No where you stand

On the joyous, therapeutic, and revolutionary power of saying no

France’s best export isn’t its three thousand wines, its twelve hundred cheeses, or its permission to wear roll-neck sweaters outside the therapy room. As a proud French citizen, I’m glad to report that my adopted nation’s greatest gift to the world is its unmatched skill with the word no.

We all need a strong no before our yes means a thing, and here’s where the French mindset can help. Officially the national motto is Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but unofficially it’s Non. It’s why France doesn’t have an aristocracy, a habit of people-pleasing, or a boring love life. I’m writing to you this week from the therapeutic heartland of no.

The roadside graffiti starts fifty kilometres out from the village where I’m staying. NO TO THE PARK! is how it begins. That’s it, in terms of information, so I can’t tell you whether we’re up against a theme park or a national park here. I hedge my bets by nodding in agreement with every second sign.

The next twenty kilometres are easier. NO TO THE ZONE! is the faded message on every roadside bridge and culvert. Absolutely, please god, no to the zone, and to whatever eldritch and tentacled thing lurks in it even now, if the zone got built despite local resistance.

Finally, and most enigmatically, you arrive in a region where NO TO THE CENTRE! is spray-painted everywhere. Your guess is as good as mine. It could be a sports centre, the political centre, or even the philosophical concept of anything having a centre. As a respectful visitor, I try to be against all three for as long as I’m in the region. Down with badminton, moderates and the middle of things.

Jean-Paul Sartre is the great philosopher of no. He reminds us that our ‘no’ is what makes us who we are. Just as a prisoner becomes free when they oppose the will of their guard, our consciousness arrives with our no, “as the nihilation of a possibility projected by some other human-reality as its possibility” (Being & Nothingness, p.87). In other words, we must say no to every option the world presents us with, in order to clear our headspace. It’s only in that space that we can create an original human life for ourselves. No is the only true source of love and creativity.

This isn’t some abstract point. We live in a world in which algorithms curate our inputs. They force the most lucrative type of content into our minds – the divisive, simplistic, ‘sticky’ content – while maintaining the illusion that we are choosing. They destroy human solidarity and the political centre in one simple move, by controlling what goes into our brain. Algorithms are shrouded in mystique, but really they’re just billionaires using the same trick my mum used on my brother and me when we were little: Would you like to tidy your room before or after bathtime?

In today’s informational climate, we aren’t really making a choice until we say no to the whole game. We have to go French on the algorithm. If we want to be human beings, rather than billionaires’ playthings, then we have to read things, converse with people, and look at stuff that we go out of our way to find.

Sartre was not a nice person, and I went through saying ‘no’ to all of him before I could reluctantly say yes to his ‘no’. Sartre was predatory to women, snooty about everyone, and generous in the same way scorpions are. To quieten his own ghosts he was a heavy user of amphetamines, alcohol, nicotine, barbiturates and tranquillisers. Once he took so much mescaline that he was followed down the boulevards of Saint-Germain by an army of scuttling crabs. It’s often said that Sartre was the father of French existentialism, but you could make a strong case that his dealer was the hands-on parent. And yet, for someone so prone to escaping reality, Sartre had a knack for noticing our real human choices. I’m sorry, but the old monster still has something to teach us about saying no.

Therapeutically, there’s no more important word. However strong we think we are, you and I should still practice it ten times a day. Say it out loud in a gentle, firm voice. Say it with a relaxed smile and your hand outstretched, palm facing down but angled up at 45 degrees, fingers slightly splayed: no. Say it to me, as often as you like. Say it back to the TV and the newspaper columnists until you get the automatic habit of saying it to a divisive algorithm, a toxic influencer or a controlling partner: no. Say it to all of them, again and again, until you’re ready to say it to the accepting tendency within yourself: no. Say it until it becomes a deep habit of mind, a tolling bell awakening us all from enchantment: no – no – no – no – no.

You and I can always train our ‘no’ to be stronger. We can nurture our resistance: to the algorithm, to the propaganda of despots, and to the gaslighters and manipulators in our own immediate orbit. This is some of the deepest work in therapy. I’ve witnessed resistance growing as a habit, and it always begins with ‘no’.

I’m writing to you from a place where resistance is a lifestyle. We’re at the house of my mother-in-law, a generous and inspiring French woman who makes a point of disobeying anything she finds autocratic. If a sign tells her ‘no photography’ and ‘do not walk on the grass’, she will march across twenty metres of lawn to get a close-up photo of the sign. During the war, her parents hid Jews just outside Paris, and diverted supplies to the Résistance. They were courageous people, and it’s as if some gene for courage has stayed permanently switched on in all their descendants. Perhaps not by coincidence, my mother-in-law has found her place in a village at the epicentre of French wartime resistance. A small memorial commemorates the victims of the Nazi reprisals against the village’s unbending no.

The villagers here still have an unspoken agreement to say ‘no’ to the entire outside world when necessary. If it does ever need to be mentioned, they sometimes call it ‘France’. Did Albert ever manage to get those parts for his obstinacy machine? Ah yes, but he had to go to France for them.

‘No’ is the most grounded word. Your feet must be firmly planted. And in this particular part of France, you’re standing on a thin soil that brings forth nothing but lavender and truffles. These things are essential for survival only if the threats to your life can be mitigated with posh omelettes and those little scented cushions you find at the back of a drawer. But you guard the resources you have. At church here a few years ago, the priest judged it time to mention a case that had been troubling the little community. A popular local farmer had shot dead a fellow human being, caught stealing his truffles. A shot in the air would have been enough to send the villain packing. At most, a leg shot could have immobilised him and prevented the theft. And so, the shot that killed him was about something else altogether. It wasn’t a truffling matter.

The priest was solemn: To kill is the gravest possible transgression: a mortal sin, which cannot be forgiven by mortal hearts. And then the priest shrugged, leaned forward in the pulpit, and addressed us candidly. On the other hand, these were not chickens that the man was stealing, hmm? Certain thefts are also unforgivable. The congregation murmured its assent and filed out past the names of those who fell defending this soil.

I don’t know if this is the maddest village in Europe, or the sanest. All I can report to you is that their way of being is deeply grounded. They ‘no’ where they stand. Their no can sometimes be reactionary, and their values don’t always match mine – but their no is a deep habit of mind that extends into the soil they cultivate, and it won’t be easily changed. Their ‘no’ is why they opposed Nazism so fiercely here the last time around, and why – perhaps – they will do so again.

And so, as the next wave of whatever-this-is-in-the-world begins to roll over us, let’s rekindle our love affair with ‘no’. It isn’t a negative word. In a world of forced choices, our ‘yes’ must count for more than acquiescence. Our fierce human habit of ‘no’ is the only thing that makes our ‘yes’ a thing of creativity and love.

Whatever it is you’re saying no to this week, I wish you liberté.

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Thank you for reading Human Again, a small dose of therapy in your in-box every week. I love comments & feedback, so please don’t hold back. If you aren’t already subscribed, it’s free, and you get extras from time to time. Please also consider forwarding this to someone who might enjoy it. Warmly – Chris