Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

‘Yes, that has been an aspect of the theory. In fact an integral part. After all, how do you define a “society” or a “social group” with any real, lasting rigour? You can’t. So the theory had to apply itself to all possible kinds of people-groupings.’

‘Parent — Teacher Associations?’

‘Yes.’

‘Cub Scout groups?’

‘Yes.’

‘Suburban philatelic societies?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Loose fraternities of rubberwear fetishists?’

‘Why on earth not … my dear man …’

‘How about therapeutic groups set up specifically to exploit the hidden mechanisms that Quantity Theory draws our attention to?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you know. Groups of people who band together in order to effect a calculated redistribution of the elements of their particular sanity quotient. Forming an artificial group so that they can trade off a period of mental instability against one of radical stability.’

‘What! You mean a sort of sanity time-share option?’

‘Yeah, that kind of thing.’

I was feigning ignorance, of course. I had foreseen this development, so had my critics, although they hadn’t correctly located where the danger lay. Not with vain and struggling despots who would tranquillise whole ethnic minorities in order to stabilise the majority, but with people like Harley, the educated, the liberal, the early adopters.

‘Well, I don’t know, I suppose in theory …’

‘Have a look at this …’ He swiped a scarf of computer paper from the still chattering printer and handed it to me. I read; and saw at a glance that Harley wasn’t talking about theory at all, he was talking about practice. The printout detailed the latest of what was clearly a series of ongoing and contained trials, which involved the monitoring of the sanity quotients within two groups. There was an ‘active’ and an ‘inactive’ group. The groups were defined entirely arbitrarily. That was all, but it was sufficient. From the quantitative analysis that Harley had undertaken it could be clearly demonstrated that the stability of the two groups differed in an inverse correlation to one another.

‘What is this?’ I demanded. ‘Who are these people and why are you gathering data on them in this fashion?’

‘Shhhh!’ Harley crouched down and waddled towards me across a lurid Mexican rug, his finger rammed hard against his lips. ‘Do keep your voice down, people might hear you.’

‘What people? What people might hear me?’ I expostulated. Harley was still crouching, or rather squatting in front of me. This posture rather suited him. With his sparse ginger beard and semi-pointed head he had always tended towards the garden gnomic.

‘The people who are coming for the meeting — the exclusionist group meeting.’

‘I see, I see. And these?’ I held up the computer paper.

Harley nodded, grinning. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

Pleased? I was dumbfounded. I sat slumped in my chair for the next hour or so, saying nothing. During this period they trickled in. Quite ordinary upper-middle-class types. A mixed bunch, some professionals: lawyers, doctors and academics, all with the questing supercilious air that tends to go with thinking that you’re ‘in on something’. The professionals were mixed in with some wealthy women who trailed an atmosphere of having-had-tea at Browns or Fortnums behind them. All of these people milled around in the large room until they were called to order and the meeting began.

It was a strange affair, this ‘meeting’, solely concerned with procedure and administration. There was no content to it, or perceptible reason why this particular group of people should be gathered together. They discussed the revenue of the group, where they should meet, the provision of refreshments and a group trip to Glyndebourne that was happening in a couple of weeks’ time. At no point did anybody directly refer, or even allude, to what the purpose of the group was.

Eventually the meeting broke up into small groups of people who stood around talking. One of the women I had mentally tagged as ‘wealthy’ came and perched on the chair next to mine. She was middle-aged, svelte and smartly dressed in a suit of vaguely Forties cut. Her face had the clingfilm-stretched-over-cold-chicken look of an ageing woman who kept herself relentlessly in trim.

‘Who are you?’ she asked me, in a very forthright manner. Not at all like an English woman. ‘I haven’t seen you at a meeting before.’

‘Oh, just one of Harley’s colleagues. I came along to see what he was up to.’

‘Adam is a marvellous man. What he has achieved here in just three months deserves to be seen as the triumph that psychotherapy has been waiting for.’

‘Were you in therapy before coming to the group?’

‘Was I in therapy?’ She snorted. ‘Is Kenton a suburb? I have been in therapy of one form or another for the last ten years. I’ve had Freudian analysis, I’ve taken anti-depressants, subjected myself to eclectic psychotherapy, rebirthing. You name it — I’ve tried it. And let me tell you that not one of these things has helped me in the slightest. My neurosis has always managed to resurface, again and again.’

‘What form does this neurosis take?’

‘Any form it chooses. I’ve been bulimic and anorexic, claustrophobic and agoraphobic, alcoholic and hysterical, or just plain unhappy — all until the past three months. Since I joined Adam’s group my symptoms have simply melted away. I can’t even remember what it was that I was so upset about. I can only recall the tortuous self-analysis and introspection that went along with my various therapies as if it were some bad dream. The way I feel now is so completely different to the way I did feel that there is no comparison.’

‘Hmm, hmm. You have a relative I suppose, or a friend of some sort who …’

‘Who belongs to the other group. Yes, of course. My son, John. Well, he’s always been rather unstable, I have no idea in the last analysis whether it was his shitty upbringing, or, as the more chemically-inclined professionals have said, a purely endogenous affair. At any rate John enjoys his little manic phases. He’s inherited a little capital and he likes to sit up for fifty, sixty hours at a stretch watching it ebb and flow on the futures market. He’s quite happy to trade an extended manic phase off against a neurosis-free period for me. I suppose some people might call it perverse. But to me it seems the eventual, loving coming together of mother and son after so much discord …’

I don’t know whether the above is a verbatim recollection of what the woman said, but it certainly captures the substance. I was horrified. Here was the incarnation of all I sought to avoid. The recasting of Quantity Theory as a therapeutic practice designed to palliate the idle sorrows of the moneyed. I left the house without speaking to Harley again. The rest of the sad story is familiar to us all. Harley is here at the conference, along with his disciples. His Exclusionist Therapy Movement has grown in the last five years by leaps and bounds. And Harley has, to my mind, diminished as a person in direct proportion. I don’t know exactly what has happened to him. Perhaps he has simply got the wrong end of his own therapeutic techniques, spent too long in the wrong group. But his affectation of some bizarre tribal costume, his disjointed and facile mutterings — which are taken as gospel by his disciples — these seem to me to be the logical result of his meddling with the natural order of sanity quotients.

Incidentally, I did find out what happened to the awful woman I met at Harley’s house. Her son died of a heart attack, brought on by asthma during one of his manic phases. Needless to say the woman herself is now safely institutionalised.