George Orwell wrote, ”he who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” But to what extent do you think your past influences the person you are in the current moment? You may be inclined to believe that your present reality is completely free from the influence of the past. The past is exactly that, it’s past; bygones are bygones and tomorrow always brings a brand new day. Right? Wrong. In fact, the past is so important that what was relevant then can never be separated from what is relevant now. This matters because the intimate connection between past and present can cause you problems. The life of innovative chef, TV presenter, bona fide swear bear and now alleged love-rat Gordon Ramsay is testament to the potentially harmful influence of the past on the present. But not everyone has to go down the Ramsay route. What happened yesterday necessarily influences what will happen today and tomorrow but it doesn’t have to trip you up or enslave you.
So how do you ensure the past doesn’t haunt your present? In order to answer this question it is necessary to first take a slight detour through some psychological theory which demonstrates the unavoidable imprint of the past. This might sound like a bit of hard work and I’ll be honest, it is . . . a little bit. But like saving your appetite before dinner, swimming laps or waiting until 11am to have your first cup of coffee, the end result will balance out any initial short term effort. And you’ll find out how Gordon Ramsay fits into all of this.
The important legacy the past leaves in our present results from the inherent nature of being human. According to Sigmund Freud, humans are forced to interact with the world due to innate motivational forces known as drives. Drives are a constant need stemming from within the individual which may be soothed but will never be fully satisfied. Drives differ in their short term aim, with specific drives existing for basic needs such as hunger, thirst, sex and pain avoidance. Temporary satisfaction of a drive is the primary motivation for interacting with the world, with items most capable of quelling a drive appearing most important in an environment. Take the hunger drive and grocery shopping as an example. On a full stomach, grocery shopping is just another chore to be done. You dawdle between aisles filled with boredom, ticking off the necessities one by one from the shopping list. Contrast this to grocery shopping on an empty stomach, when the experience transforms from an everyday visit to the supermarket to a golden ticket entry to Willy Wonka’s factory. You quiver with excitement as ordinarily monochromatic shelves are transformed into colourful towers of interesting ingredients with unrivalled potential. You race through the aisles, filling the trolley with any product that attracts your attention and bolt to the checkout, eager to start cooking as soon as possible.
Yet the picture of human motivation that Freud paints is still more complicated. We house numerous drives which simultaneously burden us with competing demands. Satisfaction of one drive may be pleasurable in and of itself but may impede the satisfaction of another drive, resulting in unbearable tension. An individual may be hungry and cold but do they start cooking dinner or do they light the fire? Attempting to allay drives through interaction with the world involves unavoidable conflict. Discerning what matters in an environment involves being able to compromise in a way which satisfies the greatest number of drive demands whilst effectively minimising conflict. Compromise is certainly possible but the drives we learn to pay attention to, the drives we learn to ignore and the way in which we satisfy certain drives is heavily influenced by our upbringing and socialisation.
This upbringing and socialisation is of key importance to human motivation because humans are born unable to fend for themselves. In order to survive, a human being is completely dependent on their caregivers. As a result of this dependence, satisfaction of the child’s drives and the inevitable accompanying compromise is completely determined by the caregivers. This process is necessarily conflict ridden because the role of parent and caregiver usually overlap. Each parent and their offspring only share fifty percent of their genetic material. Therefore, the way in which a parent satisfies their child’s drives (and hence which aspects of the environment the child’s attention is drawn to) is influenced by factors which serve the interests of both parent and child and by other factors that serve only the interests of the parent.
Now this might not sound like a big deal. We’re not dependent forever. A new personal identity emerges during adolescence and continues into adulthood. However, this new identity is strongly tied to early childhood interactions with caregivers. In these interactions, certain parts of the internal and external landscape are highlighted for the child as more important for meeting their drive demands than others. This shapes the individual on a couple of levels. At the level of psychology, patterns are instilled for when and how these drives will be satisfied by that person when they enter independent adult life. Psychotherapist Glen Gabbard has carried out research demonstrating that early childhood experiences also affect the brain at a neurobiological level. These interactions create certain neural networks which become cemented by repetition of certain elements within the caregiver-child relationship. Simply put, the past is big business. Even if you’re not aware of the past impacting your present, as long as you’re a member of the human species, it must. From the way you interpret information coming in from the world to the way you perceive your bodily signals, to the very architecture and physical wiring of your brain, the past leaves traces that cannot be easily erased.
Having established that immunity from the past’s influence is impossible, it is now time to re-introduce Gordon Ramsay into the discussion. Gordon Ramsay is a perfect case study of how not to deal with the past. It’s not that he doesn’t know what happened, far from it in fact. In his intriguing autobiography Humble Pie, Gordon Ramsay nonchalantly describes his childhood under a father whose keenness for drinking was matched only by his keenness for womanising. Ramsay is at pains in this book to demonstrate that he is in no way, shape or form a chip off the old block. He is realistic. His father was a dreamer. He is determined and has acquired his business acumen and cooking skills through hard work and sheer perspiration. His father didn’t have the discipline to hone the skills needed to pursue his desired musical career nor the patience to stay in the menial jobs in which he was forced to work. He is a family man who provides a stable and loving home environment for his children. His father was a philandering drifter who moved the family from one council housing estate to another. He is firm but fair, eliciting from others the high standards he expects of himself because they respect him. His father was an abusive bully who used hostility and aggression to manipulate the behaviour of others to suit his needs.
But there is something very wrong with the picture that Ramsay paints. As much as he tries to distance himself from his father, he cannot avoid the fact that his rise to fame has been marked (some would say made) by his embodiment of some of the very traits that he disliked the most about his father. Ramsay is as well (if not better) known for his aggressive language, temper and bully tactics in the kitchen as he is for his food. Ramsay’s Boiling Point, a 1998 fly-on-the-wall TV show which marked Ramsay’s television debut, showed a crimson-faced Gordon pacing up and down his kitchen hurling volleys of verbal abuse at any staff member who dared do anything he found annoying or disruptive. Given his short fuse and high standards, the behaviour of most of Ramsay’s staff on most nights fell into this category. Although he didn’t physically abuse any of his staff on camera there were a few pushes and plate throwing incidents which came close. More recently, there has been the suggestion of an overlap between Ramsay and another one of the characteristics that he found undesirable in his father, infidelity. This month, Ramsay has found himself in hot water (leaving any breed of lobster with a thirst for ancestral karmic revenge thoroughly satisfied) after English tabloids revealed an alleged secret seven year affair with Jeffrey Archer’s ex-mistress Sarah Symonds. With more ‘ex-lovers’ coming out of the closet and wanting to sell their stories by the day, things aren’t looking good for Ramsay.
But how does this happen? How does Gordon Ramsay come to be infamous for personifying the very traits that he disliked the most in his father, the very traits which he is most keen to separate himself from in his autobiography? Examining how Ramsay reacts when confronted with his past provides a few clues. A striking example of this can be found in the article that the Australian journalist Mark Dapin published in the Good Weekend in May this year. In this article, Dapin describes the painstaking process he had to endure in order to secure an interview with Gordon Ramsay. Once inside Ramsay’s London home, Dapin got off on the wrong foot. Rather than inquiring about food as Ramsay expected, Dapin started probing the personal. What sort of person was his father? What was it like to have a brother with a heroin addiction? Dapin acknowledges he should have picked up on the danger lurking beneath Ramsay’s polite but terse replies and shifted from talking dark childhood to duck confit. But he didn’t. Instead, he asked Ramsay’s opinion on the glaring similarities between his behaviour and that of his father. No sooner had he asked the question than Ramsay calmly stood up, informed him the interview was over, shook his hand whilst escorting him to the door and then ejected him onto the street. The interview lasted less than 20 minutes and when Dapin arrived home in Australia he was greeted by correspondence from Ramsay’s legal team.
From his autobiography and his numerous press interviews, it is clear that Ramsay can retell events from the past. He may recite the same script with the same characters and show the same detachment from his story in every setting but he is certainly not unaware of past events in his life. However, as Ramsay elegantly demonstrates, there is a significant difference between simply recalling past events and the more difficult task of being fully aware of the past and conscious of its potential effect on the present. Ramsay’s vehement denial of any similarity to his father and any negative way in which the past may have shaped him does not make the influence of the past dissipate. Rather, it magnifies its effect. As Freud observed in his 1914 paper Remembering, Repeating and Working Through, “The greater the resistance [to being consciously aware of the past], the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering”. It is no coincidence that Ramsay started life in a home dominated by an abusive father, transitioned into a work environment dominated by abusive bosses and then evolved to become an employer who many would class as an abusive boss. Similarly, current allegations about Ramsay and mistresses do not seem out of place given his father’s history with women. These are all examples of Freud’s notion of acting out. Gordon Ramsay cannot escape the potentially unhelpful parts of his personality that stem from genetics, upbringing and past experience. But he can acknowledge them. If Ramsay was willing to admit that he possessed certain tendencies which he found abhorrent in his father, these tendencies would be less likely to play out in real life.
With Gordon Ramsay as an exemplar of how not to deal with the past, it’s now time to explore how a more Orwellian approach can be adopted, so that the influence of the past doesn’t control our present. Key to this process is a conscious awareness that the past does set the stage for the present but it does not have to determine it. This awareness carries a number of implications. It can change how we act in the present because the present always forms the skeleton of tomorrow’s past. This compels a parent to be conscious of the way in which they may be shaping their child’s future through their present actions. It calls for them to demonstrate unconditional love so that their child may discover and express what is salient for them in the world with a minimal amount of conflict. At a broader level, it means that no action ever occurs in isolation. We must be mindful of what we place importance on today because this directly impacts what ourselves and others will be able to place importance on tomorrow. This entails being conscious of the potential effect that factors under individual control such as body language, words, decisions, behaviour and actions can have on the near and distant future and requires individuals to take responsibility and be accountable for how they execute these factors. Possessing a conscious awareness of the past also serves to minimise unhelpful influences from the past that may have sneaked into the present. Awareness of the effects that priorities imparted to us by others in the past can have on the way we perceive present priorities can free us from the negative effects of the past. If Gordon Ramsay could only acknowledge their presence, he would be closer to being able to truly distance himself from the problematic ways of relating and behaving that his father instilled in him.
So the past does influence the present. But this need not result in doom and gloom. Through conscious awareness of the past’s influence you can avoid becoming Gordon Ramsay. And you can effect change. If a different path is chosen today from that which was chosen yesterday, and if importance is placed on things that will lead to improvement, the effects of this are felt tomorrow, irrespective of how small this change is. The key to this process is discussion, debate and respect. We can only gain a new perspective on what is important if we ask for, listen to, respect and learn from the perspectives of others. This places onus and liability on individuals and groups across all domains, especially those who are active in areas that play a pivotal role in constructing the future such as politics, law, business, media, technology and education. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Antonio states “Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come; In yours and my discharge.” And I agree with him. Nothing is set in stone. The past may be a prologue but the future is in our hands.
Photo of Gordon Ramsay by Dave Pullig on Flickr. Courtesy of Creative Commons. Find more of his brilliant photos here.
