Be More Dullard

 Be More Dullard

You may have noticed – to be fair it is hard not to – that I often use this blog to vent my frustrations at the state of the world in which we live. I’ve never tried to hide it – I ain’t subtle and have long been prone to a bit of ranting now and again in an effort to express my inner exasperation at what is going on around me. What I also hope people have noticed – if not, I may have been too subtle, though somehow I doubt it! – is how much of that frustration also worked its way into my novels, in a wide range of forms that it would probably take a skilled literary analyst a number of years to tease out but a member of my close circle who knows me well will spot in about ten seconds. I have been told by those in the know that my books positively reek of me.  

But rather than wait for some miraculous and highly unlikely time when someone will consider my books worth analysing or indeed pull them apart for you myself, I shall say this – if there is one thing I want people to take away from my books, it that everyone needs to be more Dullard.

By that I don’t mean I expect everyone to start exploring their nearest cave system in search of interesting seams of feldspar. I simply mean this – we need to bring back kindness.

Kindness was rare in the Realm – in a land where everyone was obsessed by their role, there wasn’t much time to think about other people. But I always wanted Dullard to be kind. To be the person who notices other people and cares about them, who sees what they could be behind what is expected of them, who thinks about their feelings before he acts. I wanted a man who pushes you off a cliff if he has to but at least apologises for it. A man who doesn’t think entirely about himself and encourages others to be the same.

I’ve always felt that the most basic test of what kind of person someone is simply this – if someone falls over in front of you, how do you react? Do you laugh, do you walk past or do you stop and help them? Do you take joy in someone else’s misery, do you ignore it or do you make sure they are okay? In the Realm, Bold would laugh. Sweetness would sweep by. But Dullard would help you up, dust you off and check if you had hurt yourself. I know what kind of person I would prefer to be.

Because I feel at the moment like we live in a world where we are encouraged to laugh or walk past. Where so many people are wrapped in a blanket of self entitlement where they feel that only their own wants or needs matter, they don’t care about other people and how they might feel. Where we have social media algorithms and AI feeding and encouraging uncaring thoughts. Where we have political leaders who stoke hatred and division to enhance their own popularity and prestige. Where we have business for whom profit, not customer satisfaction, is the prime motivation and to whom staff are nothing more than another tool towards that.

We live in an unkind world.

I wish so much I could make it different. I wish people would learn to think for themselves again instead of letting the internet and AI do their thinking for them. I wish we had politicians who care about their people rather than their power. I wish we had businesses for whom customers mean more than profit and staff mean more than things. But I’m one person. Not even the Taskmaster can remake this world.

So all I can do is ask that at the very least, we start at the bottom and hope it can work its way up. That we restore simple kindness to the world. That we remember that just because a person is different from us, that does not make them bad or unworthy of consideration. That those who do not share our nationality, beliefs, ethnicity etc are not a homogenous mass of wrongness but real, everyday people with lives and needs and wants. That we hold to the fact that the world is not built around us and us alone, that there are other people in it and they matter too.

That we help someone up when they fall over, rather than laughing or walking by.

That we make the world a kinder place for being in it and hold onto the hope that it spreads. That we be more Dullard.

And then maybe we can change our world as well.

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