taken a year off to live in Bremen and work for a company there, and who now is working the ski fields in Whistler, British Columbia. Curiously awkward and confident in equal measure, she has passion and ambition and guts and sass. Equipped with possibly the greatest thing a man can find in a woman – a splendidly ironic and filthy sense of humour – every moment with her was a delight. She wants to be an astronaut one day, and I cannot tell you how much I hope she succeeds in this.

In the last few days I’ve been travelling with a couple of French girls, Laura and Marie, who’ve served as a reminder that – as high-maintenance as French women can be, as any man who’s dated a few will know – there’s a reason they’re so desired and admired everywhere they go. They're chic and stunning and politically thoughtful and fun. They’ve been in Sydney for the past year, and we hit it off immediately, in part because of our shared ambivalence towards Australia and Australians. I’ve been pleasantly smitten for days, and exploring the astonishing, ancient Temples of Angkor with them while learning to sing smutty French songs about toilet-related misfortunes has been a lovely thing to do.

And there's Josie, from Malmö in Sweden, (half-Serbian too, a mix I would recommend to any young girl seeking a second half) whose self-assuredness and composure is breathtaking for someone not yet 22. I was a fraction of the man I am now when I was that age, something which reflects not only my then-immaturity, but her precocity now. I wish I were a mere tenth as cool as her, I wish I had her fabulous style and polyglot speech and unpretentious tattoos, but not everyone is cut from the same cloth. Our passing was a brief one, but the Age of Facebook means it will hopefully not be our last.

There was Libby – in Istanbul, too – a quite obviously brilliant gender studies major at Berkeley, but who’s living in Greece right now. Resisting every opportunity to be baited by me with provocative beliefs I don’t even really hold, she debated gender differences, and affirmative action, and women’s issues in the third world with a ferocious intelligence, personal experience and an open mind. I wish we had had more time to talk. 21 too, and with a genuine social conscience, she’ll do incredible things in her life, of that I’m sure.

There was Martha, a Canadian teacher living in Bahrain, and whom I’m meeting in Vietnam for Christmas. With an infectious laugh and enormous love for other people, she met me and my old friend Sarah in Istanbul, and they bonded almost telepathically. Although they met for only a week, and don’t know when they’ll see one another again, their friendship is more real than most which have lasted a hundred times as long. Martha is an enticing mix of young girl and real woman, extroverted and confident but with the frailty of someone who is unsure of what her world will bring. It will be truly lovely to see her again.

And Sarah, my dear Sarah. I’ve never met anyone of such unconditional generosity and compassion. Sardonic and smutty, she works with plants in a nursery back home, and grew up in the New Forest, running about in wellies and splashing in puddles. For every time since we met that I’ve felt lost, angry, nervous or just plain sad, she’s been there and I will never forget it. She’s the girl I needed in my life growing up. I wish I could be with her right now, to help her through her own current sadness.

There are also the other women I knew before departing who I’ve caught up with on these travels. There’s Sabine, an Austrian with whom I lived during my Master’s degree. She has quite the weirdest sense of humour of anyone I know, and is about as physically beautiful as a human being can ever be, like Wilma Flintstone with a better accent but, alas, without the fur skirt. I love her affectations and idiosyncrasies (a sudden and periodic inhalation which sounds like a 100 decibel hiccup is especially amusing in public, as is a vocabulary of words in English with which, I must confess, I am not yet fully au fait) and I love that way that when you tell her your aspirations and dreams, she looks you straight in the eye with a genuine and giddying enthusiasm as if these dreams were her own. I love how sexual and sensual she is, I love how she looks better in the morning with a splitting hangover than I did suited up on my graduation day. I miss her self-deprecation, unusual in a woman who knows very well her physical beauty but who never flaunts or uses it for unfair leverage. I love the way she dances with no self-consciousness at all, and if it’s at all possible, with even less grace.

And there’s Kat, with whom I stayed in Germany soon after leaving the UK. Confused and a little lost as all 19 year olds are, and with a grasp of reality which is sometimes tenuous at best, she’s infectiously witty, beguilingly complicated, unashamedly dorky and one of the smartest people I know. Not a day passes when I don’t miss being silly with her, and feeling like a teenager again, as difficult as it was the first time around.

There are others, too. Sara from Korcula, about whom I wrote some months back and who mesmerised me, transfixed me with her terrible sorrow and her overwhelming strength. Ani from Sofia, who took me around the city and explained Bulgaria with insight and imagination in a way that nobody else had. Sagen (named after Carl the writer but curiously with a different spelling) who is the most good-natured and bubbly person you could meet in five straight lifetimes. Violaine, Eva and Sarah in Belgrade, the first of whom stroked my neck and insisted on cutting my hair. So electric and tender was her touch and so seductive her entreaties that I put aside my concern that she’d never cut hair before. When beholding the unmitigated disaster which resulted after she hacked indiscriminately away with blunt kitchen scissors, I forgave her in a New York minute, because she's just so utterly stylish and irresistibly cool. Which is ironic, considering the abject mess she made of my hair.

I’ve mentioned these women not to please them that they made an impression – although I guess many will be reading this – nor to boast that I’ve met such women at all. I’ve mentioned them because it makes an important personal point. That one of the reasons for the enormous gamble I’ve undertaken – a voyage which has necessitated putting my career on hold, friendships on hold, and incurring significant financial debt – has already paid off. These women I’ve met – some of whom have been just wonderful new friends; some of whom have been more – have exorcised one of the demons from my adolescence. The frustration I felt for years that dealing with women is a constant exercise in compromise – putting up with this to get that, or looking beyond that in order to appreciate this – is gone, never to re-emerge. I am cured. I am, in the best way, a lover of women once more. I implore you never to send your sons (or daughters, for that matter, but I know less about that) to single-sex schools, because whatever slight academic advantage may possibly be achieved through a lack of distraction is more than offset by the burden they may carry from seeing the “other sex” as too much “other” and too much “sex”. I know facebook has allowed many to regain contact with their old school friends and acquaintances. For me, getting back in touch with these people and seeing how they’ve turned out has confirmed an underlying suspicion that a single-sex education can (not always, but it definitely can) dangerously defer really coming to understand and admire the opposite sex. After countless poor choices in girlfriends over the years (with one exception, someone I will love always), and a growing disenchantment with women in general brought about by these poor choices, I have purged, at last, the misogynistic remnants of a myopic past, and am entranced, moved, betwixt and ensorcelled by the fortitude and sass and fabulousness of these women.

Baby elephant naughtiness

The externalisation of happiness

A middle-aged City trader has gone on holiday – a very unusual thing for someone who regularly works weekends as well as excruciatingly long hours during the week. But there he is, walking down a beach and grimacing at the underutilised hours, his separation from his beloved Bourses, and his blank-faced Blackberry nestling like an electronic corpse in his khaki pocket. He comes across a jetty and wanders to the end. There, and sitting in a small wooden boat, is a fisherman. The City trader says hello. The Fisherman says hello and introduces himself as Pong.

“What’re you doing?” asks the City man. “Well”, replies Pong, “I’m just cleaning the fish I caught this morning. My day has been very typical. I got up, had breakfast with my wife and chatted to the kids. I came out here fishing, and in a minute I’m going to take the fish to market, go home and have lunch with and make love to my wife, and play with the kids when they come home from school. This evening my friend will come round, we’ll play guitar on the porch together, drinking red wine, and then I’ll go to bed”.

“Hmmm”, says the City trader, scratching his neatly-trimmed goatee (greying until quite recently) with elegantly-manicured fingers. “That sounds really nice. But you know what? If instead of going home in the afternoon to see your wife and kids, you fished again in the afternoon, you could sell enough fish to be able to buy another boat, and pay someone to fish in it. You keep doing this, you could expand the whole thing until you have a bunch of people working for you on a fleet of bigger and bigger fishing boats, selling to supermarket chains. It could grow, and perhaps one day float your company publicly! Think of that! Retire at 50!”

Pong is intrigued. “What happens then?”

“Well”, replies the trader, “I guess you get to spend your days doing what you really want. Spend time with the kids when they come to see you, hang out with your buddy, drink wine, play guitar, make love to your wife”.

It’s opportune to tell this parable now, as I'm in fact sprawled on a beach watching fishermen in their boats bringing back the day’s catch. The parable is, of course, quite trite. First of all, not everyone lives in a part of the world or under circumstances that would permit making enough from a half-day’s work to support a family and give one’s children support and real opportunities in life. Second, even a corporate junkie working long and high-stress hours can still find time for marital love-making, spending time with his or her children, playing an instrument and boozing with friends. It is, I would think, not an easy thing. But having already seen some people manage it very well, I see no reason why plenty of others could not do the same.

And third, Man’s willingness to work more than a subsistence life has led to an astonishing smorgasbord of discovery, innovation, science, the arts – the spectrum of human imagination and achievement without which I think we can all agree - the world would be a poorer place. We might very well each have different human achievements on our individual lists – but I think it can be fairly said: humans over the past 500 years in particular would be considered a rather ambitious species to a visiting Martian. In short, if the world were populated solely by Pongs, we would give up a lot that is good.

Anyway, I’m at this moment in paradise – which also goes by the name of Lamai beach on the island of Koh Samui in southern Thailand – and watching a bunch of normally-overworked Europeans snooze on the beach while the various Pongs of Koh Samui bring in their day’s catch.

I’ve been travelling for over three months now, a trip that’s already taken me across fourteen countries and across the paths of hundreds if not thousands of people. Local service people, fellow itinerants, expats, business travellers, local academics and NGO workers, the insane and the just plain lost. The purpose of this trip (or at least its primary purpose) was to put together a qualitative look at whether people are happy, if so why and if not why not, and how happiness varies among different peoples. This was a daunting task at the start and only gets harder as you wrestle with the timeless nemesis: individuality. Every attempt to draw general conclusions about groups is continually undermined by the caveat you must keep at the forefront of your mind: that people – despite their necessary membership of groups such as gender, age, religion, socio-economic status – are nevertheless individuals. Any contemporary analysis of twin studies reveals that the age-old nature/nurture debate is helpful but incomplete. You cannot isolate an individual’s traits, beliefs and character by considering it a mere function of his or her genes and upbringing. There’s something else. And whatever you call it – the soul, the self, the mind – it plays havoc with all attempts to draw conclusions about people. I have a degree in psychology and didn’t learn very much from it aside from this nauseatingly frustrating truth: that people are much more complicated than the output of an equation. Psychologists know this, but try to brush over it because it belittles their profession to conclude they don’t know much more than they know. The unknown unknowns – to quote my favourite neoconservative American poet – abound. In short, people are – and I apologise for the manifest obviousness of this statement – all individuals.

So as I said, this truth is a spectre that haunts attempts to describe what people are like. And I could tell you stories – interesting ones, too! – that I’ve heard along the way so far. Being nosey and loquacious by nature, I seem to be pretty good at getting people to talk. But the other truth – albeit less obvious than the first – is that everyone has a tale to tell. Everyone is interesting. Even the most soporific individuals – the people who make you want to weep into your beer with boredom – have, if you press hard enough, something special, something unique, something which imports the ‘self’ into the first half of that equation and produces something intangible and wonderful in the second.

But I won’t just recount stories for now. Instead, I want to try and tell you what I have learnt so far about people and peoples as a whole. So please accept the above caveat about the spectre of ‘self’ as what it is – an acknowledgement that everything I say is not merely subject to many exceptions, but might also be just patently wrong.

As I said above, lying on the hot sand with waves lapping at my feet and the scent of coconut oil from the nearby massage beds mixing with the fresh seafood in the Phad Thai they’re cooking up the beach, is an appropriate time and place to consider the nature of happiness. Many if not most people, when asked what they'd do after winning the lottery, or what their perfect holiday entails, respond with some variation of lying on a beach in a tropical paradise. Usually with cocktails served out of coconuts, fresh food, clear waters and a good book. A casual stroll a couple of miles up this coast supports this. Spread through the hundreds of chalets, bungalows and hammocks that nestle in the swaying palm trees that caress this shore are hundreds of tourists in two – and really only two – categories.

The first are overwhelmingly middle class Europeans and North Americans. Affluent, generally middle-aged, married or divorced, they’re here for exactly the reason you’d imagine: to take a couple of weeks off from their lives – which many of them loathe – and to find the time which they can’t back home to actually read a book cover to cover, to tan, to relax, to unwind. They’re not particularly receptive to questions about why they’re here and what they think of their normal lives– for the perfectly understandable reason that they didn’t come all this way to be reminded of the mediocrity of their day-to-day lives relative to this snatched glimpse of perfection. Nevertheless, they’re unhappy people having a happy time. And you can see, beneath their newly-rested eyes and leather-tanned faces, a wistful dream; a wonderment at what life would be like were they to pack in their jobs as brokers or attorneys or civil engineers or media consultants and move to a place like this and open a bar. I’m not saying they should at all. Someone back home needs to do those jobs and if everyone opened a bar in Paradise then Paradise would no longer be Paradise and the developed world would become unbearably bottom-heavy. I’m just saying, I’ve met a few people who did pack it all in, I’ve met them in rural India and in Nepal and in the Swiss alps and here, and they’re the happiest people I’ve ever come across. So the overworked white people escaping their lives for a couple of weeks are the first group.

The second group of tourists here are people like me. Young, educated and well-travelled, we share some common traits. First, they (we) generally seem themselves as citizens of the world above citizens of their home countries. They’re well-informed, critical of certain aspects of their places of origin, but proud nevertheless to be from where they’re from. Many are on long trips on a budget, most have recently finished university, almost all have an unquenchable longing to learn more about people, and absolutely all are unsure about their futures. Uncertain about career prospects following their overpriced degrees, afraid of the mid-life crises their parents and their parents’ friends are going through, and lucky enough to be living in a time which allows one to affordably explore the world with relative ease and safety, they’ve packed their bags with no set itinerary and gone wandering in the hope that it’ll clear the mind and rejuvenate the soul. Let me just say this to anyone considering becoming a member of this diaspora: for the most part, they do find what they’re looking for. And although when they return home their lives may end up quite different from what they’d expected before they left, crucially the process of travel exorcises demons and purges fears. If you can backpack solo around the world, no job interview or rent payment or cut-throat job market will upset you again, because you’ve pushed and tested yourself to breaking point. You’ve been scared and lonely at times; jubilant and meditative at others. And for all the times in between, you’ve explored – and exploration is in Man’s blood, it always has been and always will be. What I’m saying – and what any member of this second group will say to you if you ask – is that travel is an end in itself. Apologies for the cliché, but it’s the journey and not the destination which matters, and quenching the thirst for exploration and discovery that some people have is salubrious. It makes you stronger and better.

Not everyone has the desire, that’s for sure. For some people, weekend trips to four-star hotels with guidebook sightseeing thrown in is enough. And that’s fine – I’m not a travel snob, I’m really not. But I knew long ago that mine was a lust which could never be sated without great distance, massive challenges and countless people with which to share stories, find real affection, and generally allow your life to intertwine – however briefly – with their own.

So those are the two types of people that – for the most part – you find on a Thai island. The travellers that you come across in Kathmandu are of a different kind altogether. Just as are the tourists in Rome, the adventure zealots jumping off bridges in New Zealand, or those in pain and confusion seeking enlightenment through Buddhism or Hinduism in India. What they all share, though, is, firstly, an acceptance that the pursuit of happiness – for them – cannot be undertaken by a quotidian cycle of rote banality, and, secondly, having the means to be able to go exploring. They are, we are, a lucky bunch.

But I said I’d write what I’ve concluded thus far about the nature of happiness. And please accept it not merely with the caveat I outlined above, but also the footnote that this trip of mine is far from over – so any conclusions are preliminary.

My beginning hypothesis seems right. This is bad news because I was hoping to be wrong. The hypothesis – and it was a tentative one at that – is that there are broadly two types of people, notwithstanding the ‘self’ through which each individual’s identity is filtered.

Group One is the majority. They (and alas I include myself in this) are those who, while not depressed, discover early on –usually in adolescence – that happiness comes in excruciatingly small pockets to those who try for it. They spend their adolescence trying to figure out what those pockets are, and every single moment after that trying to maximise both these pockets’ frequency and their duration. The component of individuality or self is the variable that adjusts merely the nature of those experiences which comprise the pockets of happiness. But the pursuit is constant and everyone in this first group does it. All the time.

It may come in the form of pizza with an old friend who you haven’t seen in ages. It may be a night spent dancing sweatily in a club. It might be scoring a goal in the game's final minute for your team, or a cup of coffee in the morning, or a compliment from your boss; a hot bath or a good book or an orgasm. Most people have a bunch of these things which matter to them, and some come about – thankfully – on a daily basis. These are the events, the exquisite pockets of happiness, which act as counterweights to a tedious commute, a stressful day at work, household chores or chronic pain. These are the things we find ourselves living for, and if they were taken away, little would be left. Think about your own little pockets, the things which give you that embalming warmth and satisfaction, then take them all away from your life and ask if you could ever get up in the morning again. What would life be without sport or sex or good food or music or the feeling of scalding hot water on your back in the morning? What’d be left if you took away the smell of garlic or flowers, or a strange woman’s perfume on the breeze, or could never hear your favourite song ever again or catch up with old friends and share anecdotes, aspirations and advice? Right now, for me, it’s the feeling of hot sand between my toes and the smell of salt from the sea. I grew up on the beach in Australia and not a day passes when I don’t miss some of those formative, visceral sensations – we all have them; the jagged pieces of our childhood which slot into the jigsaw puzzle we’ve become.

And the feeling you get – as I delightfully happen to have now – when you meet someone, you like them immediately, you spend time together and then realise they like you back. And it’s the exquisite perfection of the wait for the first holding of hands, the first kiss, the first touch of your finger on their skin and the way your own is galvanised, electrified, as you do. As I said, I’m convinced that we each have, we each know the things we live for, the only variables are what those things are and how adept we are at manipulating our lives to experience them as often as we can.

This group of people, us, we’re the majority. And without those little pockets of exquisiteness, we’d all kill ourselves. Not to worry; it’s hard to imagine all these things being taken away at once. But it’s sobering, I think, just how dependent we are on the externalities of life for our happiness. I guess hedonism is the word for it, but I feel it’s more than the mere pursuit and acquisition of pleasure. It’s about filling the ennui of your life with happinesses like a builder plugs a hole in a wall. Without it, it can all crumble around you.

Group Two – and I’m sure you know where I’m going with this – is a small minority. Having successfully thrown aside dependence on the externalities, they have (cliché alert) ‘inner peace’. Able to find happiness in life per se, they can have life's component parts systematically taken away from them, and nevertheless be satisfied with nothing more than the fact that – right here and right now – they are alive. And it’s wonderful. I’ve met a few of these remarkable souls on my travels already. You may remember the wandering Dutchman in Sarajevo I wrote about, who’d sold all his stuff, hopped on his bicycle sixteen months earlier and was happily just riding about, alone, with nothing but his bike and his thoughts. I’ve met few happier and more centred people than him. There was a Nepalese guide – dirt poor, of course – who was disinterested in money and got everything he needed in life from being in and around the jungle. And the woman in Varanasi who kindly gave me her time to explain the ins and outs of Indian culture and the role of Hinduism. You could take away her job, her clothes, ever her friends and family I think, and she’d still be happy. And the protagonist in an otherwise excrementally bad book I’m reading at the moment called The Monk who Sold his Ferrari. Although the writing is something of which a lovesick schoolgirl would be ashamed – so much so that I’m moved to tear out the pages when I next run out of toilet paper – the protagonist has abandoned the stress and materialism of life as a lawyer to seek spiritual enlightenment among a group of monks in India. He has, in other words, successfully moved from Group One to Group Two.

This is what I’m rather long-windedly getting at. Many of the young wanderers whose paths you cross as you traipse the globe are people who’ve come to the same conclusions I have. Although not depressed, they acknowledge how dependent they are on the little pockets, the externalities I described above. And what they/we share is a determination – if not to cross from Group One to Group Two (after all, a life of meditation and poverty isn’t for everyone) – to at least learn something about the latter group and, in doing so, pursue less the little, isolated pockets of happiness on which they are so dependent back home, and gain a renewed love of life itself.

Which brings me back to Pong and the Trader. Irrespective of the fact it’s just a parable, I really don’t know whether Pong is in the enlightened minority or not. One assumes that if his lovemaking, guitar playing, wine and the rest were taken away from him, he’d suffer just as would we. It’s not that he’s enlightened, he just has some perspective about the relative importance of work and play. But it’s a parable worth recounting both to the middle-aged and jaded European lizards sprawling prostrate on the sand next to me right now and to the people who set me on this journey in the first place: the miserable, materialistic and overworked businesspeople in the City of London – with and for whom I’ve worked for the past couple of years – and whom I am desperate never to become. They don’t need to sell their Ferraris and move to India. They don’t need to give up coffee or restaurants or kissing or tennis. They just need to remember that the only externality that really matters is family and friends. The rest of it is just stuff. And there are plenty of people around the world who are perfectly happy without it.