by Robert Gear (July 2025)
If you are wrong do not be afraid to correct yourself. —Confucius
An acquaintance recently claimed that people do not or cannot change. Naturally, I pointed out that his claim depended on what is meant by ‘change.’ The discussion may have been occasioned by the apparent 180º turn on immigration policy by the UK’s robotic (some would say ‘AI replicant, although I couldn’t possibly comment) Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. Furthermore, his recent statement that he now believes that ‘a women is an adult human female’ (excluding what are sometimes known as ‘trans-women’ from that biological category) because the UK Supreme Court has judged that to be the case! shows that the Prime Minister is not well-versed in satire.
Of course, transitions (no pun intended) of opinion such as Starmer’s can be put down to simple political cynicism and tomfoolery. But seriously, is there some common feature that explains what are on the surface robust changes of viewpoint and behavior? Perhaps an examination (necessarily cursory) of some historical and literary examples could throw light on this question; although in the case of historical examples we cannot know the full context behind changed outlooks. Only the reformed individuals themselves could truly know, and that truth may be hidden from themselves. Such changes in perspective may build slowly, perhaps unnoticed, and then all of a sudden cascade out when some unexpected crisis arrives to tip the balance.
A humorous example is shown in the comic television creation Kevin the Teenager, a brainchild of the comedian Harry Enfield. The sketch shows Kevin’s parents watching in horror as the clock strikes midnight and the boy turns thirteen, at which point he loses his sense of dress, courtesy, rational thought, good manners and good posture, all presumably due to hormonal changes. ‘I hate you. It’s so unfair … I wish I’d never been born,’ he screams, flinging his arms around as his father points out to the boy’s mother ‘Don’t worry, darling. It’s only a phase. It will only last four or five years.’
Other truly fictional characters of this kind enliven the world of fantasy comics. For example, the emotionally reserved physicist, Dr. Banner, turns into the Incredible Hulk when he is exposed to stressful situations; his shirt too amazingly expands and contracts to fit his current disposition. Perhaps most famously, Clark Kent, an investigative journalist at the Daily Planet can rapidly become Superman—usually whenever a dangerous criminal is at large. Both these fantasy creations undergo only temporary alteration—and in Superman’s case a very quick change of clothes. I have never been clear whether he can become Superman without ditching his spectacles and changing out of his more formal attire. But in both these cases we can say with certainty that there is no fundamental and permanent change in personality.
Asoka the Great, a monarch whose name was once lost to scholarship, is an historical example of a fundamentally changed personality. He is said to have been a blood-thirsty empire-builder whose cruelty was on a par with that of Caligula as described by Suetonius. Tradition holds that he engaged in horrific cruelties towards enemies, although some scholars suggest that these were fabricated or exaggerated—the fake news of those distant times. Then one fine day Asoka made a decision to renounce war; he then established and propagated the religion of Buddism to all and sundry. This change of heart may have occurred after he witnessed the slaughter and suffering consequent upon a calamitous battle during the Kalinga Campaign. According to his own account in his Edict 13 the carnage ‘weighed heavily on his mind.’ Of course, human suffering may have been ‘weighing on his mind’ for quite some time, but this event may have just tipped the scales.
Perhaps most well-known are the accounts of Saul of Tarsus’ conversion on the road to Damascus occasioned by ‘a light from the sky, brighter than the sun’ and the voice of Jesus asking for an explanation of his actions. In a matter of three days Saul goes from ‘breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord’ to accepting baptism as a follower of Jesus: ‘the scales fell from his eyes … he got up and was baptized.’
Augustine of Hippo turned over a new leaf when as described in his Confessions he heard a child’s voice telling him to pick up a Bible and read. The passage randomly opened was from the letter of St Paul to the Romans which decried loose living, lust, drunkenness, and jealousy—behaviors with which the young Augustine had been all too familiar. According to his own account he suddenly felt his heart flooded with light and so rejected a life of sin. Since Augustine had spent many years searching for meaning this conversion seems to point to the truth uttered by a Hemingway character in The Sun Also Rises; on being asked how he became bankrupt he quipped: “Two ways. At first gradually, then suddenly.”
Fictional examples abound. A well-known case of apparent psychic adjustment is portrayed in Shakespeare’s Prince Harry who famously spends his time in buffoonery and prankish behavior with his friend Falstaff and cronies. The prince turns on a groat when his father dies and he succeeds to the crown as King Henry V. When Falstaff approaches Henry’s procession with the hopes of advancement, the new king rebuffs his fat friend: ‘I know thee not, old man … Presume not that I am the thing I was … I have turned away from my former self.’ (italics added).
What about Don Quixote? The Man of La Mancha is, well, quixotic; his tilting at windmills and other escapades are proverbial. He is a man living out an illusion. But at the end of the second book, on his deathbed, he discards his mental aberrations (if such they are) and regains sanity. He states:
My judgement is now clear and free from the misty shadows of ignorance with which my ill-starred and continuous reading of those detestable books of chivalry had obscured it … I am Don Quixote de la Mancha no longer, but Alonso Quixano … I know my folly now.
In Dickens’ Hard Times, Mr Gradgrind, the hard taskmaster of his school, becomes reformed when he understands the damage this methods have inflicted on his own children. He atones for his own form of foolishness: “The ground on which I stand has ceased to be solid under my feet.”
This brief catalog of mutating mind-sets should also include Edmund, the Shakespeare villain of vicious inclination, who does a sudden volte-face, as he lay dying:
I pant for life: some good I mean to do,
Despite of mine own nature. Quickly send—
Be brief in it, to the castle; for my writ
Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia.
In most of these examples, historical, religious and fictional, the individuals cast off their prior prejudices and associated behaviors. They may have looked back at their lives and considered their former selves existing under a form of madness—as Cervantes’ marvelous creation appears to have done.
Such conversions are fairly commonplace in our everyday world. Ample examples illustrate this change, and no doubt most people have undergone some such conversion in their own lives—probably at a more mundane level than in the examples given above. These may result from a sudden awakening occasioned by a painful crisis such as the death of a loved-one or the near-death of self, or divorce or extreme disappointment; or even a new awareness brought about by marriage or the birth of a child.
But what of the ideological hysteria inspired by Marx and collectivist followers? This is a madness of monstrous scale that in the words of Ludwig von Mises is “the main cause of all the agonies and disasters of our day”—the Religion of Peace perhaps being relatively inactive in Mises’ lifetime. This delusion appears to be of a different kind from that owned by the Don whose illusions affected (not necessarily for the worse) the few people with which he comes into contact—but not the entire planet.
Are those who urge such silly notions likely to undergo a Damascene conversion? Can the scales fall from their eyes, as they did from Saul’s? Can they overcome what Jung termed ‘psychic inertia’ which binds them to foolish and dangerous notions? While some sufferers of the malady finally reject the chains of this ideology others continue until the bitter end, or chameleon-like take on new coloring with unchanged goals. Beware! They may work themselves into a lather of hatred for those whom they cannot force to agree with them; some of them emulating the Incredible Hulk while foaming at the mouth. Their psychic inertia is rather like that of Macbeth, a tyrant who believes he cannot turn back from the path of evil he has followed:
… I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
These lines reflect the attitude of a large proportion of the those whose lives are spent spreading such nonsense. They may have some inkling of their perversity but just can’t make the necessary jump since they have ‘stepped in so far.’ Exceptions exist certainly, although the words of the mad Marxist, Louis Althusser, may be apocryphal. After murdering his wife he is reported to have said “Marxism est merde;” the rumor that he cut his dead wife’s body in half to conform to ‘the dialectic’ is most probably unfounded.
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Robert Gear is a Contributing Editor to New English Review who now lives in the American Southwest. He is a retired English teacher and has co-authored with his wife several texts in the field of ESL. He is the author of If In a Wasted Land, a politically incorrect dystopian satire.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
One Response
A brilliant study analysing the opportunistic behavior of politicians so tellingly exemplified in the behavior of Brtish PM Keir Starmer who had to wait for a Supreme Court decision before he could feel safe enough to admitting that a woman is an adult human female.
Author Rober Gear is correct that Don Quixote has been misread as a tribute to idealism as portrayed in The Man of La Mancha rather than acknowledging the true hero of the novel, the realistic Sancho Panza who tried to save his master numerous times from the consequences of tilting against windmills.