Essay

Culture

Doubt

Music

Psychology

24 March 2025

9 min read

What happens when perfect plans are outsmarted by the world?

There may be delight hiding in the doom.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

Two people sit and stand next to a grand piano on a stage.

Striking the wrong note.

Polyfilm.

If I’ve learned anything at all from decades working with businesses, it’s that they love an acronym. For a while the acronym we loved was VUCA. Not a nuclear jet nor a foot wart, VUCA emerged from the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus to reflect the Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity of contemporary leadership. Nothing gets a roomful of executives nodding sagely than the observation that we live in a VUCA world. For a while it felt almost sacrilegious not to evoke VUCA at some point when training leaders. It was comforting to tell people who were supposed to be shaping the world that everything was, well… a bit nuts.

But in the last few years VUCA has lost its shine. Things have started to get too crazy, a bit too VUCA for anyone’s liking. The wars, the plagues, the natural disasters, the political upheaval, the shaking of old certainties- it’s all gone a bit super-VUCA. The acronym that once reassured us that the world tends to resist our perfect plans has been outsmarted by the world it once captured. What are we to call this permacrisis, this omnishambles, this SNAFU, when super-mega-hyper-VUCA just sounds stupid? A new acronym was needed. Enter stage left- BANI, the invention of futurologist Jamias Cascio to designate the way things are now: Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear, Incomprehensible. We’ve had a romantic breakup with the world- you’re not like it used to be, you used to be fun, you’ve changed!

In March, Seen & Unseen celebrates its second anniversary. We are two years old. Old enough to appreciate a birthday cake, too young not to burn our fingers on the candles. I’ve been writing for the site since the beginning and to this day feel surprised that this quirky mishmash of a brainfart I keep writing is still accepted for publication each month. Either the folks at Seen& Unseen are pathologically kind to their own detriment, or my monthly missive of misery is not quite as off the wall as I fear it might be.

When I look at the world, I feel like we’re in a football match with no referee. I keep shouting foul and looking for someone to blow the whistle. It feels like the Tower of Babel. Even the technologies we thought would unify us have made us incomprehensible to one another. Like the scene in That Hideous Strength (the third book in C.S. Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy) where a roomful of people is magically befuddled. They can no longer understand each other, and anyone who rises to take charge of the situation speaks gibberish that only adds volume to the babble. We don’t need any more opinions. We certainly don’t need any more people with misplaced certainty they have the answer.

To be honest, I’ve just run out of ideas. I’m confused, baffled, clueless. But what embarrasses me most is not my helplessness, it’s my hope. For some reason, in jarring contrast to the circumstances, I can’t shake off the sense that ultimately all this will make sense, that breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. We’re in the unbearable part of the story where everything goes wrong, but if we put the book down now, we’ll think that was the end of it, when it was really just the set up. Pretty much everything I’ve written for Seen & Unseen over the last two years equates to: grief, this looks bad, but maybe there is more to it than it appears.

There is another anniversary being celebrated this year. This January marked the fiftieth year of a musical event so remarkable that a new dramatization of it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival to mark the occasion – the recording of The Köln Concert. (Watch the trailer of Köln 75.) If we are looking for a story of how beauty emerges from disaster, this one is worth telling. The event was organised by eighteen-year-old Vera Brandes, at that time the youngest concert promoter in Germany. She booked the Cologne Opera House, but given that it was a jazz concert, it was scheduled to begin at 11:30pm following an opera performance earlier that evening.

The performer, jazz pianist, Keith Garrett travelled to the concert from Zurich. But rather than flying, he sold his ticket for cash and opted to make the 350-mile trip north with his producer Manfred Eicher in a Renault 4. He had not slept well for several nights and arrived late afternoon in pain, wearing a back brace, only to discover that the opera house had messed up. The Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano he had requested had been replaced by a much smaller Bösendorfer baby grand the staff had found backstage. The piano was intended for rehearsals only, in poor condition, out of tune, with broken keys and pedals. It was unplayable. Jarrett tried it briefly and refused to perform. But Vera Brandes had sold 1,400 tickets for the evening. So, while he headed out to eat, she promised to get him the piano he required.

But it was not to be. The piano tuner who arrived to fix the baby grand tells her a replacement is impossible. It was January in Northern Germany, the weather was wet and cold, and any grand piano transported in those conditions without specialist equipment would be damaged irreparably. They had to stick with the piano they had. Keith Jarrett’s meal didn’t go well either. There was a mix up at the restaurant and their food arrived late. They barely had chance to eat anything before returning to the venue. And when Garratt saw the tiny defective Bösendorfer still on the stage, he again refused to play, only changing his mind because Eicher’s sound-engineers were set up to record.

So the concert begins. A reluctant pianist – tired, hungry and in pain – sits at a ruined piano, and records the bestselling piano solo album and bestselling jazz album. Ever. He improvises for over an hour. Starting tentatively, exploring the contours, befriending the limitations of his damaged instrument – learning its capabilities as he plays. But soon Jarrett is whooping, yelling and humming with delight as he extracts beauty from the brokenness. The limited register forces him to play differently. The disconnected pedals become percussion. By the time he reaches the encore, the joy of his playing is irrepressible – it sends shivers down the spine. And when he finishes, the applause goes on. Forever.

Jarrett pulled off an impossible feat and sealed his reputation as one of the greatest pianists of his generation. And I take heart from the event, because when I face the world, I sometimes imagine I feel like he did facing that piano. Tired and pained and doubtful any good will come of playing. Can I order a new world, please? One more to my liking. One less likely to hurt. Yet I can’t quite shake off the intuition that there may be delight hiding in the doom, a treasure only unearthed by those willing to play.

I am drawn to Job. He is a hero to all those who are sick of the answers of others but have no answers themselves.

This year I celebrate my own anniversary. I was born seven months after that fateful night in Cologne, in the equally salubrious town of Birkenhead. This is my fiftieth year too. The 3:15pm of life: too early to clock off, too late to start anything new. If living is a race between maturity and senility – gaining the wisdom to live before losing our marbles – then I’m odds-on for a photo finish. The evidence accumulates daily that I am likely to live longer than most of my vocabulary.

Jung held a positive view of old age. He viewed it as the time for religion to ripen. And I can’t help agreeing with him. The older I get the closer God seems. As muscle mass thins the spirit deepens. Outwardly I’m fading away, inwardly I am being renewed day by day. This undoubtedly underlies my hope of beauty arising from our brokenness. In some small and barely noticeable way it is already happening in me. And I know I’m not alone in that.

Jung also wrote about Job- the Hebrew epic of suffering and restoration. Job’s life is like one of those old blues songs. He loses his wife, his kids, his home, his health. He’s left broken, infested with sores and sitting in the dust. If you’ve been in a situation like that, you’ll know that even the most well-meaning friends can respond with surprising incompetence. Job’s friends are no different. They are true believers in Just-World Theory, the universal human tendency to assume that if bad things happen to us we must deserve them, we must have been bad. They live in a world ultimately governed by the kind of instant karma that causes car crashes on YouTube, and they’re keen to teach Job the way the world really is.

But Job resists them at every turn. He may have a proverbial reputation for patience, but he is anything but patient. I used to think this was a story about a man defending his innocence, but it’s much more than that. It’s the story of a man who goes through a breakup with God. He once lived a life of goodness, abundance, and gratitude in which he knew God as attentive and lovingly present. His friends are not just arguing that he’s being punished for some undisclosed sin, but that he’d always been wrong about God. He’d never known God- not really. The God they knew was volatile, capricious, arbitrary, vicious - like a rescue dog, you never quite knew when he would turn. And Job’s suffering was the proof of it.

The problem for Job is that he has no clue why he is suffering, but he will not let his friends obliterate the history he has shared with heaven. He knows God to be utterly faithful, constantly present, sublimely attuned, hugging the contours of his life as the sea hugs the shore. He wants nothing to do with a fickle god who falls asleep on the job or flounces off the first time we let him down. He rejects the here-again gone-again god of his friends. Sometimes, to know God, we need to reject those who claim to speak for God.

The weird thing in Job’s story is that eventually God shows up. Over the course of the narrative, he has asked God 122 questions, and God responds with 61 of his own. The questions are rhetorical- they point to all the places God is present that Job isn’t, all the things that God knows that Job doesn’t, all the things God has done that Job hasn’t. And by the end, Job is satisfied, his friends are dismissed, and his life is restored. God is as Job expected, intimately present but ultimately mysterious. He was right to reject the obtuse certainties of his friends and face the pain of the world with a cultivated sense of unknowing.

When I ponder how best to bring beauty out of a BANI world, how best to play its brokenness like Jarret played his Bösendorfer, I am drawn to Job. He is a hero to all those who are sick of the answers of others but have no answers themselves. He is also a hero to those who, despite all evidence to the contrary, cannot smother their hope. Those who discern the leavening yeast sown in the hearts of humans across the planet; too inconspicuous to make the news, but destined to rise when the time is right.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

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Watch the Köln 75 trailer

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Identity

Masculinity

29 October 2025

10 min read

Wanted, not wasted: the older brother who couldn’t lead

In Peaky Blinders and House of Guinness, Steven Knight shows being needed—not being perfect—transforms

Will Fagan

Will Fagan serves as a minister in the Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Dressed in Victorian clothes, two brothers raise their arms together.

Anthony Boyle and Louis Partridge in House of Guinness.

Netflix.

If you’ve watched House of Guinness recently, you’ll find show creator Steven Knight return to familiar territory: masterfully exploring complex dynamics between brothers, family legacy, and ambition – captivating themes he previously explored in his ever-popular Peaky Blinders. In the respective dramas, we find both older brothers struggling to fit into roles and living with the weight that often accompanies that struggle.

In societal terms, we are not unfamiliar with the oldest son’s placement as the first in line of dynastic succession and head of the family. The Prince of Wales will succeed his father as King; Prince George will succeed his father and so on.

This dynamic plays out, of course, in common lives as well. Throughout history, the oldest son, as a rule, inherited the family home, the landholdings, and the family business (even if its legal standing was murky at best): Santino became the Don (The Godfather, 1972), Josh Kroenke and Tony Kahn essentially run their respective fathers’ Premiership football clubs, and at some point in your family line, I bet a great uncle took over his father’s blacksmith shop, leaving his younger brother – your direct line – left to fend for himself. (You’re here, after all, so things must have worked out, anyway.)

What happens, though, when the oldest son is not fit to assume this role in succession? How does he respond if he is passed over? And what happens when he’s actually needed by the younger brother, the successor?

As Peaky Blinders opens in its first series, we are presented with a perspective that Arthur Shelby, the older brother, is the boss of the family bookmaking syndicate and racketeering operation only to soon discover that his smarter, more ambitious, and more capable younger brother, Tommy, leads the family.

Being passed over naturally plagues Arthur, and his behavior consistently confirms why he isn’t fit to lead: he is quick tempered, demonstrates poor judgement, and goes on drug-induced benders. He is loyal when he is sober, and you can’t help but love him, but you wouldn’t hire him to run your company, either. By the opening of the show’s concluding series, he is shown passing his days in an opium shop, strung out and all-but-abandoned by his family.

Knight revisits this theme within the Guinness family in his newest show, set in the 1860s and three generations after the founding of the brewery, the family well-established as the first family of Ireland and wealthy beyond measure.

From the start, family tension and doubts about the brewery’s continued success are palpable. At the time of his father’s death, the oldest Guinness brother, also named Arthur, is frivolous, irresponsible, and debonair, having returned to Dublin for his father’s funeral after years of carousing in London. He is unkind, arrogant, and frankly does not care what happens with the company, so long as its sale finances the rest of his life. (You don’t root for him like you root for Arthur Shelby.)

At the time of the reading of his father’s will, anticipating he would inherit the brewery and the bulk of the family property only to sell it, Arthur Guinness finds his father had other plans, haunting him from the grave. He learns that he and his younger brother Edward – responsible and having apprenticed at the brewery – would inherit an equal stake of the brewery and family wealth, but that Arthur would be entitled to nothing if he did not participate in the running of the business, something he neither wants nor cares to do. He wants to be the older brother to inherit but has less-than-no desire to lead the family.

Saddled with expectations that he neither wants nor could succeed under, he continues his path of ruination – marrying for convenience, partying in unfit circles, and participating in election fraud, all bringing the family into public scandal and private torment. Moreover, and perhaps of greatest importance, he knows that he is the oldest son who cannot succeed, who was never built to, and that his father did not trust him. Thus, he pursues the only thing he is good at – willful self-destruction.

Well, this is great saga material – one that we will undoubtedly follow in the Guinness family in the coming years – but for us poorer mortals, why care?

I believe, and I don’t think this is an overstatement, that there is an older brother in all of us. We may not be the actual older brother ourselves waiting to be handed a family fortune only to not receive it, but odds are that at some point there was an expectation thrust upon us – or even one we placed on ourselves – to be a certain type of person or to achieve a concrete level of success, and that didn’t work out.

Have you, for instance, taken a chance in bringing the antiquated family business into the twenty-first century only to watch it go belly up? Have you found yourself in a relationship for too long “for all the right reasons” because everyone wanted it but you didn’t? Did you want to study architecture at university but read law instead because your father and grandfather were called to the bar and now you find yourself drawing neo-classical designs in the courtroom?

What happened, then, when that expectation or dream did not come to fruition? Have you, even to a small extent, arrived at the future and found you’re not who you thought you’d be? To not achieve that thing we were destined for, to not rise to the standard, as it turns out, can often leave us in the same state of the black sheep older brother – directionless, lacking a clear station in life and without a sense of worth.

What is interesting and what is helpful, if I can go so far as to say, is that we find this dynamic at the moral heart of family and social relationships across millennia, a dynamic which is presented in the Christian understanding of relationships.

Christianity’s understanding of relationships – with both God and one another – rests on two essential claims. The first is that humanity was created for one clear purpose – to love God and to live in perfect harmony with creation and fellow man. According to Genesis, the first book of the Bible, this was the expectation of our divine father, the role destined for all children of God. Yet Adam and Eve, the original children, failed to live righteously according to the standard God gave them and were viewed, thus, as guilty before God. All their descendants (which is to say all humanity) inherit that guilt because of what Christian teaching calls original sin.

That may sound both celestial and like Sunday school at the same time, and you, by the way, don’t have to take my word for it. But if you were to say that you do live in harmony with God, creation, and fellow man perfectly, I might be compelled to ask, “How’s that really going?”

When we look around and are honest, we are free to admit that things are not perfect, and we live with the weight of imperfection.

How do we feel, for example, when we let someone else down? How does it feel when we wake up with a moral hangover? How does it feel when we don’t get the position because of an unexplainable gap in our CV, even though we think we’re fit for it? We can see quickly enough that sublime internal or cosmic harmony does not, in fact, exist in our lives or in any of the created realms. More so, we find that it’s not actually attainable.

Are we left, then, to live lives with potential unrealized, spiritually incongruent, and unfulfilled? Will the black sheep part of ourselves – perhaps not evidently front and center but certainly left in the margins – become the core of who we are and how we interact with the world?

As it pertains to Knight’s dramas, a curious occurrence happens to each of these older brothers during the arc of their respective shows, particularly in relation to their younger brothers.

At some point in every series, Tommy Shelby realizes that despite everything, the one person he needs by his side is his older brother, Arthur. He needs him as he takes down crime boss Billy Kimber and expands the family business; he needs Arthur to be the one to end the vendetta with the American mafia, and, finally, to be his strength and support as Tommy faces his dark and uncertain future in the final series, telling Arthur in the darkness of a damp cellar, “You will change because I need you.”

Similarly, in House of Guinness, faced with looming political trouble, wanting to expand the brewery, and to continue the family legacy of philanthropy in Ireland, Edward Guinness looks to his older brother Arthur – the only person he can – to fulfill the other half of the inherited partnership and to gain political ascendancy, their father’s MP seat, for the cause of good. He needs him.

How do these older brothers—otherwise unfit for duty—respond?

In each case, paradoxically, they don’t crumble under the weight of expectation, but heartily rise to the occasion, becoming the man who their younger brother needs them to be. They are able to do this, by the way, not because there was some secret unfulfilled potential inside them all along (clearly they are who they are), but because despite their self-destructive patterns, the older brothers actually step up when needed because the younger brothers treat them as though they are worthy of being needed.

Put another way, having worthiness ascribed to them makes them feel worthy, and the result is that they change, they deliver, and their own self-worth changes with it. They each become, as it were, a new man.

What are we to draw on from this?

Returning to Christianity’s understanding of relationships – with both God and one another – we find its second essential claim: it is that God knows that our lives are not perfect and harmonious, that we do struggle, that we do have dreams and expectations unrealized, all of which can, depending on the severity, leave one quite weighed down and without a clear path forward.

If there is good news that can be spoken into that state (and there is), it is that God is not a father with his arms crossed forever disappointed in his firstborn. He is a father who sees the whole picture, knows all the facts, and he has done something about it in the great narrative arc of the Christian story – the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. The result of which is that we flawed individuals are seen not as those who fail to love and obey God perfectly but as those who are worthy of being wanted.

If we can learn anything from these brothers in Knight’s dramas, it is that we need not climb out of imperfection and into success to be unburdened. We find that being seen as worthy is enough. And that changes – as it does for Arthur Shelby and Arthur Guinness – everything.

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